APAC Issue 4 2018 - Leading Teams

22 APAC / Issue 4 2018 , Pioneering Decentralised Smart City Database Circle+ Launches in Singapore Circle+ was created by Singapore’s SGCN forumusing a blockchain technology transformation. It has now officially launched in Singapore. The SGCN forum was established in 2001. The SGCN forum has a base of 1.1 million users, tens of thousands of merchants, an average of 100,000-page views/IP and 51,000 posts per day. Circle+ is defined as a decentralised smart city database based on blockchain technology. In simple terms, the three points (shopping, payment, reviews) are used as cut-in points, and the data is collected and stored using blockchain technology. In case where consumers are authorised to pay, institutions or individuals can use some of the data to improve the original products or services as they require. For example, when consumers use circle tokens to pay for food sold by a merchant, during the payment by tokens, we could analyse the consumer’s location, time and taste though the updated data on the chain. With this data, related companies can use data analysis to provide a better and more efficient service. Of course, this raw data always belongs to consumers, and third- party service companies need to have the right to use data obtained from the consumer with or without compensation. Decentralisation: Transaction costs only 0.3% Traditional centralised market organisation acquires data through the user’s behaviour and pursues higher organisational interests. Decentralised organisation enables users to have “ownership and control” over their own data and can also be based on the DAPP provided by Circle+. Services allow users to profit by authorising third parties to use their data. In this kind of decentralised platform, if you use digital currency for trading, the cost is about 0.3%. In Southeast Asian countries where traditional transactions are dominant, the cost of cash transactions, credit card systems and staff exchanges is basically about 3%. Even if local banks have lower interest rates, they still have to pay 2%. Technology Support: Ensure Safety and Efficiency The blockchain database can currently only handle 144 transactions per minute. The goal of Circle+ is to be as efficient as China’s Alipay. In order to achieve this goal, Circle+ uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) as a storage structure. The characteristic of this structure is that the more users are involved, the stronger the performance of the system and the higher the level of security gets. Landing Singapore: policy support, young market The population of Southeast Asia exceeds 600 million and the coverage of mobile devices is as high as 112%. However, there is still no decentralised third-party transaction and credit evaluation platform. While the rapid economic growth in Southeast Asia, the local credit system and financial institutions have not kept pace with the times, and the development of the Internet financial market is not perfect. The Circle+ team took a look at this huge gap, leveraging blockchain technology in an attempt to overtake on the curve. Southeast Asia also gave great encouragement in terms of policy. At present, Singapore is making great efforts to develop digital payment and accelerating its advancement into the smart country.