BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — Rate
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to Davis, co-founder and co-CTO of Rate, a Singapore-based start-up aiming to implement various uses of blockchain in businesses.
1. Who are you, what do you do, and what does Rate do?
I’m Davis, co-founder and co-CTO of Rate. We are a Singapore-based blockchain start-up aimed to bridge enterprises and blockchain by tokenising their assets. Our family of products include RateX, a free browser extension to help people to save money when they shop online, as well as Rate as a social mobile app.
On the mobile app, you can look at the recent deals, some of which may be community generated or curated by us. From a mobile phone, you can view a range of products and deals in websites from around the region including Lazada, Amazon, and Shopee.
2. What is Rate’s secret sauce?
Rate’s secret sauce is that we dream big and move fast. We have a team of growing individuals who are passionate to realise our vision.
3. What’s next for Rate?
For Rate, the next thing is to build up the range of products and services for businesses as well as consumers to help them reap the benefits of blockchain. Now, I think blockchain is very intimidating and there’s no solutions that target their daily activities, mainly trading. We aim to bring blockchain into payments, salaries or even other financial services and the first step would be to tokenise assets such as SGD. Think of it as transferring money. As human resources, you get to issue out salaries over the blockchain and the value is in SGD since it is backed by SGD. It is a cheaper way to move money, corporate payments, and e-commerce.
4. What is your greatest challenge?
Our greatest challenge is to educate the public about blockchain, even developers. As with most new technologies, blockchain is intimidating. Most people when they hear blockchain, they think of trading and they think there’s no business use case for it. The education part is a very big challenge. We’ve been trying to educate via meetups, one-to-one with people, talking to our friends, and writing articles on our website.
5. What are your best memories at BLOCK71?
Our best memories is working over the weekend and listening to live bands from Timbre+ since our office is at the corner.
6. How can we help?
We’re looking to hire software developers who are passionate in their craft and love to work in an environment that values impact and personal growth. For the general public, if you want to learn more about blockchain and what we do, do check us out at https://rate.com.sg.
Watch the full video interview with Davis from Rate here:
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If you are inspired by this story and have a start-up idea of your own, you can also apply to join the BLOCK71 ecosystem at http://bit.ly/BLOCK71SGApply !
