Malaysia’s ICOs Moves Beyond Fintech as Marketplace Player ServisHero Eyes ICO
by Vincent Fong March 28, 2018Malaysia’s ICO scene seems to be maturing following a successful ICOs by the likes of HelloGold, and large players like Air Asia mulling their own ICO. The latest to join the game is Malaysia’s very own digital marketplace for the gig economy, ServisHero, which boasts over 200,000 users, 4,000 service providers and over 12,000 monthly jobs. The company currently operates in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.
What really caught our attention in this ICO is the board of advisors, which featured Dr. Karl Ng, Director of Digital Economy, MDEC, which, to our knowledge we’ve not observed the agency to be part of any other advisory board of other ICOs.
In an interview with Digital News Asia its CEO Karl Loo said that the exercise is less about fundraising than it is embracing the blockchain technology. The ServisHero Coin from what we gather has 4 main goals; reducing transaction fees, increasing trust in the ecosystem, data protection and scalability for global expansion.
According to their VP of Engineering Services, Josh Teng, they will be adopting a trustless payments using smart escrow, which effectively eliminates the costs of having 3rd party gateways and gives ServisHero a better flexibility in managing their overheads and the amount they charge. As the company scales and the transaction volume grows, the savings will likely be exponential
Moving forward, trade on ServisHero will be powered by ServisHero Coin. Though full information is yet to be available since the whitepaper will only be published in the coming weeks, it seems unlikely for ServisHero to immediately phase traditional payments systems in favour of ServisHero Coin without giving time for the users to adjust to the new system. The ServisHero Coin will also adopt a decentralised dispute resolution and reputation scores on the blockchain in their efforts to increase trust in the ecosystem.
It is unclear at the moment whether this ICO will trigger a response from the regulators given that the whitepaper is only to be made available in the coming weeks and the fact that is seems to be structured more as a utility token rather than a securities token based on current information available.
It is encouraging to see ICOs in Malaysia moving beyond fintech companies and beyond blind fundraising and it is certainly interesting to see reputable companies like ServisHero jumping into the bandwagon. Over the next few months, based on what I gathered from conversations in the industry we’ll definitely see a few interesting non-fintech players going doing this route.
Featured Image via: ServisHero Coin
