 Hello, and thank you again for joining us in the second day of the Cointelegraph sponsored block show Asia conference right here in Singapore. If you have a moment, we have a fantastic guest with us. Can you please just introduce yourself and tell us what you do. Yeah, so my name is John Patrick Mullen. I'm currently an investment banker at Guotai Junan Securities, which is a large Chinese investment firm, and I'm running fintech research for them on the buy side. It's basically, we're looking at different fintech verticals for investment opportunities. I also run a fintech community in Shanghai, which is part of a larger global network called the fintech connector. And I'm currently an advisor for several different ICO projects, trade.io and another one called lucid exchange. So it sounds like you're deeply, deeply rooted into the blockchain community. Quite busy, quite deeply rooted I would say, yeah. What is the most exciting sector that you find blockchain will have an impact on? So I mean coming from the investment space, I think that a lot of the blockchain implementation has been on post-trade, so settlements, post-trade and keeping track of actually the transactions and client information. But I think for us and for me particularly, I think it's actually going to be a lot more interesting when we do more on the pre-trade and actually the settlement and the whole process of a trade. So once you can actually get the transactions up to speed, I think we're working towards that. We're making progress. Let me ask you, what do you think about Bitfury's new project, their new blockchain technology to create faster transactions? I mean I'm down for anything that can create faster transactions to be completely honest. At this point in time I think we all are, especially what's happening today with a few of the exchanges going down. Exactly. We recently just saw Bitfinex, Band Americans, we're both Americans, so I think the faster the transactions are better. I mean one of the things that we're doing at the trade IO projects, we're a blockchain exchange, a multi-asset blockchain exchange, we're actually on Ethereum mainnet with a rate and off chain. So that way we can continually have the transactions that we need. So I think you'll start seeing the integration of on and off chain to make the transactions faster and that's where security really comes into play. Okay. Do you guys have any plans of incorporating Exxonum into your pipeline? So we're blockchain agnostic, we'll take the best technology out there that there is, whatever is the fastest, whatever is the most secure, why would we not? We have a duty to our clients and to our customers to be the best exchange possible. So we don't necessarily have any loyalty to any specific program, of course we have people that we're talking to that we like and different projects. I'm not going to mention those too much yet because that's still in the pipeline. Fair. We saw that you were on the panel for AI and blockchain. That's right. Can you talk to me a little bit more about how blockchain and AI will affect the everyday person and the everyday consumer that was back? Yeah sure, so I think one of the most simple ways that this could happen is really if you look at cars actually. So if you drive an autonomous vehicle, there's an AI in that. There's algorithms that are taking place that are basically allowing you to drive without having to manually steer the car. If you start implementing this into kind of more of the blockchain space, you have autonomous vehicles which have telematic sensors which are putting out tons and tons and tons of data. If you can then decentralize this and distribute it across networks, there's a lot of implications for insurers for example, so then that's really where insurance people are looking at. So like last week I was at AIG giving a presentation about blockchain and insurance tech and I think that's something where you'll get better premiums, quicker claims, that's something that can happen much quicker. To be honest, a lot of the space is still developing, there's a lot of things to come so we're still a little bit far away away from total implementation of artificial intelligence. People have a misnomer of what is artificial intelligence. It can be very, very simple. It's not always robots that are walking everywhere. So it's not all a terminator using blockchain to infiltrate our lives? Very, very far from it. It's a lot more simple than that. It's really just taking data sets and then kind of figuring out what's the signals and what's the noise. So do you think in your sectors blockchain will be more passive to the technology and implementation into everyday process or do you see you still actively working to look for companies that are blockchain based or will the world transform and that will be the standard? It's just truth and transparency, blockchain, we'll deal with you. How do you view that? I think from traditional financial institutions they're going to start with the private blockchain networks of course. Why would a JP Morgan use a public blockchain? So I think blockchain is definitely the future. I'm a very, very firm believer in this but at the same time you're definitely going to have a separation between public and private blockchains and for traditional financial institutions that's going to be very, very clear. I mean you're already seeing that with the different consortiums and what not out there. You'll see more companies that are starting to adopt this internally but it takes time. We're still in the early stages of the technology maturation cycle. So there's still lots of room to grow and I think in the future it's going to be much more widespread. You'll see the JP Morgan's of the world that are going to be having their own blockchain. Let me ask you, what personally have you found exciting at the show? Whether it's a technology or an actual company? Oh good question. Actually I've been pretty interested about your company too, to be honest. Oh man. So I've been talking just even about what you guys are looking at and actually just been hanging out with you which has been really fun and you know seeing some of the people you guys are talking to it's an exciting project. So I like that. I mean the IoT sector is quite interesting for me. If you had any advice to give to entrepreneurs, engineers, companies as a whole, as they start to dive down the path of blockchain in the world of ICOs and cryptocurrency, what two pieces of advice do you have for them? Okay, two. First one, don't just put something on blockchain to put it on blockchain. To be really honest, make sure that it actually solves a problem or creates better efficiencies or more efficient processes, creates more transparency, etc. Don't just do it to ride the wave, do it because it actually means something for your business. And then number two, I would say hire the right people, hire the right talent and make sure you have a strong core team that believes in the project, that knows what they're talking about with the technology. I think it's easier to teach the technology than it is to teach the business side of things to be completely honest. So make sure that they have a business sense about it because there's a lot of technical teams that are going to fail because they don't know how to do the business. So I think you can teach the technical part, you can always get the technical people and hire good technical people. You need those, pay top dollar for these guys because you need them, you need them, you need them. But you also need the people who can run the business, so those are my two things I would say. All right, thank you. This is Steven Chase for Cointelegraph in the 80 percent humidity and 80 degree weather. Thank you. Thank you.