David Johnson on Latium's approach to crypto payments in gig work

0:00I'm ashtin Addison from a vincentio for the Crypto Coin Show today on blockchain interviews we have David Johnson the CEO of Latium welcome to the show David thanks for having me any time so let's start out a little bit with a little bit on your background as well as what is Latium well my background is mostly FX and technology financial markets based I've been in

0:23financial markets space for about a decade been in technology for over 20 years started out very young in the 80s on technology my father was for the first Apple dealer in the state of Mississippi so 87 so that best bit about my background you know I got into a hardware at a very young age and started coding as a teenager that's great and then that led you to grow this

0:50company so when did it start and what was the vision well Latium was really the incarnation of acknowledging that there's two problems in crypto as far as real they use you know like everyday people hear about technology but it's quite cumbersome and you have to have a technical understanding in order to be able to access it and so we knew early on that was a problem

1:14that somebody hadn't solved you know it reminds me a lot of just about any of all the industry in technology I mean if you look at computers you know you had DOS but you couldn't really get adoption until you had operating systems like Macintosh and Windows because they may where anybody could access it they didn't have to write code they didn't have no commandments they could just use

1:33the platter so that was really the I guess the incubator for Latium was acknowledgment that there was a big issue in this space as far as about she knows and so that was a driving factor and that was the problem that we want to solve was was adoption so Latium was born out of that and the way that we've approached it was from it from a TASKE platform

1:55perspective and the reason is because labor is something everyone can do everybody goes to work everybody makes an income and it's something anybody without any technical knowledge can can get on and perform that platform or perform that task so the goal with Latium was to make that access that initial point into crypto very easy and seamless and giving users

2:19an environment they're used to you don't have to understand wallets blockchain hashes in order to operate you just come in and you click on a task you apply you do some work and all of a sudden your crypto used so that was the main driving factor in why we produce Latin I really I really like the concept and how you guys are really reaching out to you

2:41know adoption of the mainstream and that's really what I've been going for as well myself with a vent chain you know something we won't wait enough to have applications that have real-world application or else nobody's gonna you know adopt it that's right that's right you could you can make a great product but if people can't use it's kind of worthless that's great so you guys have

3:00like a crowdsourcing gig you know essentially is it limited to any type of work or what's the scope of Latium no the scope is quite general as far as tasks so right now the platform is live in a beta in a beta format and people are posting everything from you know follow me on Twitter to use my referral I need to watch my videos you know it's gonna have a general task threshold as

3:28far as what you can use it for what makes it kind of unique is the fact that it's not just digital it's also physical on the beta is digital the production release will be physical to have GPS mapping so our goal is to take tasks and allow people to aren't crypto in the physical world to so it will be just limited to digital tasks like bikes and watching videos and things like

3:51that or design a logo but it could be cutting your yarn it can be showing up for a restaurant opening we want to take anything that people do to produce income and giving them the opportunity to do so through Krypton that's awesome so let's talk a little bit about marketing and timing do you think with Latium you know the adoption of cryptocurrencies in the

4:11mainstream world is actually still fairly new to most people do you think that the timing is right for Latium to start growing their business and will it be in expansive growth or do you think that the market may maybe in the future years the growth will be more expensive well I think we're at the starting point for growth in crypto I mean myself I've

4:31been in crypto sis and you know we've kind of been watching the timing for mainstream adoption because it's something that we've acknowledged for a long time but the market had to be ready people had to be ready and I think that the PR that's come out over the last 12 months around crypto it's become a household name I would argue still a lot of people

4:50don't know what exactly it is or how to use it or get how to get access to it but I think that the exposure is there so people are aware of crypto and the idea of blending that with the gig economy it's really too explosive industries together the gig economy is growing exponentially and with good reason you know everybody wants to make additional income and the biggest

5:13problem was access so you know there's predictions out there that the gig economy won't grow the real world economy within the next decade you know no one knows for a fact that's true or not but one thing is that we have history to look at it's the expansive growth year over year and that's true for both crypto and the gig economy so naturally putting them together I think

5:32the timing is not that's great to hear so when if the timing is now then maybe a little bit of background on when you guys started Latium and how the software development has been going so far the concept for the actual latium platform I get started around 18 months ago proof of concept the idea of crypto adoption has been at the heart probably since

5:552013 for me but the actual project itself was about 18 months ago we've released an alpha product at the end of December 2017 we've released a beta product at the end of April and we've already released multiple patches to that beta proxy so as far as where we are in development you know we're pretty far along and the platform is very usable and compared to most crypto

6:20projects I would say that where we're in the top top 1% as far as actually delivering a product so you know people can go on and they can sign up and start tasking right now the functionality is good you know we're continuing to add additional functionality but there's core functionalities that's there the ability to be able to create to perform a task they'll transfer to

6:41other users we have an internal exchange we have the ability to chat with other users so I mean there's a lot lot of development that's already released the public we have a lot of other cool features that are coming very soon as well like we have a mobile app for Android that will be released by the end of July we've been in the works on that for the last six months we also have

7:04really cool functions called proof of human which creates a digital ID for it for a digital user so it's basically like a fingerprint to prove this person's real it's not a problem a lot of people think about but anyone who's in the technology space working on digital technologies they know there's there's a truth in the fact that we can't validate that a new user is an

7:28individual person and when you talk about tasking and doing these financially base this is a big problem and I have yet to see anybody develop something that actually solves a we believe we have and they'll be released July 6 so that's pretty exciting that's very exciting and I completely agree with you David on the fact that identities are going to be a necessary

7:50thing moving forward especially if you're doing gigs working with people doing loans anything you're gonna want to know who's on the other side of the agreement or else you know how can you trust that person right right now and it's very interesting to see that you guys have a chat lots of functionality in the application already so actually that's very impressive so where if you

8:13guys already have gigs running right now is it a global initiative or where are we seeing the gigs where are people putting up jobs is it in North America or all around the physical side of it has not come online the physical side that comes online with production release so that would that would be within the next 30 to 60 days right now it's strictly digital so it doesn't

8:36really matter works almost located our users are all around the world we have users in over 30 countries currently user registrations are growing daily and quite honestly we're just now starting to get the word out we've really focused on development and making it real product versus just hyping the idea of a product we see this you know I'm an old-school business guy than running

8:57digital companies for over the last decade and I know that at some point hike fades and the question is what's real right so we want to present a real working product people don't have to trust that we're gonna build something they can see it yeah and I completely agree with you the development is key and you know if you don't have the development then you

9:17really have nothing I agree yeah so can you explain a little bit about the business model of Latium itself are you connecting people together and you know providing that value for others and to with a surcharge or what's the with the revenue model of Latium well there's multiple revenue models coming coming in the future basically we're we're a service for a

9:38fee platform currently those services revolve around tasking in the future there will be additional services added some of those are slated actually within the next 30 to 60 days but the way the way the system works currently if you if you post a task right there is there is a minor fee when that when those two parties meeting complete a task that's

9:59Latium generates revenue we also had a pretty unique Tirion structure which ultimately allows you to become felis if you're good enough active right so if you if you are participating the economy and you're doing a good job eventually your fees go away as you come in new into the system you're going to be you're going to be charged on our maximum level of our fee

10:20structure and that tiers out to eventually be viewless that's great so it's sort of like a incentive gamification you know as you build your profile up you have more credibility you don't they get charged as much by the company and you can do better deals exactly that's great to hear so can people also pay with fiat currencies as well as cryptocurrency for the gigs fiat

10:42currency integration is something that we're working on and we anticipate it being implemented at it before q3 is out of this year so we're actively working on it currently we support Bitcoin aetherium next week we'll be going live with oMG we just add a RC 20 support so we'll be adding additional tokens as we and we've done that in such a way where

11:05it's moving forward it's just an administrative task for us so it's not a development thing so we'll be able to add ERC 20 tokens very rapidly but Fiat I would I would imagine that we'll have it done within the next three months and I think the implementation there is going to be it's going to exceed people's expectations that's great to hear

11:22and I think that's a major part of adoption as well considering you know what you want to bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream adoption from people who aren't already familiar with Bitcoin and aetherium and these altcoins that may be their first gig they can do it in and fiat and you know to only be able to accept crypto sometimes it's it's a barrier to entry so I think that's a

11:44really smart idea to also implement that yeah and the only reason that hasn't been implement a layer is because everything else you can kind of implement without a third party and we both know that you know with you deal with crypto and the established banking industry it's difficult it's difficult to work reporters so that's something that we're working through

12:03solving and Sue's asalto Fiat will be available awesome so can we talk a little bit about the blockchain integration on Latium is there data information stored from these gigs on the blockchain or and are you integrating a Latium token into the process as well sure this good question there is a Latium token it's called a decks and currently all tasks

12:27are priced in Latics and paid in lines we need to pass a Bitcoin or aetherium you can exchange for radix on the app so it's all a one-stop shop solution but as far as the blockchain we've actually kind of taken a different approach and I've got some really really good reasons why we've taken a different person Latium is currently a hybrid so meaning that we're using the

12:49blockchain where the blockchain excels right the blockchain currently excels in financial transactions dealing with tokens dealing with Bitcoin these things make sense there are some major issues with latency and it's something that people really don't talk about in the space and I'm not quite sure why but if you're trying to develop an enterprise app on blockchain currently there's not

13:11any implementation that can support that at a level of the enterprise okay so if you wanted to bring something on that needed say to do a million transactions a second there's not a blockchain in the world that's developed today that can handle that right so what we have is a mixture of decentralized servers and blockchain technology ultimately our goal is to go full-blown

13:32blockchain over time but we want to use the blockchain wisely because the blockchain is a ledger it should not do everything it can't do everything efficiently if you if you notice it when you load a deal for set it will take 15 20 maybe 30 seconds to load okay that is an infrastructure issue that current blockchain technology cannot solve so you have two options you either use the

13:59blockchain as it is designed to which is for transparency and for security and financial transactions or you use it for everything and you get a useful works user experience yeah that's one of the issues we're coming to right now right and especially the scalability of transactions all right we're working towards you know aetherium hopefully it has some

14:19protocol upgrades but also there are there many other competitive block chains which you know could may be able to do tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second moving forward and I think that the amount of block chains that we'll be able to handle that will also increase as the adoption increases within the next two to three years I agree and

14:39that's pretty much what we're looking for is something that can actually support an enterprise application we don't want to build an enterprise application that ultimately will fail because of this infrastructure so you know we understand that's gonna take time it's not gonna be it so it's not something someone's gonna solve in a month or two you know blockchain is

14:56still very young and most of the implementations I would consider a rough beta and so you know when you talk about enterprise application you really want something that's production tested definitely so it sounds like you guys have a lot of things going on with Latium which is super great to hear and hopefully you have a large enough team to also develop all these in a timely

15:17manner but it sounds like you guys have hit all of your roadmap development timeline marks you know Gargan so that's great to hear so can we talk a little bit I know we talked about all the things but can we just you know reiterate a little bit on what's coming up in the next six months for Latium in terms of the software development and the token sale sure sure well the toga sale was

15:39completed earlier this year so we sold through our toka sell on that happen in January as far as the future and future feature sets like I said proof of human is coming in July 6 we have additional currency integrations we have Fiat we have an Andrew Android app that will be released in July I o SF will be following that's just I need a little bit behind we have a really cool feature

16:06I'm excited about that will also be released in July that is a reward system so anyone holding radix will get a reward and they can lock that up for a period of time within the system and they're going to get a reward they put a hundred Latics in they get 110 lat ex back so it's as a holder reward system and it's all internal with within the ym network so it gives

16:28it gives lat X a store value you know everyone talks about Bitcoin but it's only if the price moves up this gives you if you believe in what we're doing you believe in the team's ability to deliver what we said we will then you're getting a reward on top of that wow that sounds really promising and looking forward to those applications on the mobile app stores as well so it is there

16:53room for extra people to join in to the software development of Latium or are you looking for more people to just join the community and what's the best way to reach out to the community and learn more well well both we're looking for users I mean like I said we're just now starting to market because we're getting close to your production release as far

17:12as development goes we actually you can come on the site right now and we have the ability to put in an application to work for Latium force we're a growing company and we're looking for talented people websites Latium that'll work if you go there you can check out the platform and see if it's something you want to participate in whether being a user or potential develop that's great

17:34to hear thank you so much David Johnson CEO of Latium it's been a pleasure speaking with you I'm really excited to see these application developments moving forward in the future leave all your community links to your telegram your website down in the description below for the viewers and I think we should follow up with another interview you know when you have

17:52developed these applications and they're out to the public to see how the community has grown and what's coming in the next steps for Latium sounds great actually thanks for having me thank you so much David