The future of crypto, blockchain and digital assets

Alan Knitowski is the president, CEO and co-founder of Phunware, Inc.

Russ Alan Prince: Tell me about Phunware.

Alan Knitowski: Phunware, Inc. is almost a 14-year-old company. We focus on an enterprise cloud platform for mobile, called Multiscreen-as-a-Service—MaaS. In our first ten years as a private company, we raised more than $100 million. In 2018, we went public via a SPAC. Today, we continue to raise money to invest in our platform as we add new products, solutions, services and other offerings, including both software and hardware, that help today’s leading brands with everything they need to succeed on mobile.

We have developed mobile ecosystems for some of the world’s most recognizable brands. In our early days, we were one of the first publishers to offer products on Apple’s App Store. Today, we have developed into an industry leader in helping the world’s biggest brands with their digital transformation needs.

Our MaaS platform powers digital application experiences and campaigns for brands, helping them reach their customers across smartphones, tablets, wearables, smart TVs, kiosks and digital signage. We help companies and governments alike engage, manage and monetize their global audiences and communities on Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems and devices.

prince: How is Phunware’s dual-token economy empowering consumers and reimagining how brands engage with audiences?

Knitowski: In the digital age, privacy has become a very sensitive topic for consumers and rightly so. Consumers have unfortunately become a product of the Big Tech companies and their computer oligarchs. These companies offer platforms, solutions and services “for free”, but they also monetize their users tremendously, harvesting them for profit. Unfortunately, and more importantly, they usually do this without a user’s consent, so consumers typically don’t even know which brands own their data, what they’re actually doing with that data, and how it might affect them individually.

We deeply differ from these technology companies, believing that consumers deserve full sovereign control over their personal data that also represents their digital identities online, and that they should be properly compensated when they share it or actively engage with brands. We reach more than one billion monthly active devices, representing hundreds of millions of active app users for the world’s biggest brands.

With this permissioned data, we are building a dual-token economy inside our MaaS customer data platform. To that end, we created PhunToken as a foundation for operating a crypto ecosystem that connects to the functionality offered in our cloud-based platform. In parallel, and separate from these platform credits that can reward you for being you, we also created PhunCoin as a financial instrument for token holders to receive distributions of the economic value resulting from the ecosystem.

prince: What is the main difference between a utility and security token for people who may not be familiar with these terms?

Knitowski: Generally, there is Bitcoin as a one-of-a-kind asset worldwide, and then there are all other cryptocurrencies as everything else. Cryptocurrencies include a wide range of digital assets, including complete nonsense and junk to highly sophisticated and novel new tokens that enable users to participate in non-traditional finance, or decentralized finance, as the next generation of banking and returns.

Security tokens like PhunCoin are regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and can only be legally traded on a specifically regulated ATS exchange, where investors must go through a process to create an account, in full compliance with know your customer, anti-money laundering and accredited investor certifications.

Utility tokens like PhunToken are completely unregulated and currently have no easily understood rules or regulations from most governments around the world. In our case, PhunToken acts as a unit of measure or credit used to participate in our MaaS ecosystem to consume platform functionality to engage, manage and monetize mobile audiences. It looks and feels similar to travel rewards points or points consumers earn on financial transactions via Visa, MasterCard or other forms of credit or debit card.

prince: What are some of the biggest trends you see with regards to cryptocurrencies and how do you see the industry evolving?

Knitowski: Right now, we’re experiencing what many would consider a sort of “crypto nuclear winter,” which tends to repeat itself every four years along with the cycles of the Bitcoin protocol. Every four years, Bitcoin goes through what is called a halving, where the block rewards programmed into the code are halved.

There will only be 21 million Bitcoins that will ever exist in the world and it is likely that the last Bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140. As a guaranteed and programmatic fixed supply, this is very unlike what we are used to seeing with US dollars or other fiat currencies, where central banks can endlessly print money to create additional debt to expand our money supply and create inflation.

Unfortunately, we are now living through a time of hyperinflation due to the recent period of “easy money.” The markets have been flooded with excessive liquidity which tends to drive up the price of everything we consume.

Globally, the current number of cryptocurrency wallets is probably close to the total number of Internet users in 1997, with adoption even more prolific than Internet adoption was back in the 1990s. This trend is not only expected to continue rolling forward, but it is also expected to accelerate dramatically over time. As each cycle of Bitcoin continues in the future, we fully expect to see more and more use of cryptocurrency, blockchain and self-storage, and supreme control over both assets and wealth.

RUSSIAN ALAN PRINCE is CEO of Private Wealth magazine (pw-mag.com) and Chief Content Officer of High-Net-Worth Genius (hnwgenius.com). He consults with family offices, the fast-tracked wealthy entrepreneurs and select professionals.