FIO And Reducing The Risk Of Sending and Receiving Cryptos With David Gold

With David Gold, CEO and Founder at FIO

What is your background briefly?

I hold a Masters Degree from M.I.T. in Aerospace Engineering and Technology Policy. After receiving this, I worked with NASA before transitioning into the private sector, working with and founding a software business during the dotcom era and then subsequently becoming an angel investor and partner at a VC fund. My current endeavour, Dapix, was incubated while I was Managing Director of Access Venture Partners (an early-stage venture capital fund) where I led blockchain investments.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Yes.  I’ve been in the venture-backed technology business for decades as an operator and investor.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

If blockchain is to achieve its potential of enabling easy decentralized movement of value, its usability must improve dramatically.  The Internet was around for more than ten years before its adoption exploded. That explosion was caused by the emergence of a usability protocol — HTTP.  Our vision with the Foundation for Interwallet Operability and the FIO Protocol is to deliver that same impact for the blockchain ecosystem.

Together with a rapidly growing list of currently 19 wallets, exchanges and crypto payment processors, we are delivering the new industry standard for blockchain usability.  As a result of the FIO Protocol, users won’t even know what a public address is a few years from now and they will be able to easily transaction on every blockchain with identical easy-to-use user experience.

As our recent study highlights, cryptocurrencies far from being what can be considered usable: 75% of people who sent crypto in 2018 felt less than completely confident that their transactions would go as planned. Our end goal is for even the most technologically-challenged users to be able to seamlessly send funds with full confidence in their transactions.

How can we improve cryptoasset interoperability quickly?

What many fail to grasp is that inward focus on individual wallets only takes us so far – wallet-specific UI/UX improvements eventually reach an impasse because every wallet has to interact with the blockchains and indirectly other wallets. To truly advance cryptocurrency usability, wallets need to converge around a standard to remove risk and inconvenience from transactions — no more need to deal with public addresses, error-free decentralized requests for payments and metadata that provides context for every transaction.

To accelerate the process, initiatives like FIO are needed to align the incentives of the players in the space. Real progress can only come about through the cooperation of such stakeholders – just as HTTP complemented the TCP/IP protocols of the early internet, interoperability standards should complement blockchain base layers to surpass their workflow limitations.

Some people have suggested the rise of BTC again was partly because it was Consensus time again – what are your thoughts?

It’s difficult to attribute Bitcoin’s fluctuations to particular events and the number of people attending Consensus is really a very small fraction of people who own Bitcoin.

How can people find out more about you & your work?

You can learn more about the FIO protocol from our website, or the demo/explainer videos.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Linkedin to stay up to date on all the latest developments.

The Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO) is a consortium of leading blockchain wallets, exchanges and payments providers that seeks to accelerate blockchain adoption by reducing the risk, complexity, and inconvenience of sending and receiving cryptoassets.

FIO is developing the FIO Protocol, a decentralized open-source blockchain protocol, that will enable greatly enhanced user experience inside the FIO enabled wallets, exchanges and applications of their choice.

With the FIO Protocol enabled, the sending and receiving of crypto tokens and coins from any blockchain on any wallet or exchange will become easy and error free.

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