Wally F

I graduated with a degree in economics from University College London. In my final year of university, I was teaching myself how to code, so I was naturally spending a lot of time on programming websites. Soon after, I stumbled upon a group of people who were talking about crypto. They were calling it the “new Internet Money”. I got really curious because I had spent 3 years of my life in the UK learning about money from one of the best universities in the world, however my lecturers never mention Bitcoin at all. So this got me thinking “Why are these tech geeks talking about a new form of money but I did not learn about it in university?”

I would not say that we are a “Blockchain Island” like many people say, but I would rather say that we are an “Innovation Hub.” This attribute of being a Blockchain Island arose and stuck because we were one of the first countries to tap into this new ecosystem, whereas other countries were being more restrictive or decided to ban it. So, in a way we kick started a whole movement from Malta. We acknowledged that crypto is something a little different from financial services; it had value and could propel blockchain as a technology, in other words the DLT. This is due to it being the underlying layer, and the underlying technology.

I am one of the founders of whale Alert. We have been developing for a long time and we used to create all sorts of stuff, mostly websites and business applications. During 2017 we were actively trading and we noticed that the market was very volatile. We wanted to find out why this was happening so we decided to create some tools. One of these was a Bitcoin and Ethereum tracker that informed us of large transfers to and from exchanges. After the big crash we decided to stop trading and shelved most of our tools. After a while we discovered that the scanner was still running and we decided to share it with the rest of the community through a Twitter channel and it turned out to be very popular.

The way I like to explain sidechains is “a way to move one digital currency from one network to another network and back”. This is so you can have different properties and features that you wouldn’t have on the main blockchain. So Blockstream was founded upon this idea of sidechains 5 ~ 6 years ago now. There is a lot of interesting things that can be built on Bitcoin, however Bitcoin moves at a slow and steady pace. More experimental features could be tested off on a another branch which only the people who choose to go to that branch would be subjected to. Thus, if there are any problems, this will not risk the main chain. There are a couple these today, such as the Liquid Network, which is focused heavily towards trading applications and assets, Rootstock is another one which is focused on features that Ethereum has but with Bitcoin as the native coin. So sidechains have different rules and features that you have which you cannot get on the main chain.

We are now able to witness global regulators coming together and work into the issue creating policies in order to protect the cryptocurrency ecosystem from different types of fraud by introducing regulations into the market. Also, when we see global law enforcement becoming more active investigating in cryptocurrency crimes, that keeps me from being concerned. Moreover, the kinds of issues CipherTrace is involved with, helping to trace and follow the flow of money, it clears those types of concerned. With the nature of blockchain, it’s actually a positive thing. With blockchain, you can’t change a transaction that has been done and you cannot change the information on it either, so it is easier to trace where money is transferred to than the fiat market.