Once implemented, it will enable businesses, retail shops, consumers, tourists and visitors to interact with each other in a smarter and more effective manner

About five years ago, Eddie Lee, a tech entrepreneur, and his real estate developer-friend Jeremiah Lee, together with other co-founders, launched a crowdlending platform, called SeedIn in Cambodia, Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines. However, the duo — both huge fans of blockchain — was more interested in exploring the opportunities for this new-age tech. And as their real estate portfolio increased, the pair started asking themselves how to leverage blockchain to better manage and bring more efficiency for their tenants and visitors.

They pondered over this question for some time and finally landed in an idea — smart city.

“We were intrigued by the idea of a smart building, and on a bigger scale, a smart city, which then gave us the inspiration to start Limestone Network,” Eddie tells e27.

Limestone Network, an initiative of Global Tech Exchange, aims to build a smart city ecosystem for real estate developments and infrastructure across Southeast Asia. This, the co-founders hope, can be accomplished through the digitalisation of the city via the development of a blockchain infrastructure.

“Our team envisioned Limestone Network to be the final solution that resolves existing challenges faced by governments, real estate developers and estate management service providers. When Limestone Network is implemented into a real estate project or existing infrastructure, it will allow the facilities management to be taken to a simpler yet more secured level. Businesses, retail shops, building facilities, consumers, tourists and the daily visitors would be able to interact with each other in a smarter and more effective manner to provide a meaningful smart city experience,” adds Eddie.

The beginning

When Eddie and Jeremiah started thinking about building a smart city, the first questions that came into their mind were ‘who are they serving in the city’ and ‘what are the different ways to make it more efficient and increase the productivity for the residents’.

Also Read: How Singapore and Hong Kong provide models for Smart City development

“We believe that in order to build a smart and efficient city, the city and its requirements need to be understood first. It starts by having a digital ecosystem that allows real time analysis of living and moving data. The end result is a greener city through optimal energy production, enhanced security via distributed ledger technology and an urban civilisation that provides efficiency yet with simplicity,” he says.

According to Eddie, this can be achieved by integrating blockchain technology into the physical real estate assets, thus forming a digital network that connects urban cities into the daily lives of the residents that exchange information seamlessly in the background to bring convenience, efficiency and enhance security to their day to day business and life.

The process

Residents who work or reside in the city are required to register themselves with the Limestone mobile app (this is called digital passport). Limestone will first verify the residents’ identity and scan them against global databases before mapping them onto the blockchain network.

With a better understanding of the people living and working in the smart city, Limestone can then unlock one of the key features — digital payments — by working with the payment providers to allow residents to pay for any purchases digitally. Limestone has developed a digital wallet to hold multiple currencies of the solution providers within the cities. It will automatically be available to residents, who have registered themselves over the digital passport.

With the identity and payment data set up, this will form the basic digital infrastructure of the smart city. The smart city will be designed such that the residents own their own data and are empowered to share their information for convenience or to be incentivised by the providers whom Limestone is partnering with for the smart city.

“We will invite third-party developers and service providers to develop our blockchain applications on the Limestone architecture to create a three-dimensional ecosystem to transfer content and knowledge through an open application programming interface (API). The open API is set up to work with partners like the micro-finance institutions, banks and telcos to allow residents to gain access to financial services. There will be added convenience with data portability as they open a new account with the telcos bypassing the submitting of the same set of information that they already have and verified in our network,” explains Eddie, who started his first technology solutions company in 1998 before selling it in 2014 to focus on fintech.

Current project

With the UX of the product ready, Limestone has already moved on to the API integration of the AML/KYC process for the on-boarding of the smart city’s residents. The company has also selected its blockchain protocol and has begun the implementation simultaneously. The minimal viable product (MVP) rollout is expected in Q3 of 2019.

“As for the construction development of the smart city, we have completed the substructure (an underlying or supporting structure) and the work has begun on the superstructure (the part of a building above its foundations). It is targeted for completion in Q4 2021,” he says.

As per the current plan, Limestone Network will first be deployed in a city centre in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh with up to 10,000 business tenants and 190,000 daily population, spanning across 20 hectares of work spaces, encompassing shopping malls, schools, retail outlets and housing the largest exhibition hall for business. Apart from Phnom Penh, the company looks forward to working with other cities within Cambodia and across the ASEAN region.

But do you think the adoption of blockchain itself is sufficient to solve the perennial problems faced by cities? Don’t you think a drastic infrastructural change is the only way forward to achieve this?

“Both the hardware infrastructure and software layer are important to form an efficient smart city,” he shares. “If a drastic infrastructural change is needed to solve the perennial problems faced by cities, we will actually need to design and construct a city from scratch, without taking into consideration that there will already be old legacy roads, buildings and systemic designs in place.”

Eddie believes that like any new technology, blockchain is also going through its share of controversies and challenging period before mass adoption. “Blockchain holds a great promise and we have also witnessed a few central banks implemented and currently testing them within a controlled environment as early as 2016. This shows that mainstream society is gradually opening up to the benefits of blockchain, and we are confident that we will be able to get over the proverbial hump in pushing for mainstream adoption of the technology.”

Eddie says he has noticed a good bit of interest in corporates wanting to develop the system on blockchain for the supply chain industry as it provides the single source of truth and data immutability.

Also Read: What’s in store for blockchain and cryptocurrency?

“In my observation, I feel that the governments and MNCs are taking the lead in rolling out initiatives backed by blockchain technology, and with adequate education, the SMEs will follow suit. Personally, it is also important for us to develop a good solution through good design thinking for the consumers. It should blend into their everyday lives without disrupting their daily activities. Blockchain or not, it should just be a backend process that works,” he shares.

In March this year, Limestone Network became one of the 10 startups selected for Tribe Accelerator‘s blockchain programme. Eddie believes that Tribe Accelerator has an excellent global ecosystem.

“We have learnt a lot from the partners they brought into the ecosystem. For example, we are regular participants in a curated series of masterclasses, where we are engaged on topics ranging from the legal system, to blockchain design, unique and interesting use cases and exposure to industry grade tools that we could consider using,” Eddie concludes.

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Image Credit: Limestone Network.

 

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