Nathan Kaiser is a Swiss-Taiwanese dual-national lawyer protecting and promoting Cardano, the world’s first third-generation blockchain.
One of Eiger’s founders, Nathan has two decades of professional experience in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing, advising clients in all matters pertaining to investment, corporate law, commercial trade, employment law and commercial disputes. Nathan also serves as a trustee on the board of companies in Switzerland, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Active in the firm’s intellectual property team for the Greater China region, Nathan assists international clients in their corporate and commercial projects.
Trescon had the privilege of interviewing Nathan Kaiser, speaker at World Blockchain Summit taking place on 25 July 2019 in Singapore.
The Interview
When did you make your first cryptocurrency investment?
(Smiles) I am not an investment advisor, and like others, I have lost a shirt or two and won a shirt or two. My first investment was in a regulated bitcoin exchange in New York. As you can imagine, that didn’t really work out – even if from the outside, it was made to look like an exit… Generally, I look at the team first and overall. People matter.
For how long have you been working on your project and what attracted you to it?
I joined the Cardano Foundation as a Chairperson last December 2018. However, I have been with the project before that. I have been working with Input Output HK (IOHK) for several years already. As the Chair of the Foundation, my mission is to protect and help to develop the Cardano ecosystem in a transparent and decentralized way. Our main mission is to drive adoption.
One aspect of developing the ecosystem is to build a decentralized global community with the Cardano Ambassador program. We launched it last December and appointed the very first group of ambassadors in January. Currently, we have a total of over 40 ambassadors with four different roles: meetup organizers, moderators, content creators and translators. The communications and community team has been building mutually beneficial relationships with our dedicated Ambassadors. And with their help, we have been able to better manage and promote our global community across the world.
This is only the beginning: we aim to broaden the program’s appeal with additional role, and generally add bells and whistles, allowing for deeper interactions between the community, the Ambassadors, and the Foundation: The Foundation is at the stage of soon launching the second phase of the Ambassador program with better features that help the community to develop the ecosystem with the Foundation’s support.
Additionally, the Cardano Foundation has been expanding the team by bringing in new talents for operations, PR and communications, community management and legal functions. We are looking forward to growing our community and keeping it updated with regular news and engaging content.
Have any previous experiences helped you navigate the challenges in the crypto and blockchain industry?
Law can both be a massive impediment, as well as a fantastic driver. Cars and road transport was only really taking off after the rule that vehicles should stick to one side of the road. Seriously, this really helped. And in that sense my having been involved in the area of law with regard to bitcoin first, then cryptocurrencies, knowing the relevant players, and how to navigate cliffs, who has been rather useful.
What sets your project apart from the competition?
Cardano project is developed based on the rigorous scientific background, including academic peer review. Based on this peer-reviewed academic research, Cardano has an ethos of openness and transparency. Further, formal specification is something we are proud of. They say “space is hard”, but trust me and the engineers at IOHKJ – so is formal specification…
The Cardano project has released Plutus and Marlowe – functional contract platforms that will ensure the correct execution of your smart contracts. Specifically for Marlowe, with its browser-based contract editor and simulator, you do not need programming expertise to design your smart contract.
Plutus provides an execution platform and functional programming language that runs on the Cardano settlement layer and provides considerable security advantages. It delivers an easier, more robust way to show that your smart contracts are correct and will not encounter the problems found in previous smart contract language design.
Marlowe is a new language for modelling financial instruments as smart contracts on a blockchain. It has been designed for people who are business engineers or subject experts rather than experienced developers.
