On Thursday, August 15th, Cobo participated in NEO Global Development’s (NGD) fourth (English-based) NEO LIVE event. NEO LIVE is an Ask Me Anything (AMA) style community event that takes place on the official NEO Telegram channel. In addition to the English event, NGD also hosts weekly NEO LIVE events in Chinese via WeChat.

To date, NEO LIVE has had Travala, Guardian Circle, and Switcheo as guests.

Cobo global marketing director, Janet Jiang, participated in the fourth NEO LIVE, answering questions about Cobo’s business model, NEO and GAS integration into the Cobo Wallet, receptiveness to working with NEO-based dApps, and more.

Source: NEO.

The full transcript can be found below:

Yanyu Shen (director of NEO EcoFund): Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 4th NEO Live on Telegram. This is Yanyu Shen, Director of NEO ECO Fund. Very happy to have you guys here. I will be your host tonight.

Before the session starts, I would like to repeat the background of the NEO LIVE initiative in case you are new to the group.

NEO LIVE is a marketing initiative from NEO Global Development, to bring the latest blockchain knowledge and NEO news to the community. It’s one hour live chatting every Thursday night 8pm (UTC+8) in NEO’s official telegram group (https://t.me/NEO_EN). NGD core teams/NEO Eco Project leaders/NEO dev community leaders/pioneering blockchain leaders will be invited to share the latest technological development, industry insights with the community member.

Our guest today is Janet Jiang, Global Marketing Director of Cobo Wallet.

Cobo is part of the portfolio of NEO ECO Fund. From the perspective of an investor, I’m so glad to see the great work of Cobo in the past two years.

Hi, Janet, can you introduce yourself and Cobo to the NEO Community?

Janet Jiang: Hi everyone. I’m Janet Jiang. I have been in blockchain for 2 years. Now, I’m the Global Marketing Director of Cobo Wallet. Before, I co-founded a blockchain marketing startup in China.

Our company Cobo aims to be a one-stop-shop for everything related to digital assets. As a company, we emphasize long-term security, reliability, and convenience. Our key products and services reflect our mission. Cobo offers a secure mobile wallet (Cobo Wallet), a high-end cold storage wallet for advanced users (Cobo Vault), and custodial services for institutional investors (Cobo Custody).

Cobo Wallet is our flagship mobile wallet with 1 million registered users around the globe. Our wallet aims to make it easy for people to grow and secure their crypto. It now supports 40 coins and 900 tokens. We offer native staking for dozens of PoS projects, an integrated dApp store, and full support for Lightning Network.

Cobo started to support NEO and NEOGAS November 2018. Users can generate Neo Gas by just holding NEO in the Cobo Cloud wallet.

Yanyu: Why and how does the Cobo Wallet support the NEO ecosystem?

Janet: It was because of NEO’s aim to build a distributed network-based smart economy system. A wallet is a very important part of that ecosystem so supporting NEO had always been in our plans. It’s one of the biggest and most popular blockchain projects in the world, and our users had been asking us to support it.

Secondly, the NEO algorithm allows users to collect GAS by just holding NEO. That’s what Cobo had been doing from the start: To grow and protect user’s crypto assets.

Yanyu: Appreciate Cobo’s engagement to the community.

Janet: You’re welcome!

Yanyu: Everybody, it’s time for Questions now! To make it easy for the team to trace the question, please kindly number your questions, starting from 1. eg. A raise question starting with Q1, then B raises questions starting with
Q2. Please keep the questions about NEO and Cobo, we will retain the right to select the questions.

Q1: Out of the 1 million registered users, how many are currently actively using the wallet?

Janet: Thanks for the question. Our data in May was 20,000 daily active users. Our numbers are still growing. We’ll share the next milestone when it’s available.

Q2: Can I receive AirDrops on your wallet?

Janet: Yes. Sometimes we host giveaways with projects and we support most airdrops like BTT, PIZZA and etc.

Q3: The NEO and NEOGAS wallets were already supported, any updates now? Some new collaboration points?

Janet: We’re working on supporting NEO dApps, which should be available in September, 2019. When NEO 3.0 is ready, we’ll also make the coin swap easy for our users.

Q4: What is Cobo’s advantage compared to other wallets?

Janet: This is a really good question. I think the answer is not only for NEO holders but also for general crypto holders.

First, security. Cobo Wallet has adopted a very typical solution of Hardware Security Modules (HSM) encryption machine and put most of the assets on the cold end. It ensures the highest possible security for the user’s assets.

The second point is convenience. Cobo Wallet is easy to use, especially for newcomers to the crypto space, and it provides a balance between convenience and security. We also support many dApp ecosystems and Lightning Network, and we incorporated exchange functions in the app. We are continuously adding new features and products to make sure our users have the most powerful tools and security available.

Third, we provide users with the tools they need to grow their digital assets, e.g NeoGAS. This allows users to decide by themselves how they want to grow their assets despite, price fluctuations; an attractive option for users who truly believe in blockchain.

Q5: Where does the Cobo wallet store the private keys?

Janet: To ensure the security we promise, our wallet uses a historically verified hot and cold isolated HSM’s. HSM’s are also commonly used in the traditional finance industry and in cryptography.

So most of our user assets are stored in a fully offline, globally distributed storage HSM. With the HSM hardware and software layer protocols, we can ensure security during the generation and use of private keys. In addition, we employ a multi-signature mechanism prevents funds from getting lost because of a single point failure.

Q6: What is Cobo preparing in the future regarding staking?

Janet: Thank you for the question. Staking is one of the most important parts of our product. Cobo is the first mobile wallet in the world to provide native staking. We’ll keep working on supporting more and more staking projects in the wallet. We’re also working on improving security and reducing the costs of node maintenance so that we can maximize our users’ profits.

Q7: Will Cobo wallet ever create its own token?

Janet: Instead of issuing users our own tokens, we distribute the rewards generated by the user’s assets directly to the user.

There are different methods for consensus that power blockchains today – Bitcoin, for example, uses Proof-of-Work (PoW). In 2017, there were a lot of cryptocurrencies using the PoS and the master node method. It creates original blocks for blockchain steadily and securely through staking or supernode building.

We enable users to make a “pool” of assets for staking, and then we share the block rewards with our users. It is very similar to a PoW mining pool, but instead of a mining rig generating new blocks, it is the user’s tokens and voting rights. So, in this way, token holders can transfer their voting rights to us by staking in Cobo Wallet, and then they receive block rewards. Cobo Wallet provides users with all-in-one access to many different projects without security risk. In this way, users hold the tokens they want and get rewards at the same time.

Q8: Are there any NEO dApps Cobo is looking to integrate in the future?

Janet: We’re working on supporting NEO dApps right now. There are already a few potential candidates on our list, but we are always open to newcomers. If there are any NEO dApp developers in this group, feel free to reach out for collaborations.

Q9: What are your current struggles?

Janet: Not sure what you mean by “struggles”. But as a blockchain startup company, there are always obstacles to overcome. 🙂

Q10: What’s your opinion about the blockchain market in 2019? What’s Cobo’s plan for 2019?

Janet: 2019 has passed for 7 months. Compared to the end of 2018, the market has recovered a lot. I think the market will not be as explosive as 2017, but there are still a lot of opportunities and important developments taking place. For a staking wallet like Cobo, one interesting aspect is the maturation of the PoS ecosystem. More and more mainchains are supporting it and the staking economy will keep developing.

Cobo has been adding staking for PoS coins/tokens since April 2018, and we currently manage over 300 validator nodes for different blockchain projects. With our expertise in PoS, we believe that we can help more crypto users to grow their crypto assets with stable, passive incomes in 2019.

We’re also looking forward to supporting NEO 3.0 in 2020.

Q11: Speaking of growing users’ digital assets, we know that Cobo is also famous for being a mobile staking wallet. What are the different ways you create awareness of your staking products?

Janet: After April this year, people are talking more and more about the direction of the staking economy, which has attracted a lot of attention. For each currency holder, it does have an inflationary income. On the one hand, we’ve made people aware of staking through a lot of examples or educational work, like this https://cobo.com/blog/NeoGASnaturalgeneration?locale=en.

On the other hand, we provide extraordinary but still easy-to-use products. Because the operations on the chain are extremely complex, users have doubts about its security and convenience. With our experience of running nodes for almost 2 years, we provide different staking projects as a simple finance product in Cobo Wallet that users can securely access on their mobile devices.

Q12: As a NEO investor, we want NEO logo come in front of the Cobo.com like the other coins logo, is it possible?

Janet: It’s already on the first page.

Q13: Very briefly, what is Cobo’s business model for revenue generation?

Janet: We do staking as I mentioned in the last few answers. We give 90% of the revenue to our users and keep 10% as our operational fees.

Q14: I like the design of the Cobo logo. Is there a special meaning to it?

Janet: Thanks! It means “Infinity.” Like we’ll always grow to infinity.

Note: Some edits have been made for formatting and readability. The full conversation can be found at https://t.me/NEO_EN/20095.

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