From Gossip Girl Cast To Building A Blockchain Marketplace: Nan Zhang, MyMarkit Inc. CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Hi, my background is in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. I had a career that focused on areas of neuroscience, clinical research, and computational neuroscience before I moved over into startup after founding my own company. I also had a tangent career with acting and was a main cast member of the television show Gossip Girl.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are called MyMarkit. We are the world’s first fintech blockchain marketplace, and it begets a whole new way to shop. Our marketplace is built ground up around ledgers that are mined from transactions between users for products in a free market (marketplace), which also creates a truly digital currency for the first time backed to the commodities.

Our tech automates traditional overhead fulfillment/COGS and yields 70-80% gross margins at scale. It also means that buyers/vendors keep 100% of what they sell on our platform, while buyers can get the lowest prices possible anywhere. Our automation tech also allows for 100% infallible authentication and data analytics/tracking for the first time for the lifetime of the product. We are starting in the resale luxury market space before moving on to retail verticals. Welcome to a new way to shop!

What is the origin story?

I came across the idea for a lossless transaction after working on fully sustainable frameworks for a non-profit. I thought, why is it that the moment I purchase something, I will never get anywhere near the price that I just paid for it?

Is this item no longer worth anything and the currency I just used to purchase it is worth everything? I realized, that’s not the case. The currency represents the value of the product purchased. From there, we looked at the fundamentals of blockchain and crypto in order to understand currency at its inception (whether it’s fiat, digital, or otherwise).

We realized that a free market can translate to a marketplace where transactions between users can mine a currency that represents and is backed to the commodity to begin with. And thus, a lossless transaction and a true digital currency was born. It’s like having real world NFTs for physical goods for the first time.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our team is made of experts in every area of commerce, blockchain, marketplaces, fintech, and crypto/digital currency. We are a total of over 45 people strong, and we’ve worked over years to build our tech stack from the ground up to scale. I think the most interesting thing is that we were not all so myopic in thinking about how digital currency/blockchain is currently utilized. We had to go to its roots to find a way to use it that neutralized all currencies and brought it into the real world with true backing/worth.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I would probably be in some other area of creation or helping others to create. The common theme of my life is to push boundaries and to do things that seem impossible in order to come up with solutions that should exist… but just don’t yet.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Our success is measured by the market demand and the users. We know our product is something that consumers have asked for but have no alternatives currently to use. We lose so much money in how we purchase. We have so much volatility in how we use currency. We wanted to marry fintech, payment gateways, marketplaces, and blockchain all under one roof.

And the most important metric is how happy our customers are with what we’ve created. They say that this is something that should have existed long ago. And for the first time, they don’t have to pay fees or lose out on commissions for selling their stuff. Buyers are so happy that they can get all of the cost savings by getting the lowest price possible on our platform. That is the most successful and most rewarding feedback.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We have been in stealth mode to build out our technology, so we are just coming out of stealth. The pre-launch user sign up was over our expectations. We’ve onboarded executives from some of the biggest competitors in this space. We’ve had a phenomenal requests to white label our technology and to provide our tech solutions for other ecommerce or marketplace companies. We’ve also had developments in the financial services space to roll out digital wallets, debut our coin, and other exciting offerings.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m most excited to see the future developments of digital currencies from countries. I think it’s a game-changing addition to the crypto world in that more regulations will soon arise, for better or worse. I am excited to see how blockchain solutions will be used for everyday use cases instead of more SAAS-focused enterprise functions. Overall, the future of blockchain with regards to financial services and various related spaces will be the one to look out for.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

We were nominated for Startup Of The Year, so we wanted to participate in the nominations. We are just going out for press now with our launch, so we appreciate that there is a community of tech-related news sourced by amazing writers to find the latest innovations for readers.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Get over the concept of fear because on the other side of it is freedom. My biggest regrets were from doing things the expected way because certain ideas or innovations were too “ambitious” for the current market. I believe that’s how dynamic change happens - we have to get out of the mindset of what’s done already to do things that are truly novel and pioneering.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

LVMH just paved the way for retail brands to adopt blockchain authentication technology. So, it’s a matter of time before we will be using more variations of blockchain in everyday use cases.