Ralph Glabischnig is practically a node of the blockchain industry, supporting Zug’s Crypto Valley in its early days and establishing a Crypto Oasis in Dubai to serve as a blockchain innovation hub with regulatory certainty.
When bitcoin companies began pouring into their small town in Switzerland in 2013, Ralf Glabischnig was an IT consultant, entrepreneur running a coworking space. It helped turn the city into ground zero for some early crypto companies, among them the Ethereum Foundation.
Today, Glabischnig wears many hats, working across time zones to help make both Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates regional powerhouses of the blockchain revolution. He holds dear to his heart the decentralization – of regulations, companies and power – which he hopes will create an increasingly heavy counterweight to the powers that be.
Dubai
In many ways, Glabischnig sees places like Dubai and Zug as the long-anticipated bitcoin strongholds of the blockchain legend – the Safe City. new rich of cryptocurrency.
“Few places around the world will attract people who can afford it because it’s safe for their family – and those people bring business.”
There is every reason to be optimistic when it comes to Dubai as an emerging bastion of blockchain innovation. Last year, Glabischnig set a bold goal to see 1,000 blockchain companies in the UAE by the end of 2022 – a 90% increase in a year – but now he expects that number to reach by the summer. By comparison, Switzerland had 1,100 companies in 2021, six years after it was known as the “Crypto Valley”.
Glabischnig first visited Dubai in 1998. He remembers looking at five- and six-story buildings in his Internet and Media City district and wondering who would be using them because “there was no one here.” He has been coming back annually since the beginning of 2010, now living between Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.
“Decentralization is in Switzerland’s DNA,” he says, explaining that tax structures are built locally, and that 26 cantons — administrative districts — compete with each other to attract business. The consensus mechanism in Switzerland is “very similar to the way decision-making is done in a blockchain network,” he explains.
“People see success overnight in Dubai, but even overnight success requires a few years of preparation,” he says.
Glabischnig, who has three children, points out that Switzerland and the Middle East have something in common – security. “In Dubai, you see people use their wallets to reserve tables while they buy coffee – you can’t do that anywhere else, not even in Switzerland,” he says.
However, the inherent security of Swiss society is a difference with the bottom-up coming from the grassroots, whereas in the Middle East, it is achieved from the top-down through strict laws and advanced surveillance. Integration and bureaucracy, however, can be particularly difficult for foreigners visiting Switzerland, while Dubai accepts all nationalities, and almost anyone can pay for a visa, he noted.
Seeing the city as a ripe cradle for innovation, Glabischnig began looking for partners in the Dubai blockchain community in 2016. He envisioned “a hub where everyone from the industry comes together” and added that Marwan Al Zarouni, now the head of Dubai Blockchain, and Saeed Al Darmaki, CEO of Sheesha Finance, were early participants in the local crypto landscape.
“We want to have a football field where players gather – then we can see which players are good, which ones to invest in and which to avoid because they are fouling.”
Headquarters on one of the highest floors of the Almas Tower, the DMCC Crypto Center Hosts around 300 blockchain companies. For Glabischnig, it is the beating heart of Crypto Oasis.
Glabischnig explains that while the idea of crypto valley covers both Switzerland and Lichtenstein with Zug as his heart, crypto oasis It covers the entire Middle East with Dubai at its centre. “And DMCC with over 280 companies is very heartfelt, but I am confident that it will grow out of Dubai and into other countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain,” he says enthusiastically.
The DMCC, or Dubai Multi Commodity Centre, is a free zone. This means that it exists under special legislation, with unique rules including a 0% corporate tax and companies that enjoy special treatment. With crypto as its newest area, the DMCC has a long history as a global hotspot for companies trading gold, coffee and diamonds between the East and the West.
One factor influencing Dubai’s success in attracting new companies, T. According toIt has had a softer response to the pandemic than peers such as Glabischnig, Singapore or Hong Kong, which remain closed for months on end. “When you own infrastructure, like owning Dubai hotels, airlines, shopping malls, etc., you think twice if you shut it down,” he says.
swiss time
Glabischnig lived in Germany for most of his career, during which he worked as a software consultant with consulting firms such as Accenture. In 2005, he accepted a job in Switzerland to gain experience as a project manager, moving to a small town with a beautiful lake called Zug. Glabischnig chose the city – which he describes as a tax haven – because it was halfway between its head office in Zurich and a major clientele in Lucerne. However, with their low wages, the tax rate did not move the dial.
In 2013, bitcoin companies such as Bitcoin Suisse and Monetus began to establish themselves in Zug due to its regulatory flexibility. In the 1970s, Glabischnig points out, Zug began to become wealthy due to a commodities business started by controversial Glencore entrepreneur Mark Rich, who was once accused by United States officials of breaking sanctions on Iranian oil. Was. Their business brought the oil trade and even blood diamonds into the city’s economy, he noted, and “the zag is open enough to place them”—an openness that extended to bitcoin, which, in 2013, just now. also maintains a tough reputation as a currency of the illegal drug trade.
“E was a big step in becoming a crypto valley in the world”The Ethereum Foundation is building in Zug,” he refers to the group led by Vitalik Buterin, who later received an honorary doctorate from nearby Basel University. The idea to organize as a foundation came from a friend, lawyer Luca Müller.
“Muller had the idea to use Switzerland’s foundation system for blockchain projects, especially for layer-1 projects. I think this is why we see many layer-1 blockchains set up as foundations in Switzerland, As Glabischnig explains, Mueller was paid in ETH for the aid he provided in 2014.
In 2014, Glabischnig and his business partner Marco Bumbacher created the Lakeside Business Center, a coworking space in the heart of Zug. As the city gained a reputation as a blockchain hub, “people started knocking on doors asking if there were crypto companies out here.” Sensing the demand, Glabischnig decided to put together Crypto Valley Labs, a dedicated space for the new industry to help blockchain startups incorporate and settle in the Swiss environment.
“We haven’t been the early innovators – we’ve been the supporters of the innovators.”
crypto valley
Not long ago, he became a founding member of the Crypto Valley Association, a local government initiative aimed at promoting the canton of Zug as a node of the growing global industry and the Swiss Blockchain Federation, whose contribution is largely to the country. have similar objectives.
He was instrumental in organizing a blockchain competition each year with prizes of $100,000 in a different category such as banking, real estate and insurance – inviting relevant companies to join as sponsors and judges. “We learned what ideas are in the blockchain space”, through the competition, explained Glabischnig, explaining that he went on to create CV VC (Crypto Valley Venture Capital) to invest strategically in the industry.
“We saw that there is something else to invest in besides equities – these are tokens, and we started investing in smaller amounts.”
In 2017, these contests evolved into Blockchain Summit Crypto Valley, the first of its kind in Switzerland. It’s ICO hype time, Glabischnig recalls that not only did participants pay to participate, but companies also paid to display and reserve speaker slots, which didn’t quite go with them. “Everyone was paying to attend these events – it was a sign of big publicity,” he explains.
With enthusiasm came the opportunity. In the years that followed, he played an influential role not only in organizing the industry remotely but also in being an entrepreneur. He is a founder and remains on the boards of ProofX, Inapay, GenTwo Digital and Tokengate and serves as a Managing Partner of Inacta. Glabischnig’s workday is 18 hours, he tells me.
internet age
Although Glabischnig described what had been “simple family circumstances” in Austria, he was given a luxury: an Amigo 500 computer, which he had been reading about for months to such an extent that he knew “everything in detail” before opening Was” box. He used his skills in 1993, at the age of 16, with the business of building flyers and later websites.
In 1995, he went to technical school to study software development and economics, first because of his passion and experience, and later because he wanted to understand how to achieve economic success beyond his childhood environment. “I needed a keyboard,” he notes because of his poor handwriting. In those days, he describes, the Internet was very slow, and someone had to “dial in” using special hardware – a modem. At the time, people were still figuring out what the Internet could be used for. “The first thing we did was download photos of Samantha Fox,” Glabischnig recalls of her early activities online.
“I first came across the Internet age, and I like to compare it to the blockchain age of today.”
Glabischnig’s career began with “a very boring problem – the year-2000 problem” at various banks and insurance companies, as he describes his first job as a software developer at a consulting company. This problem, also known as “Y2K”, emerged as the turn of the millennium, and computer programs were not configured to calculate the years beyond 1999, leading to fears of a social recession. Went.
He soon began work on optimizing data transfer between organizations, including a teledata system by which companies could automatically exchange information with the Swiss government. Glabischnig’s interest in B2B data exchange at the turn of the millennium “still interests me today” in the blockchain space, 20 years later. He sees this trend as the “internet of value”. “While the Internet of Things includes all kinds of things that connect to the Internet, the Internet of Value means that we are putting everything that has value on the blockchain,” he says with confidence. It could well mean a token of everything.
Having moved away from the consulting world, Glabischnig is more satisfied with what he calls venture building, something he has been able to participate in as part of his venture capital role. “In IT consulting, you give advice and get paid, and if the client isn’t doing what you told them, you don’t wrestle,” he laughs, as he elaborates. :
“I’m always open to inviting people to work together, and I try to create smaller organizations” because he thinks companies of around 20 people are nimble, effective, and a perfect fit for Silicon Valley giants. There are decentralized imbalances.
“I don’t like the centralization of power in Silicon Valley. That’s why I dedicate my time to building Crypto Valley and Crypto Oasis – to bring some of it back.”