Alan Knitowski is president, CEO, and co-founder of Phunware, Inc.
Russ Alan Prince: Tell me about Phunware.
Alan Knitowski: Phunware, Inc. is nearly a 14-year-old company. We focus on an enterprise cloud platform for mobile, called Multiscreen-as-a-Service—MaaS. In our first ten years as a private company, we raised more than $100 million. In 2018, we went public via a SPAC. Today, we continue to raise money to invest in our platform as we add new products, solutions, services, and other offerings, including both software and hardware, that help today’s leading brands with everything they need to succeed on mobile.
We have developed mobile ecosystems for some of the world’s most recognizable brands. In our early days, we were one of the first publishers to offer products in Apple’s App Store. Today, we have evolved to be leading the industry in helping the world’s largest brands with their digital transformation needs.
Our MaaS platform powers digital application experiences and campaigns for brands, helping them to reach their customers across smartphones, tablets, wearables, smart televisions, kiosks, and digital signage. We help both companies and governments to engage, manage and monetize their global audiences and communities on Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems and devices.
Prince: How is Phunware’s dual-token economy empowering consumers and reimagining how brands engage with their audiences?
Knitowski: In the digital age, data privacy has become a very sensitive topic for consumers and rightly so. Consumers have unfortunately become the product of the Big Tech companies and their data oligarchs. These companies provide platforms, solutions, and services for “free,” but they also rampantly monetize their users, harvesting them for profit. Sadly, and importantly, they typically do this without a user’s consent, so consumers usually don’t even know which brands own their data, what they are actually doing with that data, and how it may be affecting them individually.
We differ from these tech companies profoundly, believing that consumers deserve full sovereign control over their personal data which also represents their digital identities online, and that they should be compensated properly when sharing it or actively engaging with brands. We reach more than one billion active devices per month, representing hundreds of millions of active app users for the world’s largest brands.
With this permissioned data, we are building a dual-token economy inside of our MaaS Customer Data Platform. To that end, we created PhunToken as a foundation for operating a crypto ecosystem that connects to the functionality provided within our cloud-based platform. In parallel, and separate from these platform credits that can reward you for being you, we also created PhunCoin as a financial instrument for token holders to receive distributions of the economic value resulting from the ecosystem.
Prince: What is the main difference between a utility and security token for individuals who may be unfamiliar with these terms?
Knitowski: In general, there is Bitcoin as a one-of-one asset worldwide and then there are all other cryptocurrencies as everything else. Cryptocurrencies include a wide spectrum of digital assets, including complete nonsense and junk to very sophisticated and novel new tokens that are enabling users to participate within non-traditional finance, or Decentralized Finance, as the next generation of banking and yield.
Security tokens like PhunCoin are regulated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and can only trade legally on a specifically regulated ATS exchange, where investors have to go through a process to set up an account, in full compliance with know your customer, anti-money laundering, and accredited investor certifications.
Utility tokens like PhunToken are completely unregulated and currently have no easily understood rules or regulations from most governments worldwide. In our case, PhunToken acts as a unit of measure or credit used to participate in our MaaS ecosystem to consume platform functionality to engage, manage and monetize mobile audiences. It looks and feels similar to travel award points or points consumers earn from financial transactions via Visa, MasterCard, or other forms of credit or debit cards.
Prince: What are some of the biggest trends you are seeing with regard to cryptocurrencies, and how do you see the industry evolving?
Knitowski: Right now we are experiencing what many would consider a “crypto nuclear winter” of sorts, which tends to repeat itself every four years alongside the cycles of the Bitcoin protocol. Namely, every four years, Bitcoin goes through what’s called a halving, in which the block rewards programmed into the code are cut in half.
There will only be 21 million Bitcoin that will ever exist in the world and it is likely that the last Bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140. As a guaranteed and programmatic fixed supply, this is very unlike what we’re used to seeing with the US dollar or other fiat currencies, in which Central Banks can infinitely print money to create additional debt to expand our money supply and create inflation.
Unfortunately, we are now living through a time of hyperinflation due to the recent time period of “easy money.” Markets have been flooded with excessive liquidity that tends to drive up the price of everything we consume.
Globally, the current number of cryptocurrency wallets is likely close to the total number of Internet users in 1997, with its adoption being even more prolific than Internet adoption was back in the 1990s. This trend is not only expected to continue rolling forward but it is also expected to accelerate dramatically over time. As each cycle of Bitcoin continues in the future, we fully expect to see more and more adoption of cryptocurrency, blockchain and self-custody, and sovereign control of both assets and wealth.
RUSS ALAN PRINCE is the Executive Director of Private Wealth magazine (pw-mag.com) and Chief Content Officer for High-Net-Worth Genius (hnwgenius.com). He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs, and select professionals.