Jose A Manzano, the CTO and founder of Blackcat Blockchain Investments, first heard about Bitcoin when he heard the news that “someone had bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoins in 2010.”

“At that time, the first thing I thought was: ‘If someone putting their computer to mine Bitcoins gets a pizza, I could do the same.'”

He says he’s inspired the most “by knowing that we have a technology with many cases of use and development and that it can be used in almost all current processes to improve them.”

“It inspires me to know that all of here are pioneers in this technology and we are working to make it grow and reach the public and companies.”

Castle

He is inspired by those who “like me have been curious and have started to investigate this technology and above all that has been put to work to improve the blockchain ecosystem, because each brick forms a castle.”

Blockchain can accelerate and facilitate many processes that consume time in our lives “can reduce costs in transactions and other processes where we need intermediaries and in general favours the exchange of money person to person.”

“The speculative value by which many people earn or lose money daily and that is given by the main cryptocurrency that is Bitcoin. This value has a shorter path than the first, since we currently benefit from the volatility, which will be reduced as the public adoption grows,” he says.

“In general, blockchain facilitates processes that are currently expensive and long.”

Altruism

What moves him and his company is “altruism, we make the blockchain ecosystem grow in Spain in an appropriate and sustainable way, providing free education to people, both in technological and speculative value,” he says. “We also facilitate that other companies adapt their processes to the blockchain technology.

“We also pursue and reject unethical things that we can find today in the blockchain ecosystem.”

He says he has not noticed a lack of women working in blockchain and says “if a team does not have women or men, it is because it does not correspond with the talent they seek, but not for anything special.”

The main fluctuations in the market occurred during in 2017 when it was a “fairly young market” where “manipulation reigned. For me, 2017 was the bubble of the ICOs, every day we could find dozens of ICOs of which very few have come to work in 2019, most were a scam.”

Crypto clean up

“At the moment, I think that we have to go through a clean up period in the crypto space in order to move forward, so I would not expect any significant increase this year.”

As pioneers in blockchain he says it is “our duty to encourage this adoption, from Blackcat Blockchain Investments, we help blockchain-based companies to expand throughout Spain and the rest of Europe.”

He predicts that more than half of cryptocurrencies will disappear “either by institutional intervention, or because they have disapperared with the money of their investors as some are already announcing.”

With blockchain, he hopes there will be more regulation and more “interested institutions will appear and the ecosystem will grow and develop little by little.”

Outdated ICO model

The ICO model has become “outdated and trust in them is scarce, currently the few ICOs that go out to the market have to do it together with exchanges or big blockchain companies in order to be successful, or have a loyal, effective and honest marketing campaign.”

It seems, he believes, that STOs are gaining strength this year, but he urges a note of caution as it is “still too early to talk about a mass phenomenon like the ICOs, but I think it is the model to follow since it provides certain guarantees to investors.”

Regulation is the only answer “if we want more money and companies to enter the market of cryptocurrencies for blockchain development. Regulation is needed or at least some guidelines to follow, since many projects are in a line between legal and illegal, due to the scarce existing regulation.”

Having regulation does not mean having intermediaries in your portfolio or Bitcoins, nor can it stop transactions between people and Bitcoin, so it doesn’t go against the original vision of Satoshi. “I think that regulation will not hinder the operation, if not, it will lead to increased confidence and projects can be developed with certain guarantees.”