Founder Of China’s First Smartwatch Brand Re-Emerges With Decentralized Storage Service To Take On Amazon

Before smartwatches were a core part of a consumer electronics brand’s IoT strategy, inWatch was among the first to grip the market with a highly functional, yet affordable smartwatch, the inWatch Z. Not to mention it was the first of its kind hailing from China. Notably, inWatch Z was a contender at a time when today’s major players like Apple, Samsung, and other market leaders were nowhere to be found.

Early to market, inWatch deal-to-deal was taking its success in stride. The brand inked a deal with Tencent, Swarovski, Alibaba, and Qualcomm, emerging as a contender to be a market leader.

But fast forward to 2021, the landscape of course looks starkly different. inWatch might be a relic of a bygone era, but inWatch’s founder isn’t dejected. After all, the nature of entrepreneurship is taking hits in stride. So inWatch’s former CEO and founder, Neo Wang, says he has no regrets. He’s willing to go on record to reveal a glimpse of what happened and why the once darling of the tech industry, had shirked from the public.

“I was the leading shareholder but was swept out by investors as we were in the process of fundraising in 2016, but the winter of capital arrived. I was expelled by my investors, with one of them taking up the position of CEO,” Wang recounts. He even equated the unexpected turn of events to Steve Job’s own misfortune that led to the formation of NeXT.

But without spending time on the past, he’s since reemerged in an industry that other traditional titans like Jack Dorsey or Alexis Ohanian have become champions of – crypto.

A New Face, in Blockchain Technology

Since stumbling on the crypto industry, Neo has been quietly building a portfolio of cryptocurrency investments, dabbling since 2013 but becoming more serious about the underlying technology by 2018 after leaving inWatch in the hands of its investors. But with larger ambitions, Neo has quietly been developing his own new project.

Foreseeing blockchain technology radically upending the financial system starting in 2018, Wang saw the eventual importance and rise of DeFi, which he couldn’t miss out on. Wang had first wet his feet in the crypto industry as the CEO of FCLINK Technology - one of the seven members of the blockchain alliance formed by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). And its clients included four major banks and state-owned enterprises in the country.

Partnered with Dr. Brew Tan from Tsinghua University, his CTO, he began embarking on developing CVNT - a storage platform that would enable developers to store their data on decentralized servers. In fact, the company in 2020 wasn’t keen on relying on 3rd party servers. Wang knew that to be able to realize his vision, he had to shore up CVNT with its own servers. Harking back to his hardware roots, Neo has been thinking bigger. CVNT offering decentralized storage is just the first step. So, the company inked a deal with Huawei to purchase the tech giant’s Huawei Taishan hardware servers. Separately, the company is also the brains behind BXH.com, a growing crypto exchange recently best known for its US$10M bounty that leads to the whereabouts of US$139M that was illicitly removed from the exchange.

Lessons in Smartwatch Hardware, Translated to Blockchain Software

Smartwatches today have radically changed how we interface with the Internet and serve as either auxiliary devices or sometimes substitutes for our smartphones. They keep us connected to information or give us control over other devices connected to the smartwatch. inWatch admittedly hadn’t had the staying power to see Wang’s vision for a fully connected Internet ecosystem – powered by smartwatches - come to life. After all, it’s only recently that 5G and AI have gone from buzzword to reality, making the vision for an Internet-connected society possible. But he’s been one step ahead and realizes the resemblance with the work he’s done with inWatch, with what he’s working on with CVNT.

Like with the smartwatch industry, what accelerated the market and demand was 5G technology. Likewise, decentralized computing and data storage reliant on both 5G and AI, combined with blockchain technology is key to unlocking what he calls the “interlinked network.” And with this, he’s determined to see to it that it shakes things up. And who knows, CVNT could just take Amazon Web Service (AWS) or even Google Cloud on for size.