Zen Team Interviews: Luca
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s your background and experience?
My Name is Luca Cermelli, I am 28 years old, I come from Italy and I drive an old school Fiat 500. I started my economics studies back in 2008 at Università degli Studi di Pavia, and I now hold a Master’s Degree in Economics and Management. With about 650 years of history, and more than 30.000 students, that was a true inspiring environment where to start my university career. I decided to spend the last year of studies (2012) abroad, and I chose Denmark, city of Odense, as the place where to move. Scandinavia was a very different environment compared to Italy, and being there I had the chance to tie up my mindset about regional differences in relation to culture. Moreover, that’s were I basically discovered the existence of Bitcoin.
Once back in Italy I finally graduated, and started working in the IT sector. After a while (2013) I moved again, this time to Hamburg in Germany. I was hired as a Community Manager for the German fastest growing IT company, active in the videogame industry. I was responsible for the Italian community of players, which meant managing the online channels (i.e. forums and social media) and engaging the community with contests and activities in order to achieve the different marketing goals. In 2014 I joined a software company in Milan, Italy, where I worked as a Customer Success Manager first, to later become the Marketing Manager and the point of touch of all our partners worldwide.
Why Zen? What attracts you to the Zen project and mission?
I approached ZenCash just like I did for many other projects: reading the White Paper, entering into the Community channels, taking part to the bi-weekly calls as a stakeholder. I was attracted by the mission, and in general by the view of technology to solve privacy problems. But ZenCash looked different to me than any other projects also for other factors. Later on, after I joined the team, my exact feelings were written down by a member of my Italian community, who told me: “ZenCash has the best crypto Discord/Slack/Telegram/
What do you bring to the Zen team?
Passion, creativity, and proactivity, plus an extensive knowledge of the Italian market and the Italian Community as a whole. My final goal is to amplify Zen’s usage and distribution. Given those objectives, all my energies are addressed to the participations of fairs and events in Italy, meeting crypto enthusiasts and young University students, but also getting in touch with people who never heard about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, typically old-style merchants. In Italy there’s a big barrier represented by the English language, which is still not widely spoken, therefore having a project like ZenCash being available also in our language (with an Italian website, blog articles localized, and so on) can be very strategic. The market might be little, but per my experience in another industry with many similar things in common (the gaming industry) it is also one of the most profitable when you are able to engage and attract the stakeholders and convert them in customers. Numbers are demonstrating that these activities have a fast return on investment. Moreover, I’m focused on other projects that could be relevant for the long term, one over all is quite ambitious: creating what will be called the first “ZenCash Valley”, a town were you can basically live with Zen, doing your shopping at the local market, buying a book at the library on the corner, and going to the barber shop. Finally, as I am also the Marketing Manager, I bring all my skills helping the marketing team in producing marketing collaterals that can be then used by everybody in the organization.
What are your thoughts on the crypto market as a whole?
I consider the crypto market and the crypto industry as a very competitive industry, maybe the most competitive one in the world. It is completely open, everybody can take part to it, everybody can start its own project. If we think at ZenCash, the concept of competition can be even extended as there will be more teams from all over the world trying to improve the project, generating competition with each other. I’m quite sure we won’t have monopolies in a fully unconstrained market anymore, there won’t be a dominant company over the others. This, I believe, is a good factor, which is bringing us to a market with many more interesting projects than before, and those projects are meeting their goals in a very rapid way, because of the big competition. However, it’s also a market full of opacity, with projects raising tens of millions of dollars and not having an accountability for what they’re doing. This is also the perfect environment for scammers, thus the need for the different actors of adopting a transparent organisational model, just like what ZenCash is doing at the moment with the radical transparency. Typically, when I speak in public about the market I’m asked if I believe we are in a bubble or not. Honestly, I have no idea. It’s still not possible to determinate the market value of the single projects. This is another reason why I joined ZenCash, to me it looked clear from the beginning that the team was focused on the long term, without worrying if for one day the coin price was not going up.
Predict the future – What excites you about the potential state of the world 20, 50 years from now?
This is a very difficult question, I feel like the world of today can change in even a shorter amount of time, like 5 or 10 years. It happened already with many disruptive technologies and products. The invention of bitcoin gave us another kick at the can, another go to try and rethink the economic power grid and the old order of things. It feels like it’s 1993 again, everything needs to be reinvented, and we are all part of this change. We are going to find more use cases for the blockchain, I’m very curious about what will come out. I also believe we are going in the direction of having thousands and thousands of different coins, so at some point the interoperability between them will have to be put in place. And hopefully, the crypto market won’t look like the Wild West anymore. Finally, and I’d like to finish with this particular topic, I think privacy will play a big role in the future. Privacy rights will be heavily under attack in the next years, and there will be people saying “It’s dead, get over it”, deeply misinformed. Privacy It’s not only a basic human right, but also the foundation of a free society, and we will have to fight for it. Luckily, today we have the technology to that.
