Eric Ly, a co-founder of LinkedIn where he served as chief technology officer before leaving in 2006, has recently launched a blockchain-enabled system called “Human Trust Protocol”,or Hub to create trustworthy relationships with one another online.

As a successful entrepreneur in the Internet era, Ly is also excited about the potential of the decentralized ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.He told 8btc in a recent interview that, “ I get the same feeling as when I enter the internet space.”

In his view, blockchain transforms the internet of information into the internet of value. The value of people interacting with each other is not only reflected in a career-oriented networking site like Linkedin and other public social networks, but also in online markets, sharing economies ,fintech applications.

At present, many public blockchains focus on fighting underlying technical limitations, such as scalability, security, consensus. “One of the biggest challenges confronting the industry is how to find the intrinsic value. The number of blockchain or bitcoin users is only 20 to 30 million, which is quite smaller compared to internet users. We should think about how to grow blockchain user base.” Ly said.

The Chinese-American investor and businessman believes that the advent of a killer application like Wechat which boasts tens of thousands of users in blockchain space will claim a milestone in the industry development.But blockchain technology lacks the capability to address specific problems for now.

Against this backdrop, Ly and his team create Hub which utilize the emerging technology to associates people’s reputation data to their digital identity, so that people can use their reputation across many different social networks and marketplaces.

With the help of Hub tokens, buyers and sellers can stake tokens on the transaction. If things go well, both participants can get those tokens back. If things don’t go well, arbitrators can basically decide which is a trusted party and figure out who is right, thus the token from the distrustful party might be at risk.

Further, considering that over 90% of cryptocurrencies will turn out to be scams,and there is a growing distrust between investors and token issuers, Hub also looks to create a reputation system around the ICO ecosystem called ICOHUB to combat crypto scams.