SNKr x BitMart AMA in Telegram Community
SNKr CEO and founder George Yang did an AMA with BitMart in the Telegram community on March 3rd. Let’s take a look at it!
Before the SNK token sale event, SNKr’s CEO and founder George Yang did an AMA with BitMart in the Telegram group!
We had a great time with the community members, and we thought we should bring the lively AMA session to you guys too!
Let’s get to it!
Question 1:
Could you kindly introduce yourself and the background regarding SNKr? And why do you think SNKr is a rising star in the street fashion and cryptocurrency market?
We can simply put it this way: in the cryptocurrency industry, we know the best about fashion; in the fashion industry, we know the best about cryptocurrency.
Our team at INNERSECT introduced global famous fashion brands to China. The brands include Vlone, Fear of God from the US, FR2, Sacai from Japan, A-COlD-WALL from UK etc. These brands were initially brought in by us and now they are doing very well. The premium of their co-branded sneakers with Nike is usually 3–5 times the original price, if not higher.
Back then, one of the biggest problems we had to deal with was counterfeit products. It’s very easy to produce in China. The clothing and sneaker production technology in China is very good. With the low cost and great market demand, it’s only natural that there are so many counterfeit products. So, we tried to figure out an effective way to prevent that. Later, we found a way to combine blockchain technology and NFC chips. We realized there were more we could explore in addition to preventing counterfeits. And that’s why we branched off and started SNKr project.
Question 2:
Sneakers and blind boxes are hot topics in street fashion. However, for people outside the circle, it might not be understandable. Could you help our readers understand why shoes and blind boxes are so popular?
Simply put, I personally think there are three reasons:
Scarcity. Most people don’t have the chance to buy them.
Good design. Compared with the regular sneakers, co-branded models are indeed very nice, attractive. People always tend to notice you in the crowd.
Celebrity effect. Edison Chen, G-dragon, Kris Wu, and Ouyang Nana are all great dressers with tons of followers. They are the so-called “kings of celebrity endorsement”. Maybe ASAP Rocky, Travis Scott, Kanye West in the USA.
On a deeper level, many of the limited sneakers and toys have become collectibles with artistic value, but mostly, those items are valued due to the designers’ talent. Like KAWS, once their every batch of dolls are sold out, that’s it. Every time there are some high-priced items in the auction, their dolls’ price goes up too. KAWS x AJ5 are also the most expensive shoes in history, and there’s nowhere to buy them.
Question 3：
What`s the difference between SNKr and other platforms such as Poizion, Nice, Stock X, Goat and the competitive advantages of SNKr?
StockX is like the originator of this. Its founder is a very enthusiastic sneakers collector, who slowly collected the data of sneakers price trend on eBay over time. Then he realized it could be just like stock trade. And that’s how StockX was founded. Their sneaker resale platform ensured product authenticity with the authentication process.
In the Chinese market, the POIZON App C2C that split from Hupu.com quickly snatched the sneaker trades from Taobao.com with its loyal users accumulated over the years. Then, Nice, that was about to shut down, is always complained by users for its very brutal trading mode. So now it’s the “Forever №2” that gets dissed all the time. Generally, there is no №3 on the internet.
With their hard-core centralized platform, they could corner the market. We prefer the blockchain decentralized trading mode. It’s like the argument between centralized exchanges of the digital currency market and DEX, everybody believes decentralization is the future, but it’s true that there’s a long way ahead.
Question 4:
You mentioned the decentralized features of SNKr, then what are the advantages of SNKr compared with POIZON App and Nice？
Before we get to that, let’s go through the trading mode of centralized platforms:
The platform releases the product, then the seller lists the price, and the buyer places the order. After that, the seller sends the product to the platform to authenticate. Then the platform sends the product to the buyer. When the buyer gets the product, the seller gets the money.
Of these 8 steps, the most important one is the platform authentication part, which can be crucial to the transaction. If deemed real, the transaction can go through, and they’ll charge the appraisal fee. If deemed fake, the seller’s security deposit will be deducted, and they’ll charge the appraisal fee.
With the immense power that’s bestowed to the person in charge of the authentication, it creates a huge space for interest, leading to situations like “counterfeits could be deemed authentic by bribing the appraiser”. Sometimes, even authentic products could be misjudged or even stealthily substituted with counterfeits. The appraising record could easily be tampered.
What does the decentralized trading mode that we want look like?
Firstly, sellers will bind their sneakers with our encrypted NFC chips. Upload the seller info and product info to blockchain, and turn them into NFT digital assets, and put them up for sale.
Then the buyer places an order. They can choose to get the products directly or have them appraised first.
If they choose to get the products directly, the seller will send the products to the buyer. After the buyer receives the products and verifies that they did come from the seller and haven’t been stealthily substituted with other things. Upon receiving the goods, the ownership of the NFT transfers to the buyer automatically, thus the deal is done.
If the buyer chooses to verify the goods first, then the seller will send the products to a third-party appraiser. After verification, the appraiser will upload the result in their names to blockchain, and then send them to the buyer. Then the buyer gets the goods, and scan the code to verify the origin, which is the seller and the appraiser. Upon receiving the goods, the ownership of the NFT transfers to the buyer automatically, thus the deal is done.
What are the advantages of decentralized platform compared with the centralized ones?
For sellers, credibility once again plays an important role. Sellers that only sell authentic goods will have high turnover rate and normal premium rate.
For buyers, it reduces the transaction steps and costs.
For appraisers, they can’t cheat anymore, meanwhile, they’ll have higher income.
Without the middleman making money from both sides, why shouldn’t we try that? This is what blockchain technology is capable of.
Question 5：
What role do SNK tokens play in the ecosystem? What’s the relationship between SNKr and Vechain?
SNK tokens play an integral role in the transaction process mentioned above since technology can’t solve the problems of “human weakness”, which is the possible cheating. SNK economic model will design a reasonable incentive and punishment mechanism, so that all parties involved, aka the buyers, sellers, and appraisers, can maximize their own interests without cheating. Punishment for cheating will be greater than the benefit, which makes everybody work together to maintain this decentralized trading platform.
For example, the appraisers are the key node, then for every transaction, they need to be rewarded with tokens. Meanwhile, the appraisers also need to put down tokens as a guaranty to prevent cheating during the verification process.
Sellers need to put down guaranty as well to prevent them from selling counterfeits. But as their credibility gets higher, it’s possible that the number of tokens needed for guaranty will be less.
The economic model of tokens can make up for the technology. And that is the beauty of combining blockchain and digital currency organically.
Question 6：
You just mentioned that users play an important role in SNKr. But if I am new to the street fashion, how can SNKr help me?
We will work with many more quality brands and sellers, to introduce the most popular brands and products for our users. If you are new at this, you can never go wrong buying our goods.
Question 7：
How can ordinary users maximize the benefits of SNKr?
You can download our app “Mine” and make purchases. When C2C trading is available, people can put their stuff on-chain and sell them. We have token incentives for both sellers and buyers.
Question 8：
At the launch of BitMart, what is your expectation of the market price of SNKr?
You can see from our introduction, SNK tokens are very important in our decentralized trading mode. Its liquidity and pricing affect the development of the entire mode. Therefore, we need to entrust it with a good exchange.
We believe BitMart is a very professional and compliance abiding exchange with over one million users worldwide, and investment from Fenbushi Capital and other well-known institutions. So, we look forward to working with BitMart.
We all know BitMart Launchpad has always had great performaces. So we believe we’ll do very well here too.
We have also picked 5 questions from the group members, hopefully, this could also help you guys get to know our project better!
1. How do you evaluate the support from the community? What is your marketing strategy and for Mass Adoption? What message do you want to send to the community through AMA today?
During product operation, we’ll fully take advantage of the mature internet operation logic to expand the user scale, slowly, turn fashion users to token users with cryptocurrency.
For example, the ballot draws that’s very popular in the fashion industry now. Register and you’ll get a chance to buy the limited-edition sneakers for the original price, or even for free. In other cases, maybe some celebrity used our blockchain to claim ownership, then the fans will follow and buy the same product.
Of course, the cryptocurrency industry has a strong consensus. I hope everyone can become our token holders and participate deeply in our project!
2. Meaning there will be Token Deposit for buyers and sellers to guarantee that they will not cheat the system? meaning smart contract hold their tokens first is that correct? Now the question of how do you appraise the value of the product of the seller if he/she states the exact amount to cover by his deposit?
Good question. Yes, both buyer and seller have to Deposit Token in the system.
How to evaluate the amount the tokens sellers need for guaranty?
The easiest way is: the sale price of the product can not be higher than the deposit token value. But in fact, we’ll have a series of complicated rules, including the credibility history.
3. To bind with encrypted chips partner merchants will first send you the goods/products before they can put it up for sale? Also, will paying with SNK help to make the shipping faster and much more cost-efficient?
Sellers don’t need to send the products to us. Instead, we’ll send the chips to sellers. So the sellers have to bind our chips to their products, put them on-chain, then they can sell them.
As for the global market, we will indeed consider supporting digital currency as a payment, but we’ll probably support stable coin first, for example, we look forward to Libra from Facebook to be there very much.
4. I’m a bit confused that SNKr is working on Fashion Industry, which is great, but why Blockchain? Explain the connection between fashion and Blockchain in SNKr project?
Mostly, we try to fix two problems for the fashion industry. 1. Prevent counterfeits, identify them. this is a very common problem in the industry now. 2. Problems from the platform: their lack of transparency, verification process, substitute with other products, platform canceling orders.
Furthermore, what we want is to work with brands, designers, artists, people on this level. And create more pioneer and unique assets with scarcity value using the NFT features, create more innovative ways. This is what we want to achieve in the fashion industry.
5. What companies are you partnered with or seeking to partner with?
We already partnered up with the well-known Chinese fashion exhibit INNERSECT. And through them, we are working with CLOT、Vlone、#FR2、MedicomToy、Labubu and other brands. We hope we could expand to ComplexCon, San Diego Comic-Con and other fashion brands, comic cons.
Please follow us on our official channels and keep in touch!
Website: https://www.snkcoin.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SNKFoundation
Telegram: https://t.me/SneakerCoin_Official
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