This edition of the BLOCKv monthly Newsletter features an overview of progress made with the release of the platform on October 1st, a November recap and a list of frequently asked questions and answers.
In a recent Forbes article, Gerald Fenech cites the massive opportunity for blockchain technology companies entering into the $200 billion collectables market — Forbes article. In a recent interview, William Quigley, founder and CEO of WAX, spoke to the $100 billion in-game purchase marketplace for weapons and skins — digital objects. He boasts of the skyrocketing volume of trading and transactions on the WAX exchange.
With the public launch of the BLOCKv platform on October 1, 2018, our project is positioned to be the leading developer platform for dynamic digital objects in the collectible and in-game markets, and for the use of digital objects on blockchain across many untapped sectors like retail, advertising and marketing, entertainment, and event activation. The Vatom can become the standard for digital objects and Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
“Throughout 2018, the BLOCKv team has been working hard to build a robust and scalable framework for the project’s success; both through the successful launch of our platform, through successful campaigns and, above all, through building a great team of employees, developers and partners” said CEO, Reeve Collins.
“We believe 2019 will be the Year of the Vatom.”
Since October, we have seen the successful roll-out of tens of partner pilots and campaigns around the world, delivering against our core mission: to provide our developer community with the technology and support to successfully build and run amazing human engagement experiences. From our beta testing period to the public release, over 180 different development teams have registered for platform access. Together we’ve emitted over 7,000,000 Vatoms into the world to over 200,000 active users.
Moreover, the success metrics for many of these campaigns have been incredible, with 3x to 10x increases in user engagement. As one development community member, Jonathan Harris said, “The technical stack is very solid and the [BLOCKv] team is engaged. We’re developing production ready stuff on it and it’s a massive accelerator to our business plan.”
“We believe that BLOCKv is the best technology platform for building standardized smart digital objects and NFTs ” says COO, Lukas Fluri. “Therefore, success for us lies in growing our development community, and driving their success. With this in mind, we’ve been working with leading digital agencies and vertical market specialists across Europe and the United States who want to add engagement value for their clients and end-users through the power of the Vatom.”
A major focus of the last quarter has been on building a robust and effective Partner Management team to recruit, on-board, and inspire both start-ups and more established development houses.
“We’ve had a very exciting but hectic few months” says Head of Partnerships, Jon Knight. “We’ve been ramping up the Partner Management team with new hires in Europe and the United States. We’re looking to offer a high-touch business partnership with BLOCKv for qualifying developers and projects that have the potential to achieve significant reach or to transform the community as a whole.”
During that same time period, we have expanded our marketing capability and skill set by adding new team members and Ogilvy, a global public relations agency. When the team and agency complete the on boarding process, efforts will escalate to develop inspiring content and to educate partners and developers to create new projects and promotional programs with Vatoms.
The whole BLOCKv team is working hard to enhance the resources available to the entire developer community by providing training materials, toolsets, demo Vatoms and templates which will be rolled out over the first half of 2019. “The level of interest in the technology that we’re getting from top agencies and global brands is incredibly exciting” said Knight. “Our partner pipeline is looking very healthy.”
The leadership at BLOCKv remains grateful for the support of our spirited community and the daring creative efforts from our talented partners and developers. For more information and answers to recent questions logged on our support channel and raised on the BLOCKv Telegram community board, please refer to the FAQs below our November recap.
November Recap
Los Angeles, California | BLOCKv USA
BLOCKv US moved into a new office space in Santa Monica, California to accommodate the expanded team.
Infinity Film Festival Beverly Hills (IFF), Los Angeles, California | Partner News
BLOCKv partner Jonas Hudson from Greenfence hosted a panel at Hollywood On The Block with Varius Solutions Chief Digital Officer, Mike Gamaroff and Cryptokitties ’ Head of Marketing, Amy Cohn. The panel discussed the recent success of digital objects as entertainment and certified collectibles, and how blockchain technology is accelerating adoption by major studios such as Sony Pictures. The event, which was held at the Writers Guild Theater, brought together Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach to showcase over 100 screenings, 30 Cutting-Edge Technology Exhibitions and more than 200 industry thought-leaders over the course of four days. At the event, Vatoms on the BLOCKv platform were showcased and attendees experienced the power of the BLOCKv platform first-hand.
EOS Hackathon, San Francisco | Partner News
BLOCKv partner, Varius Solutions, participated in the EOS Hackathon that brought together 475 participants from 26 countries around the world. Varius competed to build applications based on Vatoms on the EOS platform. At the conference, Varius publicly demonstrated the beta version of its flagship product, Varius Studio, an amazing tool for the creation, distribution and management of digital objects (Vatoms) on the EOS blockchain.
Lord’s Cricket Ground & Wembley Stadium, London | BLOCKv Europe
BLOCKv’s Head of Partnerships, Jon Knight, gave a very well received talk on the basics of blockchain technology and its application to the sports industry at the InCrowd
Conference 2018. The InCrowd @InCrowd_Sports and BLOCKv teams demonstrated the capabilities of the BLOCKv platform for sports teams and rights holders by dropping demonstration Vatoms around the venue. These Vatoms were eagerly collected by audience members. The next night the InCrowd team ran a fan focus experiment at the England vs USA soccer match at Wembley Stadium, by dropping redeemable Vatoms in the surrounding area, and recording the fan reaction to engaging with the digital objects.
FAQs
What is the status of the project and platform?
- Opened the platform to the public October, 2018. Met the deliverable date outlined in the BLOCKv technology roadmap.
- Cycler & Brain framework made available to limited community.
- Over 180 developers and developer partners are registered and working on the platform.
- Partners on-boarded and developing on the platform: Meda, Varius, Greenfence Consumer, Vatom Labs, Ogilvy, InCrowd, Austella
- Number of Vatoms in circulation — over 7,000,000
- Number of users — over 200,000
How many people are working full time on the project?
The BLOCKv team has grown rapidly over the last 12 months. We now have 36 staff engaged in the project across the globe. Specifically:
- Technology (Development and Operation) in Poland, Switzerland and South Africa — 18
- Marketing and Communication in USA and UK — 6
- Partner Management in USA and UK — 4
- Business Development, Finance and other General Functions in Switzerland, USA and UK — 8
Who are the new hires?
We continue to attract the best and brightest to the BLOCKv team. We’ve hired some great talent over the last few months across the marketing, partner management and development sectors.
- Brett Loney was hired as the Director of Product Marketing, reporting to CMO, Michael Dobak. He is completing the onboarding process and making immediate contributions to our CRM strategy, V2 of blockv.io and the newly launched developer portal.
- Joana Rizzo recently joined the BLOCKv Marketing team in London and was thrown straight in the deep end, organizing presentations, stand and demonstrations around adtech London.
- Drew Yacu joined the team as a Partner Manager, reporting to Jon Knight. Drew has been managing the Greenfence and Varius onboarding process and all associated projects.
- Marcelo Faro was hired as a Partner Manager for the European operation and is quickly making an impact. He is working on-boarding six new partners, including ADE, InCrowd and Stylist magazine, as well as campaigns in London and Amsterdam.
- Ben Davey recently joined the team in London, focused on Business Development in the creative and media vertical where he has deep relationships.
The team continues to grow, so if you’d like to work with BLOCKv, reach out to us via the email address at the bottom of this update.
Where is the marketing?
Michael Dobak, CMO, joined BLOCKv at the end of June and began the on-boarding process. His first priority was to understand the core technology, while developing a
positioning and messaging architecture to communicate the core benefits of the BLOCKv platform and transformational functionality of Vatoms. Our positioning rests on the strengths and benefits of the technology as applied to human (one to one) engagement, and allowing our developer and partner community to develop Vatoms within any sector or application that demands better audience engagement.
His second priority was to bring new talent to expand the capability and skill set of the marketing team.
- BLOCKv retained Lindsey Breeden, Creative Director and Ximena Mutis, UX Designer as the in-house creative team and visionaries behind the new BLOCKv look and feel.
- In late September Brett Loney joined the team. Brett’s focus will be in Product Marketing for the BLOCKv platform.
- As we ramp up social activity, Sisi Rivera is managing and developing social content.
- Joana Rizzo is supporting social and community management, representing our European operation as well as developing an exciting partner marketing campaign for digital agencies to be launched in the New Year.
On the communication front, in September we launched v1 of blockv.io, moving away
from the pre-ICO site to an evolved BLOCKv position and announced its evolution as the new platform for human engagement. More importantly, the product positioning and messaging for the Vatom will work to establish the technology as the standard for digital objects and NFTs. A design system for the brand was developed for the new release of the blockv.io site. In mid-December we will release v2 of blockv.io, with improved navigation and responsive design, marketing automation and customer relationship management, along with a content publishing and management system that will tie-in all of the BLOCKv owned channels. Additionally, we will roll out new content and industry use cases for retail, advertising and marketing, gaming, sports and entertainment.
BLOCKv is a platform as a service and therefore our marketing efforts will remain focused on communicating BLOCKv technology milestones and integrations, celebrating partner projects and educating our key audiences on the transformative power of Vatoms across the key industries outlined above. Again, our goal is to make the Vatom the standard for digital objects and NFTs, similar to how Adobe made the PDF the standard for digital documents.
We are approaching 2019 with a motivated marketing team and a clear mission to inspire, educate and help train new partners and developers on the BLOCKv platform.
What is the status of cycler program?
The platform development team, led by CTO Gunther Thiel, has been hard at work since the October 1, 2018 public release making the necessary back-end changes to enable v2 functionality, including the cycler framework (decentralization of Vatom hosting) and the brain framework (client-independent autonomy for Vatoms with long-running back-end processes allowing movement, AI etc). A key dependency for this was migrating the platform from a synchronous to asynchronous architecture which we completed in mid-November.
We’re currently testing the cycler framework and brain framework with a limited group of partners and developers, and will have a live working demo early in the New Year, prior to full public release.
What is BLOCKv’s go-to-market strategy?
BLOCKv’s mission is to build the global standard technology platform for smart digital objects and NFTs that will allow our development community to create amazing human engagement experiences. We’re relying on that community to build campaigns for big brands, create games and apps, and to find undreamt of new use cases for our technology. BLOCKv has a mandate to train and support as many high quality 3rd party service companies as possible to drive demand for Vatoms.
BLOCKv made an important strategic decision in 2018 to not take on professional service projects ourselves and compete with our ecosystem, but to instead focus resources on the platform itself and create a vibrant developer community.
What is Varius Solutions?
Varius is a blockchain professional services company and a partner of BLOCKv. Varius builds enterprise-grade solutions for leading companies and governments. Varius has several distinguishing factors; most notably it brings industry-leading expertise in building solutions on the EOS Blockchain and the BLOCKv platform. They’ve also started an initiative to build advanced tools and analytics for BLOCKv developers to further enhance the usefulness of the platform.
We reached out to Mike Gamaroff, Chief Digital Officer of Varius Solutions for a statement on the mission and strategic intent.
“Varius Solutions is a professional service and product company specializing in augmented customer engagement. We help customers unlock value, increase efficiency and drive revenue using smart digital objects and blockchain. We help brands design, deploy and distribute rich engagement experiences that offer tangible new experiences into the hands of their consumers — without devaluing their products through discounts and shallow incentives.”
Part of the BLOCKv team in Santa Monica has previously been focused on client professional services, building direct brand campaigns and demonstrations, as well as UI tools. Given the fact that BLOCKv’s focus is on the platform development and the partner ecosystem, and that the team in Santa Monica is so highly skilled, having a deep familiarity with developing on the platform, it made sense to transition this talented unit to Varius Solutions.
We’re delighted to support Varius as part of our partner developer community and are very excited at the capabilities they bring to the ecosystem. However, our relationship is not exclusive, and BLOCKv will continue to encourage and support many other established and fledgling service organizations to become partners, as can be seen by our investment in the Partner Management team.
Is the BLOCKv project vibrant and growing?
Yes! In our view, BLOCKv is one of the most substantial, “real” projects in the blockchain space that has the potential to fundamentally affect the future of human interaction. We already have millions of Vatoms in production, and hundreds of thousands of accounts set up, allowing us to build confidence in the architecture of the platform as it prepares to grow to planetary scale in the years ahead. We have the ability to execute and are already seeing encouraging signs that Vatoms can become the global standard in smart digital objects and NFTs. BLOCKv will have a profound impact across a wide range of sectors ranging from advertising & marketing, sports and entertainment promotion, to health care, education, and government.
What is the BLOCKv communications strategy and how will it improve?
Currently BLOCKv shares up-to-date news and information through our Medium Blog and at month end through the BLOCKv monthly newsletter. With the launch of blockv.io V2 in mid-December, we will be publishing news directly from our site, and will be starting a developer blog with direct posts from the BLOCKv technology team.
Specific to the question of sharing financial information, as a privately held company we do not report financial information publicly. The team has been focusing time and energy on delivering against our technical roadmap commitments, ramping up new capabilities, and growing our business and ecosystem.
Going forward we’ll be increasing our community management presence on Reddit and Telegram and will comment where and when we can. If you have a pressing question related to our development platform and related BLOCKv technology, we ask you send all inquiries to support@blockv.io.
