Phore Blockchain Q&A From Live AMA Event August 26th, 2018
Hello everyone. Welcome to our LIVE AMA event. We will be answering questions that came in ahead of time, as well as taking questions live. Let’s get started.
Q: You have announced several partnerships recently. What benefits do Phore’s partners bring to the project?
A: In terms of the benefits Phore’s partners bring, each adds something unique. Each has been fully vetted to ensure each is mutually beneficial.
Reddcoin
We saw the opportunity to partner with this popular coin, with an active userbase, as something beneficial to both Reddcoin and Phore. We will incorporate their digital asset, RED, into the Phore Marketplace upon full release. This gives Reddcoin a real-world use and the Marketplace vendors and buyers more flexibility with payment types. In return, Phore will gain exposure to a large audience and position us for growth. This adds value to Phore, the Phore Marketplace and Redcoin as well.
UniFox
Our partnership with UniFox will allow Phore to potentially be used in as many as 50,000 Point of Sale terminals, 10,000 ATMs and hundreds of currency exchange offices around the world by the year 2020. This aligns perfectly with our vision of accessible, mainstream commerce, as well as exposure to the mass market for Phore. This adds value to Phore with a potentially large global retail and consumer base. UniFox gains more flexibility for its users by offering multiple types of digital currencies, including Phore.
StoneCash
We partnered with StoneCash, an online wholesale stone buying and selling platform, to support cross-border payments for this large wholesaler. Most of the transactions that take place on this platform occur across boarders and Phore offers a powerful solution to improve the online experience for both buyers and sellers, buy lowering the cost involved with cross-border transactions as well as dramatically increasing the speed in which transactions take place. Phore will be a payment option and when available, smart contracts will be implemented to further enhance and optimize the trade process.
Platinum Circle
Finally, our partnership with Platinum Circle allows us access to government policy makers and some of the top high net worth individuals and businesses in the World. On August 31st and September 1st, 2018, Anthony Alleyne, Phore’s Co-CEO, co-chaired a forum on Blockchain at one of their key events in Singapore called the Global Assets and Wealth Forum. He introduced Blockchain technology as a new asset class as well a introduced them to the Phore Blockchain project. He met many influential people and formed relationships we hope to nurture for years to come.
Q: How is the team coping with the bear market? What does the team have planned to ride out this storm?
A: This bear market has been challenging for everyone, however, it is important to stress that the Phore team is still has focused as ever, and has not missed a beat with the advancement and development of the project. We have just released our new development roadmap, we have a very talented and dedicated staff, we are moving forward with strategic partnerships and marketing efforts are moving ahead. The market will move up and down as it matures and we feel we are well poised to survive this bear market and others that may come in the future.
We should add that we never had an ICO, and this has certain benefits. We’re used to working on a tight budget and therefore the focus mentioned above comes naturally. In order to ride out the storm, we will continue to innovate, because after it has passed, there will be fewer tokens left out there. We’re about to enter a stage in the market where Crypto becomes much more serious and much more respected.
Q: I want know more about the lead developer Julian. Are there any interviews planned with him?
A: Julian is a tremendous asset to Phore and is extremely talented. People have even referred to him as the next “Vitalik Buterin”, however he is potentially going to deliver much more than Vitalik did. If you look carefully at his plans for sharding and TX speeds, you’re looking at next level technical achievement.
Although he is extremely busy working on Phore development, and that is his primary mission, we are planning on publishing an interview with Julian soon and we hope to have more information for the community coming from him in the near future.
Q: +1 for Julian. The perception I have is that he is very talented, and has excellent demeanor in explaining the concepts without being toxic. I’d like to know more about his vision for Phore in the coming years.
A: This is Moonshot answering the question, but I speak with Julian very often so I think we have pretty good alignment on his vision for the future. Julian has a deep understanding of blockchain mechanisms and issues, and has done a great job charting out our path forward. I won’t repeat all the roadmap details here in terms of our immediate priorities, but at a high level it’s focused on completing a solid foundation that can be built on to rapidly add new features, functionality, and even new blockchains quickly, and having the scalability and security needed to support widespread adoption of people using all of those features on a mass scale.
In parallel with that, we are continuing to enhance the Phore Marketplace and to build more decentralized applications, starting with Crowdfunding but certainly not stopping there. We want to deliver not just the best blockchain technology, but also user-friendly and useful applications that people want to use, and that deliver real value. In the short term, building that foundation of secure and scalable blockchain technology is the dominant focus of Julian’s efforts, because we need that in place for it to be ready for explosive user growth, and many of those functions are needed for the decentralized applications we want to build. Longer term, we expect that the decentralized applications may take a more dominant focus of the overall team, because ultimately we are not just building raw technology, we are building applications that people want to use, and find value in — and give them more and more reasons to want to buy and use Phore.
We will never stop enhancing the blockchain technology though, and I expect that will include additional sidechains that are optimized for their particular use cases, to create a more complete Phore ecosystem of blockchain functionality. It will also include more interoperability with other cryptocurrencies, exchanges, utility blockchains, and other services to make Phore more accessible, useful within the broader ecosystem of all blockchains.
Finally, since we are truly building a platform that we believe will be one of the best to build on in the longer term, we want and expect that as we complete our foundation, other developers will increasingly want to build applications and features on top of what we are creating. We want Phore to be very developer friendly and expect to provide a robust set of tools to anyone who wants to deliver value to users leveraging all of the powerful features Phore provides.
Q: In the hopefully extremely unlikely event that something happens to Julian (meteorite impact/assassination attempt/alien abduction… etc), is there a backup plan to find a new talented and skilled Julian 2.0? From my perspective, the crucial parts of the blockchain/sharding hinge on him and Moonshot.
A: Julian is an extremely talented and knowledgeable blockchain developer, and it would big a big loss to the team if something happened to him. We are always looking to add more talented blockchain developers to the team as we can afford to do so, and the other developers we have on the team who did not have extensive blockchain experience are developing that knowledge quickly. Moonshot and Julian have frequent discussions about our plans for everything on the roadmap to make sure we have a mutual understanding of what is required, and if something did happen, it would be difficult, but we’re confident we would be able to find developers to continue moving forward with Phore’s vision.
Q: What are the plans for the future of new exchanges. I seriously feel that this is an undervalued project. And I think that’s due to exchanges where it’s available. If we had listings on let’s say Binance or Bittrex, it would be OVER! And we’d ALL be happier, bear market or not!
A: We are constantly working on new exchanges. I think it’s fair to say the team probably spends 20–40 hours a week on this alone and it takes time. It is a major challenge, as most big exchanges want some type of major funding (either BTC payments or a large purchase of their tokens). That being said, we have an open dialogue with several large exchanges that have asked us to sign NDAs. We hope to release some more information soon once we have solidified these relationships.
Q: Is there anything we, in the community, could do to help in any way. I’m sure many of us would.
A: Yes! Please don’t underestimate the potential impact you and each individual can have on the project. Posting on Phore’s Discord, Reddit, Bitcointalk, Twitter, or Telegram. Participation and discussion about Phore goes a very long way. We are also open to funding articles, reviews and other creative means of getting the word out about Phore. Anyone who is interested in starting an initiative is welcome to talk to Jennifer, our Head of Marketing in Phore’s Discord Channel. We also offer bounties from time-to-time to help you add to your PHR bag.
Q: Continuing along with the importance of marketing/promotion of the roject. We all know the marketing budget is tight (no ICO for this project), are there some consolidated and defendable talking points the community can take to the social masses that accentuate the project’s strengths and vision?
A: Phore’s vision is to deliver sustainable, “low” to “no cost”, decentralized commerce on a global scale. We strive to bring this technology to the masses so that everyone can benefit. There are several things that make Phore unique, and we believe, one of the most competitive projects out there. In fact, it is hard to find another project that shares the breath our vision.
1) No ICO or Premine of any coins. Phore is completely self-funded and sustainable.
2) Phore has a real-world use case with the Phore Marketplace with more uses in the works that include our partnerships for retail and ATM integration and cross-border payments.
3) Phore is innovative as recently demonstrated with our integration of SegWit and more innovations, such as Phore Synapse (Smart Contracts through Masternodes) and Decentralized Crowdfunding (in the Marketplace) in development.
Q: Do you have any intention of turning the Phore Marketplace into something less regulated. Akin to Silk Road?
A: Silk Road?… No. That will attract the types of products services that won’t help us grow the market further. The current Phore Marketplace is not really “regulated”. Anyone can put up a store. They don’t need any permission to do so, and the protocol allows them to transact with anyone of their choosing. However, illegal goods and services are prohibited. Remember, Silk Road did not end well and we have higher aspirations for the Phore Marketplace. We aim to compete with the likes of Amazon and eBay, and with zero listing fees and zero platform fees for sellers, we think we will be able to do so.
We also have a vision to bring the Phore Marketplace to developing countries where access to banking and ecommerce is almost non-existent. There is a tremendous need for this and it can have significant, positive impact in those areas.
Also, privacy is a big issue in current eCommerce, social media, and other platforms that are in widespread use today. Phore wants to provide more privacy and control over your own information — I think that fits very well with a decentralized, P2P model and with blockchain architecture.
So to an extent we do want to provide more anonymity from that perspective, but it is not to make it easier to do illegal things — it is to protect your own identity and information from being hacked or stolen or misused.
Q: You guys have been busy doing what you can for promotion of PHR (awesome!), conferencing and getting to blockchain events. Can you elaborate on the fruits of that labor? Have the outcomes lead to new interest in the project? What kind of business sectors are you hearing from? What sectors are you targeting?
A: We recently exhibited at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Toronto. At that conference we met with a variety of people. We made contacts with venture capital firms, marketing firms, private investors, developers, and many CEOs. We are now building those relationships and examining how they might benefit Phore. There was/is a lot of interest in Phore, as we are one of the few legitimate POS/MN coins on the market. There certainly were investment funds looking at us, and we have a few follow up meetings coming up. In terms of what we’re targeting, we are interested in any crypto partnerships that are mutually beneficial. We are also extending our consulting and blockchain development services to provide multiple revenue streams for the Phore project. And as mentioned, we spoke to many individual and institutional investors, and pretty universally their feedback on Phore was very positive.
There was one who had been doing a lot of due diligence on masternode projects who is interested in investing in Phore, who said that less than 10% of the masternode projects they looked at have passed their due diligence. They had looked at over 100 masternode projects.
Phore’s Co-CEO, Anthony Alleyne just Co-Chaired the Global Assets and Wealth Forum in Singapore where he introduced blockchain technology as a new asset class as well as the Phore project to an influential group of high net worth investors and government policy makers. We made very important contacts at that event.
Q: Can you talk about what you feel is perceived to be the biggest obstacle for this project’s success? How do you plan to overcome said obstacle? Last, tease me with some good news or an announcement! What is the team most hyped for heading into EOY and 2019?
A: One of the perceived obstacles to our success is the fact that Phore never did an ICO or premine, so we don’t have the large war chest of funds that many of the ICO projects have for large expenses like exchange fees and a massive team. However what many perceive as a weakness, we perceive as a strength. In place of an ICO, we have a recurring development budget, governed by the Phore community. ICO money is a one-time funding event that will eventually run out if you don’t have other revenue sources to replace it. Phore’s community governed budget is an ongoing source of funds for Phore’s development, and as the value of Phore increases, so does the value of the development budget. Our plan to overcome the lack of an initial large infusion of funding is simply to deliver enough value to the project that it will increase the value of Phore to our users. This will create a virtuous cycle of growing our ability to expand the team, marketing, and pay other larger expenses as Phore grows. We also find more efficient ways to get things done, which I think in many ways leads to even better solutions. I know full well the challenges that come with managing a very large development team, and I think by having a smaller team initially, we actually get more done, with higher quality, than many larger teams do.
As far as hype, we generally don’t engage in that. We certainly are excited about the future of Phore in the coming months, so from that perspective I’d say it probably varies a bit within the team. Julian, I think, is very excited about implementing sharding and smart contracts, along with all the other fundamental blockchain technology changes that requires to be done in a secure and scalable way. With the implementation of the Go wallet Julian is currently working on, it may offer some great improvements on the overall user experience as well — like being able to sync the blockchain in a small fraction of the time it currently takes.
We are very excited about the plans we have for the Phore Marketplace, Decentralized Crowdfunding, and other decentralized applications, as we really think what users ultimately want are applications that they can use every day, that solve problems and deliver value. We will be taking those ideas in some different directions going forward. We expect the next release of the Phore Marketplace will include cryptocurrency trading, and we are beginning to sketch out expanded functionality along those lines that will make our decentralized applications more accessible and usable to large numbers of users around the world.
Q: Can you talk about how you are/have/will-in-future positioned the foundation in regards to regulations of your larger markets? Specifically, PHR as a security vs. a currency. Does your position match up with your use cases?
A: Phore is not a security, and we have written, legal judgment on this to back it up from Gibraltar. Phore works as a currency within a larger platform. In terms of use case the Phore currency will drive smart contracts, side chains, and will remain the decentralized marketplace’s primary payment method.
Q: Can you talk about the benefits of working with Platinum Circle? To me that is by far the most intriguing partnership to date because I don’t know much about them, but they seem well connected. What kind of things can investors expect to hear coming out of that partnership?
A: We agree, it’s the most intriguing, and arguably important partnership to date. The benefits are direct in-person connections with high-net worth individuals, NGOs and companies that have influence and power to be the driving forces in a number of markets. Our primary goals are to build connections with as many of these third parties as possible, with the aim of making them aware of Phore as a currency, and as a credible blockchain platform.
Q: In the words of the team why does Phore stand out from the rest ? Do you guys have any specific goals other than roadmap completion? Marketcap goals?
A: We want to be the most useful, complete, easy to use, accessible, and valuable blockchain ecosystem in existence. As far as rankings go though, we would probably answer the same way about not making any statements about price forecasts. It is up to the market to value us in relation to other cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, and any other assets, digital or otherwise.
We think it is more important for us to focus on the goals of delivering that value, making the best products we can, and letting the market give us feedback on how valuable they are.
Q: Where do you see yourself vs. your competition in “X” timeframe, be that 1 month, 1 year, 3 years? What are the team’s aspirations?
A: We have the ambition to be a top tier Blockchain project, and that means being right up there with the household names. Timeframes are difficult to predict in this current market, but as we mentioned earlier in the AMA, we think this turbulence is going to shake out a lot of projects that are built on sand. Once that happens and we are fully aware of the new, streamlined environment, then we can answer more specific questions such as more defined timeframes.
Q: I’ve been impressed with the way you’ve handled everything thrown at Phore since the rollback early on (handled with class) to delivering the (optimistic) roadmap and more. What do you think the biggest challenge which Phore has faced has been?
Phore has a large team given the lack of resources, is this manageable in the current climate?
A: The biggest challenge with the current market conditions is maintaining growth and momentum, especially when everything is showing signs of fragility around you. Phore’s entire team all share the same dedication and commitment, which is to ride this out and come back even stronger. It’s manageable, and we have planned for it.
That concludes our AMA. Feel free to join us in any of our social channels to talk to Phore Staff and Executives. We are available to chat if you have any questions, or would just like to say hello.
Phore can be found on the following social channels:
Discord: http://discord.gg/zwSEvzb
Telegram: http://tinyurl.com/y9x3ecsh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhoreCrypto
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/PhoreProject/
Medium: http://tinyurl.com/y92kwnwt
Bitcointalk: http://tinyurl.com/y9v2xhpf
YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/ybflf588
Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/y82mlsmc
Instagram: http://tinyurl.com/ybehhwxo