BOLT Global Community AMA
Hosted on Zoom: 26th November 2019
Introduction to BOLT, by BOLT Co-Founder Christel Quek:
BOLT is an interactive media platform that converts your media experiences into monetary value. Our mission is to open up the power of information to all, with a vision to create an inclusive economy that will be powered by the world’s stories. We do that through two applications — BOLT+ and Pegasus.
BOLT+: interactive media platform, with a focus on sports and educational content. Pegasus: a gateway converting a user’s media experience into monetary value.
Question: In terms of revenue, what percentage comes from the new app? As you mentioned that some of the users/revenue come from the legacy of your previous company/app.
Almost 90% of our revenue is from sponsorship, advertising and licensing by the end of 2019. The balance is from support service.
Question: Former company SyQic (with Yoomob as product) was also bringing revenue and profit just like Bolt. Then it got shut down because of the lack of funding. How can the same thing not happen again with Bolt?
The company has not been shut down but rather delisted. Nothing wrong with its business just the fact that it was on the wrong public market. BOLT is utilising a different model completely and is on a vastly different journey.
Question: Hello, I have a couple of questions regarding BOLT and the old company SyQic that Jamal had in the past:
- first questions regarding BOLT, are these addresses related to the BOLT team? These addresses sold BOLT tokens during the audit: bnb1dlt2wl6j3e2p96wucwk8qfywq0hfalq4z7hrfa
bnb1438m42hzwv2h2nymswfxkwxtfr8lljj6r5a6eh
bnb1y0q7hrrph4pa40hngdtaghkcfzpgav3z7zt8yw- I understand that BOLT is a different company than SyQic, why did you keep the same offices for BOLT as SyQic in Singapore and Malaysia.
- www.cool2vu.com was a product of SyQic. But when you go to www.cool2vu.com website, BOLT name appears on the left as if BOLT and SyQic are 2 different companies.
Also, will the SyQic problems affect BOLT? On uk.advfn.com website some people complained about SyQic and BOLT.
These addresses mentioned do not belong to us. We have our team wallet and partners wallet as amongst the top holders on the list in the Binance Chain explorer, those are our main wallets and have not been touched — we could not touch them, not even for team vesting — during the course of our audit.
Regarding SyQic and BOLT- why are they registered under the same addresses?
- SyQic and BOLT have a common majority shareholder- that is Jamal. When we set up Yuma Ventures (aka BOLT Global) over 3 years ago, Jamal very kindly did us a favour and allowed us to use that as our registered address specifically for the Malaysian office. SyQic’s Singapore address is actually at Keppel Road, not at 1 Nanson Road, but we changed it just for purposes of receiving correspondence since there are actually no SyQic hires or team based in Singapore.
- Now that BOLT and Yuma Ventures are firmly established we have registered different office addresses for Singapore and Malaysia. In fact all three offices in Singapore, Malaysia and London are moving to new premises as part of our ongoing team expansion. So we will update that accordingly.
Regarding why there are people complaining about SyQic and BOLT.
- In any investor circle there will be happy and unhappy investors. It’s the same for the stock market as it is for crypto. At the SyQic level, Jamal regularly communicates with his SyQic shareholders but he and the remainder of the SyQic team will not be able to address any fud in different channels all the time.
Regarding why BOLT appears on SyQic properties including Cool2Vu and Yoomob.
- When Jamal and I started BOLT 3 years ago (registered under Yuma Ventures) — We combined know-how to build BOLT together — including brand new iOS and Android applications you see today. We also contemplated doing a licensing agreement from Yoomob (one of his previous products) into BOLT but specifically for feature phones, which is why we did testing on Yoomob and Cool2Vu in the first place. This was the base where we started running trials in Kenya 3 years ago. We discontinued the trials after a few months.
BOLT is an entirely different business which is operated on iOS, Android, and across our social media platforms. If we were truly the same company, why aren’t the Cool2Vu and Yoomob sites updated with the latest BOLT+ content? it is because they are not the same company. The Cool2Vu and Yoomob businesses under SyQic are vastly different from BOLT. it is like trying to compare Spotify and Netflix.
Finally as a statement from Christel personally:
If SyQic was truly re-branded as BOLT, you can see that I am not listed as a director or a shareholder at SyQic. Why would I then be listed as a co-founder of BOLT? It’s simply because SyQic and BOLT are two separate companies.
I am not affiliated with SyQic in any way. I am a majority shareholder together with Jamal at Yuma Ventures LTD, which operates and owns the BOLT IP and brand that you see today.
If I don’t have a problem with SyQic, given the amount of personal investment I had also poured into BOLT, I certainly don’t think any “well-meaning contributors” should.
The level of ridicule about the re-branding is akin to saying I never worked at Twitter because I wasn’t based in the US, or at Samsung because I wasn’t based in Korea.
I am a majority shareholder of BOLT together with Jamal, which is registered under an entirely different entity of which I am a director and shareholder of. Everyone has a history. I am obviously aware of the previous company Jamal had and how his cumulative experience had enhanced what we do at BOLT. Coupled with our joint mission and vision, we will bring BOLT to new heights together.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTS
Question: How many full time employees as of today?
32 full time employees. You can view our team roster on our website at bolt.global.
Question: You said you did an audit for raising money. Could you please share for about how much you are looking for, and what will be the purpose (live content, employees, licenses…) How will these investors be rewarded after raising funds from them : tokens, shares in the company..“
This will be for shares in the company and for us to aggressively build and scale in 2020, since we have already built the core product and token utility cases in 2019. 2020 will be a huge year for us given the widespread moments including Olympics, Indian Premier League, Cricket World Cup T20 Format, Euro 2020 to name a few. But this will also benefit token holders since our main token utility cases will be very much live and running by then, and sponsors need to buy tokens directly to engage in these new interactive formats.
Question: Previously you mentioned the audit was being conducted for an equity raise. Is that still true? How far along are you in that process.
Yes, that audit was done for all intents and purposes to support our equity raise. We are currently evaluating the final parties for the exercise, as we have a few options on who we would like to work with as an incoming shareholder of the company.
Question: Will you be presenting any documents from KPMG that state the audit was completed and that all is in order?
We already are one of the most transparent companies in the space, and we will not be able to share the KPMG documentation or reports since this involves numerous parties, and not just us (includes incoming shareholders and future equity partners).
Question: Are there any new partnerships and interesting upcoming use-cases?
We will always release new information in our fortnightly newsletter, the BOLT Vault. We also have a partners newsletter, Gemini, and a content newsletter for our users, aptly named Debut. As for the last two months of 2019, here is what we will be looking out to complete and finish:
Highlights to look forward to:
App Updates: We also publish app updates across iOS / Android with new features every fortnight. We will be launching a BOLT Support Site in the next week where we will also publish regular developmental updates.
1. BOLT Stake: A game of skill and prediction where users can stake their BOLTs and participate in a football-themed game where they can predict the winners of popular football matches and key moments during the game. Winners will win BOLTs and incorrect answers will forfeit the amount of BOLTs that is staked. We have covered the progress of BOLT Stake extensively in BOLT Vault and we welcome our community to give us feedback and get ready to join our waiting list.
2. Sponsorship and Partnerships: Incentivising tokens to be purchased by our sponsor partners and leveraging strong cross-marketing with present Partners. We have a strong partner ecosystem. Now that BOLT+ and Pegasus have launched, we are looking to start expanding and testing that with key partners in our ecosystem.
3. Lightning Round: Our all new interactive BOLT Gameshow where sponsors sponsor tokens to be won by participants in a live gameshow.
We are pending our iOS app approval for Pegasus and we believe we can launch Stake, Lightning Round and Pegasus iOS in stages by the end of 2019.
Question: Do you have any update on Hisense Integration?
The Hisense E30 phone is currently taking pre-orders across Europe and South Africa. We are already discussing further phone models where both BOLT+ and Pegasus can reside on.
We have been working behind the scenes on a comprehensive Hisense relationship and strengthening our various initiatives for 2020. We believe the best is yet to come, and we will be happy to share more ways on how we will be working with us in a closer way moving forward. We are currently onboarded as a global strategic partner (tier 1 partnership level) with Hisense.
All we can reveal for now is that we are developing a new app on Hisense TVs. We hope to surprise the community when the news is ready to be released. Please do not keep asking when that will be though. We will release the news and details as soon as we are all ready.
We are also happy to share that Hisense will be the first official sponsor for our upcoming Gameshow, Lightning Round.
Both Jerry and Christel will also be attending WPP Stream together in South Africa this week as a strong demonstration on the credibility and strength of the BOLT-Hisense relationship.
Question: There is a lot of criticism regarding the lack of “live” sports events, currently it is only highlights, and for most they are already available on YouTube.
Live sports events are ridiculously expensive to procure and stream, and licensing rights are very restrictive and normally confined to the traditional broadcasters of a particular country or region. We do curate highlights, but keep in mind we have official partnerships with the Cricket World Cup (International Cricket Council) and the Rugby World Cup. This allows us to additional footage around the entire league.
We are also developing our own BOLT Interactive proposition which aims to create more engaging, interactive media formats for users to enjoy- such as the Gameshow, aptly named Lightning Round, Stake, which incorporates match predictions, and our 3D replays, which overlays match statistics on animated match highlights for football and cricket. We want to be a full fledged platform. All these will specifically include token utility for sponsors and users to create a truly inclusive economy which will be powered by the world’s stories.
Question: How long will the embedded YouTube videos go on for? Why don’t you have these videos in local and stream them directly ? Because it is free advertising to the YouTube platform, and why would people stay on the app if they can get the same content from YouTube? Same for Live TV, most channels are available on YouTube.
To address this point once and for all. YouTube is extremely useful for us as a data point to see how certain content, content creators or emerging themes are doing on our platform and amongst our global base of users. This led to our decision to work with the Rugby World Cup this year as we noted Rugby was an emerging trend in Africa and South Asia, which then led to over 2.9M impressions on our platform. So we will continue to curate and aggregate great content from YouTube, and develop our own content as well — such as BOLT Interactive, our 40 Live TV channels, and over 80 Radio Channels. You can’t get those solely from YouTube.
Question: Do you have and plan about caching for LiveTV? It would be nice having pause and play. And it would bring advantages if you compare watching on non-smart TVs and watching from thousands of live broadcasters on the Web.
We are looking to incorporate interesting new features for our Live TV channels, including program caching and TV schedule notifications. However this will only take place in 2020 since our main priority will be to innovate and deliver the main token utility cases first.
Question: More than a month past when you said that iOS Pegasus will be on store in ~2 weeks. This means you got some information from Apple. What problem you still have? Why is still not active? Thanks.
Crypto applications take a longer time to be approved. For example we had to register a new legal entity to be bound to Pegasus. Maybe a good example here will be Binance. Even Binance took a while for their iOS application to be approved, so we are all in the same boat.
Question: With regards to the betting and staking. How do you plan to offer the betting? Will this be in a P2P market like a betting exchange or will it be a full sports book where odds and liquidity will be supplied by bolt? If it’s the first one, how do you insure liquidity. If I want to make a bet, there has to be someone else taking the other side?
Stake is not a betting program, it is a combination of skill and prediction as this relates to facts that happened during a particular match. Think of it as a more static way of interactive engagement vs Lightning Round, which is our Gameshow. Our marketing team will release a pre-launch, launch campaign and various tutorials to help our users understand better what Stake and Lightning Round represent and how our users and token holders can get involved.
Question: If the total supply of BOLT tokens is less than 1 billion, and the circulating supply even lower than this.
(a) How is it possible for BOLT tokens to be used on a massive scale by people all over the world? Surely there won’t be enough tokens to go around?
(b) Why was the token supply designed to be so low?
Yes, there will be enough. As mentioned every single token is divisible up to 18 decimal places and we are also actively evaluating our tokenomics programme every quarter to ensure the right balance is achieved between velocity and usage.
Question: One criticism was that you promote partnerships that are really just paid sponsorship. That you pay to sponsor an event and claim they are a partner. Can you explain if that it typical and standard? Or if that isn’t a proper description of how it works? Thank you.
Not sure what this means. We don’t pay for sponsorship at all. We do pay for content licensing rights for broadcast, such as for the Cricket World Cup, Africa Cup of Nations and the Rugby World Cup.
Question: When will you add Turkish channels in Bolt+?
Yes, we will add Turkish channels into BOLT+.
We have already secured the following channels and added them to BOLT+:
Turkish live TV channels
1. TRT 1
2. 24 Haber
3. Kanal D
4. TV8
5. TRT Cucok
6. BEYAZ
New Turkish live radio channels
1. Alem FM
2. Baba Radyo
3. Radyo Fenomen
4. KRAL POP
5. NTV Radyo
Question: These channels are popular sports channels in Turkey: TRT Spor, Bein Sports Haber, NTVSPOR, TRT Spor 2.
And economy channels: Bloomberg HT, Expo Channel, A Para, EkotürkCan you add these channels to Bolt+?
We will look into it! Thank you! We have our content partnerships team constantly looking into new ways to get great content on our platform, including live TV channels and radio too.
Question: Any plans for real live sports events ? Because Youtube is also offering free highlights. Staking would also make more sense with live videos.
Live sports events are ridiculously expensive to procure and stream, and licensing rights are very restrictive and normally confined to the traditional broadcasters of a particular country or region. We do curate highlights, but keep in mind we have official partnerships with the Cricket World Cup (International Cricket Council) and the Rugby World Cup. This allows us to additional footage around the entire league.
We are also developing our own BOLT Interactive proposition which aims to create more engaging, interactive media formats for users to enjoy- such as the Gameshow, aptly named Lightning Round, Stake, which incorporates match predictions, and our 3D replays, which overlays match statistics on animated match highlights for football and cricket. We want to be a full fledged platform. All these will specifically include token utility for sponsors and users to create a truly inclusive economy which will be powered by the world’s stories.
Question: How does BOLT plan to retain users on the app?
We have a comprehensive re-marketing funnel and user behaviour data which allows us to re-engage and re-target our users. Ultimately we want to achieve high daily usage of the app, which we believe is possible once our new interactive features are launched. At present moment, the daily usage for our Live TV channels and Live Radio segments is also encouraging.
Question: How can users change their preferences of what content they want to see after they’ve registered and initially chosen?
We are working on a feature update for this. At the present moment, the developers on our team are working to complete BOLT Stake as well as Lightning Round, our new gameshow.
Question: What kind of Olympic content will be shown and elaborate on the sponsorship?
The license to the Olympics content has to be worked through a number of different rights holders for each country that we operate in. We will have live and catchup content for various sports and the countries that we operate in.
Question: Is the pegasus app/wallet currently out for testing by a select few on the apple testflight app? If so that is great, do you have ETA please?
Yes, we have Pegasus on iOS in TestFlight. If people are interested to test it, we can compile a list for people to test it on their iOS devices. Dave our community manager can help to arrange accordingly.
Question: Recent independent reviews cited weakness’s in the Bolt development team — your appointed 5 new staff none of which were programmers — can you explain the reasoning or strategy behind the new recruits.
We actually have a strong development team internally that have built everything that you see today, including two applications and all our blockchain related engineering work. We are expanding the team as we speak. There is a myth that more developers = more progress, but you don’t have to look very far to many projects in the space who have raised 10 times of what we did, with equally 10 times the size of development or engineering teams, but not shipped a main net product.
Our focus now is to drive token utility, users, and revenue so business development, marketing, and content are key areas for us. Development is an ongoing process which we are beefing up on.
Question: You mentioned the audit had a purpose to reach out and secure investment capital. Which industry sector are you looking to partner with and can I ask what size investment (roughly) you aim to achieve.
We will announce the details in due course as we are finalising all the details around this at the moment.
Question: The recent FUD spreaded by “Influencers” on CT crossed many lines (e.g. counterfeiting of documents) aiming to harm the BOLT business and its leadership team intentionally. Do you consider to take legal advice or action to come up against individuals crossing the line?
We have our own in-house legal counsel, and two external legal firms who we engage with on a daily basis — especially since a lot of the work that we do require credible legal advice. Jamal himself took the bar and is a trained lawyer.
It would be unfortunate if we do need to take legal action against any individuals who have intentionally harmed our reputation and caused considerable damage, but we will not rule that out as we need to stand firm against lies, uncertainty and unnecessary drama around BOLT, especially if the actions of a few can lead to widespread damage amongst our community and loyal advocates. We, however, urge that we work together to encourage a culture of positivity, awareness and growth for the BOLT ecosystem and project.
Question: It was stated in October that it would be implemented on IOS in 2 weeks.. Any updates?
Yes, we are finalising the Stake feature now and have sent Pegasus to the Apple App Store for release and final approval.
Question: Any new partnerships in the works or in trial phase?
Yes, we have an active pipeline of sponsors and partners we want to work with, in addition to growing present account value of our present partners and sponsors. As always, any new announcements will be made in the BOLT VAULT every fortnight.
Question: New exchanges can bring the liquidity missing. When new exchanges? Why is it so difficult for Bolt to get listed with revenue/profit/working product/millions of users…?
The founders of BOLT and the BOLT team are not here to just build a mediocre business but please also recognise that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will we become a billion dollar business overnight. Perhaps for some context:
- Facebook took 3 years to become a billion dollar business. That is the largest social network today.
- The other big names such as Twitter, Spotify, WhatsApp took 6 years to become a billion dollar business.
- Even Buzzfeed, GoPro, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, took 10 years to reach a billion dollar in market cap/valuation
- Razer, Vice Media, and SkyScanner took 15 years to reach a billion dollars in market cap/valuation
Now we deliberately did not include mainstream companies in the crypto/blockchain space as we have set our goals to embrace blockchain invisibility to the masses. To do that, we have set ourselves a higher benchmark in operations, global scale, and product amplification which these companies have been great at. So we need time to get there.
But just as many projects have not even achieved main-net status despite raising huge sums of money during the last ICO boom, we have built and launched two products, and continued building on features within the suite. We are on the right track but we cannot always entertain questions of “when moon” and “when exchange” when OUR goal — and I mean the entire community, our users, our team, our admins included — will be to create the best inclusive economy which will be powered by the world’s stories.
TOKENOMICS
Question: Could you finally provide us with a final figure on the current circulating supply?
We will do a final tally and update CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko accordingly. At present since Binance.com has not fully completed the swap and we have over 280M ERC-20 tokens sitting on the exchange (which have not been swapped for with BEP-2 tokens) it is a bit difficult for us to ascertain the true circulating supply of the tokens — CMC for example will only count a portion of that as part of the circulating supply.
Question: As stated in the initial Bolt’s Token Ecosystem and Interoperability medium post 150M tokens will be locked on the Binance Chain (from BOLT Foundation’s reserves) to run smart contract smoothly on Zilliqa. How far are you from implementing this feature and where can we find the wallet holding those 150M tokens?
We are implementing this in Q1 2020. Most of our tokens are stored on Binance.com to first allow users to swap from ERC-20 tokens to BEP-2 tokens seamlessly, and this includes the extra 150M tokens (we need to store in excess).
Question: As a Binance Chain based token, and not an ERC20 token, does this mean BOLT can only list on exchanges that support BNB token?
Yes, that is correct. However with the latest BEP-3 upgrade atomic swaps to ERC20 will be automatic, so we are exploring the option of listing on other exchanges as well. I am afraid that is all that we can say about this matter.
Question: When are you planning to start a bounty program for Bolt holders?
Yes, this is part of our BOLT Olympus Program for BOLT community and advocates. We will release more details when the program is finalised.
Question: You have plan to share some of the profit with investors or holders?
We are not able to do so through the BOLT token or we will be classified as a security token. However we are working on strong token utility cases, which we expect will allow the ecosystem to grow exponentially in value and scale, especially after we have kicked off a greater push to grow awareness of our products with the growth funds from our equity raise.
Question: As of November 25th, despite being announced, Q3 token burn still did not happen. Why it hasn’t been done yet ? Last token burn on the Binance chain was 117 days ago. Please get this fixed ASAP before bringing more FUD.
We will do the burn this weekend or next week and announce accordingly to the community. Our team has been busy with other operational matters.
Question: What did KPMG say about Bolt buying back tokens and burning them ? Isn’t it considered as a security token, even though you are trying to bring utility to the token.
We are still in discussion with KPMG and our lawyers on the best way around burning tokens and the various regulatory licenses we would like to apply for given our ambitions to enter the fiat space in different markets.
Question: What about the 5 token given for free with the app, where do they come from ? How many more will you add to the circulating supply?
This comes from the Partner Wallet and has already been distributed.
Question: When will be premium content be in place, will it be for live events?
We are looking at several options to innovate on token utility and velocity. However with the Pegasus and BOLT+ apps already built, the Pegasus to BOLT+ bridge linked up (pending the iOS release now) and having done a few global sporting moments (Cricket World Cup, Africa Cup of Nations, Rugby World Cup, to name a few) we have learnt a lot and look to do innovative mechanisms for the Olympics and Euro 2020 next year.
Question: When will the ZRC Bolt token be created?
When our partner portal starts getting built. We aim to do a soft launch in Q1 2020.
We are in the process of developing a partner portal where users can submit content to be considered for publishing on BOLT+. If their content gets published, we will link up their respective wallet addresses and employ a smart contract mechanism where users can be paid in $BOLT depending on the validated views their video gets.
We have already written the required smart contracts, but would need some time to develop the partner portal accordingly. We foresee to begin testing this with a small batch of content creators and we hope to launch it in early 2020. Feel free to let us know how we could get the community to support this initiative! We are open to suggestions of content genres to ensure a well curated, quality experience.
Question: Can you please clarify the difference between old legal businesses and bolt token? I think, no revenue is coming from bolt app and token-related businesses no? You should differentiate unrelated legal businesses from Bolt token related businesses on reports, tweets, talks for crypto world. We should see only token related news, revenues, etc on reports. Bc we invested in tokens, not stocks. For example, I would like to know how many team members are working for Bolt+, Pegasus, and other token related jobs.
This is untrue, our ENTIRE team is working on BOLT aka all that we represent including BOLT, BOLT Token, Pegasus. How is earning revenue a bad thing? It allows us to sustain the business and continue to build on our ecosystem, including all the tech infrastructure and token utility cases which we want to start scaling from 2020. We built all that with the revenue we received in 2019.
Question: Bolt has barely any site visits and 8k Twitter followers but to have 1.7m monthly active users on their app? Those numbers don’t add up.
We have cumulatively over 1.7M users across our social media platforms across multiple Facebook pages, groups, and close to 300,000 application downloads. We also work with telcos and multiple partners in our ecosystem (including Hisense, Helo/Bytedance, Payfo, Maxis, Digi) in various cross-marketing and awareness initiatives on their platforms which we have covered extensively across all our Vault updates since we started the initiative 28 weeks ago. A platform is when you are able to get users across multiple channels and not just your own, but through earned media as well (Media ecosystems are a mix of paid, owned and earned media channels).
But on the point of our website visits, we have been steadily improving our Alexa rankings. It used to be 5M in rank (across all websites in the world) and now we are close to 700,000 in rank in less than 6 months. If that is not reflective of progress I don’t know what is!
Questions: Sponsors on BOLT+ pay with $BOLT bought on exchanges. When they sell it goes back into circulation by being sold by the BOLT team on exchanges. Why don’t you allocate a few percent of it for burning so you over time increase the value of the BOLT token? Having another burn program will be highly appreciated by the BOLT Community. You shouldn’t worry about running out of BOLT as the token support 18 decimals.
We are constantly evaluating our token utility and burn program to see the best tokenomics to achieve optimum velocity and usage in our ecosystem. I say we revisit this subject once Lightning Round and Stake are launched.
Thanks for reading! Join us on Telegram to participate in discussions on how we can make BOLT a movement we can be proud of. Drop us a note at enquiry [at] bolt.global for suggestions on what you would like to read next.
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