Transcript — AMA with Mark Basa, Concordium’s Brand Director
On August 19th our Brand Director, Mark Basa, joined our community in a voice chat to share more insights on Concordium’s plans to migrate global businesses to blockchain.
If you missed the live AMA, you can listen to the recording on YouTube or read the transcript below!
Introduction from Mark Basa (MB)
Hey everybody, great to be here today. As Amalia said, I’m the new Brand Director and this is my fourth month now at Concordium, and my background starts pretty early in the crypto days. Some buddies and I got together somewhere around 2010–2011 and we discovered Bitcoin and started experimenting with it because we wanted to disrupt the loyalty point industry. If you had loyalty points, frequent-flyer points, all those sorts of things, these schemes are not really in favour of the individual, they’re more of a scheme for what they call customer loyalty. So we wanted to disrupt that and built this omni-currency payment gateway where you could use Bitcoin, fiat and loyalty points in a single transaction. That was supported by Microsoft and the Australian government through their mentoring and high-growth startup program and years later we’re rebuilding this on different chains now and so that was kind of my first experience with Bitcoin and I loved the idea of it because it really meant decentralised money.
That’s what I’m going to talk more about today in terms of brand marketing, how people adopt crypto and how retail investors get into crypto. My crypto career, I think, has been taken more seriously in the last few years. I started buying tokens and exploring tokens from 2016–2017. It’s really funny enough, I actually did really well in meme coins and meme tokens. I bought a bunch and did really really well and that’s when I kind of got into the whole understanding of the market and what’s happening in the wider space. So if you imagine 10 years ago or whatever it was that I was pitching to investors and Microsoft that Bitcoin is going to be the new gold and I was in a room full of investors. At one stage they had probably had a combined net worth of a few billions and they didn’t understand this new concept. They thought Bitcoin could be hacked, they also thought it was nothing. I think back then it must be worth eight cents. It was really worth nothing. But ten years later, what’s really changed about Bitcoin? I mean, no one was marketing Bitcoin, It was the idea itself that went viral and people started to understand it and that’s a big part of crypto. If you do really well with the idea that you sell, you don’t need to spend countless amounts of money to try to market your product because people will believe in it and buy it. It’s very similar to meme tokens. It’s similar to what Bitcoin and Ethereum accomplished, it’s always about how do you sell that idea so I always go about ideas overspend and I’ve met some seriously big layer ones and I’ve looked at their budgets and they’ve told me what kind of money they spend and the token barely moves. In fact it’s predominantly that it doesn’t move for a long time and then they do something like hitting the nail on the head and maybe they launch a metaverse project or some big company endorses them. It’s the same token, it’s the same coin whatever, and it’s now that somebody else thinks it’s valuable, someone else with brand equity thinks that your idea is good and then the token explodes. Now today, we’re not really going to talk about price, action and token value, but I’m talking more about the adoption of something. So for me, what I’m really interested in is how do we create those ideas behind the CCD and the Concordium as a whole and how do we actually get the idea of why the ID layer is so important.
So you know Lars, our Founder, I think when he launched Saxo Bank, there must have been like 50 million people using the Internet. It was super early and he saw this coming too and now you see with more and more stable coins crashing and the market just going wild. Regulators are looking to capture this space because they’re afraid of losing money. They want to control certain things, but they also want to make sure people are safe. So this is the battle going on right now and Concordium really may be the chain to solve this whole thing and what I mean by that is to position itself to capture that trillion dollar economy that is coming. So the world’s GDP, moving over on chains so all the transactions happening on chain right? So what I’ve been doing from the last three months is building up the idea of how to make a very simple and clear idea to the retail investor that just makes sense and with the new brand and a new website that’s coming out. I believe all of you will understand that we’ll succinctly know what we’re trying to achieve so a bit more about my background if you’ve just joined. So, yeah, working with Bitcoin in 2010–2011, I worked with Microsoft and the Australian government on a decentralised loyalty point platform, did really well in the altcoin industry and love crypto. I’m also the Co-Founder of a Japanese video game developer, which is also based out of the Netherlands as well, called Murasaki. I do everything in crypto you can basically imagine because I just love this space so much and the real reason that I came on to Concordium was because I saw a big opportunity. I’m not typically one that would be for regulation, what you would regard as a degen and all the DeFi degen’s out there will relate. We’re not really for ID, so to speak, but there’s a big opportunity here and how ID can solve a lot of problems, you could say make our dreams come true. So when I talk to OG Blockchain Devs and they’re all talking about wanting their Eth for their BTC or whatever to go up and they want the world’s biggest companies to also take part in Blockchain. But they’re not just going to jump in and use other chains, not at the same rate as they would if they had the ID layer in place because you need to know your customer -
KYC, anti money laundering laws, all that stuff. So in this really strange way you need to have this ID to merge or you could take a bridge to that trillion dollar industry. So the world’s biggest brands and companies want to use Blockchain and it comes up often when we’re talking to some really big companies and they’re not even looking into it they really barely understand it and it’s kind of how I felt ten years ago when I was pitching to investors, saying, you got to buy a bitcoin, you got to get involved in this thing, this is going to be what’s happening ten years later. Maybe, it’s more famous now and we’ve seen some of the larger hedge funds jump into it to start offering it as a product, but it’s still super super early, so taking that in mind when I talk to Blockchain Devs and Crypto Degens, and they’re like “Mark what you doing at Concordium? That’s crazy. You’re the guy that made money in altcoins and games and everything else” but I believe in this because I really believe that it’s going to take a chain like this, a serious one, to start bringing on some of these major brands who want and who need that trust, who want to work with regulators. They’re not just going to jump onto the other chains, not as fast as you would imagine. So, my role really is to build out, you could say, the brand, so it connects more with the DeFi community, Web3, Gaming, Metaverse, NFTs basically where all the transactions are happening right now so if you take the whole let’s say that the layer one industry and what’s happening right now that most of these transactions are Degens building, stuff they’re building like swaps DEXs, they’re building games.
Just whatever they can build, they built and they built in speed and scale and it’s actually going to be us tapping into that and proving our use case on how we can solve the problem of scammers and bots on video games, which will provide use cases for larger organisations because the larger organisations have these systems and processes. Some of these companies are like you know, I spoke to a company the other day that was like 45,000 employees they’re not just going to jump in and start using CCD, they need to understand it but a really cool way to get them to use CCD and to understand what we do is something that’s familiar, so one of the things like as I said before completely bullish about crypto games everything, I developed a video game concept and I pitched it to this automaker and they loved it and now we’re in the process of how do we get this automaker to you know start sponsoring vehicles or we can build their own vehicles in this video game all on Concordium right using the Metaverse, NFTs all the trending stuff and that makes far more sense to them and then when you get them captured and then you know they feel so inspired because they all understand video games. The technology is just the kind of blockchain side, things is more of how transactions can be conducted and how to create a secure environment but they don’t need to understand it they just need to know what our customers gonna get from this thing, are they gonna have new experiences, can they create new revenues and can they capture a new space that the competitors can’t and you would have seen tons of automakers now jumping into this whole Metaverse trend and for good reason because eventually it’s going to be like the new web browser experience so you won’t open chrome but you may open a metaverse and then have new commerce experiences through there so that’s kind of what i’ve been working on for the last few months. As I said, a new site is coming out and we’ve got a brilliant campaign schedule. I’m gonna run through all the stuff that we’re accomplishing as I answer questions that will come through the community.
Q. Are we still dismissive of Binance as the world’s top exchange which has also recently undertaken many right regulatory steps?
MB: No, not dismissive of Binance, we would welcome Binance and Coinbase and the other top tier exchanges. I think for me personally the way that I would do some of these exchange listings of course the markets are not in a great position right now. So, there’s two parts of it: it’s good to get exposure right? It’s good to be out on exchanges to ensure there’s balance so when you have a big announcement that the investors can buy. That’s really important but there’s also the other part that if you list on an exchange and there’s not enough hype people say why did you list in a bear market and you literally can’t make everyone happy in this so I think that it’s important that we try to balance out when we’re going to list on a top tier exchange and the reason we’re going to do it so I would like us to list on something like Binance or Coinbase and then come out you know a week later or a day later with some massive news just to move, create some volume and some hype.
Q. Has the team become more proactive and time sensitive in their approach? Are we still on the old fashioned corporate “track, wait and see” and step-in when it’s late?
MB: I can tell you that, I have been working day and night behind the scenes building up so many wonderful things with the marketing team and the commercial team and just about everybody on building out our roadmap for DeFi, NFTs metaverse and everything so we are super super proactive at the moment I can’t speak at what’s happened in the past but since i joined it has just been crazy. So we got one of the best PR agents in the world and with that we’ve actually been in more top tier publications in a matter of months than we ever have in two years, and we did that actually without using other external agencies and we did it ourselves and what we did was we just made sure at least to position ourselves to be more of an authority in the media. I think it’s very important when I talk about, you know, what I mentioned before that bitcoin is an idea right and you don’t need to market Bitcoin so to speak. Satoshi doesn’t need to market Bitcoin so if we can plant more ideas and sell the idea of ID and regulation and how we’re going to capture or you could say bridge that trillion dollar economy, those ideas sell!
So this is what i’m much more bullish on, it’s creating the idea setting the brand Foundation and then to push that out and roll that out with some marketing spend but if you go out with marketing spend first while you’re trying to find your feet while the brand maybe is disenfranchised on different levels then it’s difficult, because you’re moving too fast. So that’s why as a brand director I’m here to build brand equity from the ground up. We’ve got more community managers, we’ve also turned our marketing leads into regional marketing managers, and these people from Africa, Spain and Japan are now our funnels to getting more dApps to Concordium. So we could say we’re weaponizing the way that we actually do things on the marketing side instead of trying to get to be at forums or speak at universities in different regions I’m now saying go out and find the best projects that want to use our ID layer and it’s really really working we have actually in the last few months have an enormous road map of new projects. Like I said I’m super bullish on gaming so I want as many games to come as possible. I want people building the craziest most obscure DeFi you know Dapps everything that can be brought to Concordium so that’s happening right now, and you’re gonna see this on the new site and more releases when you’re gonna see these games coming from anywhere from Japan and Africa so that’s really exciting too. So, no, we’re not stepping back when it’s too late, we’re moving very quickly now.
Q. What initiatives are you undertaking to raise awareness of the ccd chain? Education to potential builders?
Yeah so, that also sort of I answered that previously so it’s things like going out to the regional marketing leads setting up funnels we’re looking at hackathons and boot camps and spreading our wings much much further so what I really would love to do is just with the incredible commercial team that we have give them as much leads and ammunition as they can, to go to the world’s biggest brands and the world’s biggest investors. So let’s take a look at this for a second, I think this is an important part if you look at, let’s say Binance. It’s a really big chain right now. Okay it’s huge, it’s probably pretty hard to get in touch with CZ if you’ve got a great product, if you’ve got a great Dapp and you want him to help you partner with someone. We’re relatively new and you could say a small chain so the brilliant part about this is that if you’re a DeFi degen and you’ve built something awesome you can come to us and we can help facilitate a relationship with some of the world’s biggest brands and you know who our founding team are and our management team. Even some of the people I know from crypto are just, you know, really out of touch for a lot of people. I’ve been very fortunate enough to build up a strong network. But we can help you do that so if you’ve got something make contact with us and we want to put you in front of the brands that might do, let’s say, it’s a sponsor or collaboration for NFT collection or you need a brand to do something on, I don’t know some sort of event. I know we’re working with an esports dashboard that’s come out of Europe, it’s for esports teams. It basically enables you not to have to spend 300 grand on your own esports platform and you can basically use it as a SaaS platform and then they look like they’re going to be integrating with Concordium. Our commercial team is helping them by looking at sponsorship to help those young teams that are not tier one but tier two, you could say, get sponsorship. So that’s the kind of thing that we can do at this very early stage. So if you’re building something you know join us because I think there’s so many potential collaborations at this early stage most of us would wish that we could basically come back and you know be a part of some of the earlier chains and now you’ve got that chance. So that’s what we’re doing there raising awareness of course so yeah we’ve got our PR we’re starting to do more marketing now on the actual 12 month campaigns that we’re looking at so what we’re trying to do is get a press release every week. Now just so everyone knows we don’t do paid-press meaning Yahoo! Finance and the other NewsWire. They pick that up right, I think you spend 150 bucks and you go out to all the big publications but that’s not as well read, we focus on organic comments, organic features and op-eds. So obviously we pay our press agent a retainer. But then all the news we get is organic and that’s very important, and the bigger partnerships that we get the more that will actually happen.
Upcoming Projects
Let’s take a quick look at the kind of projects that look like they will come to Concordium from September to November. This is important to understand where we are and what the focus is and remember this is only like a super high level. This doesn’t even include all the stuff from the commercial team, only some of the things.
September initiatives
So right now there is a metaverse that we are talking to and I want to say that it is probably the best metaverse on the planet. I’m really bullish on this one. I don’t believe Zuckerberg’s metaverse is anywhere near as good, or Yuga Labs or the other ones. This is a really top quality metaverse that has been built by some very smart people. They’ve got an enormous team in Asia and they have already signed with and are talking to more customers but the customer they’ve signed with is one of the largest companies, largest brands in the world and this metaverse might come to Concordium. I hope it does, I really do and you know how some of these things work right? There’s a lot of due diligence, there’s heaps and heaps of things you’ve got to do on the tech side but for me it’s more important that we kind of expedite the process by locking people in and getting them to commit and then working out the technology later. I would love it if they could come then we basically have a Metaverse-as-a-Service provider and I would love to get more metaverses. I think there’s actually three that we are talking to. One is almost confirmed, two is you could say halfway there and the third we’re still in discussion. So going back, September there’s a metaverse, again in September there’s a video game, how would I describe it? It’s like a competitor to Roblox, again in September we may finish our DeFi roadmap at a very high level. I would love to come out to the community with some graphic designs about at least what our plans are, you know. Again if you’re listening to this and you’re a DeFi degen and you’re a builder and you can help build our infrastructure on the DeFi side or you want to start contributing to building dApps, please contact somebody on the team, write to us on Telegram, because we want to get as many suppliers all around the world as possible because we know every build is different, every project, every team. They all have their own different schools and you know there’s an opportunity for us to work together to partner where you can build for us and we can know we can help promote you, the commercial team can get you in a potential brand partnership, there’s so many awesome opportunities. Again another one in September that we could close is actually, it’s one of Japan’s largest or larger, I would say, video game developers and one of their video games looks like it’s going to come to Concordium and that’s really cool because when you get one of the smaller games even though it’s 250,000 players I think they have in the game. You know the Japanese like to do things very conservatively and structured but when you do a really good job with Japanese businessmen, and I’ve got colleagues in Japan, they’d love to introduce you to the rest of their portfolio. So the aim there is to pretty much do the same thing here, which is getting more and more of these, you know, tapping into the whole Japanese IP. Japan is famous for some of the best games on the planet and we would love to tap into that and bring that over to Concordium because the Japanese as well also would love to use a serious chain like this. I don’t know If any other layer-one founders are going after that market but I can tell you that we have plans to do it and it’s currently underway.
October initiatives
October, the assumption is that we do get this metaverse on and they are able to release that brand collaboration that’s going to be massive, another assumption is the automaker that we’re partnering to do the metaverse game with, again guys remember some of these companies are like forty five thousand fifty thousand people they don’t move as fast as we’d like and that’s not, you know to be disheartening but we also have to be realistic because they are publicly listed companies and there’s a lot of processes that have to go through. So just because they see something cool and they love it, there’s a few other steps. Again the assumption in october is another video game and this is a really good one because this actually uses this a brilliant piece of tech, it’s a bridge that basically you can bridge all your assets across across BSC and hopefully on the Concordium level will integrate the ID layer, but more so we’ll try to see how we can use our ID layer for NFTs particularly in creating more of a metaverse function and this game is really cool it’s a little bit like pokemon for blockchain I think I can put it like that, a colleague of mine who i know who built this with a brilliant team of artists so that’s on the commercial roadmap right now just so you know.
Assuming that another metaverse joins us in October which is great. These guys are super cool, very talented and this metaverse is more on the retail side, more gamification. The first metaverse I talked about is just its insane graphics; it’s got an analytical dashboard that will blow anybody away. It’s more for building out cities rather than just retail functions but this one is more on the retail function side where it’s like gamifying the way that you would buy something. Your commerce experience so again that’s like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, we hope we can pull off and again remember there’s a lot of it that is simply not up to us, we have to make sure that they have all their ducks in a row as well. We hope we can pull this off.
November initiatives
So we’ve got November, talking about holding, at least executing the announcement of a metaverse concert with some enormous DJs. I really hope we can pull that one off. Again in November another huge listing. In November again. Someone asked about Murasaki my other company and again guys I’ve got a couple of things that I do outside of Concordium on a limited capacity but I’ll talk about that and then the other things that generally come and flow into Concordium will be one on the gaming side and everything else that we’ve talked about before. Some of the larger brands perhaps use Concordium, supply chain management, that sort of thing. Maybe some of the more you could say are not as fun things but they’re still you know relatively cool because of who they are.
Q. Looking forward to two years, what outcomes do you want to achieve? What picture do you have in mind that you’re working towards?
MB: I want to say in 12 months I would love to see, i’m super bullish and maybe i’m too bullish but I mean it’s not hard for us if we really hone in on this space, you know in two years to get 100 dApps and I’m talking about some serious ones that make the ecosystem thrive so you can come here and you’ve got a choice of several wallets dex’s, bridges, everything that you need in DeFi, gaming but then you’ve also got some of these more bigger players on the more commercial-enterprise side who are using Concordium for tracking energy usage or supply chain management some of those other things that also need to resonate if we’re going to move towards the regulators and the government right? so it’s all the process but that’s what I would like to see in two years. I could imagine us doing 100 dApps in two years into the ecosystem but if things move really fast you know that could happen in 12 months. Right now I’ve mentioned how many projects at a very high level but there’s still you know when I mention that schedule. That’s not even the smaller announcements. I believe we can do one press release every week for the smaller dapps in the beginning of a collaboration between us and a project but then there’s the bigger announcements which we’ll put more money towards.
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Q. How large is your marketing team currently?
MB: number of people I believe we’re 10. We’re still going to keep hiring, there’s a few positions that we’d love to hire probably more on the I guess I mean you know creating content creating animation side all those sorts of things because right now we don’t actually use any agencies it’s just us so we’re pretty full capacity at the moment.
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Q. What is Concordium doing for the US market ccd planning any heavy marketing in the US and in the upcoming months?
MB: Well until we get approval that’s kind of difficult right. It’s really hard to go out and market to the US you’ve got something called the SEC which is not too friendly for you to go out there and market a security, non-security whatever. I would say that what’s important is if the US approval comes through then yes we can, but until that comes through the heavy marketing I mean the first part of the marketing is that you got approved right and you can bridge awareness so maybe we can get our management or founder on Bloomberg live to talk about what this means for the U.S blockchain market so that’s the first part.
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Q. What immediate use cases do you see that can be marketed after the success with the dutch stamps. Does it apply to other companies and industries?
MB: Yeah so again that I kind of answered that before with the campaign schedule, immediate use cases are really for me things like the metaverse, the existing games so the reason I want to tap into game developers it’s of course, you may have read you know despite the market we’re in right now I think crypto, the blockchain transactions are like 60% of all the transactions are made up by gaming so it’s important people still need to find entertainment right so this is a great time for us to tap into these companies. I think immediate use cases for me I mean as I said before we’re looking to partner with gamers and DeFi builders and everybody. What’s important to me is not so much that you don’t have anything, what’s more important, is that your idea is so radical, obscure, first mover? Because we want to hear from you and we can hopefully fund that project and bring it onto our chain first before you go anywhere else. so I think that’s an important topic on its own is the use cases that we’re looking for they don’t necessarily have to be that they’re going to be used today and they’re ready for use tomorrow but at least that they’re building on this and we can you know prove our chain itself that the ID layer is doing something but they’re all being proven at different levels via different use cases.
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Q. what KPIs are you looking and measuring at for example 100k members on telegram before end of year.
MB: KPIs that we’re focused on more right now is, so the absolute current KPIs is how many top tier publications can we get into? Can we get one press release every week? and by press release again I mean can we partner and release that we’ve announced a partnership with a project? That’s very important high-level, low-level, small, big project, whatever. Can we do one a week? And I think on that side then more of the organic you know the numbers flow themselves so you could have a hundred grand, a hundred thousand telegram members but for me it’s more important actually to have that engagement level up. You know half the amount of telegram users but more engagement is more important so these are the sorts of things that we’re looking at but if I want to say just repeat that the kpi is one press release a week we hope we’re going to achieve this and more of the major ones that we can get onto. So such as the big metaverse projects and the top brands that want to come to Concordium. And this is a good question and the commercial team will love me to speak about them so politely. The commercial team we have at Concordium is second to none, incredible and the way that we’re working with the commercial team now, a big part of this is really the inflow of projects to the commercial team to give them the ammunition so they can go out and utilise their relationships with the biggest brands in the world. That’s really important because the commercial team needs to go out there with great projects so our job at marketing is really to make sure the brand makes sense, it looks cool, it’s sexy, you know it’s got all the right things happening.
And we get the right use cases to demonstrate to brands of the commercial team pitching and say you know this came in from africa or this came in from japan and here’s what I think you can do with it in your respective territories. So we have a good relationship. We speak a lot and right now on the marketing side I’m just helping create funnels to get as many of these projects to come in as organically as possible.
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Q. Is Concordium doing anything specifically in order to pick up all the ETH devs that will leave when their merge explodes in about one month’s time.
MB: If you’re holding ETH now, whoever asked that question I think this guy or girl wants you to sell. I would say in order to pick up all the ETH devs I don’t think we can pick up all of them but what I can tell you is that we need to attract the devs now that are you could say again defi degens that you know respective of the market and the way that things have happened in crypto don’t want to use ID but we sell them the idea that ID is the way to go and I’ve successfully done that. I may bring in hopefully I can bring in 20 or 30 projects from my personal network to Concordium and these are people who typically would not want to build on a chain like this but they see the benefits of partnering with the layer-one at such an early stage where things are all happening and getting this layer one to you know effectively adopt what they’re doing and utilise that for the commercial team so all the brands can come in. We want to make sure that our brand is cool enough so that regulators who think, that industry is not that cool, think we’re cool and now we have more use cases.
So as I said before hackathons, boot camps, we’re just about to start marketing a very simple you could say just a graphic that the regional marketing leads and now respective communities all around the world can start using to funnel projects to Concordium so it’s not that we’re targeting ETH devs, we’re targeting devs. you’ve built something cool or you want to build something cool let us help you raise money let us help you get big brands on board we want to back you and be on your side and partner with you so let’s say if you happen to be an ETH dev or you’re building on whatever you’re building on it doesn’t matter but you want to do something then this is the chain to be on right now because of its early stage and what we’re capable of doing especially on the commercial side. It’s really important remember like i said earlier on with these layer ones i have met and spoken to some significant once and they’ve raised huge amounts of money and spend massive massive budgets on marketing and it doesn’t move volume it doesn’t move the ecosystem as much as they hope but the idea changes so we hope that we can create that idea and plant it in people so they actually start you know shilling and endorsing Concordium and that’s the best sort of marketing right this call following that you know bitcoin maxis and meme tokens and everyone else has, that’s very important to us.
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Q. How big of a problem for the Concordium brand is the lack of liquidity and exchange listings as the lack in brand awareness will make the listing difficult?
MB: Yeah so this is for me 50–50. Let me address first, that lack of brand awareness literally flips overnight when you announce a partnership with the brand that has brand equity, so imagine most of us here know what brand equity is, if you don’t that’s okay but brand equity is more how well is your brand known so if you’re to go to anybody on the street Coca-cola has five out of five brand equity. Everyone in every part of the world knows coca-cola but not everyone in the world will know Concordium right? So it’s important that when we go out and we partner with a brand that has equity that brand is so massive that it endorses Concordium. That press release goes out and the journalists go wild. Just to give you a little snippet we teased the media with a potential press release that is coming that we hope that can come to Concordium and literally in the first 24 hours CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, I’m forgetting a lot but pretty much everyone reached out and said we want this story we want the exclusive now we didn’t have to spend any money on that we didn’t have to put billboards up on times square and spend 100 million dollars on marketing we didn’t have to do anything we just planted an idea about what could happen with a brand in Concordium and it went nuts now you imagine that we get an exclusive and that exclusive is in let’s say it’s bbc let me give that exclusive to an exchange all of a sudden you’ve just flipped the entire atmosphere of the lack in brand awareness because now you’re in a top-tier publication that people know. so i think that’s a very big part I can’t answer the part of the lack of liquidity and exchange listings but i’ll say that these things will help with the exchange listings to make that process so much quicker so the exchanges go oh these guys are in bloomberg and bbc and look what the journalists are saying about it and look at the quotes from the ceo of the brand they partnered with. it changes everything so I think it’s a very important thing to do so for me it’s about building the authority and brand equity on that side of the press that’s super important for me. we do and I should say we are listing on more exchanges okay so a lot of the technical leg work has been done it’s a matter of announcing these things do we announce them straight away or do we wait a couple of weeks and maybe we can announce it on top of a partnership right so it’s all very strategic it’s not a matter of okay we list on an exchange thank you because I think as you can say as token holders or coin holders whatever you want to call yourself investors, it’s important you look at this and zoom out and say I have a personal interest for the token to go up in price and we all do that when we invest in something or buy something but it is hard but you have to also zoom out and look back at progress over price and over the years and i’ll tell you you know my portfolio has gone up and down and crashed up and down and everything but you know eventually as it grows it actually grows better when you look at yourself zooming out and not looking at the price. I never look at the price almost everything i’m involved now and you know you make more progress as an investor but you also put faith in the progress of the teams that you’re in and you go okay the you know they’ll do it. We expect things to happen in crypto pretty fast but just remember that like I said 2010–2011 I was shilling bitcoin and everyone thought I was an idiot and they asked me all sorts of questions and it’s a different story today so it’s important that these things take time depending on what situation you’re in. You all want that thing that you’re involved in to explode with popularity with the right combination of people and progress it will all happen just gotta have faith I know it’s easier for me to say because i’m on the inside working here and obviously I can’t share everything but please know all the things i’ve talked about all the big brands the marketing schedule you know planning to work with lots of influencers spreading our budget across youtube telegram twitter you know DJ, AMAs, digital marketing, public relations that’s all coming but it’s important for me when I came I actually said guys we should stop spending money on marketing and focus on building the brand and then execute marketing because your ROI is so much better as I said you know ideas overspend right?
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I really do a lot of crypto, Concordium is my main focus right now on the outside of Concordium I actually took over a project. it’s called hokk finance it’s an ecosystem of dapps and uses you can say meme branding and defi utility and that’s where I believe the market is heading over the next 10 years is that you’re gonna have layer ones that are far more brand adverse and you’re gonna have meme tokens or alt coins that have to have utility or they’re not gonna survive with all the hype marketing and pump that goes on and it’s not sustainable but i’m also a co-founder of a company called Murasaki. We just raised 1.5 million led by Japan’s largest web3 fund and Murasaki, basically my co-founders. One of them especially is a very very famous video game developer in japan.
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Q. How much time and effort can we expect from you to deliver to Concordium compared to what you need to also do in your own company Murasaki?
MB: When I first read that I was like oh gee okay that’s a little sharp but it’s fair enough because if you look at my LinkedIn and my portfolio you know all the things I’m doing, it looks like this guy is pretty much maxed out and everything he’s doing but I do have a lot of great colleagues and systems and processes in place where Concordium is my main function right now to build out this entire brand. You can expect a lot from me I think
I’ve spoken a lot about what I’ve done now and what we’ve achieved in the 90 days or how many days have I been here now, a bit more than 90 days. 119 days I think I’ve been here for just under four months but you can expect a lot with the Murasaki side.
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Q. Will Concordium play a central role in Murasaki?
MB: No, it won’t play a central role but what we’re trying to do here is just so you understand Murasaki is connected with the biggest Japanese IP holders of all the top games in the world and I am looking at how Murasaki can facilitate those games to Concordium. As I mentioned before there were others, our Japanese lead, Makoto at Concordium. He’s very well connected in that space too and he is funnelling us to some really brilliant Japanese AAA developers which is fantastic. This is what I really want the brand to be able to do, to be able to use its ID-layer to use the prestigiousness and I guess the scientific basis of the chain to really wow these Japanese business people so they use Concordium.
So, that’s a big part of my strategy is to facilitate all those different regions but getting back to Murasaki it’s possible that we can funnel this to Concordium and we become a gaming service partner and on that note on the new site you’ll notice there are all these different I guess service provider sections, Metaverse as a service, NFTs as a service, Gaming as a service and we want to fill those out so if you’re a brand and you want to build something on Concordium you’ve got this great idea we can tap into our network of service providers who can build you a virtual experience through one of our our media based providers and that’s been a big part of this, it’s that I’d probably do like half brand and maybe half you could say maybe like business development in one sense but more on the building of the DeFi and Metaverse side and if you put all that together I think you get a really attractive chain so all sorts of companies want to come on and start building.
So that was all 13 questions, I’m going to look back and just see if I’ve got any more. there’s one question here, i’ll take a couple other ones that i can find, that are being written to me.
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Q. When you talk to Metaverse projects what other projects do Concordium compete with to win the client?
MB: Okay so maybe it’s like this so Metaverse projects for example they all want to go multi-chain that’s the most important thing we hope to secure some of these early metaverse projects as the foundation chain and what I mean is it’s like let’s say all transactions were handled by Concordium and then you could bridge other chains and you do need to bridge other chains just so you know guys I’m all for multi-chain and Lars is as well. We want to bridge all that liquidity you know we’re not done. We know that Bitcoin and Ethereum have got lots and lots of money in there but to be able to bridge that over is very very important so it’s not so much that we’re going to try to compete with other projects. I don’t know if i’m reading this question correctly but I would say it’s more that when we go to a Metaverse project we say listen we are founded by this person, we have this team and if you really want to change a partner with you and funnel the biggest brands in the world and funnel all the sort of you know institutional money and investors and get in that space then we’re the chain for you, oh and by the way it’s a really good chain check out what we’ve actually built check out COBRA, check out the science behind it, like this is some serious stuff.
So, all that together but I don’t always sell the science behind the chain first I think that’s too complicated for a brand and I think on the science side it’s not as attractive to the degens or you know anyone building a DeFi is probably not so interested in science they always ask where’s the liquidity, what do you bridge to and how fast is it, number one question is how thriving is the ecosystem, so we need to prove that right.
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Q. Mark, you haven’t been talking about those giants that we all joined i.e. because of Volvo, Ikea, Mastercard, Maersk, Swvl etc.
What can you say for this?
MB: I want to say that we are in pretty deep dialogue with one of those brands that you have just mentioned and that is in regards to the Metaverse and let us leave it at that for the other ones. I haven’t had anything to do with four of the five brands that you’ve mentioned, I’ve had a lot to do with other brands and partners, builders,
PR, journalists and everything, but the other ones that it’s not that they’re not on the roadmap right now, it’s just that there are other core focuses and like I said just a little earlier these enormous brands that you hope come to Concordium have to answer to a board and investors as they’re public listed company, they can’t just announce they’re going to use a blockchain literally disrupts their whole like everything they do. A lot of the big brands don’t understand the concept of decentralization quite often, so it comes up when we talk with the commercial team for example: you know how we offer, how do we explain ownership, well you don’t really own anything do you? right?
I mean you you take part in a blockchain, you support the network, you stake your tokens, I mean it’s ownership is very different and you got to take for example our brands that have gotten into NFTs but now they understand ownership is that if we release a collection of NFTs then the brand itself has ownership over the community and the IP is the brands but the IP is also the community’s IP and that’s a brilliant thing that younger I could say brands or generations are understanding more and more. So, I hope that answered you,
So one of those four we are in a far deeper conversation than any and anything else in terms of the Metaverse.
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Q. Why Vitalik won’t be able to convince the boardrooms too on board on his chain and our pitch and how CCD beats ETH?
MB: Well I Don’t know if Vitalik knows anyone from Volvo, Ikea, Mastercard, Swvl.
I’ll put it like that and I would say that also maybe it’s not Vitalik’s mission to onboard them maybe he built something that has first move advantage and it’s brilliant and you know that’s what he does now he doesn’t need to do that what i’m saying is that if you had an opportunity to be partnered with a very early stage chain to funnel big brands and to get you money would you go to ethereum or would you go to Concordium? I’m really stating the difference of the different position that a chain is in the market I’m not on any of these big chains, absolutely not I’m saying most importantly that if you want help as a builder we are probably in a much better position now to help you as a builder then somebody else, I think Vitalik is doing a lot of speeches right now and he’s focused on the merge and everything else but you know we’re not focused on merge, we’re focused on getting as many people to build as possible and that’s you can say that’s our competitive advantage and we happen to know and have worked with some of the biggest brands in the world that can change everything. I’m not saying that these brands aren’t going to be built, I mean I know Mercedes is part of Polygon just recently right and it’s also interesting what Polygon did. I mean for years Polygon has been a brilliant brand in terms of the Metaverse and Gaming they’ve really captured that with the edgy kind of color themes and everything, but it took some years and now they’re working with Mercedes and you know congrats to them. It’s important that we also look at how the market changes and now these big brands are jumping in earlier so it’s good for us that this happens because that also helps in our pitches to these juggernauts that are typically slower at moving into blockchain.
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Q. Again the same question, why Vitalik won’t be able to convince the boardrooms to onboard his chain and why won’t they be convinced to work on ETH and why is CCD much more compelling?
MB: When you’re pitching a corporate to build on our chain each will come up, yes you know every chain has its Pros and Cons, the reason why you have so many chains is because I think one of the most important things is Branding. There are chains out there you could say that aren’t that great but they’ve got a very strong brand first mover advantage, chains that have enormous ecosystem and that speaks volumes so if Eth does come up we can justify why we think ours is better and that’s up to the commercial team and the tech team when those conversations are happening and we actually just had a call yesterday the day before. I myself called some of the management team and again one of those big brands that were mentioned previously Volvo, Ikea, Mastercard and Swvl there was one of those companies we were talking to and Kare literally blew it out of the water, he spoke about how this brand can actually use blockchain and the CEO of this company and and his colleagues were just like WOW!! this is some serious stuff and they invited us to come and visit them in another country to talk about this.
So, they know about Eth, they know about Binance and everything, but we sold them the idea of how the Id layer is unique to Concordium and what we can do, how it’s run and how our ecosystem is going to grow with things like Metaverses etc and actually the conversation wasn’t fully focused on the Metaverse either. It was focused on more on supply chain management, car keys, door house keys and everything else that you can imagine that someone would use to enter and use their ID. To log in with a wallet, an e-commerce store whatever you want to do and it was a great conversation because it really planted an idea in their brain that they thought okay now we want to look into the blockchain, how can this be used on a serious level in a company with you know some tens or thousands of employees. So I hope that answers this question, it’s not often that these big companies say what about Ethereum and Binance, that doesn’t happen too much actually. They actually want to understand more about what blockchain means and is it safe and how do you do it because they don’t have too many people on their side that know about this stuff.
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If that’s all from everybody, I guess from here just to summarize a real quick round up so I’ve started some three months ago. It’s my fourth month now and we have built so many incredible systems and processes to attract DeFi degens, Web3.0 Metaverses, NFTs, Gaming you name it. We’re so well positioned now to tap into this and those funnels are already bridging projects from all sorts of communities. We’ve got some seriously cool stuff to come into Concordium over the next 12 months. Our KPI’s we’re aiming for is one press release a week. We’ve just onboarded a relatively young company to a big press release and we hope with the bigger stuff the more serious things are. We are going to put a lot more money behind these like spending on YouTube, Telegram AMA’s all the degen communities, whale groups, everything.
So doing more listings again, I’m super bullish on the Gaming and Metaverse side. I think this is a very hot topic to focus on because it also is where brands want to go and the great thing is brands don’t really know what to do in this space, so we can help facilitate them to come on chain big opportunities there. The other achievements just recapping you know we’ve got more top tier press
than we ever have since I started I brought on.
Next weekend this brilliant PR agency that is so well connected, I mean if you want organic press if you want to reach the biggest publications in the world without having to pay for every damn article these are the guys and they have a brilliant team all over the world of journalists that they really give us the best stuff what we need to do now because we are placed in the media. I’m sure you would have seen the indications and everything we get that the next goal is now that that system is done, so is to execute on the partnerships and again recapping some of the partnerships are enormous and they’re really big companies and we can’t just get a letter of intent signed tomorrow. There’s alot that happens because they’re publicly listed and they don’t move so fast, then there are other companies that we need to make sure that they’re on the technical roadmap but all these things are changing and to make it happen quicker my idea is or my kind of way of doing things is to get a young project to sign and then do the tech roadmap later. We want to get as many as we can to come on board, so the grant program is changing and how grants are coming in we’ve got so many we’re like an octopus, we’ve got all of our our arms and legs out, everywhere bringing in projects Japanese video game companies we’re going to release,
a DeFi roadmap i hope we can do it by next month. I’ve got two calls about it today one next week and just to give you a high level indication of what’s coming in DeFi and how we think we’re going to do it and it can just be a high level graphic that we put on the website just so you know that we’re interested in that area it you know and that DeFi might change maybe it’s not so many wallets maybe it’s more you know different bridges indexes and everything else but it’s important i think that you all know that too and yeah so that pretty much gathers everything.
I just want to summarize so all the people listening just one last thing if you’re building something can you please reach out to someone on the team, we want to hear from you no matter what you’re building wallets, Dex’s as i said games whatever you’re building if it’s on chain or if it’s Web2.0 or if you’ve got plans to do something then show us what you’ve got, we would love to talk with you and we want to build out as many suppliers as possible and make this chain thrive. A big part of this whole thing is you know utilizing the leverage, I should say leveraging the community power to make this chain bigger and better.
So, of course if you want to shill us to other companies and brands and do fantastic things we would love to work with you.
So,that’s all for me today. Thanks everyone for joining and have a fantastic friday.
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