AMA Recap: Fore Protocol
Date: January17th, 2023
Host: DeFiNaut
Guest: Timothea Horwell — Co-Founder & Merv — Co-Founder
Hello, Raccoon family and crypto enthusiasts!
We recently hosted an AMA with FORE Protocol. Here’s the AMA transcript for those who missed the live session. We sincerely hope you have as much fun reading it as we did while running the AMA!
Introductory Questions
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: OK so let’s get things started. Happy to have you here today and we’ll be learning about foreprotocol.io!
Looking forward to learning more together with the raccoons, and as you’d expect I’ve prepared a bunch of questions, and the coons got even more!
Please tell Raccoons a bit about yourself!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: I’m Timothea, and I’m one of the co-founders of FORE Protocol. I’ve spent most of my career specializing in marketing strategy within fintech (mostly data, mobile, and payments), with the last four years in the DeFi space — which feels like an eternity as I’m sure you guys can relate haha.
Most recently, I was CMO of an exchange aggregator, a project I was with from near-inception and helped get to a top 100 market cap project. We founded FORE in early 2022, and we’ve spent the last year building through the bear market to build our team, our tokenomics, and our MVP ahead of our community launch, which happened just last week!
Merv | FORE Protocol: My name is Merv, and I’m one of the Co-Founders of FORE Protocol. I’ve spent the last 15yrs or so working in the hedge fund and private equity industries, most recently working with distressed companies to nurse them back to health. I’ve also been active in crypto since 2015 or so in a variety of capacities so I’m excited to share with you what we’ve built!
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Nice, we don’t expect anything less from FORE now aswell you know, but with you at the driving wheel that should be all gucci!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Oh absolutely, lots to do, but we’ve got an incredible team to do it.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Let’s proceed to the elevator! It’s time for the pitch for the people that haven’t yet heard of Fore Protocol — tell us what it is and what are you trying to build?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: I’ll start off at a high level: FORE exists to incentivize the wisdom of the crowd to bring real-world data to the blockchain. That sounds incredibly broad, but intentionally so… We’re building a protocol that incentivizes a decentralized network of people to bridge the gap between the real world and the blockchain. This forms the foundation of a number of web3 solutions that remove friction from real-world industries like prediction markets, oracles, auditing services, and more.
But let’s get a little bit more specific with our first dApp on the protocol, FORE Predict: a peer-to-peer predictions platform that’s powered by people. On FORE Predict, users can enter a limitless world of predictions spanning sports, current affairs, crypto, and more… And with zero counterparty risk, market-determined odds, and incredibly low fees while doing so.
Normally, “the house always wins” right? But in our people-powered model, everyone wins. Users create, participate in, and validate markets, and are rewarded for doing so through the redistribution of platform fees (in the form of our hyper-deflationary utility token).
As I mentioned, we spent the last year building so that we can come to market with a working product, because “launch first, build later” won’t work in this market… I’ve personally put way too much money into projects promising the world that still haven’t launched any tech years later.
People want (and deserve) to see something tangible, so we launched our public testnet just a week after community launch. So it’s less about what we are “trying to build”, but what we have built, and want to iterate on with our community and users to create a truly people-powered predictions platform!
Our public testnet is live now alongside a hackathon where you can win 500,000 FORE, so make sure you sign up to get involved… foreprotocol.io 🔥
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Yeah I was wondering why your twitter account wasn’t active for that long, and now I finally know!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Haha yeah, building in stealth mode 💪
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: You’re also kind of making it a habbit now to launch in the bear, don’t know if it’s on purpose but still shows kind of how persistent you are to building and not caring about sentiment!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Haha some kinda masochist eh… But I think the best projects are built in a bear market — you’ve got to focus on fundamentals, not speculative hype.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: So can you tell us about the origins of the idea for Fore Protocol? What inspired you? What issues did you identify and set out to resolve? This is more like a philosophical question but I’m really looking for the moment you’ve thought, we can do this better!
Merv | FORE Protocol: Well, I’ll start with the origins of FORE first, and then jump into the specific real-world problems we’re looking to address.
The concept behind FORE initially started out as a Web2 sportsbook: we set out to offer preferable odds to users by using deep data analytics to come up with better pricing. But what we quickly realized was that the core problem was actually centralization, not just pricing. So, we pivoted to create a peer-to-peer, decentralized predictions ecosystem — one that would distribute rewards to users that traditionally would have gone to centralized entities.
While we are building on the blockchain, we don’t see ourselves as a “crypto project” but rather a technology company using blockchain as the conduit to connect users to each other — currently in the form of peer-to-peer prediction markets. We believe that too many crypto projects have been focused on capturing short-term value at the expense of their communities, and believe this approach is backward and is antithetical to the values upon which blockchain was developed.
We believe that by combining our innovative team with disruptive technologies like blockchain, we can bring forth a new era in prediction markets, and scale this infrastructure into a myriad of sectors. By focusing on bringing long-term value to our users through the technology we produce, we aim to create a lasting and innovative incentive model that will drive the industry forward, not backward.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Thank you for the elaborate answer here, I see the motives behind the project are indeed well thought out!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: I’ll reiterate Merv’s point on real-world problem orientation. We get a lot of questions on ‘what will you do in a bear market’, but we’re in one now and the appetite for predictions isn’t waning… The global online betting market in particular reached $80 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $134 billion by 2028.
Then I think about what we’re building vs the metaverse hype last year — yeah, it’s cool and all, but when you look at a project like Decentraland with a market cap of something like $2bn and 20 active users, you have to wonder what problem they’re actually solving… 😬 (No shade, obviously, I’d love to achieve a $2bn market cap 😅)
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: I agree, betting isn’t going anywhere. I’ll be using the platform to make some markets for chess and ufc myself 😄
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Chess and UFC, not typically two interests you see together 😅
Merv | FORE Protocol: Well, not at the same time ;)
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Both are a strategical battle. So let’s talk a bit about the team, how many of you are there working on Fore Protocol? How many of those are devs?
Merv | FORE Protocol: Great, we’re really proud of the team we’ve built so excited to tell you a bit about the people working hard to build FORE Protocol!
FORE is comprised of a global team of executives, entrepreneurs, data scientists, developers, marketing strategists, and creatives — hailing from Fortune 500 companies, DeFi projects, global ad agencies, and the largest hedge funds in the world. But rather than use this as an opportunity to talk about our skills, successes, and achievements, I’d rather focus on what we think makes us best suited to build a successful company in this space: our values.
Over the past year, our team has grown from our three founders to over 20 people (including 8 devs). In that time, our values of openness, honesty, and transparency have remained consistent. We believe that if we focus on building a team with the right value system, we can iterate our way to success, build almost any product, and most importantly, we can build the necessary trust with our employees, partners, users, and community members.
In order for us to build and scale, it’s important that we think through, articulate, and reiterate how we want to operate collectively as a team — and how we want to scale that value system. And we think that transcends into the product, the community, and everything else we do.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Awesome thank you for expanding a bit on the team. Happy to hear there’s already such a large team involved especially in such an early stage. So now I wanna hear about your product vs competitors cause as you know there’s already a few players out there.
What makes FORE Predict different from other prediction markets in the space?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Good question and one that I think can be split into two parts: centralized and decentralized prediction markets.
Gambling/betting has a pretty bad reputation, but the concept of taking a position on the outcome of an event is not inherently bad… What is bad and exploitative are the incentive structures that centralized entities like bookmakers and casinos utilize to ensure “the house always wins”. Whether hidden fees or predetermined odds that disadvantage the player, they do everything they can to extract maximum value from users in whatever way possible 👎
On FORE Predict, the house can’t win because there is no house. Users participate in markets against each other, in markets that are created and validated by other users — we’ve simply created the infrastructure for people to do so.
Now, in terms of what separates us from decentralized prediction markets… First, our focus is on incentive models. A lot of decentralized prediction markets so far have had the same/similar incentive models as centralized prediction markets, essentially capturing all of the value themselves…
But prediction markets are built on the wisdom of the crowd — we think the crowd should be rewarded for their participation with the redistribution of platform fees. Incentivizing users for their activity creates a self-sustaining ecosystem that creates more activity!
Additionally, most prediction markets use BTC or ETH, or if they do use their own token it’s often pretty inflationary. By using FORE as the sole currency, we can invert these incentive models to provide sustainable value for all users in the form of a hyper-deflationary token. 1% of every market is burned, and all FORE locked into NFTs used to validate markets is burned too 🔥
Hopefully, there’ll be a question on our tokenomics so we can expand on the hyper-deflationary aspect ❤️🔥🔥📛
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Yes the tokenomics, I wanna hear about this hyper-deflationary thing. What’s this all about?
Merv | FORE Protocol: Definitely! We spent a long time developing this approach so excited to open it up to the broader community! We conducted an in-depth study to understand why crypto projects fail and what the common drivers were. What we learned was that inflationary tokenomics were a key part of any failure. Pretty easy to use the “mint” function to create new value, collateral, etc. This is not a sustainable model, as we’ve seen it over and over again. So, what is a better approach?
Because FORE Token is means of exchange on the protocol, we can create a self-contained economy of incentives for users. Simply put, the most productive users earn the most rewards. Also, as there is more activity on the protocol, more tokens are removed from circulation as a percentage of the FORE contributed to markets and FORE within validator NFTs are removed from circulation permanently. This combined with a team and investors that have long-dated vesting scheduled to align interest, we have found the right balance to make FORE hyper-deflationary.
As I mentioned, using FORE as the protocol’s sole currency allows us to invert the incentive model of previous prediction markets and reward all participants in our ecosystem for productive activity in a sustainable way, without ever minting new tokens for rewards. Instead, a 5% maintenance fee is imposed on all market participants, which is then redistributed to users for productive activity.
FORE is removed from circulation primarily via two core functions: Market Participation: 1% of the value of all markets is permanently removed from the total supply (or burned). This ensures that greater activity on the protocol benefits all token holders: the decrease in supply increases the scarcity of FORE, thus increasing its demand. NFT Minting: In order to mint an NFT, a user must “lock” an amount of 1,000 FORE. This amount is burned and removed from the circulating supply permanently. As such, every new NFT mint decreases the supply of FORE. Through these methods, we are able to continuously reduce supply as protocol activity increases to drive a supply shortage for the token
FORE’s maximum supply is capped at 1,000,000,000 FORE, although the circulating supply will never come near that number. Via activity on the protocol, a portion of all FORE tokens utilized on the protocol are removed from circulation forever: these tokens cannot be recovered or recreated. As activity increases on the protocol, the total available supply to support that activity is proportionally declining, ultimately driving a supply shortage for the token. The deflationary nature of FORE token is directly proportional to activity on the protocol.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: The more activity the less circulating supply, so can we ever run out of FORE then?
Merv | FORE Protocol: In theory, there would be a supply crunch — where demand outstrips supply. This would drive the price upward and therefore the nominal number of FORE would be less but the value would be much greater. In other words, moon.
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: The answer we all like to hear! What about the launch? Is there a private sale, public sale etc? How will you go to market?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Our seed round is closed, which was mostly filled by the core team and strategic partners. We’re in the process of finalizing our private round, in which again, we’ve focused on strategic partners that bring real-world value — mostly across the gaming, gambling, sports, and hospitality industries. This extends to our partnerships too, we’re not interested in partnerships for optics, but those will support our ecosystem and, critically, will bring users to the platform.
That said, there’s good news for the Raccoons…
A portion of the private round is being set aside for people who are most involved and bring a lot to the community, protocol, and ecosystem. We really embrace decentralization and we want to ensure that people who provide value and want to build with us are able to participate in what they’re building! To take part though, you’ll have to join our Telegram 😉 t.me/fore_protocol
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Awesome that’s seems like a fair thing to do for sure!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Last part of your question — our TGE (Token Generation Event) is set for Q2. We’re currently in discussions with a number of exchanges and launchpads for our public sale, and will provide more updates closer to the time!
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: Can’t wait for more news to come soon 😉 I’d like to finish off by taking a look into the future, can you share what can the community look forward to in the upcoming months?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Our plan is to launch TGE and main net concurrently to ensure token utility and deflationary mechanisms from day one!
DeFiNaut | DeFiRaccoons: This is how it’s done!
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Yep! No ‘wen main net’, we’re launching with a product and will be continually iterating with the community to build a people-powered predictions protocol together.
And absolutely! There’s so much to come — we’re just 9 days in from our community launch so you guys are very early.
As we’ve mentioned, our testnet is live right now alongside a Hackathon, and we’d love for the Raccoons to get involved! We have 500,000 FORE up for grabs: a total reward pool of 250,000 FORE will be divided over all bugs submitted based on their weighting (medium, severe, or critical).
But you don’t have to be a developer or seasoned beta tester to win. An additional pool of 250,000 FORE will be rewarded for the most liquid markets, the most profitable positions, and the highest power validator NFTs.
You can learn more and sign up here! www.foreprotocol.io/post/access
As I just touched on, our token launch will be in Q2. Ahead of then, there’s an opportunity for the Raccoons to get involved in our private sale through productive activity, so head over to our Telegram to learn more about that: t.me/FORE_Protocol
Twitter Questions
Q1: FORE is a peer-to-peer prediction platform powered by people. My question is, what mechanism does FORE use to qualify predictions made by users and reward them for being right or wrong? Are there any specific rules to follow to make predictions?
Merv | FORE Protocol: This is all down to our proprietary NFT validation model. FORE Protocol is the first prediction market leveraging non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to maximize value extraction for users. Essentially, a decentralized network of validators (or ‘Analysts’) perform the role of oracle by uploading the results from real-world events to the protocol. They act as the markets ‘architects’ and are responsible for verifying that a given outcome is accurate, and ensuring that all payouts are correctly executed. By creating an asymmetric incentive model (e.g. malicious actors are penalized for inaccurate validation by losing their NFTs), we can work to ensure a high quality of validation on the platform.
And finally, no, there are no rules as to what markets you can participate in: markets can be created on any real-world event, from sports to crypto, to your ranking on Discord…
Q2: I saw that in the FORE Protocol ecosystem they have “an oracle impulsed by the people”, so what advantages and what can FORE do by owning such an oracle, or why have they chosen to implement this type of oracle instead of running a “centralized input software-type oracle”?
Merv | FORE Protocol: The current prediction landscape lacks a truly scalable oracle, reliant instead upon a fragmented marketplace of APIs and data providers for various sectors and outcomes. In FORE Protocol’s proprietary NFT validation model, as touched on above, a decentralized network of validators (or “analysts”) perform the role of oracle by uploading the results from real-world events to the protocol. In doing so, the protocol can “index” real-world outcomes on any real-world event (in much the same way Google indexes real-world information) to create an incredibly granular and scalable prediction protocol. We plan to scale this beyond FORE Predict into its own solution that can help grow FORE horizontally, and provide value across as many sectors as categories of markets that can be created on FORE.
Q3: I read there are four ranks of NFTs 1. Blue 2. Silver 3. Gold 4. Black. What are the utilities of each rank and do they offer passive income to their holders? What factors influence rank? Will it be possible for users to have multiple NFTs?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Casinos have perfected the art of gamifying predictions, extending participation by tapping into innate psychological drivers beyond money alone — innate needs for entertainment, status, prestige, and reputation. The more of these needs we can address, the more time and activity we can cultivate from users. While casinos have spent millions in understanding these drivers and using them to encourage activity, decentralized predictions markets have not, and have failed to create experiences that tap into needs that drive long-term participation. FORE Predict is gamifying decentralized predictions to bring “play-to-earn” to betting by tapping into these innate needs.
The tiered NFTs are just one element of gamification we plan to bring to the platform, so I’ll touch on that briefly and share some links to learn more:
Analysts on FORE Predict will all start with a Blue NFT with the same power and are able to level up to three subsequent tiers through consecutive successful validations: Silver, Gold, and Black. Each higher tier has a multiplier effect that increases earning potential per validation. While there is a clear financial incentive for Analysts to successfully validate in order to increase their NFT tier for higher rewards, this structure has been found to increase engagement. By employing this model within our NFTs, we aim to drive consecutive accurate validation: increasing user participation and validation accuracy.
TLDR: As users level up, they increase the multiplier effect of the NFT and are able to earn more per validation.
Live Audience Questions
Q1: Staking program is very important for any project? Can I stake your token? Do you have any plans of starting a staking program?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Many existing ‘staking’ or ‘passive income’ models have turned out to be pretty unsustainable because of inflationary tokenomics, which essentially supersede a lot of the value promised through these models. Instead of minting new tokens arbitrarily for staking rewards and inflating supply, we reward redistribution of platform fees for productive activity on the protocol — e.g. creating and validating markets, for ‘almost-passive’ income, in the form of our hyper-deflationary FORE token (additionally, staking models are increasingly coming under fire from a regulatory perspective… We’ve worked extensively with our legal team over the last year to ensure FORE is a utility token in line with existing and upcoming regulations).
‘Almost-passive income’ rewards productive activity in a sustainable manner. While the validation process is not entirely ‘passive’ in that it requires a user to validate markets in order to receive rewards, we believe that in order for a reward model to be sustainable, it must be attached to productive activity.
You can learn more here: foreprotocol.io/technology
Q2: It’s really a hard challenge to be able to combine all of the traditional and crypto bet lovers into a crypto-related platform, I know it takes a long time but how do you speed up this process ? How do you combine them ?
Timothea | FORE Protocol: Our primary target audience groups are DeFi natives and crypto betters. In the longer term, we plan to tap into the traditional betting audience in order to scale, but we’re also acutely aware of the friction involved in onboarding these users into DeFi at the moment.
Decentralized predictions markets have failed to capture market share from traditional markets due to the difficulty in accessing these platforms, but FORE will have a fiat onramp soon after launch to enable access via Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Visa, Mastercard, bank transfers, and more — allowing ANYONE to use the platform, which will enable us to onboard those users more seamlessly.
Additionally, we’re focusing on building a number of different market structures to appeal to an array of different profiles (categorical markets, floating point markets, parlays, etc)
Q3: Could you tell us a bit about how the rewards will be calculated for users who confirm the result of a market? Will this be the same rate for everyone or will it depend on the capital invested by the user? And also will this reward be deposited daily in my wallet?
Merv | FORE Protocol: Hi Maria, thanks for an awesome question that really gets at the core of the FORE reward system. So, any user on FORE Predict can create a market on a future outcome. This market is then posted on a marketplace where other users can contribute to the sides of the market (they effectively disagree about the future outcome of, say, a sports game). So, the market creator earns a reward which is a percentage of the total FORE contributed to their market. Once the event occurs, then holders of FORE Analyst NFTs (which can be minted, bought, or sold on our proprietary NFT marketplace on FORE Predict) stake their NFTs on the accurate outcome of that market. Once enough validation “power” is reached, the analysts are compensated with a percentage of all FORE contributed to that market. In addition, the value of their own NFT compounds and increases tiers which allows Analyst NFTs to appreciate in value.
Taking a quick step back, all of this is consistent with the theme and principle of building something that solves a real-world problem, removes inefficiencies, and redistributes rewards to the community.
FORE Protocol
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ForeProtocol
Website: https://www.foreprotocol.io/
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