AMA With Elastos CMO — Fay Li
Q: In your last DApp meetup, Jihan Wu (founder of Bitmain) announced that he will be working with Elastos to setup a foundation to invest in DApps that operate on the Elastos platform. Can you please provide us with more insight around the size of the fund, when this will be established, and when the community can expect to see Elastos funded DApps?
Fay: Initial fund size is around 1 million ELA. He has also invested in our DApps as an angel investor using his BTC (which is not from this fund), so I believe he’s just a long term believer & supporter of the Elastos ecosystem. As long as there are DApps to be built on Elastos, he will be continuously supporting us by investing in our DApps, either in BTC or ELA.
Q:Would the Elastos team be willing to produce a new website with a weekly updates blog? This would be especially beneficial if these updates were to highlight the Elastos partnerships/dapps with concise explanations of their goals/features.
Fay: Hi thank you for your question! We started sending Elastos Weekly Reports through email a couple of weeks ago. Someone from our community has been working on the unofficial Elastos news blog. You can check it out at http://elanews.net
Q: Whilst I believe the Elastos platform is solid and its value proposition is a game-changer, I feel the organisation is still relatively unknown to the west. Do you plan on changing this? If so, what is your marketing strategy?
Fay: Thank you for your question!
Elastos is community driven. All community members are equally important to us. So, we plan on making our whitepaper available in all major languages, see here: https://www.elastos.org/whitePaper/
And here’s the Elastos Communication Plan by SF Team for April — June, 2018. https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-communication-plan-by-sf-team-april-june-2018-8979b27c6ad6
Q: Can you Elaborate more on the Elastos/SAIC relationship?
- What is the nature of the relationship between Elastos/SAIC? i.e. formal/contractual? casual conversations?
- Is the Elastos OS currently being trialed in SAIC labs?
- Is the Elastos OS currently being trialed in operational SAIC autonomous vehicles?
Fay: We do have a formal contract with SAIC. We are still communicating with SAIC for further collaboration possibilities so we do not have detailed reports yet. Here’s the current collaboration status. https://medium.com/elastos/auto-giants-new-blockchain-game-7e044dbe12b8
Q: Are you considering joining NEO tour? It could be good PR as NEO and Elastos share the same vision of the Smart Economy and fan base.
Fay: Elastos and NEO have been good friends and partners for years. Founders of both are each other’s angel investors as well so we are well bonded. However, we have different focuses when it comes to the meetups so we are probably not going to be always running meetups together. With that said, however, we will definitely do joint meetups again whenever it makes sense to both of us.
Q: People don’t seem to understand what Elastos is doing? Have seen some reviews and they don’t understand too much technical details of Elastos. Do you have plans to maybe start a video campaign or something to explain it with ease? The recent medium articles are great but when you sell something people need to be shown it’s potential easily. How do you think people perceive ELASTOS? I would urge you to please look into different exchanges, more exchanges helps the community grow as there is clearly fake volume and wash trading for ELA on Huobi which makes a whale prone to manipulation.
Fay: There’s a video campaign going on right now https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-video-contest-b531f287226f. So far, we have not received many videos so please share with your video maker friends if they are interested in making videos about Elastos. Receiving more content and seeing more involvement of our community will encourage us to initiate more fun campaigns that you can participate in and be a part of.
We are also working on other types of videos at the moment:
1. An animated video explaining Elastos technologies and how it can benefit both DApp users and end users.
2. A documentary video explaining the Elastos story.
3. We are also working on some technical videos that can help developers understand how they can build their DApps on top of Elastos in great detail. Kevin Zhang is our Developers’ community manager who will be focusing on communicating with developers and helping them build on Elastos.
4. We were selected to do two TV programs from two different countries (both will be on mainstream TV channels). We will be interviewed by both teams in April. However, we have signed NDAs with both so I’m afraid that I cannot share further information on this one.
Also, we are open to more videos in the future as we know visualizing our technologies and vision is a crucial way to communicate with our community. Let us know if you have any good ideas on creating more and/or better videos.
Q: There is vast confusion as to what Elastos is actually creating. Can we get some marketing/clarification in simple terms for the majority who don’t grasp the concept?
Fay: Thank you for your question! This will be the most important thing for our San Francisco team in the next few months. Please see our plan here: https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-communication-plan-by-sf-team-april-june-2018-8979b27c6ad6
Q: Are there plans to allow use of a cold hardware wallet such as the Ledger Nano S to hold ELA offline?
Fay: We are open for wallet integrations however our Simple Payment Verification(SPV) system is still not completed so it will take some time. We will announce once we are ready.
Q: Have you guys chosen a new logo yet — how will that determine the direction for the website redesign? And do you have a timeline for the redesign? To follow up on that, do you guys plan to hire a designer for branding purposes going forward? In these times, having excellent brand and design goes a long way especially when attracting new investors.
Fay: Thank you for your questions! I completely agree that we need a good brand and design. I have provided an answer to a community member regarding this exact same question so I will just copy that here:
It’s very important for us to have a good website and we are working on it. It would take at least 2.5 months for the whole thing to be complete according to the suppliers. In regards to the logo, we have done a community logo contest. We will have the first place logo modified by a professional firm so we can have a new branding coming out in around 3 months. The reason we did this logo contest was because we wanted to have our community be involved and engage with us. We want to respect our community members’ opinions but delivering a professional brand is also important to us so the first place logo will most likely be modified after the contest. We anticipated this therefore we had stated it clearly in the Logo contest Medium post- any use, display, reproduction or modification such Entry by the Sponsor will not violate the rights of any third parties.
I’m sure the community will understand the rebranding once they see the whole picture.
Q: To what extent do the Chinese government support your project considering their view on the crypto world ?
Fay: I will not be focusing my answer on the Chinese Government specifically but will provide a few facts between us and different governments.
1. Rong left Microsoft in 1999 and he got funded by the Chinese government with 12 million CNY (about USD 2 million) for his Operating System project.
2. Ro Khanna who is the Silicon Valley congressman and his office like what we are building deeply and they agreed that this is going to be the future. See here: https://twitter.com/Elastos_org/status/976720413274206214
3. The United Nations has supported one of our partners, New Energy Exchanges.
I cannot speak for the governments from anywhere, however, we believe governments will eventually support whatever the market wants and I believe what we are building will fall in that category once they understand that we are not only building something revolutionary from a technical perspective but also creating job opportunities and boosting the economy. Some will most likely just realize this earlier than others.
Q: Thank you for this AMA, I must say that efforts like this are regularly needed to engage the community in the vision, mission, and goal of Elastos.
As I have noticed with Elastos, there are the fewer moon and Lambo talk personalities, just a quick scan of the questions on this AMA post can verify that. As the project is just introduced to the public and luckily hasn’t attracted such unhealthy or toxic community, I must say well done.
My questions are:
- In precise terms, can you explain the marketing target of Elastos, any milestones for marketing, e.g., the social media subscribers, partnering with manufacturers, etc.?
- Having spent 17 years in the development phase of this project, there is no doubt that the team knows what they are doing, but now you owe your adopters transparency and engagement. Is there a plan of continuous engagement, and if so, what are the plans?
- The whole blockchain adoption is negligible as mostly only tech-savvy individuals understand it. I know of no other company that has a working Alpha product as usually most are still in their development stage. The primary task is adoption, how do you intend to position Elastos to the non-blockchain companies (IOT and mobile companies) to use Elastos.
Fay: Hi Thank you for your question!
1. To answer your first question, this will be the most important thing for our San Francisco team in the next few months. Please see our plan here: https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-communication-plan-by-sf-team-april-june-2018-8979b27c6ad6
2. I guess most of our DApps already have existing companies. They were experts in their own fields before they started to work on the blockchain projects. Elastos infrastructure was built to scale and if we can provide a scalable, safer and better environment that allows DApps entrepreneurs to build without learning a new language, I don’t see a reason why they would not be tempted to try.
Q: Does Elastos have a working/contractual relationship with any mobile phone manufacturers outside of Foxconn? i.e. Huawei/Samsung/Etc.?
Fay: Not yet so far. We have made some connections but no formal contract so far.
Feng Han is Huawei’s first Blockchain Advisor and probably the only one. Elastos and Huawei’s Assistant General Manager have started talking about potential collaborations on Internet of Cars last October. And the deputy director of Huawei research institute has also visited our Shanghai office to talk blockchain technology with Rong Chen. See here: https://twitter.com/Elastos_org/status/981234500394012672
Q: When will Business Development and Partnerships outside China become the priority for Elastos. How can the community participate and get rewarded from it?
Fay: It’s already the priority, there’s no boundary in blockchain. :)
Q: If/when it comes to making announcements of partnerships, has Elastos got a plan of action to release this info? There are a number of other crypto projects that release partnership info which has resulted in tweets being deleted etc as they are not always 100% correct. Do you have plans on how you will tackle this issue? Would it be best for the other party to release an official statement. Elastos can then forward it onto our social channels.
Fay: Hey thank you for your question!
I guess the only thing we can control is: we will only announce a partnership when we have a formal agreement, or at least a MOU or Letter of Intent.
Q: How will airdrops work? Will they work on huobi or do we need to move it into the wallet? Do we get paid out in ELA or the DApp ico coin? Any way to reduce the lock amount down from 300 to maybe 100? Is Bitman going to use half its hash power on ELA? How will staking work?
Fay: About the airdrop, I have talked to Ken(a community member) about it in person and he wrote it down after our meeting, I will just copy from his post:
Written by Ken: “Besides being a utility token(she also said, “Imagine when Zapya gets running. Many people are trying to get into the cloud blockchain services, but having 570 million users running on Elastos, can you imagine?”), holders of ELA of course will get sugar dividends, but there is a note: Right now, they are forming early partnerships. In the future, they can have more firm contracts when they have a stronger name, but right now, some projects like the sugar dividends (since it offers them a built-in community), and some are uncertain since the model is new. They currently have to negotiate project to project on how sugar dividends would work, and they have to be more flexible early on.”
About the lock-in, I believe we won’t be able to change the rule for the next 3 years.
Q: Do you have plans for a new lockup possibility/program next year?
Fay: Thank you for your question, I will discuss with my team about it. :)
Q: What is your marketing budget for the remainder of 2018 and can you talk through some of the projected spends?
Fay: We do not have a fixed budget for marketing so far. Our international marketing was started not too long ago and we always welcome new ideas when it comes to marketing. Here’s our email: pr@elastos.org
Q: Do you have a good marketing team in place?
A good PR team that can resolve cases of bad news? Any plans to communicate better to the WEST?
Fay: We do not have an international PR team so far. We would love to invite talents from our community and elsewhere to join us: https://medium.com/elastos/we-want-you-elastos-community-recruitment-da0e97694f63. Even if you are not in California, you can still help as a volunteer.
Q: What is the official circulating supply amount?
Does this official circulating supply amount include the lockup amounts from presale and ICO holders? How many tokens are in lock up from presale and ICO? When will these tokens be out of lock up?
Fay: Here’s how the circulating supply is calculated: https://medium.com/elastos/ela-metrics-how-is-the-circulating-supply-calculated-92b666c4f6e0. Please note that our figures are current as of this posting and are subject to change in the future.
Q: Will the tokens allocated to the Bitcoin Community only be through holding BTC on Huoibi? Or will other methods be used as well?
Fay: Yes, a few ways that you can get ELA:
1. We will have a lot to marketing campaigns that you can join such as the video contest that is going on right now: https://medium.com/elastos/elastos-video-contest-final-version-5efb9fbebf19
2. There will be a lot of DApp hackathons and competitions once our SDK is ready for developers to develop on top of Elastos.
3. Get ELAs as a community volunteer.
Q: What plans does the Elastos Foundation have to list ELA on other exchanges?
Fay: We are not allowed to openly talk about listing on exchanges.
