AMA Highlight: VersoView
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
March 8, 2021–7 min read.
On Thursday 4 March, we welcomed Steve Peaple, Alex Moody and Col Werner from VersoView into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.
VersoView present a new way for brands and publishers to engage with communities built around in-house content and simplify the publishing process through their proprietary publishing application.
The multi-functional and deflationary VVT token plays a key role in developing and rewarding engagement on the platform.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
Hey guys, excited to have you here — finally! Obviously, we’ve been following you for a very long time now. Looking forward to digging into your mission of revolutionizing the publishing industry.
As always could we start with brief introductions to yourselves and the project?
Col Werner
Hi Daniel, I’m Col Werner CFO at VersoView, happy to be here!
Steve Peaple
Hi, I’m Steve Peaple, CPO for VersoView. My role is about scoping out and delivering a total holistic solution.
Alex Moody
Thank you Daniel it is a pleasure to be here! My name is Alex Moody, Director of Operations at VersoView. This is full circle for us, as many might not know that Hillrise was an early advisor and friend to us when we were just getting started and you guys helped us so much. It’s great to be here!
VersoView is an engagement and rewards platform hosting branded DeFi ecosystems. Brands, businesses, educational partners and publishers can host and engage their communities around their content and reward them with branded social tokens within the VersoView ecosystem. PER stands for Publish. Engage. Reward — the lifecycle of Publishing 3.0.
Publishing, reader engagement and the methods of rewarding that engagement is what VersoView is designed to disrupt.
Raymond Reijnders
The use of patents is not something commonly seen (yet) in this industry. You have a patent pending for an AI web-app that you’ve created. Can you talk to us about what this patent is for and why it’s important for you?
We’re curious to find out more about how this process works, and how patents might be used in the industry at large (given open-source platforms, anonymity, pseudo-anonymity).
Steve Peaple
At the heart of VersoView is a patent-pending AI tool that digitalises publications in matters of minutes, instead of needing to have a whole team that works on it around the clock. But in essence, we won’t talk about it while it is still in process, and not while it’s being built. We are a commercial organisation and the patent shows much of the process of how this works. It would be like if Colonel Sanders printed his recipe in the windows of his stores… there’s no longevity in that.
What I can say though is that the interface is something we worked on meticulously, aligning it with the same processes and features that any designer or publisher will be familiar with. So the barrier to adoption will be low as the visual language is already familiar and ‘safe’.
Alex Moody
Generally speaking, we have an aggressive patent strategy for this year and beyond, as evidenced by our hire of Felix (a patent expert) to our core team. It is a core focus for us. We see a healthy patent strategy as a proactive way to protect IP, and market position and as a formula for long term growth and shareholder value.
Raymond Reijnders
At the core of VersoViews innovation lies the patent-pending AI technology, which seamlessly converts magazines, corporate communications and other print and digital material into aesthetically beautiful and readable formats.
Are these formats view only or also interactive (links etc.), could you shine some light in how this technology works?
Steve Peaple
VerosView will take publications (which could be myriad forms, but essentially a PDF) and convert that to OpenView. OpenView is the ‘Medium’-style viewing style that we know our clients are thirsty for, but is currently not available unless you spend a lot of money.
Clients get to choose which elements they want as OpenView and then the OpenView features will be shareable, comment-able, and more, but only to their subscriber base. What we’re creating here are silos of interests, built around a brand, ideas, and stories. We’re building communities that will wish to share their points of view in these ‘subscriber’ areas as they’re not getting other noise.
Imagine if we were doing these chats while reading NBA feeds, and recipes popping up. It’s messy. Those OpenView pages will also have audio capability to ensure a wide audience reach and engagement.
Alex Moody
VersoView goes “beyond the page” as they say and integrates all forms of media as well. Music, sound, art all can be “publishing” if you broaden your interpretation of the word.
Raymond Reijnders
VersoView has recently partnered with Morpheus Network. At first glance, these 2 projects seem to have very little strategic overlap. Could you please explain the sort of synergies this partnership might bring to VersoView? Could you share any details on what you’re currently working on together?
Alex Moody
Morpheus.Network is an incredible project. Dan and Noam are great to work with and, like us, they already break out of the crypto Eco bubble and interface with actual real-world enterprises.
One of our core values is to offer a low friction entry into blockchain for businesses. We do this through our platform, but most of these clients we have are relationships that span years and need more than we can offer them but have no idea where to start. Introducing them to a quality solution like MRPH is a no brainer and adds value for both parties.
Vice versa we live at the intersection of publishing and advertising.
If a blockchain company wants to access real business usage, it is my opinion that VersoView is the perfect medium to do so through a variety of means. You will see what I mean by that very soon
Raymond Reijnders
About your implementation of NFTs: We’ve read that commissioned reports and once-off publications can be given direct ownership with NFTs. Could you tell us more as to how this integrates into your ecosystem?
Alex Moody
Yes indeed, NFTs have exploded in popularity recently, and while all of the art and music collectibles are exciting, “boring” applications of NFTs are perhaps the biggest use case moving forward.
The concept has always been a part of the VersoView core design almost before the term ‘non-fungible token’ was coined.
Allowing users to mint their ‘proof of ownership’ on an immutable record and then manage sales and syndication on the blockchain is a core feature of our roadmap.
Steve Peaple
NFTs will work beautifully for long run — think art gallery evening where only those invited get the publication, and also high volume, like a Bruce Springsteen’s show program going out to all 120,000 stadium goers.
Daniel Dal Bello
You have a function where brands/publishers can reward their communities with “Social Tokens” — we could draw a parallel to traditional loyalty point schemes. Will these tokens essentially function as their own ERC-20 currencies/utility tokens? How do you envision this to play out in practice?
Alex Moody
First on the issue of Social Tokens, for the time being, thinking of them as either fungible or non-fungible depending on the legal and tax requirements of the business issuing them is important. They can elect to make their token ecosystem “Open or Closed” meaning it can have exchangeable value in the larger ecosystem or not in order to allow them to comply with local jurisdictional rules.
This election will drive the designation of the token and the contracts actual mint coding. The specific blockchain we use for that functionality is not set in stone at this stage and we are exploring partnership in the area as well.
Daniel Dal Bello
We’ve recently noted that you’ll be bridging VVT to Solana, so why did you decide to choose Solana over other blockchains such as BSC and AVAX?
Alex Moody
Solana is an exciting Layer 1 solution, still flying under the radar right now. It lacks the same infrastructure as its larger competitors but its lightning-fast and ridiculously cheap for transactions.
For now, it will grant our community a marketplace to buy/sell/ trade $VVT with essentially no fee. We don’t chase hype as a rule. We seek to anticipate the direction of the industry and front-run it. This follows that business principle.
Raymond Reijnders
VersoView envisions becoming the world’s central hub for corporate and retail publishing with your public release scheduled for 2022.
How do you plan to stay ahead of the curve with respect to development and any competition emerging between now and your release? What gives you that ‘moat’ of security to keep yourselves in a competitive position in your market?
Alex Moody
An aggressive patent strategy for one thing. I would also say that merging traditional business that moves at the pace of the Turtle, with blockchain which races forward like the Hare grants us a natural competitive edge that any other businesses will be hard-pressed to keep up with. We do more in a week than most companies do in a year.
Steve Peaple
One of our ‘moats’ will be those onboarded, the ability to convert not just ‘this week's report, or this quarter’s magazine, but their entire inventory. All in OpenView. Once inside, they can of course leave, but you lose all that inventory and community interaction that goes with it. And then there are also rewards. Integrating rewards and social tokens adds further layers of stickiness.
Col Werner
Having a top-class tech crew helps, keeping our ear to the ground also helps, but we’re bringing something new, that covers a lot of bases to the industry and in effect reinventing it to some degree.
Daniel Dal Bello
As a final question, we’d be very curious to know how your alpha client is coming along?
Alex Moody
It is scheduled for the later part of Q2 on our roadmap. However…. we are a tad ahead of schedule you could say, more will be revealed very soon!
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
VersoView is an engagement and rewards ecosystem set to reshape how we publish, engage, and reward.
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