AMA Session with Cynthia Huang at Dtravel

MEXC Global

Published in

MEXC Global

7 min readNov 24, 2021

Guest : Cynthia Huang, Head of Growth at Dtravel

Host: Iris

Introduction:

Iris: Today, we’re honored to have Cynthia Huang, Head of Growth at Dtravel, in our community to give us a more intuitive introduction to their unique project.

Cynthia, would you like to say hello and introduce yourself?

Cynthia: My name is Cynthia and I’m the Head of Growth at Dtravel. I’ve been a host for 7+ years as well as a community builder in the home sharing space. I’ve also worked in crypto since 2018, helping over 300K people learn about crypto trading through a trading simulation game I co-founded.

Questions about the project:

Q1

Iris: What is Dtravel? Can you share with us more in detail?

Cynthia: Dtravel is a decentralized, global home sharing community that facilitates accommodation discovery, bookings and payments, with lower fees than other home sharing platforms.

Community members are able to make and receive payments with traditional currencies and popular cryptocurrencies, including the utility token that powers Dtravel: TRVL.

But we’re much more than just a home sharing platform. Dtravel is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO): a community-owned and governed ecosystem that operates for the benefit of its community members, composed of hosts, guests, contributors and TRVL token holders. We have an ambitious and exciting goal of becoming the largest DAO in the world, especially outside of crypto.

Q2

Iris: What triggers you to launch Dtravel? What are some of the real-world problems/ pain points that Dtravel aims to solve?

Cynthia: The contributors and advisors to Dtravel all believe in the vision of a new kind of home sharing platform and experience that’s both community owned and community led.

Having worked in the home sharing and travel industries for a long time, our team has seen the problems that exist in the home sharing economy today and we believe that by using Web 3.0 technologies, we can solve a lot of those problems and get back to being community first.

For the home sharing industry specifically, these are the main problems we’re solving:

- intermediation of a platform, which puts hosts and guests at odds with each other

- high fees — we want to reduce fees for all members so that hosts keep more and guests pay less

- value that gets created by the platform users should go back towards the platform users rather than to the platform

- more transparent and neutral dispute resolution

- real tangible benefits and rewards for being an exemplary host or guest

Iris: thanks for the explanation! now let’s learn something about the TRVL token 💪

Q3

Iris: What is the role of $TRVL in Dtravel? Would you tell us more about its tokenomics?

Cynthia: The TRVL token is the utility token that powers the entire Dtravel ecosystem. It’s one of the things that sets us apart because it allows the community to have ownership and a vote in Dtravel.

The TRVL token centers around 4 main areas — travel, loyalty, governance and protection.

Travel — guests can pay with crypto and hosts can accept crypto, including TRVL

Loyalty — we have onboarding incentives for hosts and guests and a support-to-earn program that rewards people for contributing to the growth of Dtravel

Governance — TRVL holders can participate in governance and voting activities that influence how the Dtravel platform is managed

Protection — all hosts are protected by a $1,000,000 USD protection pool for property damage for stays booked on Dtravel

On the token economy side, we have mathematical experts who have built some of the most well known blockchain projects, working and designing our token economics to ensure that long term, the growth of our ecosystem is sustainable and that the right mechanisms are in place to reward people for helping with this growth.

An example of this is that all hosts and guests on Dtravel will be required to hold 25 TRVL to ensure their interests are aligned with the greater community and we’ve also allocated 90M TRVL tokens to be distributed as rewards for those who contribute to the overall growth of Dtravel.

For anyone interested, please read our article on the community rewards on our Medium blog — https://medium.com/dtravel-community/90-000-000-reasons-to-use-dtravel-1ca9bd5bc615.

Q4

Iris: Are there any exciting news or updates with regards to Dtravel that you would like to share with the users?

Cynthia: Yes! First, Dtravel is live for bookings so make sure to check it out and book your next vacation through Dtravel 🙂. You get 1% back in TRVL on every booking and up to 2.5% if you have one of our Premium NFT Memberships.

Which is a great segue to our next big news. We’re going to be releasing our Premium NFT Memberships very shortly, which are the first travel NFTs and they also give you real world benefits, such as the rewards I mentioned, plus exclusive travel giveaways. We’ll be dropping a waitlist for this soon so make sure that you sign up for Dtravel updates on our site so that you’re the first to know when this happens.

Iris: that’s a great mechanism 🔥

Cynthia: We recently announced that TRVL will be available as a payment option on Travala, which is exciting for us to be partnering with such a successful crypto travel company. There will also be a 10,000,000 TRVL airdrop for AVA smart members.

Agreed! I will be booking all my travels through Dtravel for sure!

You can learn more about the airdrop here — https://blog.travala.com/travala-com-announces-10000000-trvl-airdrop-for-ava-token-smart-members/ 🥳

Iris: nice, we partnered with Travala too and they had an AMA with us before

Q5

Iris: If you were to summarize your project in ONE word, what would it be? Why?

Cynthia: Great one and easy 😉

Community, hands down, no need to think.

I’ve been building community in the home sharing space since 2014. From the first time I heard about the home sharing space, it intrigued me. I was one of the first hosts in my city. I’ve seen the evolution of the home sharing space and moving towards commoditization of the travel experience. We really want to bring home sharing back to its community roots through community ownership and community governance so community is the word that represents everything we’re about.

Free-asking Session

Q1. Trust is very important in business, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with your project ?

Cynthia:

When you’re building community, trust is at the core of everything. Without trust, you can’t build community. Without trust, you can’t build a home sharing platform or ecosystem. First, one of the ways we’re addressing trust right off the bat is by ensuring that all hosts have access to a $1M USD protection pool for any property damage that occurs during a stay booked on Dtravel.

Secondly, we have team members who have worked for many years in regulation, trust and safety to ensure that we’re thinking about these issues up front and figuring out ways to completely erase or heavily mitigate them. We’re investing into team members who have very senior experience because we know how important these questions are.

Third, communities are most beloved by the people who live there. That means that as a DAO, we’re going to be leaning on our community to help with this and to flag bad actors.

These are just a small number of the ways that trust and safety are huge for us and we’ll continue to share as we evolve and will also be enlisting the community to help with these initiatives as well.

Q2. Many Scam Project do hide behind Tokenomics, statistics and lot of promise, so I want to ask how can a crypto user identity a genuine Project using your project as a usecase..??

Cynthia:

This is a great question. Obviously and unfortunately in crypto, there are a lot of scams. However, what we’ve done from the beginning is made sure that we had the best contributors and advisors, who are known in the home sharing, travel and blockchain industries to help build Dtravel.

All our contributors and advisors are on our Genesys.Partners website and our LinkedIn. All these people are VERY experienced and have a proven track record. Building the next evolution of home sharing is an ambitious goal and the way we’re going to do that is through having an all star team, such as we do now. Knowing that we have a team who has the knowledge and experience I believe goes a long way towards reassuring the community that we’re serious and building for the very long term, to achieve the vision of the DAO that we have, which is a 10–20 year vision.

Q3. Asides crypto payment, do you have plan of incorporating Fiat payments to help attract those who are non- crypto experts? Also, for those who refer guests and host to Dtravel, will there be an additional revenue or incentives to help motivate and encourage them?

Cynthia:

Yes we plan to incorporate more crypto payment options as well as fiat. We’re building an in-app wallet which will make it easy for non-crypto users to use it as well because it will be seamless like any digital wallet they might use on their phone.

We definitely have programs to reward the community for contributing to Dtravel’s growth. In fact, we’ve allocated 90M TRVL tokens to give away in various loyalty initiatives for members. You can read the full details in our Medium blog post — https://medium.com/dtravel-community/90-000-000-reasons-to-use-dtravel-1ca9bd5bc615.

Dtravel social media links:

Telegram — https://t.me/dtravelcommunity

Telegram announcements — https://t.me/dtravelannouncements

Twitter — https://twitter.com/DtravelDAO

Medium — https://medium.com/dtravel-community

Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dtraveldao/