Recap: AMA with Tokky
The following is a transcript of the joint-AMA between Pledgecamp and Tokky that took place on August 1st, 2019. #CommunityThursday
Answering questions for Tokky is their Co-founder, Angel Chushev. To learn more about Tokky and their novel blockchain-backed gift card solution, visit their site here.
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Why is Tokky utilizing Blockchain Technology? Is there a token, and if so, what is its main utility?
The topic of blockchain benefits for the type of product Tokky is building is a lengthy one but I’ll try to summarize it.
As a once sentence pitch i could say that Tokky is a digital Gift Card platform on the blockchain that eliminates operation costs and has all the security benefits of blockchain technology to help fight fraud.
The major benefits of utilizing blockchain technology are fast transactions with very low fees, drastically lowered investment required from merchants to start offering gift/discount cards to their customers, and of course virtually eliminating fraud which the gift card industry is now infamous for
Cheap and fast transactions fees are synonymous with blockchain and we very much want to take advantage of that with Tokky. It is of great importance to merchants, especially small to medium sized ones, to be able to have their funds available as soon as possible, to help run their business efficiently. Same applies to transaction fees, nobody likes to pay more fees than it is absolutely necessary.
So like many other projects in this space, making operations more efficient and keeping everyone more safe, accountable and honest is where the blockchain part comes in?
Lowering the investment required for merchants to start offering cards is greatly important for Tokky and we see this as a game changing feature for the gift and discount card industry. A very large part of the small to medium sized businesses around the world don’t even consider the possibility of offering gift and discount cards to their customers. That’s because the existing methods of doing so all require several different types of investment to get started and merchants are insecure if that investment will bring them more profit. Investments inlcude costs for POS infrastructure, recurring service fee, plastic card fee, etc. With Tokky you only need a smartphone as a POS — we think that this will allow an entirely new type of merchants to get started and will make existent merchants convert to Tokky.
POS in this instance refers to point-of-sale, correct?
Yes, that’s right.
Will Tokky have its own native token?
We do plan on issuing a native token. At this stage we are discussing several exciting types of utility that it will serve. We’ll officially announce it when we finalize the ideas and are ready to issue the token.
Gift and discount card security is probably the most self explanatory item on our list. Fraud in the industry runs wild, from small petty theft over the counter on one end of the spectrum, to money laundering on the other end. The way cards are secured has been ridiculous for much of history, both for plastic cards and e-cards. Recently there have been advances which make it harder, but not enough to even reduce the rate at which fraud is happening. Tokky aims to be fraud-free by utilizing the inherit immutability of blockchain and implementing secure but easy to use authentication on top of that.
What is the nature of your partnership with Klaytn? What purpose does it serve?
As I’m sure everyone in the community knows, Pledgecamp is also an Initial Service Partner of Klaytn, which is how this connection was made 😄 First of all, we are very excited and honored to be an initial service partner of Klaytn, which indeed also led to this AMA.
The nature of the partnership is for Tokky to be an initial service partner with Klaytn. That basically means that Tokky will be one of the products that aim to attract users to the Klaytn ecosystem, and ultimately help to achieve mass adoption of blockchain applications.
On the other hand Tokky is excited to partner with Klaytn and benefit from the technical and marketing aspects of their blockchain. Main selling points are faster and cheaper transactions than competing blockchain networks and a user base that will be directly exposed to the family of applications through a unified marketplace.
And last but not least, we feel the opportunity to partner with our fellow ISP members, just like Pledgecamp!
How can people use Tokky? For example a bitcoin millionaire wants to give some gifts to students, he can create some cards but how the students will use the gift cards?
Good question. The answer is that the millionaire can purchase gift cards for these students — individually or as a shared card, which is one of the options Tokky will be deploying to the platform at a later stage.
Of course that will be feasible after we gain some adoption in the retail world.
Which we will be focusing on via partnerships with other products and also direct sign ups from merchants around the world
What other business partnerships do you have or are working on? Anything you can tell us?
We are currently focusing on development and haven’t been actively seeking partnerships until now. We have had some talks with people in retail, which may be interested to offer gift cards through Tokky. We’ll make any official partnerships public as they happen in the future!
Speaking of development, do you have a roadmap for your project? And if not, what are some noteworthy milestones you are currently working on?
Our current goal is to have the product operational and deployed on the Klaytn mainnet until the end of the year, with additional features coming in the months following that.
On the topic of partnerships, Tokky is very excited about the potential verticals for partnership that we have discussed with Pledgecamp! However, talks are in the very early stages and we can’t share more details for the time being :)
Who do you consider your main competitors, and what makes the Tokky platform stand out from the others?
A few companies are also doing something in the area of gift cards on blockchain: https://www.gyft.com and https://www.zeex.me/ come to mind.
Both are buying traditional gift cards in bulk with a discount and reselling them, while passing some of the discount to the buyer, offering payments with crypto assets. However, their solutions don’t solve security problems because the initial cards are still based on the vulnerable base of the existing technology. Also, Tokky plans to do much more in terms of features for both merchants and customers, which so far we haven’t seen other competitors do.
Could you describe your team? How many team members work full time on the project, and who does what? And moreover, where’s the company registered, and where is your main office located?
To start with the short part of the question — the company is registered in Estonia, our main office is in Bulgaria and we have representatives in UK and the United States.
We have 12 people in our team — we have 8 developers (Angel, Veso, Radko, Nasko, Sasho, Stanyu, Miro, Kalinov), 3 advisors (Seb, Vasko, Yanko) and one graphic designer (Polya)
Veso and Angel: Founders, frontend devs, business and legal operations
Miro, Kalinov, Stanyu — backend development
Radko, Nasko — blockchain
Sasho — mobile apps
Seb Vasko and Yanko are our advisors in different areas of business
Do you have any closing remarks?
I’d like to thank you again for the opportunity to answer these questions! Everyone at Tokky is excited for what the future holds for us together with Pledgecamp and Klaytn!
