AMA Question Highlights
Hey everyone! With the community having a lot of questions recently, we have held an AMA to give answers to all of them. To those who enjoy reading more than watching we have compiled the highlights from the AMA here.
1. The state of the Publica technical team. (Video answer)
High-level management:
Yuri Pimenov — CTO
Antons Sapriko — Solution architect and product owner, COO
Development:
Decreased to 3 developers each for his own aspect of the platform — FIAT gateway, back-end development, and front-end development.
2. Have you considered the possibility of in-app purchases to enable users to buy PBL(and fund book ICOs) using their usual payment methods registered on their Android and Apple accounts? (Video answer)
Apple has a list of cryptocurrencies that are allowed to be transferred within the app. We had a hard time even keeping book tokens there. There is no way we can hope for in-app purchases for crypto. Thus, PWA exploration to make us App-store-free.
3. Do you consider making PBL token a revenue-generating one or PBL will be forever a utility token? (Video answer)
We are not considering any more or less utilities for PBL token at the moment. Currently, it is the means of payment for products available in the Publica eReader-wallet app. Authors receive PBLs for their books and then either cash them out or can use for payments to their service providers e.g. JetLaunch, who accepts PBL as a means of payment for book packaging.
4. Can you please summarize the incentives for readers to participate in an ICO? If a % of the future sales are not part of it please explain why, as it sounds like a basic requirement. (Video answer)
Book ICO was never positioned to be an event, where somebody can obtain a share of future book revenues. It is not book business funding, but rather purchasing your own early copy thus enabling your favorite author or an aspiring individual to be able to self-fund through pre-orders.
5. How much funding is left? (Video answer)
Publica Finance Summary Spreadsheet
Here you can see our funds raised and their consumption across development, marketing, administrative articles. Currently, we have a debt to the development company, but nevertheless, Scandiweb as a co-founder has a substantial stake in the company, so we decided to continue support and develop the project albeit at a slower pace.
There was a question about 13 million tokens from the treasury. These are used to fund partnerships or pay for services, but none of these were sold on an exchange or fund team direct costs.
6. How long do you think Publica can run without any further rounds of funding? (Video answer)
The question is what is Publica? If you talk about domain name and website, it can continue for many many years, but you probably mean Publica that grows and wins a market share. For this, we need a modest amount of developers and marketing personnel to onboard new authors, publishers, wholesalers.
Internally, we have a plan for the year after which we hope to reach the stage when we are attractive for further funding or we can use treasury tokens to support us.
7. What is the company’s strategy to fund the marketing campaign that will be needed to gain visibility and build a user base? (Video answer)
What do you see as a marketing campaign for Publica? Billboards? PPC? TC show, a series of exhibitions? If we will grow, we will grow fast and organically and many people will use Publica's growth to boost their names thus boosting ours. Once we can be scalable — we need much less marketing as we are one of a kind.
8. What is Publica's financial situation? (Video answer)
None of the tokens have been sold. The team funds are frozen for 5 years and we did not even unfreeze the first batch due to liquidity on the market.
9. Could you tell us what are the obstacles to building a FIAT gateway?
VIDEO ANSWER
Reference diagram:
10. What is the progress made on the legal side for the fiat gateway?
Andrey, Scandiweb CFO is still working on creating a contract of Publica — Exchange and authors — exchange as when authors are raising with BICO they are doing it without Publica intermediation. Gibraltar legal team is working slowly, but eventually, we will get there, when we will have necessary scale to need such an agreement.
11. On an updated roadmap.
Currently, in December and till mid/end January we are setting up side-chain, researching PWA risks and using React for eReader, local storage, browser offline storage, DB and how it may be used for storage of private keys, security, storage of books, etc..
Once we have a clear development plan we will publish it, currently, we are at a crossroads. Current Ethereum set up is not working even for the crypto community, FIAT gateway is at its emergence, but we need a fast and free solution to buy and send books.
12. How do you plan to get more exposure?
Having people talk for free is not easy.
Having people talk for money is beyond Publica hard cap and current resourcing.
I think we have got way more mentions and articles for free than an average ICO project already.
13. About partnerships, could you tell us which ones are active and running and what are the advantages going to be from those?
My favorite one is Morgan James — they are like real publishers, but with a startup mindset. We already have one pilot with them. They put a symbolic amount $49 which was naturally already closed. They use it for PR, so Publica gets their share of mentions and exposure.
14. On new exchanges.
There are no new MAJOR exchanges currently planned. We are keeping an eye open for free QUALITY listings, but MAJOR exchanges cost a lot of money. Currently, there is no volume and there is no budget to pay exchange fees as we did for e.g. Cryptopia shortly after the rise.
15. Are you going to need an exchange in order to provide your service?
We use exchange as a service for the FIAT-PBL gateway.
16. Once the fiat gateway is implemented, would it be possible to also add other purchasing options like using other cryptocurrencies for purchasing PBLs on the Publica platform?
It does not serve the purpose, the purpose is to boost mass adoption.
17. It was suggested by a commenter in the Publica telegram’s group that it might be more unique, and better to change Book ICO to simply IBO(initial book offering). What do you think about that idea?
I do not mind, but it will not change anything currently in how many people are buying books or doing Book ICOs.
18. How is the team going to get tokens to sell for FIAT?
As you see in the diagram, we will send proceedings to the exchange to get more PBL.
There is no API based exchange integration as it will make the initiation of the project harder + we can be disconnected. So, for tests and for some initial few hundreds we will use internal PBLs.
Thank you for everyone who tuned in to the AMA and to the community members who provided the questions and actively encouraged us to have the AMA. As always we rely on your support and encourage you to keep sending asking us questions if you have any.
Publica.com is the first publishing platform to use blockchain technology to innovate how books are funded, distributed, bought, and read.
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