Quadrant AMA Highlights: CEO Mike Davie on QUAD, Mainnet, and roadmap

On December 6th, 2018, our CEO Mike Davie responded to community questions in a Ask Me Anything session on our Telegram community.

Mike detailed the company’s current business priorities and upcoming near- and long-term milestones on our roadmap.

These included Quadrant’s planned Guardian Nodes Program, our internship for data scientists, and our growing list of partnerships. In case you missed it, we have prepared a recap of the AMA with key questions and takeaways.

Why did we unlock the token when we did?

Mike kicked off with the question asked by the most people: why unlock the token now? To summarise Mike’s answer: since the launch of the Testnet in May, Quadrant’s team has been hard at work meeting development and sales goals. We increased the capacity and features of our technology while onboarding clients and ensuring adoption. Once we achieved those goals, we had real customers who needed the Mainnet to be operational in order to use our products properly. In Mike’s words:

The decision of unlocking was driven by our business commitments and our tech roadmap. This was not a matter of putting eQUAD on the crypto exchanges, but of putting the QUAD in the hands of our users and clients.

Mike went on to explain that for a company such as Quadrant, with tech used already from enterprise clients, active customers, and goals in the roadmap that require an up and running Mainnet, it would not have been in the best interest of the business to delay the release in the hope that secondary token markets — over which we have no control — might improve:

What we can do is to lead by example and show that we are a company that has a working product. It will be the demand by our users and clients authenticating, mapping and designing innovative data products what will drive the adoption of Quadrant. And adoption is something the entire industry needs to get out of the winter.

Adoption, adoption, adoption

We received many questions about Quadrant’s business development roadmap. Mike told our community that Quadrant is already onboarding the first six data feeds from four companies, with blocks created every five seconds. The speed and volume of transactions will continue to grow now that we are live. You can check out our block explorer v0.1 here. And this is just the beginning. Demand is supported by our expanded sales force in Singapore and the U.S., as well as a growing base of supporters all around the world. Our focus now is on sales and adoption. As Mike said, that is the major advantage of having a working product in the market.

Customers and adoption are key. In reality that is what every project should be looking at and judging their success on. Previously many blockchain projects were emphasizing only in tech development, where customers didn’t matter for a long time -since projects were financed from third resources. But now people are realizing the basics of a successful business goes back to that.

Mike also talked about Quadrant’s current business focus on Location Analytics. Our stamping protocol and our Mainnet can be a game changer in cleaning up and mapping this corner of the big data economy, which is full of data-hungry companies.

We are starting with a focus on the location intelligence industry. This is both a strategic emphasis for business and governments alike and also offers an abundance of possibilities and use cases for innovations that address real-world problems.

Our company, our partners, our roadmap

Mike took the opportunity to highlight Quadrant’s new corporate structure for our supporters. DatastreamX, our marketplace of high-quality alternative datasets, has been incorporated into the Quadrant umbrella. Quadrant now has two public portals. Our platform for enterprises is Quadrant.io, where companies, policymakers, and innovators can choose, source and transact validated data from around the world quickly and efficiently. Quadrantprotocol.com is now the home of Quadrant Protocol, focused on our technology and product development.

He also answered some questions about the state of some of our alliances and partnerships:

• IMDA: a strong supporter of Quadrant. We will host workshops with them and with enterprises to support user adoption going forward.
• Bluzelle: technology aligned, with our data feeds stored in their distributed database.
• Reuters: stamping their news data through Quadrant. It is one of the first feeds that we have been working with, during the Testnet and now the Mainnet launch.
• Effect.ai: we are working on a location analytics data set for use on our platform in cooperation with IMDA. We completed phase 1 in November for this project and expect to complete Phase 2 in Q1 2019.
• Amazix: our contract with the community management firm has ended, as expected, with the Mainnet launch. Now, our in-house Community Manager Nikos, along with the rest of the team, will be in charge of our community.

From data scientists to data corporations

The community also had many questions about the roadmap now that the Mainnet launch is live. Mike went through the many ways Quadrant plans to build and grow in the next year, including garnering support from data innovators to data corporations.

Quadrant will be adding an AI microservice layer in the next few months with some of the algorithms and tools that are most in demand for managing complex data. This will lead to the opening of the platform for data scientists to upload their own data models and algorithms so anyone interested can use them for a fee.

Mike explained that in the coming year, Quadrant will be working hard to prepare for the launch of the Guardian Nodes Program, which is scheduled for 2020. Due to the critical importance of the masternodes, which act as the safe bridge between data consumer needs and data producer solutions, we are looking for selected partners such as data labs, universities, innovation centers, large corporations. We will be accepting applications over the next year.

Mike also announced that Quadrant is kicking off an internship program for Data Scientists in January. We have already hired the first two and will expand to as many as four if the right candidates present themselves, he said. So, if you know any talented Data Scientists looking for an opportunity to innovate on the cutting edge of the data economy, please send an email to roger@quadrant.io

Afterword

Mike finished the session with a thank you note for your continued support. We were encouraged by your involvement and we will continue working hard to deliver our promise: a new big data ecosystem with the with the data solutions your business or organizations needs. Customers, revenue, adoption.

We want to give you every opportunity to stay involved. Please continue sending your questions and suggestions and check our official channels in Telegram | Twitter | Facebook |Reddit for regular updates.