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AMA Recap 12/01/2022— Elliot, Daniel, and Nick

Verasity
Verasity
Published in
20 min readJan 19, 2022
Listen to the full AMA here! Also, check us out on SoundCloud!

Daniel: Welcome to our Discord Community members who’ve joined us today on our very first Discord stages AMA event with our guest speaker Elliot Hill. My name is Daniel and I’m Verasity’s community manager. With me here today as well I’ve got Nick our Discord manager and together, we are glad to host our special guest and speaker, Elliot Hill. I’ll pass over the mic to Nick to say a few words.

I’m sure the community is keen on hearing our Discord community manager on voice for the first time. And after Nick earlier will introduce himself and then we can start our interview and Q&A session. Thank you very much, everybody. Nick, the mic is yours. Thank you.

Nick: Hi everybody. And thank you to Daniel for that.

Many of you will know me already over text, but it’s nice to finally do a voice event in our community. So, I’ve been aware of and investing in Verasity now for about 11 months and I’ve been working with Daniel and the VeraLeader team for a few months. We saw there were lots of improvements we can make on the Discord and in the other social communities. Most of you have been around whilst we’ve been making these improvements, but it’s nice to see a lot of fresh faces appearing recently.

If you people who’ve joined recently have any questions or suggestions for the server, then please feel free to get in touch with me. So I’ll pass over to Elliot now for an initial introduction on himself.

Elliot: Hey everyone, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Really excited to meet the Verasity community and tell you about myself and my experience in the crypto industry.

I didn’t realize Nick, this was your first time as well on voice [chat], so it’s really cool that we can both introduce ourselves here together. As many of you know, I joined Verasity just last week. It’s been a fantastic journey so far, but because of that this meet and greet won’t focus so much on our product; but rather my own experience, and why I joined Verasity. So this is your chance to grab a coffee and meet me personally. You’ll probably notice that we’ve been really busy over the last week. I’ve had to hit the ground running, but it’s been in the best possible way, and it’s my hope that we’re going to have the opportunity to do a lot more of these types of Discord Stages in the future, and maybe also spin out into Twitter Spaces if there’s an interest for that. But first, allow me to introduce myself here. I’m joining Verasity as the Communications Director. This is somewhat different in scope to a pure marketing role, in that I’ll be designing and leading our content resources, finding thought leadership opportunities for Verasity, and driving PR forward.

I’ll also help shape communications for our enterprise outreach. So these are clients such as Brightcove and all of the other clients that might join us through partnerships like that. And then to just introduce myself from a professional background, I’m a full member of the Royal Chartered Institute for Public Relations, which means for those of you who aren’t from the UK it’s professional body for public speaking and public relations.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with multiple blockchain companies throughout my career, including Cardano, Chainlink, Sygnum Bank, Mode Bitcoin, and most recently Occam Finance. These range from layer one protocols to cutting edge DeFi platforms, and pretty much everything in between. So I’ve had great exposure to a range of blockchain applications and the nuances that come with communicating that value, which is quite important really, because we’re in such a bleeding-edge technology. It’s quite hard often to communicate where the value lies within any given project. So having worked across a whole host of these different blockchain projects, I like to think that I have experienced the whole spectrum of blockchain technology.

So I’m excited for that challenge at Verasity, and it holds huge appeal to me as an Esports enthusiast and someone professionally involved in ads and media placement throughout my communications career.

And a little anecdote about me before I worked in blockchain. I was studying for a Ph.D. in biogeochemistry. It was a fully-funded Ph.D. and basically, I left to pursue a career in blockchain. A lot of people thought I was absolutely crazy at the time, but it’s really paid off. So in chasing that decentralized dream, it’s bought me here, but that’s probably a story for another time. So back over to you, Daniel.

Daniel: Wonderful Elliot, fantastic introduction, and best decision ever to turn your eyes to blockchain technology.

So Elliot, over the past 24 hours, we’ve collected several questions from the community. As you know, we’ve listed some, and with that said, I’d like to kick off our interview session. One of our district members called Wes has asked a great question and here it goes: Is the early ADA community comparable to the VRA community?

Elliot: Yeah, thanks Wes, this is a really great question to kick us off, actually. So I’ve been involved in the Cardano community since 2017 when it first launched and yeah, there’s definitely some strong similarities there. So one of the reasons that I became an early member in the Cardano ecosystem, was because of the passion that the community had for the project.

And when you have a community like that, it makes it easier to make the most of good times, by sharing news and collaborating on projects together. But more importantly, I think when you’ve got a strong community like Verasity has, it also helps when the going gets tough. You know, not to be coy, but there are always tough times in crypto, that’s the nature of our industry. Regardless of whether it’s market-driven or from external factors or otherwise, but I think it’s the strength and the solidarity of the community which determines a project’s ability to weather these challenges, and quickly take advantage of periods of growth.

And that’s the core similarity that I guess I would see between the early stage Cardano community and Verasity. It’s this belief that the project will change the world, or at least change the industry, which it’s innovating within. And I think we really need that. It’s the bedrock of a solid crypto community.

So it’s really, really impressive and quite heartening to find that that community already exists within Verasity.

Daniel: That’s awesome. Thank you very much Elliot. Just for our members to know as well, so out of all these questions we’ve gathered from the community, some are Nick’s favorite, some are my favourites. So I think we will be splitting the work with Nick. The next question is for Nick to address. Go ahead, Nick.

Nick: Yep. So the next one’s from Meeden and, they’re asking: “What did you do before, have you met R J mark in real life, and in your opinion, how long does VRA need to get full adoption?”

Elliot: Yeah, thanks Meeden. That’s a great question. So I’ll actually start by answering your second question first, if you don’t mind. I speak to him daily, we zoom and meet regularly. We work really closely on a number of initiatives, so does the whole core team. We have loads of productivity software that we use to sync up and that’s one of the most impressive things actually joining [Verasity]. I mean, in crypto, there’s a lot of projects that you’re here, there, and everywhere — but, Verasity is incredibly organized. It’s really impressive to me. And Daniel does a lot of hard work there organizing as well. But I am pleased to share that I’ll be spending a few days down in London next week, syncing up with some of the other core team members, including Justin, Robert, and David. So I’ll be down there next Wednesday.

But I think actually this opens us up to a wider train of thought, and that is that, uh, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it hard to sync up with everyone. But this highlights, one of what I think is the most unique things about the blockchain industry. And I was actually on a panel a few months ago, talking about this in the sense of the wider decentralized workspace environment. You know, I’ve worked with multiple teams across different time zones. People who I’ve never personally met, and everything is just sort of works, and it’s worked well.

While the rest of the world has been scrambling to adapt to remote working conditions through the COVID pandemic, blockchain projects have been thriving. And I think that, although we might not know it yet, I believe that blockchain companies hold the blueprint for the future of how we’re going to work worldwide. Before I joined Verasity, to go back to Meeden’s first question, I’ve already touched on it a little bit, but I had the pleasure of working with many different blockchain projects, most recently with Occam. They are a decentralized launchpad and exchange for the Cardano ecosystem. Really good insights there, working at the, basically the coal face of decentralized finance and DEX components. So it’s really good to see how all of that works and how it goes together. And before that, I helped the communications at the Cardano Foundation.

This was during Cardano’s knows explosive growth from a $5 billion market cap to a $45 billion market cap, just as I left. That was a period of really strong growth, it was very busy. I’m hoping that we are that busy at Verasity, it’s looking like it, if the last two weeks are anything to go by! It certainly looks like we will be.

I helped lead some really successful PR campaigns [at Cardano]. Probably one of my proudest accomplishments was striking a partnership with Save the Children, the international NGO. That was off the back of some well-placed PR, which went on to become the first time that Save the Children had ever accepted cryptocurrency donations.

So that was really world-changing stuff, and I hope that we can do some stuff like that here at Verasity. And then finally, for your last question, I think full adoption is already here, right? We’ve got Verasity patented technology, and integrations with one of the world’s largest video publishers through Brightcove. I invest in some traditional companies as well, and there are plenty of traditional companies with similar market caps that have way fewer deals in place, and way fewer product verticals. So I think it’s time to communicate to the world that Verasity is ready and full adoption is here. We just need to evangelize that.

Daniel: That’s awesome. Thank you, Elliot. I really appreciate how much detail you go into your answers. So it’s worth mentioning here to the community that we are recording the session and I believe Elliot will also provide a transcript later on, on a Medium article. So for those that wish to revisit this Q&A interview session, we’ll have the opportunity after this AMA event.

Now the question by another Discord member named PatRick, and it goes: “Upon joining for Verasity, what could you see that needed improving? For example, what can you bring to the table to improve the functioning of a project Elliot?”

Elliot: Yeah, well, I’d probably like to preface this question by saying that all of the work done so far on Verasity and everyone I’ve met in the existing team, that’s already here, is doing an excellent job. There’s a comprehensive list of resources. There are well-defined product verticals, and there’s definitely a thriving community.

Certainly, within my role, there are some communications improvements that I will look to make. These will be classified probably into short and long-term wins as I like to call them. So, in the short term, I’ll be examining our current content ecosystem, specifically on our official channels, such as Medium, and identify any gaps in our knowledge.

So, you know, I think we could have weekly content series where we could improve education around our product verticals. That’s definitely something I’ll look to do. And I’m a big believer in [the] accessibility of information and also regular information for our community, particularly blogs and technology deep dives, which I think help our community and also enterprise users understand, and then go out and evangelize our products.

That’s a short-term goal. And you’ll notice that in the coming months, there will be a lot more regular content and informational pieces designed to raise awareness for us. Then secondly, with my background in traditional PR, I’m going to be bothering a lot of journalists about Verasity a lot!

So we’re going to be going out there talking to journalists saying that ‘this is what we’ve built’, or ‘this is what we have to offer’, you know… go away and write about us. This is what we want to do. This is how we’re innovating in the ecosystem because we have so much news to share. One of my long-term goals is to work with major publications and basically make Verasity a household name within ad tech and Esports.

Nick: Thanks, Elliot. That’s all great to hear. The next question is: “Is there already one or more Brightcove customers who are actually about to use VeraViews to its full extent in the very near future?”

Elliot: Yeah. Great question. Yeah, the short answer is yes, there have already been over 30 companies that have left other platforms, to join Brightcove and this is exclusively to leverage Verasity’s VeraViews ad tech stack. So it’s not like these companies are already existing companies at Brightcove. They’ve left other platforms after the Verasity deal and integration was announced, [with a view] to leverage our technology.

So that’s absolutely huge. And we’re going to be working really closely with Brightcove over the course of 2022, to basically build on this and attract other projects and other publishers that want to join the Brightcove network to use Verasity, and all of that drives adoption. So yes, there are actually one or more Brightcove customers who are about to use VeraViews.

The deal flow with these new partners does take time, but we’re going to keep our community updated on that progress as soon as we can.

Daniel: Sounds like an exciting year ahead of us then. Elliot. Thank you very much. Our next Discord member called Rampy has asked: “What is your number one goal for VRA in 2022.”

Elliot: Yeah, it’s a good question. I’m going to take this in the context, and I know it’s about $VRA, but I’m going to take it in the context of Verasity [as a whole], not focused that much on the token here. But as I briefly mentioned in one of my previous answers, my core focus will be on thought leadership and PR and driving that value for Verasity. So the great thing about Verasity is we have so many opportunities for sharing our expertise, and there’s going to be way more of these opportunities is in 2022. As we announced, we’ll bring on new partners, and we can be, blockchain leaders, we can be ad tech leaders, and we can also be Esports leaders. So we’ve got three product verticals, three industries that we can innovate in and become leaders in.

So, people will come to us for our opinion on things. That’s really important for setting ourselves up as thought leaders and also to attract enterprise clients. All of these product verticals are new opportunities to share what we know. Raise the profile of Verasity, not just among the retail community. And when I say retail, I mean like the community now. So you guys listening, our community on Telegram, our community on Twitter, or our community on Discord — that’s the retail community, and it’s very important, but as you guys already know, we have a super-strong retail community. And now we also need to raise that profile among other business leaders and enterprises.

So for me, the number one goal through 2022 and beyond, is to get Verasity everywhere. So if something happens in Esports, we want to be there. We want to be one of the first and be available to give our insight into that. If there is a major ad fraud case, we will be there to show how proof of how you can solve it. That’s one of my goals.

So, you know, just recently we learned that Valve had canceled the Dota 2 upcoming tournament, because of rising COVID cases, so they didn’t want all those viewers in the stadium because it was a LAN tournament. But we could be there and say, for instance, did you know, you can tune in through, VeraEsports and there’s no need to be there in person to make the most of an Esports event. So we want to be there all the time in the media, reminding people how great the components that Verasity is building are.

Nick: Thanks Elliot, I’m sure the community would be really happy to hear how proactive you’re planning on being with things like that. So this next one’s from Burmese. And I just wanted to give a little shout-out and say, thank you for their contribution. Since we started this Discord, I think they’ve sent about 20,000 messages! Thanks for your involvement. And so the question is: “The Verasity community is one of the most passionate and rapidly expanding crypto communities in the current space. Since your arrival in early January, you amassed quite a bit of a following and engagement from the community on your socials. What’s some of the most frequent criticism and hotcakes you’ve received regarding the project from the community members, and what steps do you plan on taking as we move forward to improve on them?”

Elliot: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s definitely a need for more content, especially deep dives into what we’re doing and why it’s important, not just news, but how that news or partnership, for example, is going to move the needle and increase adoption for Verasity and the benefits it’s going to bring for VRA holders.

That’s number one. And then secondly, the most requested thing has definitely been the roadmap. But that is just around the corner pending some new milestones alongside our partners. When we announced the Brightcove partnership and the magnitude of that partnership — obviously we expected it to be big — but the feedback that we’ve got from enterprise clients to date since we made that announcement has been huge and that’s led us to revisit our original plans for 2022.

But the roadmap is just around the corner. I’ve been working on it, so you can all expect that to come very soon. And I think basically, yeah, the power of the Verasity community, I mean, as Burmese says, I’ve amassed quite a bit of engagement. It’s insane! So, I mean, thanks to everyone for being so engaged. It’s a really, really cool community. I can’t wait to see what we can deliver together. We’ll just keep shipping content, shipping news, and shipping PR throughout the whole of 2022.

Daniel: That’s great Elliot. I really, I really like what they’re means set there. The Verasity community is one of the most passionate and rapidly expanding crypto communities in the current space. So the next question, Elliot: What is the biggest challenge for PR in terms of pushing/promoting /selling VRA as a blockchain company, and its solutions to real-world customers/companies and how do you plan to bridge this gap?

Elliot: Yeah, that’s an interesting topic actually, because it’s not relevant just to Verasity, but I think that’s probably relevant to any blockchain-based solution today. I think we’re in a strange industry really where the applications of blockchain are incredibly broad. So if we look at another tech area, if we take virtual reality, for example, it’s use case it’s very clear, you know, you can have virtual reality gaming, system automation, and that kind of thing. But on the other hand, we can use blockchain to power a whole host of different technologies on their own, right? So we can use it to power, decentralized finance. We can use blockchain to trade cryptocurrencies. We can use it to extend cross-border payments, mint NFTs, power decentralized storage solutions, or as you all know, in the case of Verasity, we can use it to fight ad fraud. So it’s this one single technology, but it’s got a multitude of applications. I’ve been here for a couple of market cycles now, and each time you see news cycles [and sensational headlines]. So you get “Will Bitcoin go to a million dollars in 2022” and this sort of thing. But unfortunately the application I think that sticks in most people’s minds because of this, the media drive around blockchain, especially for those unfamiliar with the industry, is crypto trading and all of the sensational headlines that have come with it over the years.

So one of the biggest challenges for me, and it’s not just been in Verasity, but it’s been there across pretty much every single project that I’ve worked with is you know, showing end-users and enterprises, the blockchain can be abstracted from the fluctuating cryptocurrency markets and actually deployed as a powerful tool in its own right.

So [blockchain] is not just about trading crypto, it’s not just about daily market movements and that sort of thing. And I think that eventually our messaging will have to focus more on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’. And what I mean by that, using an example, we all use bank cards. I mean, probably everyone listening in now uses a bank card.

But how many of us, unless you work in banking, actually understand how the backend process of requesting money from a bank through an ATM looks like, you know, we don’t, it just works. We go to our ATM. We use our bank card, we get cash in return. So in a similar way, going back to the question, I think one of the biggest challenges now is to show our end users, that our solutions just work and they work incredibly well, and they just so happen to be powered by blockchain.

I think that’s going to be one of the key marketing and communication challenges throughout 2022. It’s not how to sell blockchain to people. It’s how to sell a solution to people. And then that solution happens to be powered on the backend by blockchain. So I think we need to become a lot more solution-oriented. We need to focus on what we’re actually delivering to enterprises and businesses.

Daniel: I really like that. Can you also name me a few personal PR targets KPIs you want to achieve in 2022? This of course not in terms of VRA price.

Elliot: Yeah, of course. So we’re going to have, as I’ve already said, we’re going to have content coming out each week that scratches beneath the surface of what we’re building and delivers constant value to the community.

And I know I’ve said it a lot, but this is really important. Part of the strategy to help the already huge and really passionate Verasity community to go out and have the tools at their disposal to help us evangelize and spread the word about just how great for us it is. So we want to create really targeted content.

[Content] that even, for example, your mom could read, and say “Oh, okay. That’s the power of Verasity. That’s what it does.”… So we want to take that to the masses. As we’ve discussed, I’d like to grow our already impressive media presence, even more so pursue placements in larger readership publications, you know, the likes of like Yahoo! Finance, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, these sorts of publications.

And then alongside Daniel and the VeraLeader team, I also want to assess the communication needs of the community and increase our output where needed. So I’ve already got some calls lined up with some prominent community members like to meet with all the VeraLeaders and just discover what it is that you think we’re missing, where we can improve. And then we can work together on like a map for that going.

Daniel: That sounds great. And I do strongly and firmly believe that what I really want to achieve here is to connect the team, connect you for instance, with the community. You know, it’s always great to have you guys over for an AMA or a discussion just so that you get to a gauge community as well. All this sounds really good. Um, the next question I think is one of the last questions and it’s for Nick. I think he really enjoyed that one. I’ll let him answer.

Nick: With the fed being hawkish this year and potentially this bullrun being over, do you think the price of the coin will have any effect on the business choices going forward with Verasity’s proof of view.

Elliot: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, just from a personal point of view, having been like a crypto investor for many years, it’d be a shame if the bullrun was over, and things picked up a little today.

So, you know, that’s promising, but who knows really? And this question borders a little bit on price talk, but it’s actually a really good opportunity to convey what I think is an important message and probably a really nice point to finish on. Talking about the fed and the SEC, you know, Verasity already has working products. We have a 10 year runway that’s independent of wider market factors. So, you know, we can look independently at Verasity from the markets. And the marketing of our products to enterprise clients and businesses is going to continue regardless of what’s going on in the cryptocurrency markets.

So we have patents now in both the USA and as we all found out recently in China, these allow clients to use our products, make significant revenues with our products, and then we can use those [revenues] to buy back VRA. And this has nothing to do with the SEC or finance regulators as we exist within the ad tech space.

So market forces and our ability to deliver our solutions are not really intrinsically linked. You know, if you’ve got a project that is entirely focused on DeFi, its future is intrinsically tied to the markets. They rely on the markets.

[On the other hand] We’re looking at the ad tech space, which is huge and it’s growing year on year. China is set to grow. As we learned in our press release yesterday, [China] is set to grow into one of the biggest ad markets in the world. One of the largest growing economies. They’ve got a GDP that is growing actually exponentially, and we’ve just got a foot in the door on that Chinese market. So I don’t think you can particularly look at the blockchain markets when you see the future for Verasity. The crypto market forces at least are not something that particularly drives our growth per se.

Instead, through delivering our products to enterprises and making revenues, we’ll continue to grow our ecosystem. And I’d probably use the phrase, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships here. So if we’re increasing revenues, we’re increasing the adoption of our products and our product verticals, and then by proxy, we’re also going to increase demand for $VRA.

So in terms of communications and how that links back into what I do, I’m going to remain focused on attracting end-users and establishing Verasity as experts in the Esports and ad tech space. And that won’t matter, you know, if, if the market is, is great or if the market is poor, you know, we will still be here, and we’ll still be building, and delivering on our products.

Nick: Thanks a lot. That’s really comforting to hear that Verasity is definitely gonna be sticking around no matter the market situation. So, I think that brings us to the end of all of our questions. So I’ll pass back over to Daniel to say a few words and thank you to everybody who’s tuned in so far.

Daniel: That’s great. That’s great, gentlemen. I’d like to thank both of you for your time today. It’s been a great experience to have you Elliot right here on our Discord. Furthermore, I’d like to extend a big thank you to all the participants that joined us today. Please don’t forget to follow Verasity socials and share with us your own experience from this AMA with Verasity.

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