Cointelegraph HUB WeChat Group AMA with RJ Mark
Today, Verasity’s Founder RJ Mark had an AMA with the Cointelegraph HUB WeChat Group. HUB is an online interview program initiated by Cointelegraph China. Featuring the leaders of the blockchain and cryptocurrency world, the development opportunities and challenges of the industry segments today are discussed along with how businesses can break through the current situation, then lead the future.
Below is the English language transcript of the AMA.
Good evening! Welcome to our Cointelegraph HUB WeChat Group!
Today, we are honored to have RJ Mark, founder and CEO of Verasity, to be here with us, introduce his brilliant project, and discuss how big could be the online digital advertising market as well as the NFT market.
To make sure everyone can understand all of the conversations, our content team will use WeChat translation to translate and edit each sentence to provide Chinese version.
Before introducing our guest, we want to appreciate all the media partners and communities for supporting us：
Now, let’s start. Hope you enjoy this AMA.
Welcome RJ Mark. Firstly, please tell us about your background and the Verasity team
Hi, I’m RJ Mark, A successful entrepreneur and technologist, I have been developing exciting and high growth hardware and software products since 1996 for various platforms including PC/MAC, Android and iOS mobile devices. I have been managing the development and launch of products into known brand names for over 20 years.
I developed cloud services for online video broadcasting with unique streaming qualities including low latency, low buffering and higher quality streaming. I launched a software company providing a new way to broadcast and stream video content online for multi-user platforms whilst reducing costs for bandwidth and infrastructure. This application is utilized for online gaming but can be used for any live or VOD streaming broadcast.
Some of these applications are now also being used in Verasity.
Verasity’s management and development team, of 25 people, have been working together in the online ad space for over 7 years and we understand in-depth the ecosystem and problems that brands, ad networks, ad exchanges and video publishers have currently.
Sounds great! So what is your project exactly and can you tell us more about your vision?
Verasity is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency company across the esports, video entertainment and advertising sectors. It has just received a US patent for its proprietary technology that helps eliminate ad fraud and already has a number of products earning revenue.
Verasity’s mission is to significantly increase engagement and advertising revenues for video publishers on any video platform.
How? Through its PoV Protocol, Product Layers & Platforms
● VRA Rewards — Product Layer
● Proprietary Video Player — Product Layer
● Proprietary Adstack — Product Layer
● Proof of View (Patent # 10956931) — Protocol Layer
● PoV is the only Protocol Layer Patented technology for the blockchain
See the patent at: https://bit.ly/3fpLpw8
● VeraWallet — Product Layer Payment System
● NFTs — using Proof of View to authenticate the chain of custody of NFTs
Congratulations. You got your US patent. That’s pretty cool! You mentioned Ad Fraud as well as NFTs, so can you tell us, what is the market size of the opportunity?
Digital advertising spend worldwide (outside of China) was $325B in 2019, and is on track to reach $389B in 2021. By 2024, advertising spend will be over $525B. $525B is the addressable market. As much as 40% ($160B) of the ad spend is stolen by ad fraud. Verasity will rectify this problem.
Verasity has a key patent in video monetization with Proof of View and can tap into not only the ad market but the broader consumer market through NFT digital collectibles, another quickly growing market. After all, Proof of View also provides authentication of a number of parameters including chain of ownership. PoV is not limited to views but can be also used to verify any digital image viewer.
Approximately $250M of cumulative sales of NFTs have taken place in the last 12 months while NFTs market cap growth has exceeded 1,785% in 2021 as demand explodes.
$160B in ad fraud? A huge number, isn’t it? Can you be more specific to what is the problem Verasity is trying to solve?
As most of you know there is a significant problem with online advertising. Out of some $400 Billion of online ads, as many as 40% or approximately $160 Billion worth are seen by bots and not humans. That’s $160 Billion of wasted advertising spend by brands!
There are over 2 million video publishers struggling with the problem that brands don’t want to pay much for their ad space because they just don’t believe that humans watch the ads. Even Google and Facebook have to return substantial amounts of money to brands every quarter, because ad fraud companies that detect fraud, after the event, are used by brands to justify clawing back their ad spend. And of course that adversely affects the content providers of YouTube and other platforms because they get much less money.
Brands pay 5 to 10 times more if they are convinced that the fraud levels are low.
And this is where Verasity comes in. Verasity has recently received the US patent to its Proof of View technology that detects and eliminates ad fraud and only records, on the blockchain, genuine human views of ads and video content.
Verasity has just been granted a US patent for the technology that helps solve advertising’s $160 Billion problem.
In addition to the US grant we’ve made an International patent application. Verasity’s Proof of View is the ONLY Protocol Layer patented ad technology for the blockchain.
See the patent at: https://bit.ly/3fpLpw8
With your technology, I’m sure the problem will be solved very soon. So how do you expect to solve the problem?
Verasity developed Proof of View to combat these two separate problems.
On detection — the current standard is for analysis to happen after the content has been delivered and often towards the end of an advertising campaign. With Verasity, our technology detects ad fraud as it happens. Utilizing 200 touch points and AI, Verasity can determine with very high confidence whether a bot or human is watching an ad or content, in real time. There’s no more waiting for post-delivery fraud analysis or requesting refunds from publishers — ad fraud is detected and eliminated immediately.
The Proof of View system also prevents the multiple methods bad actors may try to manipulate view counts and audience metrics.
Once the view has been verified as genuine we need to solve the second part of the problem — accounting for valid ads.
To provide accountability, and therefore transparency for views, a unique identifier is allocated to all parties involved. When viewers create an account, they are assigned an anonymous and hashed ID that then marks the video views generated by that user. We treat views like transactions which can be recorded on the blockchain.
Verasity’s technology uses advanced methods to ensure only views verified by Proof of View are counted. Views which are verified are added to a publicly accessible database containing anonymized data.
WOW! Sounds perfect! Do you have any working use cases?
To test the system as a use case, Verasity built an Esports platform called esportsfightclub.com
Esports Fight Club has scaled with the launch of large tournaments such as PUBG, Valorant and Dota2 to test Verasity products in real time with a reasonably large number of viewers.
In the last large tournament Esports Fight Club had roughly 8.5M viewers which is a great environment for us to test Verasity products as well as earn revenues from the platform itself.
Verasity treats Esports Fight Club as a separate business model so that it grows organically and provides stats that third party video platforms can analyze to see for themselves how the platform significantly improves engagement and monetization.
This is Verasity’s most important use case because it combines all of the products into one Esports platform that Verasity owns and controls.
You mentioned several famous games. Sure there are some people who played them. Can you please list what your products are?
Verasity has built several product modules, beta tested on Esports Fight Club, that can be licensed to third party video platforms so they themselves can increase engagement and monetization.
These product modules include a video rewarding system, a digital wallet, a proprietary video player and Proof of View.
The video rewarding system, rewards Verasity’s token VRA via an SDK integration into the publisher’s video player. The integration is available already for YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo and 90% of all video players when they are used on a publisher’s domain.
The second product module is the digital wallet of Verasity which is called VeraWallet. The VeraWallet.tv is a secure, custodial wallet to store rewarded tokens and is itself a payment system providing both crypto and non crypto payment options. VeraWallet has over 101,000 users and offers VRA holders a 25% per year staking option.
The third product module is the proprietary video player which contains a unique ad stack built to optimise advertising revenue using our 17 ad partners. The video player is now in Beta to be launched imminently.
Proof of View is the fourth product module which, as we’ve discussed, detects and eliminates ad fraud sending only valid views to the blockchain which cannot be manipulated. It is against this ledger that brands will pay video publishers.
Because Proof of View has several use cases and works for different kinds of digital fraud we applied it as well to NFTs.
Since Verasity owns an Esports platform and major gaming companies are looking to NFTs as a new method of monetization, Verasity is developing the industry standard for authenticating the chain of ownership and validating it on the blockchain.
Verasity, through Esports Fight Club, has its own source of NFTs and will apply its technology to validate and authenticate them on the blockchain. Verasity is in discussion with third party NFT auction platforms to integrate Proof of View as an industry standard.
Esports Fight Club NFTs will also be available later this year in the game store at esportsfightclub.com/nfts.
To see our roadmap go to: verasity.io
To see our products go to: verasity.tv
Thank you Mark for the details! My next question is about your business model. Can you tell us more about it?
Verasity makes revenues from its use case esportsfightclub.com with subscriptions, commissions on prize pools, video ad revenues and transaction fees. And it will roll out its B2B products later in 2021 to major video platforms.
Video publishers are waiting impatiently for the completed beta of the use case on Esports Fight Club to license the modular products from Verasity for their own platforms.
Verasity will also be selling its Esports Fight Club NFTs on its own platform as well as on third party auction platforms with the integration of Proof of View to authenticate the chain of ownership and write it to the blockchain.
Sounds great. You have your own community, right? So, how has your community grown since you first launched?
We have 15 communities — WeChat, Weibo, Telegram — in 14 languages with over 147,000 members. We have over 85k twitter followers. Verawallet.tv is used by over 101,000 users and approximately 9M people have watched our esportsfightclub.com tournaments.
Our quarterly metrics increase in social media has been over 76%.
76%！I’m so impressed！What events have impacted the recent price action?
We recently received the patent on Proof of View (patent #10956931) which is a protocol level layer technology owned by Verasity and announced that we are applying it to both the ad fraud market as well as NFTs.
As a result over the last 60 days, the $2M MC of VRA has increased 40x to over $80M and volume across exchanges increased 20X to between $15M-25M on a daily basis. Over the weekend, In LunarCrush, VRA was #2 in top trending searches against over 2000 crypto projects. Ahead of Matic, Cake, BTC, EOS, Theta and all others.
I am very pleased that our early investors have made a good return on investment. It’s a big responsibility to take in investment in a token company and one of the best feelings is seeing everyone make out well.
We also added 5 exchanges in the past 30 days: Gate.io, Bittrex, MXC, Uniswap and Dodo.
And SeerLabs, 499 & Bitribe are doing active marketing for Verasity in China and Korea.
So glad to see you have these achievements in such a short time. That means people really see your contribution to the market and you are making the world better with the excellent technology! I’m sure you’ll make great progress.
OK, Mark, do you have any words for everyone here?
I appreciate greatly the opportunity to be here for this AMA and thank you for attending.
OK. Thank you for being here and had this conversation with us, RJ Mark. Hope we can have another soon.
And thanks everyone in this group, and our precious partner media and communities! See you!
About Verasity
Protocol and Product Layer Platform for Esports and Video Entertainment
The Verasity Mission
Verasity’s mission is to significantly increase engagement and advertising revenues for video publishers on any video platform.
How? Through its PoV Protocol, Product Layers & Platforms
- VRA Rewards — Product Layer
- Proprietary Video Player — Product Layer
- Proprietary Adstack — Product Layer
- Proof of View (US Patent Office #10956931 System and Method for Proof of View via Blockchain) — Protocol Layer
- PoV is the only Protocol Layer patented technology for the blockchain
- VeraWallet — Product Layer Payment System
Use Cases
Esportsfightclub.com — Esports Platform and Video Publisher owned by Verasity
This is Verasity’s most important use case because it combines all of the products into one Esports platform that Verasity owns and controls. The Esports platform has scaled to 8.6m viewers for its tournaments.
Verasity.tv — Aggregator of Publishers
Available SDKs which can be used by any publisher for the following video players: YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, JWPlayer, Brightcove, VideoJS, Kaltura, FlowPlayer, iVideoSmart and others (90% of all video players in the West). This is now available for over 2 million video publishers struggling to survive on low advertising revenues.
Verasity Revenues
Verasity makes B2C revenues from its Esports Fight Club platform through subscriptions, commissions on prize pools, video ad revenues and transaction fees using Verasity products. Verasity will roll out its B2B products later in 2021 with attendant revenues. Verasity Roadmap
📖 Read our latest adoption metrics and one page overview
📈 Find where VRA (ticker) is trading on CoinMarketCap
VRA can be staked for 25.55% annual interest at https://verawallet.tv.
Follow Us:
Medium: https://medium.com/verasity
Twitter: https://twitter.com/verasitytech
Website: https://verasity.io
Telegram Token Discussion: https://t.me/Verasity_Official
Telegram Token Announcements: https://t.me/verasity
Verasity Gaming: https://t.me/verasity_gaming
Facebook: https://facebook.com/verasitytech
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/verasity
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/verasity
Blockfolio Signals: Follow VRA to receive updates straight from the team
Join our local groups, we have support in the following languages
Chinese Chat 🇨🇳 — https://t.me/Verasity_CN
German chat 🇩🇪 — https://t.me/GermanVRACommunity
Dutch chat 🇳🇱 — https://t.me/verasityamsterdam
Brazilian chat 🇧🇷 — https://t.me/Verasity_BR
Indonesian chat 🇮🇩 — https://t.me/verasityindonesia
Japanese chat 🇯🇵 — https://t.me/vrajapan
Korean chat 🇰🇷 — https://t.me/Verasity_Korea
Persian chat 🇮🇷 — https://t.me/verasity_irn
Russian chat 🇷🇺 — https://t.me/VerasityRU
Spanish chat 🇪🇸 — https://t.me/verasity_spanish
Turkish chat 🇹🇷 — https://t.me/VerasityTR
Vietnamese chat 🇻🇳 — https://t.me/Verasity_Vietnam
Philippines chat 🇵🇭 — https://t.me/verasity_philippines
Indian chat 🇮🇳 — https://t.me/VerasityIndia
WeChat — PM @cryptomeo on Telegram
Korean Kakao — https://open.kakao.com/o/gZaO4N1c
If you are a Game Developer or Video Publisher and want to grow your audience and revenue by 500% click the link to talk to the team
