VideoCoin AMA with Wolf Crypto at a Glance
On June 9, 2020, the VideoCoin team participated in an AMA on the Wolf Crypto Telegram Channel to discuss the latest updates for the VideoCoin Network, including the Everest Release, the newly announced Genesis Staking Program and the path to mass adoption.
Here are the highlights of the AMA with Live Planet CEO, Halsey Minor, CTO Devadutta Ghat, and Director of Ecosystem Development Kellam Ames. You can read the full transcript over at Wolf Crypto’s medium.
VideoCoin Updates
Wolf Crypto: Why is a revolution in the video industry necessary?
Who is revolting and how does the VideoCoin Network and this Everest release help these freedom fighters of the video industry?
Kellam Ames: Building a real product that meets a market need is the best strategy. That puts us well ahead of most projects. The vision of decentralized computing is an amazing one. We’ve taken advantage of it and built a product that is commercially available and solves legitimate needs.
There are a lot of companies that drop nonsensible partnerships.
Our goal is simple. Mass adoption. I’ll be honest, in this market, it has been a challenge, not just in building a crypto project, but in trying to demonstrate the viability of this revolutionary model, not just to the crypto space, but also to the overall video and tech industries as a whole…Thankfully though, we are finally reaching the summit! While we aren’t the typical crypto project in many ways, delivering the commercially available platform has always been our major milestone in the journey.
To be clear — the vast majority of the industry spent heavily on marketing the last two years while we spent heavily on development and engineering. What we have built is enterprise-grade and a first of its kind.
Most of these projects (many have since exited) are playing the hype game with marketing. Enthusiastic crypto people buy it, but these projects have ZERO chance whatsoever to get any real enterprise companies to onboard.
Where is mass adoption? Why are we still only a $251B industry? I think it’s going to come from building things that are real. A viable commercial product is the only way, and while it takes time for adoption, most projects are playing the marketing hype game and sorely lacking a business model for success.
Wolf Crypto: Can you clarify what you mean though when it comes to the crypto space and they hype style marketing and lack of adoption?
Kellam Ames: Sure. The single biggest reason why our industries innovative projects have not achieved mass adoption is almost all crypto projects’ Achilles heel. Namely, requiring customers to use a crypto token for payment. Stablecoins have provided a stopgap, but they don’t address the core issues: volatility. Instead, we offer ease of use and financial inclusion to our ecosystem.
So with Everest, we released an enterprise-grade platform to transcode, store, and deliver video content over the internet at scale — our competitors are AWS, Google, or MUX. But we believe we can gain adoption because we have a fiat-based payment mechanism — customers pay in dollars, workers get paid in dollars.
This is revolutionary for the typical blockchain projects. The other projects simply won’t work for real-world media studios because their tokenomics have a “poison pill” built into their very core, and they don’t realize it yet.
Wolf Crypto: Kellam, what lessons have you taken from your previous roles that have been applied on VideoCoin Network during your tenure there?
Kellam Ames: I live in the strategic partnership side, so understand that my context here is one that I took from my 15 years of enterprise software experience in GE and JDA software while implementing software solutions for eCommerce and Supply Chain. I am all about the amazing new business models we can create in the sharing economy via the blockchain. But at the end of the day, for a start-up to gain traction and thrive — it’s customer, customer, customer. You must deeply understand the business process of your target customer’s pain and then iteratively work to solve problems. As this market matures and looks to garner actual revenue paying customers, it’s not enough to be a shiny new thing if you don’t solve business problems.
So what problems does the VideoCoin Network solve? Lower Costs and Ease of Use for video infrastructure. Incredibly difficult to build but simple in its requirement. While it’s great that we have used the blockchain to build a decentralized peer to peer cloud service, crypto is anything but easy to use and hence the lack of mass adoption. The VideoCoin Network solves that problem by providing a seamless bridge between the best of crypto with the familiarity, security, and ease of use of a dollar-based payment system.
It is important to stress that when Everest Launched on the 27th we had 26+software and 60+ microservices — all commercially available and downloadable. Supported by a white-label, fully automated fiat payment rails that make onboarding enterprise customers easy, familiar and open. This is the Revolution that the VideoCoin Network brings to the industry. We have removed the barriers to real-world adoption.
The Genesis Staking Program, Working, And Rewards
Wolf Crypto: I saw that you announced a staking pool of your own.
Can you tell us about that?
Halsey Minor: Yes. Yesterday we announced the Genesis Staking Program. This is a quick start temporary staking program that will run while our industry-first fiat-based staking gains momentum.
Read the announcement on Medium: Introducing the Genesis Staking Program
The Genesis Staking Program is expected to award 8–10% in non-inflationary VID as a reward which will be calculated based on the amount of time a staker supports the minimal functional confirmation of the network through staking in a given month. Details about the calculations of rewards will be in the program terms that will be published when the program initiates on the 25th and may also be reported by 3rd party staking services.
Now, staking and withdrawing are as simple as sending VID to a delegator address using a VideoCoin Staking wallet, to be released on the 25th. This new pool, the VideoCoin Genesis Pool, is built to allow users to easily delegate tokens to help enable certain basic network functionalities and rewards users with non-inflationary VID tokens in return for staking into it. No new tokens will be added to supply, unlike typical delegated staking programs.
Wolf Crypto: Along with the Genesis quick-start program you are planning on a different approach to staking as compared to other crypto projects.
Can you give us some background as to why you’ve made strategic decisions to pay workers/delegators/stakers in fiat as opposed to purely VID tokens?
It seems to me this would be a much more difficult process than just paying out more project tokens like pretty much every other crypto project does?
Halsey Minor: We’ve heard from every potential customer they want to use a credit card. They will not go to an exchange, set up an account, send money to the exchange, hire someone to trade to get the best price, and then send those tokens to the VideoCoin Network while the actual value is going up and down. Our customers are not traders.
I think this is a major flaw in the crypto model, not just us. It’s going to take some time for customers to trust our business model just as it did at salesforce.com when the cloud was new but putting payment friction in the way would guarantee no customers of any size other than a few dollars.
Wolf Crypto: You mention that you’ve given workers the option to choose as to how much of their rewards they’ll receive in VID tokens and fiat.
Can I ask why this choice was made? Are there any upper or lower limits on this?
I.e. Could I choose to be rewarded in 100% fiat or 100% VID tokens? Are there any limitations here?
If they choose fiat how will they receive the payment? In the form of US dollar? USD stable coin? If they are located in another country how will they then receive payments? In mail?
Devadutta Ghat: We gave this option to let workers choose what is important for them — An increase in reputation vs. cash flow. You can easily see an up and coming worker pool accepting 100% VID to re-stake that and increase chances of getting more work. Similarly, another worker pool can accept 100% cash if they want immediate cash to pay their expenses.
The beauty and power of our staking program is the flexibility and practicality of it.
People can get cash paid to their bank accounts using our payments provider — Public Mint. The cash is available on the Public Mint blockchain almost like a ‘Digital Dollar’ that can be sent around on that Ethereum compatible blockchain. When you decide to pull out the ‘digital dollar’ from any account, they trigger a KYC process with Public Mint. They can process payments out to any bank, as long as you pass KYC/AML requirements. Based in the country of residence, USD will get converted by your bank.
Wolf Crypto: So one burning question I have over the fiat-based payments is, how will workers/stakers/delegators actually receive fiat from VideoCoin Network?
Will you require each user to have a US bank account?
Halsey Minor: Subject to completing KYC checks and processes, each user will have an address, and tokenize Fiat will be sent to that address. That Fiat can be sent to anyone else who has a wallet or it can be transferred to any bank, or exchange via our partner Public Mint.
You can literally take the value in any form that you want including sending it to the bank as dollars. Providing an option for the funds to move seamlessly amongst many partners and 3rd party institutions is the maximum in flexibility.
Wolf Crypto: What are the minimum requirements to become a worker on the VideoCoin network?
In both tokens and hardware required…
Devadutta Ghat: Token requirements are constantly updated and available here — Rewards Program on videocoin.network
It’s presently 50,000 VID, but may be increased by community consensus.
We’ve written extensively about this here — How much does it cost to run a VideoCoin Worker?
You can use anything from a Raspi 3 all the way to Xeons with Nvidia Server Grade Graphics cards
Wolf Crypto: How many workers do you expect to be active on the network from day one?
Do you prefer individuals first or large hosting or CDN partners?
I assume that you’ll need workers in place before token holders who wish to delegate/stake and do so for those particular workers?
How soon can you run a business on the VideoCoin Network?
How long it will take to get enough workers to be commercially ready?
Halsey Minor: Every project has a development cycle. In parallel with our on-going prospective customer acquisition focus, having achieved Everest, we are getting a pool of workers developed first and then on-board the demand to match.
The platform has launched and is ready for prime time, however, with any new revolutionary platform of this magnitude that encompasses decentralized encoding, moving into the cloud — and the arbitrage of compute efficiency, it will take time to ramp up. Stay tuned for announcements!
Network Development and Growth
Wolf Crypto: Now that you have an actual functional mainnet, how does this change your approach to approaching potential partners of the VideoCoin Network?
Surely this takes these conversations out of the realm of possibility and into the realm of practicality?
Halsey Minor: I want to make something very clear. When I gave up my job at CNET we were a NASDAQ 100 company and we’re highly profitable and had a great deal of respect from the media community. All of that happened because of years of demonstrating that we could innovate and deliver on the promises that we had made.
That’s close for us we had to go through an even more difficult process because just about every security officer at every company revolted over the idea of putting customer data in a “website”. A website was not thought of as something that businesses used but rather a place where media showed news stories and where low priced items were beginning to be sold by companies like Amazon. Salesforce took a number of years before people were comfortable with the fact that their security was sufficient and oftentimes better than the companies who are giving up their enterprise applications. Obviously your sales tools need to run consistently full-time otherwise it will stand in the way of your sales so we needed to demonstrate that we could run consistently in order to be trusted.
The video industry is one of the largest in the entire world. There are many different players with lots of different expectations.
We are doing something in the video market that no one has ever done before. I was the co-founder and second-largest shareholder at Salesforce.Com for the first 6 1/2 years. I gave up my job at CNET to spin for naff years helping to get Salesforce.Com off the ground. It took some time for customers to trust putting their data into a website. Security people in companies shut down acceptance of the model making it very difficult to get going. We had to earn trust in our model. When that happened we were on our way to creating the hundred and 160 billion $ company Salesforce. is now.
This situation is no different because we have to convince companies that we can reliably and consistently perform our video operations. Nobody is going to immediately unhook their AWS business process just because we happen to have launched. People need to learn the product and develop trust in the VideoCoin Network but the fact remains this is one of the largest industries on planet earth and it is growing very quickly roughly 25% per year.
Lastly and importantly no other competitor is using computing capacity that is drawn from computers and servers that are otherwise doing no useful work.
Wolf Crypto: As we discussed in the earlier part of the AMA, you don’t really consider yourself to have any competitors in the crypto space, however, I have to ask about what I’d consider being a competitor of yours, Theta…
Kellam Ames: I think you need to point out that their business model is to pay people to watch videos and pay content providers for the content. While these announcements may temporarily drive FOMO they are certainly not sustainable.
Look.,..it’s simple. We don’t see them as competitors. To be blunt, these crypto projects have spent millions in marketing to keep crypto followers foaming and excited. Our focus has been building enterprise-grade software to tap into the $127T real-world economy that uses dollars, EUROS, and YUAN to pay for services.
These projects entire tokenomics are built on the flawed logic that requires the customer to use the token as payment — with many having 2- 6 Billion Inflationary Token Supply (vs our 265m). Much like Bitcoin, altcoins are never EVER going to be used as payment — and thus tokens requiring their use will never achieve mass adoption. It just doesn’t work for the reasons I shared above.
When a project’s entire tokenomics are predicated and built that you MUST use their tokens for economics, now you are trapped. Now you have built a poison pill. Failing to convince the real world to use their token instead of fiat money, it’s too late for them to try and re-engineer their entire tokenomic model. It would destroy the whole house of cards if they suddenly stripped out the token as payment. It would collapse their entire ecosystem full stop.
VideoCoin Network alone, by engaging enterprise-grade customers in the video/media world, could bring in millions of new users to the crypto space. Our differentiator is this: We use the benefits of the blockchain for low cost algorithmic compute and processing, and the ease and familiarity of fiat currency to remove the barriers to enterprise companies.
