"The set of mechanics is endless": Alexandra Pestretsova on working with blockchain

Why is blockchain not a soap bubble? Is it even for a long time? How difficult is it to figure it out? How much will it change the market? Waves Marketing Director Alexandra Pestretsova answers these questions.

Alexandra was interviewed at the White Nights Conference Moscow 2017 by Alexey Pisarevsky, CEO of Getloyal, as part of the Mobio Talks program.

Alexey Pisarevsky, CEO of Getloyal: You have a big background in the gaming industry, in marketing. Recently, you’ve been working with YouTubers, bloggers, and quite successfully. How did it happen that you gave it all up and came to blockchain and Waves?

Alexandra Pestretsova, Waves Marketing Director: You’re provoking me to some revelations about YouTubers right now. The YouTuber market is wildly interesting, fast-growing. In general, video content is the future of all content on the Internet. But at the same time, it is very difficult to make some kind of big monetization story out of this, since serious players are needed in this market, we need the arrival, for example, of Google itself, as the organizer of a certain business structure for youtubers and bloggers, who will organize them, set working conditions, correctly calculate the result and connect them with a potential employer.

Do you think Google itself will eventually do this, or someone else?

Alexandra: Google bought FameBit. FameBit is the largest platform like Uber for YouTubers. On the one hand, the employer connects and he places a certain offer on the YouTuber exchange, and on the other hand, YouTubers who see this offer are sitting, they are already making content on it and receiving monetary remuneration. Everything is coming to this. In Russia, as far as I know, Yoola and GetBlogger are being promoted very much now.

Are there many different agencies?

Alexandra: As far as I know, agencies are also making platforms that will scale the whole story. The agency’s problem is that you can’t cover ten thousand YouTubers and tens of thousands of requests from advertisers manually. This needs to be automated. Therefore, everyone is now moving towards the development of such platforms that are able to select, sort and rank YouTubers. Let’s say there are shooters in the same gaming industry, there is Minecraft and there is Candy Crush. For all these three games, you need a completely different audience on YouTube. And you won’t log into the same YouTubers with three different games.

There are a huge number of bloggers. There are those who survey the entire gaming market, and there are those who survey a particular niche. Youtubers were the best application of my marketing abilities, so I fell headlong into it. I worked there for a year, I realized that it’s all very interesting, but it’s hard: it’s hard to scale, plus the lack of agreements with YouTubers, the lack of a normal market, the lack of clear efficiency tracking. It is difficult for me to take responsibility for the money I take from investors. And I told myself that no, I probably am not ready to raise my company and do this, since this is still an immature story.

Blockchain is a topic at a higher level. And I also understood it up to some point very mediocre, just reading the news. But then significant events happened for me, several high-level people called me. I didn’t get out of reading about blockchain. And then I realized that blockchain as a technology is really a new Internet, I can’t say otherwise, although I don’t want to sound pretentious.

Are the technologies similar? If gaming developers switch to blockchain, do they need to study cryptography?

ALEXANDRA:There is a front-end and a back-end. At the front-end, you need to understand your main specialization, and now, as far as I understand, the most popular frontenders in the blockchain are Java script servers. Of course, it will take a couple of months to study the basic basics of cryptography. But there is no rocket science in this.

Do you think it’s not just a hype? There was a hype around VR, around chatbots. But it has not yet become widespread. Now there is such a hype around the blockchain. Where is it all going?

Alexandra: Hype happens at the beginning of any innovation. Of course, hype is largely due to the fact that the companies themselves, who consider innovation to be innovation, are trying to attract the attention of the market.

Blockchain…

There are a lot of significant events in the market that have occurred only this year. They say that the blockchain is not just going nowhere, but it is already beginning to penetrate our lives strongly.

For example, in April, bitcoin was legalized in Japan. Bitcoin acceptance at the state level is happening very often now. More recently, Dubai announced that it is releasing its own cryptocurrency. That is, in fact, Dubai is releasing a certain measure of value, which will no longer be just money, not just paper carriers of values, but a kind of digital value, which will become an independent unit in the Dubai economy, and will support government institutions, hospitals, kindergartens, and everything in the world.

There is news that several top Chinese banks, including American banks, are merging and creating their own blockchain platform for synchronizing digital assets and exchanging assets among themselves. That is, conglomerates of banks that exchange data with each other and transfer their databases to the blockchain are starting to emerge.

What do you think about the ICO, which is now taking place massively, about which everyone is talking? Do you agree that most companies simply don’t represent anything?

Alexandra: I want to direct everything in the right, constructive direction. It is clear that in any Wild West, in the absence of rules, lawlessness is happening. Without regulatory legislation, there will be a lot of companies that are not serious about their obligations, declare some intentions, raise money, but then release products unsuccessfully or do not release at all. Yes, there are projects that take advantage of this and cheat.

Let’s just say – you need to look above this foam. Innovation lies in what is called tokenization in our market. This is not just the issue of some securities for the money that you collect; it is the issue of tokens that you can tie into the economy. And you can provide these tokens not only with money. You can provide this token in games, for example, with the player’s time or his activity in the game, or the game currency. You can put a token on the market and tell the players: “The more you play, the more tokens you earn.” And then you start using these tokens inside the game as a means of exchanging values. You can sell things in the game for tokens or give benefits for tokens, or in esports, for example, allow players to participate in tournaments for tokens.

Is this something that could not be done without tokens, without blockchain?

ALEXANDRA:All loyalty programs and game currency are analogous to cash. The token is stored on the blockchain, you write to the database and transparently store all information about the transactions of this token. Also, these tokens begin to be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges in relation to other cryptocurrencies, in relation to the same bitcoin. A person who came into the game and earned some coins for himself can sell them for bitcoins and withdraw them into real money. It turns out that you are linking the economy with the real economy, with the economy of real money.

Burger King, for example, has created a cryptocurrency on our platform. It’s called voppercoins. You can come to Burger King, eat a burger, and for a check that you have eaten, for example, for 300 rubles, 300 voppercoins are automatically transferred to your cryptocurrency wallet. In fact, loyalty points. And you can get burgers again for these points.

Hypanuli is simple.

ALEXANDRA:But the interest is not in this, but in the fact that you can sell tokens for bitcoins.

OK. “Thank you” points from Sberbank are about the same, without any blockchain. Cashback? The same.

Alexandra: Once again, mechanics. You come to Burger King, eat burgers, earn coins and then withdraw them into real money. Cashback is a special case. Here you can wrap the cryptocurrency, this token, as you like for the work of your business. You can make loyalty programs, you can use tokens to distribute to users so that they vote for some decisions in your product, you can collect crowdfunding. The set of mechanics is endless. The fact is that this is a kind of unit of values that you integrate into the economy and link with the economy from the real world.

Do I understand correctly that there are quite a lot of platforms like Waves? But at the same time, Waves, at least by capitalization, is included in the top 20 tokens. What makes you different from others?

ALEXANDRA:Firstly, there are not very many such platforms, few people have their own blockchain. As a rule, all platforms are centralized, these are servers that stand somewhere and are hosted, and platforms have the ability to trade cryptocurrencies or open wallets, or have some other functionality. But all the data is stored on the server of the company that develops this platform.

Our platform is decentralized, we have our own blockchain, to which all data from the platform is recorded. It is absolutely transparent, it is open source. The wallet that you start on our platform allows everyone to see your transactions. The information on the tokens that you will issue on our platform is visible to everyone, it is open and transparent.

And we position ourselves as a decentralized solution for everyone. This is the first. The second thing we are working on is mass adoption. The task is to make the platform as transparent and understandable as possible for the mass market. Now the tools that are understandable to the average user are just beginning to appear, there are still very few of them. And our main task is to make a platform that will not differ in any way from a bank, from PayPal, from Yandex.Money, from Forex, from Kickstarter, with a clear and transparent interface in which you can go and do anything in two clicks.

This was the main manifesto of Sasha Ivanov, the founder, who in 2016 collected investments for this product. At that time, it was the third ICO that took place in the world.

We are in the Top 15 because our course is determined by our actions. Every month we release updates to the market, transform the platform, we have new partnerships with large and pro-government structures and businesses, and technological partners, and with legal organizations. In fact, we act as one of the leaders who organizes this market around themselves.

The capitalization of the Waves token or the Waves company is now about half a billion dollars?

Alexandra: Yes. But this is not the limit.

As a person who is not in the market, I look at it all and think: “There is nothing behind these numbers, behind such large ones. It can’t all cost that much.” Why is that?Alexandra: “That’s all” – what exactly is it?

The word “bubble”, it suggests itself. Will it all fall down? The course of the cue ball.

Alexandra: You just need to realize the full scale of the technology, and then it will be clear where so much money comes from in this market and where it came from. In fact, the current bitcoin exchange rate is the rate of people’s trust in bitcoin. As soon as bitcoin was introduced into regulatory legislation in Japan (they introduced some restrictions, that is, they recognized it as a means of payment, but with certain restrictions), the exchange rate of all cryptocurrencies increased by 2 times that month. The introduction of cryptocurrencies into the white legal field will have a positive impact on all courses.

The new Internet – pretentious words. But in terms of innovation, this is a technology that will change the attitude to the storage of information and to the processing of this information in the coming decades.

Three of the coolest projects on the blockchain.

Alexandra: As I have already said, there is now a consortium of banks that are starting to develop their platform on the blockchain for operating with information.

Of the current ICOs, the most famous are Filecoin, they have raised $250 million. This is cloud storage, storing data on ordinary people’s computers. You are creating a global public cloud that any computer can connect to, and which can store any data on itself.

We are now transferring all their digital assets to the blockchain with NSD (National Settlement Depository). It will be a system that stores banking data and trader data in a transparent decentralized form.

How can blockchain be used in the advertising industry?

Alexandra: The philosophy of blockchain is that you can store and process data in a decentralized and transparent way. Any database that requires this in the advertising industry can start operating on it. DSP platforms can start collecting all data about user behavior, putting it into a blockchain and giving advertisers access to this information transparently, openly, and quickly.

A small futuristic forecast from you for 5 years ahead. What will the world look like in 5 years?

ALEXANDRA:Everything will be fine! The attitude towards data storage and centralized systems will simply change. The token that you create gives you the opportunity to wrap it up for your own business, and then make your own digital money out of it. Each person becomes a carrier of their own currency. And the state needs to start treating this somehow.

Finally, a question that interests everyone. Buy or sell? Bits, I mean.

ALEXANDRA:Buy. Obviously.

Do you have a cue ball?

ALEXANDRA:Sure.

Waves tokens?

ALEXANDRA:Everything is there. I have several currencies: I store and trade. But honestly, I’m not a trader. I’m not trying to cash in on them somehow. I speak as an investor who believed in the technology itself, believed that this technology is at the very beginning of its development, and that in 5 years it will really be used everywhere in any business. Therefore, I am convinced that cryptocurrencies have a great future.

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