Gordon Gao, WaykiChain CEO
Thank you all for attending this conference. I am very glad to be here and share with you some information about our project-WaykiChain. Allow me to introduce myself first. I graduated from Columbia University in New York and worked for a big-data consulting company for two years as a lead data scientist. After that I came back to China and worked for Alibaba as a business analysis expert. I joined Waykichain at the beginning of this year and started my career in blockchain industry.
For me, Waykichain is like my child and I can tell 100 good things about him. However, we need someone who agree with me and spread this to more people and let them know a good blockchain project from China. I think this is why we are here to hold this meeting. I will try my best to let you know more about us and thank you for your time and hard work.
Sisi collected some questions from you and I will make it as the guideline for today’s introduction.
1. What does WaykiChain mainly focus and what’s its competitiveness compared to other projects?
Waykichain is a 3rd generation public chain with DPoS consensus mechanism. Our transaction speed can reach over 1000 tps. We are working hard to provide decentralized solutions with this chain to solve existing problems in online betting industry, assets and foreign currency exchange industry. We are going to achieve these step by step and the first one we focus on is online betting industry. We have launched our WaykiBet (Download WaykiBet at https://www.waykichain.com/) days ago and the one you are using is a public test version. We are planning to make it open source and make it to be a template. Moreover, we are developing some blockchain games and will make them open source either. Any 3rd-party or even individuals can take it and run it. We won’t run it by ourselves because of the limitation of Chinese law.
You may have heard some EOS based betting games like EOS bet or bet dice. And I saw you are curious about what’s our competitiveness and how we are different from other public chains like ETH or EOS.
The first one would be the low entry barrier to our eco-system. For developers or Dapp operators they do not need to develop from the chain directly, instead, they only need to develop from the template we published. Even if you are not able to find a team of developers who understand blockchain, you can still deploy the Dapp and run it to make profit. And Waykichain will benefit from all transactions happened since you made this chain active.
The second advantage is the product it-self. Our product is user-friendly to those who do not understand crypto-currency or blockchain technology. We have to admit that the majority of current betting Dapp’s entry barrier is very high to users who live out of the crypto circle. People will get confused with the terms like private key, gas, transaction fee, and the price fluctuation of crypto currencies. Also users need to suffer from the low calculation speed of smart contract and the delay due to the interval time between blocks.
In WaykiBet, we initiate a stablecoin using the mechanism like BitShare. The Dapp runners or some acceptance dealer need to pledge some WICC to the smart contract and get stablecoin. By doing this, users can directly buy the stable coin in the Dapp with their fiat money, instead of going to the crypto exchange.
Also, we designed a mix of centralized and de-centralized technical structure. By doing this, we do not need the users to pay for the gas but the smart contract owner. Moreover, the performance of the entire system can be improved without losing the public creditability. Because some of the calculation can be done at the centralized server and the result will be recorded on smart contract to trigger the transaction. The whole process can be verified and tracked. Theoretically, this mixed-structure can afford more parrelled transactions at the same time than all other decentralized system.
2. What are marketing goals and timeline for WaykiChain’s overseas promotion?
Actually we do not have a concrete timeline for the overseas promotion. To be honest, it is really hard to make any prediction in a market that we are not familiar with, especially in this bear market. Previously, we focus only on Chinese market, but I realized we have to be global , because our users are located all over the world, our investors are located all around the world and most importantly, our competitors are located all around the world.
I think this is a good time to launch our overseas promotion. At first, in this bear market, people will focus on tokens which can really bring some value to the society, not the tokens which is useless but good at attracting attentions.
Secondly, the price of crypto will have a larger probability to go up so this may be a better time to hear about and invest in Waykichain at the first time than several month ago. People tends to believe in you if you didn’t make them lose money.
We will try what we can do to spread our ideas and will do this by trail and error. We are in negotiation with some first-tier overseas exchanges and if all things goes well, we can be listed in some of them at the beginning of next year. We will do more promotion at that time.
3. What is the vision for the European and US market?
The vision will be the same across the world. At first we need to make blockchain prediction or blockchain betting predominant. To achieve this, we need some people to use and run our product and get as much users as they can.
4. Does WaykiChain has any plans to introduce a web-app?
Of course we do. We will need a web-wallet, which we do not have so far, to introduce a web-app. We are planning to let our community develop this plug-in. This is on our schedule, but I cannot tell what the exact time will be. Before that, we can still launch a web-app but will need your smartphone to authorize the signature.
5. What advice would you offer to upcoming blockchain entrepreneurs in this bear market?
I would say this is a good time to enter this market since you have less noise around. Never give up and keep faith in what you are doing. Focus on one or two major business which can make money in the near future. Respect the market and try not to go against it.
6. What do you feel has been your secret to rising as one of the top coins?
Our team. I love my team and am always proud of them. All the team members are ambitious and have great expertise. We have experts from very good companies such as Morgan Stanley, Intel, Alibaba, Tencent. I feel lucky to work with these guys.
Another secret would be the industry we selected. The betting industry is growing with high speed these years and blockchain technology is very suitable to solve the current painpoints of this industry. And most importantly, the betting Dapp is easy to get users and make profit. This will shorten your financial cycle and make the team easy to survive, especially in this bear market.
7. What’s your outlook on the future of this market?
Blockchian has bright future and can infiltrate to every part of people’s life. Although I cannot tell you how exactly that will happen, the day will still come. I believe the next bullish market will be triggered by some killer-level Dapp, and I hope Waykichain’s product will be one of them.
INTERVIEW SECTION
Marius: In terms of your marketing or PR strategy, the most important factor is how WaykiChain is better than Augur, which I think is the closest competitor right now? I think it can make media big splash with cryptocurrency investors if you can list your advantages. Augur has a betting volume of 1.3 m USD, how much is your betting volume in USD?
We just launched the newest version product recently. We are going to make it an open source and make other third parties run that, because it’s not allowed to run it by ourselves according to Chinese legislation. We are still under the process. Maybe after we fix the code open source, we can get some trading volume. I can show you some data of our DApp during the World Cup this year. It’s the previous version and we made it a betting game. We had daily active users at 10,000.
Marius: Augur has 50 daily active users now. Do you have your dapp data now?
The current version is just a public test version with 100–200 daily active users.
Marius: If you can beat Augur, you can get a lot of attention.
True. But we are not regarding Augur as our biggest competitor. We are competing with the traditional online betting platform because there are more users there.
Marius: did you raise money from ICO? What kind of investment did you get?
We did ICO, 30 million USD this year in Jan. We cashed out at the begining of 2018.
How big is your team?
Our team consists of 70 creative and passionate people. To get more users and volume, that’s our goal and strategy next year.
Brian：In terms of marketing, what strategy are you going to use?
First of all, we will keep improving our product and user experience in order to compete with other competitors. I will invest more in our technology and product team to make this happen. We also need to increase the diversification of games, like dice games, black Jack, Texas Poker sth, sports betting like that. Now we have football and basketball available on our Dapp, we need to add rugby, golf, space ball etc. more types of sport games.
Secondly, we need to go overseas. We established the department and we need to do more marketing globally. We have a very huge community size in China. But WaykiChain is less well-known in other countries. So we want to strengthen the product awareness.
Thirdly, we want to find operators or product runners to run our Dapp. As I said before, it’s not allowed to run it by ourselves. We are allowed to develop it but we should make it an open source. So we’ll cooperate with other third parties to help them operate the Dapp and get users as many as they can.
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