Thank you to everyone who joined AMA Blockelite x Gather on 29th October at 1 PM UTC I 8 PM UTC+7. Here is the recap for those who missed this AMA.
Our special guest today is Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather
Segment 1: Introduction about Gather and Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Hi everyone again, this is Ayhan Gungor, I’ve been working as the chief marketing officer of Gather Network for the past year. My experience spans across 18 years in sales & marketing; worked in roles such as a marketing manager, product manager in a multinational manufacturing company within the energy industry for long years. Joined the blockchain industry in 2017, and since then worked in another PoS/MN blockchain project for community management/technical support, business development, partnerships & cross marketing, as well as administrative matters
As for Gather, I’ll use an image and provide context
Gather is a platform that allows publishers to monetize without ads, provides businesses & developers to access affordable and reliable processing power
– Gather Online (Layer 0) allows web & mobile developers to monetize from their users processing power.
– Gather Network (Layer1) is the protocol layer, a hybrid proof of work and proof of stake blockchain, where stakeholders are incentivized to maintain transparency and security.
– Gather Cloud (Layer 2) provides affordable processing power to enterprises and developers.
Gather Enterprise provides consultancy services and tooling for developers, businesses and crypto networks.
I’ll try to walk you through different aspects of Gather throughout the AMA event. This is a brief information for now 🙂
Q2: Why does Gather need a blockchain? What solutions can Gather bring and will it be useful in the future?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: That’s a very good and important question, because our model really requires a blockchain for the specific purpose that we are trying to achieve. I’ll explain in parts
Gather Network will have its own mainnet to maintain a sustainable Proof of Work consensus, which will be only used by publishers (website and application owners) and will not be open to any external mining options. To make the web/app mining viable, this is needed and there is no other project using a similar model only for this purpose
Masternodes will also have an essential role and be used as the backbone for Gather Cloud for enterprises in terms of continuous processing power and storage input. Staking and Masternodes will allow further incentivization for maintaining the network and will provide passive income opportunities to the participants, as well as an e-governance system where all stakeholders can vote for the future of the coin.
So it’s a hybrid model which includes PoW + PoS + Masternodes.
Gather Cloud will also allow PoW blockchain developers to deploy blockchains ( Child chains Via Merged Mining ) without the need to source miners or build a community first.
Child-chains are forked off from the main Gather chain and they use the processing power that is available in the main Gather chain. With merged mining, Gather Online, allows mining multiple coins at the same time for better profitability.
Not only awesome, but it’s needed for the model we have designed 🙂
so everything is carefully designed and modeled – will provide further details in the coming questions
Q3: What are the Gather token (GTH) utilities? When will the Gather Mainnet launch?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: GTH’s value is derived from being as a medium of exchange within the ecosystem along with providing holders the opportunity to vote on the future of Gather. The specific features that use $GTH as a medium of exchange include:
1) Gas Fees and network interactions charges, settlement and processing power related charges for the Gather Cloud, and Settlement of Gather Online Rewards.
2) Providing a financial incentive to nodes to act honestly.
3) Entitling Staking holders with the right to participate in the governance and future of the Gather ecosystem
We target Gather mainnet go-live for the end of Q1 2021.
Testnet will be live by the end of 2020
Q4: How can website owners and businesses integrate Gather? Are there any requirements or barriers for those who do not know much about programming or blockchain?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Any website or application can integrate Gather Online easily. Integrating our core product is very easy and straightforward, it’s a line of javascript code for websites and an SDK for applications. These websites or applications do not have to be crypto-currency or blockchain sites, it can be a news/blog site, a streaming website or app, a mobile application, basically any option is viable.
Here’s a demo showing how to integrate to wordpress from our prototype testing period from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-QxqV7wgHs
So we have a Minimum Viable Product, the prototype is currently offline for further development to align with our mainnet goals (will be adjusted to mine GTH).
Q5: What is the market strategy of Gather to get mass adoption by millions of users or investors outside the crypto space?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: The core product, Gather Online, actually speaks for itself as it provides a profitable and enhanced user experience compared to digital ads. In addition to the campaigns we will organize, we believe the product will reach to a wider audience with the word-of-mouth effect. We are already having daily registrations to our early adopters program on our website (which is closed currently but we will contact these people when the program is back live).
Once we go live and the possibility to increase revenue is there, websites or applications will naturally contact us – they are already looking for ways about how to monetize their content everyday – this would only be a natural outcome in my opinion. Especially if we consider Gather Online can be used in addition to ads.
For the Gather Cloud side, we are building partnerships and we are onboarding new companies + developers via Gather Enterprise where we basically try to educate these audiences about the possible benefits of Gather. Currently we have a $4B+ revenue company on board testing Gather Cloud with us. To give some figures I’ll post an image:
Segment 2: 5 best questions from Twitter
Q1: What are the aspects considered by gather to monetizate a platform ? What exactly Gather does? Use publicity? Obtain revenues per clicks? For visits? @minh75548875
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Gather Online rewards website and application owners for the time spent instead of the number of ads displayed. In order to do this, when website or application owners integrate our code, it asks visitors for their explicit consent to use their processing power. Then this processing power is either used for mining or for affordable cloud computing for enterprises for computing specific applications.
The beauty of Gather Online is that the visitors can be rewarded via Gather’s loyalty program by the website/application owner and it actually rewards for the time spent on the website or application unlike the number of ads displayed. With our integrated payout system, we close the bridge with non-crypto users as offering them local fiat currencies. Additionally the user experience for first time users (who would be first time crypto users) is seamless, a few clicks and the product is integrated into the website.
Blockelite Host: Support my website :))
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: You can join our Early Adopters Program on our website main page 🙂
Blockelite Host: I thought you told it to end?
And your project will contact people who join program
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: The testing is closed now – but we accept registrations for some more time. We will announce some new changes in the upcoming days regarding how we will proceed with registrations in the new term.
Q2: It is well known that many streaming services can limit their creators with respect to the content they offer or the countries where it will be broadcast. Could Gather Network be that alternative for content creators who want to have fewer constraints and reach more people? @Butterf41785966
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Definitely! We are here to democratize the internet – eliminate the dependency on fixed rates decided by the industry giants. Censorship and privacy are very important topics for us that we try to address. Imagine you’re a YouTuber, you get your revenue from YouTube but they decide to censor your blockchain content (like they do) – that’s not fair. You should be able to stream your content and earn yourself with solutions like Gather without depending on other entities.
That said, I’ll also share another perspective here for streaming sites. Based on our observations during the prototype testing, Gather Online is 1.4x profitable compared to existing ad rates, therefore with better profitability streaming sites can choose to go ad-free with our solution. There are additional incentives as well – Netflix, Hulu etc all charge you per month. – If they used Gather – they could potentially stop charging you per month. I know that 10 bucks isn’t much. But think about kids in rural countries where all they have is a smart phone for example and their monthly earnings wont be more than 100 or 200 bucks – Such an audience should not be left out just because they cannot pay directly.
Blockelite Host: On youtube, you can be turned off monetization 🙂
Nobody wants that to happen
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Many crypto content providers had an issue lately, we all witness it.
Q3: Gather provides a web-based Cryptocurrency miner that utilizes user’s CPU and GPU power. So my question is that do we need high-end processor or normal CPU will also work for minning? Do we get incentives for minning? @MuLan85522129
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: No, you don’t need high end hardware, however, the used power scales with the idle processing capacity. Gather’s blockchain will only be mined by visitors/users of websites and applications as I mentioned earlier. There will be no external mining with rigs or ASICs allowed so that visitors’ processing power actually be significant even it could be low compared to these. To make the web/app mining viable, low processing power is required, and this will be maintained as observed earlier in our prototype testing process. Gather Online will be using a very small percentage of the “idle” processing power, without causing any issues to the respective device. Contributors are incentivized by Gather Loyalty program, where the website/app owner can decide to activate to share a percentage of the revenue they will generate with their visitors.
Q4: The market model chosen by the Gather Network is unusual…
How does the Gather Network benefit from the negotiation process between publishers and developers?
Who are responsible for rewarding participants? @RogerZamoraZ
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Depending on the market rates and supply/demand, there will be automated price matching. What I mean is Gather Cloud will not be 100% decentralized in the beginning but will go decentralized over time so from an enterprise perspective which will use Gather Cloud for use case specific applications, there will be no direct bidding. This will be agreed between Gather Enterprise and other businesses based on the nature of the application. Since the enterprise business payments will be used for buyback and burn, it directly affects the publisher earnings in GTH. To understand more about supply/demand mechanics, please read about our token economy model here (which can be found in our website documentation page as well): https://gather.network/docs/Gather_Token_Economy.pdf
Q5: Advertising is the segment that generates the most revenue for websites. How will their revenue change when they switch to Gather Network? If the profits decrease, what reason would they change? @LittleB86811964
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Gather Online can be used without ads or “in addition” to ads so from website/app owner perspective there is nothing to lose by adding Gather. If they want ad-free non-disturbing content, they can drop the ads and continue with Gather. When compared to existing advertising rates, Gather Online provides x1.4 better profitability based on the observations on our MVP testing period. Consequently, adding Gather Online to the sites will allow publishers to earn at least x2 of their current revenue or will let them go ad-free for a better user experience. These numbers are subject to change based on number of sessions, session lengths, coin prices and total network usage utilization.
Segment 3: Live questions.
1. Could you please tell me just a little more about the Gather team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced team members, and some of those didn’t go so well due to easily avoidable mistakes.
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Allow me to provide some information about the team because I actually believe everyone in the team has very good and relevant backgrounds, covering all the functions needed in a company. I’ll share profiles as a picture below.
Our team and advisors include high profile executives experienced in their fields, with deep roots to the blockchain ecosystem who took active places in launches of the well known projects, such as:
– Viacheslav Shybaiev, ex-senior level executive of Opera ($370 Million web browser) / Status ($SNT), 20+ years of experience in design, development and support of IT and mobile solutions
– Narendra Nag, ex-director of Publicis ($18 Billion marketing firm), 20+ years of experience in Marketing & Communications
– And many others with an average 10+ years experience working with big companies such as NCR, KPMG, NOV, MSLgroup and Nexans.
2. How does it work to know about how to use and spend our $GTH with an ePay card? thanks.
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: PolisPay integration is an important partnership I value. I know their team for a long time, absolutely great team.
Polispay allows the use of debit cards and gift cards via your currency, in our case GTH.
In the coming days, PolisPay app integration will be complete for Gather.
In this blog post, we guide you through how to use and spend your $GTH with ePay cards, gift cards including video tutorials with the other useful features of PolisPay wallet for Gather.
We will also plan a webinar very soon to inform community more about this topic.
3. What is the team’s orientation and development plan for 2020 in the Defi region, why do you think Defi, this immature term, has a future? What results do you expect to achieve?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: First of all, we should underline Gather is not a DeFi project.
In the means of DeFi, Gather already has passive income elements such as web wallet staking or masternodes. However, our product adds another dimension to the existing DeFi websites and applications, by adding an option to reward users for using these websites and applications. So, with Gather Online you can actually earn more tokens while using DeFi websites and applications so it’s a complete new approach.
I suggest everyone to have a read on these articles to understand how Gather can be the missing piece in the DeFi puzzle and how Gather can create competitive advantage for DeFi platforms:
1) https://thedailychain.com/gather-the-missing-link-of-defi/
2) https://bit.ly/Gather_Ferrum
3) https://bit.ly/Gather_Decentr
4. Gather is a platform that allows publishers to make money without ads, How does Gather generate revenue?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: Gather generates revenue from all layers of the network, which includes publishers/websites/applications at the start and enterprises using gather cloud at the top. Gather will charge a commission to websites/publishers/applications using the Gather technology. The processing power generated from the websites, is then redirected to child chains through merge mining and/or enterprises on gather cloud.
Hash rate leased out to child chains to increase their security will be lower than market price. Enterprises that are using Gather cloud will also be charged at a discount to market rate (determined by google/AWS rates) for the processing power used by them. The majority of this revenue will be redistributed back to the publishers with Gather keeping a small portion as the commission, and thus keeping profit linked directly to growth of the network. This creates a positive feedback loop where increased publishers using Gather online means more processing power can be redistributed through Gather cloud which in turn increases the revenue of Gather online users, attracting more customers to gather online leading to more processing power and so on.
5. What your long-term vision of the industry Gather in works? Are you afraid that someday another project with better and more innovative technology will replace Gather?
Ayhan Gungor – Chief Marketing Officer of Gather: We would like to see Gather being a household name, less ads all around and our technology being adopted by many. For specifics, and as per our mixed method growth model ( based on top down and bottom ) we predict 2B sessions in a year, and over 130 child chains. Note we do not say websites, as the relevant metric is sessions/visits. However these numbers can change.
There is no direct competition in the sense of what we are building as a single marketplace based platform connecting publishers with enterprises & developers.
There are of course variations of the individual parts of the Gather network visible in other projects. For example Golem is a marketplace for processing power but requires user download and maintenance and large user input. Brave offers monetization but requires their browser to be used while Gather is browser/application agnostic.
With the modifications we have made to incorporate these individual parts into our platform to operate in a complementary manner, we dont believe there’s any project that is able to offer what Gather does as a complete package at this time. We are not afraid whether any competition can replace us as we have a competent team with a clear execution strategy.
Thank you very much for hosting Gather here today and for the amazing questions.
For any further question, please follow Gather Network social accounts below and join them. We’d be happy to reply 🙂
Have a great day everyone!
Our AMA session is now over !!!
More information about Gather
Website: https://www.gather.network/
Telegram: https://t.me/GatherNetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gather_Network
