KuCoin AMA With Alkimi (ADS) — The World’s First Decentralized Ad Exchange

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: January 20, 2022, 11:00-12:17 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the Alkimi team in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Alkimi is a decentralized replacement to the inefficient legacy programmatic ad exchanges with the mission to restore the value exchange between advertisers, publishers and users.

Alkimi is powered by the Hypergraph – a revolutionary blockchain technology – trusted by the U.S. Department of Defense – which allows Alkimi to provide the fastest, infinitely scalable solution with 0% fraud, minimal transaction fees and complete end-to-end transparency.

Alkimi Exchange helps you create ad products, proven to be successful by walled gardens across the open web.

Official Website: https://alkimiexchange.com

White Paper: https://alkimiexchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Alkimi-Whitepaper.pdf

Follow Alkimi on Twitter and Telegram.

Guests:

Ben Putley — Alkimi CEO and Co-Founder

Ben has over 10 years of experience in digital advertising, predominantly focused on selling software to global publishers.

Ben led the new business function at The Fifth, News Corp’s influencer marketing agency, where he delivered £2m+ in influencer marketing campaigns with brands including Disney+, Heineken, LR Suntory, Unilever and Nestle.

Adam Chorley — Alkimi COO and Co-Founder

Adam has over 10 years of experience spent on the sell-side at start-ups and large legacy publishers.

Adam started his working life in ad operations before moving on to become a highly successful salesperson.

He was the Sales Director at SmartFrame technologies, a start-up helping image owners protect, track, present and monetize their images. His role was to build an entire advertising strategy, team and product from the ground up.

Before this, Adam was the Programmatic Director at Conde Nast, helping to bring new advertising technology and revenue streams to a global legacy publisher.

Q: What is Alkimi Exchange?

Ben: Alkimi is here to revolutionize the way users interact with advertising by bringing the best of DeFi to the world of digital advertising. Alkimi is completely interoperable with the legacy digital advertising market, which grew by +31% to reach $442 billion in 2021. Alkimi users to yield farm the internet, on their favorite sites and in their chosen browser.

We make the value exchange between publishers, advertisers and users equitable by building a decentralized and tokenized infrastructure, allowing all parties to transfer value trustlessly without the need for intermediaries like Google and Facebook.

At Alkimi, they believe in a few better ads to produce better outcomes for all participants in the value exchange of the open web.

Q: Why start with an ERC20 token?

Ben: Launching with an ERC-20 token allowed us to build endpoints and ensure interoperability of Alkimi Exchange with an existing technical infrastructure that supports the ways ads are traded online today.

We will be migrating to Constellation’s L_0 token when available in Q2 this year as their HyperGraph Transfer Protocol allows for instant feeless transactions. We are currently speaking to a number of websites that will be joining our Something for Nothing Program in Q2 this year; the program is made possible by the ability to host feeless and instant transactions.

Q: What is your roadmap and what stage are you at? Is the ad exchange done and ready to go live once you launch?

Adam: The L0 standard will give us far more functionality, which we will need in order to host an ad exchange on-chain. The ERC20 has allowed us to build out certain parts of the ecosystem, such as staking, rewards and our NFT.

We are in the first phase of our roadmap, which we laid out in the whitepaper. But we have also added way more stuff to it. We have now planned out a much bigger ecosystem than we originally planned. This is because as we have started building the state channel, more and more products have come from it. Chandru, our CTO, and his team of developers have been doing fortnightly sprints, releasing updates on a regular basis.

The larger parts of the product like the state channel and L0 token have been coming along really nicely and we are due to release those over the next two quarters. This will allow us to have a fully working product in the market later this year.

Q: Please explain the tokenomics in more detail - particularly the 1.5% fee, the tiers, bandwidth pool, the rewards/staking/lending, etc.

Adam: Our whole ethos is to make the buying, selling and viewing of ads online an equitable transaction. This means firstly paying publishers the money that advertisers spent, which doesn't happen right now, as 51% of the revenue is lost. Secondly, we want users to be rewarded for their engagement and for their data.

Our staking pools, in the first instance, allow users to stake and get rewards from the revenue generated on the exchange. But further down the line, we will directly reward users every time they see an advert.

The pools are split into the bandwidth and access pool. Advertisers and publishers will borrow from this pool and users will lend the tokens. The fees that the advertisers and publishers pay is then distributed amongst the pool.

This means we will be buying back tokens with fiat paid by our clients for using our exchange.

Q: Can you explain the thinking behind the AlEx NFT collection? Where can you see this going in the future?

Ben: We were also recently listed on Rarity Tools - https://rarity.tools/alexthealkimist

Adam: Alex is the latest member of the team, he's a great guy and we hope you can all meet him in the future. Originally he was a reward for joining our staking pool. Any user that staked 10K ADS could pull an AlEx NFT. The top one had a reward of 40k ADS for a 12-month stake.

In the future, we will migrate these to an L0 NFT standard that we are helping create right now. This will open up a wide range of functionality to users, allowing us to create a surf-to-earn model in our ecosystem.

Q: What is generative economics?

Ben: Generative economics is a system whereby collaboration breeds better results as all market participants are required to be additive before they are able to extract value from a marketplace. Essentially, "the rising tide raises all ships".

In the context of Alkimi Exchange, users choose which data to surface about their surfing habits, the $ADS token allows this data to be traded by websites and advertisers, and in return, the user is rewarded.

We are essentially tokenizing one of the largest data economies and using the trading of that data to reward internet users, websites and advertisers for buying, selling and seeing an ad.

That ad might be a digital billboard or a billboard in the metaverse for example.

Alkimi Exchange is able to support all existing marketing channels and future marketing channels. If you get your hands on our AlEx the Alkimist NFT, you can use that to play our NFT game. In which you'll see a space billboard, we are already speaking to advertisers about this unit as more and more people begin to spend more time in metaverses.

Q: Are you also building a dashboard similar to Google Ads or Facebook Ads to create your ads and keep track of the analytics?

Adam: Chandru is building a user dashboard at the moment. We will be doing a demo of it next month. In the meantime, we have a call next week in our channel with Chandru, where he'll be doing a deep dive into all the amazing development he and his team has done to date.

The dashboard will allow anyone to advertise on Alkimi Exchange.

Ben: You can join the call in the Telegram channel here - Alkimi_Exchange.

Q: How can you compete with Google and Facebook? They also control YouTube and Instagram accordingly. In order to compete with them, you would also need partners on other social media platforms. Could you please explain your vision for the future of the web and how you can restore the value exchange between advertisers, publishers and users?

Adam: We aim to beat Google and Facebook through user adoption. By rewarding users, we will create a completely different outcome for users of the open web.

Also, the duopoly of Google and Facebook are very much web2 companies. For them to pivot to a web3 world will be more difficult than just changing their name and logo. They need to fundamentally change the way they interact with their user base. Currently, Google and Facebook are being dragged through courts around the world for various privacy violations. They make billions of dollars every quarter through exploiting users. So they won't be able to change their business models to fit in with a web3 future.

We believe that we will win out over time by giving the people what they want—fewer, better ads.

Q: Is your project a community only for English-speaking countries or for users not of other languages?

Adam: We have a Spanish and Chinese channel as well. We are also looking for admins who speak any other languages. So please reach out to the admins in our English channel if you're interested.

Q: Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contract addresses and how can I buy them and what are the benefits?

Ben: We are available on KuCoin!

Q: What are your top 3 things for priorities in 2022? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?

Ben:

Launch Something for Nothing

Increase the utility of AlEx the Alkimist NFTs

Launch Alkimi Exchange

Q: The name Alkimi is really interesting! So how is Alkimi related to Chemistry? And who are the alchemists? Is Alkimi anyhow related to Fullmetal Alchemist?

Adam: Alkimists were famous for turning one thing into another through science. We want to change the dynamic of the open web, using catalysts such as using DLT and blockchain technology to bring about a different outcome for all participants. We started off with the idea of giving users "Something for Nothing," essentially turning their data into rewards or creating Alkimi!

Q: Most users are still not aware of blockchain and its related projects! So, how does your project platform create awareness about their project with non-crypto users too?

Ben: We do a lot of marketing with relevant industry titles. We are currently running adverts on exchangewire.com for the Something for Nothing program.

We also host a podcast with friends from the industry: https://rss.com/podcasts/wearealkimists

We also speak at events regularly; here's a recent panel from ATS London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKNZ52ynl4

Q: Are you planning to have a feature where users can stake their AlEx NFTs and gain rewards?

Adam: During December,we had an open staking program allowing users to get rewards of around 14%. The NFT was the reward for staking. Some users who got really lucky got a staking reward of 500%.

KuCoin and Alkimi have prepared a total of 9,000 ADS to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 275 ADS

2. AMA activity: 8,725 ADS

Activity 1 — Quiz: 6,750 ADS

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 1,350 ADS

Participation Rewards: 625 ADS

. . .

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