KuCoin AMA With Verasity (VRA) — An Open Ledger Ecosystem Designed to Fight Fraud in the Advertising Industry

2023/05/04 08:20:14

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: April 28, 2023, 14:00 - 15:21 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the CMO of Verasity, Elliot, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Official Website: https://verasity.io/

Whitepaper: Click to view

Follow Verasity on Telegram and Twitter.

Guest

Elliot — CMO of Verasity

Elliot Hill, CMO at Verasity. Former Head of Communications at Occam Finance, a DeFi ecosystem and launchpad designed for the Cardano ecosystem, and Communications & Engagement Manager at The Cardano Foundation - the Swiss Non-profit dedicated to the Cardano blockchain. Elliot designs and executes blockchain, finance, and fintech communications strategies for complex and diverse audiences, spanning enterprises, governments, institutions, and developers.

Q&A from KuCoin

Q: Tell us about Verasity. How did the idea for Verasity come about?

Elliot: Verasity is an open ledger ecosystem designed to fight fraud in the advertising industry. We launched in 2017 through an ICO, and we've been busy building out our infrastructure and components in the years following - including our patented Proof of View module.

Our team comprises almost 50 people. Also, please meet our executive team.

The VRA token, used for funding advertising campaigns, staking through VeraWallet, and distributing Watch & Earn rewards, is central to the Verasity ecosystem as a single utility token with a whole host of applications. During this quarter (Q2 2023), we have plans to launch a brand new website and welcome the first users of the VeraCard, which we'll talk about later in the AMA.

Q: What is "Proof-Of-View," and how does Verasity utilize this technology VeraViews, its blockchain-powered advertising solution?

Elliot: Proof of View, or 'PoV,' is Verasity's patented ad fraud detection module that prevents fraudulent views from being recorded during an ad campaign.

Proof of View technology ensures that ads delivered through video players with a PoV integration are served to real viewers like you and me. It does this by using a combination of blockchain and 13 other modules, including artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), to determine real viewers of ads.

Proof of View then stores this data on-chain, on our purpose-built VeraChain technology, to let advertisers and publishers audit their campaigns.

Q: Can you tell us about the VeraCard?

Elliot: The Verasity token, VRA, will soon be supported on the DAMEX payments app based in Europe. This is in preparation for the first rollout of the VeraCard, which will allow users to spend their VRA in real life through a physical card.

Verasity will be one of the first altcoins listed on DAMEX and the first token to have its own branded card. With the VeraCard, Verasity community members can pay in stores and online using GBP in just a few taps by loading VRA into the DAMEX app. This is going to be particularly useful for community members who are currently making use of our 15% staking rewards at www.verawallet.io.

VeraCard registrations are already open for UK residents, and we're going to roll out the VeraCard to other jurisdictions in Europe later in the year. We've got some news for UK residents about their card orders coming in the next few weeks!

Q: Where do you see the intersection of advertising and blockchain technology within the next three years? How does Verasity envision leveraging blockchain for the prevention of fraud in advertising?

Elliot: We first need to explore why advertising in its current form is broken and how big this market is.

VeraViews mainly operates for the Video programmatic ecosystem. Video programmatic advertising uses automated systems and algorithms to buy and sell ad inventory for video content. It allows advertisers to target specific audiences and optimize their real-time ad placements. However, video programmatic advertising is rife with fraud. This costs advertisers around >$80bn annually in lost campaign budgets.

Video programmatic advertising is vulnerable to various types of fraud, including domain spoofing, bot traffic, and ad stacking. This results in around 1 in 3 adverts being seen by bots and fake views, which is 73% more bots than other forms of advertising,

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) reported that programmatic ad buying was associated with 17% more fraud incidents than traditional ad buying methods. This is projected to grow into a $100bn problem by 2025. So it's a huge addressable market for VeraViews.

This money, unfortunately, is stolen by criminal gangs who often operate out of countries that turn a blind eye to fraud. Much of these funds fund other criminal activities, such as drugs, trafficking, and cybercrime, so solving ad fraud Verasity can make the world a better place.

Blockchain, specifically VeraViews, could help reduce this fraud by creating a transparent and immutable record of all transactions in the ad buying and selling process. This can help identify fraudulent activities and increase accountability among all parties involved. We would finally bring data transparency to the black-box advertising ecosystem.

Q: What is the team's vision for VRA? Where do they see the project heading, and what are their long-term goals and aspirations?

Elliot: The VRA token is the glue that holds our ecosystem together. It's a utility and ecosystem token that powers our solutions and technology stack.

VRA is primarily used within the VeraViews advertising stack for funding ad campaigns, within the VeraWallet, and as the basis for VeraWallet staking. In VeraViews, VRA from the circulating supply must be bought and deposited into escrow pools, which fund ad campaigns as they run on our platform.

VRA is deflationary and burned using revenues. We recently burned over 70 million tokens in Q1 2023 and will continue to burn tokens as we generate revenue.

Q: Can you provide insights on Verasity's roadmap and plans for future development and expansion in the advertising industry?

Elliot: Our major updates for this coming quarter will include a newly updated website for which will bring our marketing presence up to date with the rest of the industry.

For VeraViews specifically, we have several backend updates, which can be found in our roadmap at www.verasity.io/roadmap. Also, we have several major upcoming events this year. The first will be at the Cannes Lions Festival in France, where we will hold a networking event of almost 60 attendees.

2023 is the year we expand our adoption, as our products are already in live use with customers. So now, our focus is to build out our business development team and welcome new publishers to our advertising stack.

Q: How does Verasity plan to address scalability challenges for rolling out an advertising ecosystem to multiple publishers?

Elliot: So in terms of our scalability for VeraViews, this is something we have planned for since the beginning of our development.

We have our purpose-built sidechain for advertising campaign data storage called the VeraChain. We use this side chain to keep costs low, even though we are based on the Ethereum Blockchain. We can batch data from campaigns and send it to our side chain so it's transparent and accessible, and scalable for when hundreds of publishers use our solution.

The only other scalability consideration would be our team size. We are rapidly growing our sales and development teams to meet new demand, and we're also working on automating key features of VeraViews, such as new account creation and onboarding. You can read more about that in our latest roadmap update.

Q: Tell us about Verasity's approach to community growth and involvement.

Elliot: We're immensely proud of how much the Verasity community has grown, and we're consistently one of the top altcoins regarding social growth and community engagement worldwide.

We're now looking to reach new audiences and engage our community further with new channels. For example, we recently launched a new community-oriented YouTube called Verasity Community to share educational content. We also launched our Zealy (Crew3) community to fully engage our supporters and give back to our community for their engagement.

Over the coming months, we will launch even more social channels and look outside the traditional channels for where we can grow Verasity and ensure we stay ahead of the curve in crypto marketing and community growth.

Q: Can you share any insights on Verasity's partnerships and collaborations? How do these partnerships contribute to the overall success and growth of the project?

Elliot: Yes. Our principal partner is Brightcove, a video player ecosystem that allows publishers to serve video content to their website visitors through the Brightcove Web Player. Brightcove is a NASDAQ-listed company, and VeraViews is the first 3rd party ad stack to be integrated into the Brightcove Web Player, meaning any of Brightcove's 3,000 publishers could use VeraViews for their advertising campaign - and we're already life with Brightcove publishers right now who are using us to generate ad revenue.

We're also an Amazon Ads Partner, another similar ad marketplace where we can help publishers and advertisers prevent ad fraud across their campaigns. VeraViews also integrates ORACLE's Moat technology to enhance our ad stack for users and Hoopla Digital as an advertising demand partner.

We also partner with DAMEX for the VeraCard and Alphaday (a crypto dashboard) for sharing news with our users.

Free-Ask from KuCoin Community

Q: Do you have tutorial videos so we can get to know your project more clearly, or do you have a YouTube channel? Can you share it with us?

Elliot: We just released a new updated YouTube channel for Verasity, where we host all of our project information, video interviews and podcasts, AMAs, quarterly recaps, and tech deep dives.

Q: How does Verasity ensure the accuracy and validity of its Proof of View module?

Elliot: So Proof of View is only a single module in our advertising stack, dealing with identifying bots and recording this data on the chain. Our core unique selling point is that no other project can do this, as Verasity has patents for PoV in China, the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Eurasia.

However, PoV is deployed with 12 other modules to prevent fraud. These include AI modules and ML modules. In addition, we use the data collected by PoV during live advertising campaigns to train future AI models to detect and reject fraud.

So we constantly improve and seek patent protection for PoV. As a result, its accuracy is always improving.

Q: What does VeraViews offer to Its Publisher and Adviser?

Elliot: We offer transparency compared to pre-existing advertising stacks and invalid traffic prevention solutions. Simply put, we are the only advertising ecosystem where you can verify the performance of your advertising campaign on-chain, using open ledger (blockchain) technology.

This is a real step forward for advertisers and publishers, who currently have to rely on black-box solutions that make it difficult to prove the effectiveness of a campaign.

Q: I have seen that most crypto visa cards are not supported in Non-European countries. Does your visa card support non-European countries??

Elliot: Yes, with our partners, DAMEX, we have plans to launch VeraCard in other European jurisdictions and eventually other jurisdictions outside of Europe. This will not include the USA, as we do not offer any products to US residents, but it may include countries in East Asia.

Q: What did you do before? Have you met R J Mark in real life, and in your opinion, how long does VRA need to get full adoption?

Elliot: As many of our community know, I've worked in crypto for the last seven years, previously helping to lead communications at the Cardano Foundation. I've also worked with several other projects, including decentralized launchpads, digital asset banks, oracle providers, and more.

Yes, I have met R J Mark in real life. We meet as a team a few times a month in London for strategy meetings, and the business development team are all based in London and work together in person most of the week - even though we have team members worldwide, we always connect.

KuCoin Post AMA Activity — Verasity (VRA)

🎁 Participate in the Verasity AMA quiz now for a chance to win 1,713 VRA!

The form will remain open for five days from publishing this AMA recap.

Giveaway Section

KuCoin and Verasity have prepared a total of 342,500 VRA to give away to AMA participants.

1. Pre-AMA activity: 68,470 VRA

2. Free-ask section: 8,565 VRA

3. Flash mini-game: 68,470 VRA

4. Post-AMA quiz: 196,995 VRA

. . .

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