Hello, I have researched the ICO a little bit and I am a potential investor, but before I make an investment since this is an ICO and blockchain technology is pretty speculative thus far (I hope that is understandable) I have some questions.
What is your vision for the platform and the company, if possible, then please be specific about it.
Questions that might help with that:
- In which countries do you plan to operate in?
- How is the whole company system managed - from PR to technical team, blockchain development, security etc.?
- How will the company look like in 1 year? In 3 years? In 5 years? In 10 years?
- How big is the potential market for your product in the timelines mentioned above and how fast can your solution saturate it?
- Are there any backup plans if the blockchain technology changes or is being replaced entirely (for example: quantum computers and decryption of the hashes danger the privacy of the consumer data, how do you make it quantum resistant or modernize technology when needed)
- Why is Shopin going to make a breakthrough and what is it's edge compared to other companies?
Other questions:
- Is there any proof of pilot programs carried out? If yes, can they be sourced?
- Is the project open-sourced? If it is, can it be linked?
- Why is one of the teammebers, Abhishek Yermalla's LinkedIn link broken?
- Who is the star of your team, the one person that should carry your team the most and why?
This is all for now, if I have any more questions, then I will ask.
Thank you for your time.
EDIT: Extra questions:
What kind of technological solutions do you plan to use to get "million" or more transactions per second? How are they monetized and/or verified? How successful have they been? Are there any security concerns regarding the protol?
Also - is the token a security since it is sold in an ICO or does it not have a definition as of yet?
Our answers to your amazing questions. Thank you for your patience. the public presale is making us all work round the clock.
1.
Why do you think you can handle such a big project and how?Because Shopin is the world’s first decentralized shopper profile built on the blockchain and because we empower shoppers—for the first time ever— to control and own their historical purchase data across multiple retailers and then be rewarded in cryptocurrency when retailers use it to enhance the online shopping experience.
We are decentralizing shopper data to create a retail economy that incentivizes both shoppers and retailers to work together for the best and most rewarding retail experience possible. We are revitalizing the retail industry with a new economy of data to increase transactional conversions and enable a greater understanding of customers based on a full view of their purchase history, style, preferences, and pricing. Shopin is dedicated to reinventing retail shopping—online and in-store—in a way that respects and empowers consumers and retailers alike.
Execution is obviously key to any big project, and our core team consists of people with uniquely qualified expertise in their respective fields, from founding and scaling startups, to deep knowledge and contacts across the entire retail industry, to extensive experience with blockchain technology and engineering. Shopin’s engineering team includes the first and core engineers that architected the entire Priceline system from launch. When it comes to ingesting millions of SKUs, normalizing data, user profiles, and serving up the best recommendations in an ecommerce environment, the Shopin pedigree speaks for itself.
If you’re launching your own blockchain, how are you securing it, which consensus, and why do you think it’s the best solution and why not use some existing platform?We are launching our own blockchain because it's the only solution that offers a decentralized and secure data storage solution for our users that also includes the exchange of value using the Shopin Token. Since Shopin is building the most valuable contextual understanding of user and purchase data, it is vital that the user own and manage their data assets. These data assets cannot be stored using conventional methodologies such as the cloud, which can be hacked and is vulnerable to malicious intent. Blockchain technology enables attestablity to the first-party data that is being leveraged in our product recommendation and advertising model. We believe in full transparency and the safety of your data.
We are using the Ethereum blockchain, BigChainDB, iExec, Interledger, and Atomic swaps to create a Federated Permissioned Blockchain, which means that members are invited and voted in and out by existing members. In this case, the members that we refer to are retailers and brands who will host the nodes. As more retailers join the Federation, the stronger the security becomes as each node will increase the decentralization of the data and through manipulation of replication factor, and the increase in the number of nodes, each federated node in the Shopin Blockchain network will host a portion of data that is also encrypted.
Thus if even one node is attacked, the blockchain will not suffer any slowdown, downtime, or data loss. Using data permissioning and multi-sig wallet technologies, the shopper will be able to to grant access to the Shopin A.I., which will be fully decentralized. This means that no retailer will ever gain access to this very personal shopper data. Without the blockchain, it would have been very difficult to convince competing brands and retailers to share their purchase data. But decentralization and the Shopin A.I. ensure that no retailer can access any other retailer data, and that the shopper retains ownership of their data. Retailers will not be able to make copies of the data, and they will never have direct access to the shopper’s data.
Why did you choose Ethereum if you need a lot of transactions per second when there are better platforms out there such as NEO, Waves, OTUM?The primary reason for using the Ethereum Blockchain to generate our token was based on the industry standard ERC20 token, which lowers the barrier to listing on exchanges around the world. We can’t use existing platforms since they lack transaction speed. As a utility token for a mass consumer application, we needed to find a solution that would match Visa-grade transaction speeds. Ethereum currently peaks at 15 per-second and theoretically might eventually reach 10,000 per-second. Other platforms currently reach around 4,000 transactions per-second. In essence, no one was able to provide us with what our business model required. The reason we selected Ethereum over, for example EOS (Block.one), is that Ethereum has 60 times more developers, which creates a very healthy, vibrant, and fluid environment for the platform.
2.
Hello, I have researched the ICO a little bit and I am a potential investor. But before I make an investment since this is an ICO and blockchain technology is pretty speculative thus far, I have some questions. What is your vision for the platform and the company, if possible, please be specific.
Questions that might help with that: In which countries do you plan to operate?We recently established a Gibraltar entity that will enable Shopin to operate more safely within the legal framework of a country that is crypto-forward. Our HQ is based in Brooklyn, NY, where our more than 17 employees reside locally or work remotely from other cities. And we last week we established our South Korean entity: Shopin Korea.
How is the whole system managed – from PR to technical team, blockchain development, security, etc.We love being part of the crypto community and embracing transparency. Our initial funding comes from Neema Capital, Passport, Genesis Block, Deepfork Capital, Outbound Ventures, and SeedInvest.
We are a private company with more than 2,500 participants, 17 full-time employees, and more than 25 external developers. As any company in a hyper-growth stage, all of us wear multiple hats, literally, from janitor to CEO and vice versa. Our external partners for development are the data science team at Quantify who help us scale our ROI (they are like a Google, etc.), and Talentica has been amazing at helping us scale up our engineering team. We hire talented people with great energy, drive, and passion for what we are trying to accomplish at Shopin.
For PR, we work with the innovative teams at 8760 and Spark PR, in addition to consulting on a regular basis with select crypto experts around the world and our Strategic Advisors, who help us tremendously and bring a wide range or expertise to the table in the areas of startup growth, brand building, retail, blockchain, cloud computing, financial, ad tech, and the list goes on.
How will the company look in 1 year? In 3 years? In 5 years? In 10 years?The first year, we want to launch our solution by summer, according to our timeline. We’re focusing right now only on fashion retail and cosmetics. Just imagine how complex fashion is. A flare dress, for example, can come in so many different sizes and styles, and each item has a large amount of combinations that our A.I. needs to understand and recommend. So this is a gargantuan task. We don’t foresee ourselves moving in any other direction for the time being. But moving forward, we would like to eventually apply the Shopin model to food, home goods, electronics, etc. Our main goal right now is to make sure we see retailers use the Shopin Token, so they don’t have to go to Facebook or Google to advertise and can instead reward shoppers directly for their loyalty. As much as we would like to tell you our plans beyond this, it wouldn’t be prudent of us to reveal too much at this time. Plus we need to keep some of that to ourselves. ❤️
How big is the potential market for your product in the timelines mentioned above and how fast can your solution saturate it?The global apparel market alone is estimated at $3 trillion, which is 2% of the world’s GDP! Everyone in the world has to wear something, and ecommerce is incredibly well-received in Europe, Asia, North America, and the majority of countries. With something like 4.77 billion people worldwide using a mobile device of some sort, and that number easily mushrooming to 5 billion by 2019, we see vast potential in helping retailers who do not want to be commoditized and have their product featured on Amazon. There is tremendous potential for retailers to rebuild their relationship with their customers through a platform like Shopin and not have their products featured around their competitors. We believe strongly in the Shopin vision.
Are there any backup plans if the blockchain technology changes or is being replaced entirely (for example: quantum computers and decryption of the hashes danger to the privacy of the consumer data, how do you make it quantum resistant or modernize technology when needed?What a fantastic question, thanks for asking. Currently, there is one computer that comes close to quantum that costs $120 million, and you have to be on the waiting list to get fractional access to its computing power. There are already solutions that are quantum computer-proof, such as supersingular elliptic curve cryptography, which provides the security needed for future generations of blockchain implementations. Shopin’s CEO, Eran Eyal, recently spoke about this on our Telegram group. Like anything else, technology will evolve, and we will have to constantly evolve with those developments. We are excited about what the future brings and it will only get better. However, one thing will not change, and that’s the trend of decentralization and the fact that users deserve to own and control their own data. It’s your data and it should stay your data.
Why is Shopin going to make a breakthrough and what is its edge compared to other companies?We have the right team and the right technology stack, which is the first to provide both a fast and efficient value exchange, and scalable data storage on a single blockchain. We have a hit here because of the tremendous support from the community and the courting and interest from large companies around the world, from credit card processors, to mobile payment systems, to large electronic companies and fashion retailers. The future is looking bright.
Is there any proof of pilot programs carried out? If yes, can they be sourced?Shopin recently collaborated with two well-known fashion and home-goods retailers for a pilot program that produced groundbreaking results. Each retailer invited their registered customers to create a Shopin profile, resulting in 719,000 sign-ups. Based on personal shopper preferences and purchase data, Shopin was able to provide those registrants with curated recommendations, leading to a 22% lift in conversions, and yielding $14.7 million in additional sales. Of the shoppers who created a Shopin profile, 72,000 of them invited 65,000 additional new users to go through a Shopin onboarding. NDAs prohibit us from releasing full results.
Is the project open-sourced. If it is, can it be linked?Certain parts of our project are indeed based on open source software, and the Shopin technology stack is well publicized. Anyone can look at the code of the underlying technology stack on relevant open source git repositories. In good time, all appropriate open source code will be on Github and free to the community. The one thing we will not share is proprietary code that is vital to our business such as the business logic and our A.I.
Why is one of the team members LinkedIn link broken – Abhishek YermallaWe will look into this, thank you. But in truth, some of our team members don’t want to be social. We cannot force them to have a profile if they don’t want one. We have to respect their right to privacy if that’s their desire.
Who is the star of your team, the one person that should carry your team the most and why?We don’t like to think in terms of stars, per se. Each member of the team is equally valuable. We see ourselves as a grand orchestra where there are many talented violin players. But if you take one out, you will notice their absence. We have an incredibly powerful team that helps us move closer to achieving our dream. Eran Eyal, Divakar Rayapaty, and Jeremy Harkness are the CoFounders of Shopin.
Eran is a serial entrepreneur with three exits as a founder and more than a decade of experience in retail and ecommerce. He is the winner of the United Nations World Summit Award for Innovation, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Startup, and he is an investor and advisor for many startups.
Divakar was a Principal Software Engineer at Priceline for 14 years. As a leading member of the engineering team, he was instrumental in building Priceline’s core processing platform. Since then, he was the CoFounder at Flowhealth, Director at Mezoclick, and CoFounder and CTO at Maker’s Brand.
Jeremy Harkness served as the CTO and Head of R&D at Barrows, where he invented the world’s first active radio frequency tags capable of self location awareness and environment sensing and monitoring for in-store retail solutions. He also served as the CTO at HP Ticket, which created online ticket systems, and as the CTO and Founder of Strattice, where he invented the world’s first remotely managed mini server and failover router.
Extra questions: What kind of technological solutions do you plan to use to get a “million” or more transactions per second? How are they monetized and/or verified? How successful have they been? Are there any security concerns regarding this protocol?We announced our partnership with iExec in a January 11, 2018 press release, enabling Shopin to decentralize consumer DAPPs [Distributed Applications] and using BigChainDB’s technology to allow our blockchain to scale to more than 1MM transactions per second and provide the data storage capacity to store shopper information. We will share enhancements to these code bases with the community as it’s not a part of our core business model, and more importantly, scalable solutions for blockchains benefit the whole community. If everybody is able to run consumer-grade applications alongside Ethereum at more than 1 million transactions per second, then we all benefit and more solutions are adopted by the ecosystem.
We can’t use existing platforms since they lack transaction speed. As a utility token for a mass consumer application, we needed to find a solution that would match Visa-grade transaction speeds. Ethereum currently peaks at 15 per-second and theoretically might eventually reach 10,000 per-second. Other platforms currently reach around 4,000 transactions per-second. In essence, no one was able to provide us with what our business model required. The reason we selected Ethereum over, for example EOS (Block.one), is that Ethereum has 60 times more developers, which creates a very healthy, vibrant, and fluid environment for the platform.
Is the token a security since it’s sold in an ICO or does it not have a definition as of yet?No. We are a utility token, not a security token. The Shopin token provides a frictionless form of exchange between shoppers and retailers for incentives and sales promotions. The retailer is using the token to reward a user for their time and attention in exchange for that shopper to see their message and go to their site to purchase an item.
