In this exclusive episode from Token 2049 in Singapore, host Josh Kriger sits down with industry leaders to discuss the latest trends, technology advancements, and innovative projects in Web3, blockchain, and DeFi. Interviews include conversations with Anoir Houmou of RECRD on transforming video engagement, Ariel Seidman of Hivemapper on building decentralized mapping, and Michael Ros of Sleep.io on blockchain's potential to disrupt travel bookings. The episode also includes insights from Vivian Chan and Molly of CoinX on the future of exchanges and capital investments.
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Key Topics Covered:
- Blockchain in Video Engagement: Anoir Houmou, CEO of RECRD, discusses the challenges and opportunities of using blockchain to enhance monetization for short-form content creators, enabling them to earn ad revenue through unique video responses and interactions.
- Decentralized Mapping: Ariel Seidman of Hivemapper reveals how his team is building a global, decentralized map that rewards contributors. Hivemapper uses blockchain-based technology to gather real-time data and create maps that are accurate and beneficial for fleets, logistics, and more.
- Travel on the Blockchain: Michael Ros, CEO of Sleep.io, explains how Sleep.io aims to disrupt the travel booking industry by creating a decentralized platform that removes intermediaries, enhancing transparency and lowering costs for hotels and users alike.
- CoinX Exchange’s Innovations: Vivian Chan and Molly discuss CoinX's initiatives to support various cryptocurrencies and tokens, innovations in copy trading, and new projects in Bitcoin Layer 2 and other emerging ecosystems. They also share insights on the future of gaming, meme coins, and AI integrations in blockchain.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let us know in the comments on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@edgeofnft/
Episode Highlights:
- Anoir Houmou: “Our platform doesn’t just allow likes and comments; we’ve coined the term 'rebounds.' Anytime someone shares your content or responds with a video, both creators and sharers can earn ad revenue. It’s about community-driven monetization.” (Timestamp: 8:12)
- Ariel Seidman: “Hivemapper is building a map that uses real-time camera data to understand actual conditions on the road. This is a completely different approach from Google’s location-based tracking, and we’re rewarding those who help us build this map.” (Timestamp: 24:45)
- Michael Ros: “Sleep.io is pioneering hotel booking on-chain. By removing intermediaries, we provide better rates for users and fair revenue for hotels.” (Timestamp: 37:20)
- Vivian Chan: “CoinX is focused on enabling access to over 1,200 tokens, from Bitcoin to meme coins. Our mission is to innovate, engage, and create value across multiple markets.” (Timestamp: 52:10)
For the full transcript, see further below.
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About Our Guest + Headshot:
- Anoir Houmou – Founder & CEO, RECRD
Anoir brings over a decade of experience in digital marketing and advertising. RECRD, his latest venture, uses blockchain to transform content engagement and monetization for short-form content creators.some text- Linkedin: Link
- Ariel Seidman – CEO, Hivemapper
A veteran in mapping technology, Ariel leads Hivemapper in its mission to create a decentralized, real-time map powered by blockchain technology, with applications in logistics, transportation, and fleet management.some text - Michael Ros – CEO, Sleep.io
Michael is revolutionizing the travel industry with Sleep.io, a blockchain-based platform for hotel bookings. His goal is to eliminate unnecessary intermediaries and make travel bookings more transparent and cost-effective.some text- Linkedin: Link
- Vivian Chan & Molly – Partnership and Capital Team, CoinX
Vivian and Molly are key players in expanding CoinX’s offerings and influence in the cryptocurrency exchange space, with a focus on capital investment in early-stage blockchain projects and innovative trading solutions.
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Transcription
Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Edge of NFT live at Token 2049 in Singapore. It's day one. It is hustling, bustling over here. I think it's their biggest event ever. Pretty excited to be here with Anoir, who's the founder and CEO of RECRD. It's great to have you on the show. Pleasure to be here. So a little bit of background here. RECRD is a video engagement platform that uses blockchain to transform content creation and modernization. And Enwar has 14 years in marketing advertising, raised over $4 million through investors such as Swede Foundation, former NBA star Mitchell Richman. And since it's launched, RECRD has put up some big numbers. It's quickly grown to over 1 million daily active wallets. Focusing on empowering content creators through innovative monetization strategies. We'll get into all that. But expanding into India and Africa too. Pretty cool. I'm surprised you didn't memorize all that. Well, you know, you gotta sleep between all these side events, right? Exactly, exactly. When did you get into town?
Anoir Houmou: I got into town two days ago. Oh, cool. Adjusted? Good to go? No, not at all.
Josh Kriger: Still adjusted. By the way, I have to say, I normally will not interview someone wearing a Yankees hat, but I'm making an exception today.
Anoir Houmou: I'm a Boston guy. Oh, well if I knew that, I wouldn't have done the interview.
Josh Kriger: It's all right. The selfies are coming back. The socks, they need some more work. So you have a really interesting background. Tell us a little bit about your journey and what made you decide to sort of do something like this.
Anoir Houmou: Oh, right, so background is advertising. So I was more on the creative side, worked for multiple ad agencies, handled multiple accounts, and then jumped to the dark side and got headhunted to be the head of digital marketing for a very large bank. So jumped to client side. And then, yeah, the industry was just itching to get to get solved for various problems, specifically in the creator economy, and brand safety, advertising, and so on. So yeah, we built, we saw a niche in the market, we saw a niche that's growing in terms of content which is reactive-based content, and targeting fake ad views. You know, apparently one in three dollars is those fake ad views.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, so this is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about lately is this like, I guess you'd call it like pollution, ad pollution, right? And people are spending a lot of value to get views and engagement through the traditional means and the dollars are just getting flushed down the toilet essentially, right? It's like a hidden secret tax, if you will. So that makes sense to me. What are the other problems you're solving? And maybe, like, let's get a little technical. How exactly are you solving these problems? Yep.
Anoir Houmou: All right. So basically, short-form content creators can't monetize the same way as long-form content creators, right? Because How can they monetize? It's either subscriptions or ads, but how do you put ads in short-form content? It's very intrusive. So I'm obviously, from my background in community advertising, we designed it. It is really advertising-focused, but very seamless, and it's designed around the content creator for fair monetization, right? So, you know, we monetize all creative views on short form content and our core speciality is People post video responses to videos, so we don't do likes, we don't do comments, we've kind of coined this term, rebounds. So imagine you post a video, people post a video response, you build up the engagement on content. Anytime there's an ad within that feed, the creator gets up to 100% of the ad revenue. Okay. From day one. Right, cool. So yeah, so it's just kind of like architecturally designing a seamless integration for ads for fair monetization of creators, right? By the same time, you need to have that verification of users and that's where the blockchain comes in and blockchain kind of supports pretty much everything that we're doing. Very cool.
Josh Kriger: So I think I have a lot of questions and curiosity. We'll have to go deeper at some point. But there tends to be in sports and the creator economy a hierarchy where the top 1% bring in the big dollars and a lot of other folks don't. Do you have some early sort of signals, indications on whether or not this is a hockey stick type of curve or a bell curve where there's more folks that are earning on your platform? What type of feedback are you getting from creators on the earning potential they're experiencing on your platform versus other things they've tried out? Great question.
Anoir Houmou: All right, so if you look at the life cycle of a video where you're leading to, Right now, we're still very early. It's only been a couple of weeks. But what we found is that because the interactions of the videos gets you more reach, and it works very similar to TikTok, right? If you have good content, it's going to get shared with more and more people, right? So the life cycle of the video can be kind of adjusted in terms of the engagement and the engagement being views, rebounds and so on. But there's the mechanism that we've introduced where users, when users share your content off platform, so if you upload a video and I want to support you, It's not about followers anymore, right? I'm gonna take your video, I can share the link of your video. It creates a unique URL to me. I share it on Twitter, I share it on Reddit, I share it on Telegram. Anyone who clicks on that link, there's a pre-roll ad, you've just made money, I've just made 10% of your ad revenue, but most importantly, you know as the creator that I made 10% of your ad revenue. So we're creating this kind of superfan, ambassadorship, affiliate-fy type program for creators to rally up their community to share their content off-platform, right? So it can extend. the lifecycle as well.
Josh Kriger: So you see this working better for micro influencers, micro content creators.
Anoir Houmou: It could be anyone. Until we build famous people, right? And the niche of our platform, it's about rebounds. We're going after reactive-based content.
Josh Kriger: So are you like pro AI-generated influencers and content creators or anti? No, no.
Anoir Houmou: OK, you know what? I'm going to give you an exclusive. So we're actually developing a new form of rebalance. So we do remixes, reactions, and responses. And the next one that we're going to drop is reimagine. So reimagine, you prompt, you have a virtual avatar, and you can just rebalance based on your virtual avatar. So we're working on it right now. And yeah, that should be dropping soon.
Josh Kriger: Everyone has a chance to have a digital twin and sort of do their thing.
Anoir Houmou: And imagine that the digital twin is making you money while you sleep.
Josh Kriger: That's what it's all about, passive income. So what are some of the partnerships that you have in the works and what types of folks are you looking for that should reach out?
Anoir Houmou: Okay, so we have a ton of partnerships that I can't talk about because nothing's right. I don't want to say And we're talking super A-listers, right? Okay. So we're talking to a bunch of these guys. They love the platform. They've experienced it. Some really cool activities. Try to get the ink. Exactly. But we have just inked Shamaru Thursday. Shamaru, one of the biggest production companies in India. They have God knows how many Bollywood movies. And we are doing some very, very fun, interesting things in the next few months with them. So again, another exclusive for you. That's cool.
Josh Kriger: I appreciate getting the edge. I just, one of my co-hosts just interviewed a humanoid, Rhea. And it was the first time she'd be interviewed. And she loves Bollywood, apparently. She was like saying, she wished more people told her, asked her about her passion for Bollywood. So even the humanoids are into Bollywood. Yeah. That's it. I'm not surprised. Very cool, man. Well, we'll have to unpack what you're doing more at a later time. I think it's really cool. Any closing thoughts you want to share about what's coming up? And then, you know, how do people stay in touch?
Anoir Houmou: Yeah, just reach out to me on X. You can do it by me or... And what's your handle? Anouarou. Sorry, it's just my full name.
Josh Kriger: We'll put it in the notes. It's a long name. A-N-O-I-R-H-O-U-M-O-U.
Anoir Houmou: Yeah. Or just follow Record App for the latest updates. And yeah, just watch this space. And for any up-and-coming creators that are sick of not being paid for their work, not being paid for their views in particular, jump on Record.
Josh Kriger: Record is just skip the O. Yes, skip the O. Otherwise, record. We couldn't afford the O. All right, great to have you on the show. Nice meeting you. Hello, this is Josh Trieger, co-host of Edge of NFT, live at Token 2049. It's day one, lots of excitement here, and I'm very excited to be here with my guest right now, Ariel Seidman, the CEO of Hivemapper. I heard so much about what you guys are doing, and it's great to meet you in person. Good meeting you, man. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. So first of all, what brings you to Token 2049 this year? A lot of fun, deep-end conversations happening.
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, deep-end is kind of coming of its own, right? So obviously, Helium. projects like HiveMapper, we've reached 25% of the global road network. Asia is a very important market for us, both on the supply side in terms of continuing to grow the map, and then obviously also from a demand side. We've done very well from a demand perspective in the US, in the EU, in Canada. And now we want to do the same here in Asia as well. So that's what brings me here. Cool.
Josh Kriger: And obviously, the brand name speaks for itself. You mentioned you're doing some mapping. What is HiveMapper?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, so it's super simple. HiveMapper, we're trying to build this global decentralized map. And the idea is that you deploy this thing that looks like a dash cam. But inside of that dash cam is technology that is optimized for the purposes of mapping. And it has a camera. It has a lot of other really important, valuable sensors that are important for building a map. And then you just drive like you normally do. And what's happening is it's actually building a map as you're driving. And then we productize all that data, and we sell it to logistic companies, automotive companies, technology companies, supply chain companies. Basically, anybody who uses a map or any business that uses a map, that's who our customer ultimately is. So the two big markets for that are automotive, logistics, transportation, real estate, commercial, et cetera. Google Maps is the big player in that. They probably have somewhere in the range of about half a million businesses who use their product.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, so that's the question. How do you compete with a company like Google, which has virtually unlimited resources at this time? Can blockchain-based mapping technology be as accurate or more accurate than what Google brings to the table?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah. So the core team, we're all hardcore mapping people, right? Like, I've been in maps for, I don't know, 15 years. You seem like a cool guy. Yeah, you're really into maps. I love maps. All right. I just think they're, I mean, look, 2.5 billion people use map every single day. Yeah. There's not that many products that fit into that category.
Josh Kriger: It's hard to imagine what life was like before, like, all this mapping technology, right?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, yeah. So it was a lot of people yelling at each other in a car, right? Yeah.
Josh Kriger: A lot more fights, a lot more breakups, divorces. Right. Exactly.
Ariel Seidman: Exactly. But yeah, look, the big unlock in mapping, putting aside crypto here for a second, crypto is a really important piece of technology. But even before that, the thing that Google is missing is what I refer to as eyes. In other words, we have a camera and that camera is able to understand what's happening in real time. Google does not have that. What Google has in real time is motion, right? They can say, okay, this set of vehicles in here because we can track your motion. Right, because they got waves, right? Exactly, they have waves. And so they're basically saying, yeah, we think there's traffic here because all of a sudden, boom, we see that motion is slowing down.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's like Waze with eyeballs. Exactly. Where there's actually a reward mechanism, which Waze doesn't offer.
Ariel Seidman: Right, exactly. So the reward mechanism is the people helping us build the map, which is really important, really valuable, to say, look, if you're going to help us build this map by deploying a dash cam or by training our AI models, then as that map becomes more and more valuable, you should share in the underlying economics of that.
Josh Kriger: makes sense. Gas is expensive. And for enterprises that have fleets of vehicles, this can really be a net positive that can make a difference between a good year and a bad year economically.
Ariel Seidman: Absolutely. Yeah. So in addition to like the reward incentive, we actually now are starting to provide the valuable data back to those fleets, right? Saying like, hey, there's a lot of construction in this part of town.
Josh Kriger: Avoid that if you can't or this is a very dangerous intersection We're gonna try to reroute you around there because the last thing that we want is like your truck driver Whatever the impact so they could be saving money on dispatch software costs and whatnot as well So a lot of interesting synergies there that that makes sense so I had a Helium mapper, or Helium node. Miner, yeah. Miner, thank you. It's been a while. It got to a point where the wards cut off, and it wasn't worth it. I did break even. I think there's a lot of lessons learned from those early days. And Helium kind of was the first mover in this type of technology. Obviously, a stationary product versus yours moves around. How are you ensuring you have the right sort of economics for sustainability, where the folks that help build these maps also get to reap the benefits long term?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, there's a couple of answers to that. One is, yeah, we definitely had the advantage of learning a lot in terms of, you know, what Julian got a lot right. Let's be clear.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, no, I mean, I think they get a bad rap. But yeah, really, they built something that is sustainable.
Ariel Seidman: Yeah.
Josh Kriger: And they went through some growing pains, right?
Ariel Seidman: Exactly. So putting the reward mechanisms aside, because that's a little bit more of a complicated conversation, I'm happy to go in depth on that if you're interested. But let's just talk about the utility of the device. So the first thing is, there's 1.2 billion vehicles on the road practically every single week. And that's a lot of vehicles that we have. that are potential customers or basically nappers, right? So that's number one. The second thing is that that device that we provide or that we sell has to provide utility way beyond just the crypto aspects of it. Right. And so there's a lot of safety capabilities there.
Josh Kriger: There's monitoring capabilities for commercial fleets and stuff like that that we're really thinking about this business from a Web 2.0 mindset. It sounds like it's part of the battle.
Ariel Seidman: Yeah exactly. Like the crypto incentive that should what I view is like it's a very important mechanism but it should really be icing on the cake. It should be like, hey, this is a really great device that provides a whole bunch of utility for you and value in your everyday driving. And then the crypto incentive is that icing on the cake, that if you're on the fence of Hivemapper versus something else, then boom, there you go.
Josh Kriger: Makes sense. And what do you think about Tesla, what they're doing with their cars? Have you thought about Synergy there?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah. I mean, look, what they're doing, I mean, they're definitely trying to build a map for sure. There's no doubt about that. There's some synergy potentially. I was actually just talking to the VP of software at Tesla, or one of the VPs of software at Tesla, and so there's some conversations that are starting to happen there very early. We'll see if anything ever happens from there. But look, I think that having just a camera on your car, that's one thing.
Josh Kriger: And by the way, not everyone owns a Tesla, right? There's a lot of
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, we were joking, like Tesla would have a really good map in places like Santa Monica, California. Yeah, tell me about it. But not very good in places like Oklahoma, right? Or even parts of Illinois. Tesla in Dubai.
Josh Kriger: There's a lot of Tesla's in Dubai as well. Well, that's cool, man. So obviously a lot more we could unpack, but we are on the edge of NFC. We like to talk about the edge. I understand that you have like a big announcement that you just made by the time this airs that you can share with the audience.
Ariel Seidman: Yeah. So we're effectively launching a new brand that will sit on top of HiveMapper. It will continue to use HiveMapper's data. It's called Bee, or Bee Maps. Okay, how do you spell that? B-E-E, just like... Bee Maps. Yeah. Got it. And so, you know, it was really inspired by the bee device that we created and that we branded, and we just love the name so much. You got the hive, you got the bees. Exactly. It all fits together, yeah. So what this also makes sure is that other organizations and companies can start to build on top of Hive Network, right? It is this kind of foundational piece now. Obviously, we've been building our products on top of it, but we are inviting and engaging with developers and companies and businesses to start to build it. We now have 25% of the global world network mapped in only two years. and that just continues to grow. So I think we've reached the point of maturity to let other organizations build on the same, and they'll be on the same level playing field as B is. It's not like B is gonna have a leg up on them. Anybody else can build and they get the same capabilities, the same licensing, pricing, and everything.
Josh Kriger: That's really exciting. Congrats on all the progress. And, you know, we've on the show always been a proponent of practical uses of blockchain technology to make a real impact in the world. I'm excited about use cases like what you guys are doing. We'll have to talk about it more in the future and see how we can collaborate. But in the meantime, where can folks go to follow you? Are you on Axe? And where do they go to dive down the rabbit hole with HiveMember?
Ariel Seidman: Yeah, so you can follow me on, I'm on X, Twitter, whatever we're calling it these days. You can follow Hivemapper's account also on Twitter, or you can go to hivemapper.com. And what's your handle on X? It's just my A-sideman is on Twitter. S-E-I-D-M-A-N. Yeah, S-E-I-D-M-A-N. You know, the guy who was always talking about mapping technology and HiveMapper and all that type of stuff.
Josh Kriger: Alright, so if you're really into maps, this is definitely a primo account to follow. And if you're excited about what the future D-Pin is, check out HiveMapper. Thanks for hanging out with us today. Hope you have a great week. Yeah, thank you.
Richard Carthon: Hey, everybody, Richard from the Edge of NFT here, and we are live at Token 2049. And I have a very special guest with me. We have Alex Liu, who's with Tezos. And like, you know, it's been awesome. One of the very first crypto meetups I went to back in 2018 was actually with you, Alex. And full circle now, six years later, we are out here in Singapore getting to be at this amazing crypto conference. So, you know, great to be here with you.
Alexander Liu: Great to be here. We have gone a long way. I still remember in 2018 when you came to my first meetup in New Orleans, Louisiana when you were still living there. And yeah, it's just come a long ways and we've come very far at this point.
Richard Carthon: Oh, absolutely, man. And you know, you're one of the first people obviously to tell me about the Teslas community and a lot has happened over this amount of time. But you have three different initiatives that you guys are really speaking on right now. So how about you just break those three down for us and we'll kind of dive into each one.
Alexander Liu: Okay, yeah, our three main verticals that right now that we are focused on is our art community, DeFi and gaming. And I would say right now Tezos really from 2022 during the whole NFT boom, we have been we have one of the strongest artistic communities that are minting and creating just awesome works of art. We have one of the most cutting edge generative art platforms along with our NFT platforms. And it's all organic, community-based, and it's just amazing watching them grow. And like I said, things are getting very interesting on Teslas, especially with our Layer 2 roadmaps, and then the whole Teslas X, which is going to be our sort of roadmap and vision, where it's just going to be a canonical one huge canonical roll-up that encompasses everything and we're going to have different languages that you can build on. We're right now also pushing with JavaScript and bringing on the Java developers and all that and we're just becoming, you know, larger and larger and especially with NFTs, like I said, that's kind of where our bread and butter has been. And we, you know, we were one of the first chains, blockchains to sponsor Art Basel. And we've been at all the different Art Basel events in Miami, Basel and Hong Kong. And this year we're going to be back in Miami for Art Basel. So big things are happening.
Richard Carthon: Oh, absolutely, man. And, you know, it's one of the narratives that keeps on trying to go around is the narrative around that NFTs are dead. But like, if there's anything that I know about Tezos is that they're not dead.
Alexander Liu: Yeah, the NFT community is definitely not dead. I can tell you we during this whole bear market, our artistic community has just been extremely powerful and open. And we're getting we've been onboarding more and more artists, and they're just creating works of art that it's a sight to behold. And I would highly recommend people check out object.com, aka swap, or FX hash, which are three big NFT platforms.
Richard Carthon: Oh, absolutely, man. Well, I'm going to keep messing around with what's going on over there. But again, you have some other things going on. And one of the things I thought was really cool is what you're doing over on Ethereum. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Alexander Liu: Yeah, so right now our layer 2 rollup is called Etherlink which is an EVM compatible rollup and it's completely decentralized and decentralized sequencers. There's no governance token and it's totally permissionless and right now it's pretty much nearly free transactions and what we're seeing a lot a lot of traction is a lot of DeFi teams are moving over a lot of our Our platforms are moving over, especially like Rarible, and so I think people, especially in the whole blockchain space, are more familiar with Solidity and EVM, and so that's why we created this EVM roll-up that's going to be powered by Tezos.
Richard Carthon: It's awesome man and like I like that you guys have become more open to working cross-chain and you're listening to what your users are wanting and then building it out and obviously this is one of many other initiatives that you have going on so what else can people expect to keep unfurling with the Teslos community?
Alexander Liu: I mean it's basically what you can imagine and it's all, the boundaries are endless at this point and really what's awesome about the Tesla's community is that we, our developers, our core devs, all listen to what people are wanting and basically we're building what the users want and becoming even more user-friendly, user-centric and of course everything is very secure. We've never had any sort of security incidents or anything like that. And we take security at the highest value because it's one of the things that is the backbone of your blockchain. On top of that, we're seeing more and more museums like WeAreMuseums and the Wack Lab. minting and creating programs for NFT artists and things like that. So I would highly recommend people will come check it out and come play, experiment and leave feedback because more feedback means more innovation happens.
Richard Carthon: Definitely. And I think being user centric and focusing on those things and being secure gives people a lot of confidence to come and keep building on this. So Tesla is all over. And obviously you chose to be here at Token 2049. So What's your experience been so far and what do you expect to get out of this amazing conference?
Alexander Liu: Well, being in Singapore is awesome. This is my first time here and absolutely love it and I think one of the best parts about these conferences is being able to see old friends that you haven't seen in forever. Just because he moved to Texas, I know New Orleans is still in his heart and that's where I'm based at and it's just great seeing old friends.
Richard Carthon: Oh 100% and I gotta mix in a roll wave. We both are Tulane alums so roll wave baby. Well again man thank you so much for your time but for people who want to learn more about Tezos get more activated with what you have going on how can they do that?
Alexander Liu: They can visit Tezos.com and follow us on Twitter at Tezos and you can get all the updates and come build and play.
Richard Carthon: Awesome well Alex thanks for spending some time and always great to see you man.
Alexander Liu: Thank you.
Josh Kriger: Hi everyone, Josh Grieger, co-host of Edge on RT, live at Token 2049 Singapore. I'm here at the biggest event ever with someone I actually haven't met in person, but I've seen his company all around the Zen circuit. It's Michael Ros, CEO of Sleep.io. And Michael, it's great to have you on the show.
Michael Ros: Very glad to be here.
Josh Kriger: So for those that don't know what you guys are all about, give us a little bit of the 411.
Michael Ros: Perfect. Well, we're a hotel booking platform, so of course, I would say it's the same hotel, same breakfast, same pillow. But I'd say for us, it's more important to make everything more transparent and eventually, of course, a better deal for users. So we built the first hotel booking platform on-chain, which actually wants to remove the middleman, with the result that actually the hotel gets more of what it deserves and the user has a better deal. Makes a lot of sense.
Josh Kriger: So I'm sure people ask you this question, why blockchain?
Michael Ros: I built a web tool venture before in travel and then I was dealing actually with traditional APIs and legacy and we were partnering with the biggest hotel groups and I was like, okay, this can be done differently. And then people had often overbookings, there's like four or five actually middlemen in between before the hotel actually see the transaction field.
Josh Kriger: It's the worst thing to show up and you're so tired and then you find out your room was like given to someone else.
Michael Ros: It's happening a lot in Web 2.0. I saw the infrastructure a week because we were using it as well. It has to be done differently. If you see where blockchain is built for, removing middlemen, make sure that things are transparent, it solves a lot of issues in the time industry.
Josh Kriger: Absolutely. So, what's been the response so far? Obviously, I think the Web 3.0 community is going to gravitate to something like this, but how is the Web 2.0 community responding?
Michael Ros: If I, for example, we're targeting, if you're looking at users, travelers, we're targeting the Web 3.0 community so far. If we're looking at the Web 2.0 industry by, for example, travel industry. It's a big industry. It's a huge industry, yeah. So let's start with Web 3.0.
Josh Kriger: So Web 3.0 so far, what's the response?
Michael Ros: Better than expected, because of course we launched the platform only 11 months ago, so let's see how it will go. Eventually it will be great to partner with the biggest communities and conferences. But if you see what happened in the past 11 months, as they say in Web3, it's a movie, it really is a movie. Partnering with Indeed for APAS, for large conferences.
Josh Kriger: Yeah, so give me a sense of your, like, traction so far. Like, what was the most successful sort of collaboration to date?
Michael Ros: I'll say, for us, the hotel starts there, right? If you as a user want to use our platform, you want to make sure there's plenty of hotels. So eventually our goal was, way before actually the end of this year, to end up with around 300,000 hotels. Actually, we succeeded much more than that. We actually, over the end of the year, we have more than a million. So this is us like, wow, this is actually we're done with the hotels. We have global coverage. And we first like will be great to work with communities like the boarded community and actually reporting with them for a fast recommended by them. So this is cool, right? It's the most known NFT community. Yeah. So those things are for us a special.
Josh Kriger: Well, great. As an event producer, not just a media guy, I'll say that having someone that can negotiate those agreements or make it easier for folks to find the place they're going to sleep and not have to think about it, it's a big benefit. So wish you the best in your endeavor. Where can folks learn more about you guys and stay in touch?
Michael Ros: Of course, our platform, sleep.io. Follow us on Twitter and everywhere you can follow us. This is just the beginning. We're here to keep building and I'm sure more things will come. All right, great to meet you. Thanks a lot.
Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Josh Krieger, co-host of Edge of NFT, live at Token 2049 Singapore on the floor. And obviously there are a lot of institutions and a lot of exchanges. So we wanted to catch up with one. And we're here with CoinX. I have Vivian and Molly with me. Vivian's on the partnership team. Molly is on the capital team. It's great to have you both on the show.
Vivian Chan: Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Vivian. Hi, I'm Molly.
Josh Kriger: So let's kick it off by just learning a little bit about CoinX. Obviously, it's been a really interesting market. A lot more exchanges these days than other like in the past. I know you guys are growing. What makes you special?
Vivian Chan: All right, so we have, we encourage a lot of innovations and we cover all over the world. So we have around 1,200 tokens and coins now, obviously increasing day by day, and also 1,600 pairs to kind of be around, and also the innovation that encouraging projects to kind of come through to us as well, all kind of, even from Bitcoin to even meme coins, everything is already and welcome. Definitely.
Josh Kriger: Cool. And you have a capital product, which is, I think, sort of gives you more opportunity to get involved in the ecosystem. Vivian, what is VFBTC's thesis and some of your recent investments, maybe, if you can share them and what you're looking at in terms of potential products coming to market to distinguish themselves from the pack?
Molly: Okay, so actually, we are busy capital is an investment of we are busy. So we are looking for different early stage project in different ecosystems, a Bitcoin ecosystem, so on that and base other EVM competitor ecosystem. So recently, we focus on those Bitcoin layer two, as well as Bitcoin five, say Bitcoin staking.
Josh Kriger: Any recent investments that you're able to sort of mentioned that you're excited about and maybe what what made you excited about them?
Molly: So recently we made investment for Babylon. It is a Bitcoin post-network, so it's going to have a second round for the Bitcoin staking. We are very excited about it.
Josh Kriger: You all see this industry from a very interesting perspective because at the end of the day, everyone's looking for more users, more adoption, more traders. However, it's been a quirky six to eight months in the industry. Originally the thesis was all about gaming, right? And then the mean points came out of nowhere and have been dominated. Not that you have a crystal ball, but what are the trends you're seeing that will sort of, sort of how we're going to end the year? And what do you see sort of as the dominant trends for early next year?
Vivian Chan: I think I spotted a few things going on. There are some Layer 3s kind of on the rise with Xun as well, I think. Obviously Ton being all the Telegram bots and all things. I think they will also at least stay a pretty good 2025, I would say, definitely.
Molly: So as long we already see a lot of mini-apps in Ton ecosystem, As well as for the Solana, despite there are a lot of Mingguang, we also see some RWA sector in this ecosystem. As well as AI and DP, we're really looking forward to the application in this blockchain downstream.
Josh Kriger: Appreciate your perspective. Is there anything on the COINX roadmap that you can speak to in terms of some of the innovations coming up?
Vivian Chan: Oh, wow. We have a few things that are already launched, but we'll also be doing as well. So we have our launch pool, we have our mining site, the copy trading we've just launched. So we have so much more coming up. So do check us out.
Josh Kriger: All right, guys. Thank you both for your time. I know your booth is really busy. It's bustling over here. You know, glad to have you on the show. And if folks want to learn more about CoinX, check them out. Not too hard to find.
Vivian Chan: Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much.