Turing Research AMA Recap with Cere CMO Martijn Broersma
After a successful first edition of our AMA with the Turing Research community, our CMO, Martijn, was invited for another AMA. Just like last time, he delivered some interesting insights on our upcoming products and answered some great questions from the community! Below you can find a recap of the AMA:
H: Firstly, long time no speak Martijn! It’s a pleasure to host you again in our community.
M: Always good to be here
H: So much has changed since our last AMA. We have the mainnet and the TGE just around the corner now! We have a line-up of some interesting questions today. So let’s start this AMA.
You guys have released a lot of updates recently and so I thought today, we could base our conversation around some of the key points.
M: Sounds good!
<Start AMA>
Q: Here is one statement from your recent update: “In the coming weeks, there will be an avalanche of information about the Cere Mainnet, staking rewards, extended developer program, and a sneak peek of our NFT platform!”
As a Cere evangelist, our team is flooded with anticipation from this recent update. Will the staking program go live as soon as the mainnet? And what can we expect in terms of potential incentives for the community?
A: Pretty much, yes. But, it will be a phased process. We currently have 6 mainnet validators (coming from the extended developer program). Other participants of the program will stake early, as a reward for their participation, after which the larger rollout will take place.
Q: Recently you guys shared some stats for the Extended Developer Program. How important is the extended developer program to the success of the platform? Could you give some examples of concrete results from the EDP?
A: It’s one of the cornerstones of the platform. If you want a decentralized network, you need a decentralized developer community to achieve this goal.
Fred (CEO) was a developer and had his own gaming company backed by Tencent with 30m DAU. This means he understands gamified incentives for developers, which we aim to be among the very best in. The program is young, but we see it develop into something massive in the future
The most important result is that with the help from these great developers (see stats), we were able to launch our own mainnet from the ground up. Without them, this wouldn't be possible
You can read participants’ experiences here (https://blog.cere.network/external-developer-program-update/ ) amongst more EDP info
Q: Exactly. It’s reassuring to see such an initiative in action. The bigger the developer community you have, the more robust the tech is, the more applications that can be built/integrated on the DDC, more use cases and the list goes on!
Not too long ago, we’ve seen Cere Network shift one of its core product positioning towards the NFT space.
Here is a recent statement by your team: “Next to that, our Decentralized Data Cloud will become an industry standard for extending any NFT platform and standard out there. The DDC will also function as a tool to extend every NFT project on every other Layer 1 — with currently ETH and DOT integrated already.”
Will the DDC act as a multi-chain, interoperability hub/tool for different NFT L1s? Could you perhaps elaborate on this statement?
A: The DDC will function as a (fairly simple) API to extend every single NFT (both erc721 and erc1155). Anything you want to be unlocked with an NFT (think content) as a developer, is a couple of clicks away
So yes, it will function with every layer1, since we will be building these integrations ourselves for turnkey use, as we did so far with Polygon, Ethereum, and Polkadot
We’re in talks with many parties to extend their existing offering. In the end, its a network transaction game to determine network value, so we want to have it used as much as we can, in cool ways by creative developers
Q: How are these talks going? From these talks, would you say the product offering has hit some product-market-fit?
A: Definitely! They will be announced fairly shortly. We would like to have the proper momentum to do a rocking joint pr. Fred and Kenzi were in New York for mainnet 2021 which was almost 100% NFTs and all the top guys were very excited about our solution.
Q: “The NFT marketplace will be directly integrated with social media, enabling supercharged adoption. Our new royalty NFT contract will be the standard for direct, real-world stakeholder revenue distribution.” How would the Cere NFT marketplace be different from platforms such as OpenSea? At the moment, users are able to directly share their NFTs on Twitter/Facebook via OpenSea.
A: Sharing is different than buying 😉
Our proprietary NFT platform is something we’ve been building for 6 months with a 40 person team. I don't want to spill too many beans on it, because I want the launch to be a mindblower. Expected release in 1,5 months for web, Apple, and Android
So the buying of NFTs without leaving IG is what you’ll have to take for tonight as a sneak peek 👀
Q: Would the CERE token have a part in the token model of the NFT platform?
A: Yes — the DDC is driven by the Cere token, meaning that every asset/content view/play on our NFT platform will require Cere tokens, to incentivize the data nodes
We’re fixing this:
Q: Okay I saw another bold statement by your team: “Let’s say Netflix wants to have insight into Spotify listening data to optimize my watching recommendations. Now, this would be impossible for dozens of reasons (compliance, privacy, security, etc). Cere allows for integrating our DDC into these platforms to actually facilitate this, today!”
This use case would supercharge hyper-personalization in the consumer industry. And as we know, hyper-personalization is the MAIN BUZZWORD in consumer marketing with an unlimited budget from decision-makers. But this is almost scary for us consumers.
It’s great for enterprises but do you really see such cooperation happening in the future between two tech incumbents?
A: Why wouldn't they? As long as the information exchange is 100% secure and compliant and these 2 companies don't have conflicting interests
I use Spotify, I use Netflix. I rarely want to use them at the same time (Spotify, bike — Netflix, couch)
So if they could both facilitate me better as a user by exchanging insights in this compliant way when both benefitting…
Data isn't even exchanged, it's sampled via machine learning tech like federated learning. If you apply this ML principle to DDC, data that is being sampled by another party never leaves your cloud, while the data in that cloud is anonymized and encrypted by default.
Q: It’s true. At the end of the day, they are separately already collecting personal data from us. So the data is already out there. If they can use it to optimize our personal preferences for a better experience, I can see this happening.
A: Facebook already does this via their ad auctions. But regulation will become a problem for them soon, and we don't have that issue since we’re as consumer data compliant as one can theoretically be (given current encryption methods available)
Q: “Cere SaaS-DeFi enables enterprises to better utilize their sidelined capital, optimize their financial operations, create frictionless payment experiences for their customer base, and tap into the supercharged liquidity of DeFi.”
Would the SaaS-Defi solution compete with the likes of AAVE PRO and COMPOUND TREASURY?
A: Not really — they would be to its extend. Companies exchange crypto (whether that's CERE, BTC or USDT) in the near future when doing B2B data contracts (on Cere, with its enterprise b2b focus). These assets would need to be used in DeFi, as current corporate finance does know in CeFi. We facilitate that bridge for ease of use to the DeFi realm by using our own AMM smart contracts as a turnkey solution for enterprises. To save them the hassle basically.
Q: Got it. This is another value case for SaaS clients to lock into the Cere platform. I’m curious if the Defi yield will be similar to the likes of Compound/AAVE & co.
I got two final questions then we can wrap this up for the public to ask some questions.
How is the progress going with the POCs?
A: Good! Testnet is being used well at the moment. Of course with the goal to have them run on decentralized mainnet once we achieve that, and be able to publish more info on them.
Q: Yes, I know there must be a lot in the pipeline. Okay so in regards to the TGE. Is the final date around mid-Oct? Timing is everything in life and for me personally, it was a great move to postpone for macro reasons.
A: Aimed date, yes. The final date is -as you can imagine- hard to say. China actually banning crypto was just unlucky this last week. With exchanges telling us they're shutting down, massive internal operations to take care of by Chinese tier1 exchanges to become compliant again, we just had to make this decision. It's also very inconvenient that golden week is just the week following.
I can assure everyone who doubts our plan and intentions, is that my team is viciously working every day to build incredible things. For ourselves and for our communities. It's difficult to see that being diminished in public channels by the loudest yellers, but you have to let people vent as well who cant see behind the screens.
Question and Answer with Community
Q: hello sir. Can you tell if you were audited? With so many features listed on CERENETWORK, how can you ensure users that your platform is very safe to use?
A: We have (i think) about 10 audit reports from top security firm Halborn, which will all release in due time
Q: Any possibility of Cere Network working with data-focused projects like Covalent or Kylin which are data oracle parts? What is an exact market cap in decentralized data now in the crypto sphere?
A: Yes, I'm speaking to Covalent often, a great team to work with. More on this soon!
Q: Could you tell us a bit more about your parachain strategy? I assume you’re not going to bid for KSM parachain but instead going to DOT. Why and are you looking to get early slots or wait for a while?
A: It’s the next step after decentralized mainnet. First things first 🙂
Q: “NFT marketplace will be directly integrated with social media” I wonder which social media platforms will be targeted mostly and will there be special campaigns for those platforms… Is it like “Sell Your NFT on Twitter” or more?
A: Much more, just as the info that's coming on this soon 😉
Q: 1. How are data nodes and validator nodes getting stored differently and who will authenticate the requests?
2. On how many data nodes will the same customer data be duplicated in a normal scenario?
3. Will you have downtime/maintenance time like other SaaS services?
4. When will you offer documentation so that other developers can upskill themselves on Cere?
5. Will you provide Cere certification programs, and when?
6. Will you allow 3rd parties/devs to create packages/apps on your platform to enhance Cere’s functionality?
7. Will Cere be able to offer private blockchain networks to its clients? Will that require any hardware setup by Cere or its clients if that works?
8. Will the clients be governed by governor limits as they are using a shared tenant architecture?
9. Will you have a sales team, and a product development team, developer partner companies to help Cere reach its potential?
10. Will Cere charge clients on a tier-based pricing model or a Usage-based one?
A: Ok, let me answer these as much as I can.
1. Getting back to you on this
2. More than 1 ;). I’ll ask my devs.
3. Yes, our (data) node smart contracts function as regular SLA’s, else these companies wouldn't be using them
4. We already do, via the EDP tasks + Gitbook. It's still a WIP, but it gives a good idea: https://cere-network.gitbook.io/cere-network/
5. Yes, we want to implement this into the current EDP boot camp, as a nice extra.
6. Yes! That's something we very much look forward to and will highly incentivize via the EDP
7. Yes, this is already built and rewarded by Web3 (https://cere-network.medium.com/cere-network-awarded-grant-to-develop-turn-key-private-blockchain-network-c0c45c8d968c)
8. Yes (i believe)
9. Already in place, both internal sales as external channel partners with incredible deal pipelines
10. Depends on how much help they need, as long as they use the cere token!
Q: Will you be working with arweave for permanent data storage?
A: We could since cere is storage agnostic. Currently using IPFS, but we’ll move to a cold stack model in the future where you can pick your storage (elevated by DDC) to your needs as a customer
<End AMA>
About Cere Network
Cere Network is well on its way to defining the future of consumer data, e-commerce, and NFTs.
Our key innovation revolves around the Cere Decentralized Data Cloud powered by the Cere Network mainnet.
Cere’s Decentralized Data Cloud (DDC) is designed from the ground up to address today’s enterprise need for individual user data encryption and privacy compliance while simplifying the customization and integration with today’s intelligent (AI) data-driven personalization solutions.
Utilizing this Decentralized Data Cloud, the Cere team is currently rolling out several enterprise projects and its own proprietary NFT platform.
