BlockTalks x Decubate AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Decubate, on July 2nd at 2 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Elliot Hagemeijer, CEO of Decubate. So here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks!
Q1. Could you please introduce Decubate to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Decubate is a crowdfunding platform for traditional startups that want to launch blockchain solutions.
For example, a direct to consumer clothing brand wants to expand into viral good or a gaming studio that wants to unlock new revenue from existing IP or a technology provider whose solution translates perfectly to web3.
What these startups have in common is that they’re established. They have working products, existing customers and real revenue, most importantly - endured the hardships of entrepreneurship (business owners would understand).
We partner with these startups and help them get their shit together to successfully launch their blockchain solution.
Getting their shit together = strategy, legal, product support, tokenomics, smart contracts, marketing etc etc etc.
In parallel, we onboard them to the decubate platform where our community (aka investors) can back them.
These investments are made using our token, DCB, which is then swapped for equity (utility tokens at first) once they graduate off our platform.
Q2. What are the advantages of Decubate to other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — First and foremost, Decubate is the first and only (to my knowledge) investment platform to focus on bringing the $3T global startup economy on-chain.
There’s a ton of competition in the web3 fundraising space from launchpads to VCs and everyone in between. That said, they exclusively back native blockchain projects.
Creating blockchain solution for existing startups is a massive opportunity we’re aiming to capitalize on.
As for other advantages, I’d say our approach to community and the utility of our token are unique.
Growing a strong community is a massive priority for us. We had community participation in mind when we designed the reputation score, which incentivizes investor activity on our platform in exchange for status and rewards. Investors with high reputation scores will have access to additional allocation, voting power and much more.
Maximizing DCB token utility was also extremely important as we want it to support a wide variety of use cases. Sharing a few examples... -I copied&paste these.
Voting power
The Decubate platform is community powered, not just from an investment standpoint but decision making as well. Token holders receive the ability to vote on which startups to back.
Platform rewards
Community members receive airdrops, discounts and additional allocation just for holding DBC.
Staking rewards
DCB holders earn financial rewards for staking their tokens. We’re introducing a burn mechanism to increase scarcity and reward value.
Q3. What are the major milestones Decubate achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — As CEO, I have 3 core responsibilities:
1) Provide a clear vision for Decubate
2) Inspire and hire the best people to build that vision
3) Make sure our business is self-sufficient so we can over deliver
This will sound a bit self-serving but I think we’ve exceeded expectations thus far
1) The vision for Decubate is to become the #1 platform traditional startups choose to get on-chain, full stop. The global startup economy is massive, valued at over $3T. Securing a leadership position in this space will unlock incredible financial opportunity for us and our investors.
2) The Decubate team is extremely talented with decades of combined experience in blockchain products, startup incubators, software development, and marketing. Building this team has been one of my proudest accomplishments.
3) Fundraising has gone well. We completed our private sale a couple weeks ago which will allow us to continue to expand the team while building a sustainable business. That said, I’m also counting on all of you to participate in our public sale July 6th on BSCPad, TronPad and Ignition
As for other milestones:
-Relaunched our website
-Product in Alpha testing
-Successfully audited our smart contracts
And our future pipeline:
-IDO on July 6th!
-Product MVP (Minimum Viable Product) live in August
-First startup onboarded to the Decubate platform in August
Questions Asked on Twitter For Decubate Team!
Q1. I saw that your IDO will be on July 6th on three different platforms; BSCPad, TronPad and Ignition. Can you tell us more about the events and what expectations do you have for it? Is there any whitelist we can join it? After this IDO is over, what should we expect next?
Ans — Really excited about our upcoming IDO. The team and our partners are doing a great job from a marketing perspective and we’ve seen a ton of interest thus far. Our market cap is $127.5k which is also extremely attractive. Sharing the IDO whitelists now:
Ignition
https://ignition.paidnetwork.com/project/decubate
TronPad
https://app.viralsweep.com/sweeps/full/d954da-90641?framed=1
BSCPad
https://app.viralsweep.com/sweeps/full/d954da-90641?framed=1
Post IDO, we’ll be heads down on product to ensure we ship a great platform MVP in August.
Q2. I found it very interesting that you commented that in Decubate investment decisions are decentralized and defined by the Decubate community. What exactly does a user need to be able to participate in the governance of your platform?
Ans — The only prerequisite to participate in governance is to be a DCB token holder. Utility at launch will be focused on startup voting but this will continue to expand as we update the platform.
Q3. I've been reading your personal take on blockchain futuristic specs, and you mention that the holy grail of blockchain innovation is fractional ownership of all assets. So what leads you to think that we are facing a new digital revolution much bigger than cryptocurrencies?
Ans — The barriers between the physical and digital worlds are crumbling. My favorite recent example is legislation that just passed in the US (Wyoming DAO Law) which will allow DAOs to control LLC’s. This opens the door for exciting use cases like tokenizing physical assets like real estate, etc.
Q4. In relation to your feature Reputation Scoring, what mechanism does Decubate use, to qualify and quantify influence and community involvement?
Ans — We’re building something akin to a gaming engine that tracks and rewards user activity on our platform. Highly active users increase their reputation score which in turn provides them with status and benefits like enhanced investment and voting power.
Q5. Do you have a Token Burning plan to increase Token value and attract Investors to invest?
Ans — Yes, maintaining scarcity is important to us. Full circulation should take around 10 years but we have a burn mechanism in place for each transaction that takes place on the platform. 90% will go towards our staking pool and 10% will be burned forever. No extra tokens will ever be created after the TGE.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Decubate Team!!
Q1. You recommend your users to discover the best startups before they join the chain, but what guarantee will we have that these startups are reliable and will not end up being scammed, when discovering them and selecting them before incorporating them into the chain?
Ans — We will communicate our latest hire (COO) which worked in the traditional industry for over 4 years as an investment manager within the incubator where he also carried out all tasks of a product manager.
During this time he has audited hundreds of companies just as I did when I was a listing manager.
The challenge to this would be to set a framework into place that filters out the bullshit so we can pick and really do DD regarding the great ones.
Short term: we will audit everything ourselves and incubate companies we have selected ourselves.
Mid term: we ask our community to give feedback and participate in the incubation process.
I always say, 10,000 eyes are better than 2.
Q2. I just realized that a lot of projects of these days offer so many similar services, and basically they’re just copy themselves, by consequence the competition grows but the quality of projects decrease, so can you tell us how Decubate combat this situation?
Ans — We apply what is called a blue ocean strategy in combination of focusing on quality rather quantity. Once our business model is proven (we’re extremely confident) and our business is ready to scale up we will utilize the community for the decentralized part of the platform. However, there will always be a "Decubate’s core team pick" or other name to it.
One other aspect is the fact the companies we incubate have already a working product and sustainable business. They do not rely on their token to be extremely succesful. They also don't need much funding for already have most of the core team. That means we can offer micro market cap companies to the market.
Q3. Decubate says that is aiming to offer incubation rewards, so can you explain us how this mechanism will it works? How can we participate in one of your incubations?
Ans — Community participation in the startup incubation process will be limited at launch (e.g. investment and promotion). That said, we will gradually add more features until most if not of the incubation process is community run.
Q4. Decubate offer a good place where starting projects can grow up faster, but do you have any particular KYC or verification mechanisms to prevent that Scammers won’t use your platform to incubate scam tokens?
Ans — Investors on our platform will be KYC’d, a step that will mitigate scammers in our opinion.
Q5. What are Decubate’s plans for NFT? Will we see the integration of NFT into the Decubate platform any time soon?
Ans — We’re big fans of NFTs and the wide variety of use cases that are popping up beyond digital and generative art (our marketing lead wants to become a virtual real estate tycoon). While we don’t have plans to mint NFTs ourselves, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the startups we bring onto Decubate decide to go in that direction.
Q6. Currently the quality of new blockchain projects has decreased a lot because of so many useless meme coins and projects without clear visions so I would like to know what new approach Decubate platform has to compete in a saturated market?
Ans — We’re focusing on bringing traditional startups onto blockchain, no meme coins or white paper projects here.
Q7. Currently the quality of new blockchain projects has decreased a lot because of so many useless meme coins and projects without clear visions so I would like to know what new approach Decubate platform has to compete in a saturated market?
Ans — We’re focusing on bringing traditional startups onto blockchain, no meme coins or white paper projects here.
Q8. How strong is your team? Many projects starts with good impression and later abandoned the project. What makes your project different than others?
Ans — Team has decades of combined experience in blockchain, software development, product and marketing. Highly confident in our ability to execute.
https://decubate.medium.com/meet-the-decubate-team-1cc097cae24c
Q9. What is your plan for global expansion? At present, which market are you focus on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users and partners?
Ans — We’re a globally distributed company ourselves and have built a strong startup network. As for expansion plans, we’ll continue to expand our startup partnerships to have a truly global pipeline.
Q10. Smart contracts are still, prone to bugs. How secure, is your smart contract? So that we believe, Your project is safe and good for the future of investors?
Ans — Contract security is a top priority! Our contract has been 3rd party audited to further boost investor confidence.
Q11. How do you deal with scammers acting on your behalf with our DMs under the pretext of selling your whitelisted project? can you provide your official link so we don’t get scammed again?
Ans —
Unfortunately there is not much we can do about it except adding to our profile name that we don’t DM you, post repeating warning and add a pinned message warning.
Q12. Who is your investor? How do you generate revenue to sustain the project? What are your goals to the end of 2021 and beyond?
Ans — We secured backing from a few notable blockchain VCs during our private sale but are committed to being community funded (we’re a crowdfunding platform ourselves so it’s on-brand). We’re using these funds to build the product and grow the team.
Q13. If there are other projects that compete with your project, what will you do to be superior to that project.
Ans — We have competitors in a sense that they are also incubating other projects to boost their succes.
However, Decubate is the first platform worldwide to actually focus on web2 companies. You can find the whole list here: https://decubate.gitbook.io/documentation/what-makes-decubate-different
Q14. What is your strategy for building a strong community? Do you agree that the power of community will lead your project to develop globally? What services do you provide to the community?
Ans — Our approach is to build community into our platform and token meaning we are designing these systems to provide positive feedback for active participation and sharing.
