Recap of ReadON’s AMA with Arbitrum: Insights from CEO Neo
Intro
On February 9th, ReadON’s CEO, Neo, participated as a guest in an AMA hosted by @Arbitrum_cn. Over 12,00 listeners were eager to learn more about innovative projects built on the Arbitrum chain. During the AMA, ReadON issued a Witness OAT on Galxe and collaborated with Soshow to release commemorative NFTs, which have all been claimed.
The following Q&A between Neo and the host conveyed ReadON’s vision and future plans. CEO Neo also addressed questions related to NFT minting, token listing, and shared the latest development plans for the ReadON app.
To facilitate understanding for the ReadON community, the conversation was translated into English.
Q: Can you tell us about the team behind ReadON and how the idea for the project came about?
A: The founders of ReadON come from Google, TikTok, and Pinterest and bring with them a wealth of product and technical experience, as well as successful entrepreneurial ventures. Our team has created a product with millions of daily users in Southeast Asia and ReadON has already secured a 2,000,000 USD investment (led by SevenX) and won a hackathon award.
Web3 is a revolutionary product, and today, practitioners in the field are striving to bring new changes and value to human society through blockchain technology. The success of DeFi in the financial sector is a prime example of this. By breaking through the various constraints, rigidities, and inflexibilities of traditional finance, DeFi has allowed decentralized technologies to shine and gain prominence.
At the same time, we also see that the content and social sectors are another realm dominated by centralized organizations. These platforms, which dictate what we see, read, and receive information daily through their pursuit of business models focused on exposure, continuously feed us with fast-paced, time-wasting content that reinforces our preferences. This creates an “information cocoon” and exacerbates the extreme division between different cognitive groups on the Internet. To a certain extent, centralized platforms determine our cognition, perspectives, opinions, and personalities, taking away our right to choose the information we receive.
In the financial sector, centralization controls wealth, while in the content sector it controls our cognition. Therefore, we are eager to build a decentralized content platform, breaking through the information cocoon, and providing access to valuable content and a more genuine world. This is our mission.
Q: What is ReadON and how can we join?
A: ReadON is a decentralized content platform that consists of a series of underlying protocols. It supports content from Web2 and provides authentication and on-chain services, which enriches the content input for the entire Web3 content ecosystem.
From a user perspective, we have released the ReadON DAO app, which is a content aggregator product that indexes both Web2 and Web3 content and curates it based on user behavior.
We have minted a ReadON Achieve for each C-end user, which is an SBT that records the user’s experience and reputation values in different content areas such as Defi and Gamefi, and will be expanded to non-Web3 content topics in the future. Users with different experience levels will have governance rights in their respective areas of expertise, including curation, comment weighting, content quality evaluation, voting for the genesis of new community topics, and more.
At the same time, we introduced the Game-Fi mechanism and system at the C end to make reading behavior more interesting and less dull. We designed a cute cat, named “Catto,” which is our NFT and will accompany you in your reading. This cat will have many gamified features, including producing the currency $READ, upgrading, and producing kittens, among others, making reading itself enjoyable. Currently, we have opened up activities such as exchanging points for blind boxes and synthesizing parts to produce cats in the product, and these activities will be strengthened in the near future. Users do not need to own an NFT to use ReadON, it is completely free.
So, for ordinary users, joining ReadON is just a matter of downloading from the Google or Apple app stores, everything is simple. Currently, we mainly aggregate content related to Web3, including information, blogs, reports, and video content. These contents will be curated based on user behavior and we hope to bring everyone a different content experience.
The mission of ReadON is to reshape the digital reading behavior of Web3 through the use of the Game-Fi mechanism and system. Users start by equipping themselves with the Catto NFT, which will enable them to earn the currency $READ in the game while reading content. The accumulation rate will be affected by factors such as content theme, Catto attributes, and user experience. The quality and type of content will be managed by the community, and users will be able to vote and sponsor the content they like through ReadON.
Through these mechanisms, ReadON aims to help users rediscover the joys of deep reading, foster a vibrant reader community, promote the dissemination of quality content, and empower users with the power of information.
Although we have also joined NFT for reading and earning money, we have an essential difference with the gold-mining project Gamefi. Our NFT is more of an attention economy identity certificate for the ReadON product, and the future product form of ReadON will have many external benefits. Users who hold the identity certificate will earn a share of benefits from advertising and other income, rather than simply the money of later entrants.
ReadON is an ideal platform for ordinary users who enjoy reading, and it is completely free to use. Through ReadON, users can also learn more about web3 and blockchain technology. If users wish to participate in the token ecosystem and earn token rewards, they can purchase a Catto NFT. It is important to note that there will be taxes associated with participating in the token ecosystem.
But I think what’s more important is the external value offered by advertisers. Even for those who use it for free, their attention is valuable to advertisers. This is an important profit for ReadON, and it sets ReadON apart from Gamefi.
Q: Why did you choose the Arbitrum chain?
A: As a decentralized platform for content sharing, ReadON aims to effectively manage a wide range of content and behaviors while supporting EVM-compatible user wallets and converting users’ on-chain and off-chain reputations into NFTs.
To address the issues of high gas fees and network congestion, ReadON has decided to leverage the power of Arbitrum, Ethereum’s top-performing second-layer scaling solution. Many well-known DeFi protocols, such as AAVE and Uniswap, have already integrated with Arbitrum.
Arbitrum’s ecosystem is thriving and ranks first among Ethereum scaling solutions in terms of locked volume. Its ongoing development aligns with ReadON’s philosophy of building a robust and sustainable ecosystem.
Currently, the majority of projects in the Arbitrum ecosystem are focused on DeFi, but with the recent testing of Arbitrum Nova, ReadON has seen a clear commitment from Arbitrum to support social projects, and ReadON is confident that it will become a leading player in this space.
Q: How does ReadON consider growth and attract Web2 users?
A: As a Web2-compatible content platform, ReadON was designed from day one to cater to not only Web3 native users. We have a gradual plan to serve different types of users.
In the first phase, we focus on senior Web3 users who demand content on market trends, investment research, and project information. ReadON aims to help them improve the efficiency and quality of information acquisition. However, ReadON also offers entertaining content, such as investment tips, airdrop news, and even coupons clipping guides, to diversify their reading experience.
The second stage is for users interested in web3. Today, the narrative of web3 has already gained widespread attention, and these users are eager to enter the world of web3, but they don’t know how to get in or what to do once they’re there. Therefore, it is essential to create products that cater to these users. Many of my traditional internet friends ask me how to create a wallet and own an NFT, but these steps are not very user-friendly, and exchanging currencies often hinders users from entering the space. In addition, these actions lack context and support, so even if I help them set up a wallet, they often don’t know what to do next.
ReadON has done a lot of work in this area. We integrated the next-generation MPC wallet facility early on, which allows users to create a wallet through their web2 social accounts without having to deal with mnemonics. In the next stage, ReadON will collaborate to provide many tutorial-style contents to guide users in experiencing the gameplay of web3 while using our products. This will be many new users’ first wallet, first NFT, and first time participating in DAO governance, which is the bridge we want to play.
In the third phase, we aim to engage a broader range of content and user groups. Content consumption presents a vast opportunity, and several great companies have emerged in various verticals. Our goal is to leverage Web3 to enable communities to define the topics and content they desire. Rather than competing with traditional content companies, we seek to create new content creation, curation, and distribution logic that will deliver a novel content consumption experience.
Q: What are ReadON’s plans for attracting creators?
A: As a content platform, we must consider the two-sided economy. Our approach is to focus on growing our content consumers first, then growing our creators. This is a pragmatic strategy because even though there are creator platforms like Mirror that solve the problem of property rights, it’s not the core issue in the web3 creator ecosystem. A web2 creator can receive a share of revenue and traffic from various media platforms. When you convince them to come to web3, they’ll find that, besides the content being on-chain, they don’t have anything else, no money or users.
Therefore, we are developing tools to reduce the barrier for creators to enter web3. When this barrier tends to zero, it is no longer a cost for them to put content on the chain. On the other hand, we clearly give out the profit-sharing logic of web3 content distribution. It is a decentralized advertising alliance. When the author’s work is distributed, they will receive corresponding digital currency dividends. Both ReadON and other applications can permissionlessly distribute the author’s content and give the author appropriate profit-sharing.
When the cost of publishing content is low enough and there is expected income, creators will gradually join in.
We are working on video content-related products, which have stronger interaction than text content and greater imagination space for creator revenue. Imagine a scenario where you can reward a Youtube idol blogger with digital currency through ReadON. When they claim ownership of the video, they can receive these rewards. This will attract them to enter the web3 world and establish a different way of connecting with their web3 fans, such as a fan DAO community. This will be very helpful for the web3 creative ecosystem.
Q: How does ReadON deal with cheating?
A: Specifically, as for cheating through multiple account usage within the ReadON application, we can say that our team has ample experience in dealing with this. Our co-founders have experience in addressing cheating that accounted for less than 1% of the daily distribution value of up to $100,000 in 2019.
As for users, let me introduce our anti-cheating system for “real” reading time. We have an SDK integrated into the application that identifies suspicious bot behavior. We have built a comprehensive model to do this. Genuine reading behavior can be identified based on gyroscope and screen touch data. All calculations remain on your phone or network to best protect your privacy. There is also environment detection to detect script-controlled devices. If we detect cheaters, we will mark their NFTs as cheating NFTs.
Q: Many users are particularly concerned about the listing date of the token and whether they can make money with NFTs?
A: We have not yet decided on the sale date of the NFTs or the token listing plan, but let me first tell you why.
Many projects sell their NFTs and tokens before their products are ready, even before they start building. We believe this is not a reasonable approach.
People should buy a project’s assets because they like the project and want to become an investor in it.
So we want to first allow more people to use ReadON. We want to hear more feedback from them. We want to make ReadON more perfect. Then we will launch the NFT sale and token listing, which I think is more reasonable. This will also bring better returns to our supporters.
There are two good examples, Cyberconnect and Arbitrum. They have not yet listed their tokens, but they are doing well with a large number of users. We share the same philosophy with them. So Cyberconnect became our investor, and Arbitrum has a deep partnership with us.
Q: In the ReadON application, there is a points and task system. What is “points”? What is the “ReadON Beta Box” (RBB)?
A: During ReadON’s testing phase and prior to the launch of NFTs, “points” are the way users can earn rewards for reading and other in-app activities. Building a product and developing a community takes time, and the value of the $READ token is too unstable for investors and early adopters before the features and community of ReadON mature.
This is why we have introduced a reward system. Users can collect “points” from daily check-ins, tasks, and achievements. After a few days, when the reward system is fully implemented in the application, users will be able to redeem their collected points for ReadON Beta Boxes. The ReadON Beta Box will contain parts of the Catto NFT, which can be collected to create a complete NFT, a trade basket (as the parts of Catto cannot be traded separately), or a redeemable $READ token voucher.
This system is designed to reward early adopters and will be temporary because it is a unique freemint process for the Catto NFT, and the number of ReadON Beta Boxes will be limited.
Stay informed by following our official account for the latest news and updates:
ReadON Twitter: @ReadOnMe3
ReadON discord: https://discord.gg/readon
ReadON web: https://readon.me/#/
