Dominique: We’ll get started with the first question by @Tony128a. “From what you have outlined with your current deal with Lucid the Vetri foundation will be the only non speculative buyer of VLD in the foreseeable future. Will you publicly announce the amount of USD you’ll use to buy back VLD tokens on bitfinex? In addition to that question: How will we be able to double check that you’re actually using the promised amount received from Lucid for buy-backs on bitfinex and not for anything else?”
Yves: Hi Tony, No we will not announce ahead what our intentions are re our participation in the exchange, the reasons are many:
1. Firstly our common goal is for VLD to appreciate but in a way which is as little volatile as possible
2. To do that will be testing the sensitivity of the many levers we have but we’ll require time and data to hone our skills
3. As a foundation we are audited and we will publish these numbers after each period
Finally, keep in mind that knowing what you are asking is not enough to gauge future price actions as you also need to know what we are doing re selling, keeping and savings incentives for users
Tony: Thanks Yves, does that mean we’ll get a quarterly report? Or yearly?
Yves: Count on it. Semi annually seems fair
Dominique: Next question is from @david7cr “Picture (How it works with Lucid) in Token Economics.
‘50% of required number of surveys are completed via VETRI’s pool of respondents.’
I don’t understand the meaning of that sentence. Please explain.”
Yves: Thanks David. 50% is an arbitrary number as an example. It’s the % of completed surveys originating from us
Dominique: Next question from LTP “Do you have a financial statement? I would like to know how much money is left from the ico. In order to calculate the theoretical price of VLD.”
Yves: Do our peers publish that? Of course not. This isn’t an enterprise value exercise since it’s a foundation with no shareholders. Also, cash or equivalent balance info is only half the picture. Future funding capacity is the other
LTP: Thanks
Dominique: Next question again from @Tony128a: “When people decide to exchange their VLD for gift cards, you’ll sell the required VLD on bitfinex for fiat and then use that fiat to finance the gift card purchase. But who is going to purchase VLD from you? Currently Lucid are the only partners and they are not buying tokens themselves. What if there is low liquidity on the buy side? Will you purchase the VLD you are selling with money from the foundation again? If so that would seem like a bizarre system that only benefits the exchange. Or will you dump them at any price? What if you have to sell them for less that what was promised to the gift card user in terms of USD? How can you guarantee the user a fixed amount of fiat for the gift card with that approach?”
Yves: As per the fact that we centrally manage the account for Lucid, that is true and serves us well at this initial stage, but not a model we will encourage with future partners
Back to our common incentive to see this price go back up and beyond ico price. We will have to buy more than we sell, all else equal which it will never be, and so within a few months we will buy a very large proportion of lucid funding on exchanges
David: 50% is an arbitrary number as an example. It’s the % of completed surveys originating from us – What do you mean with “from us”?
Yves: From Vetri users vs other lucid partners also able to complete a same survey.
Dominique: Next question again from @david7cr “ Picture (How it works with Lucid) in Token Economics.
‘5% for provision for failed surveys:’
5% of 35 USD = 1.75 USD (in VLDs).
Who will get it?”
Yves: He got it. One caveat, the 5% to partners only paid if VETRI users are on-boarded from partners. If from us directly, that 5% isn’t paid out.
Tony: @Dominique_Kunz and @yapZH apologies for my many long questions, appreciate the AMA. I was wondering if you could expand a bit on when Vetri will consider selling tokens they are already holding? Just for arbitrage opportunities? Or also as a way to finance themselves in the near future? As this would of course increase the sell pressure by quite a bit
Yves: Well, for one thing we cannot finance all the gift cards, so selling will occur. But other upward pressure will take place:
– More data consumers means more demand means more balances held with each participant
– though we haven’t said how yet, users will be incentivised to hold, keep ever bigger balance and we have compelling options for that
– more users also means tokens held
– the “velocity of money” aspect here will have an important role
Last but not least, new speculators will enter our market.
There were some questions debating the merit of stable utility coins. Indeed, they are useless, expect one and that is debatable.Using stable in this sentence is an unfortunate choice of words. This isn’t a stable coin, ie one that is pegged to another currency, far from it. What I meant is that we will use arbitrage wherever possible when the volatility gets crazy.
Jan: Hi everybody, thx for the time and answers. Are there still efforts being taken to put Vld on more exchanges?
Yves: Yes, as soon as June we will resume talks with Binance
June is when the proof is in the pudding, e. i. when we can show that we have a sustainable business model and a real life use application of our tokens.
Richard Feynman: Hi Vetri, Thanks for answering live.
I have a more fluid question. How are we coming along we “your data your money” philosophy? Can I soon sell my medical history? 🙂
Yves: We are of course at the very beginning of accomplishing the vision. First we intend to make this use case it’s own revenue and costs centre and bring it to an advanced stage. Second one, marketing, we will tackle once we have a significant user base and when the industry is ready, which is about 12 to 18 months out.
Jan: VLD is a marketing app…. Why do you think the market isn’t ready? Lucid is doing great these days.
Yves: Lucid isn’t marketing, It’s market intelligence or Insights Technology as they called themselves, a subset of market research.
Jan: And how will the partnership with Vidaplayer look like with Carlos as the owner of Vidaplayer?
Yves: Carlos as one of the owners of VidaPlayer which gets standard 5%
Carlos: Currently we are testing how the Partnership will work and succeed. For now it involves VidaPlayer inviting users onto VETRI (5% payout) and offering those users VidaPlayer gift cards. Once this has been optimized we hope to have similar integrations. Currently, we’ve begun talks with other similar sites that are in the gaming sector.
JEAN: YVES é possível saber quem são os maiores investidores institucionais da ICO ?
Dominique: Não, não é possível divulgar os investidores. Temos de proteger a sua privacidade. O NEO é o único que foi anunciado publicamente.
Adrian Lengweiler: When will be the application open for everyone who is interested to answer surveys (D/CH/AT)
Dominique: Hi Adrian, I can’t give you an exact date but we are working on integrating a verification mechanism into the app which would then allow us to open it up to all interested users. I think end of Q2 latest unless there are changes in priorities
Jan: There was this”we don’t pay for exchanges “ thing. Can’t imagine Binance is for free.
Yves: You’d be wrong there, just as the next guy they are keen to flush the shit coins and embrace the good ones with real life applications. Its competitive now and free it can be
Dominique: Great, we already went well over the initially allocated time. We can take one last follow up question if there are any. If not, we’ll be publishing a summary as well as answers to the other questions that were submitted in a blog as usual
Jan: Thx for your time guys!
Yves: Thank you for your interest and loyalty
David: Yves and Dominique, thanks a lot for clarifications!
LTP: Thanks team VETRI
Questions which were not answered live during the AMA
Question 1: A lot of smart people have been saying for a long time that is basically impossible to create a stable utility token that keeps growing in value (Ryan Selkins has been writing about this already back in 2017/2018). So far we have yet to see a project that proves them wrong. Given that the Vetri Foundation is clearly legally allowed to use money received from partners to purchase tokens on exchanges, why not use the money received from partners to buy back VLD tokens at the ICO price, and implement a stable coin in the platform. This would both benefit Vetri users and ICO investors enormously. The only real winner with the current system envisioned by Vetri is bitfinex. They’ll make money when you use USD to purchase VLD and they’ll make money when you have to dump VLD back for USD. They’ll also make money whenever you withdraw funds. At the same time there’s no mechanism in place to guarantee that the price of VLD will increase, even if more and more people are using the platform. Why use an approach that benefits an exchange more than the people who have financed the project?
Yves: The paper you are referring to is one I absolutely adhere to. Stable coins are useless, apart from perhaps one, tether, and that’s debatable. I made an unfortunate choice words by saying we will tend towards keeping VLD stable. By that I didn’t mean to say peg to another currency as are stable coins but simply smoothing out the peaks and thrus in case extreme volatility using standard arbitrage practices, which isn’t the same at all.
Question 2: Yves said that you want VLD to be a stable currency that is still appreciating in price. The VLD token was sold for around 0.065$ during the ICO. Its current value is around 0.0038$, which constitutes a 94% loss in fiat terms. For the price to reach the ICO price again the demand for VLD would have to significantly outstrip the supply for quite a while. According to the tokenomics there is no incentive in place for people to hold VLD long term. In fact the only incentive users have is to hold it until they’ve accrued enough VLD to exchange it for the desired gift card. Basic velocity modelling tells us that the price could increase in the short term with this approach, but per definition it has to crash back down to the starting price as soon as the VLD has to get sold for the gift card again, unless there is a constantly growing demand. What mechanism will you put in place to prevent these issues and create a long term demand for holding VLD? Why would anyone hold VLD long term?
As you said “unless there is growing demand”. As any other product, VETRI and the VLD will only be successful if there is growing demand for the product. In the beginning, we will have to keep the “cash out” threshold higher to keep the velocity lower and allow the user base to grow. In the medium to long term, we plan to offer additional services and discounts (e.g. premium notifications or other features) which users can acquire with VLD or by holding a minimum balance of VLD on their wallet.
Question 3: Under what conditions exactly will the Vetri foundation sell their tokens on bitfinex (the ones you already own and also the ones you’ll have to buy for Lucid)? When will you sell VLD tokens for a lower price than the one currently on offer at bitfinex? What will the combined sell pressure be (original VLD holdings from the foundation plus newly bought VLD combined)?
We can’t give you numbers yet because we are currently collecting data. We don’t intend to sell any of the foundation tokens in the near future.
Question 4: How many VLD tokens is the Vetri foundation currently holding? Are employees/advisors of Vetri holding VLD tokens (as part of their salary, not talking about tokens they might have purchased privately)? Has the foundation sold any tokens yet?
The foundation has not sold any tokens. You can see the original allocation of tokens here: https://vetri.global/vetri-token-sale-statistics/
Question 5: What’s the minimum amount of VLD/USD users will need to exchange into a gift card? How many VLD will users roughly get for one survey?
Again, we are collecting data at the moment to determine this threshold. As you can see in the app right now, the threshold is set at 30$, which allows us to collect enough data before users start reaching the threshold.
Question 6: An example calculation for my understanding of the picture „How it works with Lucid“ in Token Economics:
We have
1) Client A (data consumer creating survey)
2) Partner B (giving data base of users answering surveys)
3) Lucid C (connecting Client A to Vetri App)
4) Vetri Foundation D (providing Vetri App)
5) User E answering survey
So now the example in numbers.
Steps:
1) Client A creates surveys and pays 100 USD for answering of them.
2) Lucid C gets 30% for connecting of A to Vetri App: 30 USD (70 USD remain).
3) 50% of required number of surveys are completed via VETRI’s pool of respondents.
50% of 70 USD = 35 USD (35 USD remain).
4) Partners B will get 5% commission. 5% of 35 USD = 1.75 USD
5) Vetri D invests 95% on Bitfinex in VLDs. 95% of 35 USD = 33.25 USD
6) 5% for provision for failed surveys: 5% of 35 USD = 1.75 USD (in VLDs).
7) 35 USD – 1.75 USD (commission in step 4) – 1.75 USD (provision in step 6) = 31.50 USD in VLD providing for users answering surveys.
Is my understanding in numbers correct?
Almost. The provision for failed surveys is also deducted from the total amount available to buy VLD, so only 90% of step 3 are available, not 95%.
Question 7: How do you want to buy gift cards? What kind of budget do you want to use?
We will use a specialized provider which allows us to integrate their API. The budget will be determined by the amount of surveys completed (and withdrawal amount anticipated).
Question 8: If one user buys a gift card for VLD, do you sell VLD immediately on exchange or how it works?
No, we will only sell tokens on the exchange if we cannot finance the purchase of gift cards through fiat received from Lucid.
Question 9: Does it make sense to use one part of money from data consumer clients for the further development of Vetri by Vetri Foundation? E.g. 1-2 %?
Yes, we are considering this.
Question 10: Is it desired that the community makes suggestions regarding process optimization in order to reach for example the increasing of VLD price?
Absolutely. Of course, we reserve the right to vet and reject any suggestions.
Question 11: How do you build the price for gift cards in VLD in the app? Do you plan to use the current price on exchange? Will be the price for gift cards updated daily? E.g. today 50 EUR Amazon for 10000 VLD, tomorrow for 9600 VLD depending on the exchange price.
Currently we are using a rolling average of the exchange price for both the surveys and the gift cards.
Question 12: Will we ever reach ICO price or beyond?
We cannot make price predictions, but we are confident that we will be providing the necessary utility.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions.
