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We hope that you found the AMA to be exciting and informative, as Fred was able to address many of your questions. We tried to squeeze in as many questions as we could during the hour that we had, so please be patient if we didn’t get to your questions. We were happy to have given you a glimpse into many of the exciting developments that we have been working hard on, we’ll be doing more of AMA’s for the community soon.
A big shout out to our friends at Elrond, who kindly helped spread the word! Make sure you check out their telegram group as well.
Alright — here’s the transcript!
Moderator: And we are live………..😊Hello Fred, good to have you here with us today. I will be asking you the questions submitted by the community, so are you ready?
Fred: Hi guys! I’m here and ready! Good to have everyone here..
Nothing better than a good ole AMA on Fridays and catch up with our community!
Moderator: Great! *diving right into the Community Questions
How does the Cere CRM work?Fred: Cere Network enables businesses to own their own customer data ecosystem, instead of relying on the likes of Salesforce, SAP, etc. This approach allows different types of CRM’s to be built on top of it. The first two types that are being deployed using Cere Network are specifically focused on travel, mobility, and retail. More customized and vertical specific solutions will follow as the CRM space is evolving fast toward that direction, which suits our approach well..
The key here is helping businesses to move towards more of a 1st party approach, and make the data more secure, and more interoperable. And have partners and developers working with the business directly to build up the business’s own data ecosystem.
How does Cere make money?Fred: Cere is a customer data network that will be open-sourced and eventually fully decentralized. CERE Tokens will provide both the utility and the economic incentives to power SaaS solutions and marketplace operations on top of this data network.
Why did you start Cere?Fred: I started to become obsessed with the vision behind Cere when I was running my gaming company, when we couldn’t find any customer data solutions that allowed us to understand each user’s behaviors across all of our games such that we could better serve them and make more revenue. We ended up building our own solution that not only served us but also partner gaming companies. (but it was hard work and required a lot of trust between partners). Fast forward to today, there is a much stronger demand for first-party customer data solutions built around privacy, security, and interoperability. It’s great timing for us to start helping other businesses and developers to take control of their data and wean off the habit of keep handing their data to the tech giants.
It’s really an exciting time to be in this space.
How is Cere different from other related projects and what are the plans for global mass adoption?Fred: We are firm believers in that the path to mass adoption is through enterprise adoption, specifically in working with brands/businesses who already have millions of loyal users. We have been working hard on the SaaS front to drive adoption through traditional sales/marketing efforts, to address specific business pain points with better solutions that are implemented on top of cere network. This is a longer term and harder approach than launching Dapps, but the upsides in terms of adoption is exponentially greater.
The key is that at this rate, we’ll have immediate and sustainable growth and adoption post alpha main-net launch.
Who are your competitors?Fred: We are disrupting the CRM/CDP space for sure, and will eventually take on the giants like Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, etc. But not head on for now, on the SaaS side, we are focused on building more specific solutions for travel, mobility, and retail where we can be more focused and competitive. Also we are not fighting this alone, other developers will be able to build industry or application specific solutions that are much more modular and custom on top of the Cere Network.
When will the token sale take place?Fred: We are really focused on establish real-world utility with our current integration partners for now. Some discussions with certain launch platforms have taken place, but no concrete dates yet. I’d say stay tuned.
The market timing is better, and we do have a lot of inbound requests.
When can the community expect the the white paper be released?Fred: We’ve had a couple of versions of internal whitepapers, another iteration of which is getting ready to be made public. Our approach is to accurate detail real product features and concrete code implementations, thus it’s been a constantly evolving process. Now that we are close to launching our network, it’s getting close.
Thank you for being patient.
Hello Fred, I know that Cere Network and Elrond are partners, so that makes this more interesting to me, since I am part of the Elrond community and I also run nodes on the Elrond network. I have a few questions:
1. Could you give us a real-world example that demonstrates how Cere will leverage the scalability of the Elrond network?2. Could you give examples of CRM-related smart contracts that Cere Network will be running on Elrond?
Fred: 1. Real-world cross-chain interoperability has been something that we had discussed with our partners like Elrond, matic, chainlink, etc. We are looking at this with a consortium approach, it’s definitely not a one blockchain to rule them all future.. For example, we can off-load some transactions to a sidechain implemented on top of Elrond network, that could better leverage their Smart contract or scalability work.
2. Sure. An example would be a Smart contract running on Elrond can be staking resources to ensure the guaranteed deliverablity( SLA) of services on Cere Network. Once the service is reliably delivered over time, the smart contract on Elrond can seamlessly reflect this and transfer the staked resources. Elrond offers WASM smart contract execution environments, even Rust libraries (we have a couple of Rust loving developers who are fanbois)
Very interesting! I’m curious what kind of specific 1st party benefit Cere’s CRM/CDP will provide to their customers, compared to the competitors?Fred: Hi Randy, to answer your question.. most of the existing data lakes and data warehouse are old and hard to keep clean of PII’s (personally identifiable information). Where our approach is built from the ground up to be focused around individual privacy and security, such that each users data is individually encrypted and segmented from everyone else, and we support the ETL’ing of data changes upstream seamlessly, something hard to do with existing CRM’s and whatnot. And it’s integrated with our blockchain in such a way that identify abstraction and encryption and tamper proofing of data is built in.
How do we know the team are working? We need some kind of proof.Fred: I know the community has been patient.. Only if they can see all the github pull requests that are being cleared every week!
We will be happy to showcase some of the product and tools during the next AMA session. The current Telegram format is not best setup for it.
We also have our 1st major integration going into limited beta now, this is with a business that has 300+ retail locations in the US. This is running on top of our soon to be released alpha-mainnet. We’ll make official announcements / PR once it’s out. It’s just a case of not letting the cat out of the bag too early.
Good AMA, but my question has not been asked yet: There is no road map yet, I would like to know the roadmap for Cere?Fred: We’ll be announcing our first integration in conjunction of our alpha mainnet launch first.
Is there a public github for cere?Fred: We’re in the process of sorting out the different layers of our code base with a clean separation of concerns and good abstractions, packaging, and documentations. It’ll be opened up piece by piece soon.
When will the private sale for matic token holders happen?Fred: As soon as we have a timeline with the potential launch partner. We will send out an update to them specifically soon.
Where is the Cere office located?Fred: We have been fairly decentralized from day 1, with offices and personnel in San Francisco, New York City, Berlin, and Belarus.
Is the Corona virus affecting your working progress?Fred: Not really, since we have been working mostly distributed and doing a lot of remote work from day 1. Our focus has always been clear. We’ll get through this.
How will CERE deal with European GDPR rules?Fred: We don’t actually store any PII (personally identifiable information), and eveything is encrypted. GDPR and CCPA compliance tools is something that we’ll be offering to businesses since this is a real accute pain for many. More details in the upcoming white paper.
Hi Fred , where do you see Cere and the blockchain space in 5 years time?Fred: I think we’ll be part of a consortium where you’ll see various blockchain projects working with each other, and assets/data moving across. It’s already moving towards that direction, and this common vision is aligning us with the likes of Matic, Elrond, Chainlink, Parity and etc.
Is Cere a public or private blockchain?Fred: We are taking a hybrid approach. We want to be accessible to every business and developer, yet at the same time we’ll need to support businesses which wish to have more choices for additional private features.
As the CRM is all about the Customer Related Data, Security, Roles Etc… which must be completely private. I want to know how it is possible to achieve these with CERE?Fred: I think I’ve already answered most of it above. We are laying the foundation and providing the toolsets so that a business’ users data is individually encrypted and segmented from so that it can be more secure and agile. The current solutions sit on top of traditional storage solutions that all it takes is one admin’s access is hacked… Like I mentioned before, our solution is built post privacy era, built from the ground up with these solutions in mind.
How big is the team now?Fred: We have 26 people now, mostly focused on development and innovations. We are now trying to staff up more toward marketing/community.. Will be doing more of this to engage the community.
Is any new data registered in the blockchain? I mean if a customer receives a delivery for example, do all the transactions go into the blockchain or are there any central databases for some of the data?Fred: The blockchain is more for data encryption and data validation. The actual data is not on the chain, but data hashes. There’s a decentralized data cluster where the data are stored in.
Fred: Thank you guys! Cheers to the community. Thank you all for your support!
Moderator: Thanks everyone for the questions and your presences…. AMA is over… Please look forward to the transcript of the AMA in the coming days.
This transcript was edited for spelling and readability.
Visit us at Cere.Network or write to us if you have any questions: team@cere.network
