The Growth of Yamgo Gives Users a Leg Up in Earning Crypto Rewards

Welcome to gossip about gossip powered by Hadera Hashgraf, and each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of Gossip about Gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Godshock, and I'm the SVP of Communications here at World's Labs helping to grow the Hadera ecosystem. Today, I'm very excited to have a return guest, Ian Mullens with Yamgo. Hey, Ian. How are you? I'm very good. Thanks for having me. I'm I'm delighted to be on the show. The last time I was here was October two thousand and nineteen. So we've got a very long and rich history to share with the listeners today. So, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Yes. Pre pandemic before the world, you know, turned on its head. So Ian, I think, you know, one of the first things I wanna tackle is a lot of people might know you from ad stacks, and I think it would be helpful if you can just explain to the audience a little bit about the relationship between those two companies. And, you know, hey, you've you this is you know, sort of your journey. Sure. Okay. So, essentially we're on a mission to build the best metaverse to earn, play, and collect. So we first started looking at how we could help people to earn. And this is where, our background for the last of the twelve years, we've been working with some of the world's biggest brands to deliver their video campaigns. So we've been working with agencies and big brands. We do the creative production from the video creation, the graphics, the HTML five, and then we analyze and deliver that to an audience. So historically, what we've been known for is our ad network. We've had a network of millions of, consumers all around the world connect to our servers, and we've been distributing adverts. That's what we were originally known for in the Hidea ecosystem. And the sort of the the big claims, the flames, for us is that we we solved, a large portion of the ad fraud challenges within the existing web two advertising ecosystem by making sure that we could track every single payable event and interactions with the consumer. And what this did was enable us to identify and cut out and reduce certain types of fraud. And in the advertising industry, the fraud is rampant. And one of the big reasons we we first started using Hidea was to address this problem. There's no transparency. There's about eighty to eighty five percent wastage from when you spend you know, a single dollar in the ad industry. You know, forget how effective it, you know, fifty percent of it is gonna be. Literally, eighty five percent of it is wasted. On inefficiencies. So that's where we first started. We could see a big opportunity to try and change the industry and make sure things were transparent And, you know, we really, very quickly became very passionate about looking after the consumer. And, you know, at the same time, you know, four or five years ago, you know, web three really started become a thing and how could everybody reward the consumer for their participation. So we were kind of like really leading that charge with a passion that We've come from the ad industry. We know how it works. We work with big brands. The biggest losers in the industry so far are the consumers who have in their data used, abused, stolen, ripped off you know, manipulated. So that's where we started. We're a really strong proposition to to solve that problem. And, we literally for every campaign that we did, We literally started adding in tracking. We started adding in these four prevention things. And it really, you know, over the first few years, we really ramped up. It was fantastic. We're getting really good traction. We could see more and more brands taken on board. You know, the the challenges of identifying where they were wasting their money. But there there are so many problems with the ad industry and that also includes it's very difficult for small companies like us. To change the way in which these existing ad companies work. So we've been really up against it, particularly in the last eighteen months. You know, we're we're currently in the midst of kind of an advertising decline and a extended crypto winter, which is, you know, really starting to give me a bit of a chill. To be honest with you, we really need the the ball times to, you know, to start to come back again, which I'm sure they will. So for us, it's really about building and scaling during this time. To how we can improve the products and services that we offer, to advertisers. So, you know, a big big claim to fame was we we've done two billion of the current nine billion transactions that are on Hodeira. We were number one for for the first few years. With a peak, peak TPS of thirteen hundred and seventy two. Now, Avery Dennison, I think they have they've done over seven billion. So we're only twenty two percent of transportation. So, yeah, we we were the first big at scale live, enterprise use case. And there is still significant, you know, opportunity to actually create a new standard. And, you know, we see we aim to create kind of like a a paradigm shift in how consumers are respected and rewarded. And we try to tackle the market from right. We can run these campaigns and we can solve the fraud and we can deliver your campaign. And to to be honest, that only solves part of the problem. We actually need to disrupt the advertising ecosystem. We need to properly make sure consumers are rewarded. And, you know, based on our success, you won't actually ever need a Facebook or a Google or any other publisher or intermediary to reach your audience. We believe that once a brand is connected directly to a consumer, via the wallet, issued a, issue a, a token, their token, ID the h bar, or our token. They can be, they can be rewarded and the lifetime value for holding on to somebody. It's like having, every product, a brand, could offer to its consumers. It's like having a bank account like extension. How do you incentivize people to by again to recommend to their friends or just to feel part of the community. So we see like many others in the web free community, we see that the tokenization of everything, the tokenization of how a brand interacts with their customers, this to be delivered in a way that can be valued. At the moment consumers are not valued. So that was our our real passion to get us started. And so we've been working for the last few years, really on how we can extend that proposition into to help consumers to to extract value from from other areas. So, we see, for example, a big opportunity in how consumers can be rewarded for their gaming for their playing for consumption. So our vision really is to you take a, you take a product like, like red ball. Wouldn't it be amazing if every time you consume the product, you're able to simply scan it. And receive a reward. Now Redball, their distribution strategy is via, you know, intermediaries and distributing out, but the trend in the world really is that brands wanna go direct. They loved email when that first came out. They now offer a combination of email, a bank account, and social media combined combined with the ability to have greater sort of, a relationship that's built on trust that you, are you respect me as a consumer? I buy a product from from Red Bull again, if I was given a tiny incentive to collect red Bull tokens that gave me an offer or a discount or an exclusive NFT, I when I'm looking on the shelf, I wouldn't buy monster energy. I'd buy red bull. So these new kinds of loyalty programs that can be delivered online and offline, we believe we're gonna be game changing. We believe we can create the, the track and pay loyalty payment rail that can reward consumers for, multiple interactions with brands and what they do as they surf around the web as they they contribute and they, you know, they create value for others. We want to pay consumers the fair share of the value they create. So so that's really that's where we started. That's what's continuing. And the exciting news really is, I mean, really watch this space. Whilst Avery Dennison has, you know, really shown the potential beyond what we did, know, we were kind of instrumental in the early days in helping, you know, really showcase the technology, what it can do. We've always known for years from the very beginning the potential of Vidira. And now I think the market starting to wake up, to the potential. And, Avery Denison, what's watch this space. We'll be number one again. It might take us a few months. It might be next year, but, he's on. We're up for it. Throw down the gauntlet. I love it. And so this sounds like a much more sort of robust and feature rich, you know, engagement with consumers. Right? It's not just a, hey, I'm going to advertise to them and, you know, try to solve this fraud problem. It's I really want to have a sort of a two way dialogue with them. I want to be able to understand what they like, what they care about, what engages them, what, you know, causes them to, you know, buy more or utilize more. So how do you see that space evolving today? Well, at the moment, it it's quite challenging. There's lots of different ways, you know, that that basically brands want to buy attention. Mean, that that's the big thing that the the commodity that they're after, when it comes down to it. So, we first started with looking at, you know, the incentive that you would need to encourage a consumer to do any particular action. So if we wanted someone to download a game, the biggest problem with these onboarding metrics is the cost of acquisition versus the cost versus the advertising. And when you suddenly look, talk about apps and you add in the lifetime value, You know, I mean, initially, ninety nine percent of apps are uninstalled, you know, within thirty days of first installing. It's, the the the customer retention within some of these mobile markets and for certain apps, it's sort of like really as a hit driven industry. So we see brands really firstly tried to look at how they can better connect with their audience with these micro communities. And what we're looking to do is to create every one of the brands in the ecosystems that we we see in the web two world now, we wanna migrate them over to web three. So we've spoken. We're we're having a sort of hot hot prospect list consists of five brands, which we are, you know, in sort of like, you know, double digits number of, meetings and and, discussions with them to try and create the products that they see are gonna change the industry for them to enable them to stop giving their budgets to an advertising agency, you know, because they can reach the market through, you know, the Google and Facebook to actually go in How do we invest in this for the long term to have a better relationship? So if we see more brands very interested in this, getting them to switch from their existing media plans to a new one has been really challenging. You know, you often see in the media, you know, for every once in a while that you know, some big brand will come out and announce and say, we're no longer using Google and Facebook for this. We are absolutely terrible. They announced that on the Friday, And on Monday afternoon, they start buying again. Because there are very few little choices. There's very few choices. So we see that, you know, the the big trend really is brands want to own. Again, they have in various part times in history, like, you know, when this first started, you know, direct to, direct to consumer communications. They want to own a better relationship with their customers. And so we wanna provide the tools where they can do that. And we're just gonna basically essentially leverage our existing relationships with brands and agencies. And, you know, we see that as as a key thing. The community is is it's really important for every brand to have a closer relationship. It's key now that influencers are a thing, you know, for some time. They've been, you know, really important for some of the big brands to get their out there. And, you know, we can see that now being extended to the influencers are being rewarded, you know, because of their connection with the consumer. Now Let's go down to level level and start properly rewarding the people for creating the real value, the actual end consumer. So that's where we wanna really kind of on board millions of consumers into our ecosystem to to help them to get rewarded. And many people see our services kind of like banking the unbanked, giving people who don't have access to basically financial rewards or rewards to have their own bank, you know, account, which is very similar to a bank account in many ways, but doesn't have the constraints and it can be owned and controlled directly by the consumer without any third party. So we we believe in decentralization, you know, through and through. So just to put this in perspective, we're on a mission to, you know, to deliver an ultra secure, unhosted cold wallet solution, which offers, you know, the best ways for consumers to, interact to earn, to be safe and to store and spend, their virtual assets. We think it's, you know, some of the most fundamental problems in crypto haven't really been solved. How do people look after their their assets to the best ability? How do consumers understand, the complexities of the security? How do they, you know, feel that well, if you've got a large amount of age bar, what's the best way to separate and protect my assets? Some of these fundamental problems, we've seen exist We've always known it. I mean, Christian Hasker about four years ago said, like, critical to this is education. We've gotta educate the user. Let's go go go. We've gotta get them up to speed. And today, four years on, same message. Education is still critical. And we see it in the, you know, the the, hidirico system as well. It's really important for people to understand how you, you know, how you can use these advanced tools like, like Multisig. So how do you use that? How can you use that effectively? And we've seen examples in the industry recently where people haven't really fully understood how you can use those tools, and they you know, they they, they're very most recent example. Someone didn't understand that after you've lost, if you've got a multi sig where four out of seven have got a sign, If you've lost, three of your keys, you can reset them. I know people didn't know that. You know, you just need to, you know, the the four people to sign, and then you can reset if you set it up correctly. So there are some fantastic tools and there's some fantastic technology, which people need to understand more about. To use effectively and make make themselves safe. So, one of the big products that we've had within Yamgo, you know, so just to ask you just to ask you your question from the beginning, so you've got ad stacks, which is effectively our advertising platform. Where you were were aiming to effectively reinvent the ad industry with web free tools for brands. And then we've got Yamgo, which is our business to consumer brand, and that comprises of our wallet tech and we aim to be a a super app to earn, play, and collect virtual assets. So that's that there's kind of the the the interact between the two. And, Ian, you talked a little bit about education, and I know you all have some education initiatives on the horizon. Can you share a little more about those? Yeah. I can. So, so today, we are really excited announcement. And so so today, if you go to yamgo dot com, you could you could break. And I will clarify this. So this will run, you know, after we have recorded. So, since on the, well, since the seventeenth, of this month, we we announced, a major partnership with Sterling University. So, and it's basically for educational content. So let me just give you a bit of we have this all came about. So if you go to yamca dot com, today right now, you can use our advanced, you can use our advanced wallet tools. You can set up multi signature, You can go there. You can you can earn H Bar by doing activities like downloading games, and you can also earn Hbar today. Right now, by looking at videos. And you can have multi that we have, a number of campaigns running at the moment to learn about Yangou to learn about Hideira. And at the end of them, you you can earn h bar. So if you answer the question correctly, so we've this is a learn to earn product, which you know, that leader in the industry is someone like coinbase. They they they have already learned to earn. So we, for the the past few months, we've been looking at how we can get solve this educational challenge properly and have a long running program where we can educate people and there's nowhere better to educate people than at university. There's people that are very keen to learn. They, you know, the universities want to teach people how to use a digital wallet and what cryptocurrency is and how it all works. So we started a number of months ago, well, six months ago, to be honest, talking to universities about how we could have a kind of university educational program to make sure that students are learning, you know, about Hodeera, about HVOR, how it works, how it what are your key works? What's a non custody of what what's a hot wallet? All of these really big key features. So, yeah, Sterling University, I'm pleased to announce has signed a partnership with us for educational content. So, Sterling is one of the UK's top universities. It's ranked top thirty for student satisfaction. Sterling is Fourth in Scotland, and the forty third, I think, in the UK for researching back. And they get a fantastic campus. It's it's a kind of, northeast of Edinburgh. So northwest of Edinburgh. In the ocean. And can anyone participate in these, or does it have to be students at the university? The the program is run, with the university of Sterling. There will be extra capacity need to run this to run the same educational content for more, but this is in partnership with them. It's specifically, for their students, but it will be opened up. So, basically, it features expert insights from professor Marcus Scripts. You know, we have the core things really to teach the fundamentals of of of crypto blockchain, Hidira, what we're doing, and, the use, the correct use of private keys. You know, so one of the the biggest hooks for the university to to engage with us is they love the fact that our wallet you know gives the private key gives it in a non custodial way so the student is in charge of their private key. A lot of our services hide what's going on And then they actually become centralized because they've got a copy of your key or access to your key or other third parties have. As where we are an unhosted cold wallet, really trying to satisfy the needs of, you know, large crypto holders, brands looking to secure their their treasury developers looking to secure their treasury. And so they love the fact that students can practice. Oh, multi sig. We can have a threshold. Or we can have, you know, a setup where if we lose, you know, two of our keys, it's fine. And so so what we found is that, you know, the the wallet, the services, the technology that we've built really has a really strong educational opportunity to help educate people and who, you know, the university is fantastic. They will push this out to their students and the interesting thing is that, you know, at the end, they're actually gonna be paid. They're gonna be paid in h bar. Answer the questions correctly. They're gonna be paid in h bar. So this shows like real utility for for HR. It shows how it could be used by, you know, a tier one educational brand. And this is the start. So, you know, it it could be a fantastic opportunity. We're looking to roll the program out globally, with different different universities and different educational partners. To get the message out there. And we hope this is going to bring on lots of the right, you know, retail end users and also university and computer science departments are usually spawn a lot of developers every year. So Adira, for the university of Sterling, you know, watch this space, there could be lots students now developing on Dadeera, you know, over the coming years. And, you know, that's going to be fantastic for everybody to see new projects coming from Sterling. Very exciting. In anything else on your roadmap that you would like to share with our audience before we wrap up here. Yeah. Sure. So I guess, so so much has happened. So I guess that it kind of like, the the key things for us is, you know, I I guess, you know, the big thing in terms of our tokenization platform, what I don't think many people realize is that we've actually launched our own utility token. It's called Yamgo. We launched that last year. But we've followed a different launch plan to many other people We have a platform, we have a service, we have customers, and we basically, instead of giving out points and some other token, we're actually giving out our own utility token, you can't buy it. You can only earn it. So we've done from a legal and regulatory perspective what's called a fair launch. So, people aren't buying our token to you know, to to build our platform or anything like that, we built our platform. This is a loyalty token. So even in regulatory environments like Europe, where there's Micah, you know, we are we we're fine. As where some companies now are running around going, oh, dear. We're a virtual asset service provider. We need regulating. So we're trying to stay in this sort of on the decentralized side, where we can offer a full range of services, but We never have access to your keys. We're completely non custodial. So, we, you know, we we coin ourselves as like, virtually decentralized. If we didn't exist or our servers went down. We don't have access to your crypto. We don't have access to your keys. Everything is safe. You know, so there's there's no issue. If if we got hacked in some way, it doesn't affect your crypto. We've not got your keys, your keys your crypto. So, our our token really sort of, for brands, you know, our token enables them to access our Yammi verse. We're launching our own metaverse called the the Yamiverse, that we're coming out next year, that we use to they use our token to pay for their advertising for the in game collectibles. Could be to access our infrastructure, our tools, our low cost payments. And what we believe is going to be a new standard for direct consumer programmable incentives. So in the same way in which Sterling are using to try and encourage, they can their their, their students to learn about crypto. And we're gonna give them incentives to to do that. We can look at the, the statistics and the figures and say, alright. Okay. We've only got x files and the students who've completed that program. Do we need to do to encourage them to do more? You know, we'll look at the incentives and and and what we offer. So we're we're rolling out this infrastructure to be able to do that. And for consumers, our token enables them to pay in our marketplace, to collect, in game collectibles, characters, and resource action. So our utility token has started off quite quietly. We've done no big, you know, ICO or anything like that. But we're building the utility as we scale, and then we we believe our our token will become incredibly useful as our new standards for programmable incentives for brands, and that platform gets launched. So it's pretty, pretty exciting times for us. And, we're keeping a really close eye on the regulatory side. And to to get to sort of to emphasize that we've launched a brand a sort of brand new club. It's club Yamgo. It's exclusively for Hbar Hodlers. They they can earn extra rewards. They can earn more HVAR rewards. They can earn Yango rewards, and they can earn our NFT rewards that they will be released. They get first first access. And, essentially, if you hold HPA, which I'm sure you do, if you join Club Yamgo, you'll be able to, get significantly more rewards. So we hope to we hope to see you in our club soon in Opia. Alright. And that is that just clubying yamgo dot com or where do they go? Yeah. Club yamgo dot com. You can sign up at yamgo dot com. Club yamgo dot com gives you more information as well. Our yammo verse is yammo verse dot com. The other, you know, the thing that I've alluded to here is our game, our meta verse is called the Yammi verse. Yammi's, have also been, launched in privately to our club Yamgo members. If you're in our club, you can receive our Yammies. I think when we met in Davos, I gave you some stickers of our Yammies for your for your kids. Did the Indeed. They love it. Yeah. Well, now you need the real thing. Now you need the NFTs to go with them. So, you know, join the club and we'll, we'll send them some real virtual assets and some of our NST. So so YAM is is a really innovative social gaming metaverse that that seamlessly kind of merges the exciting realms of NFTs, collectibles, with an idle strategy gameplay, in Hbar. So it's in a kind of a rapidly evolving landscape. Yamis are these kind of hard work and industrious ant like creatures that inhibit the world of colon easier, which in colon easier is also a virtual land, which is an as well. And we're hoping to onboard brands into our hubs and cities, so that way they can have their, their web three offerings within our meta one of the big ways that we're pulling in brands in the future is for them to join our Metiverse. There'll be a whole bunch of collaborations launched in the second half of this year. With a number of big brands where they're sponsoring Yammies. And people, wouldn't it be amazing if people like Red Bull had, our Yammies had wings so they could fly from one side to the other And that's kind of that's sponsored, sponsored product placement, which we think, you know, the brands are really interested in. They've they've kind of they're open and receptive to, the metaverse, but they really want to see the hard numbers. There's a there's a large amount of experimental budgets But until we see the big numbers entering into the metaverse, it will never get beyond, you know, a few hundred thousand campaigns. So we we really wanna focus on building the audience. And the the n f t game, you know, it's a play and earn game. The key thing about our game mechanics is the user as in a certain amount of control when they merge Yammies, they create a more scarce Yammie, which has higher value within the game. So we enable we've got very exciting new, dynamic features within the game where you can you can merge your Yammies to create a more powerful, you know, more more powerful Yammie within the game. And there's nine levels and it goes up to Queen. Queen obviously be in the highest level, game nine. So you can merge your way all the way up to a Queen. And we we believe this is gonna be a really exciting game for people to play. It's gonna be a bit of a social experience. You know, we have looked at some of the best games in the industry like Axy, and that's been, you know, that's been interesting to see where they failed, where they succeeded. But at the end of the day, they had one million concurrent users. You know, many times -- Yeah. -- currently. So to get, just to to get kind of that user base, and to tap into that with an earned product, we see this as one of our interesting, you know, in the future, one of our interesting consumer products but it's, you know, it's one of many of our ways for consumers to earn money, but it's quite exciting. The NFT world is, you know, is growing when the next bull market comes around. We're gonna see a return, a massive return to the NFT industry. So, so yeah, we we we think we think that's fantastic. I look forward to seeing you in the club and sending you some some of our Yammies. And they will be available for sale at some point this year. We will be using a one or two marketplace to help us to distribute to the community. There's some fantastic marketplaces out there. We're going to use them, rather than build our own. And so we're looking for people you know, to join with that. So, so yeah, I've mentioned loads of things. You know, to say, I I guess you know, just to clarify, we've got four core products. We've got our advertising and token platform. We've got our rewards platform. We've got our play and play and earn platform. And we've got our our collectibles and n f, NFT Gaming, for brands, going forward. So, yeah, it's pretty exciting. We're doing we're we're doing quite a few things at the same at the same time to really hit the same objective to, to enable consumers to earn. It's it's fantastic. Well, Ian, thank you so much for joining us today. I I'm sure that folks who've been following your journey will be excited to, keep going and, and to try out all the new things and, features that you have available. Cheers. Thank you very much. So, I, you know, my my kind of closer would be really. Please join Club Yamgo, open your wallet Keep your h bar safe. You can earn more rewards on Yamgo. Please sign up at yanggo dot com and watch this space for more exciting new educational content and partnerships with big brands. We're looking for funding. If anybody knows any web free investors, please reach out Ian at yahoo dot com. And look out for our new, sort of video where we're doing a week, well, a, a regular update, starting tomorrow on going on with Yama? What's going on in the community? We're gonna have a a regular update. We're doing so many things and doing so many partnerships and deals, in the background. We'd love to get more exposure for that So, watch out for our podcast. And thank you very much for having me on. You've got you've got to get our product, our product director on Ryan Davis. He's and you had a lots of detail about the ins and outs of our products. So, Fantastic. Yeah. Alright. Thank you so much, Ian. Take care.