OIG AMA with Quoth

24 min readFeb 16, 2022

NFT Oracle — Search — Authenticate — Multi Chain Mint Bridge — all under one protocol

Spicey | OIG: Welcome back OIG family to another exciting episode in our ama series where we sit down with incredible projects and ask all the right questions. Today we have the privilege of having Chris Boundikas, the CEO of Quoth, an all-chain NFT authentication Oracle. Remember, if you like the content, subscribe and hit the bell notification icon to get all the latest updates with everything that has to do with cryptocurrencies and OIG. Enjoy. Okay, Chris, so welcome to the show. Could you tell us a little more about yourself and how you came to be involved with Quoth?

Chris Boundikas: Yeah, no problem. Quoth has been an evolving project. But about a year ago, I went to an incubator called Ledger link labs, run by Nick. And they helped us cultivate relationships with VCs and our tech team that can build up to our product. And we’ve been building for the last six months. And the idea kind of stemmed from a while back, but as of lately, obviously, the NFT craze. And, you know, I saw the vision of NFT’s not only going from crypto art, but into the real world, such as manufacturing, documents, and real estate. And you know, there’s just no protocol, there’s no infrastructure in place to handle, you know, such a growing market and NFT’s are extremely hot, and the real world is now starting to adopt. And we are here to set the infrastructure in place for authentication and Google like search. And, you know, that’s kind of how it came to be.

Spicey | OIG: Yeah, no, it’s good that you mentioned the infrastructure, there’s definitely a need, I mean, the space is still very, very young. So I guess that kind of answers a little bit of my second question, which is why do you think there is a need for Quoth? Could you go into a little more detail of what void you’re trying to fill?

Chris Boundikas: The NFT space has got some issues right now. And the big marketplaces are just not really doing anything to mitigate these issues, such as scams, fake NFT’s, duplicates, it is a growing problem, and it’s just only going to get worse and worse and worse. So, you know, what our authenticator does is it authenticates the originality of anything that is listed on a marketplace. So we are a fixing the newbie kind of scam problem where you go into, say, open sea or looks rare, or, you know, any of the other marketplaces. And you want to buy an NFT, if you’re not a crypto and NFT degen, it’s going to be very difficult for you to figure out if this thing that you’re about to buy for, you know, what, five bucks or $50,000 is real. And if you don’t know how to do the research on that you are, you’re putting your capital at risk. So we are building one suite of our product is that on the fly, you can pull down in for a very nominal cost, figure out if this thing is 100% original or not. So picture a Chrome extension, like Metamask. So you pull this down, you’ll pay whatever it may be, 50 cents, and instantly, it’ll tell you if it’s 100% original, if it’s not, it’ll kind of it’ll list out all the NFT‘s that kind of match it. And if you see that there’s a match, you better be careful of what you’re buying, because it could be a fake. So that’s kind of one of you know, the API’s that were running

Spicey | OIG: That definitely appeals to the masses because one of the biggest struggles for onboarding people onto the crypto, let’s say universe is the research side, you know, and I see a lot of platforms that you know, have the abbreviation of do your own research because there’s there are so many scams, so having an effect authenticators key, not only for onboarding, new potential clients and participants but also for, you know, just validating that you have something real on your hands. So that’s an impressive feature. Could you explain some more features that quoth would provide to differentiate itself from the competition?

Chris Boundikas: Yeah, no problem. First off, there is no competition. There is no search index. It’s a fragmented market of just marketplaces, you have some other stuff like rarity, tools, snipers, and it’s just the data is just spread out. And you have to go out and you know, figure out what to look for. And as you know, even an intermediate NFT enthusiast, that’s a daunting task. It is not easy, Where are you going to go, you’re gonna go to Reddit, you’re going to go to telegram groups. I mean, yeah, half of these things are full of scams and scammers that post links, and so it’s a daunting task. So what we’re doing is we’re simplifying NFTs, you can log in and search for any NFT in existence with semantic search, meaning, just as you would with Google, you just type anything you want into our search bar, such as looking for an ape NFT with a blue hat. And if it exists out there, it’ll pull it up at the top of the search result. If it doesn’t, it’ll give you the closest matches of what our artificial intelligence will show, as a search result. So that’s the first step is people want to kind of search for NFT’s but they just don’t know where. So this is the onboarding quote, newbies into the space. This tool will be very easy for them to search. The second one is the authentication tool. So, man, I found this NFT on your site, that’s great. But if it’s a fraud, or if it’s a scam, what’s the point? So we’ve gone, you know, one step further, to say, this is real, it’s okay to buy, you know, you’re not going to get scammed. And then thirdly, you know, we’re doing a bridge, so it’s a multi Chain Bridge. And, you know, even for new NFT collections we’re hearing this often is that they don’t want to go mult, they don’t want to go cross, you know, multi-chain. And it’s key on mint because that allows everything to be dispersed on every chain immediately. And it’s a lot easier for people to find it. They don’t some people don’t want to pay a Ethereum and fees and gas and this and stuff. So if they could find it on Fantom, and buy it on Fantom. So that’s kind of our bridge, down the line. But the first two are main products on MVP that we want to definitely have people, you know, try and utilise.

Spicey | OIG: I mean, you mentioned it already about the number of fakes that are in the market, it’s really hard to really differentiate between the fakes and the real NFT. So having that validation and having that, you know, almost as if a stamp of approval, it’s key. My next question is more in regards to the quoth token. So what kind of utility will that provide to the project?

Chris Boundikas: With the core token utility, you know, everybody could have the best token in the world, but if nobody’s gonna use it, then what, you know, what’s the point, it’s not really a utility token. So, you know, our tech team and our team in general, have been around the block. We’ve been here for years and years. And we realised, you know, if we’re not going to be offering utility token, then we don’t need a token at all. But in this case, we do. So we have artificial intelligence. And if you’re new to artificial intelligence, what this means is a lot of data needs to be run through machine learning before it can actually have any meaningful output into a user’s hands. So we have kind of infused our machine learning with our token for our first utility. So we have neural nets that need to be trained in order to help the API’s you know, get more accurate data. And with that, we onboard communities. So for example, to train our neural nets a little bit easier, We have already started to onboard NFT collections. So let’s take sup ducks, for example, supducks is a partner of ours, and an amazing collection, amazing art. And they’re actually gonna be launching a game shortly as well through their collection. So what that means is we can actually access their community, because their community knows those art pieces better than anybody. So we actually say, Okay, if you guys want to earn some quoth token for rewards, we need you to go through a bunch of CAPTCHA exercises in order to train our neural nets and our machine learning. So our search results become that much more accurate. So as users start to go through our training of the neural nets, it becomes gamified. You know they’re helping really detail some of these, you know, NFT collections in advanced detail. Like, you know, if you take fluff world, for example, I’ve got a fluff bunny up here, if you haven’t noticed, intent. And if you take fluff world, and if NFT’s are have dynamic backgrounds, meaning you change the background of the NFT that you have. So if you know that metadata changes all the time, and our AI has to tell the users as they’re searching that that is the real NFT. Now, a lot of the tools that gravity tools don’t change on the fly, once it’s set, they forget it, and you have to pay them again to update that information with us it’s on the fly. And it gives you know, a more of an accurate search. So if you’re searching for blue bunny, with Lambo background, which there is a there’s lots of flux with this blue Lambo in the background, you’ll be able to find it. But as those backgrounds change, if our neural nets don’t process that information, the NFT won’t be the same on the search. So it’s a fairly dynamic tool that we’re onboarding communities with, and specifically NFT collections as we are in an NFT authenticator. So it ties in a lot of the big NFT collections into our token utility. You know, we also have rewards for running on-chain Oracle’s used to serve our API endpoints and also rewards for our bridge, you know, staking and so if to kind of correlate it if you’re familiar with chain link, or the graph that type of model. We are very similar in those data, Oracle’s for token utility.

Spicey | OIG: Interesting, and I didn’t even know that you could change the background of that NFT you got there. Is there a story behind that NFT?

Chris Boundikas: You know, fluff world got they got a lot of attention. They got Snoop Dogg, it’s a 3d rendered, the art is, you know, is amazing, but it’s also virtual now their own metaverse. So fluffy world is a, I don’t know what the floor is today. But you know, call it four or five Eth. That’s a good floor. And it’s and it’s starting to surprise. So yeah, this is one of the more pricier NFT’s we got a one of only, I believe, 36, green Grinches, and this one’s a female. And as crazy as it sounds, imagine two adults having this conversation, As crazy as this sounds, you can breed the females. And more NFT’s and utility will come from that. So if you’re looking for utility and NFT’s specifically in the fluff world, you know, collection, females come with a, a reproductive utility. So it’s, it’s kind of a cool thing.

Spicey | OIG: That’s really cool. And I love the fact that you mentioned, the AI also recognises not only static information, but, you know, information that changes such as, like the background to have it validated still to be a real NFT even after a piece of information has been changed. That’s I don’t know anybody else that’s doing that at all. So you’ve touched on the fundamental infrastructure that will provide aid to the space right now, but what how can people earn by using quoth?

Chris Boundikas: We are going to be having a lot of utility with the NFT collections and their community, and they can earn, Quoth, token by doing your own research and verification, and that just trains our AI to be more accurate, you know, as as a search engine. You know, if you look back in 1995, you know Netscape and Yahoo You know, were the pioneers and some of the search, but it still wasn’t, you know, what you were really looking for. Then Google came along and changed the whole script. So you know, we’re doing something extremely similar. We are really pioneering search in this field. And you know, there is no competition. We actually don’t know another company that’s doing this, and we are six months ahead. And we’ve also infused it obviously with AI, which is an incredibly difficult task for anybody, it’s a big barrier to entry. So we’ve kind of put up the walls, I think we’re going to be well established before, you know, really any competition kind of comes behind us. And we should be trailblazing this movement of, you know, of index and authentication and ft infrastructure.

Spicey | OIG: No, definitely. And, you know, this is a very ambitious project with the aims you, you’ll need a talented team to bring your goals to fruition. So I guess my next question would be, you know, can you tell us a little bit about your core team’s experience and qualifications?

Chris Boundikas: No problem. Myself, again, I’ve been in the blockchain space for you know, since Bitcoin was an infant in month one, I’ve been through it all, Mount Gox. You know, I’ve run mining facilities, I’ve helped a government in the Caribbean launch legislature for legalised ICOs before any other country did it such as Malta. My background comes from trading. So I’ve always kind of been a, you know, a hands-on trader and did well with the mining. So I’ve been in the space for quite some time, I’ve seen all the cycles from day one. So my, my guidance should be, you know, in the management, visionary side of things, Alex is our CTO, he was head of consultancy at a firm called pixel Plex. And he is, you know, heading our team, we’ve got seven full stack and solidity. devs, as well as eight AI devs, four of them with PhDs. And on the AI side, they have been around for over a decade. Which, you know, it’s cool to say because, you know, the AI team is regular AI, meaning they, you know, this wasn’t a crypto AI team that we assembled because there’s really that there’s not many out there. It’s so brand new to the space to find a crypto AI team, it’s near impossible. So we pulled this team is hired full time. And the great thing is they don’t have any bias. They haven’t lived through these cycles, they don’t care. It’s they are strictly artificial intelligence. How do we get the data? Where do we find it and we can spend it together? So it’s a really cool team because half the team is degen you know, crypto Degen, solidity and full-stack and the other team has no clue about, you know, anything crypto, they’re just straight AI depths, for the math PhDs and it’s like, it’s a dynamic team. And it’s really cool to see how they’re, they’re spinning this data up. You know, our CMO is out of Germany. We’ve got data science out of Canada. We’ve got our, you know, sort of designers out of Canada as well. incubator out of Belgium. Social media kind of spread all over. I myself, I’m in the Caribbean, I moved out of Canada in 2017. And I’ve been offshore for four and a half years. So it’s a very diverse team. And we’re constantly growing the team as well every month, we are hiring somebody new, fresh and hungry, if they’re not smarter than then than me and the rest of the team combined, we don’t want to bring them on. So that’s the kind of talent that we’re looking for.

Spicey | OIG: Right on. No, that’s good to hear. And it’s really great to see that, you’ve taken like in regards to your AI team, they they’ve been pulled out from their natural habitat, let’s say and brought into the crypto world and they have a strictly objective mindset on solving a lot of the AI requirements we have in crypto. So that’s very key. And it sounds like you have a very powerful team. So I don’t think you’ll have any issues. accomplishing what you’ve set out to do. So that brings us to our next segment, which is the Twitter questions. We’ve sent selected questions from our Twitter account from our communities submitted prior to this AMA

Community Twitter Questions

Spicey | OIG: The first one’s from @111111Alon , and it reads, partnership is an important and impactful thing to bring in more users, with whom does Quoth currently partner? What benefits does Quoth get from these partnerships? And vice versa?

Chris Boundikas: Great question. Every project, you know, is the foundation of it as their partners, you can’t do it alone. And we have been assembling a great partnership with a lot of key players. You know, in the NFT space, we’re onboarding NFT collections on a daily basis now. And, you know, we’re offering them the chance for free marketing. And in return, you know, we get, you know, access to share our product, with their community. And they can train our neural nets and get rewarded and Quoth token. So, you know, as an NFT data aggregator NFT collections are everything to us. So we’re going after, you know, every one of them doesn’t matter how big and small you are, you know, we would like to chat with you. Because, you know, we have something that your users could use to better search your offering, you know, if you got 10,000 NFT’s, it’s, you know, it’s not easy to get through them all, even with a filter, you know, you might miss one or something. So the search on that can become more dynamic. And outside of crypto is where everybody really kind of gets mystified. And in the NFT space, we are already trailblazing partnerships outside of crypto, we are an infrastructure play, it’s great to be playing in the sandbox, so to speak, no pun intended, but NFT’s are going to be real-world utility. And colourful JPEGs and stuff right now is cool, and it’s, it’s great, but NFT’s are going to be just that much bigger. So we’ve actually partnered can’t say the name with one of the largest 3d printing manufacturers in the world, they’ve got over 150,000 locations, and they’ve kind of taken all their blueprints and diagrams and stuff into NFT’s, but you know, they needed authenticated, and there was no copyright, you know, type of person in the real world. So they had to turn to somebody who’s actually doing this, and we’re pretty much the only one. So real world utility is coming. Within the next two years, it’s going to be the normal, you will interact with NFT’s on a daily basis on your phone. It’s just what it’s going to be. So partners are everything, and we’re always reaching out, we’re always looking for more, you know, partners. It’s what we do. I mean, without the partners, you got no utility, you got no, you know, viewership and, you know, your project and token will, will eventually disappear. It’s no different than any other, you know, startup business in the real world. That’s why 90 plus per cent of all, you know, startups fail within the first three to five years. There’s just no utility, you know, so. So yeah, we’re partnering on an ongoing basis.

Spicey | OIG: That’s really impressive. I think that 3d printing is the bridge between the virtual world and the physical world, especially with regards to NFT’s. I see a whole market that’s untapped. You know, even just from making toys for kids from NFT’s they buy online. And I completely agree in the next two years, it will be it’ll definitely be the norm. But great answer. So we’ll go on to our second question here, which comes from @Alon14091 And she asks, How will Quoth value its community? And what are the ways that Quoth can build a strong and supportive community for its long term success? And how many communities does Quoth currently have for its non-English users?

Chris Boundikas: Yeah, great question. Community is everything. You know, it’s transparency, you know, that’s why all of our tokenomics are fully transparent. From day one, they cannot be changed. You know, there’s a lot of projects out there that do not adhere to their tokenomics and it’s, if you want to nuke a project, and your community, you know, start to start diluting. You’re not delivering on tokenomics model that will just destroy you. So we set up our token, but you know, it took tokenomics expert set this up for us perfectly, you know, with the utility of our token plus the emissions and we came up with a really, really cool tokenomics. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but there is one segment in there, that kind of is 25% of our entire circulation is locked for 18 months. So it’s called the strategic reserve fund, you’ll see it on our light paper or in our tokenomics model. So that’s kind of a cool thing. A lot of people look that over. But you shouldn’t, because you’re now only playing with 75% of the circulation that makes the token just that much more rare in the first couple of years. But back to the community question, you know, we stick to our tokenomics. We’re building communities everywhere. So we’ve got Kols everywhere. We have an English telegram channel, we also have a Mandarin and Korean already. And you know, moderators for that, NFT collections live in discord, we’re actually going to be opening up our discord within about a week to start to onboard a lot of the NFT collections because they just don’t live on telegram. So it’s a funny thing. So we’re opening up that market for communication. And you know, we’re pretty much on every social. So if you want to have our community on Facebook, we’re on Facebook, which you know, some crypto companies don’t do that. We’re on Instagram, medium, big Twitter, obviously, crypto lives on Twitter, and you know, a couple of other places. So we’re kind of spread everywhere building communities and building different languages. As we grow into Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, eventually we’ll have our own groups set up in telegram specifically for those languages and territories. So that’s kind of how we plan to grow the community and keep them around and just make sure that our tokenomic model is that here too, because that’s the number one thing we hear back from, you know, consultancy is you sway on those tokenomics You’re in big trouble because people just think the devs are dumping or the devs are minting and dumping. And it just creates very, very bad optics. So we will definitely adhere to that and have transparency around that with locked vaults and stuff like that.

Spicey | OIG Transparency is definitely key. And it’s good to see that you value community. And for our audience watching, if you want to join Quoth community, all the links will be in the description. You can definitely check them out after the show. But great answer. So we move on to the last question that we pulled from Twitter. This comes from @Don_88888. What is the current progress of the project? What have you achieved in the market? What is the next Quoth development plan and layout?

Chris Boundikas: First off, we’re trailblazing so nobody’s ever done this. This isn’t a this is not a copycat project. So it’s we are building this from the ground up, there’s nothing really to go on. So you know, that being said, We’re original. And we’re doing, you know, this is all custom code, custom AI and machine learning. So not something easy. But obviously, we’ve got the size of the team to pull this off. And we’re doing well. We should have what’s called a beta MVP, a few days after IDO, IDO is February 23, with the listing date. So we will have a kind of a curated beta model that will be for specific NFT collection communities to try our search and start to test those neural nets that will continue for about a week or two. And then the full MVP should be opened up for the public use on the search side, you know, shortly after that, So the product is you know, 98% ready, we are now just in neural net training mode. And for the search side, we’re looking real good right now.

Spicey | OIG: That’s great to hear. So that ends up our Twitter questions segment. We’ll move on to our last question. And that’s just what do you have coming up in the near future? What is the roadmap look like for both for the rest of the year?

Chris Boundikas So we’re, you know, we’re building and building and building and NFT protocol, and as easy as it sounds to just type it A couple of words into a search bar, and a bunch of colourful jpg show up. It’s obviously not that easy. Google wasn’t fully functional for a couple of years, right. And it’s, it’s ever-evolving. And NFTs, are ever-evolving. You know, the space is fast. So, you know, we have a very dynamic team that can pivot fast. And we are adding bells and whistles all the time. So, you know, this won’t be on launch, but think about this for a second, we can add curated and optimise buying options for marketplaces and it’s easy because once a user connects with our wallet, we can peer in and see what NFT’s they hold. And, you know, if they have 10, blue Lambos, for example, we can suggest just like eBay or Amazon, or, you know, any other kind of ECOM, big ECOM does say, Hey, man, you mean, you like blue Lambos. So we were going to show you more blue Lambos. Because you may like that, and you may want to purchase these NFT’s that we suggest that you may like. So there’s a lot of bells and whistles. And I think the marketplace is listening to this right now that’s, that’s huge for marketplaces, because we are giving suggestive, artificial intelligence to buyers, that will possibly create more sales for marketplace platforms. And it’s not a bad thing, because the user gets what they want. They’re not just buying any random, you know, any random NFT, they’re actually looking at stuff that they might want. And it’s a win win for everybody. So those are just just a small minuscule of some of the bells and whistles that will be added on a weekly monthly basis, just as how Google kind of started with search and then added, you know, AdWords and maps and all that stuff, we’re doing a similar approach. Another really cool feature. And I think, you know, not a lot of people know this, it’s not in our light paper, it’s actually really not anywhere, is staking for advertising, projects always have a liquidity problem. If you’re not big out of the gates, right. And we’ve combatted this with token utility. So listen to how cool this is, if you are an NFT collection, or let’s just say you’re an artist, and you want somebody to buy your NFT, well, you need to advertise it, stuffs just not gonna fall in your lap, it could, but 99% of the time, you got to get out there, you got to advertise, we’re creating an AdWords model. And it’s a hybrid model, you can pay us to advertise, which you know, on certain key keywords, your NFT could come up on the side of the top, and it’s for sale on, you know, opensea wherever. Or you could get even higher search rankings by staking our token, LP. So if you buy Quoth token and stake it in our LP, we will know that because we’ll see it in your wallet. And if you are an advertiser, your advertisements will show up higher than anyone else. So it’s a really cool token utility that not a lot of people are doing but it adds a lot of liquidity to our pool, it gets the advertiser in front of more people to try to get more eyeballs on their NFT’s. And again, everybody kind of wins. Yeah, so that’s uh, that’s just kind of the cool stuff that we’re coming down the roadmap and you know, the bridging the multi-chain bridging is going to be one of the last items on the roadmap because that’s one of the hardest, but yeah, that’s kind of the update on that.

Spicey | OIG: That's genius. I think that’s a really great feature. Again, same as almost all the other features you’ve mentioned, and not something that I’ve seen in the market. So that’s really cool. What would you say is your favourite thing on your roadmap? Because it sounds like you have a lot of really cool stuff coming up.

Chris Boundikas: You know, I really want to get the search and the neural nets spun up, you know, without searching accurately, our product isn’t as attractive. So, the more NFT collections we get, the more community you get, the more training the more advanced training we can get our own AI is already spinning up the data sets on the on-chain NFT’s right now, right. We’ve already captured all those. They’re doing their own but you need humans to train those machines in order to be smarter, and then it starts to work on its own. So I’d say, you know, onboarding and NFT collections it’s fun because we’re getting in touch with some of the brightest talent out there. We get their marketing arm, they get our marketing arm, their community loves it because they’re basically researching their own NFT’s that they’ve already been looking at, for a year or a month or a day. And they’re getting paid to help, you know, increase the searchability of that NFT. And if you’re an NFT, holder of let’s say, fluffy world, or supducks, and you hear this, you’re thinking, Okay, well, if I make this easier for people around the world, to search for sub ducks, then more sub ducks will be sold. Of course, as a holder, I want more sub ducks sold, because the floor raises, it becomes rare. It’s more demand. So it’s a win win for everybody, I really am excited about that part, to get into communities and really collaborate. And then just all the other stuff is, you know, bells and whistles, and stuff, but we’re really just working on building the community, getting the name out, and making sure our product is actually, you know, usable. It’s the main thing we see with Project launches, the greatest idea in the world. But it takes too long to get out. The community loses momentum, and then nobody uses it. It could be the best thing in the world. Yeah. But if nobody’s using it, it’s it’s just, you know, it’s not good. So, you know, we plan on continuously engaging in NFT collections all the time, bringing them on, and eventually, you know, we should be an NFT Springboard Launchpad, that can really help new mints get out there. I'm dropping a lot of information that’s not, that’s not out there. I know what this is, I guess that’s what these are for and listeners, obviously get rewarded for listening to stuff like this.

Spicey | OIG : For sure, I mean, like, again, thank you for all the exclusive content, obviously, that you can’t catch anywhere else other than OIG. And, you know, it’s you hit the nail on the head when we see so many projects coming out with such ambitious goals. But it seems like you have all the necessary tools and infrastructure at your disposal to really make this work. And you do have a plan, you value community transparency, these are all fundamental things that the community loves, and the investors as well. So I see a lot of great things up ahead for Quoth. I’m excited because I’ve never heard something like this, and I would use it. I feel like this is something that the market needs the space needs. Absolutely. Almost as if it’s the Google of crypto and NFTs, and who knows where it can go from there. So really great. Hearing all this from you, Chris. Where could our viewers find more of you? Could you give us a list of some socials?

Chris Boundikas: Yeah, we’ve got, you know, Twitter. I’m on Twitter team is on Twitter. We live on Twitter. You know, obviously, telegram as well. But the community is mainly in telegram. I’m sure Discord is about to get filled up when we open that up. Our website Quoth.ai If you go to the team, you can find all of our handles there on Twitter, if you’re not on Twitter, probably LinkedIn and get a hold of us if you’re an NFT collection listening to this. Just reach out in Twitter or wherever just get a hold of us and let’s try to to to collaborate and see what we can do for you.

Spicey | OIG: Really great stuff today. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. It was an honour speaking to you about Quoth

Chris Boundikas: OIG in the house. Hopefully, I can be on again. See you guys. We’ll see you soon.