On 10 October 2019, our CMO Sean had a Live AMA session with Contentos CEO Mick on Crypto.com's Official Telegram Channel.

Sean: Welcome, Mick! Got some great questions for you. But to start, can you briefly introduce the COS project?

Mick: Contentos is a decentralizing global content ecosystem. It is supported by Cheetah Mobile (600M+MAU) and various content-related services including Live.me (live streaming), Cheez (short video) and Photogrid (image) and cos.tv with over 60M overseas MAU combined. Contentos has attracted global investors in blockchain, internet, and venture capital community in its early-sales rounds such as Binance Lab, DHVC and IDG.

Compared with any other similar content blockchain, Contentos has real content products which support Photo, Live Streaming and Video, millions of content creators and a large number of potential users worldwide, these three unique advantages give Contentos the best place to stand out among any similar projects.

Currently, Contentos main-net already launched on Sep 25 and cos.tv now is fully integrated to the main-net, we have reached almost 2K daily on-chain users and 30K daily TX. You can find out more from these links:

COS.tv

Github: https://github.com/coschain/

Contentos block explorer: https://explorer.contentos.io

$COS already be listed on Binance.com from Aug 3 2019 with COS/BNB, COS/BTC, and COS/USDT trading pairs.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/contentos/

https://info.binance.com/en/research/COS-2019-08-02.html

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/COS_USDT

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/COS_BTC

https://www.binance.com/en/trade/COS_BNB

Sean: Thanks for the introduction, Mick. Now, let's jump into the Q&A session.

Q1: What would be the number one benefit of going through the COS platform?

Mick: A fair, transparent decentralized content distribution platform which rewards your content based on the true audience engagement.

I believe it's the most fundamental value proposition from any content blockchain project, even to any content platforms. This is the vision we set to the Contentos from day one.

Contentos main-net already launched on Sep 25, so now everyone can experience it on cos.tv.

Q2: Can you explain to a young person, in plain words, why should they use Contentos and not youtube? Thanks

Mick: First, you can still use YouTube, but after you create the content, why not try to upload to cos.tv at the same time and see how many ADDITIONAL money and followers you can earn besides YouTube?

Second, do you think it’s easy to be top tier YouTuber now? If you want to get popular, cos.tv perhaps is a much easier new content platform you can give it a try! furthermore, you will be part of it, the early join, the more privileges you will have.

Q3: How different is Contentos compared with BAT as both are kind of providing rewards to content creators?

Mick: BAT is focusing on rewarding the audience "attention", and it's a main product is the Brave browser (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser&hl=en). We just need to make a simple comparison - the user base, you can see Contentos potential: on GooglePlay, Brave has 10M+ downloads, but just a Photogrid has over 100M+ downloads (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.roidapp.photogrid&hl=en), it's 10X bigger than Brave. Not to mention we still have Liveme, Cheez and cos.tv. so user number is one of the most obvious advantages of Contentos.

Second, Because we have a main-net and the way to distribute COS is based on the content engagement and contribution, so it's relatively more transparent and fair compared with BAT token distribution.

Certainly, I personally respect BAT since they are also an early pioneer in this industry, it's possible that BAT and Contentos can work together in the future. After all, we all aim to help global content creators!

Q4. How do you think you will differentiate Contentos from a regular video sharing platform besides the token infrastructure? How will the people with know how get attracted to the platform?

Mick: Interaction feature. As you can see, in today's video content sharing products such as YouTube or TikTok, the interaction between creators and audience are weak, most of the time they can only interact via "Like, Share, Comment, or Follow/Subscribe".

Unlike live-streaming apps such as Liveme, there are more ways to help creators and audience to do live interaction.

Soon we will roll out some cool interaction feature on cos.tv which increase the way that creators and audience can interact with each other. We believe this can significantly improve the engagement, at the end of the day, to improve the monetization potential in the content. Blockchain can build some really cool "limited supply, time-limited offer and its be built on top of "Trust", which is one major unique value that blockchain can offer but the centralized platform cannot.

Q5. At present, it seems that the currencies that earn the most are utilitarian tokens. In this sense, how the team of COS are working to be a more useful currency in everyday life?

Mick: The key problem is how to help creators pay their living after receiving COS as a reward. Today, the path will be the following:

(1) upload content

(2) get COS reward

(3) move COS to binance.com or other crypto exchanges and convert to BTC or USDT

(4) move BTC to a regional exchange that has a fiat channel to sell and get fiat money. For instance, move to Coinbase.

(5) use fiat to pay for living.

The path is long and the conversion is hard to regular users. With the crypto.com credit card feature, in future, the path can be significant shorten!

(1) upload content

(2) get COS reward

(3) store COS to crypto.com then uses a credit card to pay for a living!

Each small step to improve can eventually increase the massive adoption. That's why Contentos team is so thrilled to work with crypto.com.

Q6. Considering the fact that we are looking at blockchain as a solution for the long term, do you have any plans to partner with large game streaming platforms like mixer or twitch to try to cater to the younger generation and get them to understand and adopt crypto, thus effectively creating a generation of early adopters all by yourself?

Mick: Certainly, just like the partnership we did with Photogrid and Liveme, the next step of COS adaption definitely can be the more partnership with mainstream content platforms, so Twitch definitely one of the good options to Contentos.

Meanwhile, we will also leverage our own product line such as COS.TV to attract more creators and audience. The COS.TV main-net integration can be a best case-study to partner’s products. I believe if we can have both directions work, it can significantly speed up the massive adoption process.

Q7. What really differentiates Contentos (COS), from other similar platforms that operate on blockchain like LBRY? Also, where are the videos stored: on a centralized server or servers like YouTube or decentralized on the Contentos network and using peer to peer protocols to recover the videos?

Mick: 1. We are leveraging existing content products which already in the market for years and have tens of millions of daily active users such as Photogrid. It’s hard to find any similar content blockchain projects which have this amount of user base.

2. Today’s decentralized technology still cannot guarantee the best watching experience for video/live streaming distribution. Maybe 5 to 10 years, we will have something that can perform better than today’s AWS service. We are talking about how to guarantee 95%-99% of real-life connection rate, not just a “proof of concept” peer-to-peer video distribution technology.

I was working on Liveme - one of the most popular mobile live streaming apps before, this apps serves over 10 million "monthly active users" worldwide, so we were very experienced in terms of video/live streaming content distribution. That’s why in the current phase, Contentos still rely on AWS to store and distribution video content, but in the future, we will keep a close eye on decentralized technology and see if we can adopt it.

Q8. Is there any running DApp of Contentos?

Mick: After Sep 25 mainnet launched, we already have cos.tv - a decentralized video website fully integrated with Contentos.

It now has 2K daily active onchain users and over 30K daily TX on mainnet. In the middle of this month, Photogrid will also integrated with Contentos mainnet, so global photogrid users - that's 40M monthly active users will be able to join Contentos. We expect this will further increase the mainnet daily active onchain users and daily TX

Q9. What is the role between Contentos (COS) & Popcorn (POP) tokens?

Mick: COS is the only utility tokens circulated in Contentos ecosystem, which means COS can be used in any DApp that is integrated with Contentos blockchain, and it can be circulated among these DApps, when you earn COS from one DApp, you can spend it on another DApp.

COS also is the only token can be traded in crypto exchanges such as crypto.com or binance.com.

POP is the centralized rewarding point in cos.tv and POP can only be used in cos.tv, you cannot trade POP in any exchanges. We reward POP to the user who conducts desired behavior on COS.tv. but POP cannot be used in any other Contentos DApp such as Photogrid or Liveme, cause these Apps have their own centralized rewarding system.

Q10. For Contentos to succeed, direct transactions between content creators and content users need to increase without intermediaries, and the number of content registered on content platforms will have to be high, but so far, most of the Contentos user based in China and Asia.

There are huge barriers in the content market that are difficult to spread easily by country, continent, and culture. Then how Contentos plan to do spread with global markets such as the United States and Europe?

And I think the quantity of coin is also very important in maintaining price. Contentos has 10 billion coins. This large quantity is likely to raise the value of the coin and make it difficult to spread the ecosystem. What do you think about this?

Mick: First, the key still how Contentos can leverage our partner’s existing products and user base. Start from next week, every day over 1 million Brazil photo creators and audience will be able to join Contentos main-net via new Photogrid.

In fact, the beta version already launched yesterday, but this is just the beginning, we expect to see the global rollout in early Nov. Photogrid has over 200K daily active users in US and another 300K daily active users in Europe. These are all “Daily Active Users”, not download or total users. So it gives Contentos a great chance to get mainstream user and creators' attention.

Second, as long as enough users demand the token, the value of the token will be raised. That’s also why I mentioned a large user base is the key strength to Contentos compare with any other similar projects.

Q11. How are you going to make it possible to track every copyright transaction? Will you support the creators when other people make fake copyright claims unlike other platforms?

Mick: We will leverage the community to help us filter the copyright issues. Even today on YouTube or Facebook, they also leverage community power, not just A.I technology to fight with the copyright issues.



The problem is

#1: they never share value back with community moderators.

#2 if its controversial content, centralized content platform becomes a black box to make the final call, sometimes it’s break’s trust. We expect blockchain technology can be more transparent in terms of controversial content judgment.

Q12. How will Contentos attract content consumers - not just content producers - to the platform? What incentives are in place so that viewers of material will want to come to Contentos more than established sources like Youtube, Instagram etc.

Mick: Good question! for my point of view, only great content attract audience, any other type of incentive won't last long. This is the conclusion we got after years experience on building live streaming app. So the key is to attract good content creators. In order to have good content creators, good products and a fair content distribution environment can really help. That's why we believe Contentos stands it's chance.

Q13. Why did you choose to collaborate with Crypto.com?

Mick: The way to help ordinary people easily use crypto! I personally love the credit card approach. One of my team members has a crypto.com credit card, the ease of use is the things that we always want to look for. Especially when you need to talk with lots of content creators who have zero knowledge of crypto.

Q14. Will Contentos look to implement different ways of supporting content creators such as paid subscriptions with CRO or even similar to Patreon but may be paid in crypto?

Mick: Definitely Yes, in fact, my ultimate goal is helping creators to find a more diversified monetization way to make a living with their creations.

Patreon.com's membership subscription is a good example, but there can be more. Imagine in future, creators can issue their own very unique, limited offered tokens, whoever holds it represents a right to have a more close engagement with the creators. Fans love this, and they will FOMO about this!

These tokens can be used to trace the holding time and can also be traded. It can be not just used to get "membership" privilege, but can also be used as a way to calculate the contribution to a creator's work.

This can NOT be easily done by today's centralized membership platforms due to lack of trust. But blockchain technology naturally can be used to solve the trust issue, which makes it become possible! You will see some testing on Contentos soon.

***so a hint to you is, COS has the potential to become the next BNB if we do this right***

Q15. How are you going to make sure to grow your rate of adoption amidst the well known and established platforms? Especially considering that your token is being used for speculative purposes on exchanges as opposed to being bought for a fixed price and used for one main purpose; driving your platform and rewarding it's contributors/content creators.

Mick: #1: True that YouTube or Facebook already become too big to compete. But I also want to point out most of the creators today cannot easily monetize their content due to more and more restrict "ad revenue sharing program" in these centralized content platforms. Content creators desperate need more ways to monetize content. So it gives us a chance.

#2: Indeed a good question, for me, I believe token is more like ownership in the system, we are exploring many different usages of COS in the ContentoS ecosystem. COS can be the replacement of fiat money in the ecosystem, so simple business models such as membership subscriptions can use COS instead of fiat. In this case, due to it's not a stable coin, it will cause some issues for sure. That's why we are also thinking about some new usage. Perhaps even having a stable coin in the Contentos ecosystem in the future.

Q16. What is the business model for Contentos?

Mick: As a non-profit foundation, Contentos blockchain itself and our team cannot make a profit, but we do have several major use case for COS:

1. Peer-to-peer transaction - such as Fans direct donation/subscription to Influencer / Creator, which is a huge business model on Twitch or pateron.com. COS will be the token you can purchase virtual gifting or make direct donation/subscription.

2. COS will be the “fuel” to run the Smart Contract System in Contentos. We have WASM virtual machine built in Contentos and we will have many pre-created Smart Contract for Advertisers to make business deals such as Ad with Creators on-chain. COS consumption is essential in this case.

3. COS will also be the Vote to elect block producer, similar to EOS design. We expect to see huge COS “staking” need from here.

4. Any DApp developer wants to build DApp on Contentos also needs to make COS security deposit into Smart Contract - this makes sure DApp developer won’t build something that hurt the entire ecosystem.

On top of Contentos blockchain. COS.tv will also have its own business mode and collect COS as the payment, we leave this to each DApp team to design the usage of COS. For instance, cos.tv will accept DApp developers to pay COS in exchange for the promotional spot on cos.tv website, today we already have Harmony and MixMarvel parented with us to promote their DApp games.

Q17. Will a mobile app for Contentos be launched soon?

Mick: I got this question all the time, yes, we are planning to have an Android version in late Q4. Stay tuned!

Q18. Can you explain how scalable the Contentos network is? Are you going to establish or make use of a Content Delivery Network or edge servers for low latency and high throughput?

Mick: Our public chains adopt sabft consensus mechanism, which can achieve high transaction throughput and up to 5000 TPS during the test network.

Dapp in our public chain, such as COSTV, Photogrid will put the file content of video pictures into CDN, and write the content hash or URL to the chain, which will have a very good user experience.

Q19. Which plans of Marketing are in place, so more users/influencers start spreading the word?

Mick: 1. Via content creation and creator to spread the words.

We are launching a new singing contest with US largest radio iHeart radio (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liveme-and-iheartradios-102-7-kiis-fm-launch-music-house-singing-competition-300929418.html), Contentos will host both Korea and Vietnam contest and winners from these two countries will join the final at L.A, US on middle Nov.

In Korea, we've partnered with local the most popular karaoke App called "Somesing" (https://medium.com/@ContentosHome/cos-we-love-sing-song-contest-commence-603a1cb7c49d). In Vietnam, we also started the early round of the contest and have hundreds of musicians joined the contest now! (You can check out their performance on cos.tv

2. Via developer hackathon. We've worked with Binance, Matic, Celers, COCOS, and several other top tier blockchain projects to run a joint developer hackathon around the world, including previously at Shanghai and Seoul, on Oct 25, we will have the next round at S.F.

3. Via large user base existing content app such as Photogrid. Photogrid has over 100M+ downloads, this month the new version will be fully integrated with Contentos main-net, which means we will have a chance to introduce COS to millions of users.

Q20. How would COS continue to work together with Crypto.com in the future?

Mick: 1. User education. We will have content creators to produce tutorial content in the future for crypto.com. We believe this can educate more regular users to understand crypto and how to use it.

2. We are love to have more community engagement with crypto.com community for sure!

Q21. As the use of the Contentos blockchain grows, if it reaches the maximum limit of total transactions, would there be an adjustment for "stamina" and "energy" to cap total transactions? For example, more stamina or energy is needed, or it refills slower

Mick: It can be an option if the need is raising. Now you can stake more "VEST" to obtain more "stamina" and "energy". That's the way we can create a strong need for COS since VEST is the staking form of COS. In the future, if the community truly needs to adjust these system-wise parameters, it can be achieved after all block producers reach the consensus.

Q22. There are 4 Billion COS for rewards. What happens when those COS are distributed? Will there be no more rewards necessary at this point, or will there be a new reward scheme?

Mick: From a price point of view, it's actually good if the tokens are limited supply.

Meanwhile, I believe token is not just the "fiat money replacement", it also means the ownership, that's why we've designed a limited supply model.

To your question, after 12 years all COS are distributed, the business model will be:



1. Content peer-to-peer model such as donation or content membership subscription.

By the time when Contentos/COS becomes adopted by billions of people (yes! billions!), people will start used to trade with COS as a way to calculate content value, which means existing circulated COS can help to facilitate this purpose.

2. After 12 years later, we believe the audience also already get used to send GiftingVote to creators, in this case, the revenue from selling GiftingVote will be shared among creators and BP.

3. If the GiftingVote revenue to BP is declined (since part of it needs to be shared with creators), how to help BP? the answer is the revenue from using COS as the fuel to run Smart Contract. By the time Contentos has billions of users, the needs of doing business must be huge, like today's all type of Advertisement run on YouTube and Facebook, but this time there will be no middle man, just Smart Contract, so the revenue from running Smart Contract to power all these content businesses will be a new, super-strong revenue stream to all BP, they are the platform operator just like YouTube or Facebook. The only difference is, they are transparent and can be voted by anyone who hold COS!

Q23. What are the bottlenecks when scaling applications on the COS blockchain? E.g. how many transactions per second are possible?

Mick: We actually have some real-life reference. Take Liveme as an example, 2 years ago, when a top tier YouTuber "Roman Atwood" (15.3M subs, https://www.youtube.com/user/RomanAtwoodVlogs) went live stream on Liveme, the peak time we've recorded is 700+ virtual gifting sent per second from over 100K concurrent viewers. This can be a good reference to us. If we have 10 Roman type influencers onboard and all do live streaming content at the same time, it will require over 7000 TPS.

At this moment, the highest TPS Contentos test-net has achieved is around 25K, which is enough to cope with this need. However, we also foresee the future need must be ever more, that's why we already started researching the expansion design, lucky, we are not alone, there are many great blockchain projects teams such as Harmony.One out there can help. We will announce a more detailed tech roadmap soon on late Q4, stay tuned!

Q24. Would it be possible that instead of moving to your own blockchain you would move to another one in the future?

Mick: At the current stage, we will focus on Contentos mainnet and make sure it can achieve our goal - to be the world's largest decentralized content ecosystem.

We are also very open to any type of partnership, regardless it's from another mainnet, another domain such as game or ToB projects, even with another content blockchain projects. Inter-blockchain communication will also be the next major research point to Contentos v1.1.

But we will focus on Contentos mainnet development, so I don't see any possibility to completely move Contentos to another blockchain mainnet at this moment.

Q25. Hello! As a content ecosystem you would wish to have a global reach. Where do you source your traffic foundations in search for active users globally?

Mick: We got three major content partners apps, in total, they can cover around 60M "monthly active users" (not downloads, if we talk about downloads, it will be over 150M worldwide). Take Photogrid as an example, it has over 40M "monthly active users". 20% from Brazil, 20% from Indonesia, 15% from the US. These gives Contentos a large and diversified user/creator base.

Second, cos.tv is also a new initiative from Contentos team, we now have over 50K daily active users, 40% from Vietnam and 30% from Brazil, these will be a new user source to Contentos.

Q26. How will Contentos try to surpass, or at least convince the majority current content makers (eg. from youtube, twitch) to actually put their content in your platform. I understand that there are already users but we still see the dominance of the current traditional media streams.

Mick: The key still how to make money. I am in content creation business for years, most of the YouTubers you see never make any money. Now they just do their best to produce content and hope someday they can go from Amateur to Pro.

So our strategy will be convincing long tier creators to give it a try first, later we will also partnered with few selective top tier YouTubers. The other way is leveraging our existing content products such as Photogrid or Liveme to reach creators, plus some incentive program, we believe finding early adopters will not be extremely hard to Contentos.

Q27. What are the minimum requirements to run a complete node of Contentos?

Mick: Welcome anyone who wants to run the Block Producer! here are the requirements:

1. An AWS m5.2xlarge or equivalent spec. machine. (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/) , (8 cores/32G RAM/1GMb network bandwidth/1T or more SSD), it’s about $3363 a year.

2. Linux operating system.

3. At least one Dev-Op engineer.

4. Must closely work with Contentos core developers.

5. 30,000 VEST in the Contentos account.

We have a detailed article to talk about this: https://medium.com/contentos-io/what-is-the-benefit-to-become-contentos-block-producer-f8751c3ca401

Q28. Are there any plans of launching Contentos tokens on other blockchains other than ETH? (e.g. EOS)

Mick: COS currently is BEP-2 format (on Binance chain). And it’s the trading format on binance.com, DEX, Crypto.com, Gate.io and Bithumb global.

COS used to have ERC-20 but we didn’t use it anymore after converting to BEP-2. Now our next step is converting from BEP-2 to our main-net native token format. We won’t consider issuing COS token on any other blockchain at this moment.

Q29. What is the next step for Contentos? There is very little information on the next steps in your white paper.

Mick: Next, Contentos has three major roadmap:

#1 We will help creators to issue their own token on top of Contentos main-net, imagine any creator can have their own content token, perhaps limited supply to their fans, and these creator tokens can be traded as well, everything will be pegged to COS. We believe this will significantly increase the demand of COS.

#2 more product adaption. More peer-to-peer use case will be created to increase the demand of COS, such as content donation/membership subscription.

#3 2020 contentos v1.1 tech roadmap. We expect to have the major upgrade in scalability, inter-blockchain communication and more decentralized consensus mechanism, stay tuned, we will release the new v1.1 tech. roadmap in late Q4 this year.

Q30. What's next for Contentos platform? What does the future look like with COS?

Mick: By the end of this year, our goal is to have over 50,000 daily active users on chain. These users will come from Photogrid and cos.tv, which means Contentos main-net will have large amount of real users and real TX everyday.

We now already have over 1K daily active on-chain users, just after 2 weeks main-net launched. We expect to see Photogrid new version released in the middle of this month and large amount of global photo creators/audience will join.

Next year, 2020, Contentos has three major roadmap.

#1 We will help creators to issue their own token on top of Contentos main-net.

#2 more product adaption. More peer-to-peer use case will be created to increase the demand of COS, such as content donation/subscription.

#3 2020 contentos v1.1 tech roadmap which covers the previous major research points in previous answer.

Sean: Now it’s the Live Q&A Session, please submit your questions here and Mick will address it. Please note that only 3 questions will be selected.

Live Q1. Most content creators use Youtube for videos or amazons twitch for streaming. Can gaming streamers still use the standard tools and services like streamlabs, streamelements, Open Broadcaster Software etc. to manage, design and moderate their streams or are there even partnerships planned with these tools and services?

Mick: Yes, that's our goal, we don't want to change the creator's behavior, for instance, you should still use OBS to do game live streaming and leave the rest to Contentos/COS.tv to handle, we believe this will maximize the adaption from content creators. Today, you can actually use OBS and live stream from Liveme then the content will be shared on cos.tv!

Live Q2. As we all now that YouTube is the biggest Giant in terms of contents But How Contentos Platform is better and improved than YouTube ?

Mick: One major issue happened to YouTube today is they focus on too much to the top tier content creators and media house, for those long tier content creators, they cannot really help. That's why we'd like to see if Contentos can help on long tier content creators and audience to find the true content value.

Live Q3. Contentos has a lot of achievements in TestNet and will release MainNet. After launching MainNet, what strategies do Contentos have to make COS more valuable in terms of increasing the number of players and what apps are you integrating to expand your ecosystem?

Mick: At this moment, main-net BP election already start attract lots of attention on staking COS to main-net, meanwhile, the content rewarding system also require user to stake COS to "VEST", later, the peer-to-peer content model such as content subscription or membership can further enhance the demand of COS, which eventually will increase the market value of COS due to strong product side demand.

Sean: Thanks for all the questions! Much appreciation for your insightful responses Mick. Today’s Contentos X Crypto.com Community AMA is complete. We appreciate everyone who stayed all the way.

Pre-collected questions that were addressed during the AMA will share a pool of $3,000 USD worth of COS. Congratulations to the winners! COS rewards will be issued within 14 days after the campaign ends. You can log in and see your Crypto.com App's COS wallet section.

See you next time!

Mick: Thanks, everyone! Let's stay tuned and welcome to follow us! contentos.io