Blockchain and crypto projects are building solutions to problems in content marketing and advertising, logistics, security, banking, and traditional payment systems. Through our CryptoCatnip dApp, where you can read crypto news and earn MEDIA Tokens, we are collaborating with revolutionary projects to bring you up-to-date news and announcements from our partners.

One of our CryptoCatnip partners is COTI, the ‘Currency Of The Internet’, which is a digital currency alternative to systems like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. On Wednesday 29th August, James Tabor, CEO of MEDIA Protocol, and Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI, had a live Q&A session in the MEDIA Protocol Community on Telegram. If you missed it, or want to recap the chat, read the highlights below.

During the AMA, James and Shahaf spoke about MEDIA Protocol and COTI, the future of payments and online transactions, and other hot topics across crypto, blockchain, tech, and more.

About COTI

Currency Of The Internet, or COTI, is the digital currency alternative to traditional payment systems like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. COTI addresses and takes into account a number of the key pain points that merchants and buyers alike experience on a daily basis, providing a currency and a payment platform that is simple, transparent, trustworthy, instant and scalable.

Perhaps you could start by giving a quick intro to COTI and what it is you and the team are trying to achieve?

Shahaf: COTI is a world-changing blockchain 3.0 protocol that can be used by decentralised payment apps (dApps) and stable coins. We provide the infrastructure for merchants, enterprises, governments, developers, and more, to optimize their payment solutions in a way that is extremely scalable with near zero fees.

At the core of COTI’s infrastructure lies the Trustchain, a proprietary consensus algorithm based on machine learning, which dramatically decreases transaction costs and increases processing speed by assigning trust scores to transactions and clustering them in chains. When coupled with no requirement for mining and low energy consumption, the network can operate with near zero transaction fees.

The Trustchain works by creating a trust layer over the DAG that is coupled with a ranking mechanism to track the behavioural data of network entities. Users are ranked according to trust and are assigned a trust score. Fees decrease the more trustworthy a user is, while the speed to process a transaction increases. The inverse is also true, thus improving the security and overall trustworthiness of the network by generating trust.

What are the possible security issues, vulnerabilities to attack, of DAG and how do we avoid them?

Shahaf: COTI has built mechanisms to monitor, detect and defend against possible attacks to ensure network security. An example of such a mechanism is COTI’s Double Spend Prevention (DSP) Nodes.

The COTI network has been designed to be highly secure and fault-tolerant. We have implemented a multi-tiered security architecture that limits attack vectors and attack ingresses. All traffic is encrypted end-to-end using Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 (utilising SHA256 keys), and all data-at-rest is secured with AES-256 encryption.

Will merchants and customers have some kind of appeals process in the instance an outcome of arbitration is disputed on valid grounds (similar to how banks have a complaints process to review such decisions before escalation to a governing authority)?

Shahaf: Our decentralised arbitration system protects all entities against errors, fraud and counterparty abuse. The COTI Arbitration System maintains a pool of reputable network participants from which the arbitrators are randomly chosen for the arbitrators’ jury. Users are invited to the arbitrators’ pool if they have maintained high Trust Scores. And yes, it is possible to file an appeal if a merchant or a consumer feels that justice wasn’t served.

Is MEDIA Protocol open source? How long have you been around for?

James: MEDIA Protocol is open source — we believe that you cannot foster true innovation without collaboration. Version 1 of the parameterisable smart contract can be found on our Github. We first started working on MEDIA Protocol around Q3 of last year!

Why are you using Bancore to stabilise, is it safe? I understood COTI had its own stabilising controls.

Shahaf: We do have our own stabilization framework. We use Bancor to gain extra liquidity.

How decentralised is Media Protocol? And how decentralised is COTI?

Shahaf: COTI, when fully launched, will be completely decentralised.

James: When launched, MEDIA Protocol will be fully decentralised — this is also reflected in that there is not a central/defined way of implementing the set of tools, or deploying the token:

1. The content that is promoted and made available to consumers is decided by the brands/publishers that are distributing the tokens.

2. Similarly, each brand/publisher establishes their own parameters for how they want to accept, or allow consumers to access it.

3. Meta data is stored on the blockchain, but separate off-chain data storage has to happen. Writing consumer data to the blockchain in a transparent form would open up regulatory issues across a number of areas.

You explain COTI as a “blockless payment system” does this mean transactions are not stored on a blockchain? How does DAG improve transactions?

Shahaf: COTI is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), as opposed to a blockchain. Compared to PoW, PoS and dPoS, COTI’s DAG-based distributed ledger is best suited for high-performance apps and extreme scalability. By combining our Trustchain consensus algorithm with proof of trust (PoT) and a DAG-based ledger, COTI can process tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) at near zero fees.

Could being fully decentralised result in potential regulatory challenges in certain regions, given the finance sector is generally heavily regulated?

Shahaf: The choke-hold is around KYC/AML processes. Right now we are doing everything ourselves and that is of course centralised by nature. We hope to see more decentralised KYC processes happening. There are some things already happening like GlobalID and possibly CIVIC.

James: This is an interesting question, and while you addressed it from the financial side, I’d like to address it from the data / media side. In the EU we have GDPR which is a strict regulation about the use, processing and storage of consumer data. In this case, we advise that content owners/creators abide by these regulations when processing/dealing with consumer data.

As only metadata around content/ID is sent to the blockchain these don’t actually contain any sensitive data. While this could be perceived to “centralise” data handling and processing, I am pretty sure we’d agree that sending all consumer data to the blockchain would be a huge issue.

What will the experience be like for the users — will it be a seamless experience or do users have to take any special action to be able to use COTI?

Shahaf: COTI has been designed to be extremely user-friendly for all parties involved, whether consumers, merchants, developers or any other third parties. We have designed digital wallets, debit cards, POS integrations and SDK/API tools into our COTI PAY app for streamlined adoption.

If we give preferences then this just increase our biases. How do we still get what we need with limiting our views?

James: Actually that depends on how this data is used by the application/site provider. There has been a realisation over the past year or so that simply giving people their “preferences” results in an optimisation to zero/you just repeat the same content and they lose interest (looking at your Netflix “recommendation” algorithm).

However, currently a lot of preference data is sent back piecemeal to the people who created, or own the content. These centralised parties only share fragments of this. It’s their business model. But, if we establish a direct relationship between consumer and content creator/owner they are able to build a far better picture. The true art of using data is not to give someone what the data says they want, but to use the data to divine what it is they want, but don’t know yet. Used properly you would get better, more informative content. And if you did not, you would also stop going to those sites, or giving them tokens to access content.

Can you retract your preferences? Say I am interested in trading, then lose interest and do not want this, can you change your preferences?

James: Depends on how the app/website decides to record or infer preferences.

A sensible deployment would both infer by showing you other content mixed in, as well as offering users the options to change their preferences in settings too.

Crypto projects don’t tend to have a marketing advisory team. Why does MEDIA Protocol?

James: Actually this is a team of Media, Advertising and Marketing Industry experts. Their roll isn’t just to help us with marketing MEDIA Protocol. Their most important work is in helping us clarify, shape and identify early adopters that want to experiment with MEDIA Protocol and begin roll out to major brands and consumers.

It has taken a long time to boil down MEDIA Protocol and blockchain in to something that the wider industry, our target market if you will, can get behind. Lots of conversations have started with “why would I use Bitcoin to do marketing”! It is not really a marketer’s remit to think about how to apply seriously nascent technology. When they encounter something that has been portrayed in the press in a certain way it is up to us to ensure that we are re-framing the conversation, and uncovering actual business cases they can get behind.

Can you elaborate more on how this partnership will benefit MEDIA Protocol and COTI in the short and long run?

James: Short term — it’s a great way of sharing ideas, comparing notes on technology and other aspects of early stage projects. I also look at partnerships as a way of spreading the word to businesses — for example, content marketing and promotion is often tied directly to product and payment. This allows us to share leads/mention each other to big partners.

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For more information regarding MEDIA Protocol find us on our social channels below:

Website: www.mediaprotocol.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MEDIAProtocol

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEDIA_Protocol

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/media-protocol/

Telegram: https://t.me/Media_Protocol_Community and https://t.me/MP_Announcements

Medium: https://medium.com/@mediaprotocolsm

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MEDIAProtocol

For more information about COTI find them on their social channels below:

Website: https://coti.io/en/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/COTInetwork

Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coti-ltd/

Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork

Medium: https://medium.com/cotinetwork

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl-2YzhaPnouvBtotKuM4DA