FAQs

What is the status of the project and platform?

Opened the platform to the public October, 2018. Met the deliverable date outlined in the BLOCKv technology roadmap.

Cycler & Brain framework made available to limited community.

Over 180 developers and developer partners are registered and working on the platform.

Partners on-boarded and developing on the platform: Meda, Varius, Greenfence Consumer, Vatom Labs, Ogilvy, InCrowd, Austella

Number of Vatoms in circulation — over 7,000,000

Number of users — over 200,000

How many people are working full time on the project?

The BLOCKv team has grown rapidly over the last 12 months. We now have 36 staff engaged in the project across the globe. Specifically:

Technology (Development and Operation) in Poland, Switzerland and South Africa — 18

Marketing and Communication in USA and UK — 6

Partner Management in USA and UK — 4

Business Development, Finance and other General Functions in Switzerland, USA and UK — 8

Who are the new hires?

We continue to attract the best and brightest to the BLOCKv team. We’ve hired some great talent over the last few months across the marketing, partner management and development sectors.

Brett Loney was hired as the Director of Product Marketing, reporting to CMO, Michael Dobak. He is completing the onboarding process and making immediate contributions to our CRM strategy, V2 of blockv.io and the newly launched developer portal.

was hired as the Director of Product Marketing, reporting to CMO, Michael Dobak. He is completing the onboarding process and making immediate contributions to our CRM strategy, V2 of blockv.io and the newly launched developer portal. Joana Rizzo recently joined the BLOCKv Marketing team in London and was thrown straight in the deep end, organizing presentations, stand and demonstrations around adtech London.

recently joined the BLOCKv Marketing team in London and was thrown straight in the deep end, organizing presentations, stand and demonstrations around adtech London. Drew Yacu joined the team as a Partner Manager, reporting to Jon Knight. Drew has been managing the Greenfence and Varius onboarding process and all associated projects.

joined the team as a Partner Manager, reporting to Jon Knight. Drew has been managing the Greenfence and Varius onboarding process and all associated projects. Marcelo Faro was hired as a Partner Manager for the European operation and is quickly making an impact. He is working on-boarding six new partners, including ADE, InCrowd and Stylist magazine, as well as campaigns in London and Amsterdam.

was hired as a Partner Manager for the European operation and is quickly making an impact. He is working on-boarding six new partners, including ADE, InCrowd and Stylist magazine, as well as campaigns in London and Amsterdam. Ben Davey recently joined the team in London, focused on Business Development in the creative and media vertical where he has deep relationships.

The team continues to grow, so if you’d like to work with BLOCKv, reach out to us via the email address at the bottom of this update.

Where is the marketing?

Michael Dobak, CMO, joined BLOCKv at the end of June and began the on-boarding process. His first priority was to understand the core technology, while developing a

positioning and messaging architecture to communicate the core benefits of the BLOCKv platform and transformational functionality of Vatoms. Our positioning rests on the strengths and benefits of the technology as applied to human (one to one) engagement, and allowing our developer and partner community to develop Vatoms within any sector or application that demands better audience engagement.

His second priority was to bring new talent to expand the capability and skill set of the marketing team.

BLOCKv retained Lindsey Breeden, Creative Director and Ximena Mutis, UX Designer as the in-house creative team and visionaries behind the new BLOCKv look and feel.

In late September Brett Loney joined the team. Brett’s focus will be in Product Marketing for the BLOCKv platform.

As we ramp up social activity, Sisi Rivera is managing and developing social content.

Joana Rizzo is supporting social and community management, representing our European operation as well as developing an exciting partner marketing campaign for digital agencies to be launched in the New Year.

On the communication front, in September we launched v1 of blockv.io, moving away

from the pre-ICO site to an evolved BLOCKv position and announced its evolution as the new platform for human engagement. More importantly, the product positioning and messaging for the Vatom will work to establish the technology as the standard for digital objects and NFTs. A design system for the brand was developed for the new release of the blockv.io site. In mid-December we will release v2 of blockv.io, with improved navigation and responsive design, marketing automation and customer relationship management, along with a content publishing and management system that will tie-in all of the BLOCKv owned channels. Additionally, we will roll out new content and industry use cases for retail, advertising and marketing, gaming, sports and entertainment.

BLOCKv is a platform as a service and therefore our marketing efforts will remain focused on communicating BLOCKv technology milestones and integrations, celebrating partner projects and educating our key audiences on the transformative power of Vatoms across the key industries outlined above. Again, our goal is to make the Vatom the standard for digital objects and NFTs, similar to how Adobe made the PDF the standard for digital documents.

We are approaching 2019 with a motivated marketing team and a clear mission to inspire, educate and help train new partners and developers on the BLOCKv platform.

What is the status of cycler program?

The platform development team, led by CTO Gunther Thiel, has been hard at work since the October 1, 2018 public release making the necessary back-end changes to enable v2 functionality, including the cycler framework (decentralization of Vatom hosting) and the brain framework (client-independent autonomy for Vatoms with long-running back-end processes allowing movement, AI etc). A key dependency for this was migrating the platform from a synchronous to asynchronous architecture which we completed in mid-November.

We’re currently testing the cycler framework and brain framework with a limited group of partners and developers, and will have a live working demo early in the New Year, prior to full public release.

What is BLOCKv’s go-to-market strategy?

BLOCKv’s mission is to build the global standard technology platform for smart digital objects and NFTs that will allow our development community to create amazing human engagement experiences. We’re relying on that community to build campaigns for big brands, create games and apps, and to find undreamt of new use cases for our technology. BLOCKv has a mandate to train and support as many high quality 3rd party service companies as possible to drive demand for Vatoms.

BLOCKv made an important strategic decision in 2018 to not take on professional service projects ourselves and compete with our ecosystem, but to instead focus resources on the platform itself and create a vibrant developer community.

What is Varius Solutions?

Varius is a blockchain professional services company and a partner of BLOCKv. Varius builds enterprise-grade solutions for leading companies and governments. Varius has several distinguishing factors; most notably it brings industry-leading expertise in building solutions on the EOS Blockchain and the BLOCKv platform. They’ve also started an initiative to build advanced tools and analytics for BLOCKv developers to further enhance the usefulness of the platform.

We reached out to Mike Gamaroff, Chief Digital Officer of Varius Solutions for a statement on the mission and strategic intent.

“Varius Solutions is a professional service and product company specializing in augmented customer engagement. We help customers unlock value, increase efficiency and drive revenue using smart digital objects and blockchain. We help brands design, deploy and distribute rich engagement experiences that offer tangible new experiences into the hands of their consumers — without devaluing their products through discounts and shallow incentives.”

Part of the BLOCKv team in Santa Monica has previously been focused on client professional services, building direct brand campaigns and demonstrations, as well as UI tools. Given the fact that BLOCKv’s focus is on the platform development and the partner ecosystem, and that the team in Santa Monica is so highly skilled, having a deep familiarity with developing on the platform, it made sense to transition this talented unit to Varius Solutions.

We’re delighted to support Varius as part of our partner developer community and are very excited at the capabilities they bring to the ecosystem. However, our relationship is not exclusive, and BLOCKv will continue to encourage and support many other established and fledgling service organizations to become partners, as can be seen by our investment in the Partner Management team.

Is the BLOCKv project vibrant and growing?

Yes! In our view, BLOCKv is one of the most substantial, “real” projects in the blockchain space that has the potential to fundamentally affect the future of human interaction. We already have millions of Vatoms in production, and hundreds of thousands of accounts set up, allowing us to build confidence in the architecture of the platform as it prepares to grow to planetary scale in the years ahead. We have the ability to execute and are already seeing encouraging signs that Vatoms can become the global standard in smart digital objects and NFTs. BLOCKv will have a profound impact across a wide range of sectors ranging from advertising & marketing, sports and entertainment promotion, to health care, education, and government.

What is the BLOCKv communications strategy and how will it improve?

Currently BLOCKv shares up-to-date news and information through our Medium Blog and at month end through the BLOCKv monthly newsletter. With the launch of blockv.io V2 in mid-December, we will be publishing news directly from our site, and will be starting a developer blog with direct posts from the BLOCKv technology team.

Specific to the question of sharing financial information, as a privately held company we do not report financial information publicly. The team has been focusing time and energy on delivering against our technical roadmap commitments, ramping up new capabilities, and growing our business and ecosystem.

Going forward we’ll be increasing our community management presence on Reddit and Telegram and will comment where and when we can. If you have a pressing question related to our development platform and related BLOCKv technology, we ask you send all inquiries to support@blockv.io.