Intro
The company behind GIFTO is Asian innovations Group, a fast-growing social apps company with over 100M users to date (founded in 2013).
UpLive, one of AIG’s apps, is a live video streaming app with a gamified gifting solution that enables emotional interaction between broadcasters and their followers. Currently, users of UpLive are buying virtual gifts worth Millions of USD each month.
AIG wants to enable anyone to give and receive virtual gifts in an easy way. Gifto is a decentralized gifting protocol based on the Ethereum blockchain and a virtual gifts market place. Gifto will first serve UpLives’ 60,000 broadcasters to receive gifts from their millions of followers from other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others.
The team is strong and well experienced in the necessary fields, the advisory board is well respected in the crypto sphere, the crowdsale details are fair (low cap, low bonus to early contributors), and the first pilot of the Gifto protocol is expected to launch by the end of December 2017.
Let’s get going with our evaluation!
Team
Asian Innovations group
Gifto is a project led by Asian Inovations Group Limited.
Asian Innovations Group, founded by Andy Tian, is a fast-growing mobile internet company creating mobile products, with over 100M users to date.
It has the following social products:
PengPeng: a gamified social chat app in Asia, with over 40 million downloads.
UpLive: a live streaming platform launched in June 2016 which has managed to attract 20M downloads, 60k broadcasters and is on track for 100M USD in revenue for 2017.
BigCat: a YouTube Content maker in South East Asia, with 150M views per month on YouTube, attracting 11 million unique viewers per month.
Superfans: a fan app that allows fans to follow their favorite stars’ social media activities, with over 10 million users since launching in 2016.
Core team
Andy Tian: Founder
CEO and founder of AIG (described above), previously the general manager of ZyngaChina and an early member of Google China.
Graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree and a masters in computer science.
Charles Thach: Chief crypto officer
Previously worked at top tier investment banks in various roles in Washington DC, Boston, Paris, New York and Hong Kong.
William H.Nguyen, PHD: Chief crypto architect
Over the past 10 years, William has built many social networking, on-demand video streaming, and telecommunication applications serving tens of millions of users worldwide. He is also the author of a US patent pending technology (filing number: 62590659 with the USPTO), allowing one to build a scalable cryptocurrency wallet (The tech behind Gifto’s future wallet).
Advisory Board
Bo Shen
General partner at Fenbushi Capital, (along side Vitalik Buterin and Dr Feng Xiao). Cofounded Invictus Innovations Incorporated, the team behind BitShares (~350M USD @ coinmarketcap).
Loi Luu
CEO and Cofounder of Kyber Network, an upcoming decentralized crypto exchange (~150M USD @ coinmarketcap).
Hitters Xu
Antshares (NEO) founder, a Chinese blockchain (~2.4B USD @ coinmarketcap)
For all the team and advisory board members, visit Gifto’s team page.
UpLive- Live it Up
In order to understand the Gifto protocol and platform, one must understand the UpLive video streaming app.
Let’s take Olivia as an example:
Olivia is a social media influencer with ~140,000 Facebook followers. Since being on UpLive for about 10 months and broadcasting for about 40 hours/month, she received 14.7 coins (=diamonds) on UpLive which is equivalent to ~220,000 USD.
Olivia’s viewers who want to show their affection can buy and send her virtual gifts, for example: a private jet (73.5$), Lipstick (0.3$), private island (441.2$), Blue Roses (1.5$) and more.
If you send a gift to Olivia, everyone sees the gift that you have sent, and Olivia can thank you. It creates an emotional interaction.
Olivia’s revenue is a percentage of the cost of the total gifts sent to her.
You can check it out yourself and join a live show of one of the top broadcasters with thousands of viewers.
Like Olivia, there are many more broadcasters with monthly revenues of tens of thousands of dollars.
Problem solved
Expanding UpLive’s influence: Allowing the current 60,000 UpLive broadcasters to receive gifts from all their other social media followers, in YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others.
Better revenue potential for all social platforms media creators: Allowing all social media producers to post a link under their content and receive Gifto tokens for each gift sent to them. Just like using PayPal, BitPay etc.
Gamified donations: Donating gifts is a lot more fun than just donating BTC, USD etc. There is only one way to give someone $10, but endless ways to give someone gifts valued at $10.
Exponential growth potential: The creation and maintenance of a high-quality and high-demand inventory of virtual gifts is a hugely manpower-intensive task. The current team of over 300 highly skilled game artists, designers, engineers and operational staff can only create 50 new gifts a month. The Gifto protocol will open up this market to anyone and hopefully increase its capacity and capability.
Gifto protocol
The Universal Gifting Protocol is envisioned as being a self-governing and self-sustaining ecosystem for virtual gifts to be created, curated, tracked, bought, sent and exchanged across any content platform such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and UpLive.
Gifto Protocol will have the following components:
Gift – Gifto Protocol’s Virtual Smart Gift, self-executing virtual assets based on smart contracts that live on the Ethereum blockchain.
Gift Store – where a fan can buy a gift for the content creator. The Gift Store will be displayed when a fan clicks on the gifting link of a content creator, and will show gifts customized by this content creator.
Gift Inventory – holds gifts for a user who can either be a fan or a content creator.
Gifto Tokens – an ERC20-standards token used to buy/redeem virtual gifts.
Gifto Wallet – a wallet to hold a user’s Gifto Tokens.
The Gifto wallet will leverage a private chain server for massive, fast transactions off-chain, and then sync back to the public chain. The wallet is simply a part of the overall fast transaction systems that are required to support a real large scale commercial deployment.
Gift Portal – a management system for gifts to be created, curated, and managed by Gifto Protocol contributors.
The gift cycle
Gifto platform Shares revenue of each virtual gift that is bought and sent to a content creator (the following revenue mechanism will be written into each gift’s smart contract and will be transparent to all):
Gifto protocol use case (cryptopotato.com as an example):
The following is one example of how we might use the GIFTO protocol in the future.
Let’s say that we have decided to end our next live market update with a gamified poll.
At the end of our broadcast, each viewer will send a gift coin (ETH/BTC/LTC/ZCASH/ENG/other) that he thinks will top all other coins until the next market update.
To do so, you press on a link under the video, chose your gift resembling the coin you believe in and send it to our broadcaster (You will have to charge your GIFTO balance in advance).
Each gift is an asset that will enter cryptopotato’s inventory immediately and could be calculated easily.
At the last 10 sec time frame, everyone will see ETH/BTC/LTC/ZCASH coins flying to the screen and a live score bar of all the coins sent.
Not only will it make our show more playful and create a better interaction with you, our community. We will also receive 80% of the price of each gift in GIFTO tokens.
Gifto Token (Erc-20) use:
The Gifto token will be the only way to buy virtual gifts on the Gifto platform, Gifto tokens will gradually replace Diamonds on UpLive platform (The current virtual coin to buy gifts on UpLive).
Roadmap
Alpha version- End of 2017
A centralized Gifto protocol working on external content platforms with a pilot of 5,000 active broadcasters.
Beta version- Q1 2018
Decentralized Gifto protocol on blockchain working in an external environment. Hybrid on/off chain server to support fast transactions.
Commercial version 1- Q3 2018
Full ecosystem enabled, commercial grade fast transactions blockchain server. Fully push to global content creators worldwide.
Crowd-sale
Hard cap: 30 M USD
Token allocation: 30% public sale, 30% power the system, 15% advisors/investors/contributors, 25% company reserve
Private sale (20M USD): oversubscribed, 10% bonus (Max), above 100K USD-6 months lockup (1/6 each month). Private sale is led by Pantera Capital, Block Asset (In partnership with Fenbushi Capital), and Wicklow Capital. Company also has equity investments by KPCB, MSA, Index Ventures, Whitestar Capital, Ventech, and includes angel investors such as Joe Lonsdale (founder of Palantir), Justin Waldron (co-founder of Zynga), Hugo Barra (VP of VR at Facebook), etc.
Public sale (10M USD): 14th of December, 2017. Personal cap will be decided at the end of the whitelist period (10M USD divided by the number of whitelist approved subscribers).
Whitelist: KYC needed. Live until 12th of December, 2017
