Fractal Protocol AMA Recap

Hello, everyone!😁 We are glad to meet here: Julian Leitloff (@julianleitloff), CEO, Co-Founder of Fractal Protocol

Hi Everyone 👋 Happy to be here

Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with: Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Hi I am Julian, Co-Founder, and CEO of the Fractal Protocol I have been an entrepreneur since 2012 and started Fractal in 2017 together with my technical co-founder Júlio to provide an infrastructure service for the evolving Web 3.0

Q2: Can you introduce Fractal to us?

Basically, Fractal is a protocol to govern the exchange of personal data. Your personal data is being used like a resource right now: It's harvested and stored away from your control. At the same time it is just helping a very limited number of companies, namely a duopoly that controls 60-70% of the ad market. That's a problem becasue the free web relies on it. Our mission is to make sure that the bloggers and builders that actually create the content for the free web are getting paid. Fractal is proposing a different standard that puts the data in the hand of the user, while making sure that the bloggers and builders get paid.

Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

That’s important to focus on and something we want to be held accountable to in the future. So where are we at? We have proposed a framework that is our technical primer and already publicly available https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/600c8c2ee034d32f97280917/6019512c99096e2be8251212_Fractal%20Protocol%20White%20Paper_01022021.pdf The good folks over at Parity helped us sketch out some technical details around the implementation. We have won a grant application that we are now working on. The team has started developing curcial parts of the protocol and we will release the first open source code in the next couple of weeks. On the product discovery front it was important to us to get knowledgeable people from the adtech ecosystem. We got Aurel (former COO of Adjust who just sold his comapny to Applovin for 1bn) and the feedback couln’t have been better. At the same time we have been starting to look for allies. Going against a powerful oligopoly isn’t going to work without supporters and allies. In the future you will see that we actually ship code. You have the Fractal software that is already there and we’ll release some new features soon. The main net is planned for early fall, maybe late summer We’ll release a more thorough timeline soon though 😉

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers! It is time to move to the community questions part.

If I'm right, you guys are proposing the market to move away from Google and Facebook, to me this is like a suicide mission which would only take divine grace to be possible. I would like to know the approach you would be adopting to help end the Oligopoly in the market?

It’s a tough question, but you are right 😁 Going against the oligopoly isn’t going to be easy. And don’t get me wrong, it’s an open protocol, so everyone –  including Google and Facebook – can work with it. We will need all the help we can get, including from you. We’ll specifically need allies from the remaining ad market to make it work

How does Fractal plan to dominate the data market? How easy is it to use Fractal Protocol?

Fractal is to data sharing what SMTP is to Email. So ideally you keep using whatever you are using now and you won’t even notice.

Truly you’ve done AMA in many telegram groups, so what next, what other way will you make your project more popular? How do you planning to solve the scaling problem And how do you overcome the threat of centralization?

We have some conversations with apps that have a much larger userbase than we do. Ours is currently at 200k – so getting Fractal in the hands of our own users is going to already get the ball rolling. But for us to succeed we are talking about hundred of million of users.

Since 2017 what was your Income source? How did you make revenue to run this project untill now? What are your major goals to achieve in the next 3-4 years? And What are your plans to expand & gain more adoption?

We were helping companies like the Ocean protocol and had customers like Sovrin. So we had revenue from the frist day. But to finance the development we also took on Venture Capital. One of our investors is Coparion, a VC that is funded by the Marshall Fund which is close to the EU government. The other is a corporate VC that has inveested in Polkadot and other crypto projects.

⛰️Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?

We are an open-source zero-margin protocol, so the aim with the protocol isn’t to generate revenues. However, the application will be part of the ecosystem and ‘mine’ Fractal tokens just like every other app taht decides to use the Fractal protocol. Indeed, there have been AdTech protocols that promised to replace existing infrastructure with on-chain governance. I think the tech just hasn’t been ready. I mean Polkadot sounds too good to be true, but we see the code actually being shipped and the network is live. It’s working. We are waiting for the slot auctions now and some more functionality. But the tech is ready.

Does the design of the Fractal Protocol allow multiple identifiers to be used for different user purposes?

Yes. We don’t dictate the types of classifications that users want to use.

How can Fractal Protocol keep data secure? What are the benefits of using Fractal Protocol?

So first of all there is not central place to store the data. Instead attestations are shared in a pseudonymous way. So we don’t issue all attestions agains one central wallet. Otherwise you’d be able to pin-point that to a specific person after a while. We leave it up to the user to control what they want to share with whom and allow to share it in a way that doesn’t reveal her or his identity.

🟣The Adfraud is a true problem, and Fractal says that its platform is "resistant to Adfraud", so can you explain us which mechanisms to you have to obtain such performance in comparision with other platforms?

The current ad ecosystem works with cookies. The way that cookies work is that they get planted into your browser. You can modify them or copy it. So there is really no proof that it’s a legitimate information point. Here is where the protocol is different: The user initiates the process by issuing a claim. The other party publicly issue an attestion. To make an example: You surf on a sport website and the plugin issue the claim “this users has been on the sports website”. Then the website publicly attests “yes, that is true”. If the user surfs somewhere else, third parties can rely on that event actually taking place

About the tokenomics? Could you give us an overview of the tokenomics? Is the token designed to rise and fall with the success of the platform? And does it include any scarcity paths such as stake, store, or burn?

There are 865m tokens. Nearly half of which will be minted over the next 50 years. The team and founders have 6m lockup and 50m vesting. The token is going to be used to buy data (think about a micro TX everytime everytime you visit a website). In order to ensure that the data is correct, validators will stake on data pools. This allows them to rake in parts of the payments but they will also lose their money if the data turns out to be fraudulent Alright, let me pick one last question. And leave the sticker here while I’ll answer 😄

You organized a very useful AMA session and received lots of questions related to utilities and technology, visions of the future, ... So now I want to ask you what would you like to receive from the community? thank you

This is important! Thank you for asking. IF we want to see a free web like we know it, we need to vote by our actions. Only with *your* help we’ll be able to make the change. We will start introducing cool apps that will implement the Fractal technology soon. Please use these guys. There are alternatives and it’s in our hands what kind of internet we want to have

Thanks for your time ! @julianleitloff Thank you to everyone who took part! it was very informative and insightful AMA=)

Thank you guys for taking some time on a Saturday to read about Fractal Really appreciate it