GIFTO Weekly Updates — 8 January 2018First of all, I want to thank all of our wonderful community for supporting us. As a newbie in the crypto world, I have been humbled by the enormous goodwill and enthusiasm. This is the first of our weekly updates to the community, and we would love to get your feedback on how we can make this better to inform all of you.
As this is also the first update of 2018, I’d like to take a bit of time to reflect on 2017. We started this whole journey of blockchain actually in the beginning of 2017. I have to admit, we were too slow when we first started in researching blockchain. We were actually encouraged to research and implement blockchain technology by our equity investors, many of whom have already been involved in this sector for several years. At first when they mentioned that we should look into blockchain, we were skeptical, this is such a new technology that seemed to me still is so far from our sector, which is online mobile entertainment. But thankfully, we were curious and looked deeper. We realized soon that blockchain was made for virtual assets, which, in the shape of virtual gifts, are exactly the driving engine of our live streaming business. That was a very exciting revelation.
On the other hand, as our Uplive live streaming business rapidly grew, our streamers and users constant bombarded us with their questions and requests for more innovation and better service. One of the rising requests from many streamers is to get gifts OUTSIDE of Uplive. Yes, Uplive’s virtual gifts are awesome (you can see them again here:
www.up.live), but streamers can only get them while streaming, at most an hour or two a day. Many of the hosts have fans on other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, and they cannot monetize these fans. We then developed a Web-based gifting system for them to use on these platforms, outside of Uplive.
It is the confluence of blockchain technology and requests from our own business that drove the birth of GIFTO, the first universal gifting protocol. Unlike most protocols that just focus on the underlying technology, we are also building the full stack of user facing product, as that’s our strength.
Which brings us to the first update on the year. The goal for GIFTO in Q1 is to to get a commercial Beta for blockchain based gifts to Uplive’s now close to 100,000 streamers, and 30 million users, and of course, external influencers.
https://medium.com/@gifto/gifto-weekly-updates-8-january-2018-4b09c328926e