For the past few months, we’ve had a lot of questions from our community, potential investors, media and partners. We were trying to give as straight and as frequent answers as possible, but sometimes there were just not enough light hours to cover everything.
So, we had a chance to take a little breath, gather our thoughts, drink some cappuccino together with our CEO Alex Bondarenko and provide answers to the most frequent questions and inquiries. Let’s start, shall we?
Q: What is going on with Discoperi’s ICO and when will the public sale start?
A: Currently, we’ve decided to stay in private pre-sale round till the end of this year. The decision was hard to accept, but totally driven by a realistic picture of our development as well as industry-wise status quo. We have the best development team in place, working 24/7, we have massive interest from the investors (institutional funds interested in the blockchain, AI and mobility), and support from drivers’ as well as crypto communities. One thing that we are missing now is a ready-to-be-used product. Merely saying, AI (artificial intelligence) takes more time for the education.
Talking about the ICO dates we expect it to happen end of Q1 — beginning of Q2 2019. We have already done most of the steps (built investors’ dashboard, issued DISC tokens and made all the necessary arrangements required to launch a public sale). Once the full product or at least its ready-to-be-used part is there, we will proceed with the ICO. We want people to see what we can deliver and share our vision of a better future.
Q: When will System ‘EYE’ be available to the public and how people will be able to obtain the device?
A: First of all, let me tell you a bit about our AI development. Since May 2016, we massively proceeded in the visual recognition. What was as an idea, in the beginning, today seems to be a successfully done job. We can identify vehicles (type, brand, color, plate numbers, etc.), road signs, lanes and distance among different objects. This is a quite sophisticated level of AI advancement. However, it’s still not 100% of our final product. I would say that we need to spend another quarter or two on the building the algorithms and finalization of the full functionality of System ‘EYE’.
Talking about the timing, the first devices you would be able to find on our roads in Q2-Q3 2019. Starting from Spain, the US, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, UK, Poland, etc. We would need to conduct trials and testings. Thus an individual may expect to buy it in Q3-Q4 2019. It’s also important to mention that we already have a pre-orders on 3.5 million of devices, coming mainly from Europe: Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, etc. Thus if you would like to buy one, it’s better to sign up on our website as soon as possible.
By the way, we will sell the very first devices to our supporters and community members, in particular to those, who contributed during the ICO. In a way that any contributor may exchange his DISC tokens for System ‘EYE’ device. All the rules and conditions aren’t finalized yet but will be provided you with more details. Regarding where future buyers may purchase devices, we will partner with multiple partners, however no information here as well for now.
Q: You’ve announced that Discoperi will have its blockchain. Are there any specifics?
A: Indeed we partner with UNSW on the blockchain development as well as leverage expertise of Vareger — another partner of ours, which gained substantial expertise in blockchain building, auditing, etc. We work together with both partners to come up with the solution that may revolutionize blockchain industry for data transactions and IoT devices. Once it’s ready, you will see the use case for a blockchain in an entirely new way. And the core part will be our System ‘EYE’. We expect to demonstrate a beta-version of Discoperi Blockchain Protocol by Q3 2019.
Q: Will System ‘EYE’ be the only product provided by Discoperi?
A: Well, System ‘EYE’ for us is the main product as it allows us to achieve our main mission, which is to make roads safer by preventing road accidents and enabling drivers to control and monetize their automotive data. In the same time, during the development process, we discovered many new features, which are parts of System ‘EYE’ today. The coolest thing is that each feature of System ‘EYE’ can be brought independently on the market, yet still maintaining its meaning for the whole puzzle. It can serve a specific need of our users and take one or few of the problems down while keeping the track on what we do and where we go.
We’ve already started preparation of a couple of such “features” that will be available for anyone soon. We expect that at least one of them will be ready by the end of the year, yet not sure about the launch time. Probably, right after the preparation. Once it’s ready and tested, we will share the news with exact names, details, etc.
Q: What are the plans for the future and what should the community expect from Discoperi?
A: Our plans are very ambitious. Beyond finishing the System ‘EYE’, launching ICO with DISC tokens, Discoperi Blockchain Protocol and Discoperi Ecosystem (please find more details in Discoperi’s white paper), we plan to deploy our products globally. We clearly understand our role as inventors and executors simultaneously. If we work well, we will save many millions of lives. If we do our things with a great passion, commitment, and perseverance, we will turn the numbers of road accidents down to zero right before self-driving cars are everywhere.
From another side, we will also continue working on eliminating automotive industry inefficiencies, in particular, in data transparency, privacy, and monetization. We expect that by 2021 we will enable transactions of more than 10 billion data points. In every transaction, the individual driver will benefit at first, and he/she will be running the party. In the same time, we expect a huge mutual value for insurance companies, fleets, governments, etc. We clearly see Discoperi to be among the top-10 largest companies in the world. But we can achieve this position only by bringing to this world unique technologies and products, which will innocently serve people and making our world a better place for generations.