Exclusive: Monetha ICO - Interview with Co-Founder Justas Pikelis

This interview is the first in our series of PICOR’s (Post ICO Reviews) on high profile startups which raised capital via their token sales. For this series, we will be focusing on the building blocks like Strategy, Product, Team, Go-To-Market and Budget - rather than getting caught up in the tech-hype, which can be distracting.

CV: I am here today with the co-founder of Monetha, Justas Pikelis. Monetha is a decentralized trust and reputation system for global commerce on the Ethereum blockchain. Today we are going to be doing a PICO which is a post-ICO review. So, Justas, great to have you with us at Cryptovest today.

Justas: Thanks for having me. I am really excited to talk with you and to your audience.

CV: Let’s start with recapping on the last three months for Monetha.

CV: So, in August your ICO ended and you did a deal with Pigu. September you listed on two exchanges and did a deal with Foodout Group. October you listed on another two exchanges and by December your coin value plunged nearly 17%. So, let’s discuss December.

In December, you ran a, what you call, a “strategy brainstorming” workshop where you gathered your whole team together in Lithuania. Now, most startups at the stage that Monetha is at already have a clear business plan in place – know what they are going to build, how there are going to get to market and how they are going to scale.

So, I found the timing of your workshop, this “strategy brainstorming”, a little bit strange because one: you are not live in market, two: you’ve got no live users and three: it was the same month your coin has taken a battering.

Hence, my question is, in hindsight, do you think you’ve sent out the right message doing that sort of strategic brainstorming in December?

J: I wouldn’t call it a brainstorming session. Why we gathered everybody from all around the globe, people from Israel, people from Amsterdam, from Silicon Valley, is because we felt it was the right time for us to get that sync up with all of the team, see if all of our goals are aligned. The most important thing in that strategic session was understanding what are going to be the next actions for the next three months and was very useful because we had some input from potential clients, from potential partners and that was something that was really kind of revealing when we understood it.

It is very important to us to catalyst the whole trust and reputation system but the trust and reputation system gathering the data both from the clients and from the industry experts was something that we really wanted to focus on. So, I wouldn’t call it a big kind of a pivot but we want to do this as a hygiene, you know doing these strategic summits every three months or so.

J: Yes, the MBP has already been created prior to the ICO but we are calling this our first product milestone and as promised in our whitepaper its going to roll out in the first quarter of 2018. The deadline is the 31st of March. But how’s going to look...

I don’t want to reveal too much because there are of course some competitors, especially after the ICO, people who are trying to copycat Monetha’s model and want to do something similar. So, we don’t want to give them too much of a sneak peak of what’s going to be.

People who previously worked at Braintree, who previously worked at American Express, people who previously worked at PayPal - the companies who are really dominating the payments game – those people understand really well the infrastructure and what needs to be done and we are really glad that our philosophies are aligned toward the trust and reputation. So, the 31st of March – it is going to be a very disruptive for the trust and reputation field.

CV: Your whitepaper. You say you want to solve the reputational issue. You want to solve payments fee issue, which is great. But you also claim, in your whitepaper, that online merchants have a big problem accessing customers, buyers who want to pay using Monetha. Where is the research to back this up? When Hacked.com asked you this question in August, you gave them the answer by quoting the size of the crypto market by 2025 but that doesn’t really seem like an answer to me.

J: As mentioned, we do collect a lot of research from consulting companies but the most important thing for us is to back that up with empirical facts and experience and the feedback that we are getting from the merchants, people who are…This is no secret, everybody wants to be a part of the crypto game and merchants are the ones who are very closely looking at innovative solutions and for them to see how the market is growing it is…you have to be either living under a rock for six months not to kind of see how big the crypto market is, how fast it is growing and merchants they take notice of that and that’s why they are approaching us, they want to work with us, they want to accept crypto currencies.

But as mentioned, the payment processer is not something very hard to build. It gets down to more of a marketing a competitive advantage and for us it is more important to build that trust and reputation and having payments…registering them as a fact – the payment has happened and then only empowered by users who has done the payment for them to rate the merchant because without the payment, as many trust and reputation systems now work nowadays, you can rate a merchant or a service provider without even bothering using their services or buying something from them.

So, we want to collect those payments, we want to see the fact that those payments have happened and then built core trust and reputation on top of that. Not necessarily has to be crypto payments, we want to integrate permanent payment service providers in order for us to facilitate payments for them.

CV: Let’s talk courting trust. In Monetha’s whitepaper you outline fixing the trust problem between merchants and customers. How will the merchant port the Monetha trust rating outside the Ethereum ecosystem? Into the broader web?

J: I have an example for that as the users don’t really care where the reputation is stored. What they have to and what they want to know is whether that reputation is not manipulated or whether that reputation is immutable - can it be transferred to other platforms, selling unclassified ad marketplaces and then shifting, transferring their reputation into their e-commerce store.

From the research that we have collected it’s all