Forward AMA Recap：Moving Forward On KCC

11 min readDec 15, 2021

On 13th December 2021, KCC and Forward Potocol had an Ask-Me-Anything session on the KCC main Telegram group with 8000+ members. The main topic was “Moving Forward”. If you missed the AMA, you can check the recap as follow.

Venue: KCC Official English Community

Time: 2 PM, December 13th, 2021, (UTC)

Host: Juanma

Guests:

Mitch Rankin, Co-Founder of Forward

KEY, Co-founder of Forward

[ Juanma ]

Hi guys, what an exiting AMA we have today.

I am Juanma, the ambassador of KuCoin Community Chain(KCC). We are having great incorporations to the KCC in the last weeks. But talking about today, I’m very happy to be the host of this interesting AMA with a project that brings value to the day to day economy in the blockchain.

Without further delay, let’s welcome the CoFounders of Forward Protocol Mr Mitch Rankin and MR Karnika Yashwant

Please Mr Mitch.

[ KEY]

I’m Karnika E. Yashwant (KEY) from India. I’ve been running a Marketing Agency for the last 15 years and have worked with Fortune 100 brands like CISCO, AJC, etc. Since 2013, I have been involved in Blockchain Marketing. Many of you might be familiar with KEY Difference Media which I am a founder of, one of the top 3 blockchain marketing agencies — the largest and oldest in the space with a 350+ member team.

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrkey/

I have worked with founders of many of the top crypto brands from day 1 when they were just starting out. I have a good mix of technical and marketing backgrounds.

I believe in creating impact. A legacy. I believe #Forward Protocol is the way to do it. And to make it happen, I am bringing everything I got — my team, my contacts, and resources to help the mass adoption of blockchain.

[Mitch]

I’m Mitch Rankin and live on the east coast of South Africa. My background is in international businesses and working with investors. Here is an intro video on me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSitMgTFy4s

When our kids were 10 and 7, my wife and I decided to take 10 years off to homeschool our kids and travel

During this period I learned an incredible amount about online business, and started connecting with thought leaders, reading and learning, looking for an online opportunity to get involved in.

During my reading, I was challenged to look for a business that could solve a Grand Challenge of humanity

I started thinking about what a massive difference we could make in our world if we could impact 1 Billion people positively.

I came across blockchain in 2018, and realized the power of building a system with gamification and blockchain rewards could revolutionize the way value was transferred in the economy.

I started connecting with blockchain experts, looking for people to help me learn and build a company in this space.

It was during that time that I met Mr KEY. We connected immediately, sharing the same ideals and vision, and we co-founded Forward Protocol.

[ Juanma ]

What a rich and incredible journey that you had. It is clear that you have been able to take advantage of it and make it worth.

Can you please tell us more about your team?

[Mitch]

We have 35+ full time members

We have a combined 180+ years of blockchain experience and over 400+ years of business, tech and marketing side.

We have people from Aave, Mahadao, and many top brands

Our team has solid experience working on various blockchain projects.

[ Juanma]

Thats a very rich team.
Would you mind briefly sharing with us what the Forward protocol is about? And how can businesses benefit from Forward as you said it is going to impact 1 billion people?

[ Mitch]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaooIYnNwww

Forward Protocol is the WordPress for Web 3.0: Blockchain adoption for everyone.

Forward features blockchain toolkits requiring no code or technical knowledge that will enable anyone to create and participate in Decentralized Value-Driven Economies.

By using a similar model to that of WordPress, Forward will help increase blockchain technology adoption and its capabilities.

These toolkits are blockchain agnostic, industry agnostic, bull & bear agnostic, adoption focused and can be deployed for free.

The goal is to create a protocol that is simple to use with no code or technical knowledge needed, allowing users to deploy their own app — in any EVM chain — with no programming skills.

Forward Protocol will tap into several markets to make this a reality: DeFi, NFTs, Social Tokens, Gaming, e-Learning/EdTech, E-Commerce, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning.

[ Juanma ]

Good. I see it as a toolkit of templates for the B2B

What do you think is Forward Protocol’s advantage over its competitors?

[KEY]

Yes, anyone can use it and get their products to life in few mins.

[Mitch]
According to Forward’s most recent research, the company has no competition within the crypto sphere, as there are no crypto projects that provide this type of no-code infrastructure.

Blockchain Adoption can only happen if its made super-simple for anyone — with no technical knowledge to deploy applications and use it in their life and business.

For the general population to use dApps without the complexities.

Can our non-crypto friends use it from day 1? That’s the question I always ask.

Making that happen is the objective. To get blockchain in the hands of every organization, person, and user.

The solution is simple. To create an ecosystem like that of wordpress, where anyone can drag and drop, use user interface and create their applications.

Without technical knowledge, they should be able to deploy dApps and integrate it with their product/ecosystem/business.

We are not here to create the next fastest or best technology. The crypto community has all those amazing smart people doing it.

All we are doing is to connect all those amazing tech to the rest of the non-tech world.

We act as a bridge that connects — making things simple for the larger world to join and use it.

I will give you a diagram as an example of market

We are focusing on real-world entities and communities. They are new to crypto and we focus on bringing them on.

What is good for Forward, that’s good for crypto!

We are not trying to steal users from existing dApps and communities, but bringing in fresh eye balls.

Does that make sense?

[ Juanma]

I understand that Forward solves and facilitates entry to the blockchain for small businesses.

That is the biggest obstacle that the real economy has today if it wants to enter the crypto sphere

Can you provide us a simple example of how could you help a small business?

[Mitch]

Lets use an example from decentralized ecommerce sector (DeCom)

A company plans to build a vegan food ecommerce platform that can adapt quickly to changing global markets and supply chains.

The end goal is to create extraordinary customer experiences and the ability to stay on top of new customer demands.

They can achieve this by adapting existing offerings and introducing new products and services to the market as soon as new opportunities become available.

But a full tech stack is very costly and will cost $300,000 to set up, and the company does not want to take the financial risk.

So the company will use the IVO (Initial Value Offering) smart contract to raise the funds. Its a kickstarter program for blockchain

They can offer to make supporters of the program shareholders in the company (e.g. 30% of company stock will be issued to backers)

The company will describe the development roadmap and rollout in a scoping document and draw down on escrow funds on completion of pre-determined milestones being achieved.

This process protects backers from non-delivery, and ensures progress is rewarded.

[ Juanma ]

Awesome. I really wanna see it running

Can you tell us about the revenue streams?

[Mitch]

here are 2 primary revenue streams:

1. Every transaction on the Forward Chain will have a fee, and $FORWARD will be used to pay the transactional fees. (Once Forward Chain is live on mainnet)

2. There will be a percentage of fees for all smart contract services. For example, if someone uses an escrow service with the Proof of Value — Delivered model, Forward Protocol will charge a small fee for all transactions (decided on each independent use case and volume metrics). Each of the 5 smart contracts will have a “fee” which will act as a scalable-revenue model with more integration partners added, each with their own growing user base.

[Juanma]

Good. I like the escrow service. Gives always a lot of confidence.

And what about the tokenomics? And of course, the launch. We all want to hear about the launch.

[KEY]
Here is our detailed tokenomics:

https://forwardprotocol.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Forward_Tokenomics.pdf

Infact, we published a detailed article about it couple days back.

https://twitter.com/ForwardProtocol/status/1469680668057784322You can read about it here.

This is our current launch plan :)

Infact, we are live in Daomaker today. An hour or so ago.

And mahastarter IBO whitelist is on…and it sale is tomorrow.

We infact have a contest going on as well ttps://twitter.com/ForwardProtocol/status/1470033758715789315

$100 of $FORWARD For 5 lucky winners. So its very exciting time..

[Juanma ]

You gave us really detailed explanations and information. I would like that all projects be the same.

You are an example. After the launch and listing, how is your roadmap planned out?

[KEY]

This is our current roadmap

Our launch on MUTIPLE centralized exchanges is this week as well. Stay tuned for announcements :)

We have a lot of deployment partners lined up for early 2022 as well :)

So our focus is purely to expand the templates/applications in Forward Factory and continue deploying more partners.

That will help expand our ecosystem :)

[ Juanma ]

I see you have a lot of things comming out.

Which are the main partners you’re collaborating with and why?

[KEY]

Creating an impact out in the world does not happen easy :)

We work with a lot of partners in the space.

[Mitch]

We have partnerships with many large scale organizations.

Our first deployment partner is English Forward, the largest learn English community with 310+ million unique visitors, over 1 million social following.

Unified Council issues over 1 million certificates per year, and are deploying in January

We are in talks with Unesco, and and have partnerships with Cambridge and Oxford blockchain, and many more

With a useful technology like Forward, we have integration partners coming on all the time

[KEY]

We integrate other blockchains (EVM based currently, RUST and WASM in the future), we integrate other protocols and blockchain apps.

We are like wordpress, everyone can connect to us.

And users can connect to everyone through our no-code interface.

We make adoption happen. We are not here to create the fastest or the best blockchain, but to make adoption happen

The partners Mitch is referring to above from integration/implementation side are all the users we are bringing onboard to the blockchain and to other blockchain ecosystems out there.

@Mitch I will let you finish

[Mitch]

Yes, its a long list of collaborations

We work really hard on building relationships and partnerships in the real world, as our project is a long term project focussed on adoption and making it easy for organizations to connect to Forward

This makes blockchain really accessible for so many now. Everyone can take part!

[Juanma]

I´m really impressed

Could you share with us the collaboration that you find most interesting?

[Mitch]

Thats a hard one.

Every organization has different problems that they are trying to solve, and our smart contracts solve so many across sectors.

Engaging with different organizations from ecommerce, to humanitarian, to education, to communities, to organizations…its a facinating process as we see how the 5 core smart contracts can solve so many real world challenges for real businesses.

Our token is bear agnostic. Forward is integrated by all real world applications and they will need Forward token for rewards

Those applications will not stop trading in a bear market.The smart contracts are programmed to buy tokens from the market to issue the rewards needed to incentivize users. So even in bear markets, the token will have buy demand.

@Zekksama
Does your project support staking program? if yes. how is your stake system work what is the requirement for user, if they want to stake in your platform?

[KEY]

Yes, we will be announcing the staking program shortly. Please stay subscribed to our community:

Telegram — t.me/forwardprotocolofficial

Ann Channel — https://t.me/ForwardProtocol

Twitter — twitter.com/ForwardProtocol

YouTube — www.youtube.com/forwardprotocol

Facebook — facebook.com/ForwardProtocol

Instagram — instagram.com/forwardprotocol

Medium — forwardprotocol.medium.com

Discord — discord.gg/X6HYF8dHYQ

LinkedIn — linkedin.com/company/forwardprotocol

It will be mentioned this week :)

@Idee01

Smart contracts has always been the subject of hack, costing users loss of funds and making project lose credibility. What necessary measures has Forward Protocol taken to prevent exploit of smart contract? Have you been audited?

[KEY]

All our smart contracts are audited. Infact, we work with centralized exchanges, so they need to be audited.

And contracts we develop on the platform are audited carefully as they need to work as templates in the Forward Factory and used widely.

@iByrm

How does Forward Protocol view future of DeFi and NFT-metaverse world?

[KEY]

We integrate and connect with all these niches.

We have tools from NFT, DeFi, Metaverses, etc and we provide them in easy to use manner for various industries

We are working with Africarare Metaverse from Singularity University Africa as well currently

@Idee01

There will only be 5 Billion FORWARD tokens in existence. with an initial circulating supply of 94,750,000. Can you share with us token vesting schedule? will there be a buy-back and burn mechanism in the long run?

[KEY]

https://twitter.com/ForwardProtocol/status/1469680668057784322

We have a detailed tokenomics published here

buy-back and burn mechanism is not announced

@ayhan406

What are the main products that are coming on the platform in near future?

[ Mitch]

We are contributing 5 core smart contracts to the smart contract library. These fulfill the needs and track value across multiple sectors of the value driven economy

We are also deploying Forward Chain, which will act as the “value chain” for tracking the global value transfers and ‘impact’ of various elements involved in the value transfer process. It also helps large partners attain scalability.

And Forward Factory, which has a no-code, drag and drop interface. Any platform can install its open-source application integrated with the smart contracts of choice (fully customizable), pre-integrated with Forward Protocol and $FORWARD.

To connect the ecosystem we also have Forward ID.

When they register on any platform that integrates Forward Protocol, a user will create a Forward ID — a single ID that lets them automatically log in to any website that utilizes Forward Protocol.

This universal ID is similar to Facebook and Google’s IDs that enable automatic connection to websites and services.

And Forward Pay which is a digital wallet that connects to a user’s Forward ID.

It allows users to store, manage, swap and trade their funds/cryptocurrencies. It is connected to Fiat ramps (in and out) so that users can complete transactions using their credit cards and bank accounts.

It is a very comprehensive ecosystem

[ KCC ]

Wow amazing answers and that was a wrap for the Q&A

Alright that’s a wrap for our AMA. Winners for AMA will be submitted to Forward and they will handle the reward sending. Thank you all for participating. KCC is going full force this month with many other big announcements and events lining up !

Go tell your friends about KCC and make sure you stay tuned the chat. Getting some secret sauce we would say.

And lastly, let’s thank Mr. Mitch and Mr Key for sharing today!!!

Please drop your links for Forward !

[Mitch]

Its a pleasure. its been great chatting with you

Telegram — t.me/forwardprotocolofficial

Ann Channel — https://t.me/ForwardProtocol

Twitter — twitter.com/ForwardProtocol

YouTube — www.youtube.com/forwardprotocol

Facebook — facebook.com/ForwardProtocol

Instagram — instagram.com/forwardprotocol

Medium — forwardprotocol.medium.com