SENSE Token – An Interview with Founder and CEO Crystal Rose

Sensay

Sensay is a platform that connects users upon request to other users for real human advice or inspiration. It’s anonymous, free, and works in your favorite messengers – Facebook Messenger, Slack, Kik, Telegram, SMS, Line, WeChat, and Skype. Users can add Sensay to any of these messaging platforms to then seamlessly gain access to the Sensay Network. Sensay claims their product is the “best friend you’ve never met”.

Optimizing their product over the last three years, the Sensay network has tapped into just a fraction of personal human knowledge and attribution of that knowledge. 3 million individuals from all over the world have transacted over 21 million tokens in gratitude of sharing knowledge with one another.

SENSE Token

Today, the Sensay team is introducing the SENSE token to assign value to and facilitate the growth of the human capital-backed network. With the optimal engineering of incentives driving the economic exchange of the token growth of the network, the Sensay team seeks to connect all of the world’s knowledge on the blockchain.

SENSE creates blockchain based smart contracts in messenger applications and rewards humans for their contributions to the network. Developers will be able to monetize their bots for the exchange of data used to train AI applications. I recently had the opportunity to interview Founder and CEO Cryptal Rose to ask some questions to shed light upon the SENSE token project:

Given that both have their respective websites and brands, what’s the difference between Sensay and SENSE token?

Sensay is an established company we’ve been building for 3 years, and we’ve had a public product for two. Our community is widely spread – we started building on SMS first and hit a million users within 9 months. Then we partnered with Facebook and other messaging platforms, and started to realize that the community was becoming really diverse. Each messenger brings along its unique demographic. For example, Kik Messenger has a very heavy demographic of teenagers 13 to 24.

Sensay is an ecosystem that’s built upon our ability to match humans, to perform conversational analysis, and to use machine learning to get smarter with each conversation. While we did a good job at building a community that has millions of members and 21 million circulating coins, those numbers are small in the grand scheme of things. With this rebranding and distribution of the SENSE token to create a decentralized platform to exchange human data, we are essentially saying, “hey this is something that’s open to everyone, and we want to let developers have access to its API”.

How will you engineer aligned incentives to enable tokens to flow on your platform?

Any bot that works inside a messenger can be built on top of our decentralized network – and anytime a bot contributes data into the network, its developer gets paid in SENSE token through a smart contract. Similarly, if the developer wishes to gain access to chat data, he or she may use the SENSE token to pay for the API usage.

We essentially are the Twilio of conversation. The difference is that any developer can contribute as well. The Utopian vision is to create a human neural network where our AI can learn from the best of the best. We connect humans today with Sensay – but what we realized while building this product is that anyone who has an AI or a chatbot can contribute data to the network and should be compensated for it. The one core value of the network lies in human conversation data. Our goal is to put everyone’s brain on the blockchain.

Who do you envision building on your decentralized platform?

We currently have 3 companies building on our platform – one of which is called CoinBot. CoinBot is integrated into our base telegram group as a fun feature that is currently being tested internally. It enables cryptocurrency to be sent over chat.

For companies, brands, and influencers who have more dollars to spend to reach users – today their only option is advertising, which has a low conversion and is fairly manipulative. We do have a lot of data today, especially with Facebook and Google, that helps us guide advertising catered to the user, but it still is not something that I as a user am soliciting. I am not pulling that information – I’m getting that information pushed toward me.

The number one thing in terms of larger companies’ participation in the network would be the ability to have a presence when a user wants to pull. So let’s say I’m using a chatbot application, and due to our partnerships, it should be directly in the messenger stream – whether it be slack, SMS, Kik, etc. Let’s say I want to pull information on the best places to stay in Bali. Now, I could connect to Miles who has been to Bali, or I could connect to a resort in Bali with good ratings.

The main thing we do today with our existing product is that we make sure there is no preferential treatment between the average user and the brand – and everyone has to have an equal consensus. So if you as a user were to recommend a particular resort in Bali and it also received good ratings – the system would recognize that and sees that as a social consensus on that resort and helps boost its rating and value.

These companies will be able to put the money directly in the user’s pocket who recommended that product or service. Our platform will take the traditional advertising model from a push to a pull – only pull information when a user has a specific need, and they want a solution on demand. We will not allow companies and brands to pay for preferential treatment as it is against our ethos, but we will be giving them equal access to the platform.

The use case for the average consumer is the opposite of that. The majority of the conversations on Sensay are relationship based – or related to some sort of need that we all have – jobs, gigs, food, places to stay, etc. These types of conversations have been really hard to value in the past. A person who wants to do a gig – for example, an Uber driver. We call this person a “free agent”. Our platform enables these free agent to set up a digital shop for their brain. So you take all the skills, knowledge, and experience over your lifetime, and you can translate that into a digital asset.

We have yet to be able to truly connect together. We’re connected based on our social circumstances – where we live, where we grew up – and those are not the people that are necessarily going to enhance the quality of our lives. We’re working to fix that and provide that value.

How will you structure charges to access data on your platform and how will you attract this core group of developers to build upon it?

We are going to base charges off of API calls. Firstly, we are opening up our pre sale to developers first with a very low minimum around $100. We are allocating the first million dollars to developers because we want to get people who are passionate about building applications on our platform and truly be a part of the network. Then we will be opening up the doors to the larger contributors but this cap is $50k. We see our own token filling this virtuous cycle in autonomously building out this neural network.

As a token purchaser you get all of the pie, as a previous venture capital investor, you get all of the pie. None of these projects are separate. They all benefit each other.  We really believe the value exists in the product we’ve built, the team we’ve built, and platform we’ve built – and we’re keeping them all together, even though they have different names.

If there was one piece of advice that you would you give to centralized companies?

Decentralization is hard, you can’t just flip the switch and decentralize something. I’d say the piece of advice I’d give a company is look at your motives. For example, venture capital has a profit motive. They want a return in a certain amount of years. So what happens is very good companies with very good teams end up building for the wrong motives.

It’s important to ask yourself: what are your motives? Do you have a profit motive? And if you do that’s ok. But the bottom line is that can you create a balance and sustain an ecosystem that benefits everyone – the interests of the users, the interests of the shareholders, and the interests of the founders. If you can create a balance between all of those, that’s when you have a really healthy ecosystem. And that’s what decentralization gets us closer to. It provides us with transparency and autonomy.

The decentralization movement is primarily about access. It’s about providing fair and equal access to everyone. And providing everyone the ability to do some work and get involved – have some ownership of what they’re doing. You can either take a sizeable chunk of your company and give it away to people just because they have capital, or you could take a chunk of your company and give it to people who want to do the work and have true ownership.

What’s the main question people have regarding your platform/token? What would you tell them to help them better understand it?

My barometer of what’s understandable is what I can explain to my mom. And using the word blockchain is like trying to explain a website talking about PCP and IP keys. I don’t think the average consumer is even going to hear that word – and it describe an entire movement as well.

What my mom understands is that with our platform, you can connect to anyone from anywhere, share everything you know, and earn money for it. I want to empower people to understand that within themselves they have human capital. It is something you earn – some people drive for uber, with our platform you can put your mind to work.

The ICO presale is live now and developers are first. If you have 5 commits in the last 6 months you can get in for the developer discount. The public sale will take place October 3rd to October 10th.

Thank you, Crystal for taking the time to do this interview to shed light upon your platform and token.

ICO Economics and Team

25% of the SENSE token will be sold in the Token Sale, 25% will be retained for the company, 35% will be retained for SDN communities, users and contributors, and 15% will be reserved for future development.

The SENSE token team also includes CSO Ariel Jalali, as well as advisors Dr. Gavin Wood (Ethereum and Parity), Nick Sullivan (ChangeCoin, Airbnb), Galia Benartzi (Bancor Network).

The ICO presale is live now and developers are first. If you have 5 commits in the last 6 months you can get in for the developer discount. The public sale will take place October 3rd to October 10th.