At 16:00 Feb 9, 2021, XT.COM CHANNEL was starting!
We have KauriHero (Project Owner/Lead) and Mac Vaughn (Marketing Director)as our honored guests during this time. Let’s move on to know more about MASQ. You guys missed this AMA but do not be sad. Let’s have a review~
(Q: Jun, XT CBO A: KauriHero, Project Owner/Lead & Mac Vaughn, Marketing Director)
Q：
Hi, everyone! Welcome to the XT AMA Channel. I'm Jun, CBO at XT.com. I am hosting today's AMA with MASQ. Let me give a brief introduction to XT.
XT.com is the world's first real-time social trading platform with 0% leverage interest. The XT ecosystem has over 6 million global users and with a daily transaction volume close to $5 billion. The platform has real-time indicators and tools that bring the best trading atmosphere for all users.
XT exchange's innovative social model empowers the blockchain industry through newly developed social trading avenues, which were once not possible. XT has achieved this through a combined effort with our partners, such as Bananatok.
Today, our guest are Project Owner/Lead, KauriHero and Marketing Director, Mac Vaughn. Let's talk to them to learn about the MASQ Project.
Hello KauriHero and Mac Vaughn, thank you for joining us for the XT and MASQ AMA!
A：
Kaurihero：
Hello team, we are grateful to have this opportunity to speak to you and your community. Thanks for the warm welcome from the XT world!
MAC：
Thanks for having us!
Q：
Can you give our community a brief introduction behind the inspiration to build MASQ?
A：
Some time ago, our founders were extremely interested in a similar project which was trying to create a network that provided freedom across the world. When that project faded away, we decided to band together and gather other exceptional team members to continue building the solution.
Before the events of 2020 unfolded, we decided on the name MASQ back in Oct 2019, when we formally announced our project publicly – the word MASQ is meant to remind users that they can masquerade their traffic to look like normal traffic.
We call this type of network routing ‘clandestine’ routing.
We certainly draw our inspiration from all the freedom fighters against censorship around the world – many of this is an ongoing concern for citizens of China and HK, which we know is a big part of our audience and a extremely big focus for our software to help.
Q：
In the blockchain industry, what do you think of the current state? What do you think that needs to be improved?
A：
KauriHero：
Well I personally believe we are still in the ‘early days’ – if you imagine even back in 2017 when you spoke of BTC or ETH many people thought it was a scam, and crypto was seen as a ways for ‘bad people’ and money laundering to operate.
Now with the big corporate entities getting involved, more and more average people realize there is a lot more to the space than just BTC and the big top 10 crypto projects. There are literally thousands of projects out there, all with different use cases.
But Defi is the one in the spotlight right now and is ramping up its cycle.
I think for blockchain this is a great way to legitimize the technology more and show the average global citizens that there are huge opportunities in so many industries to make life, finance, independence, privacy and freedom in so many ways.
Of course there is always room for improvement also – I’d say gas fees are a big hurdle for many everyday use types of tech – of course ETH2.0 needs time to be rolled out, but hopefully it will help projects based on the Ethereum network (like ours being ERC20 utility token). These too are cycles where layer 2 technology will find niche markets to build and prosper which will improve the crypto-space even more.
The other area of blockchain which I think could be improved is the area of education. There are more and more free learning platforms and popular influencers talking to new users about the technology, but its always helpful to get the base knowledge increased around blockchain and cryptocurrency innovation.
MAC:
For me it’s education. Most people have a very distorted perception of crypto and BTC still. For instance many people I talk to still think Crypto is used for nefarious activities when in reality, any type of currency can be used for such things if one were so inclined. The truth is that that we need more positive media coverage about the positives that crypto can provide the citizens of this planet. Once we can get people to understand what crypto really is and truly understand how remarkable blockchain technology is, we will see more and more mass adoption.
Q：
How does the MASQ team plan to tackle these issues to reach mass adoption? Let's start with your point on the developer and marketing experience?
A：
Kaurihero：
Yes we have a very impressive team of both marketing specialists and developers. I can speak about the tech and dev side, and can let Mac speak about the marketing more.
For development, we are designing the software to have a smooth User Experience (XT) and redeveloping it right now from the ground up with a professional UX/UI designer. We want to build in education so user both understand and appreciate the tech and how it works, and realize they are part of something important and greater than just one user!
Our developers are all volunteers but are very experienced and committed and are big supporters of freedom and anti-censorship, so those aspects will be ingrained in the code.
MAC：
Mass adoption for MASQ will require much more awareness of how amazing our software is and revolutionary for that matter. From a marketing perspective, my job really is about finding and utilizing as many opportunities as I can for people to learn and understand more about what MASQ has to offer and how amazing it will be to run a NODE. Once there are enough nodes connected and pushing (serving) content, my theory is that the word will spread about the incentives that MASQ will provide. Once there are a high level of nodes connected and being used we will have freed the internet really. Who wouldn't want to earn crypto for operating a node?! You can basically rent your bandwidth while you're not using your computer. I think this will help with MASQs mass adoption.
Q：
It sounds like the team is building something unique and special. Can you introduce the core team members of MASQ? We hear the team is highly experienced, can we get some examples?
A：
Kaurihero：
Of course – unique and special is a good way to describe it – we have researched dozens of other projects in the space and we do feel our technology is extremely innovative and unique and no other project is approaching things like we are.
As the project leader, I’m privileged to work with some of the finest individuals I see in the crypto space. After 5 years in the blockchain area, I feel I have a good understanding of the industry and the technology as a whole. I lean on my background experience as well, as I have a Masters Degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering with 4 years in that industry and 10 years in Business working in areas of the financial industry. All these sets of skills and experience help me both connect, build and support the talent across our project team.
Another core member is Dan Wiebe who is the grandmaster of the codebase and have written our software code in Rustlang – an asynchronous and very secure programming language which can be built to operate a low levels. He is the core of the tech and we are very grateful to have him his decades of experience with software and Test-Driven-Development experience.
MAC:
My background is in advertising/marketing/branding. I also own and operate a small business in that field. I help clients with visibility in the marketplace, finding their niche and helping them identify creative solutions that help them stand out against their competitors. I’ve been in the advertising/marketing field for over 15 years. I started out doing signage for businesses.
I’ve had extensive management training, went to school for graphic design and have worked with some of the top names in the world like Nike, ASUS, University of Phoenix, SONY, MRM Worldwide, and many others. I began my crypto journey in 2015 when I tried to get into mining bitcoin. I pretty much gave up on it and decided that buying it was easier haha.
In 2017 I started a company called Ico Driver which was an ICO launch support company that assisted icos with community growth, management, branding, web, social media and anything else that comes along with launching an ICO. We helped raise over 50 Million and worked on several well known projects at the time.
Now I work on MASQ with a small team of web, graphic, ui designers, community managers, and another team dedicated to social media.
Q：
What is your timeline, and what can we look forward to from MASQ?
A：
Kaurihero：
Well we have a strong reputation for not providing hard dates and deadlines, so we focus on our milestones – what’s amazing is we have achieved a few already, and strongly moving towards our other milestone goals.
Our next milestone is to polish the UX and UI to deliver a Public Beta of the software, while also ensuring we select and work with other Partnerships to help us grow.
With our main goal being development, we are also looking at building out our development team as well.
MAC：
Yes as Kaurihearo has said we’re a living road map. We’re in the thick of it as we speak. We have about 22 private testers working out all the bugs so we can open the software up for the public and start the public testing soon. That could happen any day now. We don’t like to give deadlines because it hurts the project and hurts people who genuinely have an invested interest. We are a project that does not cater to hype or token speculation. We know what the value of our software and token will bring to the space eventually.
2021 will be very big for MASQ. We have 6 major milestones as a project and we’ve achieved 2 of them so far and the other 4 will happen very soon!
Q：
Thank you, KauriHero and Mac Vaughn, for taking the time to do this AMA with us today. It has been great learning more about MASQ and the team behind it!
A：
KauriHero:
Thanks again!
Mac:
Thank you to XT for the amazing hospitality and for listing our project. We are very honored to be a part of the XT family！
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