Elrond News Now S1 EP6 — Calileo Interview — 13 Sep 2022
Calileo is the first Decentralised social network on the Elrond Network. A social network with FREE speech, secured privacy & is built for the creator.
This interview provides an overview of Calileo and their services, and we covered topics such as:
- Why the team built Calileo?
- The importance of a decentralized social network.
- How Web3 is integrated in Calileo.
- The upcoming Calileo NFT called ETHOS and $CAL tokens.
- Token allocations and support for Victor
- and a whole lot more
Here is the interview transcript below:
Armand: All right, guys, it’s Armand here from Elrond News Now, and we’ve got here Denis from Calileo. It’s a social network project here in Elrond and we’re fortunate to be able to interview him today and find out more about Calileo and what they’re about to do. So first up, can you tell us a bit of background of who you are and what you do?
Denis: So my name is Denis living in Dundee, Scotland, and founder of C alileo I’ve been studying marketing, business and management for about six years in France and four years in the UK. I completed a bachelor’s degree with honors at the University of Abertay where the founder of GTA developed the game and launched a gaming production called rockstars.
I think you guys are very familiar with it. So I studied in that university, which is amazing. I met so many interesting people, especially in the gaming industry. It’s not my background, but, well, I have these people, I met and that’s brilliant. I then studied a master’s degree where I completed a research in the NFT industry as well.
And beside my years at the university, I had a side hustle, which was to develop websites and startup brands from the ground, especially for small businesses. Which gave me, six plus years of experience in web development, right after being graduated. Which was pretty amazing to me. It really helped me to secure a first job right after my post-graduation, which was pretty amazing as well, and a very great job.
Thanks to all the experience I got in the past. Regarding my crypto experience, I start in my journey a few years ago and. Invest in my first penny on, around in 2020.
Armand: Fantastic. That’s good to hear Thanks for that. And can you tell us what’s prompted you and your team to create Calileo?
Denis: So it all started in March when Elon Musk posted his concerns about the freedom of speech of Twitter and their centralized counterparts, such as Instagram and all these social platform.
I was studying back at that time, the Elrond network as a tool to develop highly scalable blockchain based products. And it all came naturally to me, I’ve always wanted to develop a genuine technology by myself with like-minded people that would solve with world problems and become sustainable in the web3 and non web3 space.
And through my research and I welcome you to have a look at the Calileo white paper. I realized how fractured the decentralized social platform market was. There is no other blockchain based social network that offers a powerful experience. Like big players are known for such as Instagram, for example, and this is the real gap in the market.
And that is why famous centralized social networks cannot get more than a few million users.
Armand: That’s great. And is that the reason why you chose Elrond? Is there any other reason why you chose that, as a blockchain choice for Calileo?
Denis: So Elrond was one of my early investment project during the last bull market.
And that became profitable to me. I was very fortunate with it. I wasn’t paying much attention to the community at first and didn’t realize how powerful it was until I digged more into the blockchain technicalities. And I, I could talk about it for hours, but to summarize it, Calileo chooses Elrond for its speed and low transaction fees, which is essential for social platform to become scalable.
And it is the first network solving the blockchain trilemma that allows it to be secured, decentralized while being scalable. It collides with Calileo’s ambition to be truly decentralized and secure while being able to handle a considerable amount of transactions, like any global social media platform need.
Armand: That’s great. And yeah, that’s what I’m finding with a lot of the developers and builders that I interviewed. They’re saying the same thing. You expanded a little bit about Calileo and what P O H is. Can you explain that a bit further?
Denis: Yeah, of course. So, people are tired of interacting with bots on Twitter or Instagram. It ruins the whole experience when you are supposed to socialize with actual humans. Sometimes people get even scammed and therefore these platforms become almost unsafe for vulnerable people. This leads me to another reason why we are building on this fantastic Elrond tool, the Maiar app.
It allows us to significantly reduce the risk of having bots on Calileo connecting with Maiar, which previously verified that you are a human. We love Maiar because it hides the tedious wallet address and replaces it with a simple hero tag lowering for global adoption of the technology with its simplicity.
So obviously, we are fundamentally solving the problem of having bots on the platform, improving the social experience online through the Elrond technology. So, we are proving that people are human on our platform, which is a Proof Of Humanity.
Armand: So that’s what P O H is, the Proof Of Humanity.
Denis: Yep.
Armand: See, that’s great. And what is it that makes Calileo different to the projects or NFT’s?
Denis: So we have the chance to have talented people in house and experienced partners to accompany us throughout our journey. So we have, for example, Combased our technical partners, they work with several Elrond based projects and we have Jujotte as well.
They are amazing UX and UI designers and they push the limits of our platforms in terms of user experience. So, we are quite aligned with the Elrond team standards in that direction. Our team is doxxed, as well because any single person Calileo believes in the better future for social media users. Every single one of us is invested and knows that we have the power to become a big player in the Elrond ecosystem and beyond.
And when it comes to the investors risk management, in terms potential rug, or inability to deliver what’s promised on our side, I would say we offer pretty low risk in that respect. Because we have the trust of big names in the ecosystem, believing in our technology. We aren’t backed yet by any of them because we are at an early stage and we clearly rely on our community trust, people like Lucian Mincu, UTrust and its founder, all the team member at Elrond and so forth.
Follow us and keep an eye on Calileo. Key people in the Elrond ecosystem already adopt us, even though we still haven’t anything to offer yet. Our MVP is under development. Our NFT collection is under development. Our intrinsic token is under development. And I think our community likes our mix of theoretical and pragmatic approach, which isn’t aggressive and is all about making sure everything is flawless and truly deliverable by our team.
We could have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars already if we wanted to, but everything that we sell, or that we will sell in the future, needs to bring true value and utility to our holders. That is truly essential to us.
Armand: That’s great and that’s one thing I really like about your project and I’m fortunate I’ve come across yours because wow, this is so cool you know. It’s a new social network for Elrond. I’m sure there’s others there, but I think that just the potential of where this can go to is vast.
Denis: Yeah, for, sure yeah. That’s also what I like about the potential of our project and our community.
So obviously, we want to create first and foremost a platform for the Elrond users rewarding this amazing community, but we also know that our Elrond community, the Elrond community is seeking for adoption. And this is what we can deliver throughout our huge and impressive user experience that we’re gonna have through our platform.
So, I like the way that people obviously want to have valuable project for the community, but they’re also open to welcome more people because they are wonderful, wonderful community. And this is what I really like about us and about the Elrond community.
Armand: That’s exactly right and that’s what I find about the Elrond community. It’s a very tight knit community.
Denis: Yeah
Armand: It’s a growing community and it also has big potential in smart contract space. I think Elrond is, one of the best, if not, the best there is and I like the way that you guys at doxxed too.
So that’s another plus, you know, cuz I know that you guys are gonna stay here for a long time.
Denis: To be fair though I remember some of our first Team members, they were not so keen to doxx themselves because some of them, they have a huge bag in EGld and obviously they’re scared that, you know, people find out who they are, they obviously, I mean, it’s all fair, you know, but then they truly realized the potential of Calileo and that, as a team, we had to doxx ourselves. People had to know who we are to truly show some trust because this is really important nowadays.
I mean, I wouldn’t personally invest in the project if I don’t know who’s behind the project. And if, I don’t know if they’re capable of delivering what can be delivered as well, you know. It’s truly important to doxx yourself as a team if you start a project.
Armand: That’s exactly right. You said that word trust, cuz ,you need that trust to be able to grow. There’s so many rug pulls out there.
Denis: I honestly feel bad for communities sometimes because our community doesn’t deserve it because they’re so supportive towards the Elrond ecosystem. They’re so supportive towards all these projects, technologies, projects that are going on and building daily.
And you know, when you have such a strong community, very supportive, I mean being rugged is the last thing you want for them. So, sometimes it saddens me, but it is what it is. Those are the risks you know.
Armand: Then you come across projects like yours and you know that, it’s gonna be there and there’s people behind it and people who just wants to build for us to make the ecosystem grow.
Denis: Fortunately, we’re not the only ones that are able to, promise that. So it’s good. That’s what I like about the Elrond ecosystem. They are truly, they are true builders out there, and this is very exciting, honestly.
Armand: Totally agree. Did you encounter any challenges along the way of you building Calileo and how did you and the team overcome it?
Denis: Yeah, so I would say our main challenges were that we needed to get our first traction towards our project. It was a bit challenging per se, to find the correct wording when talking to our community and the Elrond ecosystem. The main challenge is to basically adapt our tone of voice as a brand when it comes to promoting Calileo,
I believe, the Elrond community is amazing in its complexity, but is also very specific and it is quite focused on gaming and NFT artworks. So, first challenge is, how do we implement this gamification throughout the development of Calileo? How do we provide quality artwork and what would be the utility of that collection you know,
This required sitting down and gathering the whole team to think about the perfect NFT artwork, the right story behind it, and the utility to be brought on Calileo because you could have any type of NFT collection. You could have the insane artwork and people knows in the Elrond community what I’m talking about.
There are some incredible artwork out there, but if you don’t have a utility to bring to your OGs, let’s say, there is no true potential, you know, there is no true reason to invest in that NFT.
Armand: That’s right.
Denis: That was the first challenge, to think about the utility, but deliverable utilities. So, instead of like tossing around so many utilities that potentially couldn’t be deliverable, our challenge was to sit down and be like, okay, We want to achieve these. We want to bring these to our NFT holders. Is that possible? Is that truly possible to achieve? So that was the first challenge of our first milestone, which is to deliver our upcoming NT collection in our MVP right after, as well.
Armand: Okay, I’m glad you mentioned the NFT. I was gonna ask you, will you be selling NFTs and tokens in order to implement utilities in Calileo? Or can you explain how tokenomics would work within the whole Calileo platform?
Denis: Yeah, of course. I’m gonna break it down, talking about all NFT first, and then I will talk about our Calileo token, which will come later on this year after our NFT collection release.
So we will be selling NFTs next month, called ethos. Ethos, meaning ethic and collides with the luxury and ethic when using our platform. A true masterpiece to represent the state of the art that our platform aims to become, but also an implementation of pop culture traits to remind you that a social network should be for all, fun to use. You don’t necessarily go on social platforms to make money, right? Especially non — web3 users, the big picture, but more to have a lot fun on it. And that is what we want to vehicle through our NFT collection. This is the, I made, we want to display and regarding of Calileo token, this token will grant access to the usage of its network through increasing utility tokens called Calileos or in short CAL’s. And all rewards for various contributions to the network will be paid in CAL’s, creating content supporting creators and users, having an impact on others in the platform and all sorts of contribution will be rewarded in CAL’s.
However, it brings me to our token economics. It’s not really sustainable to give and give and give to the users and only give. You at some point, you’ll have to take back from them, which makes sense. Right? We can’t really promise we’re gonna make yourself rich and we’re gonna give you so many tokens by creating quality content or artwork like, on our platform or creating I don’t know, cool videos cool articles, insane podcasts, whatever.
The aim is to create an ecosystem to create sort of like circular economy that works. And for that you need to give, but also to take back. So how do we take back? We take back those tokens in our platform that are generated and reward it to our users by implementing some very cool and very fun to use features.
So you’ll be able, for example, throughout our massaging system called communication hub, you’ll be able to send tokens, ESDT tokens to each other. You’ll be able to interact with people by giving them CAL’s, for example, or give them other ESDT tokens in the longer future. And.
In these features, we’ll be able to take some fees as well to obviously reward the Calileo team and take it back into our treasury and then giving it back to the users. Because if we issue tokens I don’t know, for three years, for example, then we don’t have anymore tokens to give to our users.
So we have to take back and then give back again. Creating a whole circular economy.
Armand: Yeah. I think that’s gonna be a bit hard to you know maybe some balancing act in between users accumulating the coins, but then you wanna be able to let them implement it by either buying something or like you said, purchasing something.
So this circular economy within the whole ecosystem. You’re using that CAL tokens as a currency in between each other. Yeah. You know, you don’t want someone HODL all the tokens, cuz there’s nothing else to sort of you know tokens, to be circulated around. Yeah, that’s a great idea. It’s fantastic
Denis: Thank you.
Armand: Is there anything else that you think that I missed, that you wanted to share to other people listening and watching?
Denis: I could say a bit more about the actual token economics, but I clearly invite you to have a look in our white paper, light paper or one pager.
We talk in detail about the allocation of the Calileo token. Regarding the NFT token allocation. There is not, any public announcement yet. It’s gonna happen later this week, but there is nothing announced yet, but basically regarding the sales of our NFT collection, you have to know that 70% of our sales is gonna come to our treasury, the Calileo treasury, and it’ll be reused for our marketing, for our development.
This is basically a sort of something that we’re gonna use to, towards our platform essentially. And then we’re gonna have 5% for Super Victor. A charity project on the Elrond project that we really care about.
I dunno if you heard about him and what’s going on to Victor, but we have the power, if we sell a ton of NFTs and that will make a ton of EGLD as well, to give back to someone that really need it. So I think this is really important for us to achieve our goals and then to give , to Victor as well. And hopefully we will achieve his goal and collect, the $2 million he requires.
So that’s what we have. And then the rest of the 25% is gonna go towards our suppliers, people working on the NFT collections and people working on the development of our MVP as well, and also to rework the team, cuz I mean hard work needs to be rewarded, especially to the team. I feel this is really important.
So that’s pretty much it. I think I already talked about Victor. I wanted to raise awareness about Victor and telling you that the 5% of our NFT sales is gonna go towards Victor. I think I did this part. I want you to talk about him and it’s really important that you guys keep spreading the word.
Keep talking, keep tweeting about him. Try to help in some ways, if you don’t have, the financial means that’s all right. You can still spread the word then I’m pretty sure it will have an impact. So, let’s not forget Victor, because it was trendy for a bit, but, it’s not just a simple trend. It’s someone that’s a human behind, a kid that could have a life.
Armand: I totally agree. I do my bit as well, and there’s a lot of people that do their bit, and good thing about the Elrond ecosystem and community is they’re all huddling together, projects like yours, and other projects are also sharing their fundraisings, to support Victor. As you said, he needs it, no one wants to see a child suffer like he does.
The best that we could do is support and share the love and share what we can to raise awareness, to help and support him. So if anyone wants to support him, definitely follow DNS Victor and also, Calileo, if you wanna support the project as well.
Just going back into the tokens, you said the CAL tokens is gonna be released in September or end of the year?
Denis: No, it’s gonna be released at the end of the year. So really want to take one step at a time, right? So this is where we’re gonna release our NFT collection first. It’s gonna help us to finish up development of our MVP, right. And once we have, the development of our MVP done, We’re gonna be able to gather some feedback, some valuable feedback. We’re gonna be able to know.
So what needs to be fixed, what needs to be improved and then we will be able to release our Calileo token. That’s gonna be implemented for a beta version. we really want to take one step at a time. We don’t want to do everything at the same time and then be overwhelmed. We want to work in a qualitative way rather than quantitative way.
So we are gonna have our set token sale around the end of this year, as well as the private sale, very close to that date as well. And according to how it goes, we should have our public sale around January.
Armand: Good. I’ll be looking forward to that and I’m sure a lot of people will, too as well.
Denis: Thank you.
Armand: Guess we’ll leave it here. If there’s anything else, you wanted to say share here. Otherwise, how can people find out about you?
Denis: I don’t have really much to say. I mean, if you wanna ask me other questions just feel free to hit my private messages. I’m very open. I’m very reachable. I’m a normal person, you know, like our project is not huge yet. Like we don’t have the pretension to say, oh, we’re too busy to answer to you or to reply to your Mercedes. Sometimes we could be, but we’re really reachable. So just reach out to us, try to have a chat with me or with anyone from the team, we will always reply to you as long as you are not a bot, right?
But yeah, just thank you for having me today, Armand. That was a really cool experience. I really enjoyed it. And yeah, just follow our project. If you would like to follow Calileo on Twitter, Calileo Ethos on our Twitter as well for our NFT collection. You can join us on Discord, on telegram and, we have the blog as well right now.
So you can be informed on any sort of release. We’re really active. So yeah. Thank you.
Armand: Your website address too. So that’s Calileo?
Denis: That’s Calileo.co, not com, but. Co yeah.
Armand: So if you wanna follow Calileo? Go to Calileo.Co you’ll find the social media links in there as well.
Twitter, you can go to Discord, their Telegram and there’s also a Linktree, which is good. Cuz it’s got all the information in there that you wanna find out. The one pagers, and you know, it’s got a lot of information there for you. As Dennis said, if you wanna reach him, you can send him a message.
He’s got his profiles. You can find him on Twitter as well. And they’re very reachable and approachable. That’s one thing I like about you guys, you know, I like supporting underdogs and I think you guys have a really good potential , to grow and I’m really looking forward to your project and see you succeed. So thank you for your time again.
Denis: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. That was brilliant. Thank you.
Armand: Have a good day. Bye-bye.
Denis: You too. You too. Bye.
********
Elrond News Now interview of Calileo on YouTube:
