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· 15 min read
Sha R.
Jerome V.

Hello everyone; this is the first post of the Affi Network dev team. For the past few months, we've been on stealth mod building around a crazy idea of decentralized, trustless, automated, performance-based affiliate marketing. The main idea was to use public ledger (Blockchain) transactions to prove a sale happened, pay the publisher fairly and squarely, and use all advertisement budgets based on performance, not guesswork.

At the time of writing this, after two rounds of private community testing took place and thousands of extraordinary people helping us find nasty bugs and squish them.

Today, our product is very close to coming out of alpha.We are hoping for a public beta release on the polygon PoS mainnet.
We can finally reveal what's going on behind the sense. We'll start with a bit of background, and then we'll jump into our ecosystem.

To make it easier to grasp, we combine real-world circumstances, blockchain, AI-generated art, and magical school story to re-introduce Affi Network to those who have never heard of us.

Chapter I: So dead yet so alive  

Last year wasn't the best for the crypto league, with NFTs in the front community taking many hits, criticism, and even pure hatred! Unfortunately, many got scammed, projects rug-pulled, and games were never released, so they got all the rights to be furious.

The mess caused by NFT going mainstream too early, followed by various crypto crises, namely FTX, Celsius, and Three arrow ... People started focusing only on its finical aspect and buying a bunch of stuff without any primary research. The wild west of buying millions of dollars in uncertain assets is pushed away, and it's for the best as it allows the NFT community to focus on innovation and tech growth rather than promoting unrealistic values. one lousy dispatch leads to another, and we ended up here.

If we put the investment side away and keep an unbiased look at NFT offers, art, games, innovation, and potential are authentic.

Art, you say? 

You might hear this one.NFT is not art, and it's just an image I can right-click and download, period.If that's what you think, you should check out works by artists like Pak , Beeple, and XCopy. They all have a unique style and art, people love their works, and their work may be praised years from now. But this time, there is a significant difference from traditional art. Verifying the authenticity of a specific author when it comes to NFT arts is a different story because the creator and author will stay on-chain forever.

Arguably there was no easier way for artists to sell their art globally, and get paid, allowing transferring ownership with ease, all verifiable on-chain. The reality is there is a new medium for artists welcoming everyone; many more will use it in upcoming years. If you search around, Jose Delbo, 89 years old DC and Marvel comic artist is also using NFT to share his art.

Community 

Send and receive GMs every morning might not be your cup of tea, yet some people enjoy chatting with their friends daily. Some of these communities are hardcore fans. Azuki, BAYC, and y00ts, to name some. They support other members and feel they belong; arguably, they have stronger communities than IRC and old forum days, but they mostly live on discord, Twitter, and telegram nowadays nowadays and call each other degen here and there.

Potential

Gaming and eSport companies like Ubisoft and GameStop are incorporating NFTs in their in-game purchases, where players can buy unique features like skins. NFTs are being used in various industries, such as automotive, fashion, luxury, retail, food and beverage, sports, entertainment, and music. NFTs create additional revenue for creators by tokenizing merchandise.

With the increasing popularity and adoption of blockchain technology, NFTs could revolutionize how we own and trade digital assets. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges to overcome, such as scalability, accessibility, and regulatory issues, before NFTs can fully realize their potential.

Chapter II: The problem 

Now we talked about use cases and potential. Let's inspect the gap between the creation and publication of NFTs in the most straightforward form. Many artists and builders need help sharing their work with the community as they might need more audience or digital marketing skills. At the same time, advertisers and advertisement agencies have limited capacity to help creators.

To feel this gap, web2 companies like Upfluence, GRIN, Creator, and Impact have created excellent products to use a more recent variation of digital marketing called influencer marketing and work with people with influence in the required niche as an advertiser.

As crypto and NFT communities grow, the influencer marketing model makes more and more sense as we have so many cryptos and NFT influencers across different social media. However, the gap between them and the project still exists.

And that's where Affi Network Protocol comes in.

Chapter III: Affi network 

Not only do we bring a solution for web3 equivalent, but also we improve previous models by so many innovations.Let's hear a story to understand how the Affi Network works, shall we? Our story is about a magical school headmaster who uses the NFT collection as a student id for each new-year student. Students require the NFT or can not pass the school gate guided by the school guardian dragon DGON. Let's start by introducing Ocarus school and main characters.

Welcome to the Ocarus Magic School

Ocarus Magic School

Outside school is more like a castle, which might give you the creep, but if you look carefully, you'll see nothing but beauty. The location is said to be somewhere in the land of blockchains.

Inside the school, it is warmer. The architecture of libraries, of course, is as magical.

Let us introduce you to the headmaster of the Ocarus, DGON the guardian dragon, Jill the student and Alen the publisher.

Headmaster, the Advertiser

Advertiser (agency, artist, builder): He is the magical school headmaster. Nobody knows his real name. People say he is hundreds of years old. This role can be a single artist, an advertisement agency, or a major gaming studio.

DGON, the Guardian

DGON, toasting anyone who comes around the gate without a valid NFT. DGON will read and validate the data from blockchain, cheating will lead to instant death. this role is equivalent to NFT gate protected apps in the real world.

Jill, the Consummer

Consumer (buyer): she is a highly talented magician. She wants to enroll in magic but needs to know the best. She trusts Alen's instincts. this role is equivalent to the consumers in the real world.

Alen, the Publisher

Publisher (influencer):  His job is to research and find the best magical schools and share them with their followers. This role is equivalent to a person active on social media platforms, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. they talk about NFTs and crypto

All the students require to have an NFT card.

The Ocarus school uses blockchain-grade cryptography to ensure students don't use fake ids.

Besides magic, the headmaster (advertiser) enjoys blockchain time when he decides on the new year registration using an NFT gate guarded by DGON and dark blood magic.

As a magical school headmaster, he knows his best bet is Affi Network, he magically creates an ERC-1155 smart contract with a collection of student ids for the number of students you are willing to register this year. So you create a campaign. As soon as the contract was ready, he created a campaign on Affi Network.

What's going on here?
To simplify this, you have to think of it as creating a google or Facebook ad, but because Affi Network is dApp, it requires different inputs.
What happens behind the scenes is that you fulfill your campaign details, giving us your contact address, we keep a copy of your campaign off-chain, and you do three transactions.

  • First, to deploy your smart contract, the Affi Network factory deploys a smart campaign contract and sets you as an owner.
  • Second, to approve as much as you want to put on the pool, there is no max approval but the exact selected number.
  • Last transaction is to deposit your campaign budget to the pool.

Our testnet has a cool feature allowing you to use a USDC or DAI faucet for your campaign. It's just a click. Unlike the traditional model, you have to deposit your whole campaign budget before your campaign is active and lock it for a period giving publishers (Alen) enough time to promote it. There is a reason for depositing the whole campaign budget because Affi Network uses a real-time, performance-based model, which will be discussed shortly.

Now there is Alen (publisher), whose job is to research and find the best magical schools; he talks about his finding on his social networks and is loved by all new upcoming students because he always told the truth in the past. Alen visits Affi Network time by time and finds out there is a new school to promote. After background research Alen finds out this school is one of the best opportunities for students, so he goes to the school campaign and mints a link as a publisher.

Behind the sense, Alen submits his wallet address to the headmaster campaign and registers himself as a publisher.

And finally, there is Jill (consumer). She wants to enroll in magic but needs to know which one is the best, but she trusts Alen's research because of his successful school finding history. She is excited to join the school and use Alen's link to enroll for the upcoming semester. Because Jill used Affi Network links and received a sweet cashback(discount). as soon as Jill purchases the Id cart NFT Alen gets paid, the headmaster enrollment list is updated, and Jill is officially registered. She doesn't have to be worried about getting toasted by DGON.

Jill can use her purchased NFT to pass DGON without getting toasted and start a new semester happily.

What was the difference between these and the traditional model? as magical as our magic school story.

What did we solve? 

for all parties involved

  • You, headmaster, did not pay a single more dollar to Alen than his enrolled student, pay-per-sale model
  • Alen and Jail get paid automatically and instantly
  • A successful zero-trust relationship between parties is shapen

from advertiser side  

  • Exaggerating their budget
  • Not being satisfied with the result and not having enough conversion

from publisher side 

  • Not getting paid on time
  • Exaggerating their influence and power

And about the element in the room? Bots, if you are watching this on Twitter, you know how big of an issue bots are. Even though machine learning has advanced a lot in eliminating their damage, in terms of digital marketing, bots are more harmful and dangerous than ever.

However, The bot situation improved heavily after Elon musk took over Twitter.

Because Affi Network monitors mints and traffic and pays per sale, traditional ad fraud and bots does not affect it. With community support, we are on the right track to changing the game.

Here is a list of features that makes Affi Network different.

  • Fully automated zero-trust relationship: Affi Network is a fully automated, pay-per-sale model, everything is transparent on the chain, and all payments are in real-time. Payment attribution is done using our protected bot wallet, and transaction proof are on-chain.

  • Stablecoin real-time pools: Moving influencer marketing to the blockchain, one of the most significant issues is the various blockchain platforms. They use the volatile asset, or they force using their native ERC-X token; Affi Network uses two of most historically stable coins, fiat-backed token USDC, decentralized backed by crypto over-collateralization DAI.

  • Mobile ready:  Affi Network support mobile wallets, and it's optimized to work on mobile, meaning advertiser, publisher, and buyers can promote and earn using nothing but their phone.

  • Advanced privacy:  our dApp platform does not log anything related to personal identity but your wallet address; we do not use google analytics or another logger in our dApp. Unless you are a project and want to get verified on our platform, you can be an anonymous marketing ninja.

  • Mindful craft: after two rounds of testing, one private testnet round, and one public round, we battle-tested our ecosystem on Mumbai to simulate our mainnet scaling and issues as much as possible we do our best to release a stable beta.

  • Modern tech stack: we are using a modern tech stack at affi network, allowing us to build and break stuff in short sprints; the complete underlying technology stack is detailed in our documentation.

  • Comprehensive documentation: we created a white paper and comprehensive platform docs guiding users with text and videos. Check it out here. It should be the place to get you started.

  • Simple, transparent revenue model and sharing:  Affi network revenue model is designed to help the platform evolve and reward our early and upcoming backers fairly. All Affi Network Protocol fees are sent to our multi-sig treasury wallet. As soon as our token is released to the public, 50% of stablecoin revenue will be converted (purchased from the market to create natural volume) and shared with our holders. The complete details of our revenue model and sharing are available in our tokenomics page.

Chapter IV: At last

We are incredibly proud and grateful for the opportunity we have had building Affi Network so far, but we are just at the beginning. We did make a big move; now, we require the community to start taking over and guiding the forward direction.

Here is our current to-do list:

  • Mainnet launch: Soon, we will close our third and last round of public testing, get our critical contracts audited, and will launch on Polygon PoS mainnet, as our platform, by its nature, requires so many transactions we are carefully looking at zkEVM to be early migrators. We also work with legal teams to protect you and us while engaging with Affi Network.

  • Open-source: At the affi network, we believe open-source will lead the community to build mutual trust; we will start open-sourcing our ecosystem components with our mainnet launch. stay tuned and check our github and twitter.

  • Going beyond NFT: Affi Network's core idea was a generic decentralized web3 dApp. We scoped down our work to NFT to release an early version faster, allowing our early investors and community to see what we are cooking. Still, the core idea of Affi Network is far more generic, and we want to move towards it.

  • Towards DAO: Currently, the platform's revenue is controlled by a multi-sig wallet. We would love to allow all involved communities to take control, so we will move to snapshot sooner than later for big decisions (e.g., treasury withdraws).

  • Token and Staking: We will release a new set of contracts after a successful mainnet launch. The token will come first.

  • More decentralization: We are researching and looking for ways to cut down as many as centralized components possible, moving toward a total decentralized platform.

  • Community growth and partnerships: We have already talked to and gathered many NFT influencers and advertisers; getting closer to the mainnet launch, we need exponential community growth. We plan to release so many upcoming media talking to influencers and advertisers.

Conclusion 

We build a fully automated crypto native, web3, dApp that builds jobs for influencers, a platform that doesn't evade privacy, pays in real-time, and pays only per conversation. Our platform is free-to-use globally and welcomes any tokenized assets. The system is trustless, meaning no party can play dirty. Still a big road ahead of us, but we hope this post gives you a heads-up on what's going on behind Affi Network.  We would love to thank our early investors and the rest of the Affi Network team and community for their unconditional love and support so far, and we will try our best to keep building and releasing utopian stuff.

· 2 min read
Pinaki Sachathamakul

Exactly 6 months ago today, I had pushed out the first version of the Affi Network Whitepaper.

Happy to share that so much has been accomplished since then:

  • Went from 1 to 5 solid team members
  • Created three websites
  • Built a large database of potential users
  • Released updated versions of the whitepaper
  • Onboarded over 10 investors
  • Onboarded strategic advisors
  • Partnered with a massive institution (confidential until announced by them)
  • Started building our community (~15k Twitter)
  • Designed our architecture from scratch (innovative technology)
  • Created unique smart contracts using very modern tools and frameworks
  • Built our own multi-chain tracking engine
  • Designed and built our own dApp (MVP)
  • Went to crypto events, got user feedback, and networked with awesome people
  • Acquired customers and got LOIs signed

Excited to share that we’ll soon be ready for testnet 🤯. Really excited for this! We’re testing internally and fixing bugs at the moment.

Most of the people who’ve seen our demo have said that the product is “very cool” and “easy to use”.

It’s been a wild journey so far - and pushing through a bear market is …. No words for it 😅

While I wish we did things even faster, I’m really proud of the team for what we’ve accomplished with such little resources.

We have many more releases, updates, and announcements coming your way so please stay tuned!

If you’d like to be considered as one of our product testers, please send me a DM to request for an invitation!

Let’s go #AffiNetwork 🚀

· 7 min read
Indy Kajornboon

​ I have been eager for my first post for some time now! We have been working to build a strong core team over the past few months to ensure that Affi Network is built with the latest innovations, efficiency, and most importantly, security. At Affi Network, our values are Transparency, Fairness, Empowerment, Unity, Innovation, and Inclusion. These are the core values that we live by and are looking for in every individual that we onboard into our team. ​

It was not an easy task to find potential candidates that would align with our values and our goals. It all started with casual chats between many Web3 enthusiasts. New ideas were bounced around, and many crypto topics were debated. Discussions turned into validation, and validation turned into an opportunity. Seeing how passionate each person was about Affi Network’s vision and long-term goals, it was clear that we could make Affi Network become one of the leading web3 marketing platforms if we united our skills and worked together.

​ "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." – Michael Jordan ​

We are setting out to become champions, making the core team crucial to our success. While we are excited about what the future holds for us, we are focused and working hard to deliver the best experience for our users. We know there is a lot of work to be done, and I believe our core team can now deliver. I am happy and excited to announce that the initial team members behind the scenes of Affi Network are coming together, and we are now a talented team of five that is constantly growing. We started from one only a few months ago and now we have a strong five. Here they are! ​

Pinaki

The main man himself, our CEO and founder, Pinaki, has been a serial entrepreneur in the media and marketing industry for over a decade. Specializing in media and marketing, Pinaki has founded and built 3 companies in this space; a video production house, an influencer marketing platform, and Affi Network. Having worked with several brands and agencies worldwide and working closely with advertisers and publishers, he understands firsthand user needs and pitfalls that can be avoided in this venture. His video production company, Albatross Film Service, has produced commercial content for Apple, Netflix, Airbnb, Western Union, and several more! His influencer marketing platform, Brandface Innovation, created over 2,500 influencer jobs through collaborating with brands like Decathlon, Stabilo, and HappyFresh. He discovered crypto in 2017, and his passion for this space grew rapidly. Like most of us, Pinaki initially began by investing through centralized exchanges and then later started dabbling in Web3. His eureka moment came when he realized that we could build a real-time pay-per-sale solution on the blockchain. Pinaki started to spend more time researching and talking to Web3 founders, agencies, publishers, developers, and tokenomics experts to further understand their pain points, gain insights, and craft an optimal solution. Once his solution was validated, the journey of Affi Network began! ​

Sha
Our Chief Technical Officer, Shah, is the wizard behind the magic that Affi Network is bringing to the community. A software engineer, infosec expert, and blockchain developer who was previously CTO at equinox.fund (building launchpads and marketplaces). Shah has had over a decade of experience in this space, learning multiple coding languages and always building and breaking tech for the benefit of the community. Shah has been recognized for building multiple web3 products, but not only building; he has also been awarded for breaking Netflix, Zoom, and several other products.His strong security background is a perfect complementary skillset for building and deploying secure smart contracts!
Indy

Our Chief Operating Officer, Indy. Me! Just to introduce myself briefly, I am a finance and management specialist who previously worked at Lazada as Head of Pricing, supporting Lazada leading up to the Alibaba acquisition, along with several other initiatives. I spent 2020–2021 heavily interested in the crypto world, trading NFTs and testing blockchains. I went deep into Web3 and developed a passion to one day build something to help contribute to this community. Pinaki and I have known each other for over a decade and have been talking about Web3 and its potential for years. Now it's exciting to be a part of building something that will help grow and shape the future of Web3!This month we have onboarded two more valuable members to the Affi Network team. I am excited to introduce and share their experiences as they are also Web3 enthusiasts, having helped build many Web3 projects in the past. ​

Jah

Our recently joined Community & Marketing Lead, Jah, is a crypto enthusiast, web3 marketer, influencer, and publisher that has helped build multiple blockchain projects to success. Jah has been a crucial part in growing and educating the Thai crypto community, having been the Marketing Head at NFT Gamer Thailand and brand ambassador for multiple blockchain projects. Her enthusiasm for web3 has led her to establish her own crypto community (Dumbui Crypto Community), where she actively discusses crypto news and educates her community on the most recent web3 developments. She has built and managed a crypto community of over 250k members and has worked with many web3 influencers, making her a perfect fit to build a strong Affi Network community. She loves the space and loves building a quality community, so you guys are in good hands! ​

Jerome

The latest member of the Affi Network family, our Lead Developer, Jerome, is a passionate developer with a decade of experience in developing software and IT solutions for various industries. Jerome has dedicated his time to blockchain over the past few years and has hit the ground running by building multi-chain launchpads (Ignition Pad on PAID Network and equinox.fund launchpad) that have become successful in growing the Web3 and gamefi ecosystem. Jerome and Shah have been working together at Equinox previously and have shown success in building a launchpad together. I am excited to have Jerome on our team as his experience in building dApps can help deliver the robust user experience that the Affi Network community deserves!

​ Our team is based on individuals who are passionate and go the extra mile to constantly improve and optimize Affi Network. It is my pleasure and honor to be working alongside a team that I feel can bring Affi Network to the level we are aiming for. This is just the beginning, and we are always looking to grow. We invite all Web3 founders, Writers, Bloggers, Influencers, and anybody who is looking to grow to join us in shaping the future of Web3 together with Affi Network! ​

We are also excited to share that we have some notable partners and advisors on our roster and will be making announcements about this in the near future! If you are interested in joining us as an advisor, partner, advertiser, publisher, or any other role, please feel free to reach out via Twitter or Telegram with a proposal. Our community is buzzing!

· 6 min read
Pinaki Sachathamakul

I am excited to be kicking out this blog with our new website!

Wow, it’s been a long journey until we finally landed on a solution like Affi Network.

I spent over a decade in the media and marketing space. I wore several hats (management, sales, recruitment, screenwriting, producing, directing, and much more), working with some really talented people along the way and having loads of fun! In my years, I had the chance to build businesses that produced ads for global brands like Apple, Netflix, and Airbnb, collaborating with some of the largest ad agencies worldwide.

In late 2019, I registered a company in Singapore called Brandface to build software in digital media. We planned to build an agency, gain insight, and then launch a product. In early 2020, we launched Brandface Innovation, a tech-enabled influencer agency in Thailand to help brands manage nano-influencer marketing at scale. In 2021, we continued to work with some global brands like Decathlon and several others to create over 2,500 influencer jobs. Through this experience, we learned that we could create more value for advertisers by building a performance-based product on Web3.

The critical insight gained was that advertisers wanted to pay on a performance basis (even for engaging influencers) versus the current flat-fee model, which can be pretty risky. Many of the brands we worked with were consumer brands that wanted to “pay per shoe sold” or “pay per IoT device sold.” It would have been challenging to build and scale this solution for several reasons; however, we found a way to do this for tokenized assets (e.g. NFTs).

I've been involved in the crypto scene as an investor since 2017. My passion and curiosity in crypto led me to explore the different projects and solutions being built. I was deep-diving into community groups and spent hours understanding each product's tech. As time passed, Web3 got bigger and bigger. Blockchain TVL started growing. In 2021, some friends and I started investing in DEXes (decentralized exchanges). One DEX we got into early had an internal referral program for one of their pools (one I was already farming in). That was my eureka moment!! On-chain performance marketing!

Of course, the DEX’s referral program had some issues (e.g. I was referring to myself and made an extra 3%), but the idea of on-chain performance marketing made a lot of sense! I spent some time researching further and found that transparency was a massive issue in the traditional affiliate industry. 11% of all ad budgets, or about $100bn in 2023, is the size of ad fraud! How valuable could a fully-transparent decentralized performance marketing platform be? Can we create our own economy? Should we have our own token? Should we be a DAO? What are the barriers we need to be aware of? I had a lot of questions.

In early 2022, I started spending more time researching the space, getting consultations from experts, and trying to get some of these questions answered. We spoke to Web3 projects, marketing agencies, and several publishers to understand what they liked or didn’t like about our concept. We spoke to several developers to understand the challenges of building and automating our services. After gathering feedback and validation, Affi Network was born… and our adventure began. Our adventure to build the world’s largest blockchain-based affiliate marketing platform that fuels publishers of tomorrow with a stream of paid opportunities.

‘Affi’ derives from the word ‘affiliate’. Affi Network will enable advertisers to work with publishers on a pay-per-sale basis. All conversions will be verified on-chain. Advertisers of tokenized assets will be able to control their CAC (customer acquisition costs) and have access to a tracking dashboard that displays on-chain verifications for each conversion. Publishers will have access to more opportunities, less friction to join campaigns, and real-time payments. Consumers of Web3 will have a chance to support their favorite publishers and receive cashback on their purchases! What excites us as much as the innovation is the social impact - We hope to make Affi Network home for more than a million publishers.

To be at the intersection of marketing and blockchain, so early, and to do nothing about it - that would probably bug me a lot later down the line! We wound down operations at the agency and started focusing on Affi Network full-time. We had to go for it! Tokenomics. Whitepaper. Logo. Branding. Website. CxO Recruitment. User Flows. Legal. Pitch Decks. Fundraising. The whole shebang and more!

I can not be more excited about the leadership team I've recently onboarded as founding members of Affi Network. We will release more information about the team members in another blog post, but I can share that everyone is an A player in their domain. We are currently working 10-15 hour days - driven by passion, extremely unsustainable, but perhaps until product launch! We look forward to welcoming high-caliber candidates and developing cross-functional teams over the following months and years. If you are passionate about Web3 and think you are a good fit, please get in touch! There's a lot of work ahead, and we can't get it all done alone. Come and build with us!

We also invite marketers, publishers, NFT lovers, and other users of Web3 to join our community and learn more about how you or your project can benefit from Affi Network. There are learning resources in our Docs that can help you get started. As a DAO, we are truly building Affi Network for our community. This is why 50% of our revenue goes to AFFI stakers. This is why 100% of our treasury is governed by our DAO. We are incomplete without our community. Please reach out if you resonate with our values of transparency, fairness, unity, inclusion, empowerment, and innovation. No bs. We are here to kick ass and we can not do it without our community.

We have thought very deeply about our users, the features we need to build, the value we need to create, and our purpose behind it all. We welcome all walks of life to explore how they can contribute or benefit from joining our community.

Are you excited to shape the future of Web3 with us? Join our community. Read our docs. Follow us on social media. Invite your friends. Share our website. Send us a partnership proposal. Come and change the world with us!