Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The Blockchain is facilitating the transaction for both. The people who are offering the bounty are from the company that is looking for the prediction. The people who are making the predictions are consumers who want to participate in that kind of aprediction situation.

Yossi Peretz: Correct. Blockchain is only the infrastructure. It comes to solve the problem on a conventional prediction market. The prediction market has the problem of the middleman. Somebody has to operate. Once he operates the platform, he usually takes a portion of the fees. He takes a side usually. He has to provide liquidity. That’s why we turn to the Blockchain – to solve the problem of the conventional prediction market.

Sramana Mitra: How do you make money in that process?

Yossi Peretz: Stox makes money by assisting the operators and helping them in the flow of setting up a prediction.

Sramana Mitra: You are taking a cut of the bounty?

Yossi Peretz: Not necessarily. It depends on what the operator is asking. If he wants us to connect the correct crowd to his prediction, then we collect fees from the operator. Additionally, we consider ourselves as a technology group, which means we get paid for developing additional features and requirements on the platform itself.

Sramana Mitra: Can we do a few more use cases of the kind of prediction that you particularly do?

Yossi Peretz: One example is an information request. It could be things like who would be the next president or what is the best product for a specific market. The question should have a definite outcome. It could be a university asking a specific question for information. It could be a company opening a prediction and using it for marketing purposes. We’ve done a few of those. They use that information for marketing purposes. An additional use case is for the end user.

Sramana Mitra: Are you seeing a lot of adoption of this kind of crowdsourced predictions?

Yossi Peretz: We’re overwhelmed with the adoption. We built a better version around two months ago. People are actually seeking this kind of platform to join. We definitely see that in the long run, anybody will be able to take this platform and open a prediction about a future event. It doesn’t matter in which field it is. It could be in sports, politics, and economics.

Sramana Mitra: In the adoption that you’re seeing, are there trends? What kinds of industry sectors are adopting the most right now?

Yossi Peretz: We’re trying to see what the crowd would be interesting in answering. It doesn’t matter if we can get a company to ask a prediction if nobody wants to answer it. That’s the reason we released a beta version. We’re asking questions in different fields with different types of questions.

What would the crowd be interested in answering? We’re continuously analyzing the feedback from the crowd. We’re harnessing the crowd. We don’t just ask them the prediction. We ask them what they think about the flow of our platform. By analyzing the results and predictions, we see what is the most popular field.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Yossi Peretz, CEO of Stox
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