When Referral Marketing And Blockchain Meet, You Get Attrace: The Missing Piece

Referral marketing has its problems. Mainly, centralization, data and privacy mishaps, as well as reconciliation.

Web3, an antidote to the aforementioned, ought to suffice, right? Wrong.

That’s according to Attrace CEO Erwin Werring who helped build a referral network for the Web3 space.

Benzinga chatted with Werring to learn more. Here is the conversation that transpired.

Benzinga: Hi Werring. Nice to meet you. Can you start off with a bit of background?

Werring: We founded Attrace in 2018 and I’m one of seven co-founders. We initially wanted to build a blockchain, ourselves, from scratch, to take out the middlemen in affiliate marketing. But then, we identified something new.

This tokenized economy is missing an essential element, and that is a decentralized, trustless technology that incentivizes to promote tokenized assets.

There should be a way for somebody to promote a tokenized asset and get paid for generating a participant.

So, this is what we developed.

It is a referral network which is basically a group – we call them verify nodes but maybe you could use the term advertising oracles – and they are basically reading all the blockchains and, in that way, establish a system where you, as a project, can promote a project and generate a participant.

It’s a type of promotion without any cookie tracing or fingerprinting. It works via the wallets of the three parties: the promoter, the participant, and the project.

Tell me about your competitive advantage. What are you worried about?

We don’t have any competitors, right now. Though, I have no doubt that they will bump up in the coming months. We have the first-mover advantage to be as public about what we’re doing as possible and to get as much traction before other parties jump into the space.

My main worry is that I have a very large CRM list of projects that want to work with us and we cannot facilitate them quick enough.

If I don’t facilitate them quick enough, then I have less of an edge, should another competitor come up.

The sole focus going forward?

We want to become the industry standard for advertising in the space. Ten years from now, DApp (decentralized applications) will become more mainstream and then, it should be that: “Okay, if I want to promote my DAPP, the go-to tool would be Attrace.”

That’s what we’re aiming for.

We’re blockchain agnostic and the advertising oracles, or the more technical term verifying nodes, are able to read on any blockchain and arrange the commission payments, via the blockchain.

Where do you stand on growing your team?

We’re based in the Netherlands and the team is about twenty-five, in total.

We have raised this summer with Deribit, a large Ethereum ETH/USD and Bitcoin BTC/USD derivatives market. So, in terms of funding, we are okay.

If we want to scale quicker, then, of course, additional partners would be more than welcome. But yeah, I think that’s the same for any startup you would be talking to.