Decentralized marketing – a revolutionary technology based on smart contracts that guarantee reliability and transparency.

This is the FORSAGE platform. Lado Okhotnikov, one of FORSAGE founders, spoke to us about the idea behind the project and its further path of development for the coming years.

- Your project’s performance has been nothing short of stunning – data shows that by the end of May the FORSAGE community members made over $14 million, how much has this figure grown since?

- According to the latest calculations, our members’ profit has exceeded $48 million. By our estimations, by the end of 2020 the total profits will reach $1 billion, however, at this rate, it seems that we are going to hit this milestone much earlier. I’m only talking about our members’ profits, not that of administrators or founders. Here at FORSAGE we don’t have admins, and us, the developers, are regular members, just like the rest of the community. By the way, some community members have far surpassed us in profits, so there’s that. From the very start we aspired to create a fully decentralized project where absolutely anyone can make money.

- Can you elaborate on what the project is about?

- FORSAGE is a next generation crowdfunding platform based on smart contracts. This means that partner rewards are distributed among the community members automatically. The system is simple, transparent and fair. Here you won’t find huge fees or hard restrictions like you would on centralized platforms, and the proceeds from crowdfunding are not stored on the platform.

- How did the idea of FORSAGE come to be?

- We, the founders of FORSAGE, were originally brought together by the idea of building a project that we would enjoy participating in ourselves. Indeed, every one of us had our own pilot projects, but we couldn’t figure out how to bring everything we had devised to life – until we looked into the smart contract technology.
I was very inspired by the first smart-contract-based marketing projects that appeared last year – it became clear that this is the direction I should take, considering there hadn’t been a project I would consider perfect. We have spent a lot of time discussing our vision of FORSAGE and debugging code – after all, we were the pioneers in our field. Today FORSAGE is open source, and many have tried copying our project, but what they fail to understand is that simply cloning the technical side of things is far from enough. Every idea requires thorough cultivation and hard work. If the numerous FORSAGE copycats spent their resources on internal project development, I’m sure their results would be impressive.

- You said decentralized technologies guarantee the reliability and transparency of FORSAGE, how so?

- The smart contract at the core of FORSAGE is what enables both transparency and security. The contract’s code is open source, but the currently running version can no longer be altered, and it will continue executing the algorithm we have built into it. The authors of the idea behind the project have never even been its administrators, since the smart contract doesn’t rely on our intervention, doesn’t need a website — or anything else for that matter. All the payments go directly to participants’ wallets, we merely observe and steer the growth of FORSAGE. The website, for example, is just an interface that offers project participants a convenient way of accessing information.

- You have mentioned steering the growth of the project, could you speak about your plans for future development?

- In terms of development we approach FORSAGE as an epicenter of decentralization. This is a very ambitious idea – we believe that we are leading people towards a new economy that will inevitably take place, with or without us. We simply catalyze the process and contribute to the popularization of such ideas as decentralization and other technologies that enable more freedom.
We are constantly scaling up the project, and in the future we expect this process to continue. For example, we are currently working on launching a FORSAGE academy: inviting speakers from different countries, creating content. We want every beginner, no matter how inexperienced, to be able to find answers to their questions and set on the right course for improvement. We are also constantly adding new capabilities to the platform; expanding the list of languages the website is presented in by tapping into our community. For instance, our website is translated into various languages through a system where any project member can submit an improvement to the translation that will later be either voted in, or rejected by the community. Our members also help us build the FAQ section with lots of useful information.
In the near future we plan to launch an exchange where users will get to enjoy features that no other platform offers. In addition to that, an important difference between our exchange and the rest of the market will be the community around the platform, which is valuable human capital that very few have going for them.
Another FORSAGE innovation is the use of IPFS that allows us to create a truly decentralized website that can’t effectively be brought down. This enables us to further strengthen project security and attract even more participants.

- In one of your previous interviews you mention that FORSAGE is more than just a platform, but a community that has united lots of successful members, can you speak about your methods of motivating your audience?

- Transparency and openness motivate people. They like the fact that FORSAGE allows anyone to make money. As I’ve already said, the project we’ve created is the one we wanted to participate in ourselves, a project where opportunities for development are near limitless – and people are very driven by that.
Another advantage of FORSAGE is that there is no human factor that could affect the project, so people can be sure that they won’t lose their money because an administrator suddenly decided to keep the funds he happened to hold the keys to. We provide our members with the opportunity to act however they like, as long as it is legal and obeys common sense.

- What do you believe is special about FORSAGE, what’s the secret of success?

- I believe it’s the combination of all the factors I talked about today. First and foremost, the very idea of crowdfunding does a great job at motivating the community, people enjoy coming together to help each other achieve their goals. Secondly, our marketing model has been extensively tested – it has also been successfully used in centralized projects, and we further improved it to increase the overall reliability of the project. People from different countries all over the world are joining our community and have witnessed our integrity firsthand. We know what we’re doing and where we’re going. All of that combined helps us achieve the perfect balance.