BTSE AMA Highlights: A Conversation with Artem Lazarev and Andy Bohutsky, Co-Founders of Whalemap, on November 18, 2021
On November 18, 2021, the BTSE Telegram Community invited Whalemap co-founders Artem Lazarev and Andy Bohutsky for an AMA.
Whalemap uses blockchain data to derive insight not otherwise available in legacy markets. Are long-term HODLers selling, at what prices are large players accumulating, is the market overheated with greed? All that and more is what Whalemap is for. Whalemap was built by former physicists and designers with simplicity and utility in mind. Our goal is to bring transparency to the crypto market using fundamental blockchain data that is reliable, precise, fast, and comprehensible.
Here are the consolidated and edited highlights of the AMA.
• • •
The Whalemap Team
BTSE Moderator:
Hi all. Welcome to today’s AMA. Today we are honored to have two guests from Whalemap! Please introduce yourselves and your core team.
Artem Lazarev:
Our names are Artem and Andy. We are a physicist and an architect with extensive experience in blockchain analytics.
Andy Bohutsky:
Whalemap has also been blessed with a team of super-strong engineers. They have previously built an order matching engine for a centralized exchange, and are an ideal match for the technological stack that is needed for blockchain data processing.
• • •
What Does Whalemap Do?
BTSE Moderator:
Please tell us what your project does.
Andy Bohutsky:
Whalemap is an on-chain analytics company. We get data directly from the blockchain and run it through our algorithms to visualize it in an actionable and accessible way.
• • •
Whalemap’s Investors & Partners
BTSE Moderator:
Please share with us your investors/partners. Are there plans for partnerships with other projects?
Artem Lazarev:
We are proud to share that we already have 30,000 registered users, and 65,000 followers on Twitter.
We are partnered up with some cool influencers including Pomp (1.2M followers) and Koroush (271k followers).
And we also have investors including angels from claystack.com, solstarter.org, rarestone.capital, coin98.com, rr2.capital, as well as VCs such as Shima Capital, momentum6.com, defi.tech, and Ghafcapital.ae.
• • •
What Data Does Whalemap Provide?
BTSE Moderator:
WhaleMap seems like a data analytics company. What kind of data are you currently providing, and how is it being used?
Andy Bohutsky:
Whalemap provides data (insight) about whales and HODLers, currently for Bitcoin only but is expanding to provide data about Polygon, Solana, and Ethereum blockchains too. When are the big guys/HODLers buying, when are they selling? Are they selling for a profit or a loss? Whalemap can answer those by analyzing data straight from the blockchain. Historically, this type of data was extremely successful in predicting supports, resistances, and inflection points for BTC price action, and is easy to use in trading.
• • •
Upcoming Products & Features
BTSE Moderator:
What are the next few upcoming products or features on your roadmap?
Artem Lazarev:
We have an extensive roadmap ahead of us and are planning on releasing the next iteration of Whalemap’s product — pro.whalemap.io in the next year and the demo version released in Q1 of 2022. Pro.whalemap will have five key features:
- Super Real-time Analytics — mempool analytics displayed in real-time
- Address Tagging — tagging which type of player has made a transaction (exchange, OTC desk, retail player, whale, miner, etc.)
- Multichain Support — We will be bringing classic Whalemap charts to Solana, Polygon, Ethereum, and other blockchains
- DEX Integration — Integrating a trade button on our platform that will allow our users to buy and swap tokens on a DEX without leaving Whalemap
- DeFi Analytics — analyzing smart contracts and their performance that influences the token’s price
BTSE Moderator:
Your current products are bitcoin-based, are there any plans to shift them for use outside of bitcoin? How easy is that process?
Andy Bohutsky:
We are planning on integrating multiple blockchains into our platform. As we are launching on Solana we will be introducing Solana support to the platform first. We also plan to support Polygon, Ethereum, and Bitcoin-like blockchains such as Dogecoin, Litecoin, etc. Bringing our classic charts to bitcoin-like blockchains does not pose a big technological problem for us, so that can be done fairly easily. Introducing other blockchains will be harder.
• • •
Whalemap’s Community
BTSE Moderator:
What does your current community base look like?
Artem Lazarev:
Mostly Twitter audience, 100% organic and including big accounts like TraderSZ, Will Clemente, and IvanOnTech. In fact, they started following Whalemap’s insights and data quite early on (when we had only 500 followers or so). They definitely saw value in our data quite quickly.
Now we have more than 65,000 followers on Twitter, with multiple news sources such as Cointelegraph and Forbes quoting our tweets and posting our charts.
• • •
Whalemap’s Native Token — WMP
BTSE Moderator:
Tell us more about your token. What does it do, and what are the benefits of holding them?
Artem Lazarev:
WMP is the backbone of Whalemap’s ecosystem of utility. It will be native to the Solana blockchain but will also be cross-listed as ERC-20. Staking WMP will yield rewards and is anticipated to provide governance. There are burning and usage reward mechanisms that will be implemented too.
In order to get access to the pro platform, you will have to pay with our xWMP utility tokens that you in turn get by staking WMP tokens. There are also staking rewards for xWMP holders in the form of redistributed rewards from the general usage of pro.whalemap.
We will be launching our WMP token in the near future. We also do not rule out an airdrop to our community members, so keep your eyes out for that news! We plan to have our tokens available for purchase on DEXs and centralized exchanges.
• • •
Whalemap vs. Competitors
BTSE Moderator:
There are quite a few blockchain analytics products on the market, such as Nansen.ai and Glassnode. How does Whalemap compare to those two?
Andy Bohutsky:
Accessibility (low price), big focus on UI (we are quite proud of its usability and got a lot of positive feedback regarding it), and actionability + ease of use of our data (draw a horizontal line from a big whale bubble and that’s your support). We also leave out the noise and only display charts that are useful for trading, whereas you will have to take an extra step to distill useful data out of the numerous charts that some of our competition provides.
• • •
Future Plans
BTSE Moderator:
Please share with us any future plans you have in place, any new exciting partnerships or developments?
Artem Lazarev:
We are committed to delivering on our Roadmap in a timely manner and have started active development of pro.whalemap.io already.
We want to show the demo version very soon (Q1 2022) and keep introducing new features throughout Q2 and Q3.
We were lucky enough to get some strong support in our funding round from notable investors and advisors that are opening doors for us regarding new partnerships.
We are currently speaking to Solana wallets, decentralized exchanges, and many other projects to collaborate with. We are also successfully talking to many influencers in the space to increase our community reach.
Most importantly, we are working very hard on creating a large amount of useful educational content around Whalemap and on-chain analytics in general. We are strong believers that this is the only way to achieve broad adoption of this type of data.
• • •
Community Questions
Cat Tien Schaffer (@ShaunteSchaffer):
What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team lead the market?
Artem Lazarev:
One of our strongest advantages is our team that includes top-of-the-line data scientists, data engineers, and business development people from some of the best companies in the world. Making our UI beautiful, educational content understandable, and most importantly, making our data the fastest out there is something that should hopefully allow us to reach the mainstream adoption of blockchain analytics that we are ambitiously aiming for
• • •
Flemming (@flemmin):
How will you manage the project and the token to get a position in the market and become the best token in the crypto world?
Andy Bohutsky:
I think the best answer to this would be to look at our track record so far. We have a working platform — whalemap.io that has been live for over a year now. We have more than 30,000 registered users on it, and that serves as suitable proof of concept for us to take Whalemap to the next level. Furthermore, the entire team and advisory tokens are vested linearly over two years, with no tokens being released upfront. We have adopted this strategy to show our commitment to the project.
Our main goal is to make on-chain analytics mainstream. We believe that the best way to achieve this is to make it accessible to a wide audience by providing educational content and reducing the barrier of entry (pricing-wise). We also believe that fundamental ideas that Whalemap is built on are key to worldwide adoption.
• • •
Mendenhall (@lamendenhall):
Is your platform suitable for crypto beginners? Or does it only limited to professional users?
Andy Bohutsky:
As mentioned before, we are strong believers in making our analytics accessible. We make our analytics easy to understand to less experienced users. We also have educational content explaining how our charts work and how you can use them to trade. There will be a lot more educational content coming out in the future as well.
• • •
WINNER (@burlson):
Staking is one of the strategies to attract long-term users. Does your project have a plan for staking?
Artem Lazarev:
We believe that a comprehensive analytics solution for blockchain data will be integral to a mature crypto economy. There are multiple examples of this happening in almost all industries. Therefore, tailoring tokenomics to account for the general success of the platform, whether it be usage wise, customer acquisition wise, or even ideological wise, is something that we had in mind while developing our tokenomics.
Our tokenomics will include staking as well burning, governance, redistribution rewards, liquidity mining programs as well as potentially an airdrop to our existing user base.
• • •
Joel Richie (@Joelrichie3 ):
Audits play an important role in enhancing the stability of any project. Do you have audit certificates? Or are you working on auditing your project to make it more secure and reliable?
Andy Bohutsky:
We intend to audit our project and are already working with auditing firms to ensure the security of our token. We believe that security is very important, and we are of the opinion that every project must be audited.
• • •
Twitter Questions
@cryptoboy237 — Partners play an important role in the marketing as well as the development of a project. Do you have any strategic partnerships that are backing your project?
Andy Bohutsky:
We have a strong cap table and a strong advisory board. You can see a list of our angel investors and VCs in a previously asked question.
We also get introduced to many projects on a daily basis, and we will be working with a number of them to form partnerships in the future.
• • •
@SLiomie — Hackers are very active in the market and almost every day we hear about another hack attack. Can you please give some information about the security system of Whalemap? How safe are the funds of the investors? Do you already have an audit?
Andy Bohutsky:
We take security very seriously, and we are working with auditing firms to make our contract as safe as possible. The smart contract will be audited, as we believe that every project owes this to its investors and community.
• • •
@SyminuL — What is the competitive advantage of your project? Can you point out the strengths of your project that other projects do not have to attract investors?
Andy Bohutsky:
We have already built whalemap.io, and in a short amount of time without funding, we were able to grow it organically with no marketing to where it is today (30k + users and 65k+ Twitter followers). This was only possible because of the following:
● Clear vision
● Strong team
● Good product with a realistic roadmap.
We are fundraising now for the next iteration of Whalemap, a better product, where we are overcoming a technological challenge to provide the fastest and most precise data on the market and make it accessible to an average user.
• • •
@hazelwoodsuzyi — Real-life adoption is one of the key elements that all blockchain projects aim for. This is a crucial factor for long-term development projects. So, do you have any plans to put it into practice?
Artem Lazarev:
Making blockchain analytics mainstream is one of our core ideas behind the project. Multiple problems currently exist within blockchain analytics that need to be addressed. That includes educational content that effectively conveys the actionability and precision of blockchain data. But also the engagement factor: making blockchain analytics engaging through real-time, no-delay insights while keeping the UI beautiful allows the actionability and the fundamental blockchain data to come to life.
• • •
@basiciggya — Does Whalemap have a plan to launch new products in the future? And how necessary is WMP for your project, what is its role and objective, and what are the benefits of holding it?
Artem Lazarev:
We have an extensive roadmap ahead of us and intend to release the next iteration of Whalemap’s product — pro.whalemap.io in the next year and the demo version released in Q1 of 2022. Pro Whalemap will have five key features that have been mentioned above.
$WMP is the backbone of the Whalemap ecosystem of utility. Staking WMP will yield $xWMP rewards and is anticipated to provide governance. In turn, the only way to get access to pro.whalemap features will be by using xWMP. There are burning and usage reward mechanisms that will be implemented to reflect the platform’s success in token terms.
• • •
Closing Thoughts
BTSE Moderator:
What should the community anticipate in the near future?
Artem Lazarev:
We are committed to contributing to the blockchain community by making this space even more beginner-friendly, exciting, fun, and useful. One of our primary goals is to shed light on data and insights not otherwise available while keeping it beautiful and simple. At its core, blockchain technology allows us to derive analytics, such as what we do at Whalemap. Such insights are not available for legacy markets, and we want to capitalize on that.
Some of our short-term plans include adding new charts, providing data block by block instead of hourly, and educational content. Active development of pro.whalemap is something we are focusing on as well. A demo should be released very soon.
• • •
Whalemap Social Media
🌐 Platform: https://whalemap.io
💡 TG Announcements: https://t.me/whalemap_announcements
📱 TG Chat: https://t.me/whalemap_chat
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/whale_map
📝 Medium: https://whale-map.medium.com/
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/whalemap
