GarageSaleIt - Ebay on the Blockchain

Hey everyone, I hope you had a wonderful weekend. I'm here for another week of AMA's bringing in some new projects and just kind of seeing what's out there. Again, there's not a ton happening in the crypto space right now. Just markets are down and, you know, sentiments are kind of down and just people are not really excited about a lot of new stuff. So it's been harder to find people who are actually building, actually creating some new stuff and creating new stuff that we're actually excited to see. So I'm happy to have David here from Garage Sale It. We'll be talking about that project here today. If you're in the audience, what we need from you guys, same as always, please hit the like button as we're going. Say hello, get some comments flowing. And question of the day, since we're kind of talking about, you know, eBay-ish type stuff today, I'm going to ask, what is your most, what's the most unique thing you've sold on eBay or what is something you've sold on eBay before? So go ahead and comment that. I just want to see, have you never sold anything on eBay? I think everyone's probably done it at least once, but let me know in the comments as we're going here. And if you have questions, of course, bring those up and we will get to those. So turning over to David, welcome to the channel today. David, can you start us off with a quick introduction of yourself, a little bit of your background, and then we'll dive into Garage Sale It. Thank you, James. Thank you for having us very much. It's great to be here. My background of the development of Garage Sale It has really come out of the COVID pandemic where a lot of retailers, a lot of people struggled with contact selling. And our co-founder, Sarah, loves a bargain hunt, done a lot of garage sales, yard sales across the journey. And part of it came through the charity retail stores in particular, which really had to shut it down and they lost the connection back in the community. So Garage Sale It, the project we've put together now very much came from, let's reconnect into that community. Let's take the humble garage sale, as we know it, take that online. But the concept wasn't just stopping on taking the humble garage sale online, it was then how do we really bring that into the modern age and introduce crypto currency at the same time. So that's where we started. My background is in in accounting in particular. I've worked across leading accounting firms at the time and more recently developed my own business around our own business, which started on my own home desk, and we took that international. So I love building businesses. I love the excitement of building businesses. I love the excitement of bringing people on for that ride at the same time. Hence, we're probably speaking to you today about garage sale and all that will entail. Awesome. Well, very excited to hear about it. We've got quite a few eBay users in the audience. That's what I figured. So, yeah, we got people that have sold miners. So there you go. They're already integrating blockchain with eBay a little bit. Collectible coins. I've been almost scammed by a Nigerian prince on eBay. So I think we've all been almost scammed by Nigerian princes everywhere. So a lot of Nigerian princes. So let's go ahead. Can you give us kind of an elevator pitch? If you're in an elevator with somebody, you have to tell them, we'll say the sixth floor. And they say, what is garage sale? What are you doing? What would you kind of tell them? Garage sale today is very much, we describe it as eBay and Bitcoin having a baby. So if you missed eBay and the growth of eBay, we've got a marketplace which takes all the good stuff from eBay. And if you've missed Bitcoin and the growth of Bitcoin, we've got a project which takes all the good stuff from Bitcoin and we put them together because we certainly recognize if you captured the strength of both of those business models, which are fantastic in their own rights, when you bring them together, you get such a more powerful impact. That's what we're doing. Combining eBay, principles of eBay, principles of Bitcoin. They're having a baby and that's garage sale with the GSI coin. That's my elevator. Okay. There you go. There you go. No, I love that. That's, that's a really good one. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what are the challenges or the problems that you currently see? I always like to ask projects, why the blockchain? Because, you know, I don't want people that are just building on the blockchain because, oh, it's new, it's fancy. That's what people like. So why the blockchain? What problems are there with traditional markets that you're looking to solve with the blockchain through this? Yeah, certainly the traditional markets. And when we talk traditional markets in this sense, we're very much talking some of the bigger marketplaces, which we're aware of. Each of them have their own inherent weaknesses. eBay, which we talk about has increasingly high commission rates. And it's quite staggering when you break the numbers down as to how much the commission rates are when you sell a single item. You've got something like a social media driven marketplace, we'll just be careful of words, I guess, a marketplace which was driven out of a social media background. That's increasingly open to potential scams, potential frauds and activity. And then you've got everything in between. They're probably the two main ones people think of. And the garage sale, it brings both all the good points together. So what we do is in terms of eliminating or trying to eliminate scams as best we can, we register buyers and sellers, which is an aspect of eBay, you need to be registered, registered buyer and sellers. We have an integrated payment portal, for example. And we then list our sellers on a map, geographic map to say, here's all our sellers in these locations, which takes away being lost in a social media stream. So where a social media platform has their marketplace, you might see a product and then it's gone and it's gone forever and you can never find it again. Ours is very much about giving visibility back to the sellers. Across all that, though, from a blockchain perspective is the marketplace thing can be developed as the community wants it to be developed. So we pick out the good points. Something as simple as we organise our marketplace on rooms of the house. So if you think of a room, if you think of holding a garage sale or a yard sale, clothes go in a pile, books go in a pile, toys go in a pile, and they're all spread out nicely. So when we've created the marketplace, our marketplace, garage sale, we list things by rooms of the house. So if you wanted to find books, then you check out the library and you browse the library. If you want to find clothes, you check out the main wardrobe in the main bedroom. So it's where logically these items are located is where you then browse. And then once you're in the item and you find the item, it stays there or the shop stays there. Each of the sellers have their little shop. But again, it's coming back to what the community, the broader community sort of wants from it, saying we have some really big corporate behemoths doing what they want to do and driving their profits. This is about how do we best bring the community back together and what they want from it, which brings in that blockchain aspect going, let's bring in the blockchain community aspect of the project. Okay, gotcha. And that was actually going to be my next question is, so are you kind of, are crypto people kind of the target market for this? Or are you going to try to bring in non-crypto people in or kind of a combination of the two? Or what's kind of the main strategy there? A combination of the two. The concept is eBay does something like 2 billion transactions a day. So if we do half of 1% of that traffic, there's 10 million transactions a day that can be crypto enabled. So suddenly you've got a project with massive global utility on the token. So it's a crypto project in terms of, yes, the crypto community will probably jump on board early because of the fact that it gives this massive token utility, but it's for everybody. So what we've also tried to do is bring others along for the ride. So our instructions are set up for the normal person to understand. Crypto, we all understand is a tricky and at times confusing project and process. It's about simplifying that. So we've got our development team work very much on making sure the user experience from both the marketplace perspective, but also the crypto perspective is easy. So it's smooth and easy in that respect. So it's both. We think it's a bit of a perfect business circle in terms of what we do. If you think of, we might touch on those in a minute. Perhaps if you ask me that question, I'll come back to the next question slide. I'll let you ask the question. Yeah, no, we definitely will ask you about that. So sometimes with marketplace or projects kind of like this, you end up with a chicken and the egg scenario where vendors don't want to come on because you don't have users and users don't want to come on because, oh, you don't have vendors. And it's hard to get both of those to hit at the same time. What's kind of your marketing plan to, you know, get enough users where vendors are interested in getting on here and vice versa? So the key difference from ourselves, I guess, from a lot of crypto projects is that we're not a concept. So the marketplace is built. The marketplace has been tested. We've done that for probably six to 12 months now. And we know what the buyers want. We know what the sellers want. And it is very much a chicken and egg. It's a good way of putting it. But we understand how to grow that already because we've been testing that. So we're launching in terms of expansion, not going, we're starting to put the whole thing together. We've learned the lessons to say how to grow the buyers, how to grow the sellers. What does that cost? What do they expect? How do we manage them best? So it becomes a live project. As of four hours ago, we were live extending. So you're the first one to speak there. So when you say you went live, what do you mean? What went live and what can the audience do right now? So the marketplace has been live, as I said, and been in test mode. So we haven't pushed the marketing of that significantly. We just wanted to test what worked and what didn't work. Part of that is because when we're live now, it's about prudence and spending money properly and expenditure. What's live as we speak now is we have the cryptocurrency component of the marketplace going live or has just gone live. In that sense, your community can, we've got a node network process where to be involved in the project, you can buy a node of the system and your viewers and understanders like the little computer servers there is in and you can buy a node. So this node buying has gone live four hours ago and that enables you to buy a node within the project, support the project and provide the underlying platform for the project in some respects. And in return for buying the node, you receive the GSI coin or GSI token, which is in the middle of your screen there. So it's the marketplace, the coin and the node owners. The reasons to buy, we come back to that eBay versus Bitcoin having a baby. It's the ground floor opportunity and it's a serious and exciting ground floor opportunity again to get involved early with a project which has global expansion plans and global utility. And what I'll come back to, I mentioned earlier in terms of where we're excited from a business perspective is that the node sales, when a buyer buys the node sale, we use that money to grow the marketplace. As the marketplace grows, so does the token utility across the marketplace. So people can start buying and selling now and transacting in GSI coin. As the utility of the coin grows, that by default will grow the value of the coin or improve the value or contribute towards the value of the coin improving. As the value of the coin improves, node owners get the coins. The coins are distributed by the master nodes there. So as the master, as the coins get distributed and increasing value, the master node itself becomes more valuable. Therefore people want the master node. By buying the master node, you then again enable the marketplace to be growing. So it's a beautiful circle of node sales, finance the development of the marketplace, which enhances the utility of the token, which by default enhances the value of the token, which defaultly enhances the value of the token. So that's a good example of how we're trying to bring the mainstream along, just what you can do with your coins. People aren't quite sure of this whole cryptocurrency thing. What can we do? So we've sort of tried to explain, well, these are the three or four basic things you can do with your cryptocurrency. There we go. 435 nodes sold already. And that's, that was live four hours ago, four and a half hours ago now. So that's where your community can get involved and buy a node. By buying the node, when they own a node, you receive daily coins. So the tokenomics are available in the white paper, but the tokenomics basically say we distribute half of all the coins daily go out through the nodes, half are kept by the company for maintenance and development of the company. The complete other half are shared equally amongst the node owners. Okay, very good. So $300 for nodes. And then cost of a master node, $300. Is there an early bird discount for master node purchases? The price is going to go up every so often, correct? Can you, you want to kind of explain how that works? Yeah. So what we've done to enable probably more people be involved, we sell the nodes in essence in batches of 200 is the best way of putting it. So as 200 nodes sell, the price increases by 100 US dollars. So in that scenario on the screen, there's 435 sold, 165 at that price before it goes up to the $400 mark. And then there's another batch sold at $400 and then they go to $500. So it rewards those who go, this is actually an awesome opportunity, I want to help support the project. And the earlier they decide that the better off it is in terms of the value they get for their money, let's call it that way. So they get in an earlier price. As it goes up, it's also designed to say, well, no one can really own the whole project because it gets probably price restricted for a lot of people. But if you want to support the project early, you get in early. And by default, you've got your money to spend, you'll get more nodes per that value. But it's in batches of 200. When we sell the batch of 200, the price goes up by another $100 at that point. Okay. So that's kind of a, that's an early bird discount. Basically you get in earlier, taking a bit more risk, but you get it for a bit cheaper. And then what was the initial node price? They started at 100 US dollars. So the batches of 100 have already sold, the batches of 200 have already sold. So into the batch of 300. So the very early birds are being rewarded and their coins and everything being distributed as we speak, but they started at $100. Gotcha. And sorry, audience, we couldn't get you in earlier, but this is the first video they've done since they launched. So we're in the third lowest price. So it'll only go up from here. Then Susan would like to know too, buying a node requires no interaction, no interaction administration, correct? Like you don't have to have any hardware knowledge or anything like that. No, no. So to buy the node there, again, we've tried to simplify it as much as possible. You need your normal wallet set up. But in terms of the ongoing, you're just buying the node at this point in time, there's no need for computer servers, no need for any hardware behind it. It's the license to operate and that will be that way for some time, just the license. Okay, gotcha. And then it's, is it USDC or on which chain? AVAX USDC. So we're using Avalanche, a very strong network, obviously, and USDC on the Avalanche network. Okay, very good. So 300 USDC right now, it's on AVAX. So fees will be very affordable, very cheap for fees. How do you talk to somebody, if somebody just says, oh, what kind of return can I expect from these? We understand it's a certain number of coins per day. How should somebody think about, oh, what will those coins be worth? How does somebody process through some of that to try and figure out if they're going to be making money from this? Yeah, look, investment's an interesting one, because we always like to say they're not an investment, it's a supporting network first and foremost. You've got to support the project. I like to remind people going, if you had asked Bitcoin the same question, when they listed point at point 0008 of a cent, they would have got the answer wrong. So the concept is, the return on investment is very much dependent upon everything else. We build businesses, this is what we do. And we're confident that we will build the business and the coin value comes that point in time. If it gets to $0.10, $1, Bitcoin went to these $30,000 now, Bitcoin's been extensively high. My argument's been, if Bitcoin can do that, there's nothing stopping someone else to do it if you've got the right modelling in place and the right business practices to support it. So I don't like saying this is what you can return, because it's a case of, if the coin gets to $0.50, it's very different to $1, it's very different to $2. And if you had five nodes at $300 there, that's a different strategy than having one node at $2,000 time. Eventually, though, I agree, it becomes a numbers game. And this is the beauty of how it all works in terms of the value tokenomics and the utility is that it becomes, I buy a node, I get this amount of coins, we know the coin's worth this amount, I get a payback of 12 months, two years, three years, whatever that might be at that point in time. So I don't like saying the return is this, I think the return, as I said, we think it's eBay and Bitcoin having a baby. Either of them would have done nicely a few years ago, invested either of them on day one and kept your coins available. Do you want to talk a little bit about how revenue is going to come in for GSI? Are you going to be doing fees on each sale that's going on? And do you want to talk about that? And then talk about how that's going to affect, are they going to be paying the fees in the GSI token, or how is that going to affect the GSI token? Yeah, certainly. So the business model, and this is important because when you get the utility through the token, you start moving away from a spec leave asset into a project. We have the project. So the project as it currently stands has three core aspects of, actually four core aspects of revenue generation, which is important. At the moment, we've tested garage sales or holding a garage sale, becoming a seller, and we've enabled that for free. In due course, we'll enable this to sell a garage sale for a nominal fee of might be $10 to hold a garage sale for 30 days. So you can sell X amount of products online for $10, as opposed to paying a percentage rate on sale, which is something like an eBay. So we offered that in terms of, instead of a slice of commission, it's a flat rate, it's very transparent, and you get X amount of products available for $10. So you got revenue item number one. What we then factored into was going, a key which is often missed is fundraising. Now to fundraise, everyone wants new fundraising ideas, and this is an idea for sporting clubs, an idea for schools, that sort of thing, where instead of throwing out the old cricket bat or your old baseball bat, your baseball glove, your basketball, whatever it may be, or your books from school, you can re-donate them back to your sporting club or your school, that sort of thing, and the school can sell them as a fundraiser. So now the school's holding a garage sale, let's What we also tap into there is that whole re-circular and the circular economy, which is becoming bigger and bigger in sustainability. So they're donating things back to their sporting club, donating things back to the school, the school sells it. So now you can have got a fundraising exercise, normal people holding a yard sale, and we're a fundraising yard sale, let's call it. Both revenue generating at the same time. The third aspect, which we've put a lot of work into in terms of the strategy side of things, is we mentioned earlier that one of the key foundations for developing the platform in the first place was to help charity retail outlets and thrift stores. They really struggled through COVID and a lot struggled to get online because the complexities of going online. So we're in discussions with some in terms of how we bring their charity stores online for a nominal fee, because they're charity stores, but how do we bring them online? So you've got your yard sales, your fundraising yard sales, now charity stores come on board. The beauty about charity stores is their buyers love second-hand products in the first place. So their charity stores come on board, they bring their existing buyers and promote quick traffic back to charity stores. Now you've got three aspects of revenue. What we'll introduce because not only but more so, is fourth, being that we've got a model which we'll roll out as well, which is very much we've got a buyer subscription model, let's say. So instead of a marketplace where anyone can buy anything and you can, you know, is this available, you hear nothing from them, we're charging an absolutely nominal fee for buyers which is two dollars for 12 months to say to be to be a member of the platform and to buy from the platform two dollars for 12 months, which is a first step in terms of discouraging just people abusing the platform, they've still just paid two dollars and then become a buying member of the platform. So four revenue, four streams of revenue, all thought throughout, all practiced, all tested to see what works and what doesn't work, which makes it a viable project by itself at that point in time. Okay, love, I love some revenue sources, so something a lot of projects are lacking, so love that. Let's get to some audience questions here as we're going, well then we'll go back over to the nodes and looks like people have some questions about that. But can a user engage GSI without any crypto involvement for old school non-crypto users? Yes, so the garage sale at marketplace is available for old school and new school. What will effectively, the longer term goal is to move the whole thing to the blockchain, but the technology is not there just yet, so we've got to be mindful of bringing the technology along or vice versa, but most certainly in the immediate old school is available. Okay, good answer. Let's see, what are the benefits of going the masternoding way rather than using an already existing blockchain? The masternode lets people be involved first and foremost, so that's the key criteria to say if people can be involved, we want people to be involved. The way we've always done business is bring people along with us as best we can. So if you went, if you just use a blockchain avalanche or whatever it may be, then you don't get the people involvement. The flip side is by the node process as well, the node owners get rewards, which is again, bringing them along, giving them the opportunity to receive something back for their reward. And also we can use those node sale monies to capitalise the marketplace, to grow the marketplace at scale effectively. That's the key requirement. So bringing people along and providing the fast development of the fast development of the marketplace. Okay, gotcha. And is it possible to sell your node after you get it? What we've done to protect the value of the nodes is to lock them until they're all sold. So once they're all sold, they'll turn in, then you're able to sell them. We don't want people saying that they buy them at $300 and then they sell them next week for $320 basically. So to protect the value of those nodes going forward, we lock them until they're all sold. We're confident they'll all sell. And then once they're all sold, most certainly it's open market. And again, the value in them becomes the distribution of coin and the coin now has a value. So there's a value to that node pretty easily calculated. Okay, gotcha. No, that makes sense. Yeah. Cause it'd be hard to keep selling them if there was a marketplace open to get them for cheaper. No way to pay with credit cards. So there's probably not a way to do it with a credit card directly. But again, if you have MetaMask now, let's see if you can see my screen here, but MetaMask now has a buy that you can hook up to a Fiat on-ramp and it's actually fairly easy soon soon. So if you've never bought crypto through MetaMask, you can do that pretty easily. And then it wouldn't be too much work then to mint the node once you're able to just get 300 USDC. And you don't even need an account now on Binance or anything like that. You can buy straight from MetaMask. So it's getting easier as time goes on. It's getting easier for sure. Let's see. Funny Turo says, sorry, not understanding why this is called a master node sounds more like an investment NFT. Are the node operators actually setting up computer resources for validating transactions? They don't have to at this point in time. We've called them master nodes or foundation nodes. I swapped the words around slightly in terms of what they're for. In due course, if the technology gets to where we think it will and we can move the whole marketplace to the node network, we will do so. At the moment, the technology is not there. So it's the distribution of the coins coming through them. The terminology probably flips around a little bit. I swap between token and coin, which I know is probably not appropriate, but I swap between token and coin. So no, at the moment, not necessarily. If the technology gets to where we think it will be, there might be a requirement to run a little laptop, a little virtual private server. We don't expect that basically to cost at all for anyone. Okay, gotcha. Let's see. How many master nodes in total can be sold? We've got 100,000 for sale. Again, bringing people along, what we've done is factories of 200, what's 100,000 globally, there's the other side of things. Where we sit comfortable with that is that we start extending and scaling the marketplace next week into America, UK, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and Australia. So we start with five. The white paper sets out plans for Spain and Germany over the next six months. The development of that interface is taking place as we speak. And then we basically have a rolling program of two countries every six to 12 months thereafter. So we're comfortable when you go global, like we're going, 100,000 is not too many at all. Okay, gotcha. And then of course, people always want to know about timelines on things. When is the most popular question in crypto? So when do you kind of expect, again, we're not going to hold you to this, I understand how development goes and a lot of things in the pieces. But when do you kind of expect for the service to launch? When do you kind of expect payouts to start on the nodes? And what's kind of the timetable we're looking at in some of these things? Well, look, we've come back to the marketplace is live. So that's in place. In terms of the crypto side of things, we'll start listing that over the next week or two is our goal to get the value in the token increasingly quickly. And you mentioned earlier, it was a good comment that everything's a bit flat and a bit quiet in the marketplace. This is a project that stands aside from all that. So we're happy going to the market now, because we know where we think the markets in that second two thirds of the bull run, we're in place for the bull run, basically. So if we hold for six months, 12 months ago, let's catch the bull run, we're going to miss it, we'll miss some of it. So our approach was the project we believe stacks up, we don't need the bull run to make it attractive. We need that it's an attractive project at one time. We're going now when it's a bit quiet, there's not much on the market. But also we're ready for when that bull run kicks in. So the rest of the plans are in the white paper in terms of rolling out the marketplace in particular, because again, they work together, the marketplace is driving the coin which drives the marketplace type thing. So as I mentioned, there's three or four countries are all out the next week or two, we start rolling out into and then we roll out across countries thereafter. Okay, gotcha. Nope, that makes sense. Yeah, if you wait for the bull market, then a lot of times you miss it, you know, it's like, oh, it's here. Oh, no, quick, everybody quick, pick this launch and get the nodes going. And that's right. It's just we want people involved early so that they can experience that whole growth, not the end of the end of the run, they get the whole growth out of the run with a good project. Yeah. Okay, very good. Nope, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, cool. Well, do you anything else that you want to share about the project or things you didn't don't feel we talked enough about? Now, look, we think it's tremendously unique in its aspects. And the background is very much taking all the good points from from those platforms we've spoken about and tried to eliminate the bad points or the pain points from those platforms. We think it's a tremendous opportunity for those who want to be involved early. And we think it's a tremendous opportunity full stop. The node system is very much to enable people to do that with us and come along for the ride with us, which is great. That's where we sit. And I think we sum it up by saying eBay and Bitcoin having a baby I think is really spot on. So I think that's a really good summation of what we believe the project to be and where we're at and the white paper in particular. If there's more questions or more information, the white paper is quite detailed, but an easy read at the same time. It's not a technical document. It's a relatively simple read, which explains what you can do with your tokens, how the network works, what the marketplace is, the market opportunities themselves. It talks about the circular economy and it talks about Bitcoin and all that sort of stuff. It's a really good read to give a really good idea of the project, which would be well worth having a browse through first. OK, very good. And again, I'm a marketing guy. So love my calls to action. So what would you say? What do you want from the people who are watching this, whether you're watching it live or replay? What is it that you would like from people? What can they do? The call to action, look through the white paper, see if it makes sense logically, see if it makes sense to what you want to do going forward. If you believe it's an opportunity, hit the how to buy button, which will take you through to the purchase page and purchase yourself a node and come along for the ride with the rest of us. Fantastic. OK, very good. Yeah. And of course, hit like on the video, you know, maybe go go go join the garage sale at community. Start kind of building those up again. Those are all kind of free things that you can do. But yeah, have a look at the white paper, which, again, I'll put these links. They'll be in the description and also in the comments here. Check out the white paper if you want to get involved financially. You know, the nodes are the cheapest that they're going to be right now. So you can get and you know, we saw that kind of the similar progressive node price with playable, which is actually how I was introduced to David was through playable. But we saw, you know, some of those first nodes were very cheap. And now it's, you know, forty five hundred dollars to get a node on playable. So you might see kind of that similar type thing. So, yeah, it'll be cool to see. And hopefully we can have you back on, David, to kind of do an update maybe in a month or two and kind of see how things are rolling. Yep. Wonderful. Be great. Look forward to it, James. Awesome. Well, hey, audience, you guys are amazing. I hope you have a great week. I hope your Monday is starting out well. David, thank you so much for hopping on. And we look forward to kind of growing together with you. So we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, James. Thanks, everybody. Take care, everybody. Have a great rest.