After interviewing J.D. Seraphine, the founder and CEO, as well as Reggie Tan, the CMO, we sat down with Ray Parker, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Raiinmaker to talk about some of the things that only someone in charge of building the Raiinmaker Network can tell us.
Interviewer: Hi Ray, nice to meet you. I heard a lot of good things about you, and I’ve been told that you’ll be able to take us a bit behind the scenes and reveal some of the processes that go into building an ambitious platform like Raiinmaker. But first, please tell us a little bit about you and your history with Raiinmaker.
Ray: Hey, nice to meet you. Yes, let’s get into it. My experience with Raiinmaker… I’ve been with the company literally ever since it started. I was, long story short, one of the very first employees. I originally met JD and Ben through Joe, who is our other co-founder.
A long time ago, back in 2016–2017, coming up 7–8 years ago, I was a technical program manager at Dragonchain, and long story short, I met JD and Ben there, and we stayed connected. After I left Dragonchain I met JD and Ben again and they said, hey, you know, we’re trying to kick off this new project and we’d like you to come on to help run the development team. So, long story short, I’ve been here for a little while now, you know, essentially from the start of perspective is a very, very long time.
Interviewer: How do you go about building something as ambitious and complex as Raiinmaker Network?
Ray: It really comes down to breaking things down into smaller components and pieces. You know, coming from the business perspective, I understand what it is and what we’re trying to achieve. But basically, I go through and divide it out, basically by component, and subcomponent, and work with the development team to make it happen. I work closely with our VP of Engineering, Eric, who worked at Google and Joe Roets, who’s our CTO, basically to plan out how we’re going to get these done and making sure I have all the specifics lined out from the leadership team, from JD and everyone else and basically we make things happen through lots of diligent work.
We’ve come a very long way since the time we were very much focused on the SocialFi aspect and then pivoted over to the AI environment. So how we can utilize our token and our infrastructure had to change, and I believe we’ve transformed it into the next big thing.
Interviewer: Rainmaker sits on the intersection of blockchain and AI. I’m curious, how do these technologies actually connect behind the scenes, in a technical aspect? Do they even, or do they work in parallel to each other?
Ray: So essentially, how the blockchain interface works, especially on the Rainmaker app, is very seamless. So, as you’re interfacing and moving through the application, adding certain types of factors and verifications, essentially, you’re signing all these actions on the blockchain. A variety of actions are being received by the Network, and they’re all essentially logged, analyzed, and understood. Some of these actions are you training the AI model or generating AI art, so in that way, they are connected. Any interaction with the AI is stored on the blockchain, and this is important for us to know so we can create an economy around that process of training the AI.
So obviously, we have the lightweight NBL validators and other components that are working behind the scenes as well, but basically, what we tried to do when we were creating this was to try to figure out the best way to integrate a web2 user experience into the web3 environment because it’s our core design philosophy and product philosophy that Raiinmaker can be used by anyone, regardless of technical ability.
A web3 product should work just as intuitively as a web2 product works these days, right?
You don’t need to understand or even see the underlying components. Because of all these different aspects, your identity, your behavior, AI, the economic features of blockchain, and distributed ledgers, all these different components are basically being morphed into one complex but well-engineered product that works intuitively for everyone.
And we strategically thought out each of these different components in order to ensure that we are creating a new utility. Blockchain is one of the only ways that you can handle a lot of these different components together in a scalable and decentralized manner.
Interviewer: Was it a big challenge when you were transitioning from SocialFi to AI? Maybe transitioning isn’t the right word, since you have kept a lot of the SocialFi aspect in your Raiinmaker App. How did that all shape up?
Ray: It’s the gamified aspect. What are you going to offer to keep the community incentivized, engaged, and having fun on your platform? That’s the SocialFi part.
There’s a reason inside the madness, I guess is what I’m saying. The way we’ve architected Raiinmaker is really a combination of various concepts. The AI components, the behavior, SocialFi, decentralized digital identity, right? However complex it sounds, it really makes sense, and from the outside it looks very smooth.
Interviewer: So, the Raiinmaker App is the first app on the Raiinmaker Network. JD told me in his interview about some partnerships that have already been secured, as well as that that your protocol is compatible with both Bitcoin and EVM ecosystems and that you are essentially trying to be compatible with the whole web3 ecosystem. So how do you achieve that and how would you characterize your network?
Is it an L1, L2?
Ray: I know what JD would say. He’d probably say something more of an L0.
The way that I like to think about it is, yes, it is its own blockchain, but the future is interoperable, right?
Everyone at some point is going to have to bridge to one another and be compatible, right? That’s the only way we can scale quickly.
We manage a variety of different third-party applications and ecosystems. We tie in with a couple of different service providers and we also host our own infrastructure as well. We’re basically interoperable with a variety of other chains as users come back and transfer assets to and from.
The token is on BASE, and we chose BASE for a variety of different reasons. We want to keep it sustainable and addressable, and obviously, in the long term, we believe interoperability is key. Regulation also plays a big role in this decision.
Interviewer: You mentioned the product-market fit earlier and how you’re working around that.
How did you recognize the gap in the markets that you’re trying to fill? Do you have any competition already, and how do you plan to stand out?
Ray: Yeah, so really, the product market fit came from a variety of different sources, doing the market research, but mostly talking to people, understanding what the future is and how we can contribute. Basically, we wanted to address the weak points in centralized AI. That was the gap where we can fit in and help people get the most out of their involvement in shaping the AI models of the future. We’ve been conducting user interviews and understanding what’s actually happening from their perspective and that’s how we kind of pivoted into that niche.
On the topic of the current competition, I think that we really have a lot of competitive advantage over a variety of other types of AI labeling apps of tools. I know there’s a variety on Solana and Polygon, and there’s also non-traditional web2 companies that are also very much focused in on this such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and a variety of other types of competitors are very much in the same space but not necessarily competing in the web3 space.
I think one of our competitive advantages is the time and effort we’ve put into all the mechanisms for user retention, engagement, and reward, as well as a lot of work we’ve put into the social aspect of our platform.
“How do we incentivize user behavior? How do we track the identity? How do we reward them appropriately? And how do we pull the incentives, behavior, identity, and then all that into one mix and make it so it’s all scalable, sustainable, and the user is feeling empowered and really owns a component of that.”
And I think that’s where we have probably the strongest play and where we’re most competitively advantageous.
Interviewer: Finally, what upcoming features, updates for the Rainmaker App, or some new projects on the Raiinmaker blockchain, can we expect?
Ray: A couple of interesting things coming down the pipeline. Gamification, as we talked about, and what you alluded to around how we incentivize our users to connect within the ecosystem, that will be rolling out here soon.
We’ve also been in talks with the community as well about being able to withdraw coin. So at some point Raiinmaker users will be able to transition their tokens over to coin.ai. And then from there be able to withdraw once the TGE happens.
We’re also rolling out the second phase of our AI, training AI models and how we start validation as well.
That’s another feature that’s a little bit further down the line.
Obviously, like I’ve mentioned, it’s a balancing act between what the community wants and longevity of the project and how we can keep things alive and going. I think that’s really what it comes down to and why we’ve been delaying the TGE for such a long time is because we are solely focused on making sure that everything is offering the best value that we can provide for our community and stakeholders.