First foresight
@araneobit
Hello! I’m Anna Berova. I write and edit - a lot. The wave of ICO crushed on me during summer 2017. Since fall 2017 I became a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the consulting agency ICOffice. In October last year, we became partners with AraneoBit - a global P2P-net for cross-border money transfer. Our collaboration started with a foresight. That was when I witnessed a miracle. Because when you see a birth, you become a part of a miracle. Even if it is a birth of the business.
There were no “Sapsan” tickets from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and all compartments were sold out. Friday. “Let’s fly”, I thought and bought a plane ticket. Take-off, landing. 6 p.m. Through the window of Aeroexpress, I see streets packed with cars. But I race past towards them. Towards the meeting with Moscow. And with the partners. In my mind, I’m getting ready for a boring business dinner with discussions and tortuous making up of the project logic, basis, publication topics…
I arrive at “Park Kultury” and find the house without a navigator - Ostozhenka, 37. I look at the front door, check the address and realize that I’m off by 30 houses. Need to go almost to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Luckily, it’s a straight way. And I go. Enjoying the freshness of empty Moscow. The capital is always beautiful, but it is especially good at dusk when a rare passers-by run with their eyes on the pavement. But the city, on the contrary, is looking straight into your eyes. It is lit, it lives and breathes to the fullest.
Here is the right house. I ring the buzzer. My business partner greets me. I recognize his voice - we only talked on the phone. He opens the door, I walk into the entrance hall and up the broad stairs.
A large flat, which obviously was first a shared apartment, is tailored to a residential property, excellent for Moscow standards. There are 10 men in the open space of the hall. Large pieces of paper are taped to the perfectly colored walls. These men think, write, talk, gesticulate. I’m given a chair. I start to listen and write down.
Foresight
What is happening here, is called foresight. This is a method of ideas development and future guessing based on trends. Ten serious men gathered together on Friday evening in the center of Moscow to predict the future and give a birth to the idea of an up-to-date project. I watch it and eventually, join the process. And you know what? Foresight is unbelievable: it is a magical feeling of involvement, and at the same time, excitement from intellectual work, possible and even impossible predictions. It is similar to the usual brainstorming, “What? Where? When?” game, mind map, meeting, lecture, friends meet up, sit-down by the fire and even a party.
Our foresight was led by AraneoBit adviser Rustam Davletbaev, a founder of the first ICO in Russia, a rare specialist in the virtual economy and a very interesting person. Rustam teaches the technology of foresight in Innopolis. From him, we have known that there are several basic moments in foresight organization: it is a project definition, trends analysis and future scenario.
Definition - first of all
In the beginning, we made a plan of our project and defined its structure. For example, we realized that we are looking for a slot service model, which will let people save money on transfers.
Then we decided what the project will be about, who is the subject and who is the object, why is this all necessary, will it be profitable and how.
We had the obvious target audience: labor migrants, who want to send money to their family, travelers in foreign countries, simple crypto enthusiasts. But there was also an unobvious one: business, state, god, spirit. Yes, yes, this is the charm of foresight for me - all ideas are expressed and written, the best are picked out at the last stage.
By 10 p.m. we started to think on the token mechanics, on how the principle of Arab hawala could be applied, will be the project a P2P-platform of cross-charge, barter or exchange service, or data search and distribution service.
We generated almost 20 ideas about what can be done on the basis of the project. Some variants were dropped out, others passed to the next level for more careful examination. For example, an idea of financial uber-system we dropped right away, it didn’t sound good. Whereas the idea of decentralization, exclusion of mediators, remained as a working assumption. Global cross-charge services were also taken to task because the team has decided that sometimes at the end of the 2030s the whole world will come to this.
We invented and wrote down slogans such as “who owns the information - rules the world” or “bots are the future”. We derived future models from the present. Sometimes they looked like bad Hollywood disaster movies, sometimes as ridiculously as “Monday starts in Saturday”, sometimes as a Disney movie and also Singapore futuristic Gardens by the Bay and Frank Herbert’s (and even early Sergey Lukyanenko’s) worlds.
Future trends
The next stage was to get the current trends out of our heads. To that end, Rustam gave us special cards, where we had written two current trends and explanations to them. Here are some trends, that we managed to formulate:
Increased government control in all spheres of economy, including digital and supranational;
End of cash and fiat money era;
Increased number of non-monetary systems, namely, systems with no-equivalent exchange;
Increased automation of processes - from cooking to space flights;
Reinforced Internet of Things: industry and home services will work on their own, a refrigerator will be able to buy products itself.
The next trend raised from the previous - the full transition into the matrix and the rise of machines.
We attached the cards with predictions, threats and possibilities to the papers on the wall, colored them and thus composed a map of trends of the 2020-30s. We got an illustrative SWOT-analysis.
The world in 10 years
At last, we turned to the question, what will be the world by the 2030s. It became clear that when we were young all of us read a lot of good and not so good fiction. Someone loved Jules Verne, someone - Sergey Lukyanenko and Zelazny, others preferred Herbert Wells, and someone only the Wachowski brothers, or better say, sisters.
We wanted to create the technology and format of the product. Rustam asked the question in the following way: if a technology is a sequence of actions, a format is a type of social interactions, what can be a single format of economic technology? And one more time, we started generating ideas on paper with our markers.
There are three basic scenarios of future in a generalized analysis of all known foresights - in relation to religion, from a scientific point of view and from a futuristic perspective. These are the following:
Cyberpunk or extended present;
This is what we have described and demonstrated in the matrix: transnational corporations order a scenario when a person sits behind the computer, receives all that he needs from the web right into his head and becomes food for the matrix.
Green creativity (or “Avatar” the movie);
Nowadays people are exploiting the world around us, but in future, there will be an urgent need to redefine the relations between people and nature and society.
All-out war;
Militaries order a scenario, in which the remaining humans fight for food...
That day we worked till 4 a.m. We wrote, created, talked, laughed, made coffee-breaks.
The second day of foresight started at 8 a.m.
What is the result?
All that we created in a little more than 24 hours, eventually became the AraneoBit project - a service of cross-border money transfers, a global p2p-net for transfers in tokens.
Of course, we have changed the initial idea greatly. We still constantly introduce adjustments into economic calculations, edit the white paper, speak at the conferences and upgrade our system, make it easier, more convenient, transparent and clear. We work every day.
But in my mind I still cherish one thought: I wish that this project, born in the misty autumn Moscow, will grow up and begin to work; that by spring when the pre-sale would start, the beautiful idea could pick up the first snowdrops.