The future of making money online

ReCheck, one of the pioneers in blockchain technology, has always been at the forefront of developing new solutions in business. 'And that's been quite difficult at times,' says Emilyan Enev, CEO of the tech company: 'When you're too early, it's very difficult to convince people that you're doing valuable work, because their natural reaction is rejection.'

It is perhaps ReCheck's biggest challenge: the slow adaptation of the business and enterprise sector to blockchain, mainly because of mistrust and associations with crypto-currency price fluctuations. 'In the mindset of traditional business, it's all about creating their own systems, their own software and their own databases. This is how companies try to maintain complete control.' The idea behind this is that you can only create value for your business by extracting volume from another party: a so-called "zero-sum mentality."

The very philosophy behind blockchain calls for collaboration and decentralization (see box at the bottom of this article). Emilyan: "For blockchain, bringing multiple parties together is essential. It's a way to create value together and unlock synergies so that all partners involved can win. He adds, "Not much different from the Brightlands Ecosystem. In addition to opportunities for synergy, Emilyan and his co-founder at Brightlands also find a nice working environment and the connections to participate in major European Interreg projects and hackathons. They also hope to use their knowledge to move other Brightlands partners forward, and have previously done so with workshops on blockchain.

ReCheck creates infrastructure for companies that want to take advantage of blockchain without completely changing the way they work. Their applications add an extra layer of security to existing business models. Says Emilyan, "This is our sweet-spot: implementing blockchain, especially in environments where trust and security are paramount, dramatically reducing online scams and cybersecurity threats. For many companies, blockchain is and has been a distant concept, but this is not the case for ReCheck. The tech company helps entrepreneurs integrate blockchain into their processes by connecting regular business data to blockchain. Companies can integrate just one component, link their systems and in this way add transparency, security and new services.

Currently, ReCheck is about to launch their new product DataPond. DataPond (www.datapond.ai) combines lessons from blockchain with advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The main question ReCheck is trying to answer with this is: how will you make money as an Internet company in an AI Web environment? Emilyan: "In the near future, instead of searching multiple pages on Google, all you have to do is type a question into the chatbot and all the information will come to you. That means websites that use advertising as a revenue source will lose their visitors, and with them, their way of making money.'

With DataPond, companies can securely register their data on the blockchain and make it available to AI. This allows them to accurately track and monetize the use of their content in the results of AI tools. Blockchain is used to account for each dataset used by AI and pay out rewards to authors and data providers. An added benefit is that for customers, the source of the information is retrievable, which adds transparency to chatbot results. "And there's more," says Emilyan: "With this new technology, we have the ability to tap into non-indexed data. This is data that is not accessible through search engines like Google, which is roughly 95 percent of the Internet.'