Pryze, the automated sweepstakes protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain, plans to unveil its highly anticipated platform for companies to hold faster, cheaper, and more secure sweepstakes competitions. Pryze’s automated system will enable users to execute all the various processes involved in launching and managing sweepstakes using a single platform.
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Holding digital sweepstake competitions is an increasingly popular marketing strategy for companies, and has been shown to be highly effective in driving both conversions and brand awareness. According to Jupiter Research, over 80% of all Internet users have participated in an online sweepstakes or contest in the past year, and an additional 50% enter them once a month. However, companies encounter significant problems and challenges launching and managing their digital sweepstakes competitions using the tools available in the market today.
For one, most contest runners are forced to rely on a hodge-podge of various services, agencies, and platforms to get their sweepstakes off the ground, which drives up costs and dramatically reduces efficiency. What’s more, contest runners must put sweepstakes prize money in ESCROW, an extra step that uses resources and introduces friction. It is the responsibility of contest runners to prove they picked winners fairly, and that winners are properly paid out. These are complicated and time-consuming tasks with today’s tools.
The Pryze platform leverages blockchain technology to solve these problems, offering a one-stop-shop solution for the entire sweepstakes process. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, the most advanced manifestation of the technology, Pryze takes advantage of the key features of the platform such as transparency, immutability, security, scalability, and automation using smart contracts.
For instance, instead of manually custodying funds in and out of an ESCROW, with Pryze, sweepstakes runners can utilize distributed smart contracts to manage funds. This may enable prizes to be disbursed directly and automatically to winners without intervention, complicated processes, or intermediaries. The transaction is secured through encryption, and the data lives on a decentralized network, drastically reducing its vulnerability to hacking and manipulation. Finally, since the blockchain-based system is transparent to contest runners, Pryze users can easily monitor competitions, demonstrate winners are chosen fairly, prove funds are committed to the contest, and have been sent when awarded.
Supported by ConsenSys’ Token Foundry, which provides the technical expertise to enable decentralized applications and platforms to launch highly secure and well-designed tokens, enabling buyers to make use of Ethereum software. ConsenSys employs over 400 of the world’s top experts in entrepreneurship, finance, enterprise delivery, cryptography, Ethereum development, and game theoretic token design. The blockchain venture studio was founded by Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin, and is one of the largest and fastest growing companies globally in the blockchain space.
The Pryze team is led by seasoned entrepreneurs and award-winning content producers. Founder and CEO Peter Franklin attended Duke in 2010 where he obtained a masters in computational economics for his studies in mechanism design. After years spent developing underlying technology as a lead engineer at Microsoft and Zynga for projects ranging from Azure and Clusters to Farmville, he went on to founding 3 highly successful companies with world-class teams. A chance meeting with top angel Gil Penchina at a non-profit event lead the two to found Pryze.
Peter Franklin is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for game theory. Pryze is co-founded and advised by Gil Penchina, a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor. He is the former founder of Flight.vc, co-founder of Fastly, CEO of Wikia, and was a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay. He is a partner at Ridge Ventures and an active investor in 70+ companies over the last 12 years, including: PayPal, Brave, Ripple, Filecoin, Civic, Dollar Shave Club, LinkedIn, Indiegogo, Wealthfront, AngelList, and more. Gil has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg. Sherilynn Macale, Pryze’s Head of Marketing & PR, has a strong track record launching record-breaking campaigns, including the cult favorite Virgin Airlines safety dance video that won several Shorty awards. Macale also launched SKULLY, the fastest ever Indiegogo campaign to raise one million dollars, and is known for her work both in-house and in-agency creating viral multimedia content.
Also on the team is Jason McGuirk, CTO, who has shipped dozens of successful games, including managing the launch of Zynga’s largest titles. Jason rapidly rose to the role of distinguished engineer at Zynga and formerly started his own gaming company called JuiceBox Games. Senior Designer Kelly Battista has over 8 years of experience designing and shipping products, as well as leading product design for the last two years with Infuse, a development firm. Kelly has worked on a variety of consumer and b2b products, including founding Zenboxx. Juan Muñoz, Sr. Engineer, is a former Cisco veteran working on IEEE 802.1X features, Juan is an experienced Software Engineer with a tremendous amount of network and web apps experience. Annie Le, CX Manager at Pryze, is a customer-centric thinker who’s spent the last 6 years deeply immersed in consumer-facing technology and finance.
“The Pryze project is well positioned to take advantage of the features of the Ethereum platform, and promises to make the fast-growing sweepstakes business significantly more transparent, secure, and efficient. Identifying the best use cases and building high-quality products around them will ultimately drive adoption of decentralizing technologies, which is our mission at ConsenSys. For this reason, ConsenSys is proud to support Pryze and the strong team behind it,” said ConsenSys founder and Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin.
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About Pryze
Pryze is creating the first sweepstakes automation protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain. The application and website will make it easy for new and veteran sweepstakes creators to easily run and maintain sweepstakes by baking compliance, security, and scalability into the Pryze protocol, eliminating the need for costly administrative services and hosting platforms.
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About ConsenSys
ConsenSys is a venture production studio and custom software development consultancy building decentralized applications (DApps), enterprise solutions and developer tools for blockchain ecosystems, focused primarily on Ethereum. Powered by smart contracts and secured through encryption, our applications provide the benefits of transparency, auditability, and immutability that are unique to blockchain-based solutions. For more information please go to www.consensys.net.
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