Extensive Interview with the BRAVO Team

I had the privilege to do an extensive interview with the Bravo Team, they really took their time to answer in detail all the important features of BRAVO pay, this goes far beyond the usual interview and could be called an “All you need to know about BRAVO”

1) What is the background and expertise of the Bravo Team?

The BRAVO Team is led by innovators in software development, marketing, entrepreneurship, and blockchain engineers.
CEO, Maria Luna, MBA — Energetic serial entrepreneur with over 22 years of experience in marketing and managing consumer and healthcare brands at Nabisco, BMS, AbbVie and other top companies. Maria excels at lean operations.
COO, Hector Rodriguez, MD — A doctor, researcher, software and blockchain enthusiast who started his first technological experience in ANN for prediction of cancer recurrence. Innovative entrepreneur and crypto fan. First time bought ETH in late 2014. Hector brings strong “physician problem solving”, business skills and artificial intelligence expertise to build BRAVO as a disruptive force in financial technology.
CTO, Elmer Morales — Serial entrepreneur with 17+ years of experience building innovative software and leading high-performance engineering teams at companies like Microsoft, Accenture, and American Express.
Elmer leads BRAVO’s blockchain initiatives.
Lead Blockchain Architect, Paul Nguyen — Over 20+ years in software engineering leadership and CTO positions at companies like AT&T and Accenture. Led several mission-critical systems including PCI-compliant payment systems, electronic financial trading systems, and blockchain-based platforms. Deep expertise in Ethereum, Hyperledger, and A.I.
Lead Blockchain Engineer, Tanmay Shahane — 12+ years of experience in developing and leading cutting edge technologies and platform, worked on various domain including Healthcare, Finance, Non-for-Profits, and microeconomics. Blockchain like Ethereum, Hyperledger, Crypto platform engineering expertise
CFO, Robert (Bob) Lunny, MBA, CPA — Born and raised in Canada, Bob had always had an entrepreneurial spirit. After his MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Bob started a career in technology as CFO. He has successfully guided multiple companies to profitability and through rounds of venture capital, debt financing, and private equity investments. He brings to BRAVO strong emphasis on organic growth and lean
Product Manager, Steven Cornejo — Over 12 years of experience in business marketing, project management and product development with a passion to help entrepreneurs bring their visions to life. Steven has managed software development projects with tech companies worldwide and continues to manage the design, development, and delivery of all BRAVO products including blockchain, mobile and web. Lifelong musician with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Marketing plays guitar for the band OddHeart and is the Creative Director of his own digital media.
Director of Client Strategy, Adam Swanton — BRAVO bridges the gap between the hard-working people that depend on cash payments and tips for a living and the Millions of customers who no longer carry cash. Adam has over 15 years of experience in Business Development for Bio-Pharma and Technology and is extremely proud of being part of this grassroots movement of financial empowerment!
Community Manager, Vitaliy Marusenko — MSL -10+ years of Multimedia Experience in Education, Startups and Private Sector. Managed large teams in-app, web and marketing development. Vitaliy is a cryptocurrency investor and holder. He will help grow and support the BRAVO crypto community.
Visual Content Director, Travis Colbert — As an entrepreneur, he sustains connections with other major companies that work closely with Bravo. Bravo is shared with the world through his artistic visuals. His work has been displayed worldwide on major television networks such as MTV, Trace TV, amongst other. (All LinkedIn links available at bvo.trybravo.com)

ADVISORS
Dean Cannell, Blockchain Advisor: Dean is the Founder of CoinFabric.com, a full-service management consultancy for Blockchain & Blockchain-enabled companies — specializing in fundraising through ICOs. Dean has spent the last 13+ years helping traditional technology startups to go from idea to funding or acquisition. Dean’s experience includes business strategy, internal governance, technology & product positioning to enable growth.
Manpreet Singh, ICO Advisor: All aspects of merchant services and global payment processing. Specializing in global e-commerce, multi-currency payment processing, managed-risk payment processing, SEC reporting, start-ups, international trading, and commodities.
Michael Lees, Marketing Advisor: Experienced CMO/CEO with a proven track record of bringing software solutions to market and developing profitable business for startups and public companies. Michael is a specialist on all aspects of marketing strategy and execution, inside sales leadership, European and US software sales, business development/strategic alliances, VC fundraising, financial analysis, and planning as well as company formation.
Mital Makadia/Grellas Shah LLC Legal Advisors: Mital is a corporate and securities partner at Grellas Shah. She works with companies in a range of areas, including corporate formation, private securities offerings, and merger and acquisition transactions.
Daniel S. Friedberg, Fenwick & West, LLP, Legal Advisor ICO/Payments Systems: Daniel has more than twenty years of experience representing an expansive range of businesses in financial regulatory matters, including banking and non-banking companies. In this work, Dan counsels clients from entrepreneurs and startup companies to publicly traded companies in various industries including manufacturing, consumer products, and services, biotechnology, gaming, and software. Dan’s financial technology practice includes representation of companies that are money transmitters, digital currency issuers, and mobile payment providers. Dan also assists clients with issues involving lending matters, electronic payments, prepaid cards, branded credit cards, and virtual currencies.
Early Boykins III, ICO Advisor: Early is an ICO investor, advisor, mentor in the blockchain space. He has 6 years of crypto-currency experience; participating in the first ICO — Omni (formerly Mastercoin) in 2013. He is a Director at Andra Capital — a “tokenized” technology growth fund focused on late-stage investments, specifically in the Silicon Valley private technology sector. His role is guiding the ICO process for the tokenization of the fund and oversight of future investment in the blockchain space. Early advises other institutional funds, ICO projects, & security token exchanges.
Miikka Saloseutu, ICO Advisor: Miikka is a strategic marketing advisor he is also an ICO Bench ranked advisor. He is a founder of icotokennews.com and cryptocoinjudge.com websites. He is an experienced marketing professional with a demonstrated history of working in the internet industry with many challenging projects relating to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), venture capital investments, angel investments, E-commerce Optimization, Sales, Initial Coin Offerings, Crypto Currencies and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. He has his own internet marketing company Triplex Trading OU, which specialized in highly targeted SEO based affiliate marketing in the financial space and has grown exponentially in the last few years.
Lance Connolly, ICO Advisor: Lance is an early adopter of cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast. Due to the combination of his previous experience in both marketing strategy and web development, he has quickly progressed in this space as an ICO advisor on several projects. Lance has experience in delivering the full stack A-Z of services that assist in a successful campaign for tokenized fundraising.
(All LinkedIn links available at bvo.trybravo.com)

2) What’s the goal and vision of the project?

The goal of BRAVO PAY is to enable day-to-day crypto transactions for anyone and to anyone in the world while providing users with full control of their privacy on demand.

BRAVO will be offering an API for developers to use the Protocol to build applications of the future that require low fees, fast transactions and on-demand privacy in the transfer of value.

Our Vision: A scalable blockchain protocol for payments and other industries with a combination of speed and ease of use to help humans gain control of their data and privacy.

3) Tell us about The BRAVO protocol and what makes it different compared to other crypto projects?

BRAVO is building its own innovative hybrid blockchain technology that consists of a public and private blockchain. The public blockchain is based on the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm while BRAVO’s private, Incognito blockchain is based on an anonymizing Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The BRAVO blockchain integrates these two technologies together, which allows them to interoperate seamlessly, and gives the end-users control over transaction speed, privacy, and cost.
BRAVO will help accelerate the adoption of crypto payments at a global level by introducing three main factors to the ecosystem: ease of use (no longer for tech-savvy people), utility of crypto in our daily lives (for peer and micro-merchant payments), and trust (they are one of the very few teams in the world that actually have a product in the market and a blockchain platform developed before launching their token).

The following summarizes why BRAVO is a unique ICO:

• BRAVO has a solution developed with proven traction and validation with our Fiat version available since 2015 in the USA market. In 2019 BRAVO will release an update to pay with our cryptocurrency (BVO Token) allowing for instant, secure and anonymous payments worldwide
• BRAVO is built and runs on its own blockchain platform. BRAVO is beyond an app, we are a technology company with a great pipeline of products. BRAVO has been working on our crypto wallet since early last year (currently on private beta) and we are on track to launch our hybrid-blockchain based platform early 2019 that will allow enhanced privacy on payments on demand while being compliant with AML and KYC regulations.
• BRAVO has an established marketplace and is growing rapidly. BRAVO has a community of tens of thousands of active users in multiple verticals (gratuities, micro-merchant payments, friends settling a debt and peer to peer general payments).
• Our Team: The BVO team is led by innovators in software development, marketing, entrepreneurship, and blockchain engineers. All team members are identified and have public profiles with our careers lined up for anyone to scrutinize the level of experience and skills needed to continue to contribute to BRAVO’s success. We have demonstrated that we capable of building in a lean way a highly effective team to deliver results with limited resources and are now ready to fuel the engines of growth after a successful proof of concept, problem/solution fit, and product to market fit.

4) Please tell us about the BRAVOs blockchain and why did you choose to build your own instead of an existing one?

We looked at existing blockchain solutions in the market and learned about their strengths and weaknesses through a very thorough market research process that from day one was centered on the user experience. We realized that in order to deliver a solution that will help advance the adoption of cryptocurrency payments in our daily lives by mainstream users, we needed to deliver ease of use, utility and control on-demand of their data and privacy.

The BRAVO Blockchain API will support blockchain-specific operations including creating a BRAVO wallet for the cryptocurrency, transfer of funds between wallets, retrieving the balance of wallets, and an execution method to support smart contracts. Beyond this, BRAVO will offer an API and SDK to retailers and 3rd party apps to provide payment using the BRAVO token so other 3rd party companies with multi-asset wallets can add support for the BVO Token. Moreover, beyond payments, BRAVO is a technology company and BRAVO Pay is our first DApp. Our protocol has major implications and applicability to other industries where on-demand control of privacy is applicable and useful.

5) What stage are you now in terms of the roadmap? Please tell us your progress so far.

The following stages have been completed:
Q4 2013 IDEA • Private, instant and secure payments
Q4 2013 R&D • Customer discovery process
Q4 2014 BRAVO MVP • Initial release to prove the concept
Q3 2015 TC DISRUPT MVP RELEASE • Audience Choice Award Winner
Q3 2016 FIAT ALPHA • Released iOS and Android
Q1 2017 BLOCKCHAIN • Planning and design
Q2 2017 BLOCKCHAIN R&D • Blockchain proof of concept dev
Q4 2017 ABC’S SHARK TANK DEAL • Public fiat beta released
Q1 2018 VNEXT DEV • vNext & blockchain development continued /UI design for vNext
Q3 2018 BVO TOKEN • Private Sale Starts • Smart contract testing

Next stages in the Roadmap:
Q4 2018 BVO ICO • Private Sale Continues / Public Pre-Sale
Q4 2018 BVO ICO • Public Crowd Sale
Q4 2018 BVO CRYPTO • Wallet Initial Quality Testing • 1st betanet network available
Q1 2019 EXCHANGE LISTINGS • High volume exchange listing
Q1 2019 VNEXT • vNext code complete • First Micro-Merchant Tool release
Q3 2019 BVO-P • Public Preview • Crypto Wallet Production Release
Q1 2020 BVO CONSORTIUM • Initial partners network testing phase
Q2 2020 API FOR DEVS • QA Testing & Production Release

6) Very essential parts of the BRAVO blockchain are the Federated Byzantine Agreement and the Blockchain Consortium, can you describe them in simple terms?

About FBA: Understanding the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm requires understanding its predecessor, the traditional Byzantine agreement. The Byzantine agreement ensures consensus even if you have some misbehaving members in your network. This has two advantages. First, consensus can be fast and efficient. Second, trust is entirely decoupled from resource ownership. This means that a small vendor has as much power as a wealthy, large organization which helps keep them both honest. On the downside, all parties must agree on the exact list of participants. Generally, membership in Byzantine agreement systems is set by a central authority or closed negotiation. In practice, traditional non-federated Byzantine agreements require every node to be involved with every transaction to reach a quorum. This is akin to letting every city mayor in the state know you’re about to plant a tree in your yard and getting most of them to agree to it. This is unnecessary and a waste of everyone’s time and resources. In BRAVO’s FBA system, each node can decide whom to trust and be part of their decision-making group, which we are referring to as a quorum slice. Following the earlier example, you only have to let your neighbors know (your quorum slice) that you want to plant a tree in your yard and get them to agree to it. Furthermore, the system-wide agreement is reached when overlapping quorum slices communicate the transactions. To continue with the tree planting example, after you and your neighbors agree to plant the tree in your yard, you bring it up to your local city council, who in turn legitimizes the action for the rest of the city.

About the Consortium: BRAVO exists because of its users: everyday people that include your friends, neighbors, and people you pass on the street; and everyday merchants that include your taxi driver, your favorite band and your local grocer. With the incorporation of the blockchain, it is only natural for BRAVO to invite its users to participate in the operation of its network to ensure smooth, decentralized and secure operations while avoiding the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Collectively, users who materially participate in the operations of the BRAVO Blockchain will be known as the BRAVO Blockchain Consortium (BBC). Members of the Consortium are selected merchants who meet the criteria and that can provide computing resources through existing or new computing infrastructure to keep the BRAVO Blockchain running. For example, a restaurant that joins as a member can use the computers running their point-of-sale system (POS) to lend some of their computing power to the BRAVO Blockchain.

7) Building an ecosystem is a working progress and demands constant self-improvement, please explain the role of the BRAVO Foundation.

The BRAVO Foundation will exist to support BVO to become a global method of exchanging and storing value. It will coordinate the efforts of its members to create awareness at a local and global level of the unique technology behind BVO and the benefits of using it. The Foundation will promote events and best practices to help humans celebrate and empower each other.

8) How many developers are currently working on the BRAVO blockchain?

We have 4 Full stack plus 1 iOS and 1 Android for a total of 6.

9) Where do you think existing blockchain platforms are lacking and what can BRAVO do better?

Current blockchain platforms have done great contributions to the ecosystem, no doubt, but to advance the adoption of cryptocurrencies by mainstream, we are still facing some hurdles that include:
• Complexity in user experience
• Onboarding process
• Key management system
• Concerns for privacy and security of data and traceability
• Expensive transactions
• Speed

BRAVO’s hybrid blockchain technology that consists of a public and private blockchain that interoperate in the backend in a seamless way gives the end-users control over transaction speed, privacy, and cost. It also simplifies the experience of onboarding and eliminates from the UX the key management system.

10) Let us go wild, How do you see the future of Blockchain, and where do you see the BRAVO project in a few years?

We firmly believe that blockchain technology is here to stay. It is not only disrupting fintech, but also the transportation, real estate, contracts, and healthcare industries, just to name a few. BRAVO has the technology not only to compete and penetrate the cryptocurrency market with success given our killer application that brings ease of use, speed and low cost to help mainstream adoption but also to power the development of a multitude of other industries’ applications.

11) For token holders, how can they engage in the blockchain and be incentivized in the ecosystem?

We are in an internal review of our program that involves miners, consortium members, and the communities that we serve. For compliance reasons, announcements with details will be made at a later date. However, there is one aspect of our platform which is that it already has an established marketplace for Fiat version with active users already familiar with our ease of use and data privacy.
This will be sure to migrate existing users to the new app which will have fully enabled crypto payments solutions with the option of a fiat payments too. As a business that is focused on bringing crypto to the mass market, this is a recipe for success after having already captured a piece of the market and to soon introduce a solution of further enhanced features to entice them into the world of the blockchain.

12) Who are your competitors and what are your advantages or distinctive features?

In order to fully appreciate the features that BRAVO offers, one can look at other similar cryptocurrency projects to see how the blockchains match up.

A detailed comparison can be found in BRAVO’s whitepaper of the differences between BRAVO’s Blockchain application platform interface (API) and that of Ripple, ZCash, and Dash. These tokens, like BRAVO, are also highly focused on privacy and strive to offer quick transactions times.

Several fundamental features are explored in order to show how the BRAVO Protocol performs next to the three cryptocurrency companies.

Ease of use and consumer app: BRAVO’s first DApp (BRAVO Pay) introduces a user friendly experience that for the first time will allow users to have a similar experience as in our current Fiat version where you find the user either by proximity or via a username or a private 4 digit code (no long keys or long wallet addresses needed). It is a simple experience that will allow adoption at the mainstream level of cryptocurrency (no longer for the tech-savvy people). BRAVO pay app supports instant and private transactions. We eliminated the use of long keys to permit for a simple experience in the front-end thanks to our hybrid blockchain technology. The experience of paying with BVO is instant and allows privacy on demand. The only other company offering a mobile app payment tool for instant payments is Dash, but there are several important differences with BRAVO. With the Dash app, you can have an “instant send” which is supported by the Masternodes to confirm the transactions preventing the “double spent” problem, but their phone wallets cannot support private send.

Blockchain Protocol: With regard to the blockchain protocol, both Zcash and Dash are Proof-of-Work (POW) protocols, while XRP uses the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus protocol, such as BRAVO except that BRAVO is a Hybrid Blockchain that not only uses FBA but also an anonymizing Proof-of-Stake protocol.

Transactions per second (TPS): Both Zcash and Dash complete between 23–26 successful transactions per second on their public blockchain, while Zcash completes 6 transactions per second using its private blockchain. Ripple and BRAVO complete between 1500–1800 successful transactions per second, but unlike XRP, BRAVO has a private blockchain that completes nearly 30x the transactions per second than that of Zcash. BRAVO’s FBA block time is a short 3.5 seconds and PoS block time is 1 minute. This, compared to Bitcoin’s 10-minute block time, makes for exceptionally speedy transactions. BRAVO’s confirmation time is even more impressive. XRP user’s face 3.5 seconds before transactions are confirmed, Dash transactions are confirmed within 15 minutes and BRAVO’s FBA transactions take a further 3.5 seconds to be confirmed. That’s a maximum of 7 seconds for a full transaction to take place on the FBA blockchain.

Privacy and Compliance with KYC/AML: BRAVO has created a solution that allows users to utilize an option for an anonymous payment, but also the option for a lower fee public payment is they choose. Make no mistake, this process is for the those who prefer to keep their personal details undisclosed day-to-day public transactions. BRAVO creates a high priority in vetting their users and places a great sense of priority in remaining KYC/AML complaint at all times. Dash, Zcash, and XRP do not use KYC/AML for onboarding users who use their payments mechanism although Dash offers independent businesses to use the AML/KYC features if they choose.

Scalability: XRP is a strong competitor to BRAVO as it provides a scalable solution, unlike Dash and Zcash. However, after much analysis, it is clear that BRAVO dominates as a solution for a peer-to-peer, business-to-business and peer-to-business solution and targets more verticals and markets beyond that of just general payments such as settling bets, tipping, live and instant payments to streamers.

BRAVO is the first Hybrid Blockchain of its kind and the only between the four analyzed coins. It is also the only blockchain of the four that will be offering an API for developers to use the Protocol to build applications of the future that require low fees, fast transactions and on-demand anonymity in the transfer of value.

13) With multiple projects launching daily, it becomes difficult to stand out, what are the BRAVO marketing efforts pre and post ICO? Have you been officially introduced by accredited or reputable media sources? Or do you include any public figure in your team?

Our go to market approach since our launch of our MVP in 2015 has been building a grassroots movement of supporters that share our values and purpose of financially empowering everyone. This approach has paid off and we have seen the network effect of happy customers sharing BRAVO with their social networks, clients and fan base. We made partnerships with hundreds of companies and with influencers such as Refereum (a growth engine to reward active community members), Monte Pittman (Madonna’s guitarist), Alice Cooper’s Solid Rock, Retired NFL player and Champion Jimmy Wayne Kennedy, Chef Aaron May, R&B artist Corey Piper, Jared & The Mill, Fayuca Band and Fayuca Beer, Paz Cantina, Poetic Soul, Unplugged LA, Bullseye events (they produce all the VIP tailgate events around major US sports events such as SuperBowl, the Masters, Kentucky Derby, and many others), Ultimate Jam Nights, FlyNYON, multiple valet parking companies like Epic Valet, Integrity Valet, Desert Valet, hotels, transportation companies, nail salons, hair salons, massage therapists, Wichita Theater, Sip Coffee, and many other merchants. We also have developed partnerships with Non-For Profit organizations like the Ricky and Suzanne Barnes Foundation, Phoenix Children’s Hospital, One Vision One World, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of AZ, Kidz For Causes, the Shadows Foundation, and many more announcements to be made soon. These partners and celebrities do not advertise BRAVO’s ICO but rather from our early days have helped us bring attention to our solution to the need of instant and private micropayments in the market where previously cash was the only option.

BRAVO (besides TechCrunch and Shark Tank) has been featured in the national news in multiple reputable media, the following is just a short list of some, but a quick engine search should bring thousands of articles on BRAVO such as:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2985269/ios-apps/the-20-most-fascinating-ios-appsfrom-techcrunch-disrupt.html
https://asunow.asu.edu/20171105-entrepreneurship-asu-based-entrepreneurs-take-tripshark-tank

“Bravo has nothing but upside and if positioned, expanded and managed effectively, could stir up some great big changes in the world of money exchange…Not just with service professionals, but literally everyone”. Snapmonk

https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/forget-san-francisco-l-phoenix-next-tech-hot-spot221936165.html
http://aztechbeat.com/2015/09/tip-your-tour-guide-with-bravo-tipping-app-interviewwith-ceo-maria-rodriguez-luna-at-techcrunch-disrupt/

https://asunow.asu.edu/20171105-entrepreneurship-asu-based-entrepreneurs-take-tripshark-tank

http://app.criticalmention.com/app/#report/efec4703-da5e-4b41-bd65-da537b760856

https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/asu-students-plan-topresent-their-app-on-shark-tank-

http://www.telemundo.com/shows/2015/08/21/conoce-una-aplicacion-que-te-permiteenviar-dinero-o-pagar-propinas-directamente

On our ICO phase, we have been covered by reputable media outlets and ICO reviewers like the Arizona Republic, ASUNow, CCN, CoinSpeaker, CoinBeat, CoinJournal, ICO Bench, ICO Marks, TokenDesk, ICOHolder, ICOBazaar, TrackICO, and many others.

With the current raise, we will be able to implement our detailed tactical plan that has asl main pillars: Partnerships, Stimulating Word of Mouth and Advertising.

14) Thank you for your time and answers to the questions. Any last words for global blockchain enthusiasts?

BRAVO is beyond a technology company or a simple and private payment solution to bring cryptocurrency payments mainstream. BRAVO, as our name suggests, is a grassroots movement of humans celebrating and supporting each other. We have come this far with a very lean operation thanks to our tens of thousands of supporters and partners. Imagine what we will accomplish when we fuel the engines of growth!

Brought to you by tehMoonwalkeR

💠 Announcement channel: https://t.me/tehmoonwalkin
💠 Discussion channel: https://t.me/joinchat/FgncLw8SKo3w_nrlvmpeUA

some links to get to know the Bravo project:

https://twitter.com/Bravo_Pay
https://www.bvo.trybravo.com/
https://t.me/BRAVOPay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUmIU2NH2oY