The Decentralized economy based on permissionless protocols is swiftly growing as more people in the world embrace the idea of P2P ecosystems.

It is no wonder the DeFi market has tripled within the past two months to hit a total locked value (TVL) of $3.7 billion according to DeFi Pulse. While skeptics have speculated a bubble, innovators are working round the clock to see to it that more opportunities emerge from decentralization.

Initially, the prevalent idea was Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in terms of financial services like lending and borrowing markets. This has, however, evolved over time as more industries tap into the potential of decentralized protocols.

One niche that has particularly shown to be compatible with the P2P ecosystem is the content creation space which is today dominated by centralized networks run by big Tech. That said, a new decentralized protocol dubbed WOM Protocol is seeking to change modern-day marketing as we know it.

WOM Protocol Pte. Ltd. which is behind the creation of an ad-free marketing environment has in fact partnered with Chainlink in an effort to decentralize the price feeds of its native token.

Being an area with so much potential, I have been following it keenly and decided to have an interview with WOM Protocol CEO, Melanie Mohr. She gave detailed insights on the DeFi space as well as the potential in MarTech which is now a blockchain prospect.

Andrey Sergeenkov:Decentralized protocols are starting to shape a new economy; can you give us some insights as to what demand factors are pushing the space to grow significantly?

Melanie Mohr** :** As with other sectors where decentralization is getting traction, the advertising and marketing area is rife with misaligned interests.

Agents and platforms are incentivized to extract as much revenue as possible from brands and advertisers, regardless of true engagement with real users. Users are annoyed by the onslaught of ads.

Advertisers are confused and disappointed at the effectiveness of the ads, and the inability to do true correlation. Platforms do a minimal amount of fraud prevention, to placate advertisers while still keeping large revenue from them.

Decentralized protocols are an attempt to disintermediate some of the misaligned agencies while providing true shared interests and income for users, platforms, merchants, and brands.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **What is WOM Protocol’s role as an upcoming contributor to the shared or protocol economy?

**Melanie Mohr : **The WOM Protocol is designed precisely to create and enable this proper interest alignment, to share rewards and advertising revenue to those directly involved. We very intentionally refrained from adding any component of revenue for ourselves, to maintain a proper interest alignment, and to pave the way for eventual full decentralization.

The WOM Protocol scales an entire ecosystem to enable monetization of word-of-mouth content for brands, creators, and publishers. Word-of-mouth content is known as authentic recommendations from real product fans.

Numerous studies across decades prove this form of brand advocacy is far more effective and has a higher conversion than any currently-available marketing channel because the messages come from peers and not the companies.

Brands and marketers do not have an effective and scalable way to properly identify, incentivize, and measure trusted peer-to-peer recommendations. Even worse, methods such as affiliate and influencer marketing compromise the trustworthiness of content and its creators.

The WOM Protocol, together with the WOM Token, provides a way to reward creators without compromising consumer trust in the content and its creators. We are confident that it will become a viable marketing channel for brands, targeting the $335 billion annual digital marketing spend, and the main revenue stream for content platforms.

Our blockchain-leveraging MarTech solution is currently being tested with more than 900 brands–including Adidas - and platforms with a network of hundreds of thousands of creators and authenticators.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **The Decentralized economy has come to be defined by digital tokens, does WOM protocol have its own native token and how is its value accounted for?

**Melanie Mohr : **We have the WOM token, an Ethereum ERC-20 token, which is traded on a number of top tier exchanges. Within the WOM protocol system, the token is used as a value transfer between users, merchants, brand managers, platforms, and financial investors.

The “users” include both those who create content, those who view and help validate the content, and the platforms who are delivering the interface for engagement, in this case, any digital platform from social networks to e-commerce.

All have a role to play in creating viable and trusted communities, which significantly improves the engagement and reliability of advertising and marketing for brands, merchants, and platforms.

In general, brands and any kind of advertiser purchase WOM and use them to reward content creators, platforms, and content authenticators. They use the WOM campaign manager to access content and interact with the WOM ecosystem of digital platforms that deliver the content to the right audiences.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **Being still a young market, what do you think can be done to improve the pricing ecosystem of digital assets to prevent manipulation and market arbitrage?

**Melanie Mohr : **We can only view this from WOM’s own perspective. We use a private (but publicly auditable) blockchain for transactions within the WOM ecosystem. This allows us to do transactions with immediate finality and zero transaction cost something which is not possible on public chains.

We also provide a “WOM Crypto Bridge” so that any participant may convert WOM to/from the internal chain from/to public ERC-20 WOM at any time.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **On that note, does your recent partnership with Chainlink to integrate price oracles reinforce on a decentralization pricing feed approach?

**Melanie Mohr : **Our intention is to remove ourselves from any type of price setting or market-making. ChainLink is a trusted third party that aggregates information about the WOM trading prices from exchanges where WOM is bought and sold by anyone and provides the price information as an oracle, which we reflect users via our app.

We believe that it is critically important that we use transparent, trusted sources of information on the road to greater decentralization.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **The DeFi boom has seen leading exchanges like Binance list Maker and DAO tokens, what are your future plans to have WOM tokens listed by such exchanges?

**Melanie Mohr : **We certainly expect that as it gains momentum, WOM will be listed on most of the larger ethical exchanges.

**Andrey Sergeenkov: **Ethereum appears to have taken the lead in terms of DApp development, do you think WOM Protocol might grow that big as well?

**Melanie Mohr : **We are not a platform of any sort, and we are not a public blockchain, so we have nothing to say about DApp development. Of course, as a protocol, we are open to engagement by any DApp, from any platform. We are building the first DApps to deliver an interface to engage in the WOM ecosystem, but this can be done by anyone else. The WOM content authenticator is already live on iOS and Android. The very special content rating system is for sure the “soul” of the WOM project.

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