We had the pleasure of getting to sit down and talk with Denim and DateCoin CEO, Nikita Anufriev, in an exclusive CryptoCurrencyNews.com ‘CCN’ interview.

DateCoin is backed by the Russian dating app, Denim, that holds 700K+ members currently. Anufriev explains the need for the ICO and expansion below.

What is your background? Introduce yourself.

My name is Nikita Anufriev. I am graduate of the Automation and Informatics faculty of the Moscow State Mining University, graduated from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys.

I’ve been doing IT business for 8+ years. For that time I’ve successfully launched and managed several projects, including international online service Denim (one of the market leaders of online dating in Russia), Yasno.mobi Ltd (design and development of websites) and served as financial consultant for some ICOs.

How did you come up with the idea of Denim? Any specific instance or did you just find a need in the market?

(The) Digital paradigm (space) has changed our lives forever, especially being implied (when it comes) to private life and finding a partner. When performing targeted market research, this trend becomes obvious. Some experts expect the total volume of the online dating market will amount to $6 billion by the year 2019.

Thus, it is inevitable that numerous dating services will become highly specific in order to attract a niche target audience.

In 2015 we successfully launched an IT project designed for matching wealthy men and spectacular (beautiful) women. This approach had been in high demand and resulted in a fast-growing audience (700K+ as of now). Today, Denim is the market leader in online dating in Russia with high ARPU.

Wow! Are all 700k users currently active?

Absolutely. Those users are active, meaning all of them signed up, verified an account and are regularly using the app.

How do you use Artificial Intelligence to match couples up? What’s the difference between AI and someone taking a quiz that matches them in other dating apps?

What is the role of artificial intelligence in matching partners? What is so special about this technology compared to others commonly used ones (for instance, setting multiple specific parameters)?

For the majority of dating services, we believe that the key problem is the inability to consider all users’ preferences (to be represented) regarding an ideal partner. Moreover, the user himself is often not sure what he or she wants. Standard parameters (such as looks) are always considered, but others, such as emotions remain almost untuned. For instance, we may base our preferences on a person’s sense of humor, talking manners or even smile. Artificial intelligence can consider all these hidden preferences.

NowADAys, face recognition has advanced significantly being able to detect person mood by a photo. Blended with data clustering, it will help neural networks to solve a multi-parameter problem of finding the best matching partner from millions of users worldwide, thus providing the best-ever dating experience.

Artificial intelligence builds an ideal partner layer-by-layer. Let me give you an example. Many men dream of girls of a certain type, or of girls, similar to their friends, with whom they for some reasons failed to build a relationship. Neural networks give an opportunity to find the only one that completely satisfies the user’s requirements among all of the girls signed up for the service. The criteria may include facial images and body parameters (bra size, waist circumference), lips and nose shape, body proportions, and much more (up to the voice timbre). He does not need to set a lot of filters, scroll down endless profiles. All that is required is to upload a photo of an ideal woman and let artificial intelligence pick up the best matching girl.

Being a self-learning ecosystem, the service will also take into account prior user activity, including profiles viewed, chats and calls history (using in-app anonymous calls), and so on …

Based on the knowledge gained, artificial intelligence will provide customized recommendations and pool of the best-matching partners. If the user preferences change or he wants a completely new experience, the standard filters can always be applied, for the search engine to quickly tune to the updated expectations.

Employing neural networks for dating is closely related to big data processing. It is not a secret,  that big search engines have already gathered all the information regarding users preferences, including favorite music, politics and other interests. Being analyzed, this data is used for targeted ads, music and news suggestions, etc. Moreover, big data is quite useful in traffic analysis for hacker attacks prevention and optimization of business processes.

With syntactic and semantic analysis of dialogs, special algorithms can identify users goals, preferences and characters. As a result, all users will be split into groups based on goals and interests and matched with the soulmates, with all the frauds filtered. Artificial intelligence will further filter the reduced pool of the matching partners based on an averaged favorable face. That is how DateCoin will operate, to provide users the most relevant search results, based not only on appearance preferences but also on users goals and interests.

Moreover, with users activity analysis, one of the key threats the majority of dating services suffer from, swindlers, can be identified and prevented. Thus, technical support will be more efficient and the quality of services provided will increase.

Denim states that it matches successful men and beautiful girls, can you elaborate on this a little more? Seems like an exclusive target audience.

That’s true. Denim meets the expectations of a specific target audience. In DateCoin we will get rid of this model and employ artificial intelligence to find all kinds of partners.  

We do not stick to LTR or flirt. Our users are free to choose the options that work better for them. Our mission is to quickly provide the pool of the best-matching partners, regardless of our goal.

Dating, romantic relationships, business meetings, trips for two…It’s your turn to pick one!

Moreover, I believe that our app will not only be used to find a soulmate, but also friends, business partners, fitness buddies etc.

It also states that you use Artificial intelligence to screen fake profile images – a current issue among online dating. In your ‘goals for the crowdsale’, it mentions only girl profile verifications. Do you screen the men?

An unambiguous user identification is one of the key problems of online dating. It’s not a secret,  that leaving bots aside, scammers and swindlers tend to steal an identity. Attractive photos and complete profiles do not guarantee a real date with that exact person. With time and money spent, disappointed users tend to avoid using dating services at all. We fix this problem with cutting-edge technologies, employing artificial intelligence and blockchain.

The mechanics of unambiguous user identification (or the second verification step) is quite simple. An authorized user can verify the identity of the partner at real date via encrypted transaction note in a distributed data register. After that, the partner becomes authorized and capable of confirming other users identities at a real date. At the initial stages, to become authorized, the user is required to be signed up for at least one month and have stable social connections with other users. That is how we not only solve the IT problem but also build an entire ecosystem. Blockchain will help to minimize the chances of unauthorized encrypted transactions and fraudulent identity verification.

Following gender equality principles, we apply these mechanics to all our users.

With your already large user base on the Denim app right now when, do you anticipate reaching $20 million in your token sale?

Let me share our philosophy. We put our users first. Just this. For instance, all of them got St. Valentine DTC appreciation tokens.

Love and romantic relationships are the essences of St. Valentine’s Day around the globe. According to him, DateCoin is an international intelligent dating service committed to the user’s happiness and providing unique opportunity to quickly find the best matching partner. One DTC token giveaway is a special symbol for Denim and DateCoin users that ensures them to meet Mr or Mrs. Right in future.

This unprecedented giveaway aimed to popularize blockchain and to provide people a unique opportunity to check out tokenization processes and distributed registers technology.

For users convenience, we have prepared short video guide on activation of the appreciation token.

As for reaching hard cap, we believe in a positive outcome and have been working hard to attract as many users and investors as possible.

We plan to get 20 million users in four years. Most of them are buying tokens at the open market for in-app purchases (additional features and exclusive offers priced in DTC). By these means, we will ensure the token to be in high demand even after the ICO is over. It will also influence positively on the token exchange rate and popularize blockchain. That is how we are going to raise funds for project development in the nearest future and reach financial goals for investors to earn with us.

DateCoin’s ICO public CrowdSale begins on March 30th. For more information on the ICO, click here.

We’d like to thank Mr. Nikita again for taking time out of his busy schedule to chat with us about his company.

DateCoin will be featured in our CryptoMadness series this Saturday, for more information you can view it here. DateCoin will be facing off against another Dating ICO, Viola.AI.