In this Speak PR podcast episode, host Jim James interviews Colin Miles, Chief Commercial Officer and CEO of Zilliqa, about the company’s SocialPay product—a blockchain‑based incentive system that rewards social media actions (primarily Twitter) with ZIL tokens. Colin explains how the platform works (wallet creation, hashtag‑driven campaigns, token payouts), showcases three high‑impact campaigns (Zilliqa branding, Singapore Red Cross #CovidHeroes CSR, and a 3‑year anniversary hashtag that achieved 80% Twitter dominance), and shares impressive metrics (45 M engagements in 3 days, 15 M engagements in 24 h, thousands of wallets created within hours). He discusses anti‑bot safeguards (minimum likes, account age requirements, CAPTCHAs), the upcoming SocialPay 2 self‑serve portal, and plans to expand beyond Twitter to Telegram, Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Geographic data shows the US leading activity, followed by Europe and Asia (especially Indonesia and India). Colin also outlines Zilliqa’s origins at the National University of Singapore, the value of ZIL (≈ $0.02‑$0.03 per token), and how brands or charities can leverage SocialPay for marketing or CSR. Contact information (colin@zilliqa.com) is provided for further inquiries.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. Today I'm talking with Colin Miles, who is the Chief Commercial Officer and CEO of Zilliqa, which has introduced a blockchain for social media product called SocialPay. Colin's joining us from Singapore. Colin, welcome.
Thank you. Hi, Jim.
So you're solving, it sounds like, 2 problems at once: blockchain and social media. with Zilliqa and social pay. How does this work?
Well, we're taking what the blockchain does really well, which is incentivize good behavior. We're using ZIL, which is Zilliqa's token, to give people rewards for promoting content or branded information or a CSR campaign, for example, which we've done with the Red Cross. To drive interactions on Twitter. So the first point of call is Twitter. We have other channels as well, but Twitter is really something that we found a great response from as a community. And using social pay and rewarding people for promoting hashtags particularly, we've driven phenomenal engagement. The numbers are off the charts. And it's quite a simple process, but it works brilliantly. So we're very excited to see the impact on social media marketing. People need to have a wallet, so they will have a crypto wallet which can receive ZIL. There are several key partners that we have: Atomic or Trust or Moonlit, for example. ZilPay, which is another one. Zeeves, which is our play on the butler name. So all these wallets can receive ZIL. So if you go through the SocialPay landing page, Click once, twice, 3 times, add your wallet, add your Twitter account. Then as soon as you send a tweet or retweet a tweet or click our automated templated tweet to make it really easy, then you are given, say, 30 ZIL for doing that. And depending on the price and depending on the day, it's worth having.
Yeah, so who is using this? Is it companies, brands? Because in a way it's a almost like harnessing everybody to be an influencer.
Yeah, that's the key part, is to push it out in a viral way, to socially engage as many people as humanly possible. We started as a kind of proof of concept with our own Zilliqa hashtag and our own branding campaign, and it was quite a shocking number actually. We hit as many as 45 million social media engagements on the Twitter community, uh, in the space of, uh, 3 days. We ran the campaign for 3 days. So this is measured by LunarCrush, which is a free service you can use to measure and monitor all of your activity. It's a brilliant company that works tirelessly to monitor the crypto community. And when we saw those numbers, we were absolutely astonished because the cost of ZIL to make that campaign work was in the low thousands. So we had a monumental number of engagements for a really small fee.
Yeah.
So this is something we learned very quickly was going to be a powerful tool. And then we applied the second campaign to a CSR COVID Heroes campaign with the Singapore Red Cross to also help drive donations to their fundraising campaign. So we used the COVID Heroes hashtag. And anyone who retweeted that got paid in ZIL for doing so. We made a corporate donation to the Red Cross as such. And so it was a win-win for the community and also for the Red Cross. That campaign got as high as 15 million engagements. It was only 24 hours, but again, worked tremendously well. Numbers-wise, the third campaign that we ran was completely unbelievable in terms of its impact on the social dominance ranking, which LunarCrush also provides. We hit 80% dominance on Twitter for our hashtag #ZIL3 and Zilliqa for our 3rd anniversary, which we celebrated with a virtual event promoted using SocialPay, and it absolutely smashed the numbers to an incredible level.
Are companies as well using this to promote products and then getting people to come back, for example, to a landing page, to a funnel for a product?
Yeah, so we're in the first phase of the development. So this is the proof of concept. So it has worked incredibly successfully. What's being built now is what we call Social Pay 2, which should allow individual companies to self-serve. So create their own campaigns through a web portal, issue their own hashtags, and then drive traffic under their own brand name. So we think this is the best way to scale, and I'm looking forward to that build-out. It should take a couple of months to get to the next level, and then we can go slightly more neutral. So for example, retail outlets can offer vouchers and coupons for those who wish to claim them either online or in-store where permissible, and that Enables a different level of engagement because the crypto part may still be a little bit rarefied for mass adoption. Yeah, so we can cover both bases. We can offer ZIL as an incentive, or you could offer your own loyalty points, air miles, whatever it is you want to drive transactions with.
Right, so the, so the key question at the moment then is what's a ZIL worth, isn't it? Until you've got the sort of real-world value. What would a ZIL— if I retweeted, what would that— what's 30 ZIL worth?
Yeah, it's about, it's about 2 cents US dollars roughly, depending on the day. It's been as high as 3, uh, in, in past months. Um, so it's worth having, especially for those, uh, in Southeast Asia. It's, it's a really decent incentive, uh, to get 15 cents or, or 20 cents, uh, or even higher for Promoting. And of course, if you hold it, the value can go up. So there's, there's no downside.
From a sort of public relations point of view, which risks are there? Are there opportunities for people to kind of hijack the Zilliqa social page?
Part of the pilot phase is to work out what are the attack vectors, as they call them, and bots would definitely an issue which we realized early on. People were trying to create false accounts, for example, to get the number of likes. So we set the first number of likes at 5 likes. Then we've tried to increase it up to 30 likes in line with our event on the 30th of July. Then we toggled it down again to make it slightly easier. You know, it's something which we're finding to be an iterative process. And we also reset the conditions that Twitter accounts had to be more than a month old. You know, you couldn't create an account on the same day and claim. So we've been toggling quite a lot to avoid bot interactions. We added CAPTCHAs on the web pages to stop bots signing up. So we do have a lot of mitigation in place to protect the process, the brand, and the spend.
Where do you see the industry going in terms of people using things like Twitter, or will you also deploy this on Instagram and LinkedIn and Pinterest? Because hashtags, of course, are not limited only to Twitter as a platform.
Yes, so there is quite a long strategic pathway for the Social Pay Disruptive Marketing logic. We already have an integration with Telegram. Telegram is huge for crypto communities, and we have a bot called Zeeves, and that enables us to reward people who, for example, answer quiz questions on AMAs, which they, they have a lot of them in Telegram crypto communities. So we can actually reward people with ZIL for those things on Telegram. So we have a partner as well who's doing this for Twitch. So they're integrating the reward system into Twitch.
Right.
And we're working very aggressively with a company actually based in London to do YouTube, which to me is a huge, huge potential upside for the social pay logic to reward people for doing good things on YouTube. It really is something that those who are creating content, they need a huge boost. They need a lot of help to get people to promote the content enough to get into the YouTube algorithms to get a sizable audience. And it's not easy if you're just starting from scratch. How do you get that audience? And this is one great way to do it.
You'll take this social pay approach presumably across all platforms ultimately?
Yeah, so the content, the payload itself could be anywhere, could be hosted anywhere, could be your podcast link of course. But then we install it into a Twitter campaign or a campaign on Telegram and say to people, if you go and follow this podcast, if you go and even listen to this podcast, if we can do an API integration specifically, we can confirm that someone did listen to the podcast and then send them maybe an even bigger reward.
How, how do you promote getting people to, to sign up? To the Zilliqa account.
Well, the interesting part is watching the sheer crush that takes place when the campaign goes live and how many people try and create wallets to receive the ZIL. And we saw with Zeeves that 4,000 wallets were created in the space of 3 hours for a campaign that was run initially. We have now gone up to 10,000 wallets. The objective is to take it to 100,000 wallets. for that one campaign, for that one service proposition, SEEVs. So for us, the number of wallets created increased. I think we went from 100,000 to 200,000 in a very short period of time running these campaigns. So if the incentive is there, people will do it.
And what about geography? Because you're in Singapore and you mentioned a London partner. Is this going to be a Southeast Asia phenomenon, or do you think it will be something that branding and companies could use as a platform for their marketing around the world?
So again, doing the geographical analysis is really important, and we looked at the campaign hits for the last campaign. More than 50% of the activity was from the USA. Then Europe was next and Asia was third. So we were mildly surprised by that, but within Asia it was quite compelling because Indonesia and India were really overwhelmingly dominantly involved. But to me it showed we were universal, we were global, we could promote to any part of the world that we wanted to, and there was no restriction. It really is a global product, a global service, and a global solution. So depending on how you wish to do the engagement, how you wish to do the consumption, where you want the target audience to come from, things can be tailored accordingly. So if the payload and the return is for, you know, a high street in London, that's okay. People in California aren't going to follow through with that campaign. There's a natural filtering.
So how in the future would I go about it if I've got a brand or if I'm a charity?
We're talking to a few at present on different lines. We can look at it as a CSR component, so that's okay. We are happy to give back in that sense. If there is the opportunity to drive donations, then that's even even better. So that could be potentially a sponsored campaign whereby a lead sponsor for a global United Nations campaign could actually cover the cost, something similar to the One Love campaign that we've seen with the re-release of Bob Marley's song there for UNICEF. So, you know, there are many ways to work with sponsors and to provide this technology to underpin a much bigger social impact for those guys.
And is Zilliqa sort of a Singapore-originated product, or has it come from somewhere else?
Yeah, it was born in the National University of Singapore about 3 or 4 years ago as a white paper trying to solve one of the biggest problems in the blockchain, which was the bottlenecks that were created on both Bitcoin and Ethereum because the processing was too slow. So the logic of sharding, which is splitting up transactions across multiple nodes, was put forward academically and then brought into the real world, uh, as a company, uh, exploratory startup. And then it raised a large amount of money on a token generating event which funded the build-out of the company and the technology to its mature state now, whereby we can bring all these applications onto the blockchain and know that it can process thousands and thousands of For the average sort of business owner who's thinking about how to get their hashtag and maybe using like Flick, I think is one of the sort of hashtag generators, and is this going to be an alternative to a service like Flick?
Will it complement? And will they need to be technologically savvy to use it?
Very important question is how do we get adoption? And the way to get adoption is to simplify as much as humanly possible and generally not mention jargon or technology or any of the issues which people perceive as complicated in the blockchain environment. So if we say very simply, you can run your hashtag campaign, you can issue tokens or coupons just through this web interface in 3 easy clicks, as easy as AdWords, as easy as Facebook campaigns, then I think we've got something quite unique. And people do not have to know what's going on behind the scenes with the technology at all. They just want to see the result. They can manage the results. They can see the results in real time, which is an exciting drug all of its own when you see the spikes going up dramatically on your engagement. And then they can see what the end result is, performance marketing, how many people were converted to buy my product or promote my service or increase my brand impact. So, so many ways to cut it, but to make it really, really self-service simple.
Colin, if you want to find out more about Zilliqa and how to talk to you, because if you're the commercial officer, you're the, you're the man to talk to.
Yeah, very easy. colin@zilliqa.com. That's my email. Always open to people looking to explore the possibility of working with us and running social campaigns here, there, and everywhere.
Great. That's Z-I-L-L-I-Q-A. Colin, thanks so much for joining us on the Speak PR podcast.
Great. Nice to talk to you again, Jim.
Okay, that was Colin Miles over in Singapore at Zilliqa.com, and they are using Bitcoin to reward people that retweet content with hashtags and paying those people using Bitcoin via the blockchain technologies. Thank you for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health and profitable business and that you keep on communicating and using hashtags. And if you want to amplify those hashtags, I suggest you get in touch with Colin over at Zilliqa.com.
