Anatoly Kaplan (also known as Tony Kaplan) is the CEO of Forklog, is the biggest cryptocurrency media in the Russian Community. The Forklog Team has gone through thick and thin to be a media that brings news, reviews, investigation, and crypto education to the Russian crypto community, regardless of harassment from different authorities in the Russian speaking regions.
Anatoly Kaplan（Forklog CEO）
Interview Date : 28th September 2020
The Start of A Crypto Media Platform
It all started in 2014 when I was living in Ukraine, at the time the revolution happened. I had been living in Ukraine for 2 years, the revolution had ended and the war was about to break out. During that time, I lost my job at an IT company because of the economic crisis due to the situation. The currency in Ukraine fell from 8 hryvnias to 1 dollar to 27 hryvnias to 1 dollar. The situation got even worse when 1 dollar was the equivalent to 50 hryvnias at one point, but it was soon after restored to 27 hryvnias through a bailout from the government.
It was really hard to see your hard-earned savings losing so much value. I was 23 years old when I experienced such inflation. For a young guy who just started working, it was devastating. From that point on, I started to ask myself “I am a Russian who is living in Ukraine, how shall I go on from here on?” I started to read more about the economy, and also about money and currencies. I had heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 but that was before the revolution, and I had not paid attention to cryptocurrencies, because it sounded like a crazy mess to me. However, after the economic shock I experienced, I got very curious and started researching it. Then I learned about it the more I got interested, so I decided to run a small blog about cryptocurrency in Russian, not only for sharing information but also to collect and get more knowledgeable about it for myself. So, Forklog started as a notebook blog. However, after only a year, it started to get more and more popular, and today, it has turned into one of the biggest media platforms in the crypto world.
Most Well-Received Articles
People love good news, and the good news is news about Bitcoin, so that’s one category that is liked and clicked on the most. The second category is the investigation section. That is a very specific side of our job when our company started, and thanks to the ICO time in 2017, we still need to do this job. Investigation articles sound like a storyline from a movie, and people love that. The next part of our homepage is education. We have 2 main standards for education. One is the section where we have published short articles with a strict structure trying to explain simply. From our experience, we have seen that short and simple articles are much more well-received and understood by new Bitcoiners than the longer and more academic educational articles. We also have a YouTube channel where we explain more difficult topics, like programming languages, securities, technical differences, and also money as well as Austrian economics. It’s no secret that there is a big part of the global Bitcoin community that is related to Austrian economics, as it is a huge part of the crypto community.
Forklog to CoinDesk Cointelegraph
The format of our homepage is similar to that of CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, but it’s mainly created and suited for the Russian community. We are trying to improve our website all the time. Currently, we are in the middle of preparing a new application for mobile phones so that our readers will have a better and easier access place to go to. I am very inspired by Asian super apps and would like to have certain aspects of those apps in ours.
The structure of Forklog
Forklog’s composition is quite simple. We have different departments that work in different sections of Forklog. We are trying out new products and new approaches and always are in the outlook for innovation. We are also experimenting with AI content as well. The media and journalism run on creative writing. No one wants to be a robot or work with robots. Everyone wants to work with creative humans, and that’s what we try to bring forth.
We started complete remote work in 2018. We had an office for 2 years before that, but now we are all working and operating remotely. We have members of our team in different countries, where some are in Ukraine, others in different places in Europe, and Belarus as well. Now, we have around 30 people on our crew.
Russia’s Version of Facebook and Twitter
Telegram is the most adopted app and messenger that is used in Russia. Twitter is used for more external communications, and for people who want to participate in the global community. Facebook is used like LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is not popular in Russia. Thus, Telegram is the main place that has many crypto channels that we use. We have our social network site that is major in Russian speaking regions, and it is called VK.com. It was launched by the same guy who launched Telegram, Pavel Durov. VK is similar to Facebook, but I think VK’s UX/UI is much better and it works much better.
Last December, there was news about VK becoming government property from the 1st of January 2020, so the social platform has become an official national social network. It has been announced publicly that it will be a government website, but everybody knows that it is in the right hands of people who created it from the start. You just use it for general purposes and do what you need to do there. You can also go to another major social network platform called Odnoklassniki.ru. If you want more privacy and a more stable service, you can go to other service providers. If you compare the Russian Internet infrastructure to the Spanish or German internet infrastructure, the Russian Internet, also referred to as Runet, is much more stable. Germany’s internet infrastructure is from decades ago and I was shocked to know that. Since the early 2000s, Runet has been available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, cable, DSL, FTTH, mobile, wireless, and satellite. Russia became the second most commonly used language on the internet as early as 2013. I hope that there soon will be super apps like the Asian Line or WeChat apps.
Interviewer , Editor : Lina Kamada
【Disclaimer】
The Article published on this our Homepage are only for the purpose of providing information. This is not intended as a solicitation for cryptocurrency trading. Also, this article is the author’s personal opinions, and this does not represent opinion for the Company BtcBox Co.,Ltd.