Smart contracts (origins in 80s, 90s vs. 2013 ETH and 2020s Cardano)
We had a pretty interesting product update. We laughed, we cried, we all learned a little bit. Two and a half hours lots of stuff and I hope this gives you guys a good window into all the things that are happening. There's an enormous amount of complexity in Cardano and Goguen is no different. In fact that one slide showing all the interlocking dependencies and the moving pieces for it and just the sheer volume of things that are going on is, is an indication of not only the quality of the team but also the commercial reality of being a smart contract platform. In 2020 when I co-founded Ethereum our reference material was paper. We looked at things that Nick Szabo and people from the 1990s and 1980s wrote about and whether you were a Ricardian contract fan or you had programmed in Eiffel or you understood things like FpML basically it was an open field which gave us kind of a freedom to just do whatever we wanted to do but it also didn't give us a commercial reality of who's going to buy it? Who's going to use it? What do you need to do? The expectations in 2020 are vastly different from the expectations in 2013 and the reality is that there are massive deficits with Ethereum as designed today which is why Tezos exists and Algorand exists and why ETH2 is being constructed . It's why there are so many different players from Polkadot and others on down who have deep and detailed opinions about the things we need to do. If the ICO revolution hadn't happened, there was no notion of an ERC20 token and we were in a just different world.
We didn't have DeFi, any of these things and now in 2020 if you are to be competitive and build great things and actually invite real use and utility at a scale of millions and billions of people or government or Fortune 500 you need to have real good answers about a lot of different threats and things. For example, Marlowe, what it does is it leverages 20 years of history from domain experts like Willi Brammertz and over 30 years of history in domain-specific language (DSL) design from professor Simon Thompson and his team and it puts them together. It says for the first time ever we're going to have semantical clarity between the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer and the financial services infrastructure whether that be the banker, the insurance agent, the exchange, whoever that might be. Up until the totality of human history till today we have never had that semantical clarity. All four of those actors speak different languages and what we're doing with Marlowe as a DSL is an example of how you can unify and create a common language and experience between all of them today.
Marlowe, DSL, Glow, Plutus, IELE
Right now, you guys can go to the Marlowe playground and you can start using it and start building things and start having that semantical clarity and work with us and over a period of six months or so that will continue to evolve. Templates will evolve, applications will be constructed and those applications will work their way into Cardano applications and eventually they'll become cross-platform and work on things like (Hyperledger) fabric and other such things as we see industry and commercial adoption but it requires a starting point and Marlowe has evolved over a four year period through the hard labors of so many people to actually give us a great starting point. You can visually look at contracts and talk about their design. You can write them in JavaScript, you can write them in the Marlowe programming language. There's a Haskell side to things and you can see the power of this approach because of its design. You can prove things are correct, you can use theory that has existed for over 40 years like SAT solvers and reachability to actually show that you're not going to have a parity bug and that's just one example of one DSL of which many more will come. The point of DSLs is to give clarity to people in the industry. For example if we get into the health business and we start talking about medical records that will become a DSL to broker their movement and that same clarity and semantical unification will occur between doctors and hospitals, patients, governments, regulators and business professionals and they will now have a common language. So, Marlowe is an entry point and it's an example of how to build a DSL and evolve a DSL and bring the right people to the table.
When we look to things like Glow, from MuKn, this is an example of a team that's highly motivated and intrinsically across blockchain. When we look to the future and we say what happens when Bitcoin gets smart contracts? What happens when ETH2 comes out? What happens when people want to build cross-blockchain applications? Wouldn't it be nice to have a unification language and that's what Glow is basically all about. By strategic investments in that ecosystem, what Glow does for us is it ensures that we won't be left behind that Cardano has that and all Cardano infrastructure can benefit from that and Glow in turn will benefit from its embedding in our ecosystem. More users, more technology and ultimately because Cardano's the best. If you deploy in that direction it's the best experience. When you look to Plutus, Plutus is the unification language, it's the conductor of the orchestra and it pulls all of these things together and there were a lot of design requirements with Plutus that were quite hard from a theory viewpoint. We really cared a lot about resource determinism. We wanted to make sure that it was always predictable or at least as predictable as it can be to know how much it costs to do things because at the end of the day this is not a science experiment. These are not toys back in 2013. We had the luxury with Ethereum of just seeing what happened and the market makes strategic investments and they have to know how much their operating cost is going to be for their business model. We designed Plutus so that it would be one of the best programming languages on a long arc agenda of being a very practical on and off chain language to unify all the Cardano ecosystem. There are many objects in the ecosystem to operate, manipulate, instruments of value like native assets, identity, smart contracts onto themselves, DAOs, off chain infrastructure and you need a conductor that's capable of living in between all of these things and you need certainty that the code you're writing is going to work.
This is why we based it on an ecosystem that has 35 years of history and we as a company have invested millions of dollars in that ecosystem to modernize it and bring it into the 21st century especially for things like Windows support and working with partners like Tweag WebAssembly support, working on projects like compilation to JavaScript so that we can share that's there and our commitment is going to continue beyond that we are a founding member of the Haskell foundation working with Simon Peyton Jones and we're going to ensure that Haskell has compilation to ARM and that all of the technology that's required to keep that language competitive and actually make the language even more competitive will happen. It's very nice that Plutus is deeply ingrained in that ecosystem and that makes it a perfect conductor language. In the coming months we're going to talk a lot more about our relationship decay in IELE. If you live in the imperative object-oriented world and you want to do things a bit differently than the way things are done in the Haskell functional world then it makes sense to have an option that has the same principles as us which is why we reached out to Grigore years ago and established a commercial relationship with him. It's been the privilege of my career finding a way to resurrect that relationship so in the coming months we're going to talk a lot about how IELE fits into the Cardano ecosystem and the value it's going to bring in addition to the value of Marlowe, Glow, and Plutus.
Native assets
One of the single most important things about all of this is the native asset standard. One of the things we did not anticipate when we created Ethereum is just how pervasive the user's ability to issue an asset would be. We figured this would be an important thing, it's why we put it on a T-shirt back in the Miami conference in January of 2014 and we realized that from the color coin's project in the master coin project and one of the most important things is that we have the ability to issue not just a utility token but non-functional assets, security tokens and a litany of other instruments that hold value. Some ephemeral, some permanent, some with flexible monetary policies, some with fixed monetary policies, some from a central issuer, some from a decentralized issuer, some managed by a foundation, some managed by the community, some managed by fixed code that's immutable and the point of the native asset standard in the ERC20 converter is to establish a co-evolution of the technology and the commercialization of the technology. What we've been doing with ERC20 converter is using that as a way to create a conversation with those who want to migrate or build on Cardano and thinking through how are we going to create practical standards with our native assets. We already have enormous advantages with this standard over Ethereum. In particular the fact that your assets you issue on Cardano are treated the way that ADA is treated whereas in Ethereum you're a second-class citizen or ETH is treated differently from smart contracts. This first class citizen approach means that your assets will have the same governance access layer, to portfolio access and infrastructure that ADA itself has. Easier listing experiences, easier time with hardware wallets, easier time with wallet software. In general better user experience, faster transactions, lower transaction costs and then eventually for higher value tokens even the possibility of paying transaction fees over the long term in the native asset itself as if you were your own cryptocurrency.
Goguen rollout
You just simply cannot do this with the design of Ethereum and Ethereum 2. It's a huge advantage we have in our ecosystem and it's one that will become more pervasive over time now Goguen has already started. As a launch agenda the very first update to enable some Goguen era functionality was the metadata standard which meant that you could go from just moving ADA around to actually a whole litany of applications in the identity space and in the metadata space some of which we're aggressively negotiating on in commercial deals which we'll announce at a later date. The rollout of Goguen in terms of the system as we mentioned in the presentation will be principally done for the first iteration over a series of three hard fork combinator (HFC) events. The first of which is beginning this year in November December time frame and that's going to lay a lot of the foundations that will enable us to get to the second hard fork combinator event which will occur in Q1 of next year and we'll announce that specific date likely at the next product update and then the third one will happen shortly thereafter. They have to be spaced this way because it's just simply too cumbersome on our developers and also our partners such as wallet infrastructure and exchanges to try to do too much too quickly and furthermore there's an enormous amount of work as you've noticed on that slide to roll out Goguen. You have to do two things at once, you have to deploy the infrastructure but then you also have to populate the infrastructure and what's nice about the way that we've done things as you now see with the Marlowe playground the population of that infrastructure is occurring now today and with the ERC20 converter and the mint test net that's coming.
That's going to occur in November which means that that gives people time to start building and playing on our ecosystem in a safe sandbox so that when they deploy it to the mainnet they do it right the first time and they don't make an existential failure as we have seen with the DeFi space because at the end of the day once you go live you have a huge adversarial surface and everybody in the world is going to try to break the things you've done. It's very important that you do it right which means that you need time as a commercial partner and an application deployer to do it correctly. Parts of Goguen are indeed shipping this year, some have already shipped and we'll have another HFC event at the end of next month or early in December and throughout the first quarter of next year and likely the second quarter will complete the other two HFC events which will roll out full support for native assets, extended UTxO, the Plutus infrastructure and the Marlowe infrastructure. In the meantime we're also working on strategies about how we can ensure best integration of Glow and IELE into the Cardano ecosystem and as you've noticed there are three parallel teams that are working very hard. The Shelley team continues to upgrade the Shelley experience. Just today we've received a lot of concerns over for example the state pool ranking in Daedalus. Let me be very clear about something. There's no problem with the ranking software, the problem is the k parameter. It needs to be increased and the fact that things are getting grayed out is an indication that the ranking parameter is actually working right for the first time. So, k needs to go up but there are consequences of that and we need to improve the software to reflect those consequences but it is my goal to get k to 1000 before ideally d hits 0 because we really do want to have over a 1000 well-functioning stake pools but by no means is that the end of the story.
Improvements + project Catalyst
We need partial delegation and delegation portfolios. We need means for stake pool operators to communicate effectively and efficiently with those who delegate to them. We need improvements in SMASH. We need an identity center, we need a litany of improvements to Daedalus itself. Right now, today, there are more than four companies working full-time at doing just these things in addition to the Goguen updates that are occurring right now. That research thread and that development thread will continue. We've already seen seven CIPs including CIPs related to the reward function. We take them very seriously, we review them and there's enormous amount of discussion about how to create a fair and balanced system and we appreciate this feedback. It's a process and we ask for patience and we also remind people that we launched Shelley just at the end of July and despite that the ecosystem has more than doubled in size and it's been growing at an incredible pace and it's only going to continue and we're only going to see our best days ahead of us. Good things are coming down the pipe and it's becoming a much more holistic ecosystem from in performance improvements, to usability improvements, to better overall software for everyone.
There's no greater example of that than what we've been able to accomplish in the last three months for the exchanges in general. We're really proud of what we've done with the Adrestia stack and we're really proud of working with great partners like Binance and Bittrex throughout the last few months and we've had some certain challenges there but as a result of overcoming those challenges we have left behind an incredible enterprise grade listening experience that continues to get faster, continues to get higher quality and is secure and reliable 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we'll continue investing heavily to ensure that that only gets better for all of those partners whether they be an external wallet or their infrastructure like an exchange operator. We've had a lot of wins also on the governance side with the Voltaire Catalyst project. We have seen huge wins in participation going from small focus groups to now over 3500 people every single day coming into cardano.ideascale.com competing for 2250000 worth of ADA with fund2. That's just the beginning and every six to eight weeks that's going to increase in scale, in terms of the money and people, the quality... When we ask what is our developer acquisition strategy that's a major part of it because people know that there's money to be made in building on Cardano and that you have the right incentives to go realize your dreams and add value so just as these frameworks like the Marlowe playground and the Plutus playground and other such things like Glow come online and IELE come online the ability to build will be matched by the ability to discuss what to build and fund? What to build through a community driven process that includes greater and greater inclusivity. For example the next fund will include a voting center built right into Daedalus in addition to the cell phone application that we've already launched to vote and we will continue refining that experience relentlessly that's one of our fastest moving teams and I will remind you we are doing this in parallel to the Shelley workstream and the Goguen workstream that we showed you guys today. Finally there's Basho, not the next hard fork combinator event but HFC#3 which we anticipate in Q1 2021.
Sidechains, Hydra
I would like to include a sidechain protocol that allows the movement of value between independent systems through some form of blocking mechanism. We are currently examining and designing a protocol that we think fits very nicely into the way that our system works with mild modifications to the ledger rules. If that and should this be successful then that helps with one of the pillars of Basho interoperability and then the other pillar is scalability. Rob is hard at work working with technical architects and scaling up a team to start de-risking the Hydra protocol and others are hard at work evolving the science behind the Hydra protocol. We have seen great progress on all fronts to de-risk Hydra's roll-out and what's so beautiful about Hydra is it is our belief that the majority if not all of Hydra can be implemented in Plutus. As Plutus rolls out we have a natural constituency to run this infrastructure. The stake pool operators and we have a natural way without an HFC event or special accommodation of rolling out Hydra.
It's not really needed at this level of scaling capacity. We have an enormous throughput already 10 times greater than Ethereum as it is today and room to make it a hundred times greater than what Ethereum is today without Hydra. However as we de-risk this infrastructure solidify the protocols and get out all the kinks. What's so beautiful about it is that we will be able to when the time comes the community can roll out multiple implementations of Hydra so that there is diversity and there will be a natural group of actors to run those channels as we have seen for example with the Bolt spec and the Lightning ecosystem on Bitcoin. The contrasting difference between Lightning and Bitcoin and Hydra and extended UTxO and Cardano is we designed Cardano for Hydra.
Bitcoin was not designed for Lightning and as a consequence it's always more difficult for them to try to make meaningful progress whereas us there's no friction in that relationship. It just fits very nicely through so the roadmap is coming together and Cardano 2020 has definitely started to evolve into quite a mature ecosystem and what's really exciting is we're going from an ecosystem of potential to one of reality and instead of asking what could we do we're showing people what has been done and people are actually doing things every day.
Our commercial team is inundated with requests for coordination and cooperation and deployment. I get numerous emails every single day, well intended to very serious about people wanting to build on the platform and we're really excited about that. We're going to keep this steady systematic relentless march as you saw with the enormity of the news today. It's business as usual and it'll be exactly the same in November only there'll be more and every month. The velocity increases, we burn down the remaining story points to get these things done and things are happening very quickly and we just keep releasing and releasing and releasing and it's a very different time than it was even six months ago.
Community rules
What's so reassuring is we continue to have the best community in all the cryptocurrency space. It's the final point but it's one that I'm most proud of. You see people get to decide where they want to live, what infrastructure they want to deploy, on who they want to work with and when you have a welcoming warm and friendly community that is constructive and productive and their job is to help you get to where you need to go you want to work with those people. When you have a destructive or toxic community that's exclusive hierarchical and not invented here in their mentality people don't want to work with that community. Money can't buy that. I don't care if you have a bank account with four billion dollars or you're a central bank. You can't buy character and you can't buy culture, you have to make it and you have to earn it and if we've accomplished anything over these last five years from the 90 papers now and the million plus lines of code and the incredible releases that have happened and continue to happen we accomplished the greatest thing of all: we built a community to rival that of bitcoin's. I believe with that community we can realize the dream in the coming years of Cardano becoming the financial operating system.
For those who don't have one and giving open prayer and free economic identity to those who need it I am astounded by just how easy it is to roll these things out. They're super hard and complex under the hood but they just feel right and fit right and all the pieces are starting to come together in just the right way and I'm astounded by the fact that when we roll them out community members are there to receive them and take them to the next level.
Thank you all for attending the product update at the end of the month. This was a real good one, just as good as the Shelley one and we are now in the Goguen era with the first HFC event coming in the end of November and we're going to keep pushing them out. Every single one of them will add more capabilities and I encourage everyone to check out the Marlowe playground start building with it. Today things are happening really fast when the mint comes online at the end of November. Start playing around with that, start talking about the multi-token standard. If you're interested in a project our commercial division divisions always' open and you're going to see more and more progress from all entities in this ecosystem and some potentially major announcements before you can think it. Thanks guys it was a good day and thanks to the entire team that made all this happen I'm real proud of all of you.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wADba8kCw

1. SUMMARY

Decentr is a protocol designed to make blockchain/DLT mainstream by allowing DeFi applications built on various blockchains to “talk to each other”. Decentr is a 100% secure and decentralised Web 3.0 protocol where users can apply PDV (personal data value) to increase APR on $DEC that users loan out as part of of our DeFi dLoan features, as well as it being applied at PoS when paying for stuff online. Decentr is also building a BAT competitor browser and Chrome/Firefox extension that acts as a gateway to 100% decentralised Web 3.0

Allows DeFi Dapps to access all Decentr’s dFintech features, including dLoan, dPay. Key innovation is that the protocols is based on a user’s ability to leverage the value of their data as exchangeable “currency”.

1. KEY CONCEPTS

• Decentr is building foundational chain-agnostic protocols that will support “true” 100% DeFi Dapps, a 100% secure and decentralised, user-centric alt economy. DeFi dApps inter-connected by Decentr can talk to each other and share PDV (personal data value) of their users. PDV is best described as a personalized “exchange rate” (in a sense social reputation where more effort leads to more rewards and NOT more capital to more rewards. ) between currencies that users apply at point-of-sale to make the cost of goods and services cheaper online. PDV is applied to the APR users earn on $DEC (native token) that they hold that they loan out as part of the investing pool. PDV will also allow uncollateralized loans on their dLoan platform, and also on platforms like Aave and Compound.
• Decentr will implement ZKsync to get super cheap and super fast transactions across the ETH network. It is also working with HoloChain and Tomochain to allow connect their DeFi ecosystem to the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Decentr has DEEP TIES and a PARTNERSHIP with Holochain: https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/decentr-holochain-ama-29d662caed03
• Decentr is also building a browser and Chrome/Firefox extension - a gateway that “transitions” Web 2.0 into a 100% decentralised Web 3.0 via their suite of decentralised dFintech and dCommunications features. The browser adds a 100% decentralised “user layer” to current blockchain protocols so that applications built on blockchain can actually “talk to each other”. The browser uses encryption all the time and the power of blockchain to keep private keys safe. Browser will offer a more robust and innovative type of blockchain storage and caching that is much faster than VPN or TOR. It will allow surfing .onion addresses as well as the regular ones. >>BAT browser 400m marketcap, DEC marketcap 4m<<
• Decentr is researching a hardware application, powered by Decentr software, that would greatly enhance current IoT networks. It’s called a “Smart Chip Node” (SCN) and will adhere to 4G LTE standards (with in-built 5G capability), which means connectivity between devices will match or exceed current speed and connectivity, dramatically improving stability and coverage of standalone devices, such as a laptop or tablet, as well as IoT devices, such as home routers and modems.
• Decentr uses Coinbase API to optimise integrated implementation of the user layer and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) to allow users to leverage cloud-based solutions to build, host and use their own blockchain apps. Tierion’s technological infrastructure, the Chainpoint Proof protocol, will come into play whenever a user adds something in Tierion’s data store. Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda private blockchains are used as an immutable transaction database for data transfers, including the following tech: R3 Corda, Hyperledger Fabric, Ansible, Bitbucket Pipelines, AWS, Node.JS, GoLang, Kotlin and CouchDB.
• Implements a system of layered security protocols based on a radically-new software architecture that combines Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)4 and Sobol sequencing with a n-dimensional chain as part of AI-enhanced, platform-wide community consensus mechanism — a mechanism that assigns mutually agreed value to data and user security protocol upgrades (further encouraging enhanced data integrity) by deploying a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol.
• Decentr has a very STRONG supportive community. This includes the Chad Gang STRONG Community: https://t.me/decentrtrading, Community News Channel: https://t.me/chadnews. Community Built Uniswap trade tracker: https://t.me/dectrades, Community built wallet holder tracker: https://t.me/DEC_WALLETS_COUNT
• Bank of England has reached out to Decenr to discuss the potential of a UK CBDC upon hearing about the potential of their tech. Decentr is consistent with their own R&D into a "dGBP" and they requested a top-level document for review >> Decentr created this proposal: https://decentr.net/files/Decentr_Consultancy_Doc_UK_CBDC.pdf

​

1. REVENUE MODEL

A fee is charged for every transaction using dPay whereby an exchange takes place between money (fiat and digital) and data, and vice versa, either as part of DeFi features or via a dApp built on Decentr. They are launching pilot programmes in the following industries:

1. Banking/PSP Industry: On Product launch, due to Decentr’s powerful PSP connections (including the worlds #2 PSP by volume), a medium-scale pilot program will be launched, which will seed the network with 150,000 PSP customers in primarily the Spanish/LAC markets, generating revenue from day one.
2. “Bricks and Mortar” Supermarket/Grocery Industry: Decentr aims to ensure the long-term competitiveness of “bricks and mortar” supermarkets against online-only grocery retailers, such as Amazon, by a) building secure tech that allows supermarkets to digitise every aspect of their supply chains and operational functions, while b) allowing supermarkets to leverage this incredibly valuable data as a liquid asset class. Expected revenue by Year 5: $114Mn per year.
3. Online Advertising Industry: Decentr’s 100% decentralised platform credits users secure data with payable value, in the form of PDV, for engaging with ads. The Brave browser was launched in 2012 and in 8 years has reached over 12 million monthly active users, accented by as many as 4.3 million daily active users.
4. TOKEN $DEC AND SALE

Decentr recently complete their token sale on a purchase portal powered by Dolomite where they raised $974,000 in 10 minutes for a total sale hardcap of 1.25M. The $DEC token is actively trading on multiple exchanges including Uniswap and IDEX. Listed for free on IDEX, Hotbit, Hoo, Coinw, Tidex, BKex. Listed on CoinGecko and Coinmarketcap. Listed on Delta and Blockfolio apps.
➡️ Circulating supply: 61m $DEC.
➡️ Release schedule and token distribution LINK -> NO RELEASE UNTIL 2021.

• Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/decentmarkets
• Coingecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/decentr

➡️Contract Address - 0x30f271C9E86D2B7d00a6376Cd96A1cFBD5F0b9b3
➡️Decimals - 18, Ticker - DEC
➡️Uniswap link: https://uniswap.info/pai0x3AEEE5bA053eF8406420DbC5801fC95eC57b0E0A
⭐️ HOW TO BUY VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iloAiv2oCRc&feature=youtu.be
$DEC Token utility:

A tradeable unit of value that is both internal and external to the Decentr platform.A unit of conversion between fiat entering and exiting the Decentr ecosystem.A way to capture the value of user data and combines the activity of every participant of the platform performing payment (dPay), or lending and borrowing (dLend), i.e a way to peg PDV to tangible/actionable value.Method of payment in the Decentr ecosystem.A method to internally underwrite the “Deconomy.

1. NOTABLE SUPPORTERS

Simon Dedic - chief of Blockfyre: https://twitter.com/scoinaldo/status/1283787644221218817?s=20https://twitter.com/scoinaldo/status/1283719917657894912?s=21
Spectre Group Pick : https://twitter.com/SPECTREGRP/status/1284761576873041920https://twitter.com/llluckyl/status/1283765481716015111?s=21
Patrons of the Moon/Lil Uzi: https://t.me/patronsofthemoon/6764
CryptoGems: https://twitter.com/cryptogems_com/status/1283719318379925506?s=09t
tehMoonwalker pick who is a TOP 5 influencer per Binance:https://twitter.com/tehMoonwalkestatus/1284123961996050432?s=20https://twitter.com/binance/status/1279049822113198080
Holochain was one of their earliest supporters and they share a deep connection (recently an AMA was conducted in their TG group): https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/decentr-holochain-ama-29d662caed03

1. UPCOMING NEWS

• Partnership with worlds #2 PSP by volume: https://t.me/chadnews/27
• Roadmap UPDATE coming. Rich James has CONFIRMED that the MVP will be released in 2020.
• Blockfyre Report coming
• CryptoDiffer AMA coming up.
• CryptoDaku AMA coming up.
• Series of CEX exchange listing starting this week: https://twitter.com/bitcoin_brown/status/1285502234156032007?s=19

--------------------------------------------

1. RESOURCES:

Website: https://decentr.net
Telegram: https://t.me/DecentrNet
Medium: https://medium.com/@DecentrNet
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DecentrNet
Whitepaper: https://decentr.net/files/Decentr_Whitepaper_V1.4.pdf
Technical Whitepaper: https://decentr.net/files/Decentr_Technical_Whitepaper_Data_As_Economic_Currency.pdf
Recent Articles:
⚡️- https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/decentr-token-sale-metrics-and-distribution-483bb3c58d05
⚡️- https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/how-decentrs-defi-dloan-function-benefits-dec-holders-97ff64a0c105
⚡️- https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/3-vertical-revenue-streams-decentr-is-targeting-4fa1f3dd62de
⚡️- https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/brave-browser-the-good-the-bad-and-the-fundamentally-misguided-8a8593b0ff5b
⚡️- https://medium.com/@DecentrNet/how-decentrs-dfintech-replaces-swift-sct-inst-clearing-house-and-other-payment-solutions-78acacbb4c3f
Chad Gang STRONG Community: https://t.me/decentrtrading
Community News Channel: https://t.me/chadnews
Recent Uniswap trades: https://t.me/dectrades
Wallet holder tracker: https://t.me/DEC_WALLETS_COUNT

Edit: TL;DR added in the comments
 
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
 
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
 
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
 
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
 
Technology and some more:
 
Introduction
 
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
 
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
 
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
 
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
 
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
 
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
 
Down the rabbit hole
 
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
 
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
 
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here.
Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
 
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
 
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
 
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
 
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
 
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
 
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
 
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
 
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017.
Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
 
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
 
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
 
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
 
Decentralisation
 
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand.
Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
 
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
 
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
 
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
 
Smart contracts
 
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal.
If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
 
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
 
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
 
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
 
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
 
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
 
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”. Scilla design story part 1
 
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
 
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
 
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
 
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
 
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
 
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
 
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
 
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
 
And this is where the downsides of state sharding comes in currently. All shards in Zilliqa have access to the complete state. Yes the state size (0.1 GB at the moment) grows and all of the nodes need to store it but it also means that they don’t need to shop around for information available on other shards. Requiring more communication and adding more complexity. Computer science knowledge and/or developer knowledge required links if you want to dig further: Scilla - language grammar Scilla - Foundations for Verifiable Decentralised Computations on a Blockchain Gas Accounting NUS x Zilliqa: Smart contract language workshop
 
Easier to follow links on programming Scilla https://learnscilla.com/home Ivan on Tech
 
Roadmap / Zilliqa 2.0
 
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
 
Business & Partnerships
 
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
 
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
 
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
 
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
 

There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.

 

So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”

 
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
 
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
 
Marketing & Community
 
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
 
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
 
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
 
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
 
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!

ATTN: These AMA questions are from Autumn 2019 - before the official launch of the Kava Mainnet, and it's fungible Kava Token.
These questions may no longer be relevant to the current Kava landscape, however, they do provide important historical background on the early origins of Kava Labs.
Please note, that there are several repeat questions/answers.

Q51:

How do you think about France in Kava market development plan?

What is your next plan to raise awareness among French about Kava?

• Answer: It is important to reach many top markets. For countries like France we need to find 1st regulator partners such as Binance that can help provide access to KAVA for users. When our CDP platform launches, we will work through local validator partners to help translate content and work with local users.
  
• We have some great community efforts where people create content for us.
  

Q52:

Why did you choose Cosmos instead of Aion, which comes with AVM built on JAVA, which can be accepted by many developers?

Will there be a possibility that one day we will be able to collateralize a privacy coin, such as Monero, on KAVA?

• Answer: We like programming in GO, interfaces are OK for Java. Cosmos will also feature a WASM module and EVM later. The Cosmos-SDK is very flexible and it allowed us to choose our own security model. That was unique compared to other frameworks where we had to adopt the underlying blockchains. In Cosmos-SDK we can create our own blockchain.
  
• Re: privacy - you can do some fun things in payment channels to make transactions more private. Such as onion routing clearing and settlement across different nodes. This can be possible in the future, but not our priority now.
  

Q53:

The biggest advantage of finance is the efficient allocation of resource allocation. If KAVA connects assets of multiple platforms through the interchain technology, the efficiency across the market will be improved.

But in terms of connectivity, Facebook's Libra, with its centralized giant platform, could be a big threat for the future. Of course, regulatory uncertainty still exists. KAVA wonders what big platform companies think about entering the blockchain field and how they can cope with their competition.

• Answer: We think of Kava as a DeFi service that can integrate with wallets, exchanges, and other platforms when users want loans or stable coins for payments. We don't see competition with Libra, but we see lots of users potentially getting into crypto which will be good for the market, good for BTC, and good for Kava.

Q54:

What will you do with the money after IEO?

What is the most important markets that Kava is focusing?

What is your marketing strategy to approach those markets?

• Answer: What will we do with the IEO money? Put it in a bank and keep building. We keep our funds safe in secure accounts that are insured. We always maintain at least 2 years runway in pure fiat to ensure we can survive in any bear market conditions and come out on top in the end.

Q55:

On mainnet, which function/feature can we expect to see on Kava since i only saw informations about its testnet?

• Answer: mainnet will feature KAVA, staking, delegating, validator software, voting and governance / parameter changes. Following mainnet, the validators will vote to enable transactions and the CDP platform. We expect this to be towards the end of the yeaQ1 2020

Q56:

How does Kava maintain the stability of its stablecoin? Are there any opportunties for outsiders to arbitrage or any other mechanisms to maintain price stabilization?

• Answer: Kava users deposit crypto assets as collateral and can withdraw a loan based on the amount they deposited. They must always provide more collateral than the loan is worth. When the value of the collateral drops due to market conditions, before it reaches the value of the loaned amount, the platform will auction off the crypto assets for USDX that is on the market at a discount. Holders of USDX can buy these assets at a profit. This removes USDX from the market and makes sure that the global USDX to collateral in the system remains balanced. Similar to MakerDao, 3rd parties can run "keepers" - very simple implementations which continuously monitors the Kava/USDX credit system for unsafe CDPs, and execute the liquidation function the moment they become unsafe. Keepers can also perform arbitrage on DEX/Exchanges executing trades across the Kava platform and the markets.

Q57:

Alright! So KAVA is doing DeFi right, could you explain DeFi in layman term to us.

• Answer: Decentralized Finance. Finance is really ensuring everything about past, present, and future value of money. You need safe custody and a store of value to keep money you earned in the past safe to be used later when you need it. You need something liquid and easily tradable to be used in the present. And the trickier one is the future - people need to get loans on the assets they have or hedge against the assets they have in order to ensure they can build for a better future. That’s finance.
  
• DeFi is taking all those things and making them open access and unregulated so that regardless if you were born with out an ID, if your credit score is bad, or if the government is trying to censor your actions and limit your spending - DeFi promises to give you a way to get access to the financial products you need.
  

Q58:

Could you please briefly explain your projects, and why you choose DeFi as a problem to solve?

• Answer: Kava is a cross-chain DeFi platform for cryptocurrencies. Kava offers decentralized loans and stable coins for any other crypto asset such as BTC, XRP, BNB, and ATOM.
  
• DeFi is the killer use case of crypto today. I think most people see this clearly now. We believe providing the basic DeFi services is the very first step that is required before blockchain technology can really become wide spread - so we started here.
  

Q59:

Why the name of the project KAVA?

• Answer: We started in crypto thinking we would build banking products and we wanted a more relaxed cool name to stand out from other solutions. Turns out Kava means many things.
  
• Kava = Hippopotamus in Japanese
  
• Kava = crow in hindi
  
• Cava = wine region in spain
  
• Kava = a medicinal root you add to Tea
  
• Kava = now a cross-chain DeFi platform
  
• But TLDR - we liked the name and thought it sounded short and sweet.
  

Q60:

What do you think of the future of DeFi in this space? Will DeFi one day take over the traditional financial systems? -- any wild guess on when it might happen?

• Answer: I think centralized solutions will always have certain advantages and DeFi will also have certain advantages.
  
• But truthfully, KYC is a problem from a user experience point of view. One of the big things with DeFi is there is no need to make people go through a KYC process anymore.
  
• If we imagine a world where USD Is king, or Renminbi is king, or BTC is king. DeFi has a place in all of them because open access to financial services is a basic human necessity.
  

Q61:

As we have known, Lending is not the only problem to solve in the whole financial areas, are you planning on going beyond lending? What other financial products are in your pipeline?

• Answer: Thats a good #Q .
  
• While we have a lot to solve to offer lending to other crypto assets - we can expand our support to non-crypto assets, to NFT tokens, and other assets.
  
• We also have plans to offer derivatives and other synthetics other than USDX - such as synthetic bitcoin and Yuan. What is exciting about Kava and the oracle system run by validators is that we can leverage this infrastructure around the world to do all sort of things.
  
• One of the more interesting products is creating under-collateralized loans using payment channel (layer-2 tech) of our USDX coin. Two parties can lock funds in payment channels and place bets on the price feeds from the oracles. When the funds reach a maximum threshold, the bet closes. Since a price feed is just a data set, we can have the settlement rules be multiples of the real data. In simple terms we can create 100x leverage products for the craziest of traders 😉
  

Q62:

Btw KAVA is a bit unique because it use Cosmos/Tendermint. While other DeFi use Ethereum , why you guys choose Cosmos?

• Answer: Cosmos is the future. Even facebook’s Libra consensus design was just a copy of Tendermint. Kava, Binance, the Cosmos Hub and many other blockchains are built on the same Cosmos-SDK framework.
  
• It’s very flexible and soon interoperable. This is a huge advantage over Ethereum. Where system’s like MakerDAO will be forced to develop in a slowly evolving chain like Ethereum and only touching Erc20 assets, Kava will be able to rapidly evolve, program in GO rather than solidity, and interoperate with chains like Binance directly.
  
• We’re very excited to get BNB and BTCB onto Kava’s CDPs and to put KAVA and USDX onto the Binance DEX. This is fairly easy on Cosmos.
  

Q63:

I saw in KAVA deck that you guys will use USDX, is it a stable coin? How is it going to work and its relationship with KAVA token itself?

• Answer: USDX is an algorithmically stable token pegged to the USD. USDX is the token users recieve when they get a loan from the Kava platform. USDX is collateralized or backed by crypto assets so the Kava platform should always hold more crypto value than the USDX it loans making USDX a very safe store of value even if the market crashes 10x overnight. That is what a stable coin should do.
  
• USDX is special though. Natively, users can spend or trade USDX freely like other stable coins, but the important difference is that 1) USDX is free of censorship and does not require a bank or anything else. 2) USDX can be “bonded” or “staked” providing an interest bearing yield between 2-10% APR. This is substantially more than what I can even get from my bank account.
  

Q64:

From your point of view as KAVA team, what would be most anticipated feature in KAVA ?

• Answer: Our CDP platform launch later this year. The first USDX will be minted then.
  
• Support of BTC in the CDP smart contracts. No blockchain has supported a real decentralized custody and use of BTC with smart contracts before.
  

Q65:

Indonesia is one of the “developing” countries, how is DeFi can help in making a difference in those “developing” countries?

• Answer: I can’t speak for developing countries as it’s not my expertise, but DeFi in general is trying to offer the exact same services to EVERYONE. Whether you are in San Francisco or Indonesia, the financial services you should have should be similar. The rates and fees you pay should be the same. DeFi is fair treatment and open access for everyone. That is what’s nice about having things run on a protocol.

Q66:

Last but no least, since we are doing AMA in Indonesian group, I believed our members wants to know if you are interested in going to Indonesia to expand your community and reach?

• Answer: As I said, I have not been before! I am traveling throughout South East Asia for a lot of the year. It is one of my destinations. I hope to meet many of you while I am out there.

Q67:

Defi companies are growing at a rapid pace, but they're actually smaller than traditional financial institutions. In order for Defy to become a global trend, it must eventually acquire consumers within the traditional financial industry.

Traditional financial consumers, however, have poor technical understanding and want psychological stability through government guarantees such as deposit insurance. After all, what does KAVA think about long-term competitors as traditional financial institutions, and what long-term strategies do they have to embrace traditional financial consumers?

• Answer: We think of financial institutions as big honey pots of potential DeFi users. For example, if Kava can offer margin lending at better rates than a bank because there is no middle men or compliance costs, users should want to use that service.
  
• As crypto grows, I believe more FIs will integrate crypto assets and DeFi services. For example, in the US you cannot currently margin trade crypto as a retail user. But it could be possible for a regulated FI to integrate a lending service like KAVA without causing issues with regulators due to Kava having no counter party risk other than the user itself.
  

Q68:

MakerDAO is only for ethereum but Kava support multiple assets, is this only difference?

What are Kava main advantages compared to MakerDAO?

• Answer: Kava supports multiple assets THAT are on different blockchains. Maker can only support ETH. This is a huge difference. In addtion, the role of Maker is quite likely a security token. It represents fees paid by others. Where in Kava, the token is used in security of the blockchain protocol itself. The holders of Kava have a lot at stake and need it to govern the system. Maker holders have nothing at stake.
  
• I think a huge difference is that with our model being POS and based on validators with slashing if they don't participate our governance participation and management will be much more effective than MakerDao.
  

Q69:

Ticket claim for KAVA Launchpad is comming around the corner. This maybe last IEO ticket claim of this year. With this hype and expectation of investors/traders, do you think KAVA will be a big boom to end this year with happy tears?

If someone wants to manipulate Governance function of KAVA by changing voting result by possessing many Validators Node through buying over 51% KAVA of market, what will KAVA team do? Do you think Emergency Shutdown(Maker has this) can be considerd as a solution?

How will USDX be minted and backed on KAVA platform? If its based on uses crypto collateral, how will KAVA team make it stable since the inflation of crypto price?

• Answer: I believe Kava to be underpriced currently, especially compared to maker which is 10x the value and serving ETH which is much smaller market than ours.
  
• But I cannot tell you with certain if Kava will boom or bust - only the market can decide that. As with all speculative assets, do your homework and trade at your own risk. We here at kava are very LONG Kava, but we are biased 😉
  

Q70:

Stablecoin is the word that I heard everyday, so do you have any plans to release wallet for stablecoin?

• Answer: There are already wallets created for Kava that can hold our tokens 😉

Q71:

My first question is: Why do traders choose to use KAVA instead of margin on exchanges?

My second #Q is: What happens whenKAVA doesn't have enough cash to loan out?

• Answer: Traders who cannot get passed KYC can use Kava. Traders who want better rates than exchanges can use Kava. If regulators like in the US prevent margin trading, Kava is a great solution.
  
• Kava creates USDX out of thin air when users withdraw loans. It will only create Kava is the user locks a great value of crypto in the system to back it. When the USDX loan is repaid, it is destroyed. In this way, Kava can scale however big it wants - it will never run out of cash.
  

Q72:

i heard as you said before in San Fransisco, Silicon Valley. what is the relationship about Silicon Valley and KAVA? and what will KAVA done in this Q1 ?

• Answer: I am born and raised in Silicon Valley. I am blessed to have grown up in this area where lots of tech innovation is. However, I am the only one at Kava that lives here full time. The others on my team are in the Cayman Islands and Cambridge.
  
• San Francisco is a hub for the largest crypto projects - Ripple, Coinbase, Stellar, etc. It's a great place to network with founders and feel inspired to do big things. It is not the best weather here, but the people are focused and extremely helpful if they can be if you aim to do big things.
  

Q73:

With regard to minting new USDX, is there any potential chance to against Global financial law? Likewise USDT, issuing money should guarantee deposit of real collateral as I have known.

• Answer: USDX is debt. It is not a guarantee, but the protocol's rules state it must have more crypto assets behind it than the # of USDX issued. In this way, rules are better than guarantees. Tether guaranteed 1:1 USD, it turned out not to be true because their funds were seized by regulators. That is impossible in the case of Kava.

Q74:

What is the uniqueness of KAVA project that cannot be found in other project that´s been released before?

• Answer: Cross-chain is unique for us. But most unique is our partners and validator group that is launching our blockchain. We have incredible partners that support our work including Ripple, Cosmos, Arrington, Hashkey, SNZ, Lemniscap, etc.

Q75:

KAVA was initially planned to launch on Ripple network but later switched to Cosmos Tindermint Core. What is that something you see in Tindermint Core that is not available anywhere.

• Answer: We did not plan to launch on ripple and did not launch on "Tinder"-mint. I have a fiance - she would be quite mad.
  
• We did however use the Cosmos SDK - a tool set, to build our blockchain that features tendermint consensus.
  
• Tendermint is just the consensus so I assume you mean the SDK. The SDK is very much "choose your own adventure" you can build anything and design all the spec of your blockchain easily. In this way you choose the tradeoffs that make the most sense for your special application/network
  

Q76:

How much portion of USDX is backed from crypto/fiat money ...& please mention why any trader, hodler will prefer USDX over other stable coins?

What are the biggest challenges you expect to face and how do you plan to overcome these challenges?

• Answer: 150% of USDX or more is backed by crypto. Traders will use USDX because it offers a savings rate. This rate allows traders heding bitcoin or other assets to not only store value, but earn a return.

Q77:

What do you think about creating liquidity for the Kava project?

• Answer: It's the biggest challenge. My hope is the savings rate USDX offers will give it natural organic demand over existing stable coins. It will definitely be a large BD process to get USDX listed and used worldwide.
  
• We work with some of the worlds best market makers to seed liquidity today. But we will need organic demand in the long-term
  

Q78:

So many IEO projects consistently drop in price after listing. Whats different with KAVA, what are some special highlights?

• Answer: Why is Kava based on Cosmos? Based on what considerations?

Q79:

How do you see the chinese language community? How do you view the opportunities for growth in the chinese community?

• Answer: You will be soon listing on Binance, what are your plans on the business side after listing? In one years time, what are your thoughts on where Kava's development will be?

Q80:

If we take a look at all the different types of DeFi products/apps out there, including decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, atomic swaps, insurance products, lending platforms, trade financing platforms, custodial platforms, crowd investment platforms, etc, nearly cover all the important areas of traditional finance.

In this age of all these different platforms taking hold, where does Kava see itself appealing to its app developers, users, investors?

• Answer: What does Kava do? What can a normal user (of crypto) achieve by using KAVA?

Q81:

How does Kava maintain the stability of its stablecoin? Are there any opportunities for outsiders to arbitrage or any other mechanisms to maintain price stabilization

• Answer: What is the reason for the IEO price reaching 6x the first round private sale price? How did you come about to reaching this valuation?

Q82:

What would you be able to do more for Russian-speaking communities and regions?

• Answer: one thing to keep in mind is that yes, we do have limitations and regulations to follow when it comes to certain countries and we will adhere to those regulations in hopes of proving ourselves to be a thoughtful and long-term solution. while we may not directly work with some countries, we hope that communities there can understand that we're here focused on being sustainable rather than another project around shorter-term gains.
  
• for myself, I'm actually belarusian myself so I absolutely see the value of working in the CIS/Russian-speaking regions. we'll continue to do AMAs, interviews, and always engage with Russian-speaking communities to better understand what the #Q s, concerns, and thoughts.
  
• If there's anything else we can do in this region and with the @gagarin_ico communities, please let us know!
  

Q83:

What are your major goals to archive in the next 3-4 years? Where can we KAVA ecosystem in this period? What are your plans to expand and gain more adoption?

Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progresses and achievements till now, when you look back to the day when you have started this project?

• Answer: We want to really build out great DeFi products for the masses. I really believe that DeFi will be a major force to allow much more mass adoption for crypto over the coming years. In the sorter term, we want to push out our blockchain and build on top of that our CDP platform, which allows users to trustlessly put collateral onto the Kava blockchain, and receive a loan in USDX that will be also trustlessly administered.
  
• We will then build out more complex products and financial derivatives for crypto users and traders. We have barely scratched the surface in what we can do with DeFi so I can't predict the future, but we want to build products that are pegged to BTC values so that traders have more leverage purely in crypto.
  

Q84:

Which one of your milestone do you think was difficult and which was the encouragement that courages you to achieve it?

What were the Minimum and Maximum limit of KAVA tokens that one can be able to STAKE after the Mainnet launch ? And What will be the percentage of reward one gets and will it in future ?

• Answer: Good #Q ! Well we've been working on open source cross-chain technologies for a number of years and honestly it can be a pain. I think the Cosmos SDK made it significantly easier to implement the features that we wanted into the software.
  
• I think the largest challenges for Kava are not software based but in market adoption. Makerdao is a great project and they have spearheaded a lot of the work in the lending field. Hopefully Kava can be a very meaningful contributor as well
  

Q85:

What if someone fails to repay the debt? Is that KAVA is taking collateral system to enterprise level & if so, what's the plan? How secure KAVA is to safely handle the collateral tokens?

• Answer: These CDPs or "collateral debt positions" are always over-collateralized, which means you have to have more asset locked up in the bucket than you can draw from the bucket. The system leaves a margin when the collateral is 'called' to be able to sell off. If the asset cannot be fully redeemed KAVA is minted to cover the balance. Hence KAVA is a 'lender of last resort". This is why its important that we select good initially assets to support 👍

Q86:

I am very impressed with your voting method, how does it work? Whether users can vote to change things in the platform, are you a programmer with filters to decide what can be voted on and what is not possible?

• Answer: Thanks. A lot of this was pioneered with the Tendermint team. Basically voting is entirely open and asynchronous, meaning anyone can submit a proposal to be voted on. All the project in the Cosmos ecosystem are working diligently to expand the space of variable or features that can be modified via this governance method in protocol. For example, we were the first to enable transactions directly via governance in our Testnet-2000!

Q87:

Where does the interest rate come from for holding USDX specifically & technically?

• Answer: Great #Q ! Just like in MakerDAO, lenders of collateral (e.g. BTC, BNB) pay an annual interest rate to borrow USDX. A portion of that interest rate accretes to holders of KAVA, the rest we can apply a 'carrot' for users to adopt USDX. In short, Savings rate is loan interest rate less 'rents' collected from KAVA holders

Q88:

As far as I understand it KaVa is used both as a staking token and as collateral for Kava stablecoins (UsDX) .Can you talk a bit about the stability mechanism? Can other forms of collateral be used to create Kava stablecoins (a la Multi-Collateral Dai)?

• Answer: KAVA will not be used as a collateral type in the CDPs. Collateral types will be assets exogenous to the system, like BTC and BNB. Of course BTC and BNB's value fluctuates. To make USDX not fluctate we ensure there is always more BTC or BNB in the CDP bucket than 'stable' USDX. Therefore BTC could increase or decrease a lot, as long as its less than the 'stable' debt of USDX that you have drawn, the system is healthy and functional 👌

Q89:

As far as I know, KAVA had 150 Validators in the test. Why do you have so much. Which conditions are your team based on to choose / invite them to stay decentralized, important for a Defi platform like KAVA?

• Answer: KAVA mainnet will launch with a cap of 100 validators. We want as many validators as possible. The reason? What if KAVA was run by just you and me. Well that works if people trust us, but its pretty for us to collude and act maliciously. Its harder for 100 people to collude -- its still possible, but harder. And so we put a lot of effort in to promoting a healthy and large validator community, and empowering them to grow their stake in the system

Q90:

As a developer, which program languages can i use in kava core smart contracts?

2How secure your fully on-chain liquidity protocol & What's is a core Smart Contract ?can you briefly explain.

• Answer: Yay developers! 🤓 The Cosmos SDK is currently written in Golang. So thats a good start. What other language would you like to work in?

Q91:

What do you think of DEFI in the Blockchain space?

DeFi brings many benefits to users, but conflicts of interests with the Bank. What is the solution of kava?

• Answer: Defi to me is offering financial primates, the supplies of which are spreadout amongst many participants, as opposed to few. People offer loans on BTC today. Kava's goal is to maximize the amount of counterparties to any loan, thereby 'socializing' the returns on any activiely used financial product

Q92:

What is the crucial thing, in your opinion,that would increase adoption of KAVA and possibly the rest of crypto. What’s the KAVA economic model and how will it is architecture ensure scarcity of the token and help to growth token price?

Can you tell me more about the new technology that combines the benefits and interactive functions of Cosmos with the DeFi applications you have built?

• Answer: Principly what I believe is 'new' about the KAVA tech stack is that we are building a standalone piece of software that treats other network techologies as 'first class citizens'. This means from the ground up our design is mean to easily incorporate and work with other software. A lot of blockchain is a story of "everyone will use my software, because its the best". Kava Labs worked for years against this view while bringing open Interledger to market.

Q93:

As Per Kava website ! $KAVA was done many partnerships with Big project like Ripple, Cosmos, TenderMint, Hashkey, etc ! So, whats the major reason and benefits of these partnerships to kava project?

Kava Project have their own Mainnet Blockchain So, whats the main work of Cosmos Blockchain in Kava ? Is Kava projects is on Both mainnet and Cosmos OR Kava is just using the Cosmos Blockchain services?

• Answer: Working together. Pooling resources and talent to make something bigger! Crypto is still a little fish in a huge ocean of financial services. Kava Labs has always had an eye for inclusivity. Grow the pie!

Q94:

I have been too involved in KAVA's AMA, I think I know all about your technology.I want to ask a successful person like you why come with cryptocurrencies and blockchain, with talent. There are many other areas for you to choose, so why are you targeting such a risky market?

• Answer: Successful ay? hehe. Depends how you define success and what your goals are. I love delivering products to users. Crypto has some fantastic users, and there is still sooo much to be built. I think KAVA has a lot of promise, but there is still so much work to be done and I hope users like you all become producers some day as well

Q95:

What's the most critical and innovative point of KAVA to ensure users that it is the best under DeFi niche?

How can you compete MakerDAO which has done good number of business with recent market! If I hold KAVA tokens how KAVA leverage the tokens value and make it moon for me? 🙈

• Answer: "IF" you hold KAVA tokens now? 😂 Again I think this a markets concern. To the extend that users on other chains begin to trust KAVA brand for loan issuance, and we get some solid adoption of USDX I think we're in a good spot. I would say a benefit of KAVA is that we are FOCUSED. We're not trying to be everything for everyone. This is lending, quite simply, for the large market cap coins -- and that's hard enough

Q96:

Why KAVA needs to create it's own stable coin, whereas there are are many other options available in the market? Is that crypto tokens can be stable!!?

• Answer: Yeah there are a lot of USD backed stable coins that is true. Indeed we have looked around with working together with a number of them. The difference with USDX (and DAI) is that its crypto-collateral backed. Doesnt mean we won't work with others in the future 😉

Q97:

Processing fees on loans we need to pay in kava or usdx?

Which types of success you've been seen in testnet? Why on Nov 5th you've planned to launch mainnet? How many testnet was processed in the past?

• Answer: Three major testnets with some minor iterations therein. Testnet-3000's software was pinned to KAVA mainnet software. That testnet is looking good which is a good indicator for smooth sailing on mainnet launch, we'll see 🤞

Q98:

DeFi is a hot niche when it comes to crypto/blockchain project! Most of the projects are developing aiming DeFi, How KAVA is looking to contribute in DeFi ecosystem? What will be the approach of KAVA to systemize & increase adoptability?

• Answer: DeFi is big. Mostly on Ethereum, which is great! KAVA is for non-ethereum networks 😇

Q99:

What is the main reason that you think that Cosmos-based Kava zone will present a new validator opportunity :- a complex and multi-faceted governance system that allows differentiation?

• Answer: Validator #Q , nice. I believe its important for validators to be able to distiguish there service in multiple ways, not just on security (otherwise they will be treated as a commodity). KAVA present an opportunity for validators to distiguish themselves on the basis of proper governance of system parameters on behalf of their delegating constituents. KAVA is a "lender of last resort", so delegating to a sophisticated validator could lead to better results beyond security.

Q100:

How is kavas tendermint better than other defi consensus especially with the introduction of etheruem 2.0 which many believe will be better than all others - considering kavas association with ripple, is it possible to foresee defi loans from crypto to fiat ?

Maybe kava partnership with centralised banks?

• Answer: IDK about that. But we will be working closely with the great folks over at Ripple, thats for sure!

Q101:

Adoption is one of the important factor that all sustainable blockchain projects should focus to be more attractive in the invertors' eyes.

Can you tell me what KAVA has done and plan to do to achieve Adoption in the reality, real use cases, our real society?

• Answer: Bitcoin is real!? I'm continuously impressed by the demand and size of that network. Help us capture that demand! Really, if we can I think the future looks bright for KAVA!