Taraxa AMA Recap

01 Sep 202001:08

AMA

Taraxa AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:
Steven Pu, founder of Taraxa (@reedvoid)

Steven Pu

Hi everyone, it's great to be here!!!

Cryptodiffer Team

Welcome Steven, thank you for taking your time today!
Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with!

Steven Pu

No problem, it's a pleasure to be here to chat with the CryptoDiffer community
Awesome, let's get to them!

Cryptodiffer Team

Let`s start with the introduction !

Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Steven Pu

Sure, I'll make it short =)
My name is Steven Pu, founder of the Taraxa project. I graduated from Stanford with undergrad & master’s degrees in EE, launched a few startups in IoT and mobile health, and had a career in strategy consulting - my last job prior to starting Taraxa was an associate partner at Monitor Deloitte, helping to spearhead their digital innovation strategy practice. It's actually the convergence of working with very small teams (startups) and very large teams (Fortune 100 companies) that made me realize blockchain could solve a fundamental problem we face today - lack of reliable & trustworthy data.

Cryptodiffer Team

Perfect! Thank you for introduction!
Let's speak now about Taraxa in details
Q2: Can you introduce Taraxa to us?

Steven Pu

Sure. Let me start with a very short intro, and then I'll describe some of the use cases and our tech.
Taraxa is designed to track informal transaction to minimize the cost & risk of confusion and disputes. The vast majority (>80%) of the world’s transactions are informal, uncaptured, and unverifiable, often leading to costly confusion and disputes. Taraxa leverages inline capturing and audit logging to make these transactions trusted and seamless.
That sounds maybe too abstract, so let's start off with 2 examples of problems Taraxa is solving.
OK example #1: informal everyday agreements between people
Say you are working with a contractor to remodel your house, you signed a contract, but there are a lot of changes during the project. You talked to the contractor, “Hey I need the window to be a little more to the left by 5cm”. You don’t sign a contract for that change b/c it's too complicated, you probably just text him via whatsapp / wechat / sms, which is part of a much longer conversation where you discuss 20 other changes. Also, this contractor is not just working with you, he has 5 other job sites so he’s dealing with a TON of changes everyday, all of which are floating around in texts / chats / phone calls. A week later you see the window was in the wrong place, you talk to the contractor, he says “Did we talk about that?” You said you talked about it over text, he said “Sorry I just cleared my message!” You show him the text message, “He said oh I thought we were just talking about it, didn’t make a definitive decision? So you want me to re-do it? It’ll cost another day, more money.”
Now imagine this problem happening on a much larger scale, imagine this is on a construction site, with 100 contractors, a 5-year project building a skyscraper. These types of problems will compound 10,000x, creating a ton of confusion & disputes, adding in cost & risk to the entire project. One of our application platforms, Marinate, helps to tap into a huge amount of data that has not been captured before, b/c it’s hard to capture and even if you captured it, it’s not trusted. This is the final frontier, because no one is addressing this issue.
So that was an example about people-generated informal transactional data. Now let's talk about example #2: securing machine states.
We're working an asset leasing company with a focus on arcade machine leasing. They operated on a profit sharing model, which required that they got accurate and trustworthy revenue earning figures from their lessees, which had proven to be problematic because it was not in their customers’ interest to report accurate numbers. So, they had tons of orders that they can’t execute on because they cannot figure out how to agree with these new, overseas customers on how much each machine is earning, as there is no trusted source for that data.
For this project, we leveraged our Helio platform, which begins with a secure IoT endpoint, involving a secure element and a write-once MCU to ensure that the module is tamper-proof, to gather and provide critical machine operating data as well as anchoring them onto the blockchain, providing an audit trail. This helps all commercial stakeholders to come to agreement on what is happening to these assets and how much should be paid out. Coincidentally it also significantly cuts down on fraud committed by third-parties - e.g., kids trying to play them for free.
So those are the types of use cases we target with our application platforms, Marinate and Helio.
We here at Taraxa take a full-stack approach towards driving blockchain adoption, building both the Layer-1 infrastructure as well as the applications. We believe that to develop successful applications, you must be able to customize your layer-1 to meet the needs of the applications. But also, to build a successful layer-1 ecosystem, you must PROVE that your applications are commercially viable, or else developers will not come.
The Taraxa layer-1 protocol introduces many technical innovations, from a block DAG topology that allows high throughput without sacrificing security, to an asynchronous true finality that allows us to optimize the executional layer to further achieve 10x throughput even on top of block DAG, VDF/VRF to reproduce PoW's randomized & fair delay without the energy drain, and so much more!

Cryptodiffer Team

great!
the last one from us before we start community questions round!
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

Steven Pu

Love to share that!
Before I share though, please check out: https://www.taraxa.io/community#roadmap after the AMA for the latest updates on what we're doing. We'll have a ton of big announcements coming up =)
OK, so, what have we achieves thus far?
We have deployed a stable testnet that's quite performant, a fully web3-compatible RPC layer & basic tooling, basic testnet interfaces such as an explorer and a sandbox (wallet + contract deployment), two functional application platforms that have been market tested - Marinate and Helio
I do want to highlight that not only have we successfully built a blockchain protocol from scratch, we also market-tested two application platforms with a large number of potential customers, all within the past 2 years!!
Coming up, in 2021, we have two primary goals, one is mainnet deployment, the other driving adoption for our application platforms.
For mainnet, the most important thing to note (even beyond performance) is security & stability. We will be closely involving the community every step of the way as we roll out a phased approach to large-scale stress testing of the network. First, we will incentivize the community for simply running a testnet node and reporting errors. Second, we will roll out a mirrored staking on ETH that projects onto our testnet’s staking mechanisms, and enable community members to stake their tokens, participate in tests, and earn yields. Lastly, we will transition from the ERC20 tokens into native tokens and conduct final rounds of stress testing and security audits before releasing our mainnet candidate.
For our application platform, especially for Marinate, we will be rolling out a series of integrations with baseline communication tools such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat to help the community engage with our product, get a better understanding for their uses, and help source additional use cases. Throughout our project’s history, many of the use cases and customers had been introduced to us from enthusiastic community members, and we wish to keep honoring that tradition in involving our community in our product development & adoption.

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers!
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Steven Pu

Most exciting part of the AMA =)

Cryptodiffer Community

1. Concerning your mainnet, I'm sure you are aware that security and stability are key to having a successful mainnet launch. Will you be involving the community as it goes?

2. Since Taraxa will transition from the ERC20 tokens into native token after mainnet, what will happen to the ERC20 tokens in circulation, will they be burned or you plan running on both Ethereum and your native blockchain?

Steven Pu

1/ We will involve the community to run load and security stress testing, and inviting security teams to hack and audit our code. 2/ This is a fascinating question. We recognize that ETH is now the de-facto ecosystem for financial assets with a ton of liquidity, so we have an ETH bridge in our technical roadmap to enable cross TARA-ETH trading. More details to come as we get closer to finalizing our technical plans.

Cryptodiffer Community

Taraxa has been great, but as an investor, we're always concerned about the loss of hackers. So Taraxa has any mode to help users like me more secure?

Steven Pu

All of our contracts have been and will be audited by top-notch security firms, in addition to the extensive security testing we've done before. We take security very seriously here at Taraxa.

Cryptodiffer Community

What are the most important partnerships you have to achieve a good adoption of the Taraxa market today and what benefits does your project get?

Steven Pu

We will be announcing them very soon. These partnerships, in addition to providing usage traffic to the Taraxa ecosystem, also informs us of true market needs and helps guide us on how to scale our application platforms quickly.

Cryptodiffer Community

From your tweet :#imToken #6842
We are providing TARA token’s information on imToken. After completion, you can see the logo and full information inside imToken’s Token Manager.

What's the relationship between Imtoken and Tara Token? Do they have different use cases?

Steven Pu

I think that was probably our team making contact with all the major wallet teams to put Taraxa's logo into them =) Pretty simple integration. Later on when we roll out staking we'll also be exploring collaborations to enable that from wallet clients as well.

Cryptodiffer Community

What can Taraxa offer to solve the scaling problem? And how does Taraxa deal with the threat of centralization?

Steven Pu

First, our Layer-1 is already introducing a ton of innovations to boost our throughput and minimize latency. We currently have >5k tps with <1 sec inclusion latency, with a short-term roadmap to 50k tps.

Second, no matter how fast your Layer-1 is, it won't have infinite throughput. That's why our integrated approach makes sense, b/c we can design application-specific layer-2 to batch process a ton of transactions via Merkle proofs or roll-ups, to further minimizing the hit directly into Layer-1. This allows us to scale our application platforms indefinitely.

Cryptodiffer Community

Taraxa token is a non-refundable functional utility token which will be used as the medium of exchange between participants on Taraxa. But what is the main goal of introducing the Taraxa token and in what ways are users rewarded on the Taraxa platform?

Steven Pu

The TARA token is a classic utility work token for our layer-1 infrastructure. It is used to pay for gas fees, staking, and later on governance as the network becomes more decentralized. Staking will result in a maximum of 20% annualized yield if the network hits its targeted 67% staking rate.

Cryptodiffer Community

Q1. Regarding your Marinate app which formalizes sporadic daily interactions that people conclude both verbally and offline, my concern is privacy of this app, how sure are we that our conversations won't be released to third parties?

Q2. Does Taraxa team/project have access to conversations the app has helped retain in the past

Steven Pu

q1: GREAT question. What is stored on the Taraxa ledger are hashes of the informal agreement, plus cryptographic signatures of the stakeholders to that agreement. To an outside observer without access to the original data, it just all looks like random strings of text. So it is completely private, unless the stakeholders decide to reveal their meaning.

q2: we have on our roadmap for users to choose how long the app server holds the info, or if they want the app server to hold it at all. Some users will like the convenience, some will want more privacy, and we want to respect the users' choices.

Cryptodiffer Community

⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️ ⛲️
Why is Taraxa built on the next generation Block DAG topology and how does the business logic work?
How does it check the off-chain and offline transaction audit log?

Steven Pu

The audit log provides a guarantee that, 1/ the informal agreement happened; 2/ the key stakeholders agreed to it. How this is done is a bit more complex. With the original informal agreement data, any stakeholder of the agreement could hash it on their own and look it up on the Taraxa chain. Once they find it, they could also look for signatures, and our application will provide a bridge associating proofs of digital identities (email / TG) with these signatures - ONLY WITH THE USER'S APPROVAL of course. So it is a two step process: validating the agreement's integrity, and validating the stakeholder's signatures with their approval.

Cryptodiffer Community

NFT is considered the next trend of the crypto industry after DeFi. Could Taraxa share your opinion about NFT? Where do Berry see the future evolution of NFT features and capabilities in the next few years?

Steven Pu

We have been thinking about this. There are a few use cases where our partners have made some interesting proposals. For example, one of our partners in Japan has been working with various popular music groups to issue digital collectibles. We thought it would be interesting for them to issue NFT autographs over texting with their fans, cryptographically signed and traceable to their origins in addition to being an NFT, turning an "informal conversation" into an autograph. It's just one of the many ideas we're exploring.

Cryptodiffer Community

Do Taraxa communities care enough? Have you made any changes in your project with the opinions and contributions of your communities?

Steven Pu

Many of our use cases come from our community members! The asset leasing use case, and another upcoming use case in marine maintenance, all come from community members who have deep expertise within specific industry verticals who gave us not only suggestions but also business connections to make it happen!

Cryptodiffer Community

What plans has Taraxa made to educate the community which would in turn raise awareness, adoption and make more people understand about Taraxa easily?

Steven Pu

We have a lot of community events planned to get the community to engage with our applications. Please be on the lookout!

Cryptodiffer Community

How to buy $ TARA ? What is your listing plan after the sale ? DEX or CEX....?

Steven Pu

The Foundation is currently working with Bitmax / Kucoin / Gate as official listings, please go check them out =) I personally cannot comment on the Foundation's future listing plans, stay tuned for more announcements =)

Cryptodiffer Community

👉👉👉 How does Taraxa take advantage of online capture to make transactions reliable and seamless? Doesn't this imply a higher degree of vulnerability, being online, to hackers?

Steven Pu

I think you might be mistaking the word "inline" for "online". INLINE capturing means our applications capture the informal and unstructured data from the source of the data, so that we ensure we're getting first-hand information rather than second hand - during which the data could have been altered or tampered with. An example of inline capturing would be, Marinate integrating with Email where you directly send the agreement to the stakeholders and cc-ing Marinate on it, or Helio building a secure hardware IoT endpoint and integrating it directly into the assets' signal sources. This is inline capturing, getting the data, securely, at the source, so there's no tampering.

Cryptodiffer Community

Can members of the Taraxa ecosystem get TARA tokens participating in the Taraxa programs? What does your member incentive system include?

Steven Pu

We have a ton of programs coming up! We're in the process of re-launching our community site and our point-tara claim site, they're coming soon and once they're up we'll have plenty of community engagement programs for everyone to partake in!

Cryptodiffer Community

How do plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well? Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand about your project?

Steven Pu

We're rolling out an ambassador program! Please DM our admins if you're interested, we'll be rolling that out very soon.

Cryptodiffer Community

Where does the project name come from? What does it mean for you and why did you choose that name for your project?

Steven Pu

The word "Taraxa" comes from "Taraxacum officinale", which is the Latin name for the common dandelion. We thought the imagery of the dandelion is perfect for decentralization, where seeds fly around, take root and become new plants =)
I completely agree that DeFi is a huge validation of blockchain's adoption. But at the same time, the use case we're going after, informal transactional agreements, is so so much bigger, because they don't just exist inside the crypto world. That is our focus, it has been our focus since Day 1 of the project, and will continue to be our focus going forward especially because we've gotten so much positive market validation for it!

Cryptodiffer Community

Taraxa is project specifically designed to track informal transactions, so what are the requirements that Taraxa need to track transactions? Also do you support the track of transaction on different blockchains or networks?

Steven Pu

Informal transactions are much broader than just "I give you $4" type of financial transactions, it's basically all forms of coordinating communication between people / machines. Our focus on obtaining the maximum # of possible volume in the most secure manner will be focus on integrating with existing communication applications, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, SMS, Email, etc.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the next generation Block DAG. How is this different from DAG projects like IOTA or NANO?

Steven Pu

You should totally read this: https://medium.com/taraxa-project/debunking-misconceptions-about-dag-150fcc6c6e7 =)

Cryptodiffer Community

✅ Everything is Built around the TARA token but I couldn't find anything about it, so can you explain us your Tokenomics?

Steven Pu

Here you go: https://docs.taraxa.io/tech-whitepaper/economic-model

Cryptodiffer Community

On the blockchain, the risk of transactions being unofficial or un-caught and unverifiable is perhaps preventing the progress of this industry. How does Taraxa remedy this and use the capture and audit log?

Steven Pu

Our inclusive protocol minimizes the chances of discarded transactions - the network is able to generate many many blocks simultaneously without sacrificing security, and we have true finality so there's zero risk of state reversion. All of that were designed to ensure that informal transactions logged into the audit trail are secure and tamper-proof.

Cryptodiffer Community

❤️❤️What is Taraxa currently working on and what further developments/announcements can we expect to hear this year?

Steven Pu

We will announce very soon a blitzkrieg roadmap so that everyone can transparently see our progress! We will also be making announcements with our partners as they are finalized, very very soon.

Cryptodiffer Community

Lots of projects have appeared and issued their own tokens or coins, but many projects failed to disappear (SCAM) because they could not develop their tokens or coins, how did your project achieve success and tell us that your project is not a SCAM project?

Steven Pu

Honestly, just watch what we do. Projects either deliver or they don't, don't listen to what projects say, watch what they do.

Cryptodiffer Community

I am an EXPERIENCED DEVELOPER AND ETHICAL HACKER, do you have plans for HACKATHON so as to check the security of your ecosytem periodically and also invite developers to build?

Steven Pu

We will be rolling out our bug bounty program very soon, stay tuned!

Cryptodiffer Community

What makes you feel confident about the survival & sustainable success of Your project in the near future?

Steven Pu

We have a great team, great partners, and a clear vision. That's what makes me personally very confident about our future!

Cryptodiffer Community

Where do I get information about your team? Why do you prefer to be anonymous? Do you have a plan to identify your team later?

Steven Pu

Our team is NOT anonymous - why do you say that? Here is our team: https://www.taraxa.io/about#team

Cryptodiffer Community

How did you build an ecosystem of users, partners, and content creators, bringing best-in-class digital services to emerging markets?

Steven Pu

The way to build a successful ecosystem is to concretely demonstrate that our use cases are commercially viable - that developers and partners can MAKE MONEY by participating in the ecosystem and building on top of our APIs. The way to prove it, is to simply do it ourselves. This is why we're building app platforms like Marinate / Helio, because we need to drive at least one of them into profitability, then after we've proven it, it will be a much more sustainable sell to third-party developers.
@makscryptodiffer I think I've answered as many of the interesting questions as I could =)

Cryptodiffer Team

Amazing job;)
Thank you for your time🙌
Thank you everyone who took part today 🔝
Great questions!