Agora AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Hello everyone!
We are glad to meet here Leonardo, CEO of Agora (@leogammar)
Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
I’m Leonardo the CEO of Agora, Mechanical engineer, Financial engineer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, worked in investment banking structuring products for emerging markets then for one of the biggest funds in the world, designing algorithms arbitraging future contracts. Both my mother and my father were diplomats. I left the fund selling my IP to them and came back to Switzerland. I had a coffee with one of my best friends who was finishing his PhD at the Decentralised and Distributed System Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was telling me that they just started building a chain to solve some of the issues BTC and ETH had. What if I try to invest some money, and build a protocol with a 0 financial incentivised consensus so people can vote safely? All the guys of the Lab agreed and we started working on it. The guys were super sharp in Z-knowledge proof and NF Shuffling, all of them were really into citizen rights to express themselves rather than privacy coin, I was blessed to have them.
CryptoDiffer team
Can you briefly describe what is Agora in 3-5 sentences?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
A protocol made for the purpose of voting, built from scratch, with a number of Dapps to enable anyone, anywhere to vote for elections, referendums, surveys, shareholder meetings, exchange listing etc. Allowing communities, private and public organisations to eradicate fraud and corruption, reduce costs and engage voters in a modern, convenient and accessible way.
A consensus mechanism designed for the purpose of voting with 0 financial incentive, a permission infrastructure, a permission-less infrastructure, a voting Dapp, a supply chain ballot tracking Dapp, an official Dapp to help our clients (governments, institutions, communities) to organise their election both financially and logistically as well as movement of their staff.
But you guys need to get involved as well.
You are building for all of us:
As much software as you think is needed to make elections more efficient, less expensive and tension-free. Governments, competitors and communities can build as many Dapps as they wish on top of our infrastructures and utilise our chains, to help us all achieve our goal: Better elections all over the planet.
CryptoDiffer team
What are the major milestones you have achieved so far?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
National elections, but overall 33 elections: Agora organises elections, referendum, marketing surveys. Lawyers associations, association of CEOs, brands, any election that requires technical support and a trustworthy outcome, Agora will be here to help.
http://www.agora.vote/news
https://medium.com/agorablockchain/drc-former-prime-minister-and-presidential-candidate-supports-blockchain-based-election-e55fbe3e19e8
You probably heard of elections in Zug Switzerland ? maybe Geneva and Lausanne as well? a shareholder meeting for 1.5k shareholders
CryptoDiffer team
Can you name your competitors? What are the main competitive advantages of Agora?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Horizon State, I think Voatz. 1st advantage is money. In order to be able to apply for a public tender you have to have the finances to support an election. I’m not sure that our competitors are legally able to file any public tender for an election that involves a presidential outcome.
2nd. Agora is a protocol built from the ground up not a Dapp on someone’s else infrastructure. When you build on ETH you have to play within the contrains of ETH. Do you think that the US government would accept to take the risk of having Russian non KYCed miners providing consensus during their national elections ? Or vis versa Russia with the US… You cannot approach goverments with a Dapp… What if their laws say: “The final outcome of the election has to be the paper ballot result?” We built a protocol on top of which competitors. governments can come and build freely. We provide a supplychain solution to those who have paper ballot laws, we track the qr code and make sure the results are trustworthy.
So if you have a killer ID management app, one of your friends has a voice recognition app an your other friend does finger prints recognition then please come and join build on top of our chain to help everyone build a safe environment for voting.
But Agora is not and will not be FB or Cambridge Analytica, we don’t know who voted, not our role, we don’t do or care about KYC. We receive ballots in a anonymised way, we shuffle them more and send them to the chain
the idea would be for us to become a foundation and let the citizen build apps and choose the best apps to work with
CryptoDiffer team
Tell us about your ongoing crowdsale: what are the conditions?
How many have you raised so far on previous rounds? Who are your backers and why do you need to raise more?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
10% discount, no dumping from previous rounds for 3 months, 500k to raise 1.1% circulating supply for 3 months. Pure retail round, all fair. MM capabilities of a company with 15Mil USD. immediate liquidity (in a week) on DEX and a few other exchanges.
We’re ramping up exchange listing quite quickly and convinced 2 exchanges to list their first BEP2 tokens.
It was important for Binance and us to give a good user experience to the traders
Cryptodiffer Community
1 If you had to apply the voting system for the first time officially, in what scenario would it be? Voting in a company, contest, presidential, etc. ?
2 Do you think they are beating their competitors in the ecosystem (blockchain)?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We already ran several elections, but if I had to choose again, I would choose a small scale government one. You understand, trial and error. Our dream is to have a more democratic world, even tho private elections are fun!
Definitely: centralised black box are too easy to hack, we hacked the US machines in 80 minutes
Cryptodiffer Community
Hello, my question is on the current topic for Russia.Moscow city Duma elections will be held soon. On August 8, French cryptographer Pierrick Gaudry reported a break-in of encryption scheme of the Moscow Internet voting system on the website of the Lorraine research laboratory. Perhaps the staff of the Department of information technology of Moscow faced with the features of the programming language Solidity, which is written smart contracts for their blockchain.What is the advantage of Agora and what advice can you give to Moscow government ? Thanks.
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
The advantages are stated below. The price will depend on the scale and how complexe the network needs to be in average it’s 50 to 80% cheaper
Cryptodiffer Community
I tried to find many voting-related projects on blockchain but fail to find any in the crypto market great to see a new concept and please describe what potential are you seeing in voting how it will impact the blockchain system if it implements successfully?
Any plan to list on a loyal cryptocurrency exchange like binance, kucoin?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Reduce corruption, cheaper elections. Yes Kucoin and Binance are in the list. It’s better to ramp up than ramp down 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
Hello, ima from Ukraine and you should know that our new President declares building “government in a smartphone” and recently promised that next elections will be held online. Also, former Ukraine first lady Kateryna is your advisor. This can be an amazing use-case for Agora. Do can Agora make a voting ecosystem for 45mln people? Have you discussed it with our politicians? Are there any plans or agreements? Thank you=)
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Cryptodiffer Community
Q: Where does your team core profit come from to keep project working smoothly since i see in White paper that Consensus Node earn 5% and Citizen Auditor Nodes earn 95% of Election Reserver Tokens?
Q: Does Agora have an anti cheating/manipulating system to prevent bad persons or groups from trying to harm health of voting results?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
https://medium.com/agorablockchain/eat-sleep-audit-repeat-acd8bcbbabad
Cryptodiffer Community
There will be many hacker attacks to change the results of the vote, how can agora handle it?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Our consensus is called proof of sign, not offering any financial incentive to the nodes, all of them are equal and the consensus is provided based on their digital signature. Agora has three technological innovations that make them stand out they are called Skipchain, Cotena and Valeda. Skipchain provides a consensus mechanism with high throughput and efficient transaction validation. Cotena then provides a method for storing cryptographic Skipchain proofs onto the Bitcoin blockchain and Finally, Valeda performs cryptographic proofs validating Skipchain and Cotena data all with the goal of providing high security and verifiability.
The ledger is accessible to everyone, so not just outside analysts but voters themselves can look and verify that their vote is accurate and is unaltered the results of the election will also be publicly available to all parties in an election as well as the cryptographic proofs of their validity furthermore Agora does not have access to user data, including the content of voter ballots which is crucial for privacy. All ballots are encrypted on each individual’s voting device with open source encryption tech before being transmitted to Agora’s network then Once ballots are put on the network, they are anonymized thus detaching the vote from the ID of the voter.
Auditors, Consensus nodes, links to other public chains to send and protect our votes
Cryptodiffer Community
Security, scalability, and data privacy are three aspects that are very important at the enterprise level, how Agora network handle these issues?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Agora organised difficult elections with millions of votes in a few hours. Our Sharding system enables us to divide the election in several micro elections anonymise them independently and send the results to the chain. That’s how we can handle the flux and it works. The chain is designed for voting.
Data privacy: We don’t collect data, we dont know who votes, if you hack us you have nothing to find
Cryptodiffer Community
If there is an employee in Agora who is corrupt to manipulate the results of the vote, how to restore the trust of the Agora users?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Agora doesn’t provide consensus, the code is made public to the clients and stress tested before every election
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you see yourself in your project? What are some of the best and worst experiences you have encountered upon taking this project and make this as your step to become successful? Are you guys willing to do anything for your project? As you know dumpers are everywhere. You cant control them but did you already planned about this scenario? Just in case?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
It’s difficult when dictators invite you and want your system for a PR move. We have to be careful all of us to explain that there is a major difference between the word blockchain and the right implementation of blockchain.
Cryptodiffer Community
How is the person identification and confirmation system implemented to your voting dapps?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We try not to do that, we’re not in the business of data. It’s a full time job to be a good ID manager !
Cryptodiffer Community
Q* Can We Vote Offline ( Without internet) with your system. If Yes then How?
Q* According to your plans When will be in Asia this kind Voting system will be Launched ?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Very good question ! YES you can vote offline then you have 8 or 9 hours dep on how long the event is open for to find internet and send your vote.
We helped Sierra Leone and Congo 2 countries where internet is not everywhere and it worked fine, with internet hotspot and satellite. If internet is available in some keys points it’s just fine for us.
Questions about the utility of the token: Agora provides a variety of blockchain based voting services BaaS utilising a proprietary, zero financial incentive consensus mechanism (Proof of Sign). Agora incentives the auditing of elections. So Agora pays auditors all over the world to watch the consensus and the election overall. Election officials contract Agora and pay the fee, Agora takes 50% in average to go buy vote tokens on the secondary market, burn 10% of them, a reserve of vote tokens is put aside to pay the node operators and those verifying the election, the election happens, results are verified and nodes and verifiers are paid out with final results being securely stored on the public ledger.
Agora’s token free consensus mechanism is validated by, reputable, invite-only, not-for-profits who house our nodes. During an election, KYCed Auditors will watch these nodes and provide instant and honest feedback through a simple and easy to use interface on their smart device or computer, which takes approximately 15 minutes. For this service, auditors get paid.
i) VOTE is a utility token: auditors must work to earn their VOTE tokens.
Auditors are contractors of Agora, they are randomly selected and contracted for one day, the election day. Their job is to watch the election.
ii) Auditors have to tell the truth: in order to be eligible for election auditing, auditors need to stake a portion of their tokens. They are putting some of their skin in the game, it’s a collateral for their honesty. If they don’t tell the truth, their tokens will be taken away from them and given to charity.
Since they are KYCed they will no longer be able to audit elections afterwards.
(Here, we don’t want to go into too much detail of all the statistical data, AI theories, etc, that Agora is using to solve point ii). Another article will be dedicated to the technicalities of our system, for now let’s just focus on the business side).
iii) Auditors get paid: they worked during the election day for roughly 15 minutes; audited the consensus by watching the behaviour of the nodes, flagged abnormalities, if any, on the technical side, or on the ground if they’re on the spot. They then get paid proportionally to the tokens they staked.
We split our money with our auditors: They are our contractors but the beauty of all this is that, they don’t know us, don’t like their only incentive is to tell the truth
for example if a node is down between 3pm and 3:15pm and auditors report it, it’s in our favor, we can repair
Cryptodiffer Community
What is the AGORA ? Why is the Need of AGORA Platform ? Why you Came up With the name AGORA?
Do You Have Any Working Project & How are you going Replace EVM Machines?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Agora is the greek ancient parliament
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. As you are operating in a highly competitive sector of the market how do you plan to get ahead of your competitors ?
Q2. Which sectors/use cases have you identified as genuine sources of revenue?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Not that competitive. The market is massive, very few are out there, most of them are centralised blackboxes. The voting industry is 0.3% of the World GDP an election can cost up to 1B USD
Cryptodiffer Community
Why should governments/ institutes trust on agora voting how does transparency process going on?
When can we expect any place/institution where the agora voting system will be live and works successfully?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We don’t provide consensus, give the code to audit, invite their citizens to audit
Cryptodiffer Community
1. How many governments/organizations Agora has worked till now?
2. What are my benefits if I hold your token other than voting? Any added value for token holders?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
You can make money. No matter what the business cycle is, if you guys stake and audit, you will share all profits we make. We buy back and burn some. So if Agora is making money, the token value will increase and holders will make money, doesn’t matter what other coins are doing, only based on our capability to execute. It’s a good coin to have in your portfolio because it provides some uncorrelation to the market.
Cryptodiffer Community
How did You select strategic partners and early investors ?Can you put some light on your partnerships right now?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
People who opened doors and help us raise. Some governments are also partners. I’m happy to have these partners because they are supportive long term. No one wanted or tried to get BEP2 tokens for the launch
Cryptodiffer Community
What set of equipment is needed for voting? Is it necessary to equip special rooms / develop terminals or will it be possible to use the system to vote from a PC / phone? How elections in Sierra Leone are organized?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
It really depends on the use case. Supply chain, mobile voting, backend of voting machines depends…
Cryptodiffer Community
Would you consider issuing other tokens in other blockchains to increase liquidity?
In other words, can I design my own particular voting system through the agora blockchain?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Yes
Cryptodiffer Community
What are you bringing into the crypto that no project has done so far??
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Use cases, real implementation. When BTC is still struggling with ETF, Ripple replacing swift, we already organised and helped national elections to happen
Cryptodiffer Community
1. If an individual vote via Ur dapp do he need to submit KYC inorder to vote ?, if yes the most important question will arise in every individuals mind “is our KYC(ID’s) safe?” because most secured exchanges also got hacked recently like binance etc..? Which or what type of procedure u r using to protect our/users/voters KYC documents?
2. agora’s financial model is free of POS/POW consensus, this means the main utility of vote token is only voting, usually voting held in more than couple of years in every country this will result in low liquidity, how will agora overcome this liquidity problem?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
The token is not used to vote, it’s used to audit. it’s a collateral for your honestly. We don’t like the idea of giving a price per vote
Cryptodiffer Community
What is the cost of implementing the agora voting system in every place? Tell one place cost for implementation?
Any plans to implement agora on aisa like India, China?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
It can vary from a few thousands to millions. No plan for China. If an election is 600Mil we can get that cost down to 50-70Mil if we’re good.
For all questions about why holding Agora tokens, how Agora makes money: BaaS + Token based.
https://medium.com/agorablockchain/eat-sleep-audit-repeat-acd8bcbbabad
I’d add something, coming from a finance: You can make money. No matter what the business cycle is, if you guys stake and audit, you will share all profits we make. We buy back and burn some. So if Agora is making money, the token value will increase and holders will make money, doesn’t matter what other coins are doing, only based on our capability to execute. It’s a good coin to have in your portfolio because it provides some uncorrelation to the market.
ALL FUTURE CASHFLOWS WILL BE DISCOUNTED BACK IN THE PRESENT VALUE OF THE COMPANY AND ITS TOKEN.
Hopefully the market will be able to give a good approx to Agora’s value not only based on speculation. If we organise a presidential election next time, the market will how much that is, how much is burnt etc…
But the good thing is that soon, we will put a credit card portal on our website and elections can run organically. Only big size elections require us to be on the ground. For small size election you ca get the service from us and all the products you need, notify your voters, we’ll send notification to the auditors so they can audit and that’s it. We only act as moderators to make sure that the topic of the election is compliant.
So anytime an election is organised, even community ones, the organisers, pay and tokens get bought and burnt automatically.
This is how elections are organised now: 1 technical provider, 1 gov agree to run elections together, they do it and get a press release out saying it was fine.
Some observers can come check only if they get visas and are invited otherwise we just need to trust the outcome coming from the mouth of the gov and the tech provider.
Super expensive to move paper ballots, to deploy the army and the police because sometimes it’s just impossible in some countries to have people with different opinions making the queue in the same place.
Now there are 4 forces:
gov, tech provider, consensus and auditors and it’s on blockchain
the tech provider is like the admins of this chat
they dont intervene
just let things happen
that’s what we do at Agora
provide the tech and let the feedback happen
Cryptodiffer Community
How does AGORA plans to fund its development to keep moving forward, if they face a situation like fund crisis?
Do you have any plans to expand your project in International market or globally?Specially in India?
What is the consensus algorithm used by the project and how was it picked?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We have enough money and enough clients to run the business. Cost reduction is the answer when we face a crisis
Cryptodiffer Community
With 2.4 billion active members , Facebook can build a democratic blockchain voting platform soon , how will agora compete with them , what is it that you are building that Facebook cannot build ?
Who will decide on the node operators? Your organization or world governments
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Would you really want FB to track your movement of funds and right to vote ???? We really need to wake up….
Please just think about a world controlled by Amazon, google and FB. Tech companies are the new land lords of the XXI century, be careful to who you give your data and what they do with it. DATA RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
Also a more business minded answer: Governments will not want that neither. With Agora they don’t need to trust a Swiss tech provider, they can build on top on the chain, but if other apps are available and really sharp than maybe their people would prefer to go with these apps.
or maybe the international community would ask governments to go with standards
Cryptodiffer Community
You added the ability to change the choice in ballot, which is not standard for the generally accepted voting system. How, then, is the vote counting technically implemented?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Very good question, same encrypted key voting again, TX from same sender.
People can change their votes until the last second, so if someone takes your phone, offers you money, take your passport, you just need your face, since KYCed before to get back your info and change your vote.
If anyone wants to put pressure they need to hold the entire population hostage at the precise end of the electoral event 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
Since cryptocurrency and therefore crypto voting is relatively new technology that is mostly used by the younger generation do you think there will be significant pushback against it from the baby boom generation? After all baby boomer voter turnout rate is higher than any other age group, and they aren’t the most technologically advanced bunch.
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We even happy a deft and bling friendly Dapp
it’s not easy but it’s doable, we did in a country where 1/2 never went to school
and thats the reason why we choose these challenging use cases, because there is a need and it’s POSSIBLE
JUST DO IT
Let me give you a quick tech overview:
Agora chain is a propriatary chain based on a non financially incentivised consensus mechanism which has been purpose built for the use case of voting.Why did Agora build an entire blockchain for voting? The need for a non financial incentive built propietary chain serves the communities and not the incentives of miners on the network. Agora’s public blockchain which is called the Bulletin Board is where the data is stored throughout any given election process. The public nature means that Any party can verify the validity of a given election as well as all of the intermediate steps of the voting process.
Our consensus is called proof of sign, not offering any financial incentive to the nodes, all of them are equal and the consensus is provided based on their digital signature. Agora has three technological innovations that make them stand out they are called Skipchain, Cotena and Valeda Skipchain provides a consensus mechanism with high throughput and efficient transaction validation. Cotena then provides a method for storing cryptographic Skipchain proofs onto the Bitcoin blockchain and Finally, Valeda performs cryptographic proofs validating Skipchain and Cotena data all with the goal of providing high security and verifiability.
The ledger is accessible to everyone, so not just outside analysts but voters themselves can look and verify that their vote is accurate and is unaltered the results of the election will also be publicly available to all parties in an election as well as the cryptographic proofs of their validity furthermore Agora does not have access to user data, including the content of voter ballots which is crucial for privacy. All ballots are encrypted on each individual’s voting device with open source encryption tech before being transmitted to Agora’s network then Once ballots are put on the network, they are anonymized thus detaching the vote from the ID of the voter.
And some other fun things to watch
For the Ukrainians here 😉
Her Excellency Ameenah Gurib, 6th President of Mauritius
My friend Aldrich Head of Business Dev at Okex
and finally, I want you to keep an eye on this:
https://medium.com/agorablockchain/agora-entering-the-latin-american-market-730a511d6e55
Cryptodiffer Community
Anonymity is a key point in every voting, as we know that in Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc we can check every block and every transaction and it is very easy to reveal personality. How Agora will guarantee anonymity and privacy for voters? Even with your mixing tech – governments and politicians should fully control the servers (national security matter) – and what you can do with that?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
NF shuffling and Z knowledge proof are needed, but not sufficient.
We overall have patented 4 other algorithms used to provide privacy to users. But as I said we don’t know who are the voters, we don’t deal with the KYC. Tho we make sure to work with ethical, reliable providers. The KYC can be provided by the government themselves, they still won’t be able to know who voted what.
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. How did the community bring you new opportunities as a business and how did you utilize these opportunities to build the Agora Blockchain??
Q2. What’s the different between vote token and agora token?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Q1. Many journalists, contributors in previous rounds opened many doors
Q.2 VOTE token is the only token for Agora
we sometimes call it Agora VOTE token
but it’s VOTE
in short
Cryptodiffer Community
Do you think you can Really Handle Indian Elections? Because of so much People Voting at Once.
Do you have Agora for Organizations to Just try to see how it works and VOTING be done through Basic Mobile phones like Sending Message Code to Vote
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Yes I’m sure we can. It needs a lot of preparation of course and full support from Indian government. But we didn’t have (of course) and will probably never have such a massive use case.
No votes by message, not a good idea.
Cryptodiffer Community
Try again haha
Why Binance chain? I know it’s a simple but powerful question
I do not know if I am very well on the wave, but this type of blockchains can suffer 51% attack? and if so, how to avoid it
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We have our own chain, Binance did an ICO on ETH and have an ERC20 tokens, for raise purposes. The choose to go on Binance Chain is connected to our willingness to get listed there.
We have a 3 layers architecture where auditors are watching and other public chains such as BTC or others providing extra consensus.
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you plan to convince the existing companies and governments to shift to your system? How challenging is this and what are your plans to achieve this?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Not very difficult to switch, we will help you build your own app if you need. We are solving some issues that they need to address.
Cryptodiffer Community
What #AGORA can do in engaging voters or increase voter turnout/Increasing Voter Participation???
Lots of projects talk a big game in the space. Could you tell us about your execution????
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
Can you imagine just receiving a notification on your phone saying hi Crypto maximalist please vote it’s your election day, you only need to swipe and vote ! We’re so addicted to our phones, the barrier is really low to just vote.
Auditors all around the world can now just audit for 15 min and make money for that it’s cool no ? I think it’s a good incentive 🙂
Cryptodiffer Community
How will Agora expand in the future as regarding team members. (Growing a company can be hard. Growing to fast is not always good) Will you expand to other countries? What will be the primary focus?
If everyone use the same strategy, then the strategy become useless, how do you intend to solve that problem, if too many people start using only the “best” algorithm?
Leonardo Gammar
CEO
We are lucky because we have a lot of demand, so we try to first work for the challenging fun things. We try to have partners rather than hire massively. We select our partners based on their track record with governments, public tenders but also in the private sector. We are quite conservative when it comes to hiring. Our newest team member / partner will be the son of a vary famous former United Nations general secretary.
I think we’re good here. Thank you everyone for joining, I was happy to take part in this challenging AMA. Remember be careful don’t give your data points that easily Data rights are human rights ! Thanks for taking some of your time on Saturday to have a look at my project. I really appreciate this. www.agora.vote/resources you have most of info including the WP which will respond to all of your questions, especially the technical ones. You will also find a few yellow papers, but those are really challenging to read if you don’t a bit of a background in security.
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Nice, Leo, you set new record for ama duration in our chat
It was really interesting
Thank you for taking your time!
