Boba AMA Recap

10 Oct 202103:55

AMA

Boba AMA Recap

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:

Alan Chiu, CEO

Zuko, Head of Strategy

Alan Chu

Hi, everyone!

Zuko

Hello!

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Welcome Alan and Zuko, thank you for taking your time today!

Alan Chu

Thanks for having us!

Zuko

Thanks for having us!

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Okie, let's start with some prepared questions
First one is
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Alan Chu

Sure!
I’m Alan Chiu, CEO of Enya. We are the core contributor to OMG Foundation.
Been building a new Ethereum L2 called Boba Network https://boba.network
I come from a distributed systems background
As well as startups and venture investing
Zuko over to you!

Zuko

I'm Zuko, leading strategy for boba. I've been in crypto since 2015 and come from a scientist/venture background
We're super excited to be building boba to help scale the ethereum community to billions of users and make the web3 vision a reality
You may also know me as royalty of the fire nation

Alan Chu

done

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

ahah
Okie, thanks for the introduction
let's continue with moving to the project
Q2: Can you introduce Boba to us?

Alan Chu

Our vision is to scale the whole decentralized ecosystem to serve the next billion users
To do that, making Ethereum faster and cheaper is a must, but that’s just the beginning
Boba achieves that, and more
What’s super important is to enable more developers who are not familiar with smart contracts today, but are experts in machine learning, data science, secure computation and so on to join the movement
That’s why Boba offers a set of unique capabilities called Hybrid Compute to enable smart contracts to trigger code that runs on web-scale platforms such as AWS
As a developer on Boba, you no longer need to dumb down your algorithms just so that they would be affordable to run on Ethereum
You can implement the best algos possible, use the latest advances in ML, to delight your users
Zuko

Zuko

Great answers Alan

Alan Chu

Thanks Zuko
Of course we’re fully EVM-compatible, so any existing projects can easily migrate over to Boba. In most cases, the work involved takes only a few days, if that.

Zuko

Boba is an Ethereum layer 2 solution that seeks to not only make txs cheaper and faster but also augment what is possible with smart contracts
A big focus of ours is on UI/UX for the ecosystem, along with developing cutting edge technology
Some examples include our native fast exit bridge, EVM compatibility, a DAO, even our brand
We want boba to be as inviting as when my uncle iroh invites people for a nice Jasmine tea

Alan Chu

Exactly
Boba - bubble tea - evokes happiness
It’s also enjoyed by people from different cultures
That’s what Boba is about too - happy users, happy developers, across the world
done

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

superb!
One last question left before the community part)
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

Alan Chu

Our team has been working like mad and moving at lightning speed. We launched our testnet back in May, followed by mainnet beta in August
Since then we’ve had 2-3 partnership announcements every week
Super grateful to these partners for being early adopters of Boba

Alan Chu

There are many more to come
Some developers have also begun to experiment with Boba’s hybrid compute
and taking it into new directions that we didn’t even anticipate

Zuko do you want to speak more to that?
Our team has been working like mad and moving at lightning speed. We launched our testnet back in May, followed by mainnet beta in August

Zuko

Working like mad is an understatement here. If you look at the GitHub, our team is shipping code 24/7. If you look at mine and Alan's calendars, we're always chatting with partners, working on product, etc. This is the most high caliber team I've ever worked with on so many angles

Zuko

Very grateful to our partners whose belief and relationship with us extends far beyond copy pasting EVM code to Boba

Zuko

Yes, we're seeing tons of new directions for hybrid compute we didn't anticipate
Originally, coming from a scientific background, we were intrigued by the possibility of making computations that leverage any type of matrix multiplication more tenable on blockchains
Ie machine learning, fraud detection, etc
But with the recent success of NFTs, we've seen tons of interest in dynamic NFTs that leverage more traditional compute
For insurance, we had one of the leaders in the quantum machine learning field reach out to us on creating NFTs that could call AWS lambda for its quantum computer. We're currently collaborating to make quantum generated NFTs that can change over space and time, invoked by smart contracts
But we see hybrid compute could even be like an "app store", where one could submit a regular NFT, and get out a quantum generated version from an app created by a quantum scientists
So the traditional applications of hybrid compute are obvious, but we've been thrilled to see how our community has dreamed up applications we could never expect
Done

Cryptodiffer Community

I could see that Boba is Built on Optimism, could you tell us why you decided to choose them over several alternatives in the industry? What competitive advantages or benefits does building on Optimism offer you?

Alan Chu

We chose Optimism as the core for Boba because it’s actually a modified version of Ethereum, which to us is the best way to ensure compatibility with Ethereum, compared to emulation
We regularly sync with Optimism’s codebase, and contribute fixes upstream

Cryptodiffer Community

Hello ZUKO 🙋,

👇👇👇👇

Is your platform Boba only for experienced developers ?How does Boba help for new developers with EARLY STAGE PROJECTS ?

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Zuko

Great question. We're EVM compatible so the experience of deploying to Boba is as easy as deploying to Ethereum, which has a huge developer community and tons of resources for learning. Compared to deploying directly on Eth, we give early stage projects the opportunity to not detract users with slow speeds and high tx fees. We'll also have a process for community pool funding in the future, and we're big on supporting all projects in our ecosytem - not just technically but also from a strategy/marketing perspective. If you're seeking to build new decentralized applications, we'd love to talk to you, regardless of the stage of project🧋

Cryptodiffer Community

What do you think you need to do to be able to scale the whole decentralized ecosystem to serve the next billion users?
@alanenya

Alan Chu

We need decentralized infrastructure that’s affordable, scalable, and user-friendly. We also need programming environments that are developer friendly, and support them in creating the most compelling products and user experience possible. Boba is designed to make that vision a reality.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hello @zukoboba

Why do you choose to focus on UI/UX of the ecosystem, along with developing cutting edge technology?

Zuko

A big motivating factor for us in Layer 2s is making decentralized technology available and accessible to all. Even as someone with a graduate scientific degree, I had confusion using dApps and Ethereum early on. As such, it goes along with our core values to make the UI/UX as smooth as possible, since easy UX makes the ecosystem more accessible

Cryptodiffer Community

🥇 How competitive is Boba Network from a functional, scalability and security point of view against the other layer 2 ecosystem solutions? Can you compare for example the main metrics with Polygon (Matic)?

Alan Chu

Rollups such as Boba inherit their security from Ethereum and therefore appeal to users who care about the security of their assets. Of course there are many networks to choose from, each optimizing for a different set of design attributes. Boba provides a platform that is as secure as Ethereum but much more affordable, with hybrid compute-enabled apps down the road that are uniquely available to Boba users.

Zuko

We find it's also strategically important. Some people care about L2s because of the decentralization offerred by Ethereum, others just want to transact cheaply and quickly. With the rise of other L1s that do the latter well, it's important to be innovating not only on the technology by also the experience

Cryptodiffer Community

❤️I read that Boba's extensible smart contracts will allow developers across the Ethereum ecosystem to create dApps that invoke code running on a web-scale infrastructure like AWS Lambda ... does this make algorithms more expensive or cheaper to use?

Alan Chu

Cheaper - Hybrid compute allows developers to implement much more sophisticated algorithms than they can today.

Cryptodiffer Community

Could you explain why you call your project "Boba Network"? will it have any specific meaning? or will it be related to some feature or utility?

Zuko

We called it Boba network because we wanted the brand to reflect our values around opennes, ease of use, accessibility, and levity

Cryptodiffer Community

Currently, optimistic rollups like Arbitrum and Optimism are being run on a centralized single sequencer. We just saw today that the Arbitrum sequencer was down. Will Boba be adding sequencers and verifiers to decentralize the rollup at launch or in the near future? If so, who gets to run these sequencer and verifier nodes – token holders?

Alan Chu

We’ll be decentralizing the various Boba services over time. Operators of these services will be required to stake a certain level of tokens, and be rewarded for a share of the profits generated by the network.

Cryptodiffer Community

For the point we are at it is practically necessary to develop Layer 1 or 2 networks with interesting solutions for NFTs. Could you tell us what interesting features Boba Network brings to developers who want to create NFTs on top of it?

Zuko

We offer a seamless bridging experience, lower transaction costs, and hybrid compute. Instead of paying high fees for a chance to mint an NFT, with Boba minting is cheap fast and easy. Our NFT bridge allows for easy transfer of NFTs back to L1 if desired. Hybrid compute enables the creation of dynamic NFTs that would not be possible with standard smart contracts

Cryptodiffer Community

Without any effective marketing and capital injection: the project is dead...Can Boba.Network assure their users that you have enough marketing capabilities and funds to promote Boba.Network project to become a top-level project?

Alan Chu

Enya (the developers behind Boba) is backed by reputable Silicon Valley investors and led by a team from Stanford. We have years of runway to execute our plans for Boba

Cryptodiffer Community

You point out that Boba will have all the security that ETH offers, but is this really enough to protect the assets of all users? Also, have your smart contracts been fully audited? if not, when will they be audited?

Alan Chu

Boba contracts are being audited by our security partner CertiK. Our team has already implemented the preliminary feedback from CertiK and the contracts are going through a second round of audit.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hi! 💹

There are already some projects in the market such as Loopring and zkSwap which are offering Ethereum Layer 2 solutions. What makes Boba Network Different from them? Why should investors use Boba Network instead of others?

@zukoboba @alanenya

Zuko

We're fans of Loopring and zkSwap, and any project looking to grow the Ethereum ecosystem. In the case of Loopring and zkSwap, both are decentralized exchanges built on zero knowledge rollup tech. Boba is a general platform for any type of decentralized application, not just exchanges

Cryptodiffer Community

You will agree with me that the issue of gas fee is a big discouragement to most traders nowadays, paying a fee that's more than your transaction is quite disheartening. Does Boda Network have any plan to battle this issue of high gas fee?

Alan Chu

Yes - Boba reduces gas fees by processing the transactions away from the mainchain, and batching them together to make the most use of each Ethereum block

Cryptodiffer Community

Can you give an idea of transaction cost on @bobanetwork. Meanwhile, I learnt of your partnership with @coin98wallet. What is your aim of this partnership. Can we keep bobatoken in @coin98wallet ?

Alan Chu

Coin98 is one of the most popular wallets in Southeast Asia which is an important market for Boba. They have a rapidly growing user base and we are super excited to have Coin98 as an onramp to Boba

Zuko

for additional details on the coin98 partnership, check out their post here: https://blog.coin98.com/coin98-wallet-supports-boba-network/

Cryptodiffer Community

Hey Alan and Zuko, what are the best ideas for utilizing child NFTs you have heard or had?

Alan Chu

Child NFTs allow the provenance of derivative works to be tracked, which means if you create a piece of art represented as an NFT, and someone else derives another piece of art from it, these NFTs can be linked, and royalties can be distributed upstream to the original creators. Applications also extend to other realms of creative works, and even scientific reasearch

Cryptodiffer Community

I believe Boba Network's main mission is to offer solutions to billions of users in the Ethereum network. However, for mass adoption, you need to have very aggressive marketing. Would you tell us what are some of your future marketing plans? Are you looking for region-specific ambassadors? Or partnerships with already established projects? Please tell us! Thanks!

Alan Chu

Absolutely agree. We’ve been building relationships with regional influencers and are open to more!

Cryptodiffer Community

What are you most proud of when you founded Boba.Network? Can you tell me the difficult road that I and everyone have traveled from the first day of the establishment of Boba.Network to the present?
Aside from the obvious tech and partnership growth, we're very proud of the community that's grown around Boba. Capital is basically commoditized these days and tech can be built by many, but genuine community is hard to come by. As a core team member, I can confirm we have much love for Bobarians 🧋
A very important issue when investing in these projects is trust. Can you tell us what makes investors, users and clients feel safe working with your project?
My cofounder Jan Liphardt and I are known quantities that you can look up on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Stanford websites, so that provides pretty strong disincentives for us to do anything that hurts our community 🙂 Of course as we further decentralize the development of Boba other teams will get involved, and it’ll be up to the collective efforts of the Boba community, acting through the Boba DAO, to ensure the quality of future contributors to the project.
Aside from the obvious tech and partnership growth, we're very proud of the community that's grown around Boba. Capital is basically commoditized these days and tech can be built by many, but genuine community is hard to come by. As a core team member, I can confirm we have much love for Bobarians 🧋

Alan Chu

Second that - you can copy-paste code but can’t copy-paste a community. And our community is super strong. We’ve gotten many inbound requests from partners and investors that resulted from outreach by the Boba community 🧋

Zuko

As a former scientist, I've been fascinated by the idea of using child NFTs to solve the reproducibility problem in scientific research. We hope Boba can play a huge role to that end in empowering web3 applicatinos that touch elements outside the crypto world too

Cryptodiffer Community

Boba Network says its documentation is a work in progress and users are welcome to contribute. What are the procedures that users will undergo to make contributions to the documentation and how will users benefit from such contributions?

Why have Boba Network chosen to build on Optimism?

Alan Chu

Please join our Discord! https://omg.eco/discord I have to admit we’ve been underutilizing Discord but will be ramping up as we get ever closer to mainnet launch

Cryptodiffer Community

My cofounder Jan Liphardt and I are known quantities that you can look up on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Stanford websites, so that provides pretty strong disincentives for us to do anything that hurts our community 🙂 Of course as we further decentralize the development of Boba other teams will get involved, and it’ll be up to the collective efforts of the Boba community, acting through the Boba DAO, to ensure the quality of future contributors to the project.

Zuko

To add, our code is open source and you can check how much effort has gone in to development, and we deeply care about the ethos of the crypto ecosystem

Cryptodiffer Community

I have a little confusion. What was previously OMG Network is now Boba Network? On the OMG website it says they are now OMG Foundation and are now working Boba, I wonder then if it was simply a Rebranding.

Alan Chu

OMG Network was acquired by GBV last year, and we (Enya) took over the project in February this year. Since then, members of the OMG team who wished to continue have joined Enya (they make up about 10% of the current team), and OMG Network has become OMG Foundation. The OMG Plasma Network remains operational, but it’s separate from Boba Network.

Cryptodiffer Community

What stage of development is Boba Network really in? will be just in the development of vision? or is it close to launching its official platform? If so, could you tell us when you plan to release it?

Alan Chu

The Rinkeby testnet has been up since May. We launched mainnet beta last month. It won’t be long before we go live.

Cryptodiffer Community

The strength of a community lies in the quality of its members. Is there any benefit for being a member of @bobanetwork community. Coming from Nigeria which has one of the highest use case of Cryptocurrency in the world, would you be interested in gaining members from Nigeria. I can deliver up to 1587 from my crypto training group alone. Would you be interested in taking me as a community member or ambassador, who do I need to discuss with ?

Zuko

We welcome members from everywhere, espiecially those who feel a passion for web3 and growing the Ethereum ecosystem. Feel free to DM us

Cryptodiffer Community

🟢 Tell us about the Fees please. how much exactly does Boba Network reduce the terrible fees Ethereum is currently experiencing? Does it compete with BSC's low fees?

Zuko

Boba reduces fees by 50-100x on Ethereum by batching transactions using optimistic rollups

Cryptodiffer Community

Income is an important aspect of all projects to survive and maintain the project/company. How can you build a complete project and how to generate profit/income through tokens? What is the revenue model?

Alan Chu

Boba collects gas fees from protocols that run on the network, and in turn pays Ethereum to store the merkle roots from the transactions. The difference between the two represents profits for the network.

Cryptodiffer Community

It caught my attention that you have an "M-LEAGUE plan to create a new DeFi ecology", but could you really explain more about it? Will it be an event in which they will receive proposals from the community for the creation of new products in MDEX? but what is it really?

Alan Chu

I have no idea what this is - not associated with our project
let’s take a few more questions and we’ll wrap it up

Cryptodiffer Community

1. Can you please walk us through the complete process of deploying an application to Optimistic Rollups? Is it different from simply deploying to Ethereum?

2. Also, i came across some old code references to OMGX and this got me confused and want to know the relationship between Boba and OMGX?

Alan Chu

OMGX was the working name for Boba before we settled on the brand, that’s why you see it in the code

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

The chat is muted!

Cryptodiffer Community

@zukoboba you said "So the traditional applications of hybrid compute are obvious." Can you speak more about those for the layperson, as well as what the limitations inherent to Solidity/EVM are that make the hybrid compute capabilities attractive in crypto applications?

Zuko

Great question. Even though Solidity/EVM has seen tremendous growth over the years, it's still relatively new and limited in scope. A type of application we'd expect from hybrid compute would be anything involving machine learning on the blockchain, which can't be done natively with smart contracts. The hybrid compute thus becomes attractive because I can write more powerful code in python and have my smart contract invoke it

Cryptodiffer Community

1. With Boba Networks feature of Hybrid Computing, do you see this being utilised (in the coming 12 months) more for DeFi/Financial Dapps, or could we see more other type of use cases/utilisation of the network that support medical research or other non financial related cases for example?

Zuko

Both! It's possible to build better financial applications with access to more complicated math, but we also hope to see more general use cases

Cryptodiffer Community

Regarding the recent litecoin fiasco, what is your opinion on how crypto should be regulated moving forward to ensure sustained growth for the overall ecosystem? What are some beneficial regulations that would help legitimize the space and ensure security and longevity?

Alan Chu

The Litecoin fiasco could have happened to a public company as well, so that particular risk isn’t unique to crypto. Extending existing financial regulations against pump-and-dump schemes to crypto would be sensible and not harmful to innovation. The more fundamental challenge is to help regulators understand what’s truly going on in the crypto space, from technology to financial incentives to governance to new ways of collaboration, such that they can craft regulations the strike the balance between protecting consumers and promoting innovation.

Cryptodiffer Community

⚡️⚡️⚡️ Your project wants to give prominence to the ETH network, being scaled from Ethereum L2, but, in relation to the innovations that are in the crypto world today, why did you decide to bet on the ETH network and not on the BSC network, which is providing more opportunities and profits to users, at the moment?

Alan Chu

Ethereum has tremendous network effect but has been suffering some its limitations. We’re here to help remove those constraints and build a more inclusive ecosystem - it’s clearly what users and developers want, judging from Ethereum’s traction. We don’t argue with success 🙂
Thanks everyone for your questions!

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Thanks a lot for the ama!

Zuko

Thanks everyone!

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

You guys made it to the fullest

Zuko

Be sure to join our TG, discord, and follow us on twitter 🙂

Myko (CryptoDiffer)

Glad to see such passion

Alan Chu

https://t.me/bobanetwork
https://omg.eco/discord
https://omg.eco/twitter

Zuko

@bobanetwork, Alan and I are @alanchiu and @zukoboba on twitter

Alan Chu

Thank you all! 🧋