Fantom AMA Recap in Gcrypto
Gcrypto team
We are glad to meet here:
Michael Chen (@MHchn) – Fantom CMO
Michael Kong (@mkong888) – Fantom CIO
George Samman (@sammantic) – Fantom Researcher
Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Michael Chen
CMO
I’m Michael Chen, Chief Marketing Officer at Fantom, and I joined Fantom shortly after it came onto the radar last year in 2018. As to my background, I started out as an investor like most people in the space, and got really excited to the extent of going fulltime in the marketing side of this space
Michael Kong
CIO
Hi all. I have a background in IT and Finance from the University of Sydney. Got involved in Fantom via the firm DCH and have been involved managing the project as a director.
Samuel Marks
offscale.io
Been interested in alternative currencies, was using eGold back in ’07, my focus since gaining Fantom as a client has been in:
– Implementing a completely new codebase in Rust
– Contributing to new consensus and VM research
– Optimising best practices as it pertains to code quality, DevOps, and related concepts
Quan Nguyen
RnD
Hi all, I graduated from the University of Sydney as well. Got introduced to Fantom and the team last year. Quite impressed with the project and its community members. Nice to know you guys.
Gcrypto team
Can you briefly describe what is Fantom in 3-5 sentences? And what is your Mission and Vision?
Michael Chen
CMO
Personally, I feel that Fantom is a consensus-as-a-service platform that allows us to pursue many cool use cases for blockchain technology such as the issuance of stablecurrencies, distributed computing, and much more :).
The way that we structured it is so that we have tailored, or bespoke solutions for each and every user of the technology by having them issue their own mainnets matched to their own preferences, and then secured through proof of stake and community validator nodes.
That’s not a 3-5 line description but I tried
Michael Kong
CIO
Fantom is an organisation building public, open source technology consisting of aBFT consensus, middleware, and application layers. We are rolling out the stack already to clients, and are improving on existing consensus in Golang and rust.
Michael Chen
CMO
Mission is to build things that people want.
Not going to fluff it up too much, we want to work based on the idea of where the demand from institutions and users is.
Samuel Marks
offscale.io
From an implementation perspective, I’ve designed the Rust codebases to be so generic that [soon] they can be used for anything from blockchains, to alternative consensus & clustering for traditional databases like Postgres and MySQL, to generic VMs usable as the internal system for games
Gcrypto team
Hi all guys, meanwhile, congratulations for the results you are getting. Firstly, I understood the first stable coin mainnet should not be totally permissionless: do you have an estimate about the number of validator node they will deploy to secure their network and if everyone can delegate its tokens? Secondly, do you have an estimate about the performance the first mainnet can achieve? Thank you for your answers.
Michael Kong
CIO
There will be 4 validator noses initially but the public will be able to validate as well using FTM.
First mainnet is achieving 40k+ tps using lachesis and txflow with time to finality of 0.7s
Gcrypto Community
1. What are teams plans to enter Europe market and also more important UK? systems lots of changing to accommodate brexits and so companies open to the changes and can be convinced easier to take risk of blockchain and dag I think.
Michael Chen
CMO
Personally I feel that’s a good opportunity but we haven’t explored that yet. Might be a bit farfetched in practice but worth a look for sure.
Gcrypto Community
Do u think by the team having no holdings other than personal, it misalign incentives for them vs community? Not necessarily bad thing but love to hear ur thoughts
Michael Chen
CMO
If you need mad team token allocations just to do your job dilligently I think that’s kinda sad. I love the foundation and the community as they are, tokens wouldnt change that tbh.
Gcrypto Community
While many smart solutions can be implemented with the existing central systems, why should countries turn to blockchain-based solutions while they have technological infrastructure?
Samuel Marks
offscale.io
A lot of government work involves multiple parties confirming clauses for a contract to be agreed upon. Existing centralised infrastructure doesn’t handle these edge cases well. Additionally there can be jurisdictional disagreements—consider those cop shows where you have navy cops vs FBI vs CIA vs NSA—which can be resolved by not having any single party being the technology owner.
However, due to the significant generalisations of our Rust implementation, it can also be used for trusted, centralised use-cases, so that clients can get the benefits of either approach.
Gcrypto Community
Firstly, I understood the first stable coin mainnet should not be totally permissionless: do you have an estimate about the number of validator node they will deploy to secure their network and if everyone can delegate its tokens?
Secondly, do you have an estimate about the performance the first mainnet can achieve?
Michael Chen
CMO
I believe this is a question for Andre, but I believe we’re settling between a single digit or double digit number of validator nodes. Heard numbers between 4 and 12.
Let me pull up this stat from my private chat with andre quickly
Gcrypto Community
Can you tell us in simple words about your New Technology that you will use in STATHEROS ? How it will be beneficial ?
Also Sir When Mainnet will be launch ?
Michael Kong
CIO
Stratheros uses fantom lachesis and txflow for consensus, cosmos SDK for the middleware, and banking client is building apps on top of the stack such as for payment in stablecoin zar. Will be beneficial by reducing complexity of payments and reducing transaction costs.
Gcrypto Community
There are many famous projects using DAG technology: Nano, byteball; IOTA, Hedero Hashgraph, … What is Fantom different from these projects? Is this are Fantom competitor?
Michael Kong
CIO
Fantom is different at a technological level, as it’s permissionless annd leaderless consensus. We have techical papers that Quan can go into in more details @quan8888.
We are also building not just a consensus layer but also middleware and applications, working directly with clients such as banks.
Gcrypto Community
1. Why did the dev team choose to build Fantom based on Directed Acrylic Graph (DAG) technology? I see quite a lot of projects that have used this technology such as IOTA, Nano, Byteball, and Hedero Hashgraph. Does this technology have any special advantages?
2. Currently, all projects have achieved such advantages as: payment almost immediately, low transaction fee almost equal to 0. So, in addition to these advantages, what are the other advantages of Fantom?
Michael Kong
CIO
THe key benefit of DAG is achieving BFT consensus in an asynchronous manner (aBFT), instead of a synchronous manner which required blocks to be validated sequnetially such as for Bitcoin and Ethereum. aBFT means we can achieve consensus faster as event blocks get confirmed as soon as they enter the network, instead of waiting in a queue.
Advantages include faster consensus (using leaderless and permissionless voting) which means greater levels of decentralisation, as this is leaderless Proof of Stake instead of Delegated Proof of Stake.
Gcrypto Community
Q: What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market?
Q: What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
Michael Chen
CMO
1. I think that our existing collaboration/client is huge in finding more synergies. It validates the entire use case and makes it easier for other institutions to dabble into our stack or use it.
2. Trying to increase Bariq’s team, our head of BD, he’s incredibly well connected in my opinion and I think he can get more momentum on the BD with our current bank client in South Africa
Gcrypto Community
1. What is the role of FTM token in the Fantom ecosystem? What are the benefits of user holding it?
2. How does Fantom identify a smart city? This is a macroscopic goal that needs to combine many factors, so how does Fantom accomplish it?
Michael Kong
CIO
There are multiple use cases:
1. To secure the network via proof of stake, by staking FTM.
2. To vote on changes to the governance of the mainnets.
3. To pay for transaction fees
2. A “Smart city” is essentially a term to describe cities that want to streamline processes using technolongy. A city aiming to become a “Smart city” is one that is embracing technological changes, such as distributed ledgers.
Gcrypto Community
How did your team deal with the technical challenges of initial launch of this product?What are some milestone to look forward to what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to answer them?
Michael Chen
CMO
We finished the stack for our Statheros project months ago. Technical challenges were resolved quickly and milestone to look out for is the launch of this mainnet. Other milestones are the Rs Lachesis and Go Lachesis launches.
Gcrypto Community
If you had to choose a city to apply Fantom technology, which one would you like it to be and why?
What have been the reasons for the delay in the launch of your mainnet? What advantages will this extra time have for you?
Michael Kong
CIO
South Africa or Dubai are good starting points.
The technology for the stablecoin mainnet has bene available for a couple of months. We’ve just been waiting for the final regulatory approvals by our banking client before launching, as they’ve also helped to fund it’s development.
For the mainnet with smart contract support, we’ve research and found better ways of acheiving consensus and communication in nodes, particulary to do with have voting is done. So we’ve decided to spend time to implement these changes (such as StairDag).
Gcrypto Community
1. What type of business are you aiming for? Do you seem to be aiming for global solutions and services?
2. What are some milestones to look forward to, what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to handle them?
Michael Kong
CIO
1. Banking clients for the stablecoin network, and for the public mainnet with smart contract support, businesses and organisation that want to created dApps, such as smart cities.
2. Go-lang and rust mainnets: December, including full-staking support and ecosystem tools such as wallets.
Gcrypto Community
1. What type of business are you aiming for? Do you seem to be aiming for global solutions and services?
2. What are some milestones to look forward to, what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to handle them?
Quan Nguyen
RnD
Before answering your question, it’d be better to state that Fantom project also aims to make some contributions to the R&D efforts world wide in blockchains and smart contracts. 1. We’d like to provide services that users and community members around the world can use. For that, consensus-as-a-service is one target. We also aim to develop better technologies in smart contracts and virtual machines. 2. We have plans and milestones, which have been informed to the community. Our team are trying to develop and improve our technologies in terms of scalability, security, fairness and usability. We constant publish our R&D activitivies and appreciate all great inputs from the community.
Gcrypto Community
3. What have you learned from early versions of the product or service? What are some of the major roadblocks along the way?
4. In past few years many cryptocoins are prone to hacking …what you can assure to crypto traders that Fantom has strong security and privacy to prevent hacking?
Michael Kong
CIO
3. Achieving fast consensus and security is a big challange. We have experimented with different versions of DAG and believee we are developing one that achieves both as best as possible.
4. By having a secure and fast consensus protocol, combined with the right incentives for users to stake their FTM, and having the incentive to run better performing hardware with greater uptime.
Gcrypto Community
Fantom’s service is likely to suffer a lot depending on the regulatory situation in each country. Does Fantom have a team that specializes in legal work?
Fantom is a promising project that if well managed will soar to the moon: What is the plan and future of this great project? What are the measures taken to take this project to the top? What are your plans to build a strong Fantom community?
Michael Kong
CIO
Yes we have engaged with several law firms across many juristictions such as Europe, USA, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, just to name a few.
We have as our general counsel Fred Pucci, who used to be general counsel for ANZ bank, and also worked as general counsel for the Australian securities regular ASIC>
Gcrypto Community
Hello, could you tell us which are the countries that use Fantom the most, and why do you think it is due (their acceptance)?
Quan Nguyen
RnD
This is an interesting question. We hope users will be able to use Fantom whenever and wherever they like. Thank you.
Gcrypto Community
Q: What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market?
Q: What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
Michael Kong
CIO
1. Having connections to organisations interested in using distributed ledgers, such as banks.
Having a very strong research and development team with a history of work in networking, distributed ledgers, virtual machines, and compilers.
Gcrypto Community
How does Fantom solve the problems Blockchain faces?
Michael Kong
CIO
Biggest issue of distributed ledgers is achieving both security and scalability. We believe aBFT helps achieve this, as explained in previous questions that we’re answered.
Gcrypto Community
Hello, could you tell us which are the countries that use Fantom the most, and why do you think it is due (their acceptance)?
Michael Kong
CIO
South Africa, Dubai, and hopefully Australia as well. Engaging with potential clients in Korea as well.
Most are waiting for a mainnet to be released. As the stablecoin mainnet is ready, we are starting to engage with potential clients using that.
Gcrypto Community
I read that your project can be applied to health, traffic control and education. Could you explain how this would happen? And what example are being developed?
After the mainnet is launched, what are the next steps?
Michael Kong
CIO
Users should be able to build Dapps using languages such as solidity. This code should be verifiable against middleware computing engines such as Isekai that are under development. The contract bytecode is then deployed in event blocks, and these dApps can be anything ranging from healthcare to traffic as you’ve mentioned.
Next steps are
1. Make continous improvements on consensus and staking.
2. Complete verifiable computing engines by SIkoba, University of Sydney, and Yonsei University.
3. Expand Stablecoin network to other banks.
4. Promote mainnet with smart contract support to organisations and developer communities.
Gcrypto Community
Currently, there are many scalable solutions available like some works with 2layer some with triple layer can you explain how dag tech is most advanced that others these?
Is fantom smart-contract supports gaming dapps? How fandom dag provides smooth liquidity to gaming dapps?
Michael Kong
CIO
Many of these 2layer solutions arn’t really working at the moment, or are encountering issues. Plasma or Raiden Network arn’t being widely used, for example.
DAG can solve these issues with aBFT, which was explained previously. By confirming txs as fast as possible, instead of queueing, should make consensus faster.
Gcrypto Community
How did your team deal with the technical challenges of initial launch of this product?What are some milestone to look forward to what may be the challenges in the future and how do you plan to answer them?
Michael Kong
CIO
By spending a lot of time experiment with different variations of DAG, particularly on how voting rounds are conducted, while building a very strong research and development team. Milestone include the announcement of the South African banking client, the go-lang and rust codebases with full-staking support.
Gcrypto Community
3. What have you learned from early versions of the product or service? What are some of the major roadblocks along the way?
4. In past few years many cryptocoins are prone to hacking …what you can assure to crypto traders that Fantom has strong security and privacy to prevent hacking?
Quan Nguyen
RnD
3.During the development, we have developed several models and prototypes and then we learned and made improvements from them.
4. We research in new technologies to address some limitations of the existing solutions. Security is of course an important part that we are aiming at.
Gcrypto Community
What’s a significant difference between nano and fantom? Both are working on dag? Why fandom deserve more than nano?
What’re your plans to increase adoptions in future? Which types of partnerships we can expect from fandom foundation?
Michael Kong
CIO
Fantom is leaderless and permissionless. They are very different. Nano is utxo based. Fantom is account based. Fantom also will have smart contract support and verifiable computing engines to validate these smart contraacts.
Plan is to promote the technology with organisations and developer communities. Partnerships include banking clients, and other organisations involved in a wide range of industries such as supply chain management.
Gcrypto Community
I checked on website that Fantom Project is working on Smart Cities & Public Utilities ! So, How Fantom Project works ? How it helps to make Smart Cities ?
On which industries, ( except Smart Cities ) Fantom Project is working on ? like Medical, educational, etc ?
Michael Kong
CIO
Banking
Gcrypto Community
Can you tell us something about your New Technology that you will use in STATHEROS ? How it will be beneficial ?
Michael Kong
CIO
New technology will enable faster, more secure, and less costly transactions between users within the South African Bank.
Gcrypto Community
Q:- As I am a medical student it is intrested to know does Fantom blockhain have privacy feature ? If yes, will it be applied to financial service, health or education field ?
Q:- I think Decentraland is your competitor in developing smart cities ..How your consensus protocol and project more efficient than Decentraland in terms of IoT services in smart cities ?
Michael Kong
CIO
Currently not working on privacy-preseving technology, but might consider it in the future.
Fantom is building fast, secure, leaderless and permisionless aBFT with smart contract support, hopefully efficient enough for iOT devices as well.
Gcrypto Community
1. Looking at the Fantom website, I see the ambition of the dev team is huge. The team wants to apply its Blockchain to almost all areas of life. However this seems very difficult. So what did the team do to make this true? I really look forward to the project’s success.
2. The smart contract language applied in Fantom is a functional language like SCALA for executing smart contracts on Fantom virtual machines. This is a fairly new programming language, so it is going through people’s comments about its true performance. Can you say a few more advantages of this smart contract language?
Samuel Marks
offscale.io
Take everything down to the basics. We write new compilers, and implement frontends for each language (Rust, C++, Solidity, Scala, & more), with the backend targeting our VM. By concentrating on LLVM, we can get many languages for [close to] free. However since most languages LLVM supports are lower level, we need to ensure our VM is a reliable sandbox, and doesn’t implement features that would make it a fully fledged VM, and thus pose security, performance, reliability, and determinism problems.
Again, look back at the Rust module design, this is [fast becoming] generic to the point of becoming ‘the standard library of distributed systems development’.
Gcrypto Community
Fantom’s mainnet process was temporarily behind schedule. Why? What is the roadmap for the coming time of Fatom?
What is Fantom’s standout technology? What areas of Fantom can be applied in life?
Michael Kong
CIO
Has been explained previously. A roadmap has been published today, which we will provide more details about.
Standout technology we believe is:
1. Acheving fast and secure aBFT consensus, that’s more efficent than the existing solutuons out there, and
2. verifiable computing: done by Sikoba, University of Sydney, and Yonsei University, to verfiy smart contracts using a verifiable compiler, virtual machine, and zero-knowledger proofs like bulletproof and zksnarks.
Gcrypto Community
1. The problem of solving traffic congestion is always a difficult one for many countries. With “Traffic Management” technology, how does Fantom solve the problem? Each city will have its own characteristics, so does the technology need to be modified accordingly?
2. What are the human resources factors in applying Fantom technology? Is the technical and professional level a big problem?
Michael Kong
CIO
1. Users will be able to write smart contracts to solve all sorts of different problems.
2. We have built a great research and development team, and are always looking to expand the team. Mostly it is now focused hands-down on the technology.
Gcrypto Community
Do you have plans to spread Fantom ecosystem across other continents. if yes, what are the strategies and how can I as a community member contribute to making it possible?
Michael Kong
CIO
We have BD activities in different countries underway. You can contribute by sharing your ideas with us by getting in touch with the team, at contact@fantom.foundation.
Gcrypto Community
The structure of Fantom (FTM) includes: Application Layer, OPERA Ware Layer, OPERA Core Layer. Can you talk more about it, why are there 3 layers, what are the functions of each layer?
Fantom GitHub comes with a backup archive, with rewritten modules. What is the meaning of it? Should it be tidied up?
Michael Kong
CIO
Opera core layer: consensus
Opera ware layer: middleware such as virtual machine support, and verifiable computing engines.
Application layer: apps built in existing technology such as Javascript, with an api that connects to opera ware and opera core layers. This is the top of the stack.
Gcrypto Community
1. How has Fantom technology been applied in your country? What difficulties did it solve there?
2. Who is Fantom invested by? How is the quality of technology provided by Fantom verified?
Michael Kong
CIO
It’s being applied in South Africa to help streamline bank payments.
Gcrypto Community
1:User data is a sensitive problem right now while there are many leaked user data events recently, especially Facebook personal data leaking event. How will HowDoo protect personal data of users to make they feel safe when using HowDoo and ensure smooth operation of your platform?
2: Is there a ranking system for content creators on HowDoo platform like Silver Play Button, Golden Play Button, Diamond Play Button like Youtube? If yes, how will it work? Will it base on amount of followers or other standards?
Quan Nguyen
RnD
THanks for the question. 1) Our team focuses R&D to have better technologies and we believe that we help our users (and so help us) in the long run. For the second part, we appreciate for the supports from the community so far and we hope more supports in the future. 2) This field has seen a lot of innovative ideas and great efforts. This is the challenge. Fantom will stand on by itself with its unique technologies and supportive community members.
Gcrypto Community
What has the security, speed, and security with FAntom so far accomplished?
This will prevent the ability to expand the application of Blockchain in all areas of life. This is a big problem of Blockchain, so fantom has done so far to improve this problem?
Michael Kong
CIO
Stablecoin network is achieving greater than 40k tps, with time to finality of 0.7ms on average. This should make banking transactions more efficent beginning in South Africa.
Gcrypto Community
1) What critical problems do you see occurring in the Crypto Industry nowadays? How does Fantom Platform aim to solve these problems?
2) How do you make profits? Through partnerships? Through fees in the network? Selling Fantom tokens? Can you please explain this?
Michael Kong
CIO
1. Critical problem is achiving scalability and security at the same time.
2. Foundation makes money by delivering solutions to specific clients, such as in South Africa.
Gcrypto Community
What is the crucial thing, in your opinion, that would increase adoption of #FTM and possibly the rest of crypto.
Michael Kong
CIO
Better technology, and the promotion of that technology to the wider community and large organisations.
Gcrypto Community
1. There are so many crypto wallets out there on the market, and all of them can do almost the same job. In what aspect Fantom is unique from the rest?
2. To improve performance, existing platforms easily lose decentralization. This leads to security issues. The problem now is the balance between security and performance?
Michael Kong
CIO
We will have a wallet. Main difference is not in the wallet client, but consensus and verifiable computing.
Gcrypto Community
1) Fantom Recently introduced new consensus protocol ‘ STAIR ‘. May I know technical specifications of STAIR and how is better than existing ones.
2) Is it easy for you to build fast, scalable and secure distributed ledger ? How community support is important for you.
Quan Nguyen
RnD
Fantom’s vision is to support multiple mainnets, all of which will use Fantom tokens. STAIR is a new consensus protocol developed by Fantom for that target. WIth STAIR, token holders can participate a mainnet as validators (high stake), users (low stake) and observers (zero stake). The main idea of the protocol is to support onchain validations (validators and users) and post-validation (auditors, observers, learners, etc). We think this unique technology from Fantom is useful in the future. Let’s see.
Gcrypto TEAM
It was a pleasure guys!
Thanks you for your time!
