Nahmii AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
We are glad to meet here
Jacobo Toll-Messia (@Jacobotoll), Founder & CEO at Nahmii
Mark Briscombe (@MarkBKK), COO at Nahmii
Jens Ivar Jørdre (@jijordre), CTO at Nahmii
John Derbyshire (@hubiijohn), Product Lead at Nahmii
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Nahmii?
Mark Briscombe
COO
Hi everyone, COO of hubii here, I’ve been around the blockchain space since 2011. Working on scaling since 2013 on Bitcoin, then recently worked on Plasma with OmiseGo and then joined hubii in 2017
Jens Ivar Jørdre
CTO
Ladies and gents, CTO of hubii here. I’ve been with hubii for about a decade. I manage our dev resources and infrastructure, and code contracts and services.
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
We started hubii 12 years ago doing content aggregation and distribution serving up to 50m users a day. Approximately two and a half years ago we started focusing on Blockchain and we soon saw an opportunity to build an scalability and interoperability protocol – nahmii – as none of the other competitors had a working product. We deployed nahmii in early 2019.
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
Hello, John here – hubii’s Product Lead. I’ve been working with the company for almost two years after helping with the ICO in 2017. Since then my role has focused on nahmii, our scaling and interoperability solution for blockchain. I’m also usually the person writing our blog posts and technical documentation. My background is in academia and I hold a PhD from the University of Manchester.
CryptoDiffer team
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Nahmii in 3-5 sentences? What technology stands behind Nahmii and why it’s better than the existing one?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
We’ll answer that question in two parts:
What is nahmii? nahmii is a layer-2 scaling and interoperability protocol for blockchain, which is currently live on Ethereum. The protocol is designed to fix the four main performance problems with blockchain today: throughput (increased TPS), fees (predictable and low), latency (minimal) and finality (instant). In addition, nahmii is also intended to make developing blockchain-based products easier; that’s why it comes ready with a full set of developer tools: CLI, SDK and a suite of APIs.
In terms of the unique technology behind nahmii, we have two main advantages over the competition. First, unlike our closest competitors, nahmii is built and ready to use today. Second, nahmii is designed to address all of the key blockchain performance questions. That might sound like a trivial point, but we think that our competitors have ignored important requirements like latency and finality. Our ‘secret sauce’ is how nahmii works as a package.
CryptoDiffer team
Q3 What are the major milestones you have achieved so far?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
Nahmii’s White Paper was published in July 2018 and we deployed our first smart contracts to the Ropsten testnet in the same month. Mainnet deployment of nahmii began in December 2018 and continued in phases until April 2019, at which point the full deposit – payments – withdrawal lifecycle was then live on Ethereum. It is worth noting that we started building nahmii much later than our competitors, yet we have beaten them to market by at least a year.
Alongside the key nahmii deployment milestones, we have also integrated nahmii into hubii core – our wallet management tool. Another important milestone will be reached on 1st March 2020 when the first nahmii ‘accrual period’ closes. After this date, nahmii token (NII) holders can claim their share of the transaction fees from the protocol for that period.
NII tokens are distributed through a monthly airdrop, called the nahmii airdriip. We have delivered 15 airdriips to far.
We have also signed a number of key partnerships over the last year, including Microsoft, Liquid (who list the NII token), NBX (Norwegian Block Exchange) and NEO. We have been focused mainly on commercial adoption, less so crypto-hype.
Cryptodiffer Community
What are some of the more exciting potential applications for Nahmii in your eyes? (As in, not another exchange/wallet/gambling app)
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
IoT, Supply Chain Management, Gaming (NFTs), Loyalty Rewards, Tokenised Physical Assets… There are a huge number of possible applications on top of the classic crypto use cases in financial services.
Personally, I think that blockchain will revolutionise video games in terms of how players own and value their virtual assets. In terms of global impact, nahmii will be important for blockchain-backed financial services (including much improved DeFi-type products) but the applications really are endless.
This is maybe the most exciting aspect of nahmii – we’ve designed a generalised protocol which can replicate any normal blockchain transactions but at scale. Any product built on blockchain will benefit from nahmii.
Cryptodiffer Community
Adoption is one of few things that play a big role too, without adoption/userbase, projects end up in a dead end mostly, can you tell us more about how do you plan to increase The adoption of ergo coin and increase the awareness in the cryptofield about Nahmii?
Mark Briscombe
COO
Indeed adoption is key, however, our target is corporates/products with established large customer bases. No other blockchain scalability/interoperability project can target these projects currently because they cannot deliver the performance or service level required. Our ambitions don’t revolve around creating a DApp with 1,000 daily active users, instead we target “real-world” products with scale. In that sense, we hope to get recognition in the crypto industry by demonstrating nahmii’s value through real use cases.
Cryptodiffer Community
I notice that there are some double “i” characters in Nahmii, Hubii, driips, NII. What is the meaning of this naming and does “ii” represent for number 2 in layer 2 solution?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
This is a fun question, thank you! The name ‘nahmii’ comes from the Thai word for water, ‘nahm’, and it references the idea that nahmii will help transactions flow more easily through the blockchain ecosystem. The ‘ii’ style came from the company name, hubii, which was established over a decade ago – long before we moved into the blockchain industry. Given that nahmii is now hubii’s main product, I like the idea that the ‘ii’ represents the Roman numerals for ‘2’. Maybe we should start claiming that was our plan all along!
Cryptodiffer Community
To compete with similar project which already been in ecosystem is very tough & and its all depend on the devloper team of the project who assures the rapid developments and separate functionalities. So, there any noteworthy challenges that your team meet in the past on Nahmii ecosystem. I want to know more about your planning?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
You are right and, at first, we were concerned that we were starting way after our competitors and therefore it would take us a long time to catch up. So little we knew. Our competitors do spend a lot of time producing theoretical papers and attending conferences, something we are not too fond of. Instead, we focus on building and delivering working products.
We have faced many challenges, mainly technical ones due to the immaturity of Ethereum’s toolset. The fact some of us have been working together for over a decade and been in the software engineering industry for over 25 years helped us greatly.
Cryptodiffer Community
Are you targeting large corporate clients or small blockchain projects and startups?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
We have always positioned nahmii as a solution for commercial-grade blockchain scaling; in other words, we’re targeting large companies and commercial-scale adoption. At the same time, we understand that there is potentially enormous value in supporting new blockchain projects – that’s why nahmii has an easy-to-use set of developer tools: our CLI, SDK and suite of APIs.
Cryptodiffer Community
To solve blockchain scaling problem, there are many layer 2 solutions such as State Channel, Side Chain, Off-chain Computation. We have seen many projects claim to resolve these problems but there weren’t effiency solutions out there. Why does Nahmii choose State Channels to be built on and how will Nahmii be different, be unique compared to existing layer 2 projects out there?
Mark Briscombe
COO
Uniquely, nahmii lies somewhere in the space between state channels and side-chains. It is most closely related to state-channels, but we borrow the best from both methods. We think commercially it is a necessity to solve the issues of throughput, latency, finality, ease-of-use, and fee-predictability. Side-chains (including Plasma/rollups) can only help throughput, making everything else worse in general. State channels solve more issues, but introduce other problems such as capital inefficiency.
As a result, we borrow a little from side-chains, but more from state-channels. We are the only team with this approach, perhaps because our team has such a wide range of experience across the wider tech ecosystem; we know what products at scale need.
Cryptodiffer Community
What’s the Main mission & Targets of Nahmii project and what you actually want to build?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
We wanted to build and deploy a protocol that would make Ethereum ready for commercial adoption, unlike our competitors. That is our main mission.
Moving ahead, our objective is to turn nahmii into a key piece of infrastructure used by companies across the world when building their blockchain-based solutions.
Cryptodiffer Community
What are the main Benefits of Nahmii to developers like which features & facilities are provided by Nahmii to Developers?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
Nahmii is built from the ground up with developers in mind. That’s why nahmii comes complete with a full developer toolkit: CLI, SDK and APIs. Our goal here is to lower the barriers to entry for blockchain-curious developers, in turn this will ease adoption and help developers to be as productive as possible in little time.
Cryptodiffer Community
DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain space right now. Can you share your opinions on DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is Nahmii approach towards the DeFi sector?
Mark Briscombe
COO
Correct, DeFi is the latest hot topic in this ecosystem. We don’t try to follow these trends too much, nor do we need to because nahmii is a generalised protocol that can handle any type of transaction and smart contracts. We do think DeFi will both disrupt and complement the existing financial system and eventually they will exist side-by-side.
Again, talking about our ambition, we envisage solving real problems that exist today, such as financial access, identity management, efficiency of finance and self-sovereignty of one’s funds. We do not particularly see huge value in the majority of DeFi projects today, as they are mostly focused on feeding speculation in the industry. As we have seen recently, there is significant risk in lending funds in a DeFi product especially when the creators of such products do not appreciate the risks themselves and aren’t really well trained in the field of finance. We see a lot of frightening and vulnerable products around, some of which are the largest and most successful in our fragile ecosystem. There is no significant return without risk and many of the developers in this space are playing fast and loose with other people’s funds.
nahmii itself can also be considered a DeFi product of course. Token holders will participate in elements of the security of the protocol. As a reward for doing so, they trustlessly earn transaction fees from the network. Another method of earning fees for contributing is that soon we will allow users to provide other users with liquidity for ‘instant’ withdrawals. This does not involve risk, it merely allows people to extract the time-value of money.
It is also important to understand that financial products might benefit from some element of decentralisation, whilst also needing to obey regulations. nahmii can satisfy regulations, such as KYC/AML where required, but also be anonymous where appropriate. We can implement privacy methods on nahmii too. Again, nahmii is designed to satisfy as many needs as possible.
Cryptodiffer Community
Nahmii is built and deployed in the Ethereum mainnet. do you have a plan to build your own mainnet???
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
No, we do not at this time. We will, instead, focus on porting nahmii to other blockchains to enable interoperability.
Cryptodiffer 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?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
All those smart solutions you refer to rely, as you have mentioned, on a central system and operator therefore trust must be placed on that actor.
There are many use cases where a blockchain-based solution can help to reduce trust on 3rd parties and there is immense value on that.
Cryptodiffer Community
As an investor and early adopter, I find it difficult to access/value a project in the short term and require longer periods of time to fully understand, recognise and value it. So, to help my understanding, can you tell me what plans are set in motion to add value to Nahmii ?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
I agree. It does take a long time and, due to all the noise surrounding the industry, assessing the value of new blockchain products can be difficult if not impossible.
Our first objective was to develop nahmii and reach the market before our competitors. We achieved that objective.
Our next objective to add value to the protocol is to focus on adoption. To do that we work with companies such as NBX, Microsoft and NEO. It is worth noting that you cannot enforce adoption nor accelerate the natural process for an industry to mature. You can, however, position yourself in a strategic place to succeed towards adoption.
Cryptodiffer Community
How can we recover again if we lose access to the Nahmi CLI tool? How is the application ID created on Hubii’s identity server protected? Is the configuration file stored in data records?
Jens Ivar Jørdre
CTO
It depends what is meant by ‘lose access’ to nahmii-cli. There are essentially two components, one being the pair of keystore file and its secret, the other one being the pair of app ID and app secret.
The nahmii-cli configuration is stored in your home account, i.e. in file ~/.nahmii/config.yaml on Linux or Mac OS. Subsequently namii-cli expects keystore files to be located in directory ~/.nahmii/keystore.
The user will have to manage his keystore and secret as stored in ~/.nahmii/config.yaml and take the necessary back-up precautions for this. We do not manage these essential credentials for you.
On the other hand the app ID and app secret are credentials that we issue for the interaction with our back-end. If you lose these we’d be happy to issue a new pair.
Be aware that we advise that nahmii-cli be used first and foremost as a tool for the development of solutions on top of nahmii, for prototyping and as a reference on how to interact with our SDK. It is not considered the optimum choice for production systems based on nahmii.
Cryptodiffer Community
There are 4 core issues prevalent in crypto and blockchain: Excessive Volatility, Security, Scalability and Interoperability. How do you plan to overcome these issues?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
Another good question! Let’s take each point in turn:
Excessive volatility – generally speaking, volatility isn’t a problem for nahmii. Users can choose whether to make transactions in volatile currencies or more stable alternatives, either way the process will be easier, faster and cheaper with nahmii. For the most volatile currencies, a nahmii-powered exchange can potentially reduce spreads and improve liquidity. This will not necessarily solve the problem of highly-volatile currencies, but it should help.
Security – building on top of blockchains as a layer-2 protocol, we believe that nahmii’s security can approach or even match the security of the baselayer.
Scalability – we have designed nahmii to offer a minimum performance of 15 transactions per second per wallet, with no limit on the number of wallets that can be served by the protocol. While 15 TPS might not sound like a lot, remember that it is per wallet. Ten wallets therefore gives a throughput of 150 TPS, one thousand wallets 15,000 TPS and so on.
Interoperability – nahmii’s backend requires almost no customisation to run on other blockchains, leaving only the task of porting the smart contracts across. For Ethereum forks like NEO, this is relatively trivial. For other blockchains like Bitcoin, we can leverage platforms like RSK to port nahmii across. Generally speaking, the task of porting nahmii to any compatible blockchain is relatively simple because our backend is blockchain-agnostic. Importantly, interoperability through nahmii will allow for trustless trading between blockchains – this is a major benefit of our approach.
Cryptodiffer Community
Give us 1 or 2 reasons why we need Nahmii?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
Two reasons: one, because – despite what you might read or others say – blockchain today is not commercially viable. Reason two, because the other proposed scaling solutions being built by our competitors will not solve this problem.
Cryptodiffer Community
Nahmii being the only commercially-viable scaling solution for blockchain available today with no other protocol offering the same combination of performance, security and features like you, which implies that nahmii does not have any project competing with it at the moment. However, more projects will come up similar solutions very soon.
How do you plan to continually distinct your self from them when the time comes?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
We will continue being transparent, approachable, honest and trustworthy
Cryptodiffer Community
What effort are you making to continually improve on the scaling solution you provide so as not to make you technology become obsolete in the future?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
Good question. Our approach towards scalability is very different than our competitors. Our focus is more holistic: alongside scaling, nahmii offers interoperability (to make it scalable from an adoption point of view) and powerful developer tools. Moving forward, our approach will consist of working closely with our partners and the developer community to make sure nahmii contains the features needed so those players can build the products they require.
Cryptodiffer Community
Basically nahmii is Layer 2 to Ethereum base chain but nahmii also supports multi chain over its own layer 2 so can we call it’s one of its kind multy layer sidechain crypto currency ever focused?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
We simply say that nahmii is a scalability and interoperability protocol. Because of the architecture of nahmii we can easily port it to other blockchains that support smart contracts. Then, yes, within the layer-2 we can enable interoperability.
Cryptodiffer Community
Is nahmii limited to only ethereum or it will work on other blockchains also? If eth 2.0 comes with all solutions that nahmii providing what will be tha use cases of nahmii?
Jacobo Toll-Messia
CEO
Please see the first answer. Yes, it will work on other blockchains.
It is difficult to assess all the features that Ethereum 2.0 will bring and, most importantly, when Ethereum 2.0 will be completed. It might take years to arrive.
Having said that, we can confidently say that nahmii has features that Ethereum 2.0 will never have. One example is the ability to build solutions that are fully compliant with KYC/AML regulations. More importantly, we do not expect that Ethereum 2.0 will scale to the levels required for commercial adoption.
Cryptodiffer Community
What does the Nahmii ecosystem include? What is the role of NII token in the entire Nahmii ecosystem? Currently, there are many projects growing strongly, so why should we choose Nahmii instead of others? What are the highlights of Nahmii?
Mark Briscombe
COO
We’ve noticed a number of questions about the NII token itself, but our answer here should cover the key points. We’ll also address hubii’s business model and the development of nahmii.
The NII token is a token which confers rights to partake in the security of the protocol. NII holders earn all transaction fees from the protocol for doing this. This is hubii’s business model; owning a percentage of the nahmii tokens, but not enough to have absolute control of the system. In this way we guarantee that hubii can’t commit fraud, even if we tried or were compromised ourselves. If a user owns 1% of the NII tokens, then they will earn 1% of the transaction fees in the network.
What this means is that NII holders receive transaction fees from nahmii, which will actually exist in a basket of all currencies transacting in the ecosystem. This is another important point, in that users don’t need to hold ETH or NII in order to transact in nahmii. Transaction fees are paid in the currency being used. This is one other user experience blocker with base-layer blockchains and other ‘scaling’ solutions.
NII is released every month, but in a defined way. People can view transaction fees being accrued trustlessly on the Ethereum base-layer. As such, people can determine a fair price for the token, which can be estimated from anticipated future cashflows. This will set a floor price for the token, which will grow as products are launched on nahmii and develop transaction fees. In turn, as NII value grows, so does the security of the protocol; though we are not beholden to the price of the token alone in terms of security.
Regarding the highlights of nahmii and reasons to choose this system, I believe we have covered that across the answers to the other questions. I would question the definition of ‘growing strongly’ though, I am yet to see a blockchain product achieve anything close to mass adoption (except perhaps for exchanges and gambling sites). Our ambitions are in providing services to products with huge numbers of users.
Cryptodiffer Community
According to website, Nahmii is working on Layer-2 Scaling protocol for Ethereum Blockchain ! But What If ethereum Launches ETH 2.0 network? Is there any effect on Namhii by ETH 2.0 ?
Jens Ivar Jørdre
CTO
That answer was already given to AK47 above. To this day we are unaware of ETH 2.0 features that will affect nahmii negatively.
Cryptodiffer Community
As investor, whats the benefits of Nahmii coins NII & why should i invest in Nahmii?
Jens Ivar Jørdre
CTO
Any NII holdings you have will make you eligible to claim accrued fees from the protocol. If you hold 1% of the released NII during an accrual period you are eligible for 1% of fees shared during that accrual period. This obtained eligibility to claim fees from your NII holdings combined with the general expectancy of NII value increase because of the above incentive is pretty much a recipe to kill two birds with one stone.
Cryptodiffer Community
With the level of efficiency that Nii is proposing, what will the next 5 years look like if you could have your way and your solutions were fully implemented?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
Our goal is to provide the infrastructure that powers the upcoming blockchain revolution. In five years time, we see nahmii powered products running everything from financial inclusion projects in Africa to NFT gaming token exchanges. Many of these products can only be built on nahmii, as there is no other way to fix the problems of compliance and performance on blockchain today.
Cryptodiffer Community
How are traditional business accepting your proposals today compared to say 2 year ago? Are you finding them more receptive or at least more informed about the benefits you’re proposing?
John Derbyshire
Product Lead
Compared to two years ago, almost every business we deal is now genuinely interested in blockchain. That is a marked improvement, most notably in the seriousness with which they are considering the technology. Two years ago in the bull market, blockchain was synonymous with cryptocurrencies. Now it seems that companies are more educated to the extent that they understand the difference between cryptocurrencies and blockchain. This is clearly a positive development for hubii, nahmii and the industry as a whole – it is a clear sign of a maturing market.
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Thank you everyone who took part!
It was a pleasure to conduct an AMA with Nahmii!!!
Nahmii team just confirmed that they are happy to continue ama in their chat:
https://t.me/hubiinetwork
all AMA questions both in cryptodiffer chat and Nahmii will be eligible for the NII token prizes
