Sero AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Robert B.
CEO
Sure, Robert here, CEO and Co-founder of SERO. I was a search engine developer working for Lycos since 2000.
I was also sent to Silicon Valley to develop the latest Internet technology. Since 2003, I built 2 startups, Business social network and IT consulting company. After I sold the companies, I became a traditional investor who invested and incubed many TMT projects. Now I am still a part-time mentor of SOSV ChinAccelerator and also mentor foreigners on how to build and establish their startups in China.
I believe that decentralized application is a trend, and the blockchain industry must truly bring blockchain technology to different industries to create value. Privacy protection is a serious issue that has not been solved, which means application of blockchain technology in business doesn’t work yet, and it can’t form large-scale 2B or 2C applications to have very possibility to leak privacy.
Therefore, as the first generation of Internet Technical guy in China, I invited several technical geniuses who were all CTO in big billion dollar internet corporations to participate and build in the blockchain industry and our project is all about privacy protection technology. I think this market prospect is very broad and we have made great results in this challenging niche.
Current privacy coins, including Zcash, Monero, Dash, and Grin/Beam have the ability to protect transaction/account’s privacy but they don’t support smart contracts, which means that decentralized apps still don’t have privacy protection. So that’s we want to improve and build SERO.
CryptoDiffer team
Can you briefly describe what is Sero in 3-5 sentences?
Robert B.
CEO
Alright. so SERO stands for “Super Zero” and is the world’s first privacy coin supporting Turing Complete smart contract using Zero-Knowledge Proof.
SERO is also the world’s first Privacy Protection platform which allows developers to issue privacy tokens and use them in DApps.
In addition, we created SUPER-ZK, the fastest Zero-Knowledge proof encryption library available currently which is more than 20 times faster than the latest zk-SNARKs which Zcash used.
CryptoDiffer team
As we know there is already plenty of high-throughput blockchain project nowadays like QuarkChain, Zilliqa, Algorand and much more. How do you plan to compete with them and what is a competitive advantage of Elrond? What unique has Elrond beside its competitors?
Robert B.
CEO
If you think Zcash, Dash, Monero and Grin/Beam are the privacy version of Bitcoin, SERO is the privacy version of Ethereum. SERO supports turing complete smart contracts, which means Dapps can have privacy protection feature using SERO technology. Developers can spend only few minutes to issue one privacy tokens based on SERO and use it in their DApps. And there is an easy way to use exchange in SERO FLIGHT wallet (Light Wallet for phones), where privacy coins issued and SERO can be exchanged.
So SERO has good advantage to build global technical community that uses SERO privacy technology for DApps which need privacy or other business needs.
CryptoDiffer team
What is the token utility in the ecosystem? Where it will be used and why the demand for the token should increase?
Robert B.
CEO
Good question, actually SERO coin’s usage is similar to ETH in some way, every transaction not only needs SERO but also privacy tokens issued on SERO require SERO for gas fee.
But in addition as I mentioned earlier, there is an easy way to use exchange in SERO FLIGHT wallet, where privacy tokens issued and SERO can be exchanged.
So the developers can do fundraising similar with ICO in SERO FLIGHT wallet directly, to Sell the privacy token for SERO coins.
That means SERO FLIGHT wallet can be a good crowd funding tool and demand for SERO token should increase while the ecosystem keeps developing.
CryptoDiffer team
Could you tell us about the product you have already delivered? You have over 10,000 mining nodes from 30+ countries, how did you achieve this?
Robert B.
CEO
We delivery SERO wallet (Full nodes) and SERO FLIGHT wallet (light version for phones). At the beginning of SERO chain, SERO was based on CPU mining. The testnet was launched in September 2018 and Betanet was launched in Jan 2019. So one thing we made sure that our development pace was good and we’re achieving milestones and timely delivering on our words. As we grew more people started joining in and their curiosity and belief in SERO privacy technology is what made them join our vision. We also conducted a Guild Mining event where best mining guilds (in terms of network contribution) was rewarded.
CryptoDiffer team
Your token is trading much higher of the IEO price. What is your future plans and marketing strategy to attract more customers to the product and the token?
Robert B.
CEO
Actually before listing in Gate, SERO had been listed in some small exchanges like QBTC, CITEX already, and we have several very good active OTC groups too. The price at that time is about 4-5 times higher than IEO Price. The reason we offer very cheap price is that we want to give more profit and let more users pay attention on SERO’s advantage and value, so more new users can start trading SERO.
Now we see the result is pretty good because more people see the value, and the current price is much higher and SERO has also a very big trading volume of about USD 10-50million for every 24H volume only in Gate.
The highest recorded volume for 24H is almost USD 100million, which was more than 3 times bigger than Bitcoin’s 24H volume on Gate. The highest volume of SERO is more than 50% of total volume in Gate so we do have penetrated into mainstream crypto space in terms of trading.
So we believe IEO in gate is a good start and a right decision for SERO.
CryptoDiffer team
As we have seen, SERO has a very strong and solid community. How does SERO maintain a high level of project awareness and the high level of SERO consensus?
Robert B.
CEO
First, our community call SERO as “Privacy Ethereum”. This tag is very easy to understand our position and advantage.
Because of Grin and Beam’s great start, people pay a lot of attention on privacy coins.So SERO’s potential does amazes a lot of people. The members from our community are all willing to do free PR for SERO. Because of our good tokenomics and our proven technology, it’s very easy for everyone to have a high level consensus.
Also, we do have plans to be listed on more exchanges. After listing in Gate, more good exchanges plan to list SERO, for example CoinOne, Coinw, Biki etc, And we will cooperate with more global community and build our communities in many countries. Now the miners from different countries are introducing some local partner for us. And communities from Korea, Japan, Russia and America are trying to cooperate with SERO. So I think SERO consensus will keep reaching higher level.
In addition, thanks to the assistance of our investors and partners in the early stage like Qtum funds, LD capital and Landscape Capital, they contributed a lot to our solid community establishment as well, especially in China.
Cryptodiffer Community
SERO recently released the details of SERO staking nodes. I have 2 questions: 1) normally, pos is applied after having a great amount of users or holders like ETH, why does SERO choose to apply pos in the very initial phase? 2) what is the most significant difference of SERO staking nodes compared to others?
Robert B.
CEO
1) we plan to add POS at the beginning, but we are not ready for POS because we have no strong community like now. We will start POS as soon as we are ready, now it’s time to go.
2) our POS is working with POW. POS verify the blocks from POW, and it can protect SERO chain from 51% attacking. The pos reward will be automatically adjusted according to the proportion of the total amount of pos in the whole network.
Cryptodiffer Community
We have heard a lot about Origo Network. The phrase “Origo is privasy” became a meme somehow. Can you tell us about the main difference between Origo and Sero cos it looks like you from the same sphere
Robert B.
CEO
We saw Origo last year. Now our understanding of Origo is limited to white papers and a test network that lacks any of the core features described in his white paper, and there is no any source code on Github. Sero has already launched BetaNet in January this year, and has implemented the features depicted in the white paper. So we can’t compare it with two projects that are completely different. From the the tokenomics mechanism, we think that Origo is not a decentralized project because he did not give most of the token to the community to govern.
Cryptodiffer Community
Can you also tell about your long term plans – where do you see SERO in 1, 5, 10 years?
Robert B.
CEO
At present, SERO will be known to everyone by the positioning of the privacy public chain, but in the longer period, we hope that sero can become the top-level public chain comparable to Ethereum, not only in terms of privacy features, but also in TPS, cross-chain mechanism, network expansion which has excellent solution and performance on SERO.
Cryptodiffer Community
Despite this, do you plan to list on other tier-1 exchanges in common future?
Robert B.
CEO
because of SERO performance in gate, several tier-1 exchanges are coming to us. And we will announce as soon as we confirm the listing cooperation.
CryptoDiffer team
Chainlink has been partnering with many blockchain projects as a smart contract layer/adapter. Sero doens’t need Chainlink since it has its own smart contract tech right? So what kind of tech partnerships would Sero benefit most from to make it easily usable, or as usable as Ethereum. (Ethereum has Metamask etc.) Ark has its point. click. blockchain. etc etc
Robert B.
CEO
Chainlink plans to interact with resources outside the blockchain by creating a distributed oracle network for smart contracts. We believe there is good prospects for cooperation with SERO, and SERO will cooperate with more ecological partners in the future. In the field of technical cooperation, we have great partners who have excellent solutions in the fields of wallet, cross-chain and oracle, etc.
Cryptodiffer Community
A lot of people like Elrond because you are the underdog. A company from a small town in Europe. How does it feel to go agains companies all around the globe? Some located in well known tech capitals and startup hubs?
CryptoDiffer team
It was a pleasure to conduct an AMA with such a cool project like Sero. Thanks for the conversation!
