On October 9th evening, Bytom Founder Chang Jia, Bytom CEO Lang Yu and Bytom CTO James Zhu answered almost a hundred questions about Bytom’s current situation and roadmap in ChainNode’s AMA. Here are some highlights from the AMA.

What’s Bytom’s detailed development plan?

Chang Jia:

Bytom has a systemic periodical plan:

2017－2018, Development of Bytom mainnet and related ecosystem

2018－2019, Development of Sidechain Vapor and gateway Federation

2019－2020, Development of mainchain-sidechain Baas Platform — Bystack, Decentered Cross-Chain Gateway (OFMF) and Value Exchange Engine Magnetic Contract

In summary, mainnet, sidechain and crosschain are three keywords for three phases.

Bytom mainnet’s primary application scenario is asset issuing and mapping(ICO, IEO and STO). However, this is not the current focus due to the strong compliance concern but will be potential. Bytom’s sidechain aims to deal with asset transactions and advanced financial scenarios based on smart contracts (such as transaction, transfer, staking, stable coins, lending, futures and other decentralized finance) and this is our priority now. Bytom does not focus on tokenizing underlying assets because existing mainstream digital assets on other blockchains can be connected to Bytom’s sidechain which realizes transactions in trading. Magnetic contract and SWAP protocol solve the problem of liquidity and allow users to experience trading akin to centralized exchanges through the wallet. Active trading on blockchain in turn makes on-chain oracle possible and on-chain verifiable oracles( trading price) lays the foundation for all finance(lending, stable coins and Bancor protocol). In the past, all of those are based on centralized third-party oracle, which makes promising Defi fragile because all might break down if there is something wrong with the centralized third-party. On-chain oracle allows Defi to become a real closed loop. It’s very disruptive to build a non-cheating and verifiable credit evaluation system based on coindays destroyed utilizing trading data of complicated financial operations.

2.In the MOV protocol whitepaper, the open gateway OFMF seems a very important design, could you please explain it in detail?

Lang Yu:

OFMF refers to Open Federation Management Framework, which is a basic cross-chain unit. Nowadays all realized cross-chain technology is not 100 percent atomic crosschain or trustless crosschain. OFMF solves those problems and achieves decentralized assets management, clear rights and responsibilities and self-saving on doomsday by designing private key management principles, on-chain contract HTLC(Hash Time-Locked Contract) and threshold signature technology.

3. What can Bytom do for common people and what common people can do for Bytom?

Chang Jia:

This is a good question.

It’s not easy to understand the advantage of BUTXO and that trading is transactions. Let me put it differently, if you are a blockchain user, you will have a wallet controlled by your private key. This wallet supports crosschain so that it not only supports the wallet’s native asset — Bytom — but also other mainstream tokens like BTC、ETH、EOS、USDT. If you have BTC in the wallet and want to exchange for BTM, you have to sign up on exchanges like Huobi and OK in the past. But now you only need to type the amount of BTC that you want to exchange and then wallet will provide a price according to API of online oracle, you can enter a new amount of BTC that you want to exchange and release it. After one second, the trading will be done. In effect it’s a transaction because when you release your order there are many other orders and magnetic contract will find another order that matches your order and integrate your orders into a transaction.

There are two functions of magnetic contract. One is balancing spread. For example, if you want to use 1 BTC to exchange for 10000 BTM and another person’s order is using 10001 BTM to exchange for 1 BTC, and then magnet contract will automatically match the two orders and give 1 BTM to consensus nodes, which means that nodes get the spread. The other is balancing multiple assets, also called loop transaction in some protocols. If person 1 wants to exchange for B with A, person 2 wants to exchange for C with B, person 3 wants to exchange for A with C, then magnet contract will automatically match these orders into one transaction. The loop transaction is the essential idea of BUTXO.

But magnet contract might cannot get trading done immediately as you need to wait for orders that can match. In that case, you can use another value exchange protocol to do instant trading such as Byswap. Maybe you used uniswap before and know that it uses algorithm to find the price automatically. Byswap is different from it because Byswap supports multiple assets. In uniswap, you can only exchange one asset for one asset but in Byswap you can exchange multiple assets for multiple assets because of BUTXO matrix. For example, if you have many alternative tokens in small amount, you can package these alternative tokens and onchain oracle will give a price matrix so that you can exchange all the tokens for another token or exchange many tokens for several other tokens. As a result, traditional exchange rate will be disrupted. The scenarios we discussed here are only the tip of the DeFi iceberg. The advantage of BUTXO is dealing with multiple assets. Previously, dozens of interactive smart contracts must be used to deal with multiple assets which is too complicated. If these smart contracts are based on BUTXO, it will be much easier.

4.When will Bytom launch cross-chain applications? Is crosschain secure and efficient? Could you change private key to six-digit password similar to bank cards so that it’s easy to remember. Now MIX has used six-digit password to protect assets. How does Bytom see Trusted Computing？When will Bytom launch killer assets applications?

Chang Jia:

As we planned, crosschain will be open for test after the blockchain conference in Wuzhen. Our consensus nodes are based on DPoS consensus algorithm and can achieve 10000 TPS that meet DEX’s demands. Federation nodes are based on multi- signature and threshold signature so that the experience will be same as withdraw in exchanges. Private key is a different concept with password and a six-digit password is not secure. Afterall the wallet is not like a bank card and there is no centralized third-party to help you freeze account or find lost assets. Before the end of this year, MOV will play a role in DeFi.

5.How will Bytom’s ecosystem be built fast?

Chang Jia:

Lowering the cost of trading assets is the final goal of blockchain to be used as value exchange protocol. So all public blockchains that regard lowering trading cost as business logic will benefit ecosystem participants. In Bytom’s economic model, federation nodes, consensus nodes, DeFi protocol and DAPP developers can all get great profit. According to the island rule, they probably become giant companies or DAO.

6. What’s the future of Chinese public blockchain projects?

Lang Yu:

Public blockchains should not be categorized into Chinese projects and overseas projects and we should consider the future of all public blockchains. We think that public blockchains’ future lies in finance and assets. We insist on tokenization although the progress is very slow in this area.

7.How Bytom differentiates from Ant Blockchain, Baidu and Libra? What’s your edge in technology?

Chang Jia:

We have different positioning. We never consider them as competitors but comrades on different tracks.

Lang Yu:

Ant, Baidu and Libra are consortium blockchains but Bytom is a public blockchain. They are on different tracks and actually public blockchains face more technical difficulties. We do not worry about competition.

8. Is it possible to destroy part of the income from trading fees in MOV, like 20%? If so, BTM will have a higher value and more people will come to Bytom to do trading?

James：

Magnet contracts’ income from trading fees will be given to super nodes and they will distribute to voters. If community has a demand to destroy 20% and they can vote for super nodes which promise to do that.

9.After Bytom red packet integrates with MOV, is it possible that A sends 0.1 BTC to B and B gets 2 ETH and 10 BTM?

James:

Yes, actually that’s the case where red packet contract and magnet contract are used for one trading. After MOV is launched, updating the red packet DAPP will realize that.

10.When will Bycoin support the crosschain of tokens issued on Bytom? When will it support the crosschain of native tokens of other blockchains?

James：

Bycoin wallet can support the crosschain of tokens issued on Bytom to the sidechain given that the asset is considered as valuable by community. Supporting native tokens of other blockchains will be realized soon after we release the open gateway this year.