Each week, r/0Chain hosts an AMA with 0chain’s Operations Director, Derick Fiebiger, to address questions from the community. Without further delay, let’s dive into this weeks address:

You can also listen via podcast.

Introduction

Welcome to AskFeebs — a weekly address where your questions on crypto and 0Chain are answered. I’m Derick Fiebiger, Director of Operations for 0Chain, and I thank you for joining me. Let’s hop into things.

0Chain highlights

So quick overview before going into the questions. We’re really close on launching Alpha. The 0box app is looking awesome. We added a new logo to it, and I’ll give you another sneak peak. I believe we are still waiting on iOS approval, but it’s not long. I asked Saswata if we can expect it tomorrow and he didn’t rule it out. I’m not saying it will launch tomorrow just saying it’s not out of the question, and it’s coming fast. I’ll let the community know when I can give a concrete date/time. I’m just as anxious to play with it as everyone else.

Questions:

Question 1:

I really like this project and have been waiting to buy in but i still cant. all the exchanges that zcn is presently on demand kyc as well as not allow my jurisdiction. i live in the states so its not like I’m from north korea or anything. was hoping to find out if there are plans to get on an exchange in the very near future that allows more diverse investors? not talking binance or anything but something like hotbit or latoken or whatever, just something that allows more people like myself the ability to buy zcn. thank you for your time

Will there be new exchanges? (odysseus2ocn)

You can buy on Bilaxy and IDEX right now as a US citizen. Bilaxy will let you trade and has very minimal KYC requirements, and so does IDEX with no KYC requirements to my knowledge. Yes, there will be higher volume exchanges soon, but in the meantime you can use those.

Question 2:

Is the 0box app going to be available to everyone on iOS/Mac at the start? Or is it limited to a certain number of people

Can you expand on the partnership with DHLS? Is this something that’s active or prospective? Any plans with current partners to leverage the network on board their technologies?

0box iOS/Mac? Available to all or limited? Partnership with DHLS? Future partners? (MNwildfan95)

At the outset everyone will be able to use the app, and it will start out on iOS/Mac first yes. Our work with DHLS is in early stages, and progress was slowed after the government shutdown. When there is more concrete information we will provide it. We’re actually planning to do a crypto blitz soon, and partner with any blockchain or dApp that needs storage. We don’t consider ourselves a competitor — rather, a partner — to every blockchain out there. If you have a good connection with other big blockchain projects, let me know so we can get more intros.

Question 3:

How can you say, with a straight face, that the blockchain is free to use, when it requires locking up tokens and there is an interest rate. You’re just paying through inflation in that case. Seems like EOS 2.0 to me, will probably have some last minute RAM-Equivalent fee added that will be required to actually use the thing. Inflation is a cost, so how is it free? (moeb768)

Great question. So I personally don’t like saying it’s free because it invites a lot of criticisms like “well technically there is a cost here and here, and this is technically that way” and this distracts from what we’ve really achieved with token economics. How I like to describe it is we’ve counterbalanced the cost of inflation with staking requirements which scale with network growth. I recommend reading our token reward & storage protocol paper to get a good idea of how we navigate around this, and how we are fundamentally different from EOS from both token and consensus perspectives. I’ll address this in a couple parts.

Firstly, almost every blockchain protocol will have some semblance of an inflation mechanism — it’s generally how nodes are compensated for providing a service. Granted, there are some exceptions like IOTA, but in essence the transaction cost is just presented in a different format by requiring each sender to execute PoW on a previous transaction. IOTA also has serious hurdles with achieving fast guaranteed finality and reliably time-stamping transactions. But that’s a separate argument to be had. Inflation is prevalent on virtually every known blockchain protocol aside from the few outliers like I just explained. However, almost all of these blockchains charge: 1) a transaction fee, 2) cost through inflation 3) they have no underlying asset value.

The key distinction from 0Chain to other protocols is how it approaches these three concepts. We have an inflation rate of roughly 10% and we also will technically have a transaction fee as well, but the true genius in our token protocol is how we solve these problems by reducing tokens in circulation. Inflation present a cost to the value of an asset if it increases the tokens in float, also known as circulating supply. The 0Chain token protocol is hardwired for locking and staking. What do I mean by this and why does it matter? Any service that is provided or used on the 0Chain network will require locking and staking of tokens. This in essence means that any participation in the network will result in a reduction of float supply even with the 10% inflation. Blobbers/miners/sharders lock tokens, transaction senders lock tokens, storage users lock tokens, etc. So while inflation may be occurring, its impact on float supply is counterbalanced by staked and locked tokens, so there is no additional cost. You can verify this in depth on the protocol paper.

Additionally, ZCN is an asset-backed token. As the blobber network grows, the integral storage value of ZCN grows with it. This affects the utility of the asset itself. So, we address the hypothetical cost of supply by reducing total coins in circulation through locking and staking on the network, and providing a token that has actual redeemable market value beyond just speculation. We’ll have a paper out soon by Imperial College detailing the value of ZCN.

Question 4:

We would like to know about the specs for mining/blobbing/sharding (cryptofool7)

Specs will be available within a month. I’m looking at starting a form to get a gauge of interest and priority. Maybe let me know in telegram if you think this is a good idea. I plan on running a blobber as well so maybe we’ll start a separate telegram group for 0Chain service providers where we can all strategize and ask targeted questions.

That’s it guys thanks for watching. See you all in two weeks. Saswata’s monthly AMA will be next week. Cheers!

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