0Chain Operations Director was joined by CEO, Saswata Basu on Thursday, March 26 to answer community questions and to provide updates about recent progress. Without further delay, let’s dive into this weeks address:

Feebs: Welcome to AskFeebs, I am Derick Fiebiger, 0Chain Director of Operations. I am joined today by CEO Saswata Basu to answer questions, provide updates, and discuss all things related to 0Chain. I am excited to have you all here today.

Saswata: thank you for having me today, I am excited to be here and answer the questions that our community has

Feebs: of course, it’s nice to have you here. Is there anything you want to talk about before we get into the questions from the community?

Saswata: Regarding COVID-19, it has not impacted us greatly. Many of our developers are located in India and Russia in cities that aren’t too large so thankfully it has not impacted us greatly. But it is important to note the impact it has on other communities and the mentality of people

Feebs: What would you say is the biggest hurdle you have had to face? Schedules, matching up, or what has been the biggest impact from all this?

Saswata: The biggest impact is the uncertainty of the market — both investment side and customer side. Whenever there is uncertainty, there is less people that are willing to try new solutions and less funds to try new products. We will see how it turns out, but the last couple of days the economy has bounced back. If we continue on with the same mindset, I think things will workout. People are clearly impacted by job loss, rent payments, etc. It doesn’t impact us as much as it may be impacting our potential customers. We will learn more about this as we go to market and with potential partners. As well, we shall see impact on crypto market. As a startup, we are not impacted as much as bigger companies with high revenue. We are starting with no income, so I think we will be fine.

Feebs: Big investors, small investors may be apprehensive to part with cash. Maybe this could be a catalyst for some big innovations in tech like coordination apps that blockchain enables or money in general

Saswata: If you look at any big incidents where the whole global economy is impacted by a trauma, such as 9/11, many big companies were formed that became household names. We need to look for new investors that are not paranoid by short-term events.

Feebs: Even the USA is pondering central banking digital currencies that are on blockchain. China is concerned with money spreading disease as well. Regarding 0Chain, are there any general updates regarding betanet or mainnet that you would like to comment on?

Saswata: We are almost close to 100% on tasks we have set out to do. As you know in engineering, the last 1% takes longer than you think. We are in that zone. I am hoping that we get a product released out in the Oracle Cloud by end of the month — this is our highest priority. We also want to get 0Box and 0Wallet out to community to test — this is second priority. And third, betanet is after that. This is something we want to be careful about since we have been running a lot of internal tests. It may not be end of this month since we are staggering releases and have limited developers. Code is written but currently being tested. Oracle dstorage first, then 0Box and 0Wallet followed by betanet. Lot of updates will be released in the days and weeks ahead!

Feebs: Yes, I have got a taste of a few of them and I am excited for everyone to hear about them when the right time comes. So, if that is all of them, I think we could move into the community questions.

What are the workarounds around current COVID situation and what are the concerns?

Saswata: It hasn’t really impacted us or our development. We are thankful for this as it is software-based and our developers can work remotely.

Feebs: Yes, thankful for that. They are wild times.

Is betanet on schedule for late Q1?

Saswata: So end of Q1 is end of month — we had a long list of things to do with dStorage in the cloud, specifically Oracle Cloud. We are doing a lot of products that multiple companies would do individually — one would do dStorage, another would do apps, etc. On the enterprise side, we don’t need view change since it is permissioned. For mainnet, there is a higher bar and we need to do much more. dStorage to be released Q1 and hopefully, with Oracle we can go to market with a strategy when we release the app. We are very excited about our Oracle progress.

Feebs: It seems like a lot more positive response about blockchain from enterprises.

Saswata: Yes, blockchain has matured as a strategy and our focus on dStorage is the right storage (instead of smart contracts), as we can win more partnerships. We are the only storage platform partnered with Oracle and the same will follow with AWS. We are doing one step at a time. We are very excited about this opportunity with Oracle and have them essentially take us to market — it is similar to what XRP did with partnering with enterprise and then going into crypto market. We are doing things in parallel while they did it in stages. We also have a consumer product (0Box) which is different than most product.

Feebs: Ripple had a good go-to-market strategy but definitely doesn’t have the underlying value that ZCN does.

Saswata: Yeah, you hit the right point. What we are establishing with dStorage in the cloud is that we are getting enterprises to realize that this technology is something you could use in the public domain. They could have a copy in the private and public domain. It is important we get into the private enterprise setting for cloud with technology that they can understand and then do not have a barrier to get into the public domain — just need them to trust the public providers. Our protocol gives them a level of confidence in our public providers.

Feebs: Hopping into question three, will anonymous sharing be released with betanet and what features can we expect?

Saswata: We are including most features that were included in the initial requests from the community. We are doing seamless transition from “free” to “premium” with one allocation. The community wanted automatic uploads from the phone, which we will have. And anonymous sharing, will also be part of it. Our focus is dStorage is first and then we will release 0Box. Mac Sync will also be released at that time. We will start to work on Windows Sync then.

Feebs: Question 4: what are the feedbacks from previous presentations? Like sFoundation. Any new partnerships and clients on the way?

Saswata: Oracle is main focus then AWS after that. We have a small team and I will be recruiting help in the future. We can only focus on a few partnerships at a time so that we don’t spread ourselves too thin. We develop a relationship with partners and they drive the progress. We are hoping for many partners and clients via Oracle and AWS. Oracle has 500 blockchain customers.

Regarding the presentations, we had an awesome response via LinkedIn from the 0Chain community. We had people willing to write checks and follow what we are doing — then COVID hit, so we have been a little limited on communication over the past 2 weeks. I think we will reconnect in coming weeks.

Feebs: question 5, how will enterprises be able to monetize their data?

Saswata: If you look at snowflake, they offer data exchange. We are a bit different and in a different market. They were the first to come along with a data exchange platform and now a private platform. We want to attempt to enter that market with AI, etc. How do we want to monetize it in a private setting? We offer data protection — because its high value data — and privacy. We want to get into the market depending on the wants of the customers. We want to work with privacy/data officers to discuss their concerns in how to protect their data. For monetization, we will have to have different conversations and develop a new product to compete with Snowflake. That is something we would like to do but not at this moment. Could use a cloud and then a blockchain smart contract, like Oracle’s, that will execute it. We haven’t met a current client that is wanting this feature but it is something we expect to encounter as we go to market.

Feebs: Yes it is an interesting crux because a blockchain network can offer freedom of your data without worrying about exposing it. It is an interesting dilemma. Currently, everyone compiles their data into big names but this is something that will grow.

Question 6, what is the new tokenomics model that you mentioned a few weeks ago?

Saswata: We capped at 400M. 200M are pre-mined. Approximately half of the new tokens will be interst tokens and the rest are reward tokens. It will decline 10% year to year. It will start out at .7 tokens per block for miner and sharder to share. We expect a block to be generated every 2 seconds. You can then calculate the amount of tokens generated in a year. The other change is that interest will start about 7% — most likely not 10%. We want to reward miners and sharders. This will be all posted on the website soon that could appear as early as next week.

Feebs: Yeah, I think that it is simpler and that the tokenomics model was very innovative, but complex. I like the direction this is going with a capped inflation like bitcoin. It has the halvening aspect as well.

Saswata: It’s a 10% reduction which is more linear.

Feebs: Ultimately the success of bitcoin is whether people can believe in it.

Saswata: And we are not like that. Our model is dependent on people holding it and locking for interest. We also have the data aspect which no other currency has. Data providers have to stake their own tokens in proportion to amount of stored data. If I were to have 1zb of data, and offered a price at half the rate of AWS, it comes out to 100 million. In addition, there is the speculation of value which drives the price up. If you look at Dropbox and get half their data, we have a lot that will be sitting on our platform. Enterprises will make up the bulk of our data on the platform.

Feebs: I meant that we are taking all the great, basic aspects of Bitcoin that are easy for people to understand & we have the data aspect which adds value. Regardless, the scarcity component is big. I can’t wait for it to go live!

Question 7: what does the Oracle partnership consist of?

Saswata: We promote them, they promote us. They have a lot more sales leads than we do. We have a handful vs their 100s. Why do they want us? We can complete the picture in terms of data storage solution. They cannot put the data on-chain as it stalls the network. Off-chain would be traditional storage which is expensive, non-scalable. There would be multiple copies of data which would not allow a single source of truth. Blockchain is to be a trusted network without multiple sources. This could harm their own blockchain as smart contracts would be impacting multiple copies that aren’t sourced at one location. The whole aspect of having data on the platform is A) it is scalable, B) it is cheaper, C) higher performance, and D) blockchain secure with single-source of truth.

Feebs: This ties into the progress of the project. The next question is:

What is the progress on view change?

Saswata: It is done — this does not mean it is completely done because it needs to be vigorously tested. We are adding additional pieces at the moment. Hoping to release in the weeks ahead.

Feebs: Question 9: how does single source of truth work?

Saswata: If you look at Hyperledger, or most blockchains, every endorser has a copy of the data. This means there are multiple copies of data out there which can be modified without other parties knowing it. Having a single source of truth for the data — this prevents disputes. Currently, large amounts of data can stall networks and prevent scalability. If you have 10 nodes, you need 10 copies. This isn’t needed and we can add trustworthy factor about this.

Feebs: If you have uncertainty or more questions about single source of truth, we will be releasing a whitepaper soon that should address a lot of these topics.

Question 10: what does ethereum integration entail for 0Chain?

Saswata: It is the same thing we are doing for Hyperledger. It is basically putting the metadata on another blockchain. You put data on our blockchain and the metadata can be put on other blockchains. It is a way to provide an extensibility of the single source of truth. How do you go from one platform to another with being able to use that data? We provide that solution. We are going to publish that on Truffle and hopefully gain more momentum from the Ethereum community

Feebs: When that community catches wind of this, I think it will be a lot of interest just like we saw with Chainlink — they were passionate about anything that can further the Ethereum movement.

Question 11: what impact do you think the current economy will have on crypto as a whole? Positive or negative for ZCN?

Saswata: If the economy does well, it will be good on the crypto side. When the economy lifts as a whole, it lifts the other. The way I see the crypto market is as another asset class — but also a risky asset class. We are hoping that whatever Trump is doing is going to lift the economy up. We are working on social distancing but also to lift the economy like it went up about 20% the last 3 days. Looking at 2018, the stock market was doing well and in turn the crypto market was doing phenomenal. People will put extra money into crypto assets.

Feebs: I am interested to see what will happen if there is a bank run similar to the 2008 recession where people start to lose faith in the monetary system. They might get apprehensive about leaving money in the banks which could result in small fraction would put their money into BTC. I would be curious to see what would happen to the crypto market.

Saswata: I think the liquidity is always good. With ZCN we cannot print more than 400M tokens which is restricted by our code unlike the US government which can print liquidity.

Feebs: Question 12: what update about Oracle do you have? Saswata has been posting.

Saswata: I am not sure if I have anything more to add. They want us to get the product out so that we can join their go-to-market strategy so that we can be talked about in their blogs and social media. This will help build the 0Chain brand and increase level of awareness.

Feebs: Awesome, thank you! That concludes all the questions. I hope that you and your family are doing well and are safe. We appreciate your hard work and we can see the progress. We are excited to see 0Chain launch! Thanks Sas, bye!