Myself:

So the next question is regarding Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum). What has his contribution to the project been so far?

Angel:

So when we got the critical mass and we established the proof-of-concept release/ the initial product, our team of lead developers so Marek and Matthew and Konrad; actually we have a few more people working on the development side with them; and they have also extensive kind of design experience. But when we start attacking the problem, we realized that actually in this space, even the stakeholders don’t have a good answer to this scalability problem I described earlier. So what I realized is that we actually need somebody who is best in the world to be able to solve that particular problem. We had narrowed down the list to a few people and one of them was Gavin.

We met him in Geneva, it was a one-day long meeting where we just basically discussed Ambrosus, discussed the vision and what we’re trying to do and I believe Gavin said it took him like two weeks to code the first proof of concept for Ethereum, so and then another 18 months to create a kind of working, stable implementation of that. So the guy (Gavin Wood) has an amazing ability to turn bold ideas into actually programmable and executable stuff. He said this thing you’re trying to solve is extremely difficult and what he liked about this- I mean I’m not speaking his behalf here but it’s just kind of the discussion was that, he realized that the problem is a very fundamental problem. I mean that’s their own words that they’re trying to solve humanity’s most important missions and they work on the questions of energy, they work on questions of inter-blockchain operability and so on and the future of food and life essential products, he actually said that that’s an important question to solve and a difficult one. So they really like the challenge, both Gavin personally and the rest of Parity, they’d like to find that this solution can actually be transformative and this is why they decided to join. They serve as our technical advisors, the whole Parity team. They helped us on the conceptualization so when we first came to the workshop with them in Berlin, we presented them the software that our team has created, the outline for the protocol and the architecture of the token of amber, which is a data-bonded token. We spent the whole day with Parity brainstorming on how you actually make that work. How you structure the data, where you store the data and we looked at different solutions we need to look that Swarm, then we looked at IPFS and a few other solutions. Gavin and the rest of parity, they’ve been very helpful in terms of answering the basic questions that would take us ourselves a long time to solve and of course these guys know a lot of useful things in the blockchain domain.

Besides this, they have a library of smart contracts and apparently a lot of their stuff is also open source, but because we told them from the beginning our TGE needs to be you know KYC-compliant and that requires certain amendments because we actually whitelist wallets of participants after they submit the KYC recommendation. So we need a certain functionality in our smart contracts and this is why the smart contract that we have for the TGE, it was scripted by Parity and by Gavin. On Github you can see the commits that Gavin has personally made and the contract itself was an innovation and he wrote it from scratch so it wasn’t reused. Normally ICOs just reuse other existing smart contracts, in our case Gavin and the rest of Parity they wrote it from scratch. We had to run it through several audits to make sure that there were no bugs or problems, because when you have something new you always have to stress test it, and this was also one of our key concerns. This was one of the reasons for the delay.

We had a number of security issues and again some people started to criticize us saying that we delayed stuff. The point is we don’t have the alternative universe at our disposal. You see that every week, ICOs are getting hacked. Most recently there was the etherparty example. With a really basic hack when hackers breach the website and replace the address for contribution and then millions of dollars are gone. So we don’t have the alternative universe where we would launch on the 13th and then we would have a hack and then 30 million dollars or more would have been stolen. This is the same problem that many politicians face. Many politicians, especially during the bad times, they get criticized. Like “look at the country, it’s in a mess.” Or “we have an unemployment of like 6%.” What people don’t realize that if not for this person, maybe the unemployment would have been 12%. It’s just that the external environment is very bad and sometimes you’re not trying to make things better, you try to make things less worse.

So this is what we did with the security; we’ve had three phishing websites that were trying to collect money on behalf of Ambrosus using a 100% copy, a clone of our website and our security team took these websites down, the live versions were taken down in 30 minutes each. There is no other TGE that got hacked or had a phishing website that would take them down that fast. 2 of them didn’t collect anything, one of them had I think 5 or 6 ETH in. 2 people contacted us they said. “oh yeah, we were the ones who sent the money” or “I lost my money.” We asked, “how much did you give in total?” They answered, “3 ETH.” We will compensate them 3 ETH. 3 ETH in this scale is nothing really, but we managed to basically bring the losses down to nothing and I think this is something we didn’t brag about too much but I think that also needs to be appreciated. We cannot prove it because there is no alternative universe but this security approach exists for a purpose. This is also something we’ve been doing jointly with Gavin and the rest of the Parity team, it’s important to stress that it’s not just Gavin alone, the whole parity team are helping us on the solution.

We have regular workshops with them, our next workshop is planned for November. In basically one month’s time, we’re going to set up a follow up on the operations for the Ambrosus protocol and Parity will specifically help us with finding the right technology stack for the pilot projects we’re currently conducting with companies, the ones that are currently on the proposals. Right now, next door where Vlad has a meeting, we have corporate clients from a large company we hope to make the partnership public as soon as possible. But of course in this space most companies when they interact with you, they usually want an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).

We do have a lot of stuff going on in the background. It’s not ideal for the TGE of course I’m well aware. I will point fingers in this case actually. I’ll point a finger at Monaco, the Cryptocurrency card. They said “oh we’re working on a deal with Visa and their price went up by 7 times. I usually don’t point fingers but I will point a finger at them because this, in my opinion, was highly unethical. They drove up the price of their token by 7 times and then turned out that the Visa partnership doesn’t exist.

I really hope that there’ll be less practices like this in the industry because I really hate that. These situations make the whole industry look like a joke, and then legitimate companies have a problem of needing to run the show, but really don’t want to run the show for the public. I want to actually work on our stuff and our team is working 16 hours per day, sometimes more. Katerina who’s sitting here, people talk with her at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. I don’t know any time we are always there and that’s what we want people to realize. You know, for cryptocurrencies, a big part of it all PR, it’s like a reality show. But what I want the industry to actually become is less of a PR show, and more action. So from that perspective, we do want to update people on the progress we made and we will be releasing an activity report on all the achievements we’ve had. We’ve been a finalist at the Hello Tomorrow summit and a few other things that we’ve done. We probably should be better at communicating this stuff, but our team is actually busy getting these things done, probably we should spend more time talking about this.

Myself:

So I’d just like to thank Katerina, she did talk to me at 4a.m. to set this up. So to Kate and Angel and the team, I hope you get more sleep. So I’m going to continue to eat my salad, and I look forward to the day where I can find out where my food actually came from, perhaps in 3 years time.

Angel:

I do hope that’s earlier. 3 years’ time is actually when we have an ambition to make supply chains automatic, with that real-time quality auditing. But the ability for people to have the basic information — trustworthy information- I mean information you have it now on the package, but can you trust it? Well a lot of evidence shows no. So, for us to bring in more transparency and for that purpose (well for this particular product salad, might take a bit longer) for some other products, we definitely do want to make this live already early next year in 2018.

Myself:

Alright, so thank you so much for your time, Angel and Kate. Have a good rest of the day!

Angel:

Appreciate this as well and thanks so much for organizing this.

END