Dear Community,

Thanks a lot for actively participating in the BAND Protocol AMA held on 14th September 2019 at the Game of Bitcoins Channel. We really appreciate all your support. This post is a recap of the entire session held with Soravis (CEO and Co-Founder BAND Protocol)

Q1. The most basic - Why the name BAND Protocol?

haha great question

We are decentralized oracle solution (layer 2 protocol) which means we connect off-chain real-world info to decentralized applications.Band is like grouping and connecting everything together so you can imagine us in between layer 1 below us and dApps on top of us while on the side are real-world information outside of blockchain.

Hence the name Band Protocol

Take a bit of an imagination

We also don't like greek letter name that 95% of crypto projects use.



Q2. Please give us a brief introduction to the Project's vision and also given the competition in Oracles space how do you plan to get the developer community enthusiastic about using BAND





Our vision is to become the go-to data solution for every dApps, on any blockchain. This means every dApps will rely on us to serve reliable, trusted data inside their logic ranging from financial data, real-world event to identity data.

Of course competition is heated but we are still in early day, even dApps have little traction at the moment. We are planning to build solid developer community through good tech and event. Good tech: we offer a compelling solution that is cheap, fast, secure and most important VERY EASY to use for developers. For event, we will have developer grant, hackathon and many events catered toward them. Our last dev meetup has over 400+ people!

Q3. A little bit into the technicals. Am I correct in saying that Data providers can issue their own Tokens. If yes, then how will their market value be determined

Data providers don't issue their own token. Dataset tokens are particular to a type of data so for example, financial data feed has its own financial data token (FDT). Data providers who want to be part of this dataset then purchase FDT through bonding curve. The person who issues it can be anyone - likely will be us initially who bootstrap the community. The market value will be determined through demand so if there are more people joining the dataset, the higher the value of FDT. So it grows as there are more usages.

Okay, so this FDT will be a custom token and will it trade against $BAND?



that's right but there is no secondary market. People always buy and sell with bonding curve. We simplify this process by creating a governance portal, you can see sample at app.kovan.bandprotocol.com

Q4. Who will the genuine buyer the BAND PROTOCOL token at the time of the lunch , I asked bcoz most of the crypto project in just speculation, hope we can see a real demand and supply model here?





We think that we have created good solid technology that will have real usages. DApps will need to tokens to query data while data providers need to stake. Hence, this is organic demand for our tokens.





Q5. Regarding Community building

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How do you consider the importance of community in blockchain?

What's your community-building plan in 2019-2020?

How will #BAND PROTOCOL expand in the future as regarding users?

We are global company with global investor with global focus. This is why we are conducting various AMAs in many parts of the world. We plan to expand our ambassador program and have evangelists in all major part of the world to help us with community building 🙂 Community is very important to us and we value them very much.

Q6. How Band Protocol can make massive impact in Decentralised Financial (DeFi) & Crypto industry near future?

Right now, to build truly decentralized defi is very difficult because of this oracle problem. MakerDAO and Compound spend significant resources building their own. We believe that if we are able to supply reliable, trusted data solution, this will enable much more expansive use cases, developers will be able to build solutions much easier and focus on core offering of decentralized finance - not how to bring real world data to blockchain. So we think we can kickstart an ecosystem of defi as we remove barrier to entry.

Q7. What are the real life use cases of TCDs and can it be applied to voting?

Price oracle is very real. All defi like MakerDAO, Compound, Synthetix rely on price oracle, which is basically what our TCD is providing. With regards to voting, yes, identity is one of our verticals we want to penetrate and if we are able to provide truly decentralized identity solution, on-chain voting, reward, and governance will be much better.

Q8. How are you planning to competitor Chainlink having an early presence advantage?



Yes chainlink does have a lead and strong community. However, if you talk purely in terms of traction, they are also early in terms of driving real adoption of their protocol. We believe we can offer better solution by providing cheaper, faster, and easier to use solution than Chainlink. We also focus a lot in Asia where we see many more emerging use cases coming out. Lastly, our market cap is only 2% of chainlink so still a long way to go 💪

Q9. On the spectrum of centralization and decentralization, where does Band Protocol stand and can Blockchain work efficiently in a complete decentralized manner?

At a protocol level, we are fully decentralized and our codes have been open source from day one. At a go-to market level, of course we are more centralized as we need to bootstrap the network of both data providers and dApps that use our solution. We believe decentralization has its own killer use cases for its current scalability.

Q10. Is Band Protocol the best IEO project currently? Why did Band Protocol choose Binance launch IEO?

Think so as we are the only IEO project currently, don't think they do 2 at the same time 😂

Joking aside, we choose Binance because they are the best ecosystem partner. IEO is just the beginning but Binance has a rich ecosystem with strong focus on long term adoption and community. This aligns with our vision and value.

Q11. Prediction markets in traditional equity, gold and cryptocurrencies are in high demand. Do you have plans to build a Dapp for it and how will Band Protocol produce results in a transparent and scalable way?

Yes those are all key target we are looking at. Whether in-house or third party we are pursuing both options. Regarding transparency well we are fully decentralized so you can inspect everything on-chain once we go live.

Q12. Of all the previous six IEO conducted on BINANCE, we have seen 5 in the negative zone and only matic is green, what will you be doing differently so that band doesn't go the way of previous Binance IEO, What plans are in place to drive global adoption and usage, prevent a decline of the price, establish a solid ecosystem that can combat the market forces so that BAND doesn't appear as another hype

Hm i haven't looked at the number but i don't think 5 is in negative zone yet. To be fair, we don't speculate on price or compare ourselves to other projects.

All i can say is we carefully structure our protocol to make sure we can create good technology with adoption. If we are successful, our tokens should be able to capture value of the network and we will do our best to make it a success.

Q13. What feedbacks have you received from BitSwing and what exciting Dapps are in store for us? I have enjoyed BitSwing very addictive.



Thank you! we have received many similar feedbacks that it's both addictive and feel very similar to normal applications. Can't reveal specific detail yet but as you can see, we pay a lot of attention to build solid product with real usages of our protocol.

Q14. What does your roadmap for 2019-20 look like? Name some important milestones you are hoping to achieve?





You can see our roadmap from binance research report: https://info.binance.com/en/research/BAND-2019-09-06.html We will release more detailed roadmap soon but we hope to achieve a lot of adoption from defi space, along with cross-chain solution.

Q15. Future direction: after upgrading to main net BAND , is there any other breakthrough plan up to now or is it still following the set goals?

Similar to above, as we are layer 2, we are blockchain agnostic. All layer 1 solution will need data layer to make it much easier for developers to build dApps on top. Our next significant breakthrough is to provide cross-chain data solution that allows us to serve all major blockchain with our main BandChain.

Q16. Are there any significant implementations of Band Protocol's technology in place at the moment?

Well our testnet is live, our codes have been fully audited by Certik - leading code security audit firm. So we have all implementation ready

Q17. Collaborations and partnerships are very important for growth. What are your plans?

We cannot comment on the specific unfortunately but i can assure you we don't build technology without talking to people 🙂 Feedback from community and developers are important to us.



Q18. What's your greatest threats going forward and what plans are in place to overcome them, Why should I use your TOKEN, why should I develop dapps on BAND, what's your competitive advantage against other projects. What are your key strengths and how do you plan to outplay possible competitors like LINK.

That is a lot of questions to unpack haha. But i guess to sum it up why would people use Band Protocol.

Right now to build good decentralized applications like lending, stablecoin, derivative trading, stock trading on blockchain is VERY difficult. It will take months to design and code everything up. Imagine if every time you want to build dApp, you need to build Ethereum from scratch. This is close to impossible. This is why people will use Band - as we simplify a lot of their problems. Use layer 1 for computation, use Band for data oracle and then just create logic for the main decentralized application.

Q19. Band protocol allows for the creation of TCR while preventing many coordination attacks, but TCR are not 100% collusion resistant. Once somebody has bought the majority of the Token-sets for a particular list (which is expensive but possible) and has crushed that particular list, in Band protocol how do non-subjective systems that are contractually reliant on that crushed list (malicious list) migrate to the new address without creating a centralized point of failure that mediates this migration?

of course nothing in decentralized blockchain world is 100% collusion resistant - not even the king Bitcoin. If there is a blackswan event as you describe, community and us can easily coordinate to fork and solve the problem. However, we do not expect that to happen because we don't see any rational reason behind someone spending huge amount of money trying to 51% attack the system - they are better of being an honest actor and earn network fee, just like Bitcoin's miner.

Q20. How Important market is India for #Band Protocol?? Any Strategy Explain

Very important, we have Woodstock as one of our investors and they help us in reaching the Indian market, like Elrond and Matic.

Q21. Can you also tell about your long term plans – where do you see BAND in 1, 5, 10 years?

Well our long term plan is always adoption and self sustainability.

In 1 year, we like to drive significant adoption globally that we become the household name of protocol that any new dApps will want to use, particularly in decentralized finance application.

In 5 years, we want to be global standard for any type of data including real world event, identity, payment, etc. Essentially becoming a global database for any dApps to use.

In 10 years, we hope this is self sustainable and become fully decentralized. We will have a rich vibrant community of developers who help to maintain and further upgrade our protocol in a fully decentralized way.

alright, i think we can wrap it up guys! really happy to be here with all of you and thanks to the host @game_admin