BlockCity: Good day Lior, so you are with Ardor?

Lior Yaffe: Good morning. Yes, I'm one of the developers and managing director of Jelurida the company established by the developers.

Blockcity: Listen to this: Ardor will open blockchain development to organizations and individuals across the world. The high barriers to getting started with blockchain are about to vanish.

Lior Yaffe: I believe the statement above is in the context of letting users create their own blockchain without the need to bootstrap a new network and the ability to use the Ardor APIs to develop decentralized applications.

Please refer to the Ignis Whitepaper for more details about the Ardor architecture

Blockcity: What does it use as the underlying technology?

Lior Yaffe: It uses our own blockchain technology based on NXT and now developed into Ardor which you can think of as NXT 2.0. In a sense, we are competitors of ETH

Blockcity: You know ethereum has a bit of a bad rap nowadays.

Lior Yaffe: It will pass. They have such a good marketing machine. This discussion started from Dave's post on Linkedin that Ardor is an Ethereum competitor which received a lot of attention. And rightly so.

Blockcity: The top four reasons ethereum will fail ultimately (pulled from an article a the Merkle https://themerkle.com/top-4-reasons-why-ethereum-may-ultimately-fail/);

1. NOT AN IMMUTABLE BLOCKCHAIN

2. NO SUPPLY CAP

3. EXPLOITS AND WEAKNESSES

4. CRYPTOCURRENCY ICOS ARE A RISK;

Lior Yaffe: Well as a competitor of ETH it’s hard for me to support ETH but this statement above is misleading. ETH will live on.

Blockcity: But with unlimited inflation?

Lior Yaffe: Well, let's refute these claims one by one.

#1 - Nonsense, this of course this stems from the DAO incident. They made some mistakes handling this but I think that overall they did the right thing.

#2 - Not familiar enough with ETH to comment but it is a design decision with advantages and disadvantages.

#3 - Most exploits are not problems in the ETH core but in smart contracts built on top of it. Having said that, the smart contracts concepts is problematic, but for specific use cases it works very well. Our approach with NXT/Ardor is different we build the smart contracts for you.

#4 - ICOs are excellent way to raise money by startups without giving equity and other rights to VCs and wealthy investors which their interest may not align with the founder’s interests. For investors, this is a great opportunity to invest small amount of funds into startup companies. Investment avenue which has been practically closed for small investors until now.

Blockcity: What about Ardor does it have some of the same (potentially negative) attributes? ... What are its biggest positives?

Lior Yaffe: In Ardor we keep much tighter control over which code is running inside the blockchain. The core itself is accessible only to Jelurida developers or to 3rd party contributors but after extensive code review. This makes the code safer and reduces the chances of a systematic failure like we saw last week with the ETH parity multisig which turned out to be 0 sig wallet.

Blockcity: Are there other issues. What are the biggest strengths? Combatting bloat? Simplicity? Ease of use?

Lior Yaffe: I’ll answer with a question, do you remember your first Bitcoin transaction?

Blockcity: Yes.

Lior Yaffe: Do you remember the 3rd one?

Blockcity: No why would I?

Lior Yaffe: Well, you realize that they are still stored in the Bitcoin blockchain even though you probably don't care about them and will be stored there forever.

Blockcity: Ah I get it...

Lior Yaffe: And every new node which downloads the Bitcoin/ETH/NXT blockchain has to revalidate all transactions since the Genesis block, otherwise it may end up on a malicious fork. So this model of linear growth forever cannot be sustainable, right?

Blockcity: Presumably not. So the biggest positive is that Ardor does away with the repetitious transaction notes.

Lior Yaffe: With Ardor we have a unique parent/child chain design which allows us to remove transactions which are no longer important from the consensus, but still maintain the same security guarantees.

Blockcity: Why Nxt and Ardor? Why did they move ahead so quickly when others are left behind?

Lior Yaffe: The blockchain technology is still in its infancy but it is not going away any time soon. I think that both with NXT and Ardor we are way ahead of the game with our understanding of how to build decentralized applications which are safe and scalable. This is because we have almost 4 years of perspective and experience and because we learn from our mistakes. Those who start to build new blockchain solutions now, will have to re-learn thing that we already understand.

Blockcity: Will you update Ardor after you bring it out. Are there some changes/updates that you will make later on once you see what the reception is like?

Lior Yaffe: Of course, when Ardor is released it is like any cutting edge technology. It will need a lot of work to accomplish everything we are planning. There will likely be several mandatory upgrade cycles during 2018 until we complete our product roadmap which will be published soon as part of the Ignis ICO Whitepaper.

Blockcity: This was a good summary of what you are doing today.

Lior Yaffe: Thank you very much.

Blockcity: Have a great day, and thanks!



