Following a newly introduced community initiative, we are conducting Q&A sessions with Ambrosus community on our Reddit. Community members can post their questions to the team, and the most popular (upvoted) questions will be answered by the team in a Community Q&A blog. Such Q&A sessions will be taking place once every two weeks, and answers will be provided every other Monday (when there is no bi-weekly progress report). We hope you enjoy. As always, any feedback or comments are appreciated!

Question 1: Tokenomics question: What is the short/intermediate/long term plan for the 2% percent inflation and heartbeat bundles? At different points I was under the impression that inflation was a permanent reward for Apollos and important for maintaining token velocity (allowing for future Atlas/Hermes node creation and such) and alternatively it was just a temporary measure to support the system while external clients were not contributing sufficient funds to do so. As far as Heartbeat bundles, we were once told “they are created periodically to capture and relay queued transactions from IoT devices” and that they could be a key component of smart city integration. But now they also appear to be a temporary feature used to pay Atlas holders while organic bundle income is insufficient to do the job.

Ensuring that the Ambrosus Network is stable, and that the Ambrosus community is able to access and participate in the Ambrosus Ecosystem, is the core priority of the present cryptoeconomic model.

This is due to the fact that there are many external variables at play for the current stage of development of the Ambrosus Ecosystem, which all contribute to the success of the cryptoeconomic model and enable the network to successfully grow for years to come. Due to the various functions of the Ambrosus token itself — as a cryptocurrency, requirement for uploading data on to the network, unit for accessing the network via masternodes, etc. a more guided and incremental approach is needed to make sure that the ecosystem can successfully scale.

As the Ecosystem continues to develop and evolve, it is the vision of the Ambrosus team to allow the mechanisms inherent to the network itself to manage the flow of services and data in a truly decentralised fashion. When that same logic is applied to the cryptoeconomics of the ecosystem, it means that eventually the inflation rate can be modified to cap the total number of Ambers in circulation, or to normal.

In more relatable terms, these kind of cryptoeconomic considerations can be likened to starting the engine of a vehicle: to start moving you need to press the gas-pedal (inflate). At a certain point it will be beneficial to take your foot off the gas (limit inflation and lock the number of tokens), and in other instances it will be necessary to press the break (deflate). Ideally an equilibrium within the network itself can be implemented to ensure stable and consistent growth (where both runaway inflation and network inhibiting deflation is avoided). The Ambrosus team, as well as the numerous cryptoeconomic experts it has been working with from the beginning, will continue to monitor the network and decide accordingly when changes are beneficial for the sustainable and underlying growth of the network.

With regard to heartbeat bundles, the logic here has been consistent: In a blog post from October, Dr. Vlad Trifa mentioned the following about Heartbeat bundles in relation to the Public Enterprise Hermes Masternode:

“The public Hermes node will thus create real Bundles on AMB-NET periodically. Initially at a rate of one Heartbeat Bundle every 5 minutes, we will adapt this rate as required.”

Very clearly this can explained in the following manner:

Ambrosus is building an infrastructure to incentivize entrepreneurs and developers to build solutions on the Ambrosus Network. To do this, Ambrosus has provided a Public Hermes Masternode for any developer to leverage a Hermes Masternode for their own solutions they have built. Heartbeat bundles, have been created as a means of lowering the barrier of entry for Ambrosus Developers to be able to quickly and cheaply plug in their solutions and bring them to life. As more and more developers begin to build on Ambrosus in the future, ‘Heatbeat’ bundles, will eventually be replaced by the payment from the various developers running solutions on Public Hermes. Until such a time, Ambrosus will continue to create Bundles on the Public Hermes so as to maintain a low barrier of entry to prospective developers and solutions architects.

Overall, the idea is that the deployment of the open-source components of the Ambrosus Ecosystem will directly correlate to the number of bundles created by independent developers and entrepreneurs. As more and more bundles are created, heartbeat bundles will be replaced by independent projects and solutions built around AMB-NET. However to achieve this scale, a framework of incentives in the meantime is required.