The first POA AMA session went live on Thursday the 11th July 2019. Using YouTube live, Igor Barinov along with some help from Ziggy Zeidan, went through over 150 questions in a 3 and a half hour session of answering the communities questions! While most of the questions were directly from the form users filled out a week ago, Igor also managed to take some questions from the YouTube chatbox!

We spent the previous few days going through the questions to pick the winners with the best questions. However, before we present the winners, with their questions and answers, let’s look at some interesting statistics!

Now to present the best questions:

Hector Medina: How did you survive during a long bear market? What difficulties, if any, have been encountered in this period?

Igor: Well we reduced the team and reduced the number of projects. It was interesting that we explored some new ways how to save funds. One of those was experimenting with MakerDAO. And it’s it’s helped a lot! The key to software development is all about working together and people collaborating. The biggest problem during the bear market was how to disengage with people and keep the same level of collaboration together with those that were left and continue to work. It was not an easy time. We’re still here because of it.

Erwin L. Tadla: Using Delegated proof of stake, what is the advantage of your technology (POSDAO) to other cryptocurrency that also using Delegated Proof of stake?

Igor: POSDAO has a lot of advantages that puts it ahead of other crypto DPoS. It is implemented in Solidity, so it runs in Ethereum Virtual Machine. It’s written in a high level language and thus its possible for other people to modify for their own sidechains. We already have multiple partners of POA working on their own migration from POA based consensus to POSDAO, so we are actually already seeing adoption. This is important because when people are working on the same technologies together they can pool in their resources.

Another advantage is that because it is written in Solidity, it makes it easier to audit, it runs within the Ethereum virtual machine so it’s deterministic. It’s a “layered consensus” so one part is in Solidity and one part in the protocol level. It can be on AuRa which is what we are using now, or it can be on Honey Badger BFT which is where we plan to move to.

For example, in EOS, voters are not paid by the protocol but are actually paid “under the table” in a hush-hush manner. In POSDAO, however, all delegators share the revenue. And not only from block rewards, but also from bridges. For example, on xDai, the fees will be introduced on the bridge and all delegators will get a fee from it. So let’s say we have 10 validators for example, and no matter how many coins validators have staked, they have equal reward per block. If you have 10 validators, 10% of the block reward is put to. to each validator, and delegators who put their stake on validators. They form what we call a pool. So let’s say we’ll have 10 validators and hundreds of delegators who have distributed their stakes on the various validators. This means we will have 10 pools. And reward between for each pool will be split equally. So in a way, it’s a form of equality.

So within the pool, the reward between validator and delegators would be different depending on how many coins delegators and validators have staked.

But the rewards of each validator will never go below 30 percent of this staking pool reward. If we have 10 validators so one validator will always get 30 percent out of total 10 percent . So that 30 percent out of 10 percent is guaranteed.

That’s something that is different from other staking algorithms. And let’s see how it works out. It’s still not in production but these are the big ideas that we are developing and wanted to develop a consensus fair for everyone participating. To have less “under the table” deals and make it easier for communities to modify and to build on it. Proof of stake is something that we have been waiting for in Ethereum since 2014, with Casper and some other development plans… but it’s still not here.

With POSDAO we hope that we’ll finally get proof of stake on Ethereum!

Lei Cao: I think people need to trade their ERC20 tokens running on the POA Mainnet, like Geon. So in 2019, will there be a Dex based on POA Core, just like IDEX, I think games and decentralized exchanges are best suited for building on POA Core.

Igor: Yeah that’s a good idea. As I said, we’re exploring decentralized exchanges and DEXs, and we are talking to some of the current live ones too. Yeah. I hope to see Dex on POA in 2019. Its something we are very interested in but the problem is you can’t deploy a DEX without a team to support it. You still need a team to take care of it, even its a DEX.

Paul Brainy Do you have plans to create a version of POA token on the Binance chain (like many large projects) to achieve better interoperability or do you think this type of activity is unnecessary?

Igor: As I said, we plan to have put POA token on Binance chain, but not the way that other projects are doing with like burning tokens and then minting them on Binance chain, but rather we are planning on having two way interaction so you can move back and forth the same way you can convert POA to POA20 back and forth.

Nina Breznik: As a project currently still funded by the EF but in the process of ‘graduation from the EF’ we need to secure additional resources to finance our work. Can you share any tips and tricks on how to generate revenue, get grants or other ways to securing the funding for the projects in the space.

Igor: With funds it’s important to apply with the right information. It’s quite hard right to get funding, especially from grants. It’s cool to see that projects from Ethereum Foundation are graduating and looking for funding on the open market. In the crypto space it’s not that easy to create resources without having some sort of crypto-economy in place. But on the other hand, it’s quite hard for infrastructure projects to have this cryptoconomy. I don’t have a clear answer and I think that applications for grants is something that is important. From our experience, we received a grant from Ethereum Community Fund to build BlockScout and that was very helpful.

Also, sometimes you can find some obvious ways to help the project; for example, we applied for a program to get cloud credits through Amazon for using AWS for deployments of BlockScout. These opportunities are available for projects to make use of, and they should.

That’s it for POA AMA Session #1! All the winning questions have been contacted and paid out their winning prize of 10,000 POA tokens each! We are looking forward to initiating the next AMA session in Q3 2019, so stay tuned for that!