Digital Cash to Redefine Personal Finances and Businesses

Stakenet — An Interchain Economy built on Lightning Network

Hey, guys. Thanks for your time, it’s a pleasure to chat with you today and to educate our community on Stakenet and its ecosystem of services. Can you give us a detailed rundown of the most important aspects of the Stakenet (XSN) project?

Stakenet is basically a decentralized platform designed to provide a highly competitive solution over traditional banking, fiat currencies, payment gateways, and more. Stakenet provides the infrastructure for instant and virtually zero fee transactions, at infinite transactions per second, and is delivering a much more convenient way to handle your preferred store of value through an interchain ecosystem of decentralized platforms, products, and services.

Stakenet aims to be the only place people ever need to go for crypto, while still being able to make use of one’s favorite cryptocurrencies’ features. Our vision is to make that as seamless as possible. The Stakenet blockchain is powered by its own native coin $XSN, which is the money that will be used as the legal tender and gas for the entire interchain ecosystem.

All in all — we provide a new kind of digital cash for the world, as well as the fastest, cheapest and most reliable cross-currency payment gateway. On top of that, we provide the infrastructure to allow people to own and spend their money via simple desktop, mobile, and hardware device applications. This infrastructure likewise opens up a new world of opportunities for businesses to arise, and we’re honored to be at the forefront of that revolution.

It’s important to remember that kids these days grow up using digital assets. For example, in many games, you buy in-game currencies and digital assets, and by the time they get a bank account, cashing a cheque and having to wait days to access or send your money will seem like an alien concept to them. So the jump to using cryptocurrencies for them will seem like a natural step.

The most important aspect for us is to make blockchain and crypto easier for the average person. There are some amazing ideas and projects out there but this industry is far too complicated for the average person to take advantage of the wonderful tech on offer. Our mission is to make everything more accessible regardless of your level of expertise.

We aren’t trying to impose a new standard on an already cluttered industry, but instead, build the bridges to link existing technology and new innovations together. This is what we mean by the Interchain Economy and Cross-Chain interoperability since we are building the tech to seamlessly link different Blockchains together and provide easy access to them.

One example of this is our developments on Lightning Network which lately, we have been seeing a huge focus on by the industry, as more and more people begin to realize its potential. We see Lightning Network as a core pillar for the industry that will help solve the issue of scalability, and we are proud to work with LTC on its developments and to be leading the space with our latest, groundbreaking innovation; the one-click lightning swap that allows for instant, near zero fees, infinite transactions per second, via our light wallets that can and will be developed for your everyday devices. This development lays the foundation for the perfect in-wallet decentralized exchange and payment gateway, but more on that later.

Your ecosystem consists of multiple services, developments, and devices. Can you briefly explain how they all add up to one unity of a better UX for people entering cryptocurrencies?

Sure. So one problem that we wanted to address from the fiat currency world is the centralization, and lack of ownership over one’s money. With the creation of our ecosystem, we make sure that no one can or ever will own have ownership over your digital cash. And we do this via a solid foundation built on Lightning Network and a code agnostic blockchain.

To realize our goal of an Interchain Economy for everyone, we need to make sure that it is accessible. This means creating a suite of options for everyone at every level so that no matter your knowledge and background you can still take part in strengthening the network or use any of the products or services effortlessly. This required us to put in place a lot of infrastructures and develop technologies to give us a solid foundation to build on top of. There are a lot of different components that all need to work together for us to fulfill our vision.

Our infrastructure consists of the following key components:

A decentralized, trustless, permissionless, and censorship-resistant digital cash with immutable transactions

A payment gateway using Lightning Network and Masternodes allowing for instant, infinite transactions per second at virtually zero fees. All of this while being highly decentralized and very environmentally friendly

A blockchain powered by Masternodes and Proof of Stake/Trustless Proof of Stake

A suite of products and services for secure, easy storage, and spending of money including:

Multi-currency desktop and mobile light wallets, meaning no more waiting for the blockchain(s) to sync A combined hardware wallet and lightning node A hardware wallet for cold storage, staking, exchanging, as well as for cold payments in stores accepting BTC or other lightning based assets An online wallet called XSN Cloud for easy staking and trustless hosting of masternodes

A highly liquid, lightning fast decentralized exchange outperforming most to any centralized exchange in terms of speed, cost, potential volume, and ease of use.

What economic incentives will be available for users, stakers, masternodes and businesses?

Our economic model is fairly robust in that we have multiple avenues for people to earn rewards by contributing in some way to the health of the network. For starters our block rewards are split 45% goes to staking, 45% goes to Masternodes and 10% goes to the treasury for development.

Staking provides network security and you can get involved with any amount of XSN and start earning rewards. We made staking easy through XSN Cloud, TPoS, as well as normal staking. For regular people, see this as the equivalent of the interest given to you by banks for holding your money.

Masternodes not only get 45% of block rewards but we’ve actually turned the idea of a “Masternode” into an actual business, as they get rewards from running services and DApps on their nodes. Masternodes can hold different blockchains, will open Lightning Channels by putting their collateral to use thus supplying liquidity, will route privacy features and host DApps like the upcoming Stakenet dx. Every service will collect small fees and these fees will be paid back to the Masternode owner for the services he’s chosen to offer. So, for example, all trading fees generated on the Stakenet dx will be paid back to the Masternodes giving them an extra economic incentive to stay active.

Another thing is the DApps mentioned above. We are the first coin to develop DApps on Lightning Network, allowing for new businesses to arise using our digital cash as the economic driver and the speed and security of our blockchain. We believe that this is the perfect infrastructure for completely new types of businesses, start-ups, or hobbies to be carried out — and if built right, can bring the developers/business owners great returns. Literally, anything can be built on our DApps — it’s code agnostic, so you could even imagine digital businesses like AirBnB or Uber to transition onto the XSN DApps for a faster, more secure ecosystem for their apps, from in-app purchases using XSN to secure storage of user information.

Stakenet is made up of three separate companies each working to build their own part of the XSN ecosystem. How do they work together and compliment each other respectively?

We have three different divisions all with their own teams working on Stakenet as a whole, though it is worth mentioning that Stakenet is a DAO, meaning that no entity owns the Stakenet project per se. New divisions can be opened if they fit the overall ecosystem and aligns with the vision.

Our XSN Cloud service on https://stakenet.io are created and operated by Stakenet LLC.

XSN Core is our blockchain development team so they focus on the software side of things like wallets and masternode tech.

Finally, our hardware division developing our hardware solutions for the industry which we will be talking much more about in the very near future beginning with the Viper hardware wallet.

All of these divisions while working on their own areas of expertise are also working together to realize our end goal of an Interchain Economy. Outside the three divisions are our marketing and business development teams which work with all the teams planning schedules and partnerships to help grow Stakenet’s presence in the world.

There has been a lot of noise in the industry about Lightning Network being a hot topic for 2019, obviously, you have been working with it for a while now can you tell us a bit about your developments and vision for Lightning Network?

Lightning Network has incredible potential and we believe it to be vital for the industry to move forward which is why we have been focused on it for so long. Being able to move assets instantly in a way that is theoretically infinitely scalable for little to no fee solves many of the biggest problems with Blockchain tech currently. We likewise believe that coins that are not adopting to Lightning Network will fall behind simply due to lack of scalability.

Currently, you can move BTC to BTC or LTC to LTC quickly and easily for very little cost on Lightning Network, but we want to take that a step further. One of the main criticisms of Lightning Network have been lack of liquidity and decentralization, and these are problems we can solve.

We have a Masternode network of nearly 2000 nodes currently, all of which can be Lightning Nodes for BTC, LTC or any Lightning-compatible asset. These nodes will provide stability, decentralization, and liquidity for the Lightning Network as well as serve as so-called watchtowers, ensuring that no transaction can fail.

XSN itself is a Lightning-based coin and we will be putting masternode collateral to work by supplying Lightning Channels with the masternode collateral itself serving as liquidity, instead of being locked. This means we will have one of, if not the largest capacity of any Lightning Network currently in existence.

Another area is our Lightning Swap tech that allows easy conversion of assets over Lightning Network, instantly, for little to zero fee. We have already completed hundreds of Lightning Swaps on the main net as one of only three coins to do so besides BTC and LTC and in late 2018 we provided the first ever public guide allowing anyone to try it out at first hand. However, we are now taking that and condensing all that backend work into a one-click solution from within the new Multicurrency Light Wallet.

This one piece of tech will allow any asset supported by our DEX to be used to pay for anything wherever Bitcoin or any Lightning supported currency is accepted of which there are already thousands of retailers worldwide that do.

We are also planning for a future where retailers begin to accept stable coins like USDC. We believe that adoption of these will be more rapid due to it removing the volatility that crypto currently has and will be somewhat of a trojan horse for mainstream adoption, but only serve as a stepping stone for crypto adoption.

With our Lightning Swap tech, retailers can easily accept stable coins as payment while you pay in the crypto of your choice. So for example, if you go into Starbucks and they accept USDC, then you can pay with BTC/LTC/XSN or any crypto of your choice from your wallet and when you make the payment it will be converted into USDC for the retailer ensuring they get the dollar equivalent they require.

Quick question, what is the difference between a Lightning Swap and an Atomic Swap?

Glad you asked, Atomic Swaps have been around for a while and are great, but they have some limitations. An Atomic Swap is completed on-chain so is limited by Blockchain confirmation times, block size and respective fees of each chain. A Lightning Swap is off-chain so it is instant, theoretically infinitely scalable and can be done for little to zero fees.

Can you tell us about the upcoming Multi-currency Light Wallet?

We‘re proud to show off what the team has been working on with the new Multi-currency Light Wallet. Traditional multi-currency wallets usually meant that you have to download entire Blockchains for any assets you wanted to hold in it. Naturally this requires a lot of space when something like the BTC blockchain is over 200GB alone, additionally, it takes time to download and sync all that data. Our solution with the Multi-currency LW is too put our Masternodes to work and let them hold the blockchains for you while you just keep hold of your private keys. You interact with the blockchains via Lightning Invoices. This keeps the wallet extremely lightweight and fast so we are able to put it on any device like mobile, for example. It will also have a lot more functionality too like accessing the Stakenet dx and much more. We are incredibly proud of what the team has achieved with it.

Below are some of the first sneak peeks of the wallet interface:

Tell us a bit about how you aim to revolutionize the utility of cold storage.

Trustless Proof of Stake (TPoS) which we are very proud of, is the invention of cold staking and the first development to allow coins to stake from the safety of cold storage.

This can be set up from any cold storage wallet including our core and light wallets, as well as hardware wallets like Ledger, Xeeda, Trezor and of course our own upcoming Viper HW Wallet.

Taking these Cold Storage devices and turning them into profit-generating devices while keeping your funds securely store offline.

It’s worth mentioning that while TPoS currently needs a so-called merchant to run your node (you can be your own merchant), we are migrating TPoS contracts to XSN Masternodes for new applications, like one-click trustless cold staking.

Other cold storage developments that we are working on include the world’s first cold exchanging, cold cross-chain staking, and cold payments.

Stakenet is building a decentralized exchange unlike any of the so-called DEXs on the market today. How will Stakenet ensure ease of use, liquidity, and speed?

We are very proud with how our DEX is shaping up, our mission from the start was to provide an exchange that is feature rich, has the speed of a centralized exchange with the safety of being in full control of your assets at all times. Recent exchange hacks have highlighted the need and demand for people to keep control of their funds which is exactly what we are going to do.

Stakenet dx will run on our Masternode network, this means once it’s running it can never be shut down, even we won’t be able to shut it down once running let alone anyone else. Stakenet dx will be available directly from the Multi-currency Light Wallet and assets will be traded via Lightning Swaps. Lightning Swaps allow instant conversion of assets so your assets will stay in your wallet, under your control right up until the moment they are sold which means you can enjoy the full benefits of holding them, like staking rewards for example.

We are also working with Frank Amato who is a veteran of the trading industry working for the biggest financial institutions there is. Frank is helping to develop features, the user interfaces as well as provide insight into liquidity and how markets work. His knowledge about what features professional traders and institutions want from an exchange has been invaluable and is allowing us to build something with many features not yet seen in this space.

Stakenet’s Cross Chain Proof of Stake (CCPoS) is currently under development. How will this change the concept of staking?

Cross Chain Proof of Stake is something we want to bring to the market to allow people more flexibility in what they want their staking rewards to be. So if you are a shrewd investor and have your finger on the pulse about what’s happening in the market you can switch your staking rewards to something you think will be more profitable.

Another way to think of it is that it gives you the ability to stake any coin using XSN as collateral, so if you want your rewards paid in Bitcoin or USDC then that’s no problem with CCPoS.

What are the achievements you are most proud of having accomplished since the dawn of Stakenet?

We are very proud of everything we have done so far, including but not limited to;

Inventing and releasing our cold staking protocol TPoS

Launching our website Stakenet.io and our XSN Cloud services like SaaS and MNaaS

Being the first PoS/MN project to run on Lightning Network and perform Lightning Swaps

Our light wallets and our one-click Lightning Swaps solution

Our partnerships and collaborations with Ledger, Xeeda, Trezor, and the Litecoin Foundation

Our partnership with 21Cryptos and you guys at Altcoin Magazine

I think when you consider the timescale, that all of this has happened over the course of just a year, then it is definitely something we can be very proud of.

Lastly, we’re proud to announce that we will be listed on ABCC, Folex, and CoinAll, an OKEx partner exchange.

What has been the greatest challenges to overcome so far?

I think our biggest challenge has not been on the development front, but on our ability to make ourselves known within the industry. Our developer team has produced some amazing things so far especially in the Lightning Network department and it has been a real struggle to get people to see that.

With a project as large and as all-encompassing as ours, it is difficult to break that down into small pieces so everyone can absorb that information and understand what we are doing.

This is why we really appreciate it when we get the chance to do interviews like this or coverage in 21Cryptos or any other media outlet, even people just asking questions on our social channels so we can answer them is greatly appreciated.

This year however we will be working very hard in that department, we will be attending conferences and have a much larger push with marketing to showcase our products. We chose this approach as we wanted to wait until we could actually show everyone a finished and polished product so people can see exactly how it all works.

What’s the three most interesting bullet point on your roadmap for the coming 2–3 quarters? And am I right to assume that you wish to change from a deadline based roadmap to a progress based roadmap?

Multi-currency Light Wallet

Stakenet dx

Viper HW Wallet release

Correct — we changed from a deadline based roadmap to a progress bar based roadmap so everyone can see clearly where we are with everything. We don’t necessarily work on things in a linear fashion and as tech is constantly evolving it makes it easier to add new things as new opportunities arise in development.

How can we connect with Stakenet and how can we support your project?

Again, glad you asked. Stakenet is available everywhere but let me just break it down:

Social channels

Documents

Information

Quick links

Apart from that, make sure to check out our latest coverage in the 21Cryptos magazine by purchasing the 3 latest editions. You also can use the code ALTCOINMAG to get 15% off of their 12-month subscription.