Nebulas Reddit AMA with Nebulas founder Hitters Xu and co-founder Aero Wang ended on September 29. We’ve received about 20 questions and have answered most of them. There are a great number of people online during the AMA, many of them have asked follow-up questions. For more detailed info please click here to visit our AMA webpage on Reddit. The post is now locked so please save your questions for our next AMA, or you can also leave your questions on our official channel.

We will hold more similar events to strengthen our connection with the Nebulas community. Stay tuned for our dynamics.

Below are all the Q&As during this AMA that we’ve put together:

What is your plan to improve community engagement ?

Aero Wang：

Thank you very much, I appreciate your attention and suggestions for Nebulas. Currently, our community isn’t very active and this can be caused by several reasons. On one hand, the external environment of the blockchain ecosystem is unfavorable and on the other, it’s somewhat related with Nebulas development. At present, the main focus of Nebulas is the research and development of Nebulas Nova which include the core value of Nebulas. When Nebulas Nova is completed later this year, Nebulas Rank and Nebulas Incentive will be initially realized. Technical research and development as well as infrastructure construction is the core focus for Nebulas at the present stage. When these core technologies are realized, Nebulas will gradually build the community ecosystem based on these technical features. Developer incentive and community incentive built on Nebulas Rank will be the foundation of our future community development. In the near future, we will promote technical development and diversified community-driven development to build a healthy community and ecosystem based on the native philosophy of blockchain.

2. Seanxu881011

I am very interested about ATP, can you introduce what is the key function of ATP? what kind of stage does ATP going on?and will there be an airdrop about ATP?

Hitters Xu：

ATP (Atlas Protocol) is an application-layer protocol of tokenalized marketing. It is incubated by Nebulas Labs and xGBA, aiming to build a native interactive marketing protocol based on blockchain. ATP creatively proposes a new media form in the blockchain world, defining an on-chain standard of interaction between advertisers, traffickers and users. It can also rank the target value of on chain behavior, and realize the value circulation with tokenalized certificates.

ATP has already received investments from SBCVC, Baidu Venture Capital, Danhua Capital (DHVC) as well as tens of millions of dollars from seed rounds of distributed capital. Investors are all optimistic about the disruptive innovation that ATP will bring to the the interactive advertising marketing of blockchain in the future.

Currently, the R&D and marketing work of ATP are progressing smoothly. ATP has now successfully developed the on chain interactive advertising products based on its own technical accumulation and industry experience. At present, many ecological partners have joined the blockchain interactive advertising traffic alliance as the SDK integrator, including a lot of renowned projects and organizations, for example, HushWorld, Huobi.pro, Fbee community and BitMart etc, covering various fields such as games, wallets, communities, exchanges and many more. In the future, many more diversified ecological projects will join ATP’s ecosystem and provide more interactive advertising scenes to jointly build a win-win, healthy and prosperous multi-party ecosystem.

For more information of ATP airdrop, please follow the dynamics of Nebulas and ATP team.

3. HolyGladius_87

I am a developer who are interested in building decentralized applications on blockchain. What are the reasons that I should choose Nebulas over other blockchains such as Ethereum, NEO, EOS, Cardano ?

Hitters Xu：

Nebulas openly welcomes more developers to build DApps on Nebulas mainnet. Nebulas aims at becoming one of the most user-friendly public blockchains. For developers, there are many unique advantages to building DApps on Nebulas.

No doubt that other projects have their respective advantages and features, and developers can choose a blockchain platform that best suit their projects requirements.

However, we feel that Nebulas is truly unique and has many advantages. On the one hand, it has the unique Nebulas Incentive (DIP), which can reward developers based on the on chain performance of their DApps. On the other, Nebulas supports Java Script (and will support many development languages in the future) for smart contract development while supporting native cross-contract calls and has a extremely low cost to deploy and interact with DApps.

There are many additional feature of Nebulas that make it a fast and robust solution for blockchain DApp developers and I encourage you to further explore the Nebulas blockchain!

4. SilverLiningsCrypto

I have many questions for Nebulas Rank (NR), specifically, Multi-dimension Extended Nebulas Rank. Please take your time to answer. Thank you :) 1) Can you tell us more about it ? For example, how does it compute correlation between different kind of on-chain data ? 2) From the perspective of developers, can you give us some great use cases of integrating NR into DApps ? 3) So Atlas Protocol is using NR for correlating the advertisement and user ? Can you tell us more about it ? 4) Do you see this valuation mechanism (provided by NR) as a 'killer feature' for developers to discover their 'killer DApps' ? Why or why not ?

Hitters Xu：

1）The core NR is aimed to evaluate the value (or contribution) of EOA addresses (which means that the smart contract addresses are not included). Using extended NR, for example, we can evaluate some DApps by integrating the callers’ NR. Of course, such integration is not a simple NR summation and that is what the research team is focusing on now. This is what we call the Developer Incentive Protocol(DIP).

2）For example, with a decentralized credit agency, the NR can be the reference indicator of the line of credit. The higher Nebulas Rank a user can obtain, the better line of credit the agency may choose to to assign.

3）ATP (Atlas Protocol) is an application-layer protocol of tokenalized marketing, aiming to build a native interactive marketing protocol based on blockchain. Nebulas Rank, which is based on the native blockchain data, can assist ATP to achieve further interaction in deeper blockchain, supporting more complex, accurate and effective interaction on blockchain.

4）Nebulas Rank (NR) is a unique feature of Nebulas. With Nebulas Rank, we can measure the value of on chain data thereby bringing blockchain information from a place of chaos to a place of order and understanding. Nebulas Rank will bring the world a new measurement of blockchain data. With Nebulas Rank, developers will have more information to work with and explore new possibilities that were previously not possible on other blockchains. Some of the possibilities that Nebulas rank will help with include: decentralized searching engine, ranking, game, finance, credit and social application. As developers become even more familiar with NR, the possibilities are truly expansive!

5. olahdonat3

What is the vision of Nebulas ? Why do you think Nebulas is better than your competitors ?

Aero Wang:

Nebulas is a next generation public blockchain, aiming for a continuously improving ecosystem.

Based on its blockchain valuation mechanism, Nebulas proposes future-oriented incentive and consensus systems, and the ability to self-evolve without forking.

6. EducationalLadder

Nebulas Nova roadmap 2.0 is out. How is Nova 2.0 different than other projects ? What will be the greatest achievement for Nova 2.0 ?

Hitters Xu：

The core functions of Nebulas 2.0 — Nebulas Nova include Nebulas Rank (NR) and Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP); both of which are the unique features of Nebulas. NR will provide a native and quantifiable value measurement to the entire blockchain ecosystem. Microscopically, it can quantify the contribution of a specific account on chain. Macroscopically, NR has a strong positive correlation with the change of economic aggregate of a blockchain system. NR’s algorithm source code will be stored on the blockchain, fully open-sourced and transparent. At the same time, NR provides important theoretical support for the allocation of developer incentives. DIP will provide effective incentives to developers according to the contribution of their specific smart contract on the Nebulas blockchain. Nebulas Nova will help make the originally chaotic data in the blockchain world clear and ordered, and also drive the popularity of DApps.

7. xiurxiurxiur

Hi，What’s the future developemnt plan of Nebulas? Will Nebulas focus on doing game applications, or will it extend to other areas like finance, education, etc?

Aero Wang:

Nebulas is a next generation public blockchain aiming for a continuously improving ecosystem. It is the infrastructure of the future blockchain world. The future development direction of Nebulas will be very broad and may include games, finance, information, social networking and much more. Currently, the focus of Nebulas is the verification and development of new technical concepts and construction of the infrastructure. Specific development and applications will depend on the global community to explore with us.

8. zozzio

Is Robin Zhong still working for Nebulas ?

Aero Wang:

With the guarantee of successfully promoting the technical vision we first proposed in our whitepaper and in addition, we respect the career path of all team members — no matter their position. Robin is currently on a extended vacation and is no longer the CTO of Nebulas. The future plans of Robin will be disclosed after he make a clear decision.

Public Blockchain project are supposed to available to everybody. No matter who you are — a Nebulas team member or a developer from the community, you must find your own role in the community-based development mechanism. In return, we call for more developers from community to follow our news and updates from official accounts and in return, become a active participant in future Nebulas development.

9. weiht12

Hello, I am an invester of NAS and a fan of Nebulas. My concerned is that Nebulas has recently mentioned more about Nebulas Technical Committee, and no longer mentions the CTO position. I want to know what this means about Nebulas? Will the Nebulas Technical Committee replace CTO？

Aero Wang:

With the development of Nebulas 2.0 — Nebulas Nova, the original centralized technical structure and approach have been difficult to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of blockchain development. Following the decentralized blockchain philosophy, we believe that the single CTO-led development pattern must be transformed to an open and transparent community-driven pattern. Therefore, Nebulas set up the Nebulas Technical Committee (NTC), which observes the spirit of openness, sharing and transparency. In addition, NTC is committed to promoting the decentralized and community-driven development, hence ensuring the realization of Nebulas technical vision.

10. jeffyal

When is the nebulas incentive program (NIP) season 2 ? What is the difference between NIP and developer incentive program DIP ? How is DIP better than NIP ?

Aero Wang:

Nebulas Incentive Program Season 2 will be launched along with the development of Nebulas v2.0 — Nebulas Nova. The new season of Nebulas Incentive Program will be more precise and efficient, please follow our official announcement for more information.

The Nebulas Incentive Program (NIP) is a promotion and an initial trial for the our vision of Native Incentive as designed in our whitepaper. Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) extended our vision but the incentive will be provided in a native onchain way this time. During the Nebulas Incentive Program Season one, we ranked and rewarded the submitted DApps via a semi-centralized way. With the release of Nebulas Nova, Nebulas will have the native on chain DIP supported by NR and NBRE, and then the evaluation of DApps and reward to developers will be automic and native.

11. EducationalLadder

What is Off-chain NR API ? What is “0.3 NR — to measure the value of on-chain data and provide order in a currently chaotic blockchain world.” What is the difference ?

Hitters Xu：

Off-chain NR will be an API that is generated and supported by the Nebulas team. We call it “off-chain” since the calculation are done on our local server with the Nebulas Research group closely reviewing the data sets to further improve the algorithm. Developers will be able to integrate various functions into their DApps such as returning NR of a specific address or top N addresses.

NR will analyze and calculate on-chain data thereby giving it a rank according to the contribution of the address based on their interaction with the entire blockchain ecosystem. NR will highlight the users, applications and projects with higher ranking index, thus provide the value ranking in the onchain world. At the same time, NR is designed with the ability to fight against low quality and false/manipulated information. In return, NR will reshape the blockchain ecosystem by provide an additional information layer for the developers in the blockchain world.

Offline NR is an implementation of NR provided to the community at the present stage. Nebulas team will analysis the onchain data and calculated the NR value through Nebulas node servers. The calculation and storage of NR values are all executed from an off-chain node servers. Users can check their NR value via the off-chain API service.

Nebulas Rank presented in Nebulas Nova will have the algorithm onchain for all the developer to apply with.

12. Gastpa

If Nebulas goes to DPOS, the Stakeholder (Community) get coins for staking too or only the developers?

Hitters Xu：

We will eventually migrate from DPOS to PoD (Proof of Devotion) and will rely on the community for network nodes. When this happens, individuals with a high NR will have the option of becoming a bookkeeper node (block validators) and will receive a reward for verifying transactions and minting new blocks.

13. gengyanisme3e

This is very important question and many community members have no answer. Many people are confused about Native Incentive (NI) which is powered by DIP and PoD. We know developers can benefit from it. But how does an average user (average joe) who are not developers, benefit from holding NAS token ? How can non-developer increase his NR value ? What can we do and get rewarded ?

Aero Wang:

PoD is not purely for developers, for users who hold NAS, more devotion to the entire system will be rewarded by PoD as well, for more details , please refer to our technical whitepaper and please also keep your eye on our PoD paper which is planned to be released later.

14. jeffyal

This is a very good AMA. It is very informative, engaging and let the community understand more about Nebulas. Can we have another AMA every month ?

Aero Wang:

Thanks for the advice, we would love to communicate with the community, we will strive to keep the monthly frequency.

15. gengyanisme3e

Nebulas nove 2.0 sounds interesting. How does a developer use it and benefit from it ?

Aero Wang:

Please kindly refer to our official announcement along with the development of Nebulas Nova, we will release the NR API recently for the developers to play with. We looking forward to hearing interesting applications based on NR from the community.