Greetings everyone! Thank you for those who joined our AMA and livestream with the founders session on October 26! We had a great time answering your tech-related questions and talking about our technical progress so far and we would like to provide a brief summary for those of you who weren’t able to join, as well as, below you will find the questions that were chosen by the team and qualified for bonus points.
Session participants
Jing Sun — co-founder, Investor Relations & Ecosystem
Dr. Xinxin Fan— co-founder, Head of Cryptography
Larry Pang — Head of Business Development
Livestream with subtitles
Livestream Recap
Next code release
Our Mainnet Preview is set to launch in November and we will announce the exact date, once it’s confirmed.
Internationalization
In order to overcome language barriers and grow our communities in different countries, we have created localized language groups that our Community Leaders (aka Ambassadors) help to run & manage. You can see the full list of our official & unofficial groups in the pinned message. In addition, we are currently looking for more IoTeX enthusiasts to help spread the word for us and become Brand Ambassadors, join us by applying here
IoTeX Brand Ambassadors Program
At this point in time, we have offices in Silicon Valley, Singapore, China, Korea, and Vietnam and will be expanding to more countries soon.
On data security
We considered the design of our entire system very carefully and had a deep analysis of the data for all of our systems, as we try to provide intuitive security starting from the device tracking the data to how this data will be transmitted and stored. We take security and privacy quite seriously and we also consider various regulations, such as the one in Europe, GDPR. As our work continues we will expand into different regions and ensure that we are compliant in those specific geographic areas.
User experience
When building a new tech, we put ourselves in the user’s position and try to imagine how he/she will use it, how to make it easy, convenient and even fun, in order to create a great user experience. Our goal is to provide an end-to-end solution and value while pushing data ownership and privacy back to the consumer.
Permission-ed & permission-less blockchains
It’s all about trust in your systems, how you view the trust and what’s the basic relationship between the different additives. This is one of the decisions you need to consider when you are choosing which solution to go forward with. Permission-less blockchain means that everyone can freely join and contribute to the entire system, which means applications running above that should be for common good, for the entire community. So the architecture has to have this feature, as this is the most common feature to consider if you decide to run the permission-less blockchain. On the other hand, permission-ed blockchain is more suitable for enterprise applications and it’s more similar to their current workflow.
Consensus mechanism
Once we launch our Mainnet, the number of nodes will be small, around 20–30 range, as we will need a certain period of time to attract more nodes to join the network and dynamically increase the size of the consensus group, which will enable the entire system to support both root chain and subchains.
Master nodes
We are currently in the process of designing the entire selection framework, including steps such as application, the rationale for selection and requirements. The application process will be open to our community early next year. We would like to see candidates who would be interested in contributing to the entire ecosystem, through engaging with various open-source organizations, being related to IoT or developer bases, etc.
On & off-chain scaling techniques
Both of these techniques are important and we are currently exploring both of them. We are researching how to improve performance for the on-chain, even how to further improve consensus and accelerate protocols; for off-chain, we are looking into how we can combine the existing solutions to further provide reliable networks & accelerate throughput.
TPS
in our Testnet we were able to reach 1000 TPS without any sharding being implemented and a lot of projects seem to talk about TPS a lot as if this is the most important thing. We have a bit of a different perspective and think that especially at such an early stage, the security of the system is more important. Since you should not want to achieve fast throughput by sacrificing decentralization and security.
Adoption of blockchain
There are two major things that industry leaders we have connected to concerned about. First is, of course, the security aspect - removing any concerns/issues that can affect their systems. Next, is what kind of value can this new tech provide - will it increase their productivity, reduce the cost or increase the trust. And in terms of the consumer side, for the mass adoption to occur, we need to show how this technology can be used in their daily lives.
IoTeX growth
The team has made a lot of progress in relation to the technical and business sides and it’s reflected in the code and the recent price of the token. From the BD side, we have connected with the top players in the industries and recently, worked with NKN to deliver a PoC showcasing the future of Airbnb using decentralized technology, which you can see here
Recently we have also joined the Trusted IoT Alliance, which is an organization that really fosters the intersection of IoT & blockchain through initiatives from major corporations, like Bosch and Cisco.
IoTeX Predicts
What will the future of blockchain & IoT be in the next 5 years — Jing: I will be still with IoTeX because there are so many things that I want to achieve and you will be able to see the progress and how IoTeX and blockchain will be in people’s lives. Xinxin: I think it’s still early for the blockchain, so currently companies exploring different directions of it. I think in the next 5 years we will get a much better understanding, especially for the applications side, so that we can build a real product.
Working with government
Governments are being very cautious when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, especially decentralized, as they need to make sure it’s for the common good of society. We are currently working with them to explore different options on how we can be part of their solutions and future initiatives, including the local governments, who are looking into smart city solutions, smart IoT devices, etc.