Category "AMA recap"

Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Bluzelle AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you 

Introduction!

Mayank – Hello 👋🏻 @pavelbains welcome to CryptoNationIN. We are glad to have you here.

Pavel – Thanks for having me.

Mayank – Before we start I request you to tell about yourself and about Bluzelle project to our community.

Pavel –  I’m the co-founder and CEO of Bluzelle. We have been in the blockchain world for a few years. We started by doing projects for big banks and insurers in Asia. HSBC, OCBC, AIA and more. Doing those those projects made us realize that there needed to be a decentralized database for dapps.

That’s when we started to build Bluzelle. It’s a POS decentralized database that does 10,000 TPS. Its powered by Cosmos.

Mayank – So from here you got the idea. Great 👍🏻

Pavel –  Yes. What is the point of a dapp if only 20% is decentralized?

Mayank – Not much beneficial, if it is not decentralized fully.

Twitter Questions

Q1. Recently, you discover an fatal error in the Tendermint consensus algorithm. How to ensure that the Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol is immune to these types of failures when Buzelle is using it in production?

Pavel – Good question. The error being talked about is here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-firm-bluzelle-uncovers-a-critical-bug-in-cosmos-consensus-algorithm.

The error we found was in the testnet version of the latest Cosmos release. No projects are currently using that (Binance, etc). We opted to work with the latest. The good thing is we found it during testnet. And that’s what Testnets are for. Discovery of bugs and errors. The cosmos team worked quickly to resolve it and we helped along the way. Based on that experience, I dont see any problems with IBC when it comes out.

Q2. Bluzelle is already 6 years in the market, and maybe you also going through ups and downs. My question is, as a CEO what do you think is the factor that made Bluzelle stayed for that long years and many long years to come in this huge market?

Pavel – Well the first 3 years we were in discovery mode. Doing projects for companies wanting to work with blockchain.

The last 3 years were for the current form – a decentralized DB. The last two years were very tough with Crypto winter. It would get demoralizing as all the hard work you did is being pushed against you.

Many projects failed and many people quit. What kept us going is that the storm always passes. And we are part of a revolution that is building new tech. And even though we think it is big, it’s still VERY early and VERY small. Crypto is just a drop in a VERY BIG bucket.

So that future potential excite us.

Q3. I would like to know about Bluzelle interoperability. What benefits can users get from having an interoperable platform in relation to blockchains?

Pavel – We can all agree that none of us know which blockchains will be the ONE. And we will have a world with many blockchains. But all of them will need to speak with one another. That is why you need interoperability.

Bluzelle was designed to be interoperable with any blockchain. We support many programming languages, java, nodejs, python, ruby, C#, solidity and more.

That means we can work with anyone. To make it easier, we chose Cosmos as our blockchain because when IBC comes out any blockchain that connects to IBC will automatically be able to work with Bluzelle.

Every dapp, regardless of blockchain, NEEDS a decentralized database.

Q4. Where is database for DApps stored? What measures has the Bluzelle team taken to prevent the theft of customers data and how will you guarantee the safety of collected data?

Pavel – No one can guarantee data will be safe. What we can say is that it is more secure than any other database. This is because any changes to the data must be verified by the blockchain. Anyone who wants to steal the data must take over thousands of nodes.

Q5. The user community is important to a crypto project. How does Bluzelle evaluate the importance of the user community? In the near future, does Bluzelle have any special plans to attract and expand the community?

Pavel – The community for the past 3 months has been outstanding. They challenge us and support us all the way. They give very good tips.

I guess now is the right time to announce our new community program. We will be giving details after this AMA in the @bluzelle TG group and @bluzelleann channel.

Our community helped us design it. It is called the BLZ Solider Ambassador program. All our members are soldiers helping us take our territory. We will give prizes, insights, special events and more for our soldiers. It will start with a bootcamp.

Telegram Questions 

Q6. As you said Bluzelle is focused on DECENTRALIZED DATA STORAGE.  So there, Why blockchain are needed to store data? What are the main advantage of using Blockchain technology for storing data ?
What advanced activities Bluzelle want to create?

Pavel -With centralized systems there is one single point of failure. The system can go down and one place needs to be hacked. That is not right. Cloudflare went down last week and a large part of the Internet did too because of it.

The blockchain ensures that data can only changed by the right person. And because it’s decentraized with thousands of nodes, even if a few nodes go down, the data is still available.

Cloudflare DNS goes down, taking a large piece of the internet with it

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/17/cloudflare-dns-goes-down-taking-a-large-piece-of-the-internet-with-it/embed/#?secret=BgWUPsl56W

Q7. What is Difference between Bluzelle token (BLZ) and Bluzelle Native Token (BNT) will please explain ?

Pavel – BLZ is the ERC 20 token that you get on exchanges. BNT is the Bluzelle Native Token for the Mainnet. This makes sure everything runs fast. People buy BLZ and then it converts on the Bluzelle Network to pay for services and stake.

Q8. How do you plan to develop the developer community? What incentive programs for developers exist in Bluzelle?

Pavel – We just did our Swarm of Duty incentivized testnet. We had a over 40 projects built on Bluzelle and we rewarded developers for that. Because it worked so amazing, we have set aside a bigger ecosystem development fund that we will announce later this week. This will keep helping developers use Bluzelle.

Part of it we are partnering with a certain Layer 2 Ethereum net work. 😉

Q9. Which area does $BLZ focus on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps..)

Pavel – The database market for Bluzelle is massive. Over $25 Billion projected. We have a report coming soon about it. Currently we have two major focus areas:

Defi – data will need to be stored in a decentralized manner.
Censorship/Privacy – people are worrried about their information being censored. Bluzelle helps prevent that.

Q10. What’s the story behind Bluzelle success? What was that vision when it first emerged as an idea? Are there any special prototypes or upcoming Bluzelle updates that you want to show/share with us?

Pavel – After the DB mainnet, we have a number of innovative projects coming.

One is defi focused. It will be core infrastructure to grow Defi.

The second is a content management system that is completely decentralized. This will revolutionize how smart contracts are used by mainstream.

Q11. Can you share the highlights of the Swarm of Duty Campaign? Are you planning to launch a big developer program in the future?

Pavel – Over 40 projects developed!
Over 200 validators – one of the biggest for any blockchain network. It was a massive turnout.

Q12. DeFi is one of the hottest topic in the blockchain space right now. Can $BLZ share your opinions on DeFi with us?  Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is Unification approach towards the DeFi sector?

Pavel – Defi will usher in an alternative financial system. It won’t replace the current one. But more people will choose this new one. Its faster to send money. The savings rate is better than a bank (which now gives 0), and borrowing and lending money has no middleman and complete flexibility.

Q13. Investors are always looking for long-term hold benefits when investing. What attractive features does Bluzelle hold for long-term investors and what benefits does it offer?

Pavel – Do you believe blockchain is the future?
Do you believe Dapps will explode because of blockchain?
Every Dapp MUST have a database.

No better incentive than that to hold long term. It’s like when oil was being discovered. They all needed to be transported through pipes. Otherwise it just sits there.

Bluzelle is needed by everyone.

Q14. Why should organisations and DApps developer choose Bluzelle blockchain? Why are you the best platform for us to build our DApps?

Pavel – Thats the best part. You can build your Dapp on any platform. Just use Bluzelle to store the data.

Q15. Obviously adoption is crucial to the success and momentum of $Bluzelle, Any news in the pipeline short term that will be significant for adoption?

Pavel – The biggest use case for blockchain right now is defi. Thats what end users are using the most. Our defi solution will help that.

Q16. When will corporations stop being afraid to use decentralized databases? What does Bluzelle Network do to the mass adoption of dPoS?

Pavel – The last two years have shown we can’t sit and pray for large corporations. The crypto space grew on its own. It showed power and resiliance. We make privacy and defi grow and then the big companies start seeing their customers leaving. Then they wake up to our world.

Q17. Is the Bluzelle team planning to move from a data warehouse to a complete data platform including oracles?

Pavel – Bluzelle doesn’t need a warehouse. That is why we have a decentralized network. We have billions of people who can connect their devices to be a node and storage provider!

Laptops, mobile phones, Playstations, Xboxes!!!!

Q18. Are there any plan to do token burning in the future to reduce the supply of BLZ and increase its investment attractiveness?

Pavel – We are open to that.

Q19. Why do you care about Bluzelle dapp infrastructure, how do you see its advantages in security, tamper resistance and scalability?

Pavel – What happend with Cloudflare wont happen with Web 3.

Q20. From technological and commercial perspectives, how can traditional companies be integrated into the blockchain? What are your plans for traditional companies that continue to exist with their own systems?

Pavel – We support languages that traditional companies use. By using us, they dont have to learn anything new. They continue to work how they, they just connect to us for a superior solution.

Q21. Bluzelle is ensuring and developing the data security for Dapps but the core issue is the processing and collection of transaction data, so with its mission, what does Bluzelle do to become the most accurate data provider?

Pavel – We have that coming out soon.

Thank you to Pavel Bains and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day 

Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Particl AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you 

Introduction!

Mayank – Hello @Cryptoguard welcome to CryptoNationIN.

Cryptoguard – Hey Mayank, thanks for having the Particl project on and thanks to the Crypto Nation community!

Mayank – First of all, I congratulate to you for the 3rd anniversary of Particl 🎊 🎊 And we are very glad to have you over here.

Cryptoguard – Ehe thanks, I can only throw that back to you and congratulate you guys for the 50th AMA here on Crypto Nation 😀

Mayank – Double celebrations 🥳. Before we start, I request you to tell our community about yourself and about Particl.

Cryptoguard – Alright, so I am Cryptoguard from Particl. I manage communications for the project. Particl is a privacy-focused eCommerce platform which contains a privacy coin, PART, and a decentralized marketplace that allows anyone in the world to buy and sell anything without restriction, and without leaving a trace.

The coin uses some of the leading privacy tech in the space, namely a combination of CT and RingCT, which is the privacy protocol used by Monero, but unlike it and other clones, we’ve adapted the code to be running on top of the Bitcoin codebase which grants us more flexibility and security. This is how we are able to use our privacy coin in our decentralized marketplace’s smart-contracts.

The marketplace itself is entirely decentralized and there is no third-party intervention. It’s you, and the other party you’re transacting with only. It is currently live on mainnet as a Beta version, and we’re just about to release the V3.0 version of the marketplace which is going to be Particl’s biggest update since we launched the project. This update introduces a brand new desktop client and user interface, a ton of features, and a big boost in performance. We believe this is inching closer to a product that is ready to be adopted by a wider audience.

Mayank – When V3.0 is going to be released??

Cryptoguard – Our devs are putting the final touches to it and, since we are a project heavily focused on security (security and privacy above everything else), we also run a ton of tests prior to releasing it to ensure that is passes our high standards.

For the moment, it’s a bit hard to pinpoint an exact date because of the unpredictable nature of these tests, but as a general estimate, we are expecting it to go live by the end of this summer, on mainnet, with testnet coming a few days or weeks before that.

Mayank – Okay it’s a great thing that you are more focused on the security of your users.

Cryptoguard – This is what we are all about: privacy, security, uncompromised decentralization, and liberty. All of our devs are old school Bitcoin and crypto fans, so we were around crypto when these themes were more popular and we’ve never gave up on these very ideological values which were the foundations of Bitcoin itself. We are a true team of cypherpunks 😀

Mayank – Sounds interesting! Should we proceed with round 2: Twitter Questions?

Cryptoguard – Just before though, just forgot to mention, we also have an encrypted messaging system coming to the platform soon. This is being developed by some partners of ours, DeMarkets.io, and will be integrated into the marketplace so that people can communicate in privacy! Just one more cool thing coming soon after V3.0 :D\

Mayank – Amazing 👏🏻 👏🏻

Twitter Questions

Q1. I have downloaded and make a free test purchase on particl-desktop but I have a habit of using my phone regularly, so do the Particl team plan to ever develop them on mobile app?

Cryptoguard – Mobile marketplace is something really necessary in today’s world, where most of the internet browsing is done on mobile devices. The Particl team understands that very well, and this is one of the main aim after the release of this massive V3.0 update, which is coming this summer. This has also been one of the top request from our community of things to do after we release the long-awaited V3.0 marketplace. In fact, nowadays, “mcommerce”, which just means people shopping online with their phones, is almost as popular as eCommerce. And stats show that mcommerce will overtake ecommerce in maybe a year or two, so yep, definitely agree that mobile marketplaces are the future!

As such, the team has already done some preliminary work on that end. Although we haven’t really started communicating it heavily, as we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and instead focus on V3.0, we have some interesting stuff cooking in that regard. So what I could say is stay tuned because we have a lot of exciting things coming for Particl around and after the release of Particl V3.0. 😉

Q2. Why do you think we need such a private marketplace? Usually people don’t have anything to hide unless it is something illegal?

Cryptoguard – That’s a question I could go on and on about with various examples from our daily lives. This answer might be a bit extensive ehe! As explained, we are cypherpunks so this goes right into why we’re doing what we’re doing.

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” – Snowden

This is an important quote from one of the leading privacy advocate of our times that is at the core of our beliefs at Particl. The need for privacy in eCommerce is not necessarily because you have something to hide, but more because it is a human right. Privacy also brings a lot of benefits to everyone, such as added security and protection against personal information leaks (which, by now, is general knowledge that it is a problem with most online services). We’ve all seen data leaks and identity thefts becoming too common right? And it feels like we can’t do a thing about it? We’ve slowly come to “accept” that this is just parts and parcels of shopping online, but the truth is that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.

It can also protect your business, specifically product inventors who are now afraid to invent products and bring them to markets (due to the fact that they get copied by marketplace operators and put out of business before they can even break even on their investment). It can also protect you from these awkwardly accurate targeted ads that you get just by browsing the web.

Then, you also have more personal reasons to remain private when shopping (or selling) online, such as a 18+ adult items. Some people may not want to have order history related to that kind of stuff plastered all over their credit card bill or marketplace history. Other industries that benefit a lot from privacy is, for example, the art industry, which is typically more on the private side, especially when it involves high-priced art pieces.

There are many reasons why you would want online privacy, and we believe that having this option should always be possible for everyone that wants it. It’s a human right, and that’s why we are taking part in this humble fight that is online privacy! It’s normal to think about illegal trade first when talking about privacy, but this is actually a very, very small portion of why people would want privacy in general.

Of course, Particl offers much more than just privacy. So in a nutshell, here are a few use-cases of private, decentralized, and censorship-resistant eCommerce:

• Censored products, such as COVID-19 related items (i.e. hand sanitizers, N95 masks, etc) or Bitcoin miners on eBay (now it’s okay, but back a few years it wasn’t legal and eBay/Paypal WERE seizing money of mining gear vendors)
• Banned activities in troubled countries, for example, in Venezuela when it was illegal to bake bread and sell it. Vendors could secretly sell bread on the marketplace without fear of being shut down.
• Censored books and literature (i.e. Alen Berenson’s COVID-19 book or pro-democracy books in Hong Kong)
• Original inventions (inventing products and selling them on public marketplaces like eBay or Amazon is reckless. Especially Amazon, they now require your manufacturer’s contact information and they will copy your invention as soon as it gets trending, produce thousands, outprice you, and bring you down in the search results
• Items for which the buyer may want to remain anonymous (i.e. 18+ items and sex toys)
• To get access to cheaper prices (vendors don’t pay any sales fee, so they can lower their prices to increase their sales volume and beat their competitors
• To protect yourself from data breaches and personal information leaks
• Spend cryptocurrencies without resorting back to centralized parties (payment processors like BitPay). It keeps you private and makes you skip on potential fees and keeps the friction to a minimum. Perhaps BitPay doesn’t charge you a fee, but they do charge vendors a fee which is reflected in the retail price.
• The marketplace is deployed worldwide. It works in every country as long as you can get access to an internet connection.
• For companies and supply chains to provide supply but hide information that could be mined by competitors to better understand their situation.
• For supply chain optimization (no fee)
• For trading communities ripe with scammers (i.e. pre-owned precious metal bullion trading groups, craft beer trading groups, etc)
• For cryptocurrency physical art (free escrow)

If you want a very good example of why privacy is beneficial even though you aren’t doing illegal, read this classic and somewhat entertaining history where the giant retailer Target revealed to a father his daughter was pregnant before he even knew about it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#392d55576668.

Q3. What are the main differences between Particl marketplace and other? Why will be it better? What are the benefits of being a user of Particl marketplace?

Cryptoguard – I wouldn’t say “better”, although I believe Particl to be a great marketplace, I’d instead say “different”. Just like with traditional marketplaces, there are many that can co-exist and provide services for a particular type of transaction. For example, would you say that eBay is better thanb Amazon, or Alibaba…or Etsy? They are all marketplace giants but fill a different need for different kind of people and transactions. The same is and will be true with decentralized marketplaces. This isn’t a “winner take all” industry.

There are a few decentralized marketplaces out there, but really, there are currently none like Particl which is why Particl is poised to fill its own niche (that’s what you want in an industry with many competitors, be unique!). The most popular of them, OpenBazaar, is the ‘grandpa’ of open / decentralized marketplaces. They are the pioneers in the space and the first to have delivered a decentralized marketplace. A lot of what Particl has built is based on the challenges and solutions of OpenBazaar and we’ve dived deep into their product to see what had to be improved. In a way, we are building our own decentralized marketplace on top of the work made by previous pioneers.

One of the main difference with other marketplaces is about the payment. OB, for example, uses coins like Bitcoin to make a transaction on its marketplace, which means you could trace what people are buying on there. Comparatively, Particl has its own blockchain with an anonymous cryptocurrency, which means payments are confidential and there is no possibility to retrace anything on payments.

One of the downside of several decentralized marketplaces is the ‘old fashion’ use of human escrow for sensitive transaction, while Particl use a trustless, two-party escrow with a smart contract. Old fashioned escrow systems are kind of risky on decentralized marketplaces because you never know who that third person is. For all you know, it could be the vendor itself running a second account as a moderator. Case in point, we’ve met a vendor who was doing just that in Consensus last year. And then, you run the risk of potential collusion between two parties, misjudgments, etc.

Another big advantage is what the complete privacy of the marketplace data, not just the transactions themselves. Here, we’re talking about network privacy, no metadata being generated on you at all, and every single process is designed to keep you private. That ensures you leave no trace behind, no digital footprint so to speak, and because of this, you can’t be traced back by data miners.

One other thing I’d like to add, which is one of my favorite thing about Particl, is also the fee redistribution to stakers. In fact, the Particl Marketplace charges no sales fee or commission, the only fee is a small listing fee to prevent spam. This fee is then redistributed to stakers (“miners” in a PoS blockchain). This creates the potential for some very serious network effect and can help a lot motivate the community to spread the word as they earn PART. Yes, listing fees are actually quite small, but with many listings it adds up and can create a very positive feedback loop. In other words, the more people use the marketplace, the more PART you will receive in regular dividend-like payments. Imagine if you owned a portion of eBay and received some of their profits. This is what Particl enables, and that’s the true beauty of decentralized systems. Power to the people, not some disconnected corporation!

There are a few new decentralized marketplaces popping up here and there from time to time, but Particl still has a quite unique position among those as none truly tackle the issue of privacy in eCommerce, or lack of privacy I should say. And that’s because it’s not really an easy thing to do, the challenge is HUGE. And also to mention, we have deep respect for the guys over at OpenBazaar who have paved the way and pioneered decentralized marketplaces. We are working on different approaches to decentralized marketplaces, but share our thoughts on just how much we as a society need these censorship-resistant marketplaces. I think that’ll become more obvious as time goes by!

Q4. Many people are scared of using online marketplaces because of fake, counterfeit and sub-quality products. How can PARTICL solve this problem? What decentralized features/solutions does Particl provide to prevent such from happening?

Cryptoguard – This is very true, there is a lot of counterfeit online. Our secret weapon against this type of misbehavior is the use of a unique two-party escrow system. Basically, when selling something on Particl, you need to put a security deposit equal to 100% of the value of the item you’re selling. The buyer is going to match that security deposit. Both deposits only get refunded when both users agree that the transaction was honest and completed.

That means that you could have your security deposit held against you if you misbehave, which results in a net financial loss until any issue is resolved and agreed by both parties.

So, as a scammer, would you risk losing money trying to scam people on Particl, or would you rather take a chance with a more forgiving eCommerce platform? Typically, when a user is willing to enter this kind of escrow for a transaction, it’s already a good indicator that they are going to be legit. Scammers will usually prefer trying their luck with systems that have poor moderation mechanisms in place, or none at all. And if they trade on Particl and are not honest with you, then you, as a buyer, have leverage over that vendor and can cause him to lose some funds.

Keep in mind that we do plan on adding a reputation system at some points with reviews. That’ll come later on during the roadmap, and for the moment, there is a Questions & Answers section for each listing which can help people warn each others and leave comments in case some bad actor tries to scam people.

Also to mention, counterfeits are also a big problem on traditional marketplaces. It is a problem that isn’t easy to eradicate and some companies are pouring millions of dollars into building systems that can help prevent this.

We do believe though that our escrow system, since it is tied up with potential financial losses for scammers, is pretty efficient.

Q5. In Market, there are already Number of Private Private Blockchains & Coins are available ! So, Is there any Main Reason behind Launching Special Particl Private Blockchain & Coin?

Cryptoguard – Oh yes there is. There are many coins in crypto, and many blockchains, but none of them fill all of the requirements to be able to run a decentralized marketplace focused on privacy on top of it. We are perfectionists and have a very clear cut vision with how we want Particl to be. So we needed both the chain and the coin to have the “full package”.

For the coin, no coin in the space offers the level of privacy that PART has with its level of flexibility. You have cryptocurrencies like Monero or Zcoin, for example, that are excellent at keeping your privacy. But these coins are not very flexible and cannot really be used in smart-contracts. That’s why we created the PART coin, a super private currency without any of the typical flexibility compromises. It’s also built on the Bitcoin codebase, so you get all of that security and stability, but since it is a fork, we can now introduce to it features and functions that will never make it onto Bitcon due to its resilience.

As for launching our own blockchain instead of using one that already exists, there are a couple of reasons why. The first one is obviously because we wanted to have more control over it and be able to take our own decisions. When you use a blockchain that’s already out there, you become dependent on its development by another team. And since our project is mostly “product-based”, as in, we are building an actual product and not just a coin, it didn’t make sense to sort of “outsource” the development and maintenance of the foundation of the marketplace (the blockchain) to another team which we would have very little influence over.

Additionally, we wanted to have all the features we currently have on the blockchain, and have it also be a Proof-of-Stake blockchain. That’s because we want every marketplace user to help secure the network and receive a portion of the marketplace listing fees to help with the network effect.

And then, there is also the question of being dependent on other “Dapps” as well. Some of you perhaps remember the CryptoKitty “fiasco”. This Ethereum-based Dapp got so popular at some point that thousands of people were making transactions on the Ethereum blockchain which slowed down other Dapps as well. Now, do we really want the marketplace to “lag” because people are trading digital cats, or using any other Dapp? We wanted to have independence and that’s one of the big reason behind creating our own blockchain.

Having our own blockchain also allows us to release a bunch of features, and, since we are based on the Bitcoin codebase anyway, we can always leverage innovations and products built for Bitcoin. A good example of this is with the Copay mobile application, which was initially developed for Bitcoin but which we’ve forked and adapted for Particl. So while we are a blockchain of our own, we aren’t a weird, unheard of blockchain-type so it is kind of getting your cake and eating it too 🙂

So as you can see, we have a lot of requirements on the blockchain and coin side of things, and finding already-existing solutions with all of them, plus the independence, was an impossible task. So we built it ourselves 💪

Telegram Questions 

Q6. On platforms like these,There is the risk of Data sharing & transparency ,What has Particl done to Tackle with this?

Cryptoguard – The secret sauce for Particl regarding data sharing and transparency is that the marketplace doesn’t generate any identifiable data about you in the first place. There are several security and privacy protocols in place to ensure that any data generated from the marketplace is anonymous. So if there is no data about you, then it is worthless to be shared to anyone.

Q7. Is Particl Marketplace fully decentralized & private?

Cryptoguard – The only part of Particl which isn’t private by default is the network connection, but you can easily connect your Particl application to Tor in a matter of seconds. That’s because there are some vulnerabilities in integrating Tor by default, although that is something the team plans on eventually taking care of later down the road.

Q8. On many blockchain projects, Staking seems to be popular now to encourage investors to hold tokens and make them healthy for the project ecosystem. Is $PART token also supported?
If so, What are the requirements for nodes and verifier nodes? What is APR?

Cryptoguard –  Yep, Particl is PoS and allows for staking, cold staking even! There is literally no requirement to start staking except having more than 0 PART. So no minimum amount of coins required, no hardware required (unless you want to cold stake with a node at home), no masternode.

And the neat thing about it…as a staker, you will receive 100% of the marketplace listing fees. Of course, that is distributed proportionally to how many coins you own, but that adds a pretty interesting factor to staking.

We’ve actually had our staking rate go down from 3% to 2% yesterday, and that’ll stay that way forever. In reality, people are currently earning closer to 4% per year, and that would grow as more people start to use the marketplace.

Q9. Is your aim, to become the number one (leader) in the decentralized privacy platform ? and if so what will you say is your biggest strength to achieve it?

Cryptoguard – Our aim is first and foremost to provide the best and most private marketplace on the web. And for this, we believe we have the best team to do it with very talented developers and cryptographers. This is actually our biggest strength. There are other decentralized marketplaces tacking other niches, and we wish them all the best as we believe the decentralized marketplace sector to be a “winner for all”.

What I mean is that each decentralized marketplace that acquires new users…these new users are now introduced to the world of decentralized marketplace, and they may very well look around other marketplaces.

So do we want to be the number one decentralized privacy platform/marketplace? Yes, of course. We are very passionate about it and we hope more and more people understand the value of privacy as time goes by…and I believe people will!

Q10. Particl claims it has the most secure transaction system, this sounds interesting and amazing, could you tell us the methodology Particl adopts in making this actually possible in reality? 

Cryptoguard – Transactions on the marketplace are a combination of Confidential Transactions (CT) and RingCT. These are technologies made popular by Monero. But unlike Monero, all these transactions go through an escrow system that protects users against scams and dishonest actors. This actually adds a tremendous level of security as you don’t need to send a transaction to someone and then pray that they will hold up their end of the agreement.

So not only are transactions on the marketplace are anonymous, they are also scam-proof.

Q11. I see your marketplace doesn’t charge fees for purchasing goods, so how do you make profit? What’s your source of revenue?

Cryptoguard –  Particl is a decentralized and open-source protocol. Its main aim is not to generate profit but benefit you with privacy, security, and personal freedom/liberty. This is our mission and part of why I was saying we are a team of cypherpunks.

The project is actually supported and funded by a non-profit Foundation in Switzerland, the Particl Foundation. This Foundation earns 0.2% of the inflation, or 10% of all staking rewards per year in other words. This steady stream of income allows the Foundation to build up funds and pay developers or various initiatives, and of course, this gets more valuable as more people start using the marketplace and as the price goes up. It’s a positive feedback loop, the more people use the platform, the better equipped the Particl Foundation is.

But not that a lot of us in the team have been doing this voluntarily for years before the Foundation was even formed. We are doing it for personal liberties, not to enrich ourselves 😉

Q12. Congrats on the major upgrade of Particl Marketplace. Tell us your competitive advantage over Origin Marketplace and what unique features that Particl Desktop V3.0 has, to be the GAME CHANGER for e-commerce and privacy?

Cryptoguard – Origin is a great project and we have respect for their team. They are going more after the decentralized Shopify angle, whereas we are more focused on the privacy aspect of things and protecting your personal information.

That’s what I meant earlier when I was saying multiple marketplaces can co-exist and each fill different needs for different people. Particl is all about privacy so it’s going to attract different use-cases.

The biggest “game-changer” about V3.0 is mainly two things: (1) the introduction of multi-markets, which basically allows you to create or join an infinite number of user-created markets and shops. In other words, this allows you to be a market owner on the Particl network and form your very own community around your market or shop. You can refer to my extensive answer in Part 2 of this AMA where I list some use-cases. Trading communities (i.e. /r/beertrade, which was shut down by Reddit), come to mind as for great use-cases for this. And (2), V3.0 is a complete refactor of the marketplace and the introduction of a brand new desktop application. This will significantly improve the user experience of the marketplace making it as easy as ever to use and get started with.

In other words, V3.0 is a major, major step towards a wider adoption because we’re improving and fixing some of the obstacles we’ve had with previous versions. It’s a Beta product inching closer to a full release : )

Q13. Can you tell me how Particl is resilient against government control?

Cryptoguard – It’s pretty resilient. For one, it’s entirely decentralized, so you’d have to take down the entire network of nodes for the marketplace to become offline. This should be near-impossible.

But then, you could always have government or regulations forcing the PART coin out of exchanges, which would make acquiring PART (and at the same time, using the marketplace) very hard. For this reason, our team has worked on atomic swaps and have enabled them as soon as in late 2017. Atomic swaps basically lets you exchange one cryptocurrency for another without requiring an exchange or a third-party. This, along with the decentralized nature of Particl, makes Particl super resilient against any type of interference.

You can check out a proof-of-concept for a decentralized “exchange” based on atomic swap made by Particl’s Tecnovert here: https://github.com/tecnovert/basicswap.

Q14. Will there be an option in the Marketplace where my employees can accept bids from customers in my storefront, but are not allowed to do other transactions like sending parts to their own addresses via anon transactions? If I have a lot of Parts in my balance, I don’t want my employees to easily rob me.

Cryptoguard –  This is planned as part of the roadmap, yep, and V3.0 will kind of introduce the first steps towards that. You’ll in fact be able to delegate some powers to other people to let them post their listings and process them in your own market/storefront. More extensive options for market/storefront management will likely be added at a later point.

Q15. Name the 4 products that particl project offers?

Cryptoguard –  Since launch, we have seen a bunch of different items such as old casascius Bitcoin coins, N95 respirators and COVID-19 related items when they were banned everywhere else, survival gear, gift cards which you can purchase anonymously, etc.

There is really no limit to what you can buy or sell, unless it is voted out by the community using the governance mechanism. It is up to vendors to decide 🙂

Q16. Can you share some Recent Big Achievements done by Particl Project in past? Also,What are the main Adoption Plans of Particl Project of 2020 Year? Which Latest announcements we can expect from Particl? 

Cryptoguard –  I would say, our biggest achievement itself is the release of this decentralized, privacy-focused marketplace. Releasing a decentralized marketplace is already a big job in itself, but releasing a PRIVATE decentralized marketplace is about a thousand times more complicated. This is the reason we are seeing so few of them. Even though some claim to be private…we got to be careful about marketing claims vs actual reality.

Our other massive achievement was to adapt RingCT and CT to work on the Bitcoin codebase. Monero made these technologies popular, but they work on Cryptonote, which isn’t flexible at all and doesn’t allow smart-contract. So adapting the protocol to the Bitcoin codebase was actually a pre-requirement before releasing the marketplace and is a great achievement I think.

Other achievements include:
– First cold staking protocol, released in 2017
– Atomic swaps enabled in 2017
– Cold staking pools and hardware cold staking
– Particl Desktop, which is Particl’s main wallet, is a significant step forward in usability and user-friendliness compared to most wallets

Q17. How beneficial is Particl Marketplace to it’s users ?  If I shop at Particl Marketplace, do I get varieties of perks such as cashback or discounts?  Any promotional offers on the occasion of your 3rd anniversary?

Cryptoguard –  You get privacy, and we believe that’s worth a lot. Cashbacks, rewards, and etc are great, but they come at a price which can be quite costly. Identity thefts is pretty common when submitting information online, so if you’re not protecting that, you ‘re opening up yourself to being defrauded. That alone can nullify any cashback or reward gained from these marketplaces in the first place.

Usually…for typical marketplace, YOU are the product, and they’re just throwing you a bone with some rewards. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but this has become the sad truth of the internet in 2020.

Q18. As the main value of the coin is based on the marketplace could you guaranty us the marketplace is going to remain closed source ?

Cryptoguard –  Yes and no. Let me explain.

The marketplace codebase, and by that I mean the back-end code that makes the marketplace function, is all open-source. That’s for security purposes and to let people know what’s going on “behind the scene”. That will not change going into the future.

However, Particl Desktop, which is the project’s main wallet and how you actually access the marketplace, is temporarily closed-source to allow the team to protect its intellectual property. For the moment, we do not know when we will open-source it, so it is remaining closed-source for now. It’s important to understand that this is just the user interface, and it talks with the back-end. You can still verify that the marketplace is all good.

The reason we’ve started doing this is to protect the team’s work, but also protect others. We have been cloned/forked in the past by some very questionable projects who ended up modifying the code and putting in some exploits. One such project, SUBI, ended up “exit scamming” as they took all their users money out of their own wallet and dumped them on their exchanges. This resulted in a lot of people losing everything, and we don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of dishonest stuff. So we’ve decided to closed-source the user interface.

Q19. Particl leverages the Bitcoin codebase, and we all know that the bitcoin blockchain is so slow and cannot scale successfully, so why do you choose the bitcoin codebase, when there are other more Scalable and faster chains?

Cryptoguard – Ah, good question 🙂

We are based on the Bitcoin codebase, which just means we use its general structure. We have actually made a lot of modifications to the code so that it’s more scalable and faster. For example, our block time is 2 minutes instead of 10, which provides for the best stability in a PoS coin. We’ve also extended the block size to be bigger.

The biggest appeal to using Bitcoin, however, is its security aspect. As mentioned, we are all about security and privacy, so for us, Bitcoin is the most secure option as it’s been battle-tested for years now without any hiccup. The same cannot be said of new and exotic blockchains that may appear to scale better, but at the cost of security, privacy, and stability. This is a huge risk to be developing on new blockchains, and since we wanted to protect your funds as best as possible, we went with the safest option.

Of course, we’ve done some other work on scalability as well. For example, we’ve released the Lightning Network on mainnet a year or so ago. It’s not really usable at this moment, simply because we are very far from facing scalability issues, but whenever we start having trouble with that, we do have that solution around.

Additionally, the marketplace itself offloads most of the data onto SMSG, a P2P network that runs on your Particl node but that isn’t the blockchain. So images, listing descriptions, messages sent between people…that’s not on the blockchain. That’d be terrible in terms of scalability. All of these things are hosted on this external SMSG network.

Q20. Can you explain more about your tagline “The swiss-army knife of cryptocurrencies”?

Cryptoguard – This tagline is actually an old saying from years ago. Swiss-army knives are renowned to be multi-use and to be able to do a ton of things. They are a toolbox themselves.

Compared to PART, Particl’s native currency, this is pretty similar. PART is not just a coin that’s used as a cryptocurrency for monetary transactions. It’s also a voting tickets for Particl’s decentralized proposal system, it’s a moderation ticket for the marketplace’s moderation system, a way to earn passive income by staking it, a private currency, a unit that can be used to power various smart-contracts, and etc.

It just means that PART can do a bunch of things all packed into one coin.

Q21. What i need to do to be considered a Seller? I need to complete any KYC? What happen if an user tries your Marketplace to scam people? How can you stop him?

Cryptoguard – No no no 🙂 No KYC here! All you need to do to get started as a seller is download Particl Desktop (https://particl.io/downloads), create a wallet like you would with any other cryptocurrency, wait for the blockchain and SMSG network to sync (that will take about 30 minutes, we sync fast!), and start listing products. No KYC, no personal information required, no login or signup. It’s just plain, unrestrictive eCommerce.

Of course, with mobile, that becomes even simpler. Download the mobile application, make your wallet, and get started. You wouldn’t even need to sync your blockchain, but as mentioned earlier, that mobile marketplace is for a bit later after V3.0. Just giving a taste of what to come.

NOTE: Due to the current Beta version of Particl Desktop, after creating you wallet, you will need to create a second wallet named “Market”. That’s all done from Particl Desktop itself. That’s just a temporary measure that is going away for V3.0, so you wont’ have to create a second wallet anymore. Your marketplace will be enabled right from the start 😀 It’s just part of the evolution of a Beta product, we are taking out all the obstacles one at a time.

Q22. Transactions on the marketplace are secured using an autonomous two-party escrow system. Can you please explain more about this TWO PARTY ESCROW SYSTEM?

Cryptoguard – Yep, so how it works is you place an item in your cart, and then you proceed to check out. Once the vendor accepts your order, you will then be required to make a security deposit equal to the value of the item you are purchasing into an escrow smart-contract. The seller will match your security deposit.

At this point, both you and the seller have a security deposit in escrow, and this deposit will be fully refunded, without fee, when both of you agree that the transaction has been completed honestly. If something goes wrong during the transaction, the other party can hold on to the payment until the other party fixes any issue. This is based on the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) game-theory, which you can read a bit more about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

You can read more details about Particl’s escrow here: https://particl.news/particl-explained-double-deposit-mad-escrow-b3699dd29768.

Q23. Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #Part and how? What are the actions to increase awareness around #Part in non-crypto space?

Cryptoguard – This has to be done in stages as to not waste resources. Currently, the marketplace is still pretty much a Beta software that is still hard and weird to use for most people. I actually believe this is the case for 99% of crypto, regardless of what teams might tell you. I’d be careful about any claim by projects saying they are going after the mainstream. That might be true for projects who aren’t as decentralized as others, but for us, a fully decentralized and private marketplace, there is still some work to be done to attract non-crypto users.

Of course, we have a clear path towards that, and that’s what we are working on. Improving the UI/UX, adding some critical features and bringing the marketplace to mobile and web are huge parts of that.

Once we do have all the features we consider “essential” for non-crypto adoption, then it becomes easier to target these people. There are bunch of communities, groups, and industries and dire need of what we do, which is privacy, no-fee on a marketplace. Think about it, no sales commission, and no identifiable data. Please refer to my earlier answer in Part 2 where I list some potential use-cases.

So, yes, there is still some work that needs to be done for non-crypto adoption, we have to be honest about the state of the blockchain industry in general. But we are fully commited into bringing this product into the hands of non-crypto people 🙂 We want EVERYONE to benefit from what cryptocurrencies have to offer, and I believe we, as in the blockchain industry in general and Particl as well, will get there!

Q24. What are Confidential Transactions, and also Bulletproofs, RingCT, and stealth addresses? 

Cryptoguard – They are privacy protocols that keep your payment information private.

CT: Hides the amounts being transferred between two people
RingCT: Hides the amounts, but also the identity of transacting parties. That’s a fully anonymous transactions.
Stealth Addresses: They are addresses that can’t be traced on the blockchain. Sending funds to it keeps you anonymous.

The marketplace actually uses a unique combination of all these three protocols. They all work hand in hand to protect your personal information!

Q25. Particl is a censorship-resistant eCommerce platform, in this trend of censorship in online activities, how can particl help us overcome censorship on the internet?

Cryptoguard – I agree with you…so much! Censorship on the internet right now is very bad, whether that be for political discourse, medical discourse (i.e. COVID-19), and on marketplaces as well with tons of perfectly legal products being banned.

This is a big fight we are undertaking at Particl, and it’s not a small fight. The Particl Marketplace is fully decentralized, and I mean…fully. That means there is no moderator, no staff, no company that can single-handedly come and ban users or products. That job is instead offloaded to the entire Particl community.

In fact, people can moderate the marketplace as they see fit. The system is similar to Reddit’s upvote/downvote system. You can flag a listing as inappropriate, and it will count the number of coins you have on your wallet and give it that many downvotes. People can then disagree with you and upvote the listing. Once a listing reaches a certain number of downvotes, it is then taken off the marketplace.

We say censorship-resistant because it isn’t censorship-proof, and honestly, when you think of it, nobody wants that because it means the marketplace could be overrun with illegal content and…nasty stuff. So that’s why we wanted to have a decentralized moderation system, and why we say it is “resistant”.

Q26. Particl looks good but it confuses me that there are so many other Blockchain projects. What should I pay attention in Particl to give it the importance it deserves? What are your planning to achieve with your project?

Cryptoguard – Total personal freedom and liberty 🙂 And we don’t say it as a buzz word, they are the core values that make us who we are. We are all a bunch of early crypto cypherpunks that are somewhat not happy with how crypto has turned out to be, so we just took it upon ourselves to create a marketplace that is private, decentralized, free, and secure. We are a no bullshit project, no marketing gimmick project. We are pure crypto ideologists.

What’s the importance of Particl? It’s what I mentioned above. We want the internet to come back to what it was before, full of free expression, personal liberties, and free of censorship. This is a highly idealistic mission we are undertaking and we hope to rally as many people as possible to our humble fight. Together, we can make it happen and we can claim back the internet.

The internet was made for the people, not for giant corporations. But it unfortunately lost its way… 🙁

Q27. Is there any plan to create a website with a fiat gateway for the marketplace?

Cryptoguard – Yes, and that’s an interesting part of Particl. We are building an eCommerce protocol to be used by anyone. This protocol, just like the internet, can serve as the base layer to develop a ton of companies offering services, such as a fiat gateway.

We also have a way to integrate these services right into the marketplace, so whenever a fiat gateway for PART appears, people would be able to use it right as part of the marketplace.

This is something we’d like to look into a bit further in the roadmap, but we know there are already some independent efforts from community members to bring forward fiat gateways. We must be patient, all good things will eventually come 🙂

Q28. In your website I saw that particl achieved near-zero cost ecommerce, what is the use of incomes for fee, would it be possible in a future a zero fee ecommerce in Particl?

Cryptoguard – Why we say it is “near” zero cost is because you, as a seller, still need to pay a very small fee (most of the time…under a cent worth of PART) to list products on the marketplace. That fee is only there to fend off spammers, it’s an anti-spam measure. Without it, you could have people write scripts and just spam the marketplace without consequences, but with the fees, that can get costly quite quickly. It also serves the double purpose of making staking rewards bigger for stakers, expanding the network effect and encouraging people to promote the project (as your rewards get bigger as more people use the marketplace)

As for your second question, I have answered it a few minutes ago so you can scroll this part of the AMA to find the answer.

Q29. Why does particl employ COLD STAKING? By using cold staking, does it mean that particl doesn’t allow Validators or consensus nodes or Masternodes?

Cryptoguard – Cold staking basically allows you to stake your funds but keep your wallet offline. That’s a tremendous improvement over regular staking which requires you to keep your wallet online, but also “unlocked for staking”. The “unlock for staking” part is also a bit of a concern as the wallet has to store your wallet password into memory. This isn’t usually a problem, but a few years ago there was this heartbleed vulnerability that allowed hackers to gain access to memory. Imagine that, if your encryption password is stored on there, they could steal your coins.

So cold staking is basically a more secure way to stake coins, and a more practical one as well.

Also, it lets you delegate staking powers to another node that you own, so that means that with it you can stake on a Ledger, a Trezor, a mobile wallet, a pool, etc. It expands the staking ecosystem and makes it accessible to more people than ever.

Q30. I have understood that Particl use Nodes to COLD STORAGE, but not to store any amout of Funds, so can you tell me what is the role of these Nodes?

Cryptoguard – Follow up to the previous question, the role of these staking nodes is only to stake on the network. They are wallets containing 0 coin, but possessing the staking power of other wallets that have delegated their staking power to this node.

Q31. Which are the differences between the Particl and Particl-qt ?

Cryptoguard – Particl is the name of the network and the project, while Particl-qt is the name of one of our wallets. It’s based on the very popular and secure Bitcoin-qt wallet which has been around for years. I even believe it was the first ever GUI wallet for Bitcoin, although I could be wrong here.

Thank you to Cryptoguard and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day

Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Muse Protocol AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you 🙂

Introduction!

Mayank – Kindly introduce yourself Anthony to our community.

Anthony – My name is Anthony Colón, and I am the founder and creator of the Muse Protocol.

Mayank – Our community is very keen to know about your project. Please tell something about it.

Anthony – In modern day, the average fan base has no direct means of engaging with the artists they love so much. Traditional avenues to enjoy your favorite artists music include iTunes, Spotify, and Apple Music. Present day artists lose a vast majority of their profits to labels, marketing, and distributors. Muse Protocol creates a unique for listeners to both enjoy music and earn while streaming it. It creates a unique platform that favors creates while rewarding engagement, and helps turn fanbases into symbiotic ecosystems that benefit each other from one another!

Mayank – It’s a great news for the talented artists who don’t get chance to show their talent on a big screen.

Anthony – Sounds great!

Twitter Questions

Q1. Could Muse protocol finance new music producers or users who make covers? Do you have any kind of sponsorship program for this? If the answer is yes, what are the benefits?

Anthony – Indeed! This is one of the pieces that is being produced as part of the entire Muse Protocol. Muse is not just a place where people stream music and engage, it is a place where artists are born and musicians can “discover their muse” that keeps them going. Muse Exchange will deliver a way for the average listener to crowdfund an artist or producers journey, and to earn from the profits generated through that journey. Think of it as listeners investing in your artistic potential and the ability to generate revenue from that potential.The benefits of this are that artists and producers can crowdfund single songs, entire albums, entire tours, or entire careers. The options are limitless and can bring new artists to light like never before.

Q2: Now, some project have policies for their ambassadors to create a contribution and attract recognition for the project! So the MuseProtocol team plans to implement policies and incentives for your ambassadors?

Anthony – That is correct. Muse Protocol will be organizing out Ambassador program in the near future. This will include interviewing and vetting them for experience, and providing them with quarterly budgets to organize community events and giveaways. Our goal is for our Ambassadors to eventually become our geographical representatives and really make them a key piece of our frontline to approach to market.

Q3. What your plans in place for global expansion, are MuseProtocol focusing on only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this?

Anthony – We have an excellent strategy for approach to market that will tackle large chunks of the available market at hand. Our main goal for now is USA, UK, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, and Latin America. These are some of the largest hubs where music streaming is enjoyed. While we are a Blockchain development, our focus is not to maintain to the Blockchain community. Our idea is diverse and can tackle 90% of the people out there since majority of the world enjoys music! Our first step is to build, which we are doing now. We are actively building out our platform to perfection before our approach to market. This will be followed by marketing and partnership acquisition.

Q4. How does MUSE PROTOCOL reward fans? And how do they manage to bring them? In case the reward is in $ MUSE can they be used in real life?

Anthony – Muse Protocol operates using a unique two token model. The Muse Token and The Muse Dollar. Muse Token has a max supply of one billion tokens and resembles ownership and stake into the Muse Platform. Muse has a premium model subscription that accepts payment in debit/credit card, online wallets, or cryptocurrency. Every time a subscription is created and paid for, our platform stores the received value, and generates equal value Muse Dollar which is a $1 for 1 ratio. These profits get split to the holders of Muse Token in the form of Muse Dollar, less the earnings that are provided to the artists. Listeners will earn Muse Dollar for streaming, creating playlists, sharing song tracks, and generating sales for the artists they love. Muse Token will not be earned and instead will be purchased for wanting stake into the platform itself.

Q5. Why did you used Ethereum fork instead of make it on Ethereum itself? Do you have enough programming skills on updating and improving the current Ethereum fork you used? Will you be implementing some of the upcoming updates that Ethereum network will be doing?

Anthony – We are actually a token on the Tron Network. Tron delivers high speed transaction processing and solid network security. We feel our platform does not need it’s own blockchain, and could instead operate as a decentralized application with it’s own token. We will be keeping up to date with all available feature sets for Tron including privacy features.

Telegram Questions

Q1. Why should artists and producers use MuseProtocol instead of traditional system?

Anthony – This is a great question to start! The main reason artists should utilize the Muse Protocol is to ensure their independence, and to release grips of the music industry around the potential of their career as artists. Nothing is more limiting than having to create and do art based on what others want and need. Art is personal and should be supported as such. Muse will create that space of comfort and freedom for artists and give them all that is needed to create, grow, and earn from their art.

Q2. The music industry is conformed by huge enterprises,how do you intend to gain the attention of them? How long do you think would it take them to get into blockchain technology, is Museprotocol the gateway they need?

Anthony – The Music Industry indeed has a overcast Created from numerous large industry figures all with their claws into some of the largest artists and distributors to date. This makes it difficult to take the conventional routes to combating this grip they have on the industry. Our approach is to tackle the independent music lovers, and utilize buyer to buyer marketing direct to consumer that changes complacent music streamers into revolutionary supporters. The change would be minimal in my eyes, and if the industry is unwilling to do so, it will create a reform from fanbases that want their artists free of these old world music tactics.

Q3. What is your long-term vision about the industry which Muse protocol is working at? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace Muse protocol ?

Anthony – Great Question! I am a supporter of change and power to the people. This being said, I am aware of the multiple factions that must arise for change to take place. I do not see them as opposition, but instead, supporters and believers of the fact that change needs to take place. I applaud any and all projects that are supporting the change at hand to bring transparency to the music industry. I am less afraid of a project coming with more innovative technology, and more afraid of a project that shrouds the goal at hand and brings the industry to a place that is worse than it is today. Competition means confirmation of market potential. Let it happen!

Q4. We are witnessing many projects enter blockchain industry with very good plans, promise to do good work but disappear in time and lose community..? So without not lose believers, how can #MUSE Protocol survive this long and challenging blockchain..?

Anthony – This is a great question that can describe our dedication and want to bring this project to market. As of now, Muse Protocol has received little to no investment. Not because people are not interested, but because this AMA is literally our first approach at gathering investor interest into Muse. We have developed everything out of pocket to date and have not needed a single dollar to get to where we are today (15,000+ members following, 400+ active users on platform, full platform development and token creation). This shows we are here to stay and that finance will almost never be a factor of us sustaining. Finances become a factor to only the speed of our success and not the chance of it.

Q5. What is the difference between $MUSE and $MUSD? Why did you create two types of coins? Will they have the same use?

Anthony – The difference between $MUSE and $MUSD are very key differences. $MUSE is a voter delegate/ownership token that resembles ownership of the platform itself. You can think of it as your dividends token too that will determine how much quarterly $MUSD to earn from holding the tokens. $MUSE allows you to vote for platform changes, create platform change requests, earn quarterly dividends, and much more!

$MUSD is a stable value token pegged to $1 of value. For every dollar that our platform earns, it stores that in a decentralized banking account monitored by a chainlink oracle that generates $MUSD for every dollar that deposits into the account. Every quarter, platform earnings are distributed to $MUSE holders in the form of $MUSD that can be spent on platform, exchanged for other crypto, or withdrawn to a bank account via bank transfer.

Q6. How does MUSE protect copyrights? Where will the contents be stored?

Anthony – Great Question! Muse is not a song registry, and there for is not where you would begin your musical journey into securing your song legally. However, Muse will be developing strong AI and sound recognition that will work hand in hand with song registries to help mitigate any copyright infringement or theft or artistic expression. This will be released later into Muse, but will be a key feature.

Q7. Great protocol, even so purchases in music are usually made with credit and debit cards, through the platform can I do this? What are the advantages that Tron Blockchain provides?

Anthony – Yes! People will be able to pay for premium subscriptions using Credit/Debit, Paypal, and other non-crypto based means of payment. Our goal isn’t to shy away from current forms of payment and usage, but instead create a bridge and option to make the change! We believe the benefits of the Tron Blockchain are speed, scalability, security, and hype. It can help ensure the user experience is fluid and without delay.

Q8. What’s the use and work of Blockchain technology in MUSE platform & Why Decentralized Model? Because many platform like Spotify and Mixclouds are work greatly on Centralized way.

Anthony – Platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud do work great in centralized environments when their only goal is to allow streaming. Muse is a social streaming platform that creates avenues for streaming, social networking, engaging, bounties, marketing, and investing into artists. Transparency is a must when it comes to these, and Blockchain provides that transparency!

Q9. I am an amateur musician from home and I would like to use the platform, what should I know and do to take advantage of it? Is your platform focused on a specific sector of music or is it open to all kinds of fans and artists in the world?

Anthony – As a new artist seeking their foundation in the industry, I would like you to know that Muse delivers a one stop shop for contracts, paperwork, streaming, sharing, and a unique way to turn your fan base into your very own marketing entourage. Muse will give you everything you need to remain independent, or to establish your push into becoming a label signed artist. Our platform is open to all genre’s listeners and people who love music. No judgement is passed. Judgement free zone!

Q10. What market share would you like and plan to wrest from your competitors in the medium and long term? or is it like a cake that grows and grows Can you explain how the voting system will work, will there be any hierarchy? What happens if someone gets a lot of tokens?

Anthony – Our goal is a 17%-24% share of the market. We believe this is the current size of the market interested in independent music, artists earning what they deserve, and freedom of the music industry. Gripping this large of a chunk of the industry will prove success and will usher in a new age of freedom for artists. This is of course a long term goal, with our short term 5 year goal being to attain 5-7% of the industry.

The voting system will work in a way that is fair to all holders of a certain amount. It will also ensure that holders of a larger amount have their voices heard, while not giving an overpowering amount if power to them. Muse Token has one billion tokens. For every 1,000 tokens you hold, you are guaranteed one master delegate vote. This ensures that people must have a vested interest into voting in our ecosystem.

Q11. As we can see #MUSE is still not listed on CoinMarketCap, What are the plans to get listed #MUSE on Coinmarketcap and When will we see #MUSE on CMC?

Anthony – We have great connections with CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, LivecoinWatch, and CoinPaprika and with over 30+ exchanges including 6 top 10 exchanges. We will have no trouble entering CMC, CG, CP, and LCW when the time comes.

Thank you to Anthony Colón (Muse Protocol CEO) and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day 🙂

Dear Community,

Thanks all for participating in our Sudan Gold Coin AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you 🙂

Introduction!

I am Elijah Ifeanyi CMO and Co partner SudanGoldCoin also Vp in block solutions.

My journey to blockchain/cryptocurrency can be dated back 5 years +
I have since then built an impressive career scaling companies from 0-million 💵 in a short period of time.

SGC is the first of its kind, and we are developing the world’s first decentralized platform for trading gold and other precious metals by uniquely combining blockchain technology with gold mining.

Q1. After Chainx IEO. $ SGC Are there any strategies to make the $ SGC more valuable in terms of increasing the number of users and $ SGC to integrate which applications to expand your ecosystem?

Elijah – Currently we have launched multiple IEO on 3 exchanges
ChainX, Dobitrade and Exmarkets.

We are targeting the largest crypto communities and currently a huge promotional campaign is ongoing so we will continue to experience massive growth in our users base.

We have integrated a special debit card functionality which will be accessible to all $SGC token holders, this is an integral part of our ecosystem which will allow users spend their crypto wealth without limitations.

In addition we have confirmed listing from Zg.com as well.

Q2. What is the process of mining operation in sudan and tell about functional features of SGC?

Elijah – We are using deep excavation method for mining

Recently we have launched mining operations in Sudan and can be proud to announce it has been a good milestones for us.

$SGC ecosystem consist of various unique packed functions

-debitcard
-Gold/minerals decentralized trading platform
-our burn functionality: each SGC used to exchange for physical Gold will be destroyed, increasing demand and reducing supply
-30% quarterly profit sharing to $SGC holders

Q3. How do I make the SGC token become GOLD physical / real?
-If the world gold price goes up how about the SGC token is there a positive impact?

Elijah – You can make this request from our platform

Which will enable you exchange equivalent $SGC to the weight of Gold, these gold will be sent to your address provided from our safe vault in Dubai while $SGC used will be destroyed

Each $SGC price will be determined by the weight of a gold per Token

Q4. One problem faced with trading gold is that it is too expensive and some brokers may require you to buy a minimum of $1000 gold. How does SGC solve this problem?? What’s the smallest unit of SGC I can trade or hodl??

Elijah – We have made this a decentralized platform, which is one major reason for applying blockchain to our project

It is completely decentralized and profits will be distributed evenly

Amount to trade or hold-no limit

Q5. Are there facilities in place that will assist in the monitoring and auditing of the Gold production process ? How often do you undergo the distribution of gold between tokens as more gold is mined and how do you make sure they are fairly distributed ?
How do you plan to..

Elijah – Yes

We have put in place plans for that

Distribution of profits will occur quarterly because while Gold weight per $SGC will increase as mining output improves

Fair distribution will be determined by the blockchain where all users can track and verify

Q6. Does your services include selling and buying of physical gold?? Is it possible to swap my physical gold for SGC???

Elijah – At this point we have have not implemented such functionality

You can only swap SGC for Gold at launch

Maybe it’s one to include in the future as we expand ecosystem

Q7. Good Marketing as well as Robust partnerships are the hallmark of successful crypto projects, can you explain more about your marketing to drive global adoption as well as your present and future partnerships that will drive you to success

Elijah – We understand the value of marketing and branding and we will not relent on our push

If you have followed our project closely you must have noticed consistent growth in our user base and community

We have been in talks with the biggest exchanges and leading blockchain companies for partnership as we push for Global expansion

Huge announcements will be shared soon relating to partnerships

#staytuned

Q8. What are your views about DeFi (Decentralised Finance)? Are you interested in it? What are the future Scopes?
Do you have any future plans to work in DeFi with SGC ecosystem?

Elijah – We are constantly analyzing our options with Defi

We are aware of it and if it’s Going to be of great benefit we will opt for it.

Q9. SGC is constantly finding new big partners.Audience is constantly growing.What’s the secret to this growth rate?

Elijah -Yes

This is due to the fact we understand benefit of marketing with our team of experts

Being the CMO of Sudan Gold Coin project I can guarantee we won’t slow down as more campaigns will be pushed out to constantly grow our brand

Q10. Which achievement will want to achieve SGC team in future and what’s plans for achieve this achievement?

Elijah – Our next target after launching mining operations will be to build our own Gold processing factory in Sudan

This is the sole reason for our IEO round
AS it will enable our project scale faster and attain tremendous growth

Q11. how much time will it take for SGC into mainstream adoption?

Elijah – This process will be swift as estimated with high demand for $SGC

Which will only tend to grow more

Q12. Your metamorphosis is a laudable one, how have you been able to survive this longest bear market and continue building and developing cos many projects have died out in this time period

Elijah – We have showcase our strengths here

Which is to show our determination and belief towards the success of $SGC

Our CEO Mr Dmitry Konoval and the SGC team is laudable for this
Now we are crushing milestone and it’s only the beginning

We won’t stop here

Q13.

1. For the last quarter of this year you expect to launch the International Mineral Finance Corporation (IMFC) what empty space in the market does it intend to solve? What highlights can you show us now?
2. SGC card is a reality, in which countries is it available, where do you plan to expand this next? And what are the current use cases, Would I use it to buy in Amazon for example?
3. If I buy gold in SGC platform, when and where would I be able to withdraw it?

Elijah –

1 announcement will be made regarding this
Follow us and you won’t miss any future developments

2 our debit card will be used to store/spend Gold wealth
It was carefully designed to enable transition from Gold to fiat and spending without any limitations

3 Gold will be sent to your from our vault in Dubai to your desired address according to your value in SGC token used for purchase/exchange

Q14. Could you share me this mining operation is legal or not, is it approved by government yet and how to make sure this mining is safe and protected ?

Elijah – Yes

We are completely backed by the sudanese government and have full license to operate and mine in Sudan
Now we have two lands and we are only exploring one right now

We are real and have been live from 2017

Q15. Will the price of sgn be backed by the prices of real gold bars

Do you have a swap function where I can swap my sgn token for real gold bars and how will they be shipped to my location

Elijah – Price of SGC will be determined by the weight of Gold per Token at the moment

Swap function will be enabled on our platform
And shipment will be from our Holdings in Dubai

Q16. Could you give me 3 key points to convince me and other investors to invest in $SGC in the long-term?

Elijah –

-Stability-safe value

-Opportunities to earn from profit sharing

• opportunity to grow with a real company

Q17. Will you guys also start offering cold storage services and access to trading Bitcoin, Ethereum in addition to their usual gold/metals business? Don’t you think that gold trading has not been in limelight,they have been taken over by btc,eth,ltc and cryptocurrencies?

Elijah – The combination of blockchain gives us the license to explore these options

So definitely you will have chance to do this on our platform

Q18. Twitter CEO said Africa is the future for everything blockchain and you are based in Sudan, what plans do you have for the African community

Elijah –

Africa is a growing continent with vast majority of opportunities yet to be explored

We are working with the sudanese government and so far It has been great

We will be giving back to the community to help bolster their growth aswell
We are here for stability not quick profit as a company even if our business is highly profitable ☺️

Q19. Gold is the currency par excellence throughout the history of humanity, now cryptocurrencies want to take that step in innovation, could it be said that SGC combines the best of both worlds?Could a change of government jeopardize Sudan Gold Coin’s transparency and credibility? or do you have an action plan in case of?

Elijah – Yes, It can be proven by both industries
GOLD being an ancient mode to store
And blockchain technology /bitcoin being the new Digital Gold

In $SGC we deliver a Token to our Investors back by real Gold which have passed the test of time as a go to option to store value

Dear Crypto^^Natives,
Thanks all for participating in our Telegram group’s 5th AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you 🙂

AMA Starts now!

Introduction!

Alex-: So, Phantasma Chain started as a NEO project, but quickly evolved into something so much bigger. We were looking at the features that both NEO and the other popular chains had, and felt that crypto would evolve into much more of a connected world.
That is why we set out to build the platform that connects all of these chains, as well as providing the best capabilities of each of them combined.

Q1. Can you explain more about the relationship between NEO and Phantasma at the time?

Alex-: Right now our token “SOUL” is still a NEP5 token, and we intend to support the different NEO dApps on our platform that will be launched along with the main net. Once the main net launches people will be able to swap back and forth between main net and NEP5 SOUL.

Q2. What will Phantasma focus on from now until 2020?

Alex-: Right now we are focusing on the main net launch, which will occur soon, and then provide the rest of the features appointed in the roadmap, such as the decentralized chat, mail and storage systems.

Q3. One of Phantasma’s core feature is to establish a Marketplace of digital-goods. We saw the difficulties faced by Ethereum in case of CryptoKitties. So, what makes you any different from them and is there a demand for it?

Alex-: So, we have built our chain in a way to prevent clogging of the network for both the use of specific dapps, as well as the trade of digital assets. With Phantasma Chain each dApp can essentially run its own sidechain and this way not interfere with the transactions being performed in the main chain.

Q4. What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?

Can we Stake #Phantasma and earn Rewards?

Alex-: we have a lot of partnerships with several crypto and non-crypto companies, such as Wax, Bluzelle, OpSkins, Goati and their 22 Racing series game that will come out on PC, Playstation and Xbox, and many others. As for staking rewards you’ll see that Phantasma has built a decentralized dual-token system that promotes not only the organic growth of the network, but also rewards the holders of the SOUL token, everything powered by the Phantasma Staking System.

Q5. What difficulties have you encountered during the development of #Phantasma ? Which is the most serious problem?

Alex-: To create a decentralized system that promotes not only the actual dApp users in the network, but also the people that hold SOUL for financial gains. Most other chains only truly have one or the other but we believe that we have achieved an outstanding framework that caters to both parties. The Phantasma Storage solution is another great aspect of the chain, as it will really allow dApp developers to run a truly decentralized application, even to the website hosting aspect of it.

Q6. What´s your outlook on the future of cryptocurrencies? What can we do to keep increasing adoption? How can #Phantasma help to achieve it ?

Alex-: We believe that the way forward for blockchain adoption is through blockchain interoperability, and that is the primary goal of the Phantasma Chain and its tools.

Q7. Could you please tell us about your latest developments??

Alex-: Currently the Phantasma Chain is in its test net fase, and we’ve fixed most of the bugs that we had, thanks to the great help of our dedicated community with the testing of the app and sdk, as well as the non-stop 24/7 work of our amazing developers.

Q8. All current projects are concerned with the speed and quantity of transactions. Old projects have also improved their network. So what else does Phantasma need to bring to investors?

Alex-: Phantasma combines the best that crypto has to offer, these are only some of the features that you’ll be able to see when you take a deeper look into the chain capabilities:
– Integrated Account Names Service
– Non-Fungible Tokens
– Dual Token System: Stake Soul to get Energy
– Two-Way Token Swap during 2019–2020
– 25 Block Producers (10 Active + 15 Standby), with number increased as the chain grows
– Voting System (with voting dilution for higher amounts of SOUL)
– Soul Masters: stake 50k SOUL and get a part of the 125k SOUL distributed monthly to SOUL Masters
– Phantom Force: Developer Group with dedicated funding using community voting for projects
– Cosmic Swaps: Automatic conversions between different coins and tokens
– Phantasma Storage: Fully decentralized and distributed File Storage System

Q9. What is SOUl Phantasma strategy to promote the development of decentralized technologies in the future?

Alex-: We want to promote blockchain interoperability, and eventually support the best dApps that the crypto world has to offer, from any chain. For this, we will be adding chain support one by one, so that people can use our mobile app or desktop app to access and interact directly with the best dApps from different chains, all in one place. This won’t be an easy task but also as part of our strategy going forward, we are focusing on decentralization of the network users, as well as developers, that is why we are also creating a new initiative of blockchain developers that actively contribute to the development of the chain and dApps called Phantom Force.

Q10. How important are developers to your ecosystem? What benefits and advantages does your platform provide to the Phantom Force?

Alex-: Embedded in the chain system there is a developer fund, which gets 1% of the yearly inflation, with this fund developers will be able to submit projects and ideas, the network users will vote on the projects that should get the money in the propositions. Each network user will have a specific voting power based on how much SOUL he has staked at the time. The other 2% of inflation goes to the block producers as the incentive for running the network, and every quarter the 25 block producers will compete for votes from the users to maintain their top10 position as active block producers or be upgraded from standby to active.

Q11. Is Phantasma App is important part of your project? If yes,then tell some advantage of Phantasma App.How Phantasma mail Dapp works? Is it easy to use just like gmail and other apps Can we earn some reward by playing Nacho MAN Game just like EOS base game?

Alex-: With Nacho Men 2.0 we are embracing the Play-To-Earn approach, as we believe this is the future of the Gaming Industry going forward. You’ll be able to acquire tokens as well and nfts (non-fungible tokens) that can be traded in the marketplace for other cryptocurrencies.

Q12. Explain what makes users interested in Phantasma storage rather than google drive? and explain how the Phantasma storage works.

The Phantasma Storage system is not competing with current centralized storage solutions such as google drive and dropbox, as currently the technology can’t provide a cheaper solution to them. Where it does offer a significantly cheaper solution is in the B2B area, especially for dApp Developers, as they usually incur significantly high costs with the centralized solutions available out there, such as for example Amazon Web Services. As you can see here, the Phantasma Chain provides solutions in different areas for either B2B or B2C markets, so you can’t really say that the chain is built specifically for one or the other.

Q13. If am not wrong the main problem for a blockchain platform to reach mass adoption is the number of regular users.
What’s your plan to attract users for dApps on Phantasma Chain?!

Alex-: Thank you for coming back to protect us all from the WhiteWalkers Mr. John Snow, we are all deeply grateful to you 😉. As for your question it is an interesting topic, and something that we also took into account when developing the blockchain framework. Our dual token system allows people to stake SOUL and get a secondary network token called “Energy” (#KCAL), this is the token that you need to perform transactions in the chain. With this new system we’ve actually created a system that is optimal even for non-crypto users, as they can essentially continuously get that token every day in order to perform their daily activities on decentralized applications. Another possibility that we are providing is the sponsorship of different Phantasma accounts, so for example I satke 10 Soul, and allocate in the app that 50% of the Energy generated by my staked soul goes to this other account that I have created for my sister, and this way she can even use dApps without knowing a single thing about crypto or that she is even using the token to perform transactions. We believe this is the way forward, we need to make it really simple for anyone to use blockchain dApps and then educated them on everything that crypto has to offer.

Q14. Why you choose Neo Blockchain?

Alex-:We choose NEO as the blockchain to launch our project back in 2017, as one of the co-founders and one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, Sérgio, was one of the top developers in the City of Zion developer group, and knew the ins and outs of the NEO chain like the palm of his hand, as well as it was developing an healthy project ecosystem at the time.

Q15. What is phantasma Revenue Model?

Alex-: The team is launching several products such and the Nacho Men game, the chat system and the decentralized email which will have its own monetization frameworks, but don’t worry because all of them will be free to use. The chain and the development tools are not supposed to be monetized as they were created to inspire and provide the best crypto developers to create the next generation of decentralized applications!

Q16. It’s been mentioned there are a number of games in development utilizing phantasma. Are these being developed internally (like Nachomen) or by third parties?

Alex-: Internally we are only developing Nacho Men, so any other game that was or is mentioned in the future is being built by third-party developers. This goes to show that we already have many interested developers that have already started to build amazing decentralized games and want to be at the forefront of this crypto revolution!

Q17. How are you building a marketplace for NFTs (digital-goods)?

Alex-: We are building a multi-blockchain marketplace for NFTs, this means that people will be able to sell their NFTs from other supported blockchains such as Ethereum, Neo, EOS and so forth, in the Phantasma Marketplace. This is all thanks our chain swap system that powers both fungible and non fungible token swaps for chains that support smart contracts.

Q18.◆How will you encourage users to participate in the Phantasma ecosystem ?

◆What major problems Phantasma want to solve in this cryptospace ?

◆What is the goal of Phantasma in the data sector ?

◆Why you choosed Neo blockchain to develop Phantasma ?

Alex-: Phantasma is one of the first chains to have an on-chain integrated swap system, we call it the Phantasma Cosmic Swaps. With this system, people will be able to quickly exchange their tokens for other tokens in an automatic fashion. Let’s say for example you are using an EOS dApp, but you don’t have any EOS, even though you have SOUL, when you try to do that it will indicate that you don’t have the required coin and offer you to trade one of your other coins such as SOUl for some EOS tokens, you click a couple of pop-ups, badabim badabum and you’re set and good to go. This also applies for the reverse scenarion, and this is what makes it golden for the adoption of the Phantasma chain and people getting into our ecosystem, lets say they have Eth and are using a Phantasma dApp, but don’t have KCAL or SOUL, they can quickly convert their tokens into our native chain tokens and use the chain dApp, without even going to an exchange and having to buy the token. We are bringing the power back to the people and providing an truly decentralized and trustless solution for trading tokens on the blockchain, which makes it super easy for new people to come into the ecosystem.

Thanks Phantasma Team ❤