CryptoNationIN X ARDOR AMA RECAP

Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Ardor 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 @alber1 welcome to CryptoNationIN 🎉 Glad to have you with CryptoNationIN 🥳

Alber – Hello everybody! very happy to be here to answer your questions. Thanks! it is an honor for me.

Mayank – Before we start, I request you to tell about yourself and about Ardor and it’s ecosystem.

Alber – I have been always passionate about computers and innovation since I was a kid, after graduating from the university as a telecommunication engineer I started to work in the era of software integration. When I discovered the blockchain technology, particularly the Nxt blockchain, I immediately fall in love and made several proofs of concepts.

I am also the co-founder of a company in Spain that provided software services. When I moved to the UK I founded another company, it has been quite a ride since them, and it made me the opportunity to get deeply into the corporate world. Since then, I have been working on many different projects in more than 10 countries.

In 2018, I made a step further from the Nxt community and became a member of Jelurida’s team as a software engineer and business developer.

The Ardor ecosystem is very wide. It came from the Nxt community. We currently have customers and developers from different parts of the world. We made agreements with big companies and corporates and we are constanly scouting new partnerships that can make the ecosystem to grow higher.

Mayank – 🤭Amazed! Could you please let our community know about Ardor Ecosystem.

Alber – The Ardor ecosystem currently has several projects and child chains. Let’s start with the child chains:

• MPG, which is a real estate company that is innovating this field with the Ardor technology. It was recently approved by the regulators.
• Bitswift, a Canadian company that is building many tools. They recently launched pegged assets to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Triffic, the new child chain to be launch in mid-september. It is a gamification app that enables to earn tokens just looking for beacons with your phone.
• Ignis, the fully decentralized child chain for every body to use.

So, as Ignis enables also other projects to come, we also have several projects launched in this child chain. To name a few:
A-trust, smart voting, Hotcity, Cycle4Value, Gallery Defender, ArdorRocks. We also have agreements with educational companies that are in touch with top professionals. For instance: ISDI school, IEB… Tarasca as well, it is one of the most important projects launched in Ignis. This month it will launched on Ignis a very important project that is currently under the radar. I am also looking forward to it.
I don’t want to forget the recent project called GiveSafely, which the giant give.org is behind it.

Mayank – How have you find the idea of launching Ardor? What is the necessity to launch it?

Alber – The idea behind the Consensus as a Service is to split the responsibility between a parent token used for securing the proof of stake consensus (ARDR token) and multiple child tokens each dedicated for its own decentralized application.

In 2016 the core developers started to design this architecture that solves the current blockchain problems and it was live in mainnet in 2018. It is the main idea where our competitors want to get but they are still struggling with it.

Twitter Questions

Q1. Can you explain the New Ardor project which is New Ardor Hackathon project – ArdorPi? What is this all about? Do you have any mobile version app for Ardor?

Alber – The Ardor hackathon https://ardor.tools/hackathon.html was a community initiative that brought several interesting projects such as the Ardor Pi. The prize pool was quite high and that made many developers show very interesting applications of the Ardor technology.

The Ardor Pi is a Raspberry Pi image with the Ardor software preinstalled. It shows the potential of Ardor to run in micro-computers that do not require a huge computational power, which is one of the main advantages of the Ardor proof of stake protocol.

Nevertheless, there were other very interesting projects. For instance:

• A decentralized identifiers solution (the specification was recently published https://www.w3.org/TR/2020/WD-did-core-20200731/) based on Ardor, using the IGNIS child chain
• Xcublicle developed a Chrome extension that gives the user the ability to send cryptocurrency and leave notes on any URL domain.
• Cryptoplay, a payment portal that provides simple APIs to be plugged into any e-commerce site
• A decentralized dApp called IgnisDex, it is like the binance DEX but using the Ardor engine instead.

And many others such as Ardor gifts, tickets and memberships solution (SIGBRO), an integration of the Ardor API for PHP projects, a DeFi Pardody bot…

We do have mobile version app for Ardor. First we have a full node in Android launched last year and we have Ardor lite, which is an app available in iOS and Android developed by Mrv777, a member of the Ardor community

Q2. What are the significant advantages of the new Ardor release version “Ardor 2.3.2” over the old version? What is the best feature offered in this version 2.3.2?

Alber – There are several advantages of the new release 2.3.2. First, it is an stable version that incorporates the HD wallet and enables the usage of the ledger wallet Nano S and X.
Moreover, it includes a automated SSL generation, new smart contracts that can be deployed or taken as an example. Improvements in the UI (I particularly like a block count down and the new fee calculator).
Of course there are more technical improvements that make the loading faster, which is translated in a better user experience.

Q3. Explain more about Consensus as a Service and using the parent – child chain architecture, how can I Launch my own Blockchain on Ardor

Alber – As I mentioned earlier, it is the main idea that brought Ardor to be a reality.

The idea is to split the responsibility between a parent token used for securing the proof of stake consensus (ARDR token) and multiple child tokens each dedicated for its own decentralized application.

The first permissionless child chain was IGNIS, it has all the features enabled. One of the benefits of the software architecture is the bundling, it is a process that receives the fees in the child chain token and pays in the ARDR token. It improves the scalability to give or take 100 Tx/sec.

The Proof of Stake protocol of Ardor is a reliable protocol, very extended worldwide with more than 1.000 nodes and running for many years (inherit from the Nxt public blockchain launched in 2013). This whole architecture was launched on mainnet in January 2018 and is working without problems ever since.

If you want to launch your blockchain (child chain), you have to contact Jelurida and get a license. The main reason for this process is to prevent scams that are very common in the decentralized sphere.

When you have a child chain, you can also sponsor the fees of your customers, which increases the easiness of adoption of the technology.

Q4. Investors often care less about technology, but more about the value of tokens. Despite the state-of-the art architecture upon which ARDR and Jelurida is built on, how do you balance the development of technology, while increasing $ARDR token value?

Alber – Unfortunately, it is a true statement. The value of the tokens is what is more important in the short term. On the other hand, we believe in investing for the long run and building both Jelurida as a one-stop-shop for all your blockchain needs and the token family Ardor/Ignis/Child chains/Nxt as a leading development platform for decentralized applications.

The marketing operations have been extended to other regions such as China, where we are actively promoting our technology. We are constantly promoting our products and projects to the most important crypto publications (coindesk, cointelegraph,…). Every week we publish a video with our weekly wins that cover the achievements done by the team and the ecosystem during the week. It is very complicated to manipulate the market and make our tokens increase their value when you are an honest company. Of course, I am here because I am sure that the long term will pay off widely (I say this statement as an investor, it is not financial advice and I always suggest DYOR).

Jelurida will be focused on developing the technology based on the market needs and will be in constant touch with corporates, partners, and solution providers. It is a less risky bet that will bring investors gradually while we continue to develop and market the technology. We do not plan to try to control the crypto market or to be near pump/dump schemas that harm all the industry.

Q5. DeFi is the new trend now. How easy is it to build Defi DApps on ARDR platform? What tools are available? Also, Ethereum platform have witnessed a lot of scam tokens being launched, how does ARDR platform prevent that?

Alber – Indeed, it is the new trend and also a very dangerous land. For me, it can bring some innovation related to financial products but on the other hand, will bring huge disappointments. This is not how we see the blockchain technology should be 100% heading.

In Ardor, building DeFi is extremely easy. It has the Ardor decentralized exchange to trade tokens, more complex collaterals for lending can be used thanks to the Lightweight Contracts and we even have seen integrations with Twitter bots, developed by members of the community (the DeadFish token).

The Ardor platform prevents the scams in their child chain because we can say that Jelurida acts as a firewall for them. The due diligence is a must, so the company that will launch the child chain must comply with the regulation and have a legit business model. The projects launched in Ignis, on the other hand as it is a fully decentralized platform can have scam tokens, as usual in the decentralized word: DYOR, and always check that the tokens are what they claim to be.

For instance, building an Uniswap alike project in Ardor is extremely easy. The Ardor software has a reference implementation that includes a user interface based on web. A developer can modify or extend this implementation and build their own DEX (with hardware wallet and creation of wallets included right away!). We have seen this case with the IgnisDex presented in the Ardor hackthon. Then you have to provide the liquidity rewards and wait for the liquidity. How much time does it require for an experienced developer? very low.

Telegram Questions

Q6. Where i can buy ARDR token?

Alber – Here you have the exchanges available https://www.jelurida.com/ardor/explorers.

Q7. According to the website, Ardor has three child chain Ignis, AEUR, and Bitswift. My question is, WHAT ARE THE ROLES OF THESE CHILD CHAIN ON ARDOR BLOCKCHAIN? And how they are connected?

Alber – All the child chains have the option to be interconnected between them. So the tokens can be traded and they can send messages or use any other mechanism to communicate with each other. Their roles are independent and don’t forget this month we will have a new child chain: Triffic, a gamification app.

Q8. What is the Staking structure of this token and how is the reward given ?

Alber – You need 1000 ARDR, 24 hours lock time, annual profit is not incredibly high at this moment. We do not believe in generating tokens out of thin air and want to make a sustainable ecosystem when the goal is that the transaction fee revenue will be profitable to incentivize the forgers (staking nodes).

Q9. There are many projects that are considered as Ardor big competitors. Why should users choose Ardor for the best choice?

Alber – First, because it works 🙂 while other projects promise but don’t deliver. We are still waiting for Ethereum to be a usable blockchain and from time to time we hear about these hacks or how hard is to issue a transaction due to the astronomical transaction fee, or just congestion. The idea of moving to PoS is good, but their implementation does not look that good. We have a working product and we will be stick to our purpose of keep on evolving the technology. We won’t rest until we are in the top of the blockchain lists and widely adopted by companies, corporations and projects.

Q10. Do you plan to build partnerships with local cryptocurrency developers and local project in each country to make the use of Ardor more global?

Alber – we are already doing that. We have spread our operations to Nigeria, where we have an office and we are constantly in touch with new developers. Same goes for the Korean and Chinese community. In Europe we are already quite well positioned, we are in touch with top industries such as banking, consultancy and public administration to continue giving shape to our blockchain for their needs.

Q11. WHAT IS THE REASON of CREATING A PARENT CHAIN AND SEVERAL CHILD CHAINS? Does this allow for better scalability? What advantages does this design offer?

Alber – It allows the throughput to be increased dramatically. The parent chain only takes care of the consensus algorithm (it is not a dual token) while the child chains have the action. One block of the parent chain can have up to 1000 tx of the child chains (artificially capped by now). It also allows the bundlers to exist and this makes possible the zero fee transactions possible.

Q12. The Internet of Things requires advanced technical support of blockchain, and no project has been found to meet the requirement yet, so how can Ardor make it?

Alber – Yes it can, we have been working on it and attracted several IoT projects, see https://ardordocs.jelurida.com/Securing_IoT_devices_and_databases. The possibility to extend the functionality of an Ardor node plus the full Android node made this possible.

Q13. What is the “thin client” option offered by the Ardor wallet? Does it offer the same level of security as the usual configuration?

Alber – In Ardor, when we talked about an official light client it means that your wallet will be connected to other node. So when you issue a transaction, it is important that the transaction is signed locally and it is only broadcasted the signed transaction bytes. This way your passphrase does not travel across the internet. All the official light wallets of Ardor work like this so it is safe.

Q14. How do you raise revenue to fund this project for its development, many employ ICOS or IEOS ?

Alber – We are already funded since the ICO made in 2017. We are also getting other revenues from licenses, consultancy and providing learning services to our customers.

Q15. Projects that are not traded on major exchanges remain unnoticed. What do you think about listing the token on the leading exchanges?

Alber – We are constanly in touch with major exchanges to list our tokens. You can have a look at the exchanges available in the links as follows:

• https://www.jelurida.com/ardor/explorers
• https://www.jelurida.com/ignis/explorers
• https://www.jelurida.com/nxt/explorers

In the Jelurida’s team, there is one person responsible for the exchange’s relationship and our goal is a balance between being listed on all exchanges and not paying ridiculous fees for listings.

Q16. One major source of problem in DeFi is smart contract vulnerability, which has lead to loss of funds, what steps have been taken ARDOR to fix this major problem and avoid future occurrences ?

Alber – I totally agree. And I am sure that new hacks are to come very soon. In Ardor we do not have such problem due to a more robust design. Our smart contracts approach is stateless, so outside the consensus protocol. Instead, we provide pre-built smart transactions that can be plugged like a lego, and if it is required, an advanced lightweight contracts framework that is a sharding solution, which the execution is only done in designated nodes.

Q17. What’s the Difference between STATELESS LIGHTWEIGHT CONTRACT on Ignis and ETHEREUM SMART CONTRACTS and How easy is it to build on Ignis with Knowledge of solidity, Java, C, KSML

Alber – Extending the answer above, the stateless lightweight contracts on Ignis are built on Java, the number one programming language in the corportate world. If you know Java, the learning curve is very low and you can be ready to deploy contracts very soon. As the states are stored on the blockchain itself, the risks of hacking are very low compared to Solidity, which race conditions and gaps to be hack are greater.

Q18. Explain more about multi-signature configuration, why do you use This Configuration, what’s the advantages over Single – signature configuration?

Alber – Ardor has the features of account and asset control. It is very similar to multi-signature, it means that you can protect your asset or child chain tokens with an approval model that can represent, for instance, the approval of several accounts. Most of the DAOs built on Ardor use such mechanisms to protect their accounts.

Q19. In the long run, why should we trust and follow you and your project? How do you raise awareness and elimination of the doubts of investors / partners / customers?

Alber – Well, a mantra in this space is don’t trust, verify. You can check the weekly wins and see how we are non-stop working https://www.jelurida.com/news/weekly-wins.
Personally, I was in touch with other blockchain projects and you could smell how dishonest they were at first sight. It did not happen with Jelurida.

Q20. Why is it said that Ardor is “the first blockchain as a service model”? What are the uses of Ardor in making it such a great project and how can it improve large companies and ecosystems?

Alber – The “blockchain as a service” is a term that was hijacked from other companies and it was misused. While Microsoft called “Blockchain as Service” to deploy a fabric node on Azure (by the way, we will soon an Ardor Azure public node option in their marketplace), we called blockchain as a service to the full experience including to be part of the consensus. For us, the term full blockchain as a service is now more accurate. As it also refers to deploy a node and take advantage of the global consensus (consensus as a service).

Q21. Ardor uses the PoS consensus algorithm, and with this algorithm ALL users get the same incentive, regardless of the investment they have made, what strategies do they use to keep their users motivated and show them that it is worth investing with you?

Alber – It is not correct, the more ARDR you stake, the more blocks you will generate. Hence, the more transaction fees you will get.

Q22. As Being permissionless, doesn’t this imply that any one can do anything on IGNIS AND thus expose you to security threats, sybil attacks and 51 % attacks as recently ETC experienced 51 Attacks and they are permissionless?

Alber – Not at all, IGNIS is not part of the consensus algorithm, only ARDR, the token of the parent chain. In case of Ardor, there are theoretical attacks that are impractical. The current market and spread of the Ardor tokens make an attack very unlikely to be successful ( and yes, we do have attack attemps every day).

Q23. What exact problem is ARDOR trying to solve in the blockchain industry that other project can not solve ?

Alber –

• Blockchain scalability – thanks to the architecture.
• Blockchain bloat – thanks to the pruning feature.
• PoW energy usage – thanks to being 100% Proof of Stake.
• Smart contracts not so smart – Lightweight contracts, stateless and sharded solution.
• Interoperability – All child chains are interoperable and the phasing transactions make the atomic transaction with other blockchains possible.

Q24. Protecting users/member data and privacy has become a problem that many companies/projects must face in their development. So can you explain a bit about your project Security?

Alber – It is indeed a problem. We have the shuffling feature to increase the privacy and on the other hand it was a requirement from the companies the permissioned child chain feature. It makes possible to KYC your customers so you can grant or revoke permissions to use your tokens.
Thinking about security tokens, it is a must feature to have: https://ardordocs.jelurida.com/Child_Chain_Control.

Thank you to Alberto Fernandez, and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day