Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Akash. The AMA took place on October 7 and our guests were Boz M (COO) and Cheng (CFO).
The total reward fund was 2000 AKT and was divided into three parts. In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of the most interesting points for you.
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Hello SatoshiClubbers! Welcome to another AMA session with Satoshi Club. Our guests today are from Akash. @boz_m welcome!
Serg | Satoshi Club: And @chenghiskhan as well 🙂
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Hi everyone.
Cheng: Good morning, evening and afternoon everyone 🤟
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Can you please introduce yourselves and tell us how did you start with Akash?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: I’m Boz, COO of Akash. I’ve been in diverse set of startups, ranging from social gaming and ag-tech, to FinTech, martech and now blockchain. I’ve led in primarily business development and partnership roles. I’ve met Greg through a business development introduction, and sold him on my previous company’s software. Since then, gotten to know Akash and after multiple conversations throughout 2019, and in person customer development meetings, joined in August ’19.
Cheng: Thank you for having us today! I’m Cheng, the CFO of Akash and I joined our team back in March/April this year. I spent nearly a decade of my career initially in traditional finance with several investment banks with the last notable stop at Goldman Sachs. Since then, I caught the startup bug and worked for a high growth mobile gaming company as its CFO.
The last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of finally getting into blockchain with Refereum and now Akash.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Thank you Cheng! Can we know what gaming company was it?
Cheng: Of course. It was called PennyPop and we rebranded to wkrshp.
D. | Satoshi Club: So you guys preparing for your IEO? 😉
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We’re all excited over here and planning quite a bit, for the IEO, and have significant plans post IEO! The IEO is the start of our next chapter as a company 🙂
Q1 from bitcointalk user L Valerievna
You will hold an auction listing through Bitmax shortly. What kind of plans does Akash Network have regarding the possibility to stake AKT tokens through their platform? Any non-centralized possibilities to stake AKT tokens planned?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We have 64-mainnet validators that you are able to stake to. https://app.lunie.io/akash/validators. Our validators are decentralized and our community’s Stake of Akash was recently published yesterday https://medium.com/vitwit/vitwits-state-of-akash-network-9bb14854520a
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Can I apply as a validator?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: There is no application process. Becoming one of the 64-validators is based on stake and delegation size of AKT. Anyone can become a validator.
D. | Satoshi Club: What is a minimum amount to stake to be a validator?
Cheng: currently, in order to get to the top 64 as validators, you’ll need at least 516,000 AKT between your own tokens and our delegation:
D. | Satoshi Club: Got it! this is a lot of AKT!
Cheng: This will of course fluctuate, but that’s currently the ranking. In addition, the current staking rewards at set at 54% APR 🙂
Q2 from bitcointalk user maxzerone
Why you decided to use usdx as your stable coin in the platform and not usdt or busd, which are far more popular?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Kava is in our ecosystem, close partners and allies. It makes sense for us given they are a Cosmos SDK chain.
Secondly, they are a growing stablecoin, and we do have plans to further expand on our capabilities of accepting other coins, but at this time, Kava’s USDX will be the first stablecoin in our ecosystem. IBC will be allowing for that to happen, and bridging outside of Cosmos into Ethereum will be enabled at another time to allow for USDT, etc.
https://akash.network/blog/akash-integrates-kava-labss-usdx/ https://akash.network/blog/akash-partners-with-cosmoss-interchain-foundation-to-accelerate-development-of-inter-blockchain-communication/
D. | Satoshi Club: So other stablecoins will be integrated, but later?
Cheng: Absolutely.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Any approximate dates?
Cheng: Not at this time, actually, but you can always count on us to be working on Akash 24/7. We’ll have more to share in the future.
Q3 from Telegram user @iulya_i
Please explain the work of the validators and what is their number, how are they selected and what is their reward?
Cheng: There are 64 total validators for Akash currently. They’re not “selected” by Akash or anyone specifically, but are selected by the network based on the total number of AKT they hold plus and delegated to them. In this manner, they’re all decentralized as the network itself chooses and decides.
This is important to us b/c validators contribute to the economic security of the chain: validate transactions, governance, etc.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Validators are so useful indeed! What are their rewards?
Cheng: In terms of their rewards, it’s a % of the staking rewards. Just like all validators on the Cosmos chain, validators charge a commission rate for all tokens delegated to them.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Can you share the % or not possible? 😅
Cheng: Oh; that % is determined by the validator. We don’t control that. So if you’re a validator, you get to set your own commission rate.
D. | Satoshi Club: Percentage depends on stake?
Cheng: No, it’s a flat % set by the validator between 0% and 100%.
Boz M | COO Akash Network: There are three ways validators earn rewards:
Validators earn proportionally more revenue than their delegators because of commissions, this is a field they set. Transaction fees and block rewards as well. Interested validators can learn more about their rewards here https://hub.cosmos.network/master/validators/validator-faq.html#what-is-the-incentive-to-run-a-validator
Q4 from Telegram user @criedluck
Akash Supermini – can you tell us if it’s a computer or a mining rig? I mean can I use it as a computer? Install an OS, play games etc.?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: The Supermini is a computer itself, so there’s no need to plug it into a computer; it just has to be plugged into the wall and connected to the internet in your home or office.
Akash Supercloud is the network that Supermini offers compute for. Anyone can offer compute on Akash and Supermini is our reference hardware to demonstrate the portability of the platform. The purpose of the Supermini is to offer compute on Akash Network, and serve as a node to service computational demand from our users.
D. | Satoshi Club: Btw what sizes of this computer? and weight?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We’ll release more information about our Supermini as it’s still under production, including dimensions. Our prototype is about the width of an Ipad pro. It’s small and compact. 🙂
Q5 from Telegram user @nasharussia1
From your roadmap, we can see that in Q2 2021 you plan to start a subsidised program with services 10-15x lower than on the market. My question is for how long do you plan this program to last and if this will not be a threat to the stability of the token?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Apples to apples, without our economics, compute prices should be 2-3x cheaper.
With our subsidy models, it will be a lot more. It is true that we are bootstrapping supply through inflation and subsidies, but that will vary based on network demand. So to your question, it’s not that we set with a timeline, but it’s the market that determines the demand and when network effects of a marketplace takes over, that accelerates growth. We expand on that here in our blog.
Q6 from Telegram user @waterbanner
Why is the inflation rate dependent only on how many short-term and long-term miners are working in the system, but doesn’t take into consideration the price of the token at all?
Cheng: In simple terms, price isn’t a part of the equation to determine inflation. Specifically, inflation is a function of time (where we are on the inflation curve), what our current supply is, and what current vs targeted inflation is. Price also isn’t something controlled by the protocol because the market ultimately determines price. Inflation is something that’s more structural to the protocol itself.
Using a real life example: let’s use the USD, the dollar. Our federal reserve bank sets the target inflation rate based on a bunch of factors, but the value of the dollar is determined by the market, ultimately!
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE QUESTIONS
The chat was open for 80 seconds; a lot of questions were posted by Satoshi Club community. Our guests chose some of them.
Q1 from Telegram User @Nickkiii
Why did Akash Network choose to integrate with KAVA, do you also have plans to enable other stablecoins for fee settlement on Akash Decloud platform?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Yes, we do and we’ll make announcements at a later time, but we will have a multi-currency settlement mechanism. We answered why Kava earlier in the AMA. 🙂
Q2 from Telegram User @Nickkiii
When is the AKT IEO on Bitmax, can you give us more details on how the IEO would run, and what the IEO price is?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Oct 14th & 15th https://bitmax.io/en/marketing/akash
Q3 from Telegram User @jpsarmah
As per https://akash.aneka.io/charts, 67 % of AKTS are held by 10 (3.861 %) addresses. Why is the number of addresses so low and who holds the other 33% of AKTS?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We launched our mainnet less than 2-weeks ago, and haven’t launched our IEO yet. This is very normal for projects that launched as the only users with AKT are investors, and testnet participants.
Q4 from Telegram User @huydo
What are the major roles of Cosmos for supporting Akash and why do you choose Cosmos instead of others?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Tendermint attracted us because of its flexibility as a library with a modular and pragmatic design. We chose to build on Tendermint because of its iteration speed and community moment. As a Go library, it was a natural fit in our stack. https://tendermint.com/ https://github.com/ovrclk
Q5 from Telegram User @Idee01
Akash allocated top 27% of validators with two-third of Veto power and bottom 73% of validator with one-third Veto power. Why did you employ the Pareto Principle in the distribution of Voting Power? Why is it calculated based on bonded tokens and not total tokens?
Cheng: Good question! We didn’t actually do this by design as that’s how things settled initially. Akash is only about 2 weeks old at this point, so there’s still a lot of room for delegations to move around. Initially, we needed to ensure that enough AKT was staked to ensure the stabilization of the network, so we were optimizing for that. As time goes on, our delegations will be distributed. If you compared our delegations today vs what it was just a week ago, you’ll already see further distribution. We are refining and fair and distributed methodology, that we’ll publish soon, so please stay tuned.
Q6 from Telegram User @KFChick
Many users are using Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon’s AWS services, so how could Akash convince them move to your service and any incentives for them?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: Akash is faster, better, cheaper.
We believe the future holds an opportunity for more distribution of datacenters versus the contemporary model of hyperscale deployments. Better distribution means lower network latency, which means faster applications. More distribution also means more decentralization. Given Akash supports cloud native applications, migrating to Akash does not require you to learn a new programming language or tools. If it runs on AWS/Google/Microsoft, it can run on Akash.
Q7 from Telegram User
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We’ll set bug bounties from our foundation soon, but we’d invite you to start contributing today and get acquainted with our developer community. Join our developer chat here: discord.akash.network
Q8 from Telegram User @solankinishu
COVID 19 has slowed many economies around the world but as a crypto business has it affected you negatively or positively?
Cheng: With people and workforces (like our own team) becoming more distributed and remote operators as a result of the crisis, demand for cloud services, cloud compute, etc. is higher now than ever and expected to continue growing quickly into the future. This benefits us at an industry fundamentals level. In addition, the team has been working remotely and managing remote teams for years already. Ultimately, we see ourselves along with other cloud-based systems, services, and software, as a category of tools that has actually allowed the world’s economies to sustain themselves to the extent they have. Akash will be making that tool set stronger, more robust, more accessible, and cheaper.
Q9 from Telegram User @Beterror203
Does your system have any kind of membership plan?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: No.
Q10 from Telegram User @KFChick
How do you plan to promote about your project in different countries? where English is not spoken very well. Do you have a local community so they can understand your project?
Boz M | COO Akash Network: We’ve translated our project/white papers/site in Russian, Chinese and soon Korean.
We’ve expanded our team across to support Russian, Chinese, and Korean communities and we’ll be announcing more regional expansions in the near future.
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Akash. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 1000 AKT were distributed between the winners. You can check the winners list here https://t.me/Satoshi_club/329044
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