Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Constellation Network. The AMA took place on August 20 and our guests were Benjamin Jorgensen (CEO), Benjamin Diggles (CRO – Business Development), Mathias Goldman (COO), Wyatt Meldman-Floch (CTO) and Tom (Community Admin).
The total reward pool was $600 and it was splitted 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
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hello! Today our guests are from @constellationcommunity. Welcome to Satoshi Club!
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: How are you today? welcome 😊 thanks for joining us today.
Mateo Gold: Hello everyone.
Tom: Hey I’m great thank you for asking!
Benjamin J Jorgensen: HELLO!
Serg | Satoshi Club: For the beginning, please introduce the project and tell us a few words about yourself. 🙂
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Hello all! We are Constellation Network – we are protocol that is creating an ecosystem for applications to communicate with one another. We leverage a directed acyclic graph (dag) for effective and efficient data processing. We are a truly decentralized network that focuses on building applications with data assurance. As such we are working closely with the U.S. Air Force and DoD to provide a scalable distributed ledger technology for big data processing and secure data transportation standard.
We have our core team here – Benjamin Diggles (CRO – Business Development). Mathias Goldman (COO) and Wyatt Meldman-Floch (CTO).
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Nice. Did any of you serve in the army?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: No. My entire family did though. Down to the revolutionary war in the US. My grandfather wrote the test for pilots back in WW2.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Wow. How comes you didn’t follow their steps?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: My dad served in Vietnam and said “No way… go build the future.” So ya. I was the only one that didn’t serve in the military. Anyhow – back to crypto!
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Good advice I would say. Kudos to your dad. 🙂
Q1 from Bitcointalk User gustafsson
Your mainnet is built on DAG. Why you have chosen DAG? Is it pow or pos?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Well – DAG is an architecture.Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are consensus mechanisms. We chose a dag because it is a common architecture for distributed systems leveraged by applications (like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc). to process and organize data.
We wanted to create a blockchain that could process a TON of transactions and a lot of data so that we could create an ecosystem where people built meaningful applications on top of it. Our consensus mechanism is Proof of Reputable Observation (PRO). And we use this because it is a programmatic and algorithmic way to effectively and efficiently organize the network for speed and security.
Our consensus is concurrent as well – we run multiple consensuses in parallel – which is vastly different and more scalable than any other blockchain
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: Could you elaborate on programmatic and algorithmic way of organization?
Mateo Gold: So, the way to scale an architecture is to have multiple consensus rounds in parallel that then feed into a global state of the network and a global consensus. That makes it truly scalable
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Yes – from a high level Wyatt and the core engineers wrote algorithms to organize the data. We score each node on their reputation (past participation, geo location, uptime, etc.). This then allows us to randomize the nodes and the data they validate.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: How are the nodes formed?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: We had about 1500 applications for nodes to be a part of the network. We ran KYC and interviewed individuals and organizations to be a part of the network. We then organized them into batches based on their contribution to Constellation – technology, messaging, and involvement in building the ecosystem.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Can you tell us which were the most interesting applications? or the funniest ones?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Well – it was one of the most amazing things I have seen. People from around the world applied and shared their life stories with us.
Some people came to us after having built ecosystems for other major protocols and were inspired by the technology – the potential to evolve blockchain technology – and could offer their technical expertise as well as experience governing a network.
Some of the funny ones were one sentence applications that said “I WANT $DAG”. But still funny. It was a humbling experience to see all of these people, from around the world – 92 countries – reach out to us.
Q2 from Bitcointalk User nyosant
Constellation bases consensus on reputation, but how is the reputation score for a node determined (i.e., what are the main parameters determining reputation)? What would happen when a node deviates from the expected behavior?
Wyatt M-F: To answer a little further we essentially have two consensus processes happening in parallel, one for blocks and one for converging global state.
- For block consensus we partition facilitators (3/total) using a locality sensitive hash function that is a Xor of the edges leading into the block.
- For global convergence all nodes must propose a ‘view’ of the total dag and conform (re-download new patches of the DAG that are inconsistent with majority) according to the state selection algorithm that incorporates our reputation model. Note that only full nodes participate in global state consensus.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: What other types of nodes are there? By “locality” you mean geography?
Mateo Gold: Locality in terms of network topography.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: We will be introducing light nodes by the end of this year.
Serg | Satoshi Club: How to run a node?
Tom: https://constellationnetwork.io/run-a-node/
Benjamin J Jorgensen: We have about 50-100 more foundational nodes we will be onboarding over the course of the next couple of months.
Irina K.| @Satoshi_Club: So it’s light nodes and full nodes, right?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Yes.
Wyatt M-F: The reputation model at its core is a ‘node influence metric’ that we calculate using a self-avoiding random walk. This is a way of understanding influence in social graphs and it also gives us a lot of flexibility for extending into convolutions of other state channel graphs.
No, but in reality there’s a tradeoff between how expensive we want nodes to be for main net. So we’ll decide via governance probably on a cap and queue new nodes when a max is hit. For state channels its totally up to you. It’s just an exercise in resource optimization. That’s the amazing thing about being memory bound.
Q3 from Telegram User @sai_sa
United States air force is your partner. That is huge! How did you manage to establish this partnership? What benefits do you have and what did you propose to do for them?
Mr. Diggles: We became aware of what is called Other Transaction Authorities that allow for small businesses to engage with the DoD w/o being squashed by the standard industry primes like Lockheed Martin, Etc. And we learned that folks inside the federal space really are thirsty for DLT solutions. So we wrote a proposal that was predicated around applying Blockchain to big data initiatives.
IBM has done a great job of establishing themselves for digital logistics but when it comes to Air and Space, we are the only solution to be successful in that realm since the data is just so big. Putting us in a class of our own.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: The worlds global food supply is regulated through satellites. They collect data like temperature, crop productions and yeilds, and send this data to organizations around the globe to better regulate the global supply chain.
Serg | Satoshi Club: What about the hyped spacex?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Space shuttles need more security around the data – think if a space shuttle taking civilians to space had compromised security.
Mr. Diggles: SpaceX is very cool for sure but we are focused on the DoD since it’s far broader than SpaceX and they handle more data than all of Elon’s ventures combined.
Serg | Satoshi Club: The business would be destroyed.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Absolutely – and lives.
Mr. Diggles: Proving ourselves in federal will pave the way for the private sector, including SpaceX, in a meaningful way. Much like the advent of the internet.
Q4 from Telegram User @angela_rer
Don’t you think that 5G technology solves the issues you described about Data? I mean about the transfers of GB per second of a lot of data.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: 5G was introduced to invite more connectivity of applications – more data – at faster speeds. The technology is supposed to advance automation at the next level. This is creating more and more data than we ever imagine.
Much of our existing digital infrastructure wasn’t built to safeguard this data…. let alone have a sound data strategy around it.
Our technology was established to provide a new infrastructure to secure this data and create more efficient and secure means of transporting and collecting this data so that we can build the next evolution of applications that connect the globe.
Q5 from Telegram User @Cryptolover1010
What your plans in place for global expansion, are Constellation focusing on only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: While we are building some incredible things for the DoD, it will be a year out before we can really share the day to day of what we are doing. We are about to announce a very large partnership and product around DeFi. We can’t say a whole lot, but this will be a product that nearly every crypto asset trader can use.
We have been building a stealth project that will be revealed in the coming weeks with some of the biggest players in crypto. A lot of data is used and created in the trading of crypto assets – it is time for crypto asset financial instruments to be on par with financial instruments of the equities and public market.
And Constellation and our partners will introduce the first ecosystem build on Constellation – using our protocol – to create more reliant algorithmic trading products in the crypto world. This will be one of many and it starts in the DeFi space.
Serg | Satoshi Club: We are looking forward to that announcement. 🙂
Benjamin J Jorgensen: It will happen before you know it and it will take the crypto space by storm.
Serg | Satoshi Club: DeFi is definitely cool now and it’s great you are in that space. thanks for the answer, Benjamin.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Let’s just say that DeFi needs a faster, more secure, and scalable protocol than Ethereum… and we are that protocol.
Q6 from Telegram User @luckydraw66
DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, has become a hot topic in the industry. On that front, I’ve seen Constellation detailing DeFi use cases on the website. What would you say is the most promising DeFi application for Constellation at the moment?
Mateo Gold: While we cannot disclose all the details of the upcoming project quite yet, you are right there is tremendous excitement and value to be captured. Connecting ecosystems and building the world of multiple concurrent blockchains that interact with each and create a fluent borderless value exchange opens us up to a whole range of applications around tokens and finance. That said this is just the V1 of our vision of an ecosystem where everyone can build on top and create value not only around tokenized finance but also tokenized data and data derivatives.
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 @Albert3990
Constellation is a token erc 20 actually. Do you have any project to build your own blockchain in the future?
Wyatt M-F: We actually already launched main net. Download the Molly wallet and you can send native $dag.
Tom: Make sure to use kucoin to buy DAG btw. Or our OTC channel https://discord.gg/zs73mny
Q2 from Telegram User @Jonahapagu
What are the advantages of Directed Acyclic graph (DAG) over traditional Blockchain?
Wyatt M-F: With the right provisioning, it scales horizontally.
Q3 from Telegram User @sarjanacryptocurrency
What features does the Constellation have, and which features are really the main weapon that even other projects don’t have?
Mateo Gold:
- Concurrent consensus -> means true scalability and higher throughputs than traditional blockchains.
- Zero fees for single tx below the rate limit but tx fees for validating data streams or sending a lot of data.
- Being able to validate and notarize all kinds of data from databases, sensors, iot devices, etc etc..
- Creating assurance and audit trails around large data amounts and data that si streamed in real-time.
- Crosschain interoperability.
- Mathematical theorems proven and turned into code.
Q4 from Telegram User @Dhanu006
What is the vision and mission of your coin? What problems are you trying to solve? Do these problems remain unsolved with the existing public blockchains?
Wyatt M-F: The vision has two angles:
– Create a protocol that can actually interoperate with real world architectures at the scale of impactful consumer products (can actually act as an oracle at scale).
– To provide in implicit infrastructure for the decentralized data revolution (getting paid for sharing your data, and a new class of ‘miners’ mining for novel data).
Q5 from Telegram User @muw_muw
What kind of advantages does Constellation have over its competitors on the market? Can you please give some reasons to convince the users to use Constellation?
Mateo Gold: We are the first blockchain company with a live token to be in a partnership with the United States airforce opening us ip to the entire world of military, government and defense. As a US company we have an inroad that many international companies simply cannot access. The barrier of entry for other blockchains is also pretty high (we have neever come across them in any of our conversations with the DoD) since they cannot process streaming data.
As a truly decentralized fast and low-fee infrastrcuture people will learn fast that they can build out an entire ecosystem (not just one solution for data) but an entire ecosystem around finance, data and many applications that havent even been thought about yet.
They can create their own DAG tokens with our new token standard that is akin to what erc20 is on ethereum. They can go raise funds for that and have immediate cross chain liquditiy not only within the DAG ecosystem but the entire erc20 world as well.
Q6 from Telegram User @putu45
Can you list 1-3 killer features of $DAG that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Yes! Great question.
Our Architecture: Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a common architecture for creating centralized big data distribution. We created a decentralized DAG
Our Consensus Mechanism: We use Proof of Reputable Observation (PRO) and organize the network using topology. Topological ordering of data is required for Artificial Intelligence engineers to add data to their automation workflows. We wanted to create a network of data that can be used by any engineer including the world’s leading data engineers. Our consensus mechanism is the next layer of defense after double spend thwarting.
Cryptographically Securing Complex Data Types (Images, and Videos): While a smart contract is great for programmatic execution and tracking of a digital asset, Constellation goes one step further to cryptographically secure the contents of those digital assets (the features, rows and columns of the data base that makes up the data asset).
Microservice Ecosystem: Microservices are the glue of any application. Think of Facebook – Facebook is made up of a myriad of Microservices that communicate and exchange data with each other. Facebook is not made up of smart contracts (these are not reliable or scalable in a highly engaged environment. Constellation allows any engineer to build a secure micro-service that communicates with existing applications as well as blockchain applications.
Q7 from Telegram User @Oreza1
Molly Wallet is not available for android devices, almost everyone uses android, what is the reason Molly wallet is not available for android devices?
Mateo Gold: We will have having an open sdk and a new light wallet coming soon as well.
Q8 from Telegram User @Jonahapagu
Constellation was built to organize and handle Big and complex Data this type of data can only be sourced and gotten from big companies and organizations that own and control them how will constellation be of use to Individual Machine learning engineers and data scientists who are looking forward to building their own AI products?
Mr. Diggles: So these big data companies may seemed locked down but this is only because they are so cautious about data security and their IP. Constellation, and the promise of DLT, will give these companies the attribution and security they need to make this data widely available for new forms of data exchange (which means new channels for revenue). This is where the Datapreneur concept takes hold. Companies are shifting to opening up their data since it’s more valuable in use than it is being closed off. This is why Mobility is seeing a renaissance and companies that have traditionally been mortal enemies are now starting to work together. The upside is just too great to not play in the interoperable eco-system.
Soon data will be widely available much like open source development tools became available in the early 2000s. Datapreneur’s will be able to grab open data (like what you’d find on data.gov and elsewhere) combine it with enterprise data and create new insights and value. We are at the beginning of a whole new industry because of this.
Q9 from Telegram User @mistihapa
As a common user, will I be able to run a node? What requirements would I need, what exactly would be my purpose and what incentives are there for this?
Mateo Gold: We have a very strong community based governance through our stardust governance collective. All individuals have built strong relationships over the last years and they monitor contribution to the ecosystem. It becomes obvious very fast who is suitable to be part of the collective and able to run a node based on these contributions and the interaction with the group.
Q10 from Telegram User @mistihapa
What is the meaning behind the Logo of Constellation?
Mateo Gold: The connected and fractal nature of reality.
Q11 from Telegram User @OS_ELIN
Where is Constellation Network in 5 to 10 years from now?
Mateo Gold: Everywhere.
Q12 from Telegram User
…
Benjamin J Jorgensen: This existing environment has accelerated constellation’s roadmap as nearly every business in the world is figuring out their digital footprint. 5G came online recently and this too has accelerated the need to create more robust data solutions.
Working with the US Federal Government, there has been a dire need to secure the data (accessing files remotely and leveraging multiple security clearances for the same data set). For the public sector, we are seeing more enterprises move data, in a compliant way, from antiquated hardware infrastructure to modern cloud infrastructures. Constellation accelerates the transfer of data in a programmatically compliant way.
With everyone moving digital, we have created more potential threats to our lives and our digital identity. Heck – the federal government is looking for a way to digitize and evolve the social security number and your identity.
Q13 from Telegram User @sivaa32
What is your biggest challenge at the moment? How can you overcome this challenge?
Mateo Gold: More awareness about the ground-breaking novelty of what we have built. More deep crypto partnerships and AMAs and exposure like this to people like you.
…
Thank you so much for inviting us to and handling and curating this AMA. It has been a lot of fun.
Benjamin J Jorgensen: Thank you all for the amazing questions! 366 questions is incredible. Hopefullly we have 366 more followers on our company. Great AMA! You all killed it.
Serg | Satoshi Club: It was really great. I was impressed by your work. 🙂
Benjamin J Jorgensen: We are making some huge strides to going into the Asian markets with our DeFi project. Really exciting opportunity and fun to announce that here – or at least set the stage.
Thank you! You as well. Have a great day!
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Constellation Network. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 300$ were distributed among winners.
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