A decentralized alternative service level agreement. Use DSLA to hedge against staking risks, and earn rewards for protecting staking deposits!
Welcome to another episode of our AMA series. Today we are glad to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from DSLA Protocol. The AMA took place on December 21 and our honorable guest was the CEO of the project, Wilhem Pujar.
The total reward pool was 2500$ 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
Mary | Satoshi Club: Hello, Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Stacktical! welcome to Satoshi Club. 😀
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Hi again everyone! Ready to do this?
Mary | Satoshi Club: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us more about Stacktical?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Sure thing! Let’s start there. My name is Wilhem Pujar, CEO of the Stacktical company, core developers of DSLA Protocol. Nice to meet you all!
I spent the past 12+ years juggling between the business and DevOps side of infrastructure management in various companies of all sizes. Execution, frontend, backend, smart contracts, product design… I have a quite holistic approach to the projects I contribute to.
Mary | Satoshi Club: When and where did you get idea to create Stacktical?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Good question! Actually, DSLA Protocol (and not Stacktical, our company) comes from a hands on experience at France’s national broadcast tv channel, France Televisions. I was the lead web architect for multiple high-traffic platforms crippled with scalability challenges. At the time, I thought there had to be a better way to scale than all-nighters.
So I started working on a way to predict the scalability of online service using mathematical models, then ultimately went on to decentralize SLA contracts.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Oh, everything we create is based on our previous experience and our desire to make everything better.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Experience is intellectual yield, indeed.
D. | Satoshi Club: What is DSLA Protocol and what does it do?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: DSLA Protocol is a decentralized alternative to SLA contracts. Our objective is to enable developers to build applications that can reduce users’ exposure to infrastructure risks using SLA contracts, cryptocurrency liquidity pools, and programmable cryptocurrency payments.
DSLA Protocol enables anyone to vouch for the reliability of an online or connected service and get paid when the service performs as expected. Conversely, users get compensated when the service does not meet pre-defined performance and reliability objectives.
As developers ourselves, we use DSLA Protocol to provide proof-of-stake delegators with a financial hedge against delegation risks, while incentivising the Quality of Service (QoS) of proof-of-stake validators and staking pool operators. Our MVP is live at https://DSLA.network for those of you who want to give it a try!
Mary | Satoshi Club: Which requirements do you have for testing?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: No special requirements, test ETH (Kovan) and test DSLA tokens. We’ll roll out an update enable you to mint test DSLA tokens to easily try out the dapp.
Q1 from Telegram user @iulya_i
You had a 175% growth in the last 7 days and also you announced a partnership with Elrond. Are those 2 things related to each other? What is the main purpose of the partnership with Elrond and what are the benefits?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Good question, important for the future of our product initiatives in 2021 and beyond. I won’t comment on our (market cap) growth itself, for obvious reasons. What I can say though, is that we are humbled by the fact that leading networks trust we are building something valuable.
We are definitely gaining more exposure as we onboard new networks to DSLA Protocol. Communities merge, and collaboration paves the way to better and/or new products. In the specific case of Elrond, DSLA “Elrond Edition” is the first announcement of a series of maximalist ports of DSLA to other networks than Ethereum, catering to difference audiences, with different capabilities and addressing different use cases. The main benefit for us is 100% of the Staking Risk Management market, and for our users, it’s all about the choice to use our Ethereum, network agnostic version or the “maximalist” version they like.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Can you name the next or give us a hint?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Haha, You’ll hear about them soon enough. But they are surprisingly large, if you consider that DSLA is relatively unknown for now.
Q2 from Telegram user @dominiksss
There are no trustworthy, cost-effective ways to reduce customers’ exposure to third-party service failures. And you aim to solve this. In other words, if I supply 10k on venus app and for some reason their smart contract is exploited, I can use your services to protect myself from this cases in the future?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical:Well, the first part of this question is extracted from our official deck at https://storage.googleapis.com/stacktical-public/STACKTICAL_DSLA-DECK.pdf
I invite everyone to check it out, it’s a great way to do a 5m initial DYOR about DSLA Protocol. To answer the rest of the question, smart contract exploits are not in the scope of DSLA contracts. This is more something that an insurance should handle. Mostly because it’s a one-shot security event, whereas service level agreements focus on providing a hedge against continuous risks using performance time series.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Btw, i haven’t seen this before, very nice visualization 👍
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Glad you like it! Spread the love 🙂
Mary | Satoshi Club: What kind of insurance? Do we have it on market?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: There are a lot of (DeFi) insurance products popping everywhere right now. Exploits are generally associated with Nexus Mutual and a couple others. Insurances are one-sided an only provide some form of coverage and rewards for liquidity providers though.
D. | Satoshi Club: Yes, that recent hack was very scary.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Yes, but it does impact the ability of the solution to work as intended. Contrary to DSLA, insurances are centralized in how they assess risks, claims and proceed with governance changes. On Nexus Mutual, elected members are NXM holders with membership rights.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Very centralised I want to tell.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: On DSLA, nobody needs to assess risk or claims. It’s pure mathematical performance time series. Glad to be able to discuss the differences with everyone! It will matter a lot as we will bring DSLA to different industries.
Mary | Satoshi Club: I think it’s still a bit hard for understanding) i just got a question in pm) “If you need to explain DSLA to your 10 years son how would you do this”. 😂
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: I would say that DSLA is a collection of smart contracts that lets anyone add a money-back guarantee to any service based on their monitored performance. And it can do money-forward, to reward service providers for their excellent job.
And for traders, that would be an option call/put, on the future performance of a given service! We have a lot in common with a prediction market.
Nice! I know it can feel a tiny bit daunting, but once you get it, you can apply it to all can of performance-driven industries. As I expressed in other AMAs, we know for a fact that space exploration, for example, needs a protocol like DSLA to guarantee the reliability of space infrastructures and inter-satellite communication.
Q3 from Telegram user @vinniepu
On the website it’s mentioned instant crypto compensation in case of failure and instant crypto rewards in case of success. Who is distributing those funds and are they made through a smart contract? If yes, what if the parties want to change the terms of the contract. Would it be possible to edit the smart contract?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Love this. So basically, to create a hedge against staking infrastructure risks, both proof-of-stake delegators and their validator will stake DSLA tokens to a DSLA contract. This pool is depleted after DSLA contracts are verified. On a weekly basis, for example.
If the contract is breached, the delegators get compensated based on their stake (money-back). Conversely, if the contract is honoured, the contract creator (either a validator or someone vouching fo rone), is rewarded. DSLA can also be used to trigger and settle DSLA contract update workflows (e.g. Company A needs more TPS from Provider 1).
If you are familiar with DevOps and IT Service Management, this will remind you of some of the things you’ll find in APM/NPM tools. We’re definitely building a fully-fledged risk management protocol, and DSLA contracts are a new form of governance vehicle.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Who created this contracts? How big is your team?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Either someone representing a staking pool, e.g. Everstake, or someone willing to bet that Everstake will do a great job. The DSLA Protocol contracts themselves are created in-house by our core team. As of today, DSLA Protocol is a team of 10 people working on marketing, advocacy, product management, development and operations.
5 devs, including myself + the technical support of core teams like Elrond’s and other unannounced leading teams in the industry.
Q4 from Telegram user @kafeinen
it’s stated on your website that reliability claims are auditable through a secure, resilient index of service analytics. Please explain what’s this index of service analytics?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Another excellent question, directly connected with our Chainlink partnership. As I said before, DSLA contracts are enforced using performance time-series. We continuously collect and decentralize staking analytics to an index, that the protocol uses to establish that a DSLA contract has been breached or honored. We’re currently building a Polkadot version of this indexer, as per our W3F/Polkadot grant. You’ll hear much more details about this initiative next year.
Chainlink is responsible for bridging the index and the protocol smart contracts.
Mary | Satoshi Club: You have Polkadot grant?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Yes, we are W3F / Polkadot grant recipients. Working on bringing our research on ITSM, performance and reliability management to the Polkadot ecosystem.
A couple months ago, we shipped https://github.com/Stacktical/willitscale-polkadot “A Predictive Analysis Platform for Blockchain Network Researchers.”
Mary | Satoshi Club: Actually, i see, that all projects are happy to welcome DSLA) do you have competitors in this field?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: You always have competitors! Our competition is any solution that aims at reducing exposure to risks and improving the QoS of connected and online services.
This breaks down into:
– 1/ ITSM Platforms or Products with Service Level Management capabilities
– 2/ Insurance products from (decentralized) insurtech companies
Mary | Satoshi Club: I know all kinds of projects but i never heard about those, who will reduce exposure to risks etc.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Yes, there are a lot of ways to improve the experience of your customers.
Here’s what I believe to be a good way to map the space between Insurance and Governance.
D. | Satoshi Club: By the way could you please share information about your token, what it’s function in your system? because there are only 2 question left in this part and none of them about your tokenomics 😄 and as i know you had a token burn event not long time ago. right?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Sure, it’s an important topic, often misunderstood. Issuing a coin gives core development teams the ability to adapt monetary policies to the use case they are building. As IT Service Management professionals, we have always been looking for a scalable way to draft, monitor and enforce SLA contracts, as well as a budget to incentivize Site Reliability Engineering practices.
So we meshed ITSM practices and crypto economics to build one. The DSLA token is a tokenized version of “service credits”, that have been used by DevOps, Customer Support and Marketing teams in the web hosting, telecom and logistics industry for decades, but lacked a standard until now.
As a utility token, DSLA serves the purpose of:
- Hedging against risks by Staking SLA premiums to DSLA contracts, as a Voucher / Provider / Customer
- Earning SLA rewards at the end of a SLA period, upon breached or honoured DSLA contract
- Stabilize SLA premiums with utility token burns (e.g. upon SLA reward claims)
- Triggering and settling DSLA contract update workflows (e.g. Company A needs more TPS from Provider 1)
- Driving governance and design changes in DSLA Protocol (e.g. SLA reward distribution split)
Our recent token burns was a radical step towards reducing the power of the core team to empower the rest of the community, and pave the way to a more decentralized governance of the project.
D. | Satoshi Club: I have a small additional question, so total supply of your token will be increasing or decreasing through the time?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: The total supply of DSLA will actually decrease over time, with usage of DSLA Protocol.
Q5 from Telegram user @occupyingmars
Your project seems to be based on solid tech. Why do you need a farming option?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: There’s no “farming” option so to speak. We’re only interested in creating incentives for the project to move forward.
The liquidity mining program was designed to thank our Uniswap liquidity providers for pouring their ETH + DSLA into our official pool. I think these practices are simply poised to become standard. But beyond Uniswap, liquidity mining is a great incentivise to lock funds in any kind of vault. Like DSLA contracts…
Mary | Satoshi Club: For sure, but you took this opportunity.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: We did! But as an extra. Food coins only do farming, which is not an utility by itself.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, that’s true. If i will buy your coins what i can do with them? As ordinary crypto user.
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: All of the things described here! I think one of the key aspects of delegating is that, it’s really something for the regulator crypto users.
It’s basically a cryptocurrency savings account. It makes sense for you to hedge against losses and potential drops in performance of your validator. We recently ran an incentivized beta for DSLA in November, with documentation available at https://readme.stacktical.com/dsla-incentivized-beta/
The official user manual is still a work in progress, but it’s a great way to get started with the experience.
Q6 from Telegram user @debrasnider
Is stacktical focused on infrastructure-level threats and vulnerabilities only or is it like an insurance against anything bad that can happen to a project?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Anything that can be monitored over time, in any industry. Staking SLAs is our flagship use case. But you can have Clean Air SLAs for ecological governance, Airport SLAs to enforce a consistent quality of service across airport service providers and much more. Generally, when data, services, goods are delivered, and people are transported, there is a risk of delays and outages.
Mary | Satoshi Club: And this is something non-blockchain related) did you try to make partnerships with non-blockchain projects?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: We’re focused on addressing these systemic, infrastructure risks, because they’re foundational to building the neighborhood, city, country and cross-planet world of tomorrow. Yes, we have large Fortune 500 level companies that expressed strong interest in DSLA. More about that soon.
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE QUESTIONS
The chat was open for 80 seconds; a lot of questions were posted by Satoshi Club community. Our guest chose some of them.
Q1 from Telegram User @Spott
What are the requirements for POS/DPOS users to make use of DSLA protocols?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: We must add support for the network of your choice in DSLA Protocol. As of today we’ve officially announced support for ONE, BAND, DOT and eGLD staking SLAs. Much more to come when we launch on the mainnet in Q1 2021 and beyond.
Q2 from Telegram User @jerryziz91
How is DSLA different from regular code of conduct SLA? How do you plan to get DSLA contracts more adopted with the businesses? What’s advantageous in it with the decentralization layer?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Traditional SLA are hard to negotiate, monitor, upgrade and enforce. They’re also disconnected with the payment of compensation, that goes through a different customer service process involving a lot of intermediaries for unproven results. This approach doesn’t scale, especially when a large number of stakeholders are involved. Like in the recent AWS outage.
Q3 from Telegram User @brodzonl
Elrond is doing very good these days, I was impressed when heard you partnershiped with them. Can you tell us how are your project and Elrond helping each other to become better?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Glad you like that our teams are joining forces! With Elrond we’re working on two things. First is to add eGLD support to DSLA Protocol, so that eGLD delegators can hedge against staking infrastructure risks, while eGLD validators get incentivized for their operational excellence. Second, is to create an Elrond-native version of DSLA Protocol to address high throughput use cases that are not currently possible on Ethereum.
Q4 from Telegram User @smelekin
How can I make investment into your project, is it through uniswap?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: DSLA is currently available on 1inch.exchange, Uniswap, Mooniswap, Balancer, IDEX and a couple other CEX exchanges. The best place to acquire tokens is 1inch, since it’s aggregating liquidity from all of our DEX pools.
Q5 from Telegram User @mogdirect
What should we expect in the next 5 years as DSLA users?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: In the short term, we are focusing all our energy on the mainnet launches of DSLA Protocol and DSLA.network, our flagship dapp, in Q1 2021. We are onboarding increasingly more staking pool operators for this key release and milestone.
The future is both about growing our flagship Staking SLAs use case on the mainnet, and making more strategic alliances to empower our developer community to take DSLA beyond Staking SLAs.
With DSLA, infrastructure operators of all kinds can reduce their customers’ exposure to infrastructure risks, and differentiate themselves through verifiable commitments to Quality of Service.
Q6 from Telegram User @crycket
- A one-time Defi contract exploit is not really the use case for DSLA, but could a stable return over a period of time be an application for DSLA?
- Unlike many projects, DSLA seems applicable to many industries outside of Crypto. Do you see DSLA on boarding any “traditional” industries in 2021 and what do you see as the biggest barriers to engaging a non-crypto industry?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: 1. Yes, although it’s very tricky from a regulatory standpoint to “promise yields”.
2. We have specific plans to onboard large European financial institutions, energy and telecom providers in 2021, but we don’t really control how ready traditional companies are to join the cryptocurrency revolution.
Q7 from Telegram User @DrCassiterite
Give me reasons why I use make use of DSLA other than other projects?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: We have competition but there’s nothing like DSLA on the market. If you don’t use it, well you won’t use anything. 🙂
Q8 from Telegram User @sirdefi
I’m very curious to know that the DSLA Protocol started in 2019 and according to its roadmap it is next year that they plan to launch the mainnet. What has been the reason for this delay?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: There is no delay. Products must ship when they’re ready to meet their market, after properly validating functional, non-functional and security requirements.
Q9 from Telegram User @shuvoapon5
A lot of new projects have been launched around us now. 60% of which are scamming. In such a situation, investors are removing themselves from new projects. New projects in particular are failing to deliver on their promises, leaving investors with huge losses. Can you clearly say why investors will like your project and why they have confidence in your project?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: We have a consistent track record of hitting our milestones. Our progress is tangible, and we’re growing on pretty much all dimensions. I can’t speak for the community, but I feel like we’re getting to a point where the value proposition of a risk management protocol like DSLA, with actual commercial viability, is crystal clear for everyone. They also know we live by the hustle and won’t let them down.
Q10 from Telegram User @KhaleesiTheCryptoLady
What was the biggest mistake you did in your entire crypto journey? And how did you deal with it?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: It takes a bit of time to understand that community development is not scalable. It’s a 1:1 relationship, you need to invest a good chunk of your time truly getting to know everyone. Today, I feel close to a lot of DSLA champions. I know I can meet them for beers any day. We’re definitely in this together.
Q11 from Telegram User @Joshblaze
What other utilities are you and your team working on?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Along with reducing exposure to staking efficiency drops, slashing and more in Proof-of-Stake networks, we are working on enabling DeFi AMM liquidity providers with ways to reduce their exposure to impermanent losses, using DSLA contracts.
Q12 from Telegram User @LLeeKuanYew
Currently, I see Stacktical being traded for the majority of the money on DEX exchanges. Do you have any plans to list on CEX in the near future?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: Yes, although I’m a DEX person, we understand that the community also wants CEX options. We’re already in discussion with several large CEX to make it happen.
Q13 from Telegram User @Arabedans
I saw your tweet about DSLA X BNB. Do you plan to build a product or test staking on Binance Smart Chain?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: You have good eyes, friend. We look at all interesting networks, and move accordingly. Definitely a lot going on with BNB / Binance Smart Chain, so wait and see.
Q14 from Telegram User @curiosoAMA
Does DSLA Protocol have a mobile application for Google Play or App Store?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: No, but we do think a lot about the end users, and the devices they use. In our findings, it’s pretty rare to manage any kind of risk from your phone. That’s more of a desktop activity, where you better control mind and body.
Q15 from Telegram User @tsafik
I read through your social media and noticed that you also have bDSLA tokens, what are those and how can the users get hold onto those? Is it restrictively for the beta testers?
Wilhem Pujar – Stacktical: bDSLA tokens were used during the beta in November. On the mainnet, we’ll use real DSLA tokens (https://etherscan.io/token/0x3affcca64c2a6f4e3b6bd9c64cd2c969efd1ecbe)
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about DSLA Protocol. A link to a Quiz form was sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 1900$ were distributed between the winners.
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