Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Sperax. The AMA took place on September 4 and our guests were Frida Cai and Zhou Yu.
The total reward pool was $500 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: Our guests today are from @sperax We are glad to see you again in Satoshi Club @FridaCai_Sperax , @yuzhou87 , welcome!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Hi everyone, we see each other again. 😊
Frida Cai_Sperax: Glad to be here.
Zhou Yu: Hi guys!
Serg | Satoshi Club: I see you are in a good mood. everything went well lately.
Frida Cai_Sperax: I am. We just got invited to speak at Diffusion Digital at Sep 16 with Outlier Ventures.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Nice. Congrats, will this be an online or offline event?
Frida Cai_Sperax: 👉 https://diffusion.events/ online.
We are stoked to announce that Sperax Top Researcher Joe Yu will join Outlier Ventures’ Diffusion Digital on September 16th at 17:30 – 18:10 UK time. Joe will speak at “The drive for Web 3 adoption” to give his opinions on the challenge to be solved for web3 to progress.
Mark your calendar and see you there! #sperax #golem #diffusiondigital 👉 https://diffusion.events/
Q1 from bitcointalk User elissa
Are you satisfied with sale you had in August? are you planning more in the future?
Frida Cai_Sperax: It was a tough battle for us since Sperax is still a very small team. We withstood two website crashes due to traffic overflow. But eventually our public sale portal got through the crisis and eventually welcomed 3129 new SPA holders, who collectively purchased $4.7M worth of 235M tokens. All of these happened within an hour. So you can imagine the thrill.
As for self-evaluation, we are not completely satisfied. There are many agendas that we could make them more perfect. But this is how startups work. You learn from your mistakes so you can do better next time. There will definitely be more to come. So stay tuned!
Serg | Satoshi Club: Did you get listed?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Quite a few exchanges are now listing us without our permission. An official listing is scheduled at Q4 in 2020. Until then, nothing is official. So we strongly advise investors to take extra caution and be aware of the risks & scams!
Q2 from bitcointalk User Dragon_Super
Sperax builds trusted infrastructure for decentralized economy, now I already build with ETH solidity and Cosmos SDK, Why should I switch to Sperax, what’s your competitive advantage for Developers?
Zhou Yu: As a new generation BFT consensus protocol, BDLS has 2 major advantages.
1. Security.
Our Internet is an open network which is best modelled by what we call a partially synchronous network model.
Previous BFT consensus are designed based on a simpler model, synchronous network model. Although it is more intuitive and easier to design blockchain consensus protocols in the synchronous network model, designs under this model can oversee some significant security vulnerabilities since this simple model cannot reflect the reality of our internet.
In contrast, Sperax BDLS chooses the more complex and more realistic model when designing and takes into account all potential security vulnerabilities.
2. Efficiency.
The most common angle to measure efficiency is “scalability.” However, there is another important angle from which to evaluate the efficiency of any blockchain system — communication complexity.
Most current BFT consensus blockchains need O(n^2) communication complexity. Since it is a “square,” it requires plenty of efforts to accomplish the communication task before reaching consensus. Even the fastest current BFT consensus needs O(7n) communication complexity, which means multiplying 7 to the input task.
By comparison, BDLS consensus only needs O(4n). This means that BDLS nearly has double the speed of the current fastest BFT consensus in terms of communication complexity.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Maybe you can share with us info about the incentives you’ve prepared to attract developers on Sperax?
Frida Cai_Sperax: We noticed that the current blockchain industry is not for the mass consumer groups.
More specifically, crypto is difficult to integrate with the real economy: It is difficult to onboard users; the token price is chronically fluctuating; and a majority of these cryptocurrencies are currencies without currency features, let alone creating killer apps. Due to the lack of financial infrastructure, the current design principle of public blockchains is to create a prepaid SaaS model rather than an economy that runs on smart contracts.
After seeing the severe lack of user friendliness, we want to overturn this pain point.
At Sperax, we take a layered approach to solve the problem. At the infrastructure layer, we developed BDLS protocol, which is an innovative consensus module that is more secure and efficient than other Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols. On top of it, we introduced Sperax stable coin system sCOIN. It is backed by fiat currency and is the first native stablecoin in public blockchain ecosystem. Developers could build decentralised applications without worrying about educating users about cryptocurrency.
So essentially: Sperax wants to provide a layer of financial services within the public blockchain stack through a native stablecoin and decentralized financial service providers.
Q3 from Telegram user @michaelaelf
I am very glad you came back in Satoshi Club to present your updates. What new happened since the last AMA here?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Yes, let me share some major updates. As for testnet, we have made great progress in the implementation of Sperax blockchain (testnet is part of the whole implementation plan). Since BDLS consensus is THE MOST important part of Sperax blockchain, we first work on it. We finished all the codes and comments three months ago. There are over 5000 lines of codes. 🙂
Serg | Satoshi Club: 5000 lines of codes is complex. everything works smoothly?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Then we worked on the rest of the system. This was easy. And after this, we have been working on integrating BDLS into the framework. So basically, first BDLS, then the rest of the framework, and we started integrating them together three months ago.
We thought it might be as easy as the second implementation task. But it proves to be a bit more difficult. Fortunately, it is not too difficult that we have to give up the project.
Yes. We made it. We already finished all integration codes right now.
The current task is many many many many local testings first and then again many many many testings on our testnet. Also, this is the reason why we need a testnet btw. Lastly, I think many here are most interested in when testnet will be launched.
We are now locally testing for two economic parameters that cannot be easily changed after launch. So we built an econ model and are currently locally testing for them. After we figure these two parameters out, we will launch our testnet. After the testnet, we will launch SPA (our token) wallet and sCOIN (our stable coin).
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Nice. What about other developments? Some non-technical insights?
On the marketing side, we will announce official partnerships with other projects & universities, and developer grants program.
Q4 from Telegram user @nata_jakarta
Please explain the DLS and its partial synced networks. I am not really a tech guy and didn’t quite understand its function.
Frida Cai_Sperax: During the early 80s, Lamport, Shostak, and Pease initiated the study of reaching consensus in face of Byzantine failures and designed the first Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol for synchronous (sync) networks.
But since practical open networks, such as the Internet, are normally not sync, researchers started to look for BFT protocols for async networks. In 1985, Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson showed that there is no deterministic protocol for the BFT problem in the face of a single failure in an async network.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Have you studied the history of IT? 🙂
Frida Cai_Sperax: After this setback, researchers sought to model our Internet as a partial sync network instead of complete async. With this motivation, Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer (DLS) introduced two types of partial sync networks (Type I and Type II) and proposed the first DLS BFT protocol for Type II in 1985. DLS protocol has an authenticator complexity of O(n^4) and it is not practical.
I did not until I joined Sperax. I am not tech-bright and learning slow but Joe has been helping me. Since then, researchers have been trying to propose more efficient BFT protocols in Type II partial sync networks.
DLS protocol leverages a star network, where participants only exchange messages via round leaders. By adopting a meshed network (that is, allowing all participants to broadcast their messages to all other participants), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol was able to achieve consensus with reduced round complexity.
By leveraging the lock-mechanisms in PBFT/Tendermint BFT protocols and changing the mesh network back to star network, HotStuff BFT/LibraBFT achieves consensus with reduced communication complexity but increased round complexity.
Until most recently, Wang carried a careful analysis of all these BFT protocols for Type II networks and designed the BDLS BFT protocol (B stands for blockchain) with both reduced round complexity and reduced communication complexity. And that is the origins of DLS, BDLS and what partial sync network is.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Wow, a really nice presentation from the beginning until present times.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: A 101 intro for Satoshi Club members. Thank you very much. 😊
Frida Cai_Sperax: I am a strategy girl who used to be a data journalist and is learning tech now. I just opened a channel with Joe. The first series is about DeFi and the first review we did is uniswap. https://medium.com/sperax/fj-crypto-channel-defi-series-ep-1-uniswap-where-joe-lost-his-tokens-5aed5bfeea0e
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, what’s the summary of this review?
Frida Cai_Sperax: A grumpy researcher lost his tokens on Uniswap. You can read the rest yourself. 😉
Q5 from Telegram User @Alika061
Sperax aims to make decentralized financial services accessible to all global citizens. That includes people who have no idea about crypto nor blockchain, how easy would be for them to use Sperax?
Frida Cai_Sperax: It is impossible for me to give a numeric rubric here about how easy it would be. But we aim to make a frictionless financial service globally inclusive.
Our ultimate goal is to integrate decentralized financial services into the real world traditional financial world by issuing our stablecoin sCOIN and working with regulated financial service providers and OTC. It is very difficult to completely disrupt the traditional one, let’s be honest here.
But a stable coin is indeed capable of solving many long-existing problems in our world, like we all know how troublesome it is to make a cross-border transaction.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: Well at least the process can be started.
Frida Cai_Sperax: It might sound insane that we aim to build a layer one infrastructure, but this is our vision. And it will take a step-by-step approach to build it and our ecosystem. So we hope you, our friends and investors, can grow together with us.
Q6 from Telegram User @stekbyte
How many developers are currently working on the project?
Frida Cai_Sperax: the dev team is around 10. We are aggressively recruiting right now with the fund we raised at the August public sale. So you think you would be a good fit.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club: What’s the requirements?
Frida Cai_Sperax: I will post JDs for 5 positions in our announcement channel soon after this AMA ends. https://t.me/sperax_Announcement
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 @adityaaryah
You had an AMA here, last month and now you are here again, and I notice you had a lot of AMAs in different groups, how has this helped Sperax positively?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Sperax used to spend time only our technology development and overlooked our marketing. Now we realize the importance of community engagement that would also be beneficial to our investors in a long run. So any sound is better than no sound, right? We simply hope more people could know about us, our technology, our vision, etc.
Q2 from Telegram User @Sazibur
DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain field. Can you share your opinion about DeFi with us? Do you think DeFi will destroy the existing financial system? What’s your project Approach towards DeFi?
Frida Cai_Sperax: DeFi is definitely a very hot topic right now. I mean both capital-wise and project-wise. We saw the Total locked value in DeFi has skyrocketed from only 1B in June to 6.5B a few days ago. Also, we saw many both innovative and exciting projects like Compound, Balancer, Syntentix and recently Aave.
However, DeFi now has a big problem. It is generally just not ready for mass adoption. Specifically, there are three reasons: high frictions, slow speed, and lack of regulation. These three pain points are what we try to solve by our Sperax solution.
Facing this problem, we bring our solution: Sperax public blockchain with BDLS consensus and a new financial design. By BDLS, we provide a better infrastructure that can significantly reduce friction and enhance speed. By the new financial design, we invite regulators to participate in our ecosystem.
Q3 from Telegram User @MsHuong206
Sir your project has any are direct competitors, what sort of trends or obstacles do you think need to be overcome in order for Sperax to capture more market share?
Frida Cai_Sperax: The obstacle for us right now is to expand the team lol. We are severely short-handed. But still we value quality over quantity. We only want the best in the industry.
Q4 from Telegram User @gunja11
In the bad situation of the Covid-19 epidemic, every industry was heavily affectedDoes it affect on the growth of your project team and its? What are your plans to turn challenges into opportunities for #project DEVELOPMENTS?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Yes, we are supposed to open a lab in Germany this year, but then COVID happened. However, it not only poses a serious threat to CeFi but further creates a window for decentralized finance, which is the exciting boat we are on right now.
Q5 from Telegram User @chunhocxitrum
Your slogan is “Sperax builds TRUSTED infrastructure for decentralized economy”. But building “Trust” in business is very difficult, so what will Sperax do to attract more users while there are too much successful projects with same your mission in crypto industry?
Frida Cai_Sperax: I agree trust is difficult to build. And I also think if you have formed or are forming trust with someone or some entities, you would know that trust takes time. Now Sperax team has not done anything to scam anyone or rip off any investors. We focus way too much on technology that our marketing effort is even imbalanced as a result. So if you will, please grow with us and realize our vision together.
Q6 from Telegram User @endtimeprophet
What critical problems does Sperax solve that existing solutions are not solving?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Security and performance are hard to balance:
1 Proof of Work systems sacrifice performance for security.
2. Proof of Stake consensus have security flaws in protocol design: Most BFT protocols are not secure under asynchronous networks.
Q7 from Telegram User @abowhasebe
Can you share your experience and journey with the Sperax project? What is the biggest achievement you are proudest of?
Frida Cai_Sperax: I was a data journalism student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism when I first heard about the chance to join Sperax. Blockchain has always been a mysterious topic for me. Sensibly, I run away from learning new technology, But rationally, I know this is the future. So I took the offer and now I am so proud of myself still being here and learning new knowledge every single day.
Q8 from Telegram User @warny
Why did you choose to build BDLS consensus over TENDERMINT BFT despite being more popular and used by many projects?
Frida Cai_Sperax: Tendermint BFT is a BFT protocol developed by the Tendermint team: Tendermint BFT is commonly used to achieve consensus in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains.
Tendermint BFT has been used by many interesting projects such as Cosmos blockchain, Oasis Labs, and Binance DEX. According to recent statistics, Tendermint BFT is used by around 40% of PoS blockchain systems. Tendermint BFT works under a partially synchronous network as we have previously explained the term. Tendermint’s protocol consists of 3 steps at each block height: propose, prevote and precommit, where the initiator of each round is determined by a public function.
The problem is, if a malicious node becomes the initiator of the round, it can successfully carry out an attack so that each node in the blockchain network will lock a different value before the GST is reached.
And, these locked values cannot be removed even after GST. Thus, the whole system goes into a deadlock. So in short, Tendermint BFT cannot guarantee the liveness property required for any secure blockchain system. That is, a malicious group can successfully launch an attack to Tendermint BFT network, lead the whole system into a deadlock, and no new block will be produced.
Q9 from Telegram User @gunja11
You guys are doing Ama’s in all group & almost answering same types of questions again n again? How do You feel about it?
Frida Cai_Sperax: If one AMA can get help us make only five community members onboard, it is worth it. No effort is a waste.
Q10 from Telegram User @tv100029
How can I use $SPA as a payment Token? What are its usecases and main functions?
Frida Cai_Sperax: SPA is the utility token in the Sperax blockchain just like ETH in the Ethereum blockchain. It ensures the economic incentives for participants in the BDLS consensus. It also reflects the network value for Sperax.
As users join the Sperax network, they could earn SPA as they run nodes and validate transactions. Similar to other public blockchain, gas fees are collected in SPA as transactions happen on the Sperax blockchain. Moreover, SPA is also the governance token for the protocol.
Use cases:
1. Xiaomi Financial Virtual Bank with full licenses authorized by Hong Kong Monetary Authority Proposed Sperax stablecoin for the following uses cases: Use the fiat gateway and accept cash equivalent; Support cross-border transactions based on the stable coin network and offer more competitive rates
2. A Sand Hill Road based Venture Capital: Tokenize its emerging crypto-focus fund: Integrate its mobile gaming portfolio companies on Sperax networks
3. A costume martial-arts TV series, The Untamed, with 8 billion views on Netflix and WeTV: Tokenize its worldwide fan meet-ups and concerts tickets; Tokenize celebrity merch’s online marketing places.
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Sperax. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 300$ were distributed among winners.
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