Hi everyone, here are some of the latest Q&A we’ve been conducting. As always, please remember, the eco system is very rapidly evolving, and we must continue to adapt quickly in order to stay ahead of the curve. You should stay tuned to make sure you always have the updated answers for your questions. If you have any doubt, please contact us on our TG channel and make sure.
1) Are there more than 1B tokens (with the bonuses etc..)?
No, 1B is final amount, you can check the code for the 2KEY economy contract (that’s the 2KEY token contract): https://github.com/2key/contracts/blob/develop/contracts/2key/non-upgradable-singletons/TwoKeyEconomy.sol
2) 1B*0.06$ = 60M not 6M as stated in your website and excel doc:
(2.1) the 0.06$ is the price of the token during the token sale period. It is only relevant to the tokens being sold in the seed, private and public token sale phases, all prior to public trading init.
(2.2) 6M is hard cap for the token sale, out of which we’ve already sold 1.5M$ in previous rounds, and currently aiming to sell tokens for another 4.5M$ to close the cap, out of which we’re now closing private sale commitments for 1.5–3M$, rest for IEO. Separation between private and IEO quotas are not finalised yet.
3) Who hold 40% of the tokens, what is called long term? for how long?
You can read more about it here: https://medium.com/2key/2key-token-circulation-system-777b5093f4b0. The Long Term Reserve — 40% (400m 2KEYs): tokens dedicated for future use, might be used in the future for conducting additional token distributions and for POS mining in the General Purpose 2key protocol (browsers as miners in MPSN). Locked for 2–5 years. 10% (100m 2KEYs) unlocked after 2 years and another 10% (100m 2KEYs) unlocked annually on the DD date conditioned on token price exceeding token sale price. The balance is assigned into a dedicated smart contract at economy init as you can see here: https://github.com/2key/contracts/blob/develop/contracts/2key/non-upgradable-singletons/TwoKeyEconomy.sol (line 50). The code for the long term pool contract can be reviewed here: https://github.com/2key/contracts/blob/develop/contracts/2key/token-pools/TwoKeyLongTermTokenPool.sol. The code will be revised to the new lockup conditions before we launch, it’s currently a blunt 3 year lockup. So the tokens in this pool are kept by a smart contract, securely and transparently.
4) Who are the integrators who are paid in 2key tokens?
Any service provider which can offer services to contractors in the network, may earn a fee per conversion. There is also a default network fee paid to the admin contract per conversion, these fees are used to support to continued R&D and core development of the project. Beyond that we’ve been holding discussions with several projects/companies that can serve as integrators, and have signed LOIs from others. This is mostly, beyond the 2key company as first integrators, something that will require business development and we’ll be dedicating substantial efforts and funds post the main-net launch, during the product-market-fit phase, not only for on-boarding contractors and users, but also greatly focusing on on-boarding integrators, as they can be major keystones for accessing traffic sources, as well as making the 2key Network open to many more types of conversions and use cases.
All integrators are paid a fee per conversion on campaigns in which they serve. They are contracted by contractors and their fee must be agreed upon by the contractor before they are eligible to serve and earn fees in that contractor’s campaign. As we grow, the marketplace will also be one of integrators. All fees earned by integrators are in 2KEY, and out of that a network tariff is taxed and retained in deep freeze for 10 years and then released to replenish the community remuneration pool, which is in turn depleting over a decade long cycle.
There are quite a few examples of integrators, here are the major types:
(4.1) conversion validators — e.g. in campaigns where the conversion is not directly validatable on the ledger, like in web2.0 conversions for example (signups on a website), or question answering etc.. there may be integrators who offer these services in the campaign — to help contractors and other participants on the campaign with conversion validation — our partnership with bandprotocol.com for example is towards them becoming an integrator in the network, for helping verify various offchain conversions.
(4.2) contractor/domain platforms — we’ve had multiple discussions with various platforms which can be seen as contractor aggregators. For example, ndio.io who are heading diocian, an independent musician platform (korea), have expressed their great interest to integrate 2key so they can offer independent musicians on their platform to run 2key campaigns to distribute and sell their music. Same can be for independent author platforms, and even for SDK providers e.g. ironsource, with whom we’ve been in contact for introducing 2key into their various channels. As SDK providers for app developers, ironsource can offer their app developers to run 2key Social Sourcing campaigns to increase their installs. In all these examples, the platform integrating 2key facilitates contractors with the stage/UI via which they launch and/or run 2key campaigns, and often also conversion validation (e.g. validating a web2.0 purchase channel, validating an install, etc..). Same goes for DAO Maker and others which are waiting to integrate 2key into their contractor aggregation platforms.
(4.3) converter validators — services offering various kyc solutions can be utilised by contractors for securing kyc in their campaigns.
(4.4) incentive model optimisers — there’s a lot of room for optimising incentive models for online sharing for various use cases, verticals, domains etc.. A contractor will be able to choose from various service providers for playing out incentive models in their campaigns.
(4.5.) general service providers — there are some integrations on the network level, not campaign level, that are also of interest, e.g. where other projects integrate their services into the 2key Network, and are paid in 2KEY (e.g. Enigma). Most of these projects have their own tokens, so following a swap mechanism allows the 2key Network to pay in its own token, and the project integrating services to receive payment in their own token as well, with both token economics benefitting.
5) Will there be a permanent identity for campaigners or referrals? Will the links between referrers be saved after the end of the campaign? if so where?
There is a username/handle for each user on the platform. Currently that handle is associated with a single non-custodial address, and a single custodial address, but these may change in the future to allow more than 1 set of keys to be used per user. The custodial address is used for participating in layer2 transactions, and the non-custodial address is used for cashing in and cashout out (purchases, rewards etc..).
The username linkage to the public addresses of the user is saved on the registry contract, but other than that there is no direct saving of personally identifiable data on the ledger, other than in encrypted form. The username is intended to be permanent, linked to a specific individual, yet not personally identifiable without the user’s consent. I.e. the user can prove he’s this username, but others cannot understand who this user is by looking at the contract data. The reason the handle is strongly binded, is because the reputation is earned and lost on that handle, linked to those addresses, linked to that individual person. The personally identifiable information, if such is collected by KYC or other means via 2key or 2key app, is only stored on encrypted servers in our backend. In other public formats (plasma, ipfs, ethereum) — only address and tx based cryptographic data is stored. Within a campaign there’s a local reputation/influence graph which is being built, and this gets superimposed into a general reputation/graph. You can read more about this in our incentive model paper here.
Using our latest patent with schnorr signatures, the 2nd layer 2key protocol referral graph will be completely zero-knowledged so even the public addresses of referrers won’t be available. Already now, the links are stored in IPFS hashes only known to campaign participants who were invited directly, and then they’re only exposed to their specific referral trajectory on their specific linear path in the graph. The persistence layer itself into layer1 at campaign resolution doesn’t store the paths, but rather the final results, and once we implement the latest protocol version in production, the layer2 will be completely masked as well (you could say that it’s already masked as only public addresses appear there, but once nothing at all appears there it will be much more private). Regarding saving the global reputation graph — we’re launch partners with Enigma, and we’re aiming to use their Trusted Execution Environments and Secret Contracts for this purpose. This will allow to mask away all the atomic data so that anyone can verify that the global incentive model has been applied, and can verify that the global reputation of each user is valid, while not exposing the atomic edges of the global reputation graph from which the global data has been calculated.
6) How is the success of the 2key Network result in the increase in the value of the 2key token?
The 2KEY token is a utility token, so we cannot promise nor discuss uplifts in toke price. What we do analyze in our papers is effects that usage of the economy has on the demand of the 2KEY token. As the 2KEY token is a deflationary currency, i.e. there’s a fixed amount of it in existence, the dynamics of supply and demand which result in the price can be more clearly discussed. As for 10 year forward looking projections of supply and demand, you can reference the doc here. As for why the regular usage of the network creates (organic, automatic, atomic) (demand, distribution, staking) you can read here.
7) What prevents others from copying the smart contracts and competing with their own tokens or without the 2KEY token?
What we should remember here is that it’s all about inertia and the core project/team. BTC and ETH are both open source, completely, yet they hold up as the biggest projects with the biggest market cap, due to an inertia in dev and community that is hard to break. So I could fork BTC and call it now BTSCAM coin, but without the human inertia of the people working on, and believing in the BTC project, that wouldn’t bring much value into BTSCAM, even though it’s technically identical. Now after that you need to continue evolving, so you must have a team and community that can evolve and adopt the “fork” better than the original, which is, given initial dev inertia has built in the original, hard to do.
As for 2key, we don’t suffice with that, as we don’t have initial inertia yet, so we have quite a few more mechanisms at play:
(7.1) The entire 2key network architecture of smart contracts + 2nd layer protocol + infrastructure is immensely complex. Even if someone had all the code in their hands + all our devops in AWS + all our devops on Azure + all our devops on IPFS + all our devops in plasma + all our devops in EVM etc.. etc.. without the entire core team, they would not be able to reverse engineer or even launch this clone network, as they wouldn’t understand how it works and how to put it together. Moreover, from then on it would be practically impossible for them to move forward in developing it (remember we’re only at the beginning, and most of the development is still ahead of us, and we’re the ones with the vision and mission and plan, that’s hard to clone, as it’s ever evolving :)
(7.2) Only 3 repositories out of the 15+ required to run the system are open sourced. Even team members within the core team don’t have access to all repos, each developer has access to at most 3–4, and on average 1 repo. And the code repos are only the beginning, as there are a lot of other infra and devops running, so even if you somehow got all the code it’s useless without understanding how it connects together, and what infra to run it on and how.
(7.3) The IP is patented worldwide using PCT, and we can later (in 16 months) register it anywhere and everywhere on earth. We continue to work on new patents all the time, as the R&D plan for the protocol continues. For example, the protocol upgrades for CPC campaigns are very exciting and include some novel cryptography and zero knowledge proof systems integrated a the plasma-ethereum validation bridge, it’s already working in POC, and we’ll start baking it into the product next week, hopefully there will be first glimpses of the CPC campaign on the app mid-november. Also, we’re now working on some very exciting cryptography to enable to distribute digital media content (books, music, audio, video), in a way that is piracy proof and purchase validated, yet fully decentralised. This is something VERY huge, but I cannot discuss it further at the moment.
(7.4) The contracts architecture is checksummed and permissioned, which means only valid contract bytecode which was approved by the congress can be used on the network, so the network architecture of contracts is proofed against external code tempering. Each contract run on the network must register on the network in the validator singleton contract, and then it’s bytecode is checksummed, and going forward each browser node downloads checksummed protocol versions, and checksummed contract interfaces. This means that it’s not possible to inject external unapproved code into the 2key Network architecture, not in development , and not in runtime.
8) How is the reputation of referrers works? How exactly are referrals or contractors gaining advantage by having a high reputation? Is it decentralized? When will it be deployed?
We have the full incentive model v1 which we still need to implement, I’ve quoted it above, and here it is again. It will be implemented by the end of Q1'20 I hope, depending on funding and resources, as it’s quite a project. This takes care of the question how is reputation gained and lost. This is just V1, and surely we’ll need to evolve it, but whatever its version it will have effect network wide.
Currently there’s a very basic reputation system in play that awards reputation on each successful conversion for all parties involved, using some naive methodology, that’s already deployed on the app (showing in the star in your profile page). It is decentralised now (contracts update reputation once validated conversions occur), and it will be decentralized, yet private, later, utilising our partnership with enigma. That is, eventually participants will be able to see what each others reputation is (like on linkedin and stakoverflow and quora), but will not be exposed to the core atomic information that led to this global view.
Unlike the centralised solutions, they will be able to validate that the incentive model on validated contract actions and results has been acted out, and everyone will be able to cryptographically validate that the incentive model is transparently being calculated on all participants alike. It’s important to note the utmost significance of reputation — Social Capital is the underlying asset of the 2key Network — it’s what each participant can earn or lose, but never buy. The 2key economic network builds on this underlying asset, in a way that reputation of integrators, moderators, contractors, referrers and converters has direct monetary implications on the network.
For example, higher reputation leads to lower fees payable by contractors, or higher fees chargable by integrators. It also means that contractors with higher reputation have lesser staking requirements to activate contracts. Also, referrers with higher reputation can earn more per conversion after them in refchains of campaigns they participate in (depending on the category of the campaign and the category of the reputations they hold). Higher reputation for converters can mean that they get exposed to more campaigns, and that their participations entail higher discounts or rights. Lower reputation for referrers can also mean that they get barred from participating in various types of campaigns. You can read more about it in our blog, tokenomics papers and yellow paper.
9) What is the meaning of the agreement with Elrond Network? How can 2KEY tokens on Ethereum be used on Elrond Network or benefit from it?
There are multiple mechanisms already working for inter-chain swaps. The idea behind 2key protocol is that it is a 1st-layer-agnostic scalability solution for turing completely blockchains. We baked it on ethereum as layer1 for convenience and speed, but the core of the protocol is completely agnostic to which blockchain is used as layer1. Using 2key protocol as layer2 on elrond, will be possible as we can for example charge some elrond 2KEY tokens, and have these swapped with ethereum 2KEY tokens using atomic swaps with out 2key Exchange contract on ethereum.
That’s all for today, stay tuned, there’s a lot more to follow :)