Cosmos Validators Brief #9: Forbole

Forbole

Kwun Yeung and Terence Lam, Co-founders of Forbole, are the brains behind Forbole (pronounced ˈfɔːbəl / four-ble). The firm is based in Hong Kong and might be best known for their “Big Dipper” explorer. Forbole however, like many of the other Validator Briefs spotlighted here already, was a Game of Stakes winner when it came to never being jailed. Quite an impressive feat.

Besides having an excellent block explorer tool, which time and time again always seemed to reliably be up and running during the Game of Stakes (and prior testnets), Kwun has been a staple of the Cosmos Riot chat for quite awhile and by now is one of the utmost go-to experts when it comes to validating questions/problems posed by others.

In this Brief, the duo discusses ForboleChain, a decentralized social network they’re creating (via the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint), as well as IRISnet’s importance to Cosmos…in fact IRISnet is coincidentally launching their mainnet in one hour from the time of this publishing.

I believe IRISnet is one of the very few blockchain teams who can tap the vast market in China.

Tell me a bit about yourselves — as much/ little as you guys would like to share.

Kwun Yeung:
Forbole is a blockchain company founded by me (the tech guy) and Terence Lam (the finance guy) which is based in Hong Kong. We provide staking service for Cosmos Hub and IRIS Hub. We are also building “ForboleChain” using Cosmos SDK and Tendermint, which is a blockchain specifically designed for decentralized social networks. We have been in partnership for ten years. Our previous venture was a digital solution company which we have experience in building mass user web and mobile applications.

Quick follow-up question, when do you think ForboleChain will launch? Any timeframe yet?

ForboleChain may need one year from now to come to officially launch. But we have learnt the experience of Cosmos and Iris, and would introduce an incentivised testnet as soon as possible.

Outside of Cosmos/Tendermint, how have you been involved with blockchain so far? What projects have you participated in? What projects do you find particularly intriguing?

Terence:
We are currently focused on Cosmos-related projects. We participated actively in IRISnet which is the strategic partner of Cosmos in China. Unlike most other blockchain projects in China, IRISnet is so low-profile that seldom people know they have closed a $20M private sale exactly one year ago. They focus on the real stuff. They deliver. I believe IRISnet is one of the very few blockchain teams who can tap the vast market in China.

Kwun:
Besides Cosmos, we are also on the PoC of Polkadot. Cosmos and Polkadot share the same vision on interoperable networks and on-chain governance. We will also validate Polkadot and develop inter-chain applications with Substrate. We are also studying Handshake. I believe it is another breakthrough of the Internet.

How did you get into blockchain space initially and what keeps you interested?

Terence:
By accident. Initially, we are requested by one of our clients for some IoT project ideas. During our research of IoT, we read some articles about how blockchain can be applied on IoT. We are then obsessed with the characteristics of blockchain which may truly bring a revolution to one of our most interested area: (corrupted) social network.

Kwun:
Then we know about Brave Browser through the news of its ICO. As we love javascript, we were amazed that its creator was also into blockchain space. Then we have the chance to attend a presentation by Vitalik in China (who has even presented in fluent Mandarin). We were amazed again by such a passionate community of blockchain. When we learnt more about blockchain, we started to see how this technology can disrupt the centralized economy.

We did a lot of researches on what technologies we should be using to develop our decentralized social networking protocol. Eventually, we decided to use Tendermint and Cosmos SDK. I started joining chat room and forums exchanging thoughts and experience with Cosmosnants. This experience have widen my horizons in the knowledge of humanity. This drives me keeping interested in this growing industry. I always believe engineers have the obligation to make the world better.

Where do you see the blockchain space evolving in the next 1–3 years?

Kwun:
More projects in application-specific protocols will appear in the market. They will become the backbones and standards of many future user-friendly applications. When some of them become mature in coming 2–3 years, decentralized applications can be deployed on IoT and home appliances. I look forward to an era that we don’t call it “decentralized application” anymore as it will become a part of our daily life. All Internet users can be a part of the shared economy.

Terence:
The information asymmetry between the projects and the users will be weakened. A lot of user behaviors on the internet will be tokenized. People will ask for economic reward according to their effort spent on a particular project.

With regards to Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges faced by the project overall?

Kwun:
Mass adoption will be the biggest challenge. It’s like the early age of Internet. Without email clients, without web browser, only a small group of people could have a taste of the benefits of the Internet. The vision of Cosmos is revolutionary. And I agree that application developers are the key to bring blockchain to end users. They have built the SDK, the Cosmos Hub. Now it’s the time to make better education to app developers and UX designers.

Terence:
Lack of awareness. Cosmos is also such a low-profile team who works on the real stuff. The publicity of its core people is far lower than that of projects like Polkadot and Ethereum. While this should be a good thing to decentralization in the long-run, we need to put more effort to let people know about the project in the short-run especially the mainnet launch is coming.

With regards to being a validator in Cosmos, what do you think will be the biggest challenges you will face?

Kwun:
Legal issues and financial compliance will be the biggest challenges we have to face. We are developing a new industry. The validating protocol itself may not fit all local jurisdictions of all validators. However, every revolution has to face this and I am confident that it will be solved.

Terence:
Firstly, the stance of big exchanges is uncertain. It is expected that they will hodl a decent amount of atoms on behalf of their clients, and hence they may have significant influence as potential validators which we need to face. Another challenge is how to educate and pitch the potential delegators.

You can find the Forbole site at: https://www.forbole.com/

And they are active on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/forbole
Kwun Yeung: https://twitter.com/kwunyeung
Terence Lam: https://twitter.com/terencesflam

2/28/19 Edit: added in follow-up question regarding ForboleChain.