Moonshot Hunter AMA
June 30th, 2021 — Transcribed by Railelujah Churchgoer
Introduction
RAILGUN is a smart contract system that gives zk-snark privacy to any transaction or smart contract interaction on Ethereum.
This means you can be untraceable when you trade, use leverage platforms, or add liquidity, with absolutely any dApp on ETH.
The team will also deploy this technology on other blockchains shortly as it is novel, but easily portable.
KAELIN: Welcome @emgoldstein
Emmanuel Goldstein: Hello! Super glad to be here. You’ll find soon that RAILGUN is the most impressive project out now, with a big long term future.
The team are scientists who have invented this technology to make private DEX trading possible WITHOUT nodes or bridges. Full Ethereum security.
KAELIN: Great To Have You Here 😎 To start of this AMA lets give the audience a brief description of what RAILGUN is?
Emmanuel Goldstein: RAILGUN is designed to let you use stablecoins, the most popular tokens, to make transactions and exchange with the same privacy level as using cash: anonymous and private. This is especially useful for people like attorneys who want to maintain attorney-client confidentiality in their billing and useful for traders who do not want spies copying their strategies and investments.
It’s a smart contract system on ETH. it uses zk-snarks to hide activity. All big traders and funds will use RAILGUN in the near future. This is big!
Before we built RAILGUN, others thought that privacy on ETH DEX was not possible…But we did it with new technology.
KAELIN : Wow, Really Great Intro. Who is the team behind RAILGUN and what is their experience?
Emmanuel Goldstein: Today we have Dr. Andrey Kravchenko, PhD MBA who is a team member, he can introduce himself @andrey_kravchenko_5
Andrey Kravchenko: Hi everyone! 👋 Pleasure to be here!
KAELIN: Thats Some Qualifications 👏
Andrey Kravchenko: I have been a researcher in Deep Learning and worked as a CTO in two startups prior to joining RAILGUN. I’ve also founded a mobile and web development agency Vitruvian.
Within RAILGUN I’m a project manager working closely with the team of developers.
Emmanuel Goldstein: Andrey is a prof at Oxford University too, he’s a busy man!
KAELIN: Wow
Emmanuel Goldstein: We have a team of scientists in different parts of the world, all of them have great experience in high tech dev.
KAELIN: That’s Some Great Achievements
Andrey Kravchenko: Within the dev team, we have three developers who are all also active crypto researchers, two back end and one front end dev.
Emmanuel Goldstein: You can see recently in Hacker Noon an interview with our genius scientist Kieran Mesquita
KAELIN: Wow; Really Impressive Team. Let’s Get Into Railgun On The Privacy Aspect. How will RAILGUN compete with the likes of Tornado Cash And Blank Wallet?
Emmanuel Goldstein: Railgun provides a new technology: it’s not a competitor because nobody else could do private DEX trading or farming before. RAILGUN is the first! Actually, Tornado Cash’s founder has already asked to check out our code and Blank (and other wallets like Metamask) will probably use Railgun as a feature option in their wallet system!
KAELIN: Hmmm, a complete DEX that’s focused on privacy, that’s really impressive. Especially other projects adopting RAILGUN will really help the project; especially in the earlier days.
Lets go into the Tokenomics of the native $RAIL Token and what are some of its use cases ? As well as how someone would obtain the $RAIL Token?
Emmanuel Goldstein:
RAIL is the ERC20 token, however new RAILGUNs will be deployed on BSC, Polygon, and later Solana & Polkadot. The new RAIL tokens ( B-RAIL, P-RAIL, etc) will be airdropped ONLY to those who are staking RAIL and to those holding LP tokens for RAIL. No others will receive this airdrop or any supply at all. These will have a completely new market cap and price. RAIL can be staked to vote on rewards and fees and vote to upgrade RAILGUN
Only staked RAIL holders are likely to receive the Treasury rewards / airdrops. If you guys vote for high rewards, you could upgrade railgun to be a very high-yield system. Because the Railgun users will grow and grow, the treasury fees could be over fifty million dollars a week easily. RAIL is a governance utility token.
KAELIN: Great use case. Governance will play a massive part. Great to see a lot of thought has gone into it.
What marketing strategies has the team decided to use to spread awareness and promote growth and use of the project ?
Emmanuel Goldstein: We have engaged 3 international marketing agencies who will start to promote this project in every country of the world next month. This was paid for by donations from people who want RAILGUN to succeed!
It will be an extremely famous system in two months.
KAELIN: Marketing Is The Most Important Thing In Crypto!
Before We Move On To Our Last Question MSH Would Like To Thank The Team For An Amazing AMA
Lastly Does the team have a roadmap in place? And if so, how has it been kept up with so far?
Andrey Kravchenko: I’ll give a more general answer to that question about what we’ve done so far and what we have planned for later in 2021.
Emmanuel designed the system in December last year.
Our core team was formed in January, and that’s when we started the development works. We are very lucky to have top level cryptography researchers and developers, some of them with more than a decade of experience working on crypto projects, in our team.
We have been building our code base incrementally, running the development process in bi-weekly sprints, and hence making sure we build the system in a modular way and also deliver the project on time. We are very happy that due to this approach we have delivered the code on schedule, which is not very common with big projects that also include a strong research component.
Our code consists of several main branches, and can be roughly split into two main parts. The first part is the back end code responsible for implementation do RAILGUN’s main functions, such as Send or Swap, all zero knowledge proof protocols that power the privacy and anonymity of RAILGUN, and the governance protocol allowing holders of the RAIL token to vote on changes in the RAILGUN system. The second part is the front end code, which at the moment is represented by the website, but in future we will also have iOS and Android apps. We have two back end researchers and developers in our team, Kieran and Hisham, and one front end developer Joey who also happens to have been actively involved in research-oriented crypto projects.
Our codebase has been fully audited by ABDK, one of the leading code audit providers in the crypto space, which means they have verified that our code works fully to the specifications from the whitepaper and contains no vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious parties. Furthermore, on the launch day, we’ll make our code base fully public, so that anyone in the community can verify it.
As mentioned above, the mid-term plans are to release a mobile app version of RAILGUN (both iOS and Android), have Railgun available on other blockchains (not just Ethereum), and work together with the community to further improve the system through the mechanism of voting with RAIL tokens for new proposals.
Emmanuel Goldstein: Yes! In fact, the system is fully built and finished! So we have already finished the first roadmap. Next we have: BSC deployment, MATIC / Polygon deployment, airdrops, then RAILGUN DEX and the world’s most advanced mobile wallet app!
KAELIN: Cross Chain Is Really Important. Especially With Gas Fees. Glad The Team Has Thought On It
Been An Amazing AMA
We Will Now Open The Chat Up For Some Community Questions
Lovely_DC 💋: I read on your Website that RAILGUN uses “zkSNARK” technology. Can you explain what the details are? how does it work? and what are the advantages? also how important is the role of zxSNARK in the RAILGUN ecosystem?
Emmanuel Goldstein:
There are two main Zero Knowledge Proof systems (zk-snarks and zk-starks), we have run several benchmark to decide which one to choose, and zksnarks was the winner in terms of efficiency and constant proving cost on the smart contract, even though some maybe worried about its trusted setup. However, by using multi-party computation, you can safely guarantee the system security as long as there is only one honest participant.
There is a “Perpetual powers of TAU” for the setup part run by many researchers and public figures on Ethereum even including some of our own team, so we can safely assure the security is strong!
The zk-snark circuit in Railgun allows users to create shielded notes that encrypts details such as amount, and users have another pseudonym identities that aren’t linked to their Ethereum account. The circuit ensures that those sending address has enough balance to send that amount to recipient. Also, the transaction will be totally indistinguishable regardless from whatever token you are transacting with. More detail about how the circuit works will be released in the technical paper pretty soon. Also, all of the cryptography and zkp have been audited by professional team and the report will be included as well.
One important note here is due to the public state of Ethereum, users will have to submit their transactions through relayers. Rest assured, relayers can’t even deanonymize or modify your transactions.
Andre Sukma:
Successful projects are the result of an experienced team, Project will not Evolve without being managed by an experienced team. So, how about Railgun ? Does your team have good experience in the cryptocurrency world?
Andrey Kravchenko: Yes! We are lucky to have an ideal combination of research, coding, and marketing skills within our team. All of our three developers are also active researchers in crypto, and our code has been fully audited by ABDK, one of the most respected auditors in the crypto space, which once again proves the code works as per the specs and does not have any vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious third parties. You can read more about members of the team on our website.
KAELIN | TGH | MSH, [30.06.21 13:38]
Great Ama With @emgoldstein And The Rest Of The RailGun TeamAndre Sukma | Will DM you first, [30.06.21 13:31]
