Trinity Protocol AMA with David Li 09/07/2018
Trinity Founder David Li was in the Trinity Telegram channel on Monday 9th July 2018 providing a list of updates, an outlook on the immediate future and took some questions from the community.
1. Marketing
I did marketing before I started Trinity and I can assure you this is a terrible timing for marketing, for 2 reasons. a) the cost is still unreasonably high due to the fact that most promoters still base their pricing on the bubble, not the bearing trend. In the meantime, we find many promoters going bankrupt (cryptorupt to be honest) and their service quality cannot be guaranteed. b) the new people you can find on the market are dumb money, they are the late comers fueled by the rich stories that were true 6months ago, they are of little value. Right now it’s a complete waste to do marketing and lose the tokens we received from your contribution. I avoid saying so in Chinese community because they were legally banned, but you guys did contribute. So I want you to know we must use this money very responsibly.
2. Neo Version
We spoke to Erik founder of Neo, my previous Boss. So the plan is to wait for Neo to upgrade to 3.0 and assess the performance. At this moment, to be very honest, we cannnot expect adoption from devs on Neo Trinity given a very unstable network. There are also several security concerns of Neo that needs to be addressed. But we do have long term confidence in the project. If Ontology runs well, so can Neo. Regarding Ontology our for profit company is also running for its nodes. (which is a proof that we kept the NEO we raised, so we got airdropped ONT plus some from friends). The tech is similar, but more advanced. We need to assess the possibility of building Trinity on it.
3. Ethereum Version
A little background story. Back in 14' and 15', a lot of projects came out trying to compete with BTC. The mentality was “I can mint a currenncy as well”, but few survived. The boom you see from mid 17 to mid 18 is also a repeatition of that mentality: “I can build a smart contract platform as well”. But nothing will prevail if it doesnt have fundamental upgrade from Ethereum. The Ethereum version Trinity is the most promising application we anticipate in the coming year. The biggest reason is not because of its performance (sharding upgrade or not), but its community and consensus. We see a good chance of gathering a lot of adoption on ethereum trinity.
4. Future targeted adoption area
Trading engine and IoT, expected Q3-Q4, more details later
5. Possible landscape in the coming year
We will see multiple projects “competing” with Trinity, from old ones like Raiden to new ones like Celer. BTW I think both of them are good. But the real challenge is for us all: to seek real adoption. We see the market going down and due to the macro economic effect this will continue. So we cannot count on projects that are built on slides and end up in a shitcoin. We need to find projects that runs like a real world business with clear and healthy business model, cashflow, etc…This is a challenge for the entire industry, I cannnot make any promise. In the meantime we learn from new ones and revise some design to proceed with the development.
6. Governance
Right now I can tell you we strictly use the money we received from contribution campaign on operational cost; employee salary, basic social welfare payment (lowest standard), office space, travel. That’s all. We dont speculate, we dont set up a investment fund. The decision is made under the forecast that we won’t see a bullish market in 18 months.
Regarding Node setup. the Ethereum version will be much better, more thorough, clear, and newbie friendly.
Do you foresee equal times to release scaling solution for each blockchain — or will they become faster with each one?
It takes some time to develop this part as it will integrate some more features such as a liquidity solution. meaning allowing people to be incentivized by providing liquidity in different tokens. It also has to do with next phase of development (trading engine).
Neo was released first, then Ethereum. All other blockchains need to be assessed carefully, we are looking at Ontology, EOS, Zilliqa. But no promise. They have to solve their problems first (before Trinity can look into providing a solution).
Will there be any reward for node uptime? To reward early adopters?
No direct reward on uptime, but in fact higher uptime=higher chances of being selected by routing algorithm so more revenue.
When will testing on WoB start, will it be playable on android?
Public testing end of this month, since it’s h5, it’s all platform but optimized for phone screen.
So there is going to be no marketing at all?
If you look closely my response in the first part, you know I am not saying no marketing at all. We are waiting for a) the resources come under reasonable pricing in a bear market and b) short term speculators to leave so we can collect high quality supporters.
WoB is leveraging Ethereum Trinity for the NFTs. But one more time; it’s another company we are just providing state channel support.
I do understand a lot of questions are about clarity and assessibility of the Node Setup. I think we will provide better guide in the coming 2 months together with the Ethereum version.
I am attending the Nifty conference in Hong Kong at the end of this month to talk about blockchain gaming in China. I think it is a good chance to promote Trinity to game developers (Trinity’s strategic partners are also at this event).
We are aware that a blockchain community is important in building this network. But we don’t want to deliver something unfinished. Basically this needs more time. Ethereum version should have been our focus earlier, but we had to deliver Neo version first and on time.
People will always find problems in whatever we deliver if the price is not going up. We are not saying this release is “all of the release” and “that’s it”, it is just the beginning.
When Ethereum version comes out we will do a round of publicity campaign, with everything achieved summed up.
Will we be able to be part of the test for the nodes before it’s release?
We are already running it and some co-operation teams are running it to test. e.g. WoB is running it.
We are preparing for the worst to beresponsible to you guys and the long term success of the project (in relation to use of budget raised).
Is Trinity working in collaboration with Zilliqa on the solution for etheremon? There was a partnership announced this week, are we still in the picture for this?
Etheremon is built on Ethereum. I know they are assessing Zilliqa and we reached a cooperation as well but reality is for zilliqa to run smoothly takes about 1–2 quarters, for us that time as well, and then some time for them to convert. We are looking at Zilliqa as our bottom layer as well.
WoB team itself is running an Ethereum Trinity node (beta) so it doesn’t require gamers to pay TNC for transactions.
How many developers are on the team now?
Full time on core protocol=5, peripheral dev about 10, and some other personnels.
We do have a centralized exchange listing coming, I will see what I can do about exchanges, but it’s the same principle with promoters, so I’m confident with that.
That’s about it today for this short AMA. I will remember fixing the website and giving you guys a office video tour sometime this month. We also have 2 releases this month, User app and WoB, I think Ethereum version could be later in August.
Round up:
In summary the take home message is the Trinity team are developing to position themselves long-term and spending the money raised in the ICO wisely and not being held to ransom as people still try to live in the boom of 2017. There is continuos development taking place on numerous fronts with several releases planned over Q3 2018 (User App, WoB, Ethereum nodes and Eth State Channel deployment).
The community must remember DApps and Developers are the target market and TNC isn’t for the standard user, it is a background use case that will gain value with adoption and utilisation of the Trinity network. What has just been said and the current market needs careful consideration when setting price expectations. The team are well placed and collaborating with the right teams in their target markets to be successful.
In terms of scaling future platforms and DApps there is a dependency on the host platform and developers to implement changes or release their mainnet before Trinity can develop solutions (Neo and Zilliqa referenced above). It is clear the gaming space and the quality of DApps is yet to take off so Trinity is still very well placed to seize the initiative and nothing has changed other than the market and current Trinity token price.
If you want to find out more about Trinity please see the links below.
Website: http://trinity.tech
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrinityProtocol
Telegram: https://t.me/TrinityStateChannels
Telegram Announcement Channel:
Github: https://github.com/trinity-project/trinity
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrinityTNC/
CMC: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/trinity-network-credit/
