Telegram AMA Recap: What’s Happening With RightMesh

Today, RightMesh held an AMA with the RightMesh Telegram community. For almost 2 hours, our core team members were available to answer questions related to anything RightMesh — from product to RMESH, roadmap, community plans, and more.

Team members and advisors included:

• John Lyotier, CEO and Co-Founder
• Chris Jensen, COO and Co-Founder
• Dana Harvey, CCO
• Jason Ernst, CTO
• Saju Abraham, CPO
• Frazer Seymour, Lead Mesh Engineer
• Amber McLennan, Marketing and Events Specialist
• Brianna MacNeil, Product Manager Blockchain
• Lucien Loiseau, Lead Mesh Networking Scientist
• Hiten Shah, Community Manager
• Sarah Bau, Community Manager
• Stefan (WhalePanda) Jespers, Advisor
• Micha Benoliel, Advisor
• Jason Butcher, Advisor

The questions, and answers, are relevant to all our community, so we wanted to share the common ones with you here.

If you have more questions, please be sure to ask! You can reach us at info@rightmesh.io.

Some thoughts from our advisors during the AMA:

Micha Benoliel: I would like to add that very few teams in the space are as mission driven as the RightMesh team. I have been in the mesh space for many years and often many newcomers create poor projects just because mesh is in the news. This is not the case with RightMesh. It is a very difficult technology to pull off and requires not only talent, but also perseverance. When I look at the latest releases from the most recent hackathons I am impressed. The team have started to deliver on all fronts and it is only by multiplying attempts and trying new use cases that this ecosystem will flourish. Congrats to the team!

WhalePanda: Just wanted to add that I’m a rather cynical person, I’ve been in this space a very long time and I’m quite outspoken. When I was introduced to the RightMesh team I was thoroughly impressed and the fact that they’re trying to bring connectivity to people who really need it was the number 1 reason I joined as an advisor. This is a long term project with a very ambitious long term goal and a team that have been working on this technology for years. Happy to be part of it.

AMA Questions

What is the status of the roadmap? Are things progressing on the tech side?

Amber: From Saju, our CPO: Where we are right now in the platform is that the majority of the core protocols are nearly complete. For the platform core, the main element to complete is autonomous role selection for nodes (where nodes will choose automatically which role they should be — master, client or router) which is under development. We also need to incorporate stats and reporting functionality into the nodes.

On the user product front, it’s still rough around the edges, and so the team is working on making the UX better for the developer portal and the RightMesh mobile service. You can see how the dev portal will now look in this update: https://medium.com/rightmesh/rightmesh-weekly-update-june-29-2018-decbe98e60bd.

During the last few weeks we have been working with the development team on defining a shorter term roadmap (6–9 months, launch of public beta and beyond), and that info will be shared with the community soon as well as how we are progressing on that roadmap.

Dana: Until the short term roadmap is available, you can check out our roadmap on our website. https://rightmesh.io/roadmap

Frazer: I can answer some of this from my perspective as well.

Beyond what Amber shared from Saju, there has been some great progress on the roadmap happening on the tech side that unfortunately isn’t very visible externally. We have focused on making our engineering organisation more scalable so that we can start growing our team and moving faster on shipping features without tripping over each other or making an unmaintainable mess. (To that end — we’re hiring! https://www.rightmesh.io/careers ) This has been going really well, and we hope you’ll start seeing the effects of it later in the year as the library becomes more stable and bigger fixes and features start rolling out.

Any update on the Superpeer?

Jason: We are working towards supporting multiple Superpeers presently so that community members can run Superpeers and earn tokens by using their tokens to facilitate payment for channels between data buyers and sellers. The plan for launch for this is first Testnet (while requiring some amount of Mainnet tokens) and then eventually launch to full Mainnet. You can consider it a soft launch.

Thanks! Does this mean for the Testnet holders need to stake RMESH tokens? And is there a limit?

Jason: Yes, it is likely there will be a minimum amount of RMESH that will be required to run a Superpeer. We will be releasing an open source version of it for people to run. It will also be possible for people to develop their own Superpeers. The thing that will make Superpeers more profitable is the strategy for allocating tokens to channels. There will likely be no upper limit on tokens. The more that are staked, the more channels with more flexible funds a Superpeer will be able to provide.

I remember you said you will be using Raiden tech, but they are slow. If there project does not work, what is your plan B?

Jason: It is already working for what we need. We don’t require further development from them.

Your team looks solid, and I know it is a long term project… I am worried your funds will run out. Did you raise enough?

John: Thanks… the team definitely is solid. It needs to be bigger however, so if you know people, we are actively recruiting.

Regarding the second part of your question, the funds that were contributed are being used for growth. But, one of the considerations is that not all $30M is needed on day one. As part of our whitepaper, and use of funds, we set a growth target of $10M year one, $15M year two, $20M year three. This was the most we felt we could spend (based on our experience growing a company). But as simple math will show, with that budget $30M is not sufficient. But as a company, we have to execute. This includes driving revenue..

Brianna: Adding on to this, we are specifically looking for:

* Decentralized Wireless Protocol Engineer

* Devops Engineer

* Senior Software Engineer (Java)

* Software Engineer

* Software Engineer (Android)

* Bilingual Community Coordinator

You can see the postings here for more details, any recommendations are certainly welcome! https://rightmesh.io/careers

Most people don’t know this project, do you have big plan?

Amber: We have grown our project organically and understand the importance of marketing to the right audience moving forward. To impact our community, we need a lot of nodes in the mesh. As I have said before, we are looking to work with universities in emerging markets, sponsor hackathons, and form partnerships with aligned companies and organizations to create user adoption. The more users we have, the stronger the mesh becomes, and therefore the platform.

Brea: Additionally, regarding event marketing, over the past year, we’ve been attending many ethereum community events, and more broadly, blockchain and crypto related events, like ETHDenver, Ethereal, CryptoChicks Conference & Hackathon, ConsenSys Blockchain For Social Impact Conference, the Blockchain for Impact Conference at the UN, Blockchain Africa (in Johannesburg), Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference, and many others. Presently, Melissa and Simon are at Korea Blockchain Week.

Various team members have presented and met many of the BUIDLers who may work with RightMesh SDK in the future. We’ve been building awareness in the blockchain for social impact sphere as well as within the Ethereum dev community. Much of this includes not only raising awareness for RightMesh itself, but also a large part of our efforts require educating people about (A) the realities of connectivity globally and (B) introducing them to mesh networking.

Who is using RightMesh? Is it being tested or are there pilots?

Amber: We currently have some pilot projects that are utilising the RightMesh network. For example, RightMesh AG is currently involved in a community-driven initiative to bring connectivity to Rigolet, a remote indigenous community region of Labrador, Canada. In this community of 300, there is only one ISP, connectivity is expensive and painfully slow, and congestion stifles use. The community has a need to share real-time data about weather condition changes, such as the thickness of ice cover, that affects their health and livelihoods. An app was developed for the community, and RightMesh is enabling the data to be sent throughout the community directly, without having to access the ISP. Please take a look at this article for more details: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvwnzd/rightmesh-is-building-a-meshnet-in-rigolet-labrador-enuk-app

Frazer: Some researchers are taking a rough version of the app Amber mentioned above, up north this month for feedback from the community. We’re planning to head back in October, when autonomous roles are working better, to start distributing phones loaded with the app for use in the community.

Other current users of RightMesh include our app development team in Bangladesh and a small team in Ontario working on a distributed forum app.

Jason: Adding on, we’ve also had RightMesh used at several major hackathons. We are planning to continue to do so while we proceed towards a public release to get feedback from developers along the way.

Aldrin: For example, the beta version of the RightMesh API was used by developers recently at nwHacks (The largest Hackathon in western Canada). You can learn more about it here: https://medium.com/rightmesh/the-largest-hackathon-in-western-canada-our-recap-of-nwhacks-2018-c2d92a917696

Frazer: And of course, we’ve been using it ourselves internally to work on meshIM: https://github.com/RightMesh/meshIM

Why not recruit a marketing guru? Your team is very weak at that.

John: I would argue that contention. In your context, marketing is all about marketing the token towards exchanges and the token itself. Marketing, however, is a broad field involving government relations, partner management, communications, community management, digital marketing, recruitment, product marketing, technical evangelism, and a whole bunch of related disciplines.

From a marketing standpoint, I have over 20 years of marketing (both introverted and extroverted). The challenge with marketing throughout the ICO, and even still, is what can one say about the project without actually saying it. We engaged a firm last summer (www.ICOAgency.io ) and gave them the challenge of helping us to establish a brand, without soliciting in specific regions. A few months ago, RightMesh’s parent company Left, bought ICOAgency outright to ensure that those involved in marketing the project throughout the ICO were available and working with us for the duration.

In our marketing/communications team today, we have 5 full time people. We also have 5 more in our product marketing team and an external PR firm with which we are engaged. So in some instances, the marketing team is larger than many projects overall team sizes. This is a group that will continue to grow, but all measured against the budgets that we set.

There are a certain percentage of RMESH tokens that were allocated to pay for TGE expenses. Can you provide the details of it. Why you don’t use the funding you raised to pay for TGE expense instead?

John: Yes… 10% of RMESH tokens were allocated to pay for expenses, advisors, acquisitions, etc. For many of the service providers we engaged with, they opted for RMESH tokens over fiat as they believed in the long-term vision of the project. That being said, running and operating an ICO is not a cheap process, and more than $1m was involved in actual dollars out for the process as well. Lawyers and accountants are expensive.

Can you apply for Coinmarketcap?

Brianna: We understand the importance of CoinMarketCap for cryptocurrency projects and are actively working on this 👍 We will share updates when possible to do so.

The RMESH token needs to reach a certain trading volume in order to get listed on CMC. Do you think RMESH has enough trading volume at the moment?

WhalePanda: That’s correct, iirc there needs to be at least $100k+ daily volume on an exchange that doesn’t have 0 fees.

Have you guys thought about shifting to EOS ?

Jason: We are always evaluating better options for technical solutions. Currently our roadmap is planned for continuing with ethereum and payment channels. It would have to be a significant benefit or problem to shift to something like that currently. We’re always open to considering it though.

John: I was at a crypto dinner last night and another project called EOS, “the chain that shall not be named”. There was debate around the table as to its level of decentralization. After some discussion, what we all agreed was that there are different chains that are fit for different purposes. As Jason just said, we are continuing with Ethereum as this is where the development community presently resides and developers are essential to our model and growth.

Team, what is your KPI to determine the success of the Rightmesh project?

John: We are going through the exercise of mapping out organizational KPIs presently as part of strategic planning popularized by Salesforce.com’s V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Metrics). The last one ‘metrics’ is all about the KPIs that you need to measure against. It starts from the top organizational metrics, then trickles down into departments, then into individuals. For example, “applicants per job posting” may be a leading indicator of our recruitment efforts. @compscidr has a large list of performance metrics within the platform itself that we are using.

RMESH token price should be your №1 KPI. It is needed to determine the success of your project. You are running a crypto project.

John: Token price is a metric, but it is not the only KPI. There are tokens that are operational that have not and will never ship a product. These are not a success in our opinion.

WhalePanda: There is also no volume on the current exchanges, this price obviously does not reflect the real value. This is a long term utility token which means that when the team reaches its goals, there will be more demand and that will be reflected on the price.

Micha: You are correct, but since the daily volume is low I wouldn’t worry at this stage. A few people probably sold with bad intent at a low price. The team is working hard. It will pay off when a reputable exchange starts to list the token most probably. The use cases for the use of the token are numerous. Be still and supportive.

I saw in a weekly update that there was some progress on token economics — could you share us the highlights ?

Jason: We have a rough game theoretic model which we have been working on with Rogayeh Tabrezi. The model has been defined considering the buyers, sellers and network topology as defined in our white paper. We are working on a version for a Medium post soon and will publish the paper in a journal or conference proceeding.

Which app stores have approved the RightMesh software?

Frazer: Android apps don’t have “approval” like iOS, so none, but that’s the rule not the exception. We have been downloading alphas of meshIM through Google Play with no issues. Apps using our library run fine on Android since 4.2.2, and we respect user permissions, battery life, settings, etc.

Which regions is the meshIM app available? It doesn’t seem to be globally available.

Frazer: It’s in a closed alpha, and there are no apps on the public market I can link you to. We won’t know Google’s stance until RightMesh apps start gaining traction, but in the meantime it runs without issue on Android itself and that’s good enough for our current partners.

If you are looking to try an app, there is of course always Yo!, the predecessor of RightMesh: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lotd.yoapp It does similar network manipulation to RightMesh and has been on the Play store for years, with over 500,000 downloads from there (and more sideloaded installs in e.g. Cuba).

Will we be invited for test flight @ iOS?

Frazer: Maybe one day. It isn’t possible for us to control networks programmatically on iOS the way it is on Android, so we’re focusing on where we can build the most powerful product.

In addition, our initial target region where we can make the most positive impact, is in emerging markets. These regions, and increasingly developed regions as well, are dominated by Android users with 87% of the market being Android devices.

How is the transferring of tokens between users and service provider done? Also, how will the amount of token transfers be determined? Will it be fixed (i.e. 1 RMESH per min) or based on the USD price?

Brianna: RightMesh will not set the rate of the consumption — that will be set by the network nodes themselves, and will be determined by the market’s supply and demand. So nodes will set the price they wish to buy or sell bandwidth at. For example “I want to buy up to X MB at a price of # RMESH per MB”.

A bit more on this from Saju’s earlier answer: t.me/RightMesh_Official/24248 (Saju’s post to be quoted).

Frazer: To add to this the routing protocols running by the devices will be a balance of price and performance controlled by the users setting their preference of whether they’d like to spend more money, obtain higher performance, a balance, or something in between.

The team should knock it off with the silly hats if they want investors to take them seriously. Makes it seem like the project is a joke

John: I vehemently disagree. The most successful projects (long term), those that will truly have sustaining power, are those that have the best people. The best people are attracted to join a company that has a great culture. Wearing “silly hats” as you call them are part of our culture that have allowed us to attract and retain top talent from around the world. Culture, of course, is more than hats just as it is more than physical playthings in the office. It is the shared belief of the team, what we stand for, and our actions that define who we are.

Through various social media, there are different audiences that we cater to, and not just contributors. We have a talent niche that we have identified and cater to their needs. Generalizing here, but people look for different things from potential employers. The best talent can work anywhere, and be paid high rates. With those things constant, what is variable in employment opportunities are three pillars: a sense of purpose, a sense of community, and a sense of belonging. And frankly, that is where we shine.

Do you care about your investors? I am an early investor. Why are you not discussing exchanges?

John: We do care. We do care a great deal. And thank you for your support since the beginning. Since the very beginning — we have stated that we are not able to talk about exchanges. There are legalities around what we have been able to say. But to emphasize, yes we do care about the entire Community.

Why use an ERC20 token (RMESH) that will have a large gas cost, isn’t liquid and is not a good storage of value (volatility). Especially when you can just use ETH. Do the pros overwhelm the cons?

Jason: We could have just used ETH, however we wanted a token which had a longer term value that was independent of the things ETH is valued for. It is a value that represents smart contracts, payment transfers and the token systems on top. RightMesh’s long term value should be tied to incentivizing resource sharing on mobile devices. Whether that’s data, storage or processing.

Regarding the high gas cost, payment channels remove many of these concerns. We think advances in this area which allow reloadable channels and withdrawals without closing the channel will further improve the solution in the long run.

Lastly, like other people alluded to, there is always the option of something other than ETH and ERC20 tokens if we find something very compelling.

Indeed, I feel like if I were from a regulatory body, I would set the regulation that regardless if the token is security token or utility token, there must be a market maker and an issuer to provide a secondary market in order to protect the interest of investors.

Chris: That’s an interesting approach. One of the most discussed topics at Blockchain events is regulatory governance. From the SEC to FINMA to the BCSC, regulators are all struggling to get a good handle on how their rules should be applied in the Crypto space. This is the time for you to work in your local jurisdiction to push for your views to be heard. Our experience with those where we have had direct contact is that the individual commission staff have an excellent level of knowledge and are keen to make good decisions for their specific stakeholder ecosystem.

Solving a short term issue is easier than solving a long term problem. Especially when your long term problem is something rather big to handle, like connecting the next billion. What does ‘long term’ actually refer to? Are there checkpoints or KPIs to evaluate the team’s performance?

Jason: Yes, we have checkpoints and KPIs. Here is a list to give you an idea of some of the shorter term KPIs we will be tracking on the tech side:

1) Maximum nodes in a local mesh

2) Maximum meshes on a single Superpeer

3) Average devices per mesh with maximum number of meshes

4) Avg/max/min throughput, delay, jitter, packet delivery ratio, discovery time…all of the QoS metrics from my thesis

5) Average uptime of all running Superpeers

6) Total network throughput

7) Total network utilisation between data sharers and Superpeers

8) Maximum devices online

9) Average devices online in 24hr period

10) Number of crashes, number of submitted bugs, number of solved bugs, created/ submitted bug ratio, number of developers signed up, avg number of active developers, average time to respond to support request and number of support requests/ device

Is it the mesh network only stable if the nodes are in close range? How can we grow the security and stability of network?

Jason: Stability of the network can mean many things — if you look at it in terms of token flow for example, stability is when all of the buying and selling pricing strategies settle into a state where nobody can change their strategy and do any better.

Then there are network performance related “stability” measures. These might be things like throughput, delay, jitter, packet delivery ratio, etc. It will be affected by things like density of devices, distance between devices, traffic flow patterns (is this traffic flowing internally within the mesh or going to the Internet). For the Internet traffic it will be affected by the pricing, how much data people are willing to sell into the mesh, how many paths there are to the internet, how far away devices are from the Internet connection (in terms of hops), etc.

For many of the KPIs we are collecting, we are starting with fairly low goals. For example, suppose we aim for 30–50 devices per mesh, and 100 meshes per superpeer, then we can determine, as people start to use it, where and how the throughput, delay and other metrics go bad. From there we can work towards technical solutions to improve these. Then, we can aim for larger and larger meshes and anticipate where it may break along the way.

What is the user adoption strategy?

Saju: Distribution is indeed a key factor for success of the project. The goal is to attain widespread adoption of RightMesh that can be used in smartphones initially, and other devices (such as IoT devices) to follow. And so the go-to-market strategy consists of 4 parts as we continuously build and improve the mobile mesh networking technology:

1. Explore the different use cases that are now made possible through RightMesh through pilots and rollouts. From this we expect to test and learn how the technology behaves under real-life conditions, how the token mechanics work, and how user behaviour affects the running of networks. This is important because today’s apps are built for the internet world, and the apps that are beneficial for mesh networking are yet to be discovered. Fortunately, we’ve already had many interesting discussions on this with other entities and we’ll be close to rolling out these pilots as we get closer to beta. (If you’re interested, I’ve wrote more about the importance of this in this blog post: https://medium.com/rightmesh/will-rightmesh-really-change-the-world-part-2-395f17cf94da )
2. Grow the developer ecosystem for RightMesh. This comes through evangelism at global hackathons, partnering with educational institutions — those focused on blockchain and otherwise, and participating in developer meetups around the world.
3. Grow RightMesh nodes and networks. This includes growing the Superpeers and data sellers. This may be through some of the initial apps that are developed on top of RightMesh. Starting to grow a core network is an important prerequisite for developers to build more apps, and will provide a benefit for more sellers and more nodes to be a part of the network. This is important for network effects to form.
4. Work on large-scale distribution strategies — and this is a must to get to widespread adoption. This involves working with OEMs and handset manufacturers, chip manufacturers, app stores, retail distributors, and large-scale apps that benefit from mesh networking. OEMs are particularly beneficial as it will allows our tech to be more closely associated with the hardware. These relationships naturally take time (i.e. years), and are dependant on the success of the previous three steps, but is important to start working on now. Again, we have been fortunate to already been having discussions with several distributors, and those are discussions we will continue to have.

In all 4 areas above — whether that is for pilots, growing the developer ecosystem, growing our networks or working out distribution partners, we would love to hear your suggestions, thoughts and ideas. That’s what I personally would love to see come out from a vibrant community! Feel free to reach out to our team by emailing research@rightmesh.io

If you have more questions you would like answered, please join the conversation on our Telegram Channel.