Summary of the Live Telegram AMA held in the dbcrypto community Telegram chat on 13 December 2018.
This afternoon we were joined by the team from CPChain for another live Telegram AMA. Joining the conversation from CPChain’s team was Dr Chengnian Long — Founder & CEO, Dr Matthew Ma — R&D Director and Wayne Tian — Overseas Operations Director.
CPChain is a project focused on the integration of blockchain and the ever-growing ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) space. CPChain is a new distributed infrastructure for IoT, intending to build out a platform that will provide solutions to the current ‘chimney architecture’ and isolated data-islands that currently exist.
AMA Question Highlights
Hi guys! Nice to meet you here. Thank you Daniel for inviting! It’s our honor to be here answering questions for the community — Wayne Tian
Daniel [dbcrypto]
I have a quick one regarding a recent post from CPChain. The ‘Chain Plus’ conference in Shanghai; Can you tell us about this? What was Dr Long’s speech about and the award that you received?
Wayne Tian
The Chain Plus conference is hosted by The Blockchainer, a quite influential blockchain conference organizer in China. Dr. Long was there presenting the speech mainly about CPChain, how we try to integrate IoT with blockchain and the basic infrastructure of CPChain. The award is called the Best Industry Application Award.
Telegram user trippledutch asks…
1. Can we transparently follow the buyback by looking at a particular wallet? If yes, which one? If no, where are we at right now?
2. What happens to the tokens that are bought back?
3. How big is the team currently and how many are expected to be employed by the end of 2019?
4. Do you face any technical difficulties, constraints or limitations in development for the CPChain mainchain? If yes, what are they?
5. Can you give us a geographical distribution of investors in CPChain at the Season 1 lockup? Is it true that Chinese investors in CPChain are underrepresented, compared to western investors? If true, what is the reason behind it?
6. Will CPChain update their whitepaper and/or their roadmap? If yes, when will this be ready?
7. You are developing a Private Transaction/Data Privacy mechanism. Was this the result of talks or a POC (proof-of-concept) with a European customer and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law they must follow? Can you explain how the Private Transaction/Data Privacy mechanism is intended to work?
8. When can we start implementing an RNode to test if it is functioning properly? Will you provide clear guidance installing an RNode including strong security verification?
Dr Chengnian Long
Thank you trippledutch for raising questions:
1. We are indeed planning to reveal some details about our token expenses in the next 1–2 month after Alpha mainnet launch, and will reveal the detailed number of buyback. Like Wayne said last time in the interview, we have already bought buy over 5 million $CPC from the market.
2. The token being bought back we will reserve it to use it for support the ecosystem & community establishment in the future. What from the community belongs to the community.
3. Right now we have 35 full time employees plus our global team. The global team are working remotely and not full time. In all it is now over 40 and we are actively hiring more. we are planning to recruit more R&D personals in 2019.
Dr Matthew Ma
4. The main tech point we are working on right now is to finalizing the block creation procedure. The key part is to make the whole process stable and we are very close to it. The Alpha mainnet will be release in this December.
Wayne Tian
5. For S1 lock-up session we have final gathered over 90 million $CPC involved. over 60% come from EU, 25% more from NA, 5% from Australia. The rest belongs to other continents. Chinese investors at this time are not the target participant in that we have some concerns in promotions. In China, BC tech are open for discuss but tokenomics/tokens are still prohibited, we are careful on that.
Dr Matthew Ma
6–8. Whitepaper will be updated in that there are some changes in it already, and we have our team working on it. We will reveal the status with the community later on. For the private transaction part we are not designing it specially for POC. It has been in the plan since very beginning, we believe it will be one of our competitive advantage. For RNode to formally function we will wait for the formal mainnet in March but we hold the opinion it will happen before March, depending on the status of our R&D. We can confirm having some POC developing both from China and Global sides. Because of NDA cannot telling more right now. Once the timing is right we will reveal to the community.
Telegram user TheJoker99 asks…
Thank you to the CPChain Foundation and in particular Dr Long for taking time out of your busy schedule to address your loyal community.
I am a long term believer in the project and will continue to support this as I have faith in the technical abilities of the team and realize that IoT in China is going to be big business.
My concern is in regard to the prolonged crypto winter, I wish to understand the strategies that you have formulated to tackle this issue. Your detailed response rather than “we have funds” will help mature investors such as myself and others lend more support to what we believe is a gem of a project.
Dr Chengnian Long
We will conduct the fund expenditure status in our financial status release along with the next community update. For the overall surroundings in China, like we discussed before, the government is in supportive attitude towards creative stuff like AI (artificial intelligence)/BC (blockchain), and based on the talks we currently have with some of the government related programs, they have fund for projects, and this is also what our business development team are working on right now. In China, follow the direction with the government, not discussing heavily about tokens, and the space for blockchain is huge.
Telegram user Caratecox asks…
Are you happy with the current development status of CPChain? When were you first considering that you had to postpone the mainnet?
Dr Chengnian Long
The decision to postpone the mainnet was a hard decision for CPChain. Like we have discussed in our previous Medium post. The R&D team have found some innovation/improvement points in field of Private transactions and enhancing the overall perfromance of block adding, verification and broadcasting. There is actually one more concern at that time we also have is for the market. At that time the overall market is going down so dramatically and it also hold us thinking whether it is a really good timing for announcing a not that perfect mainnet. And finally we decided to postpone for a better Alpha version.
Telegram user trippledutch asks…
Are you planning to release an audited financial statement too some time next year?
Wayne Tian
The current plan is to first release the expenditure along with the next community update. The audited financial report, we have not thought about it before, but will discuss internally later on since our community asked.
Telegram user TheJoker99 asks…
Please tell us. How many years of funding do you have left? This is important.
Dr Chengnian Long
At least 2 years. It is a conservative estimation. We have limited little bit on overseas marketing but putting more resources to R&D recently. This is the way to put right money on right place in the market winter.
Telegram user Dodolyke asks…
1. Are the rewards already known what we will get when we run a CPChain RNodes?
2. Will there be another coin/token as reward? If so why not just the CPChain token as a reward?
3. When will you guys give us a calculator to calculate our return-on-investment if we want to run a RNode?
4. Do you guys consider running these nodes on virtual private server? So everyone can run these?
5. When will the alpha launch will be? Is that still 31 December?
6. Will there be a maximum amount of RNodes?
Dr Chengnian Long
1. RNodes reward cannot be calculated out for now since the committee node will be selected out randomly. But the pool is there, for Economy Nodes — 5 million a year. For RNode who have been selected into committee to contribute to maintaining the chain, 1st year 50 million $CPC.
2. Yes it is going to be two token system. Another token is more like a gas token to support the transactions/activities on chain, it will be much more stable than CPC so that the reward on chain contribution can be stabilized.
3. Return-on-investment calculator is not feasible for now. But we have already started to design a better way for our nodes to foresee their benefits.
4 . Yes we have plans for it.
5. It will not be that late. Our R&D team are very close to the line.
6. For now there are no ceilings for RNode holders. We want to let the market decide. The more RNodes the more competitive to entering committee.
The market is in winter but not at CPChain. The good thing internally is that we still can see HR manager interviewing engineers EVERYDAY. And the War Room’s lights not down till 10 pm everyday — Wayne Tian
Telegram user cryptokio2 asks…
1. Several blockchain projects have patents for IoT technology. How does this affect CPChain’s development?
2. Could it be possible, or is it safe to assume that other companies will license CPChain patented technology or is it patented solely for development of the CPChain ecosystem?
3. Is there any already patented technology CPChain wanted to have for development of the ecosystem or are all the necessary patents already ‘on board’?
4. In the official Telegram channel it is said multiple times by an admin that CPChain is going to shape the IoT landscape and aims for global adoption. Why do you think you will succeed?
Wayne Tian
Thank you for raising the questions.
For patents, we are not affected by the patents gained by other projects. As far as we know from the team, despite the patents that Dr. Long has in hand, the team have 5 patents in writing and are very close to be done, we will submit them for approval in due course.
The patents are not a big concern for us since one of our core advantages is the academic resources bought by Dr. Long.
Regarding your comments about shaping or reshaping the IoT world — this is the vision of CPChain. The core advantage we have is the R&D capability, team structure and the financial control from the board to better support the long term strategy.
Telegram user BlockchainBrad asks…
Hi Wayne, it’s stated on your website that the “value of CPChain comes from the improvement of the physical industry efficiency and the innovation of business models”, can you talk us through how you are marketing your company to expand reach and achieve better global adoption?
We hear a lot of talk today about enterprise and hybridization of private and public chains, given that you are building a base data platform for IoT system in combination with distributed storage, encryption computation and blockchain technologies, are you also focused on providing this to the private business sector via private, permissioned sidechain offerings?
How easy it it to do blockchain business in China at the moment?
Finally from me, when you started, like most blockchains, you were in the pre-utility phase and the token itself was technically not a utility. Would you now regard the token as a true utility token and if so, how?
Thanks so much to Dan and the CPChain team for this AMA.
Wayne Tian, Dr Chengnian Long
Brad, thanks for asking, the value proposition for CPChain have never changed. We are not a project based on marketing but on the technology itself. We want our image for now is a hard-working team focusing heavily on tech. Not a project with nothing special but are good at marketing. The blockchain industry is for now heavily finance related.
CPC is also bounded to the market. Which means our marketing and globalization strategy will also be influenced by the market. We intended to assess the market situation every 3 months and make some relative amendment on it. For now our plan for Q1 — 2019 is mainly on mainnet and some partnership deal closure.
Brad, the CPC always have the utility function in its existence. It will have more use in CPChain ecosystem.
BlockchainBrad continues…
So essentially you are tech-centric. Do you think that perhaps there needs to be more marketing support, especially in the west, given that crypto hinges largely on social networks, especially initially; or is it the case the value of the token is not a focus of the team?
I ask directly as you are 373rd on CMC (coinmarketcap) and have shown a gradual decline in value since you listed. The challenging question is how, with such a decline, does the token possibly reflect all your tech innovations and team/tech growth? The direct correlation/synergy is tough for investors to see.
Wayne Tian, Dr Chengnian Long
Great question Brad. Yes we are tech-centric. But it doesn’t mean that we will give up marketing. Under the current situation we want to hold the marketing for right timing. For example, this December’s Alpha main, we will have some marketing release around it.
As the trend it showed on CMC, we have already seen it and we still think it is heavily related to the overall market. CPChain will never neglect the feeling from community. All the concerns the community raised we have all discussed about them and still we want to find a balance between satisfying the community and holding our own team rhythm.
We are solid on that after we did things well internally and if the market goes up again, CPChain will go back for sure. We want our community also hold tight with us and one thing we are sure that in Q1,2019 there will be a lot marketing activities.
BlockchainBrad continues…
If you are going to have a dual token system, and if the other token will function like NEO’s GAS token to support the transactions/activities on chain, then it sounds like a dual utility model. Is it fair to say that the current token would morph into another form? NEO call NEO a ‘governance token’ (whatever that actually means) but I am thinking more of words like commodity or security, to be blunt.
Wayne Tian, Dr Chengnian Long
CPC gas will take more responsibilities as the utility tokens to support the transaction on chain and CPC will be hocked with the open market.
And for Dual token model, our architect is working on papers about it and we will release it to the community once it is done.
Thank you guys thank you! See you next time! Thanks Daniel for hosting such great AMA.
— Wayne Tian
I would like to say thank you to the team at CPChain — Dr Long, Dr Ma and Wayne — for making themselves available to speak with the community. I think I can speak on behalf of the wider crypto-community and those following CPChain in saying that we all appreciate the openness and opportunity to speak with core team members in this format
— Daniel [dbcrypto]
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Please note that some questions and or answers may have been edited to account for grammatical errors and appropriate presentation. This summary does not include all questions asked and answered during the event.
