Constellation AMA hosted by Satoshi Club
Date/Time: Thursday August 20th, 2020 at 09h30 (PST)
Participants:
Constellation:
Benjamin J Jorgensen (CEO)
Benjamin Diggles (CRO — Business Development)
Mathias Goldman (COO)
Wyatt Meldman-Flock (CTO)
Satoshi Club:
Serg
Irina K
Note: This transcript has been edited to remove “typos” and to improve readability. The original conversation can be viewed at the Satoshi Club Telegram: https://t.me/satoshi_club
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
For the beginning, please introduce the project and tell us a few words about yourself :)
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Hello all! We are Constellation Network — We are protocol that is creating an ecosystem for applications to communicate with one another. We leverage a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for effective and efficient data processing. We are a truly decentralized network that focuses on building applications with data assurance. As such we are working closely with the U.S. Air Force and DoD to provide a scalable distributed ledger technology for big data processing and secure data transportation standard.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Nice. Did any of you serve in the army?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
No sir. My entire family did though. Down to the revolutionary war in the US. My grandfather wrote the test for pilots back in WW2
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Wow. How come you didn’t follow their steps?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
My dad served in Vietnam and said “No way… go build the future.”
So ya. I was the only one that didn’t serve in the military. Anyhow — back to crypto!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Good advice I would say. Kudos to your dad 🙂
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Alright guys. It was a nice introduction :) Ready to discuss the questions of the community?
Mateo Gold:
Yes sir
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Lets do it my man!
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Q1 from bitcointalk user gustafsson “Your mainet is built on DAG. Why you have chosen DAG? Is it pow or pos?”
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Well — DAG is an architecture
Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are consensus mechanisms
We chose a dag because it is a common architecture for distributed systems leveraged by applications (like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc). to process and organize data
We wanted to create a blockchain that could process a TON of transactions and a lot of data so that we could create an ecosystem where people built meaningful applications on top of it
Our consensus mechanism is Proof of Reputable Observation (PRO). And we use this because it is a programmatic and algorithmic way to effectively and efficently organize the network for speed and security.
Our consensus is concurrent as well — we run multiple consensuses in parallel — which is vastly different and more scalable than any other blockchain
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Could you elaborate on programmatic and algorithmic way of organization?
More than 2?
Mateo Gold:
So the way to scale an architecture is to have multiple consensus rounds in parallel that then feed into a global state of the network and a global consensus
that makes it truly scalable
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Yes — from a high level Wyatt and the core engineers wrote algorithms to organize the data. We score each node on their reputation (past participation, geo location, uptime, etc.). This then allows us to randomize the nodes and the data they validate
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Would you like to clarify other things or shall we proceed to the next one? :)
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Nope
Happy to discuss in a more technical format later!
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
How are the nodes formed?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
We had about 1500 applications for nodes to be a part of the network. We ran KYC and interviewed individuals and organizations to be a part of the network. We then organized them into batches based on their contribution to Constellation — technology, messaging, and involvement in building the ecosystem
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Can you tell us which were the most interesting applications?
or the funniest ones?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Well — it was one of the most amazing things I have seen
People from around the world applied and shared their life stories with us.
They were really heartwarming.
Some people came to us after having built ecosystems for other major protocols and were inspired by the technology — the potential to evolve blockchain technology — and could offer their technical expertise as well as experience governing a network.
Some of the funny ones were one sentence applications that said “I WANT $DAG”
It was a humbling experience to see all of these people, from around the world — 92 countries — reach out to us
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Q2 from bitcointalk user nyosant “Constellation bases consensus on reputation, but how is the reputation score for a node determined (i.e. what are the main parameters determining reputation)? What would happen when a node deviates from the expected behaviour?”
Wyatt M-F:
To answer a little further we essentially have two consensus processes happening in parallel, one for blocks and one for converging global state.
- for block consensus we partition facilitators (3/total) using a locality sensitive hash function that is a Xor of the edges leading into the block
- for global convergence all nodes must propose a ‘view’ of the total dag and conform (re-download new patches of the DAG that are inconsistent with majority) according to the state selection algorithm that incorporates our reputation model
note that only full nodes participate in global state consensus
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
What other types of nodes are there?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
We will be introducing light nodes by the end of this year.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
By “locality” you mean geography?
Mateo Gold:
Locality in terms of network topography
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Got it
Serg | Satoshi Club:
how to run a node?
Tom (Constellation admin):
https://constellationnetwork.io/run-a-node/ :)
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
We have about 50-100 more foundational nodes we will be onboarding over the course of the next couple of months.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
So it’s light nodes and full nodes, right?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
yes
Wyatt M-F:
The reputation model at its core is a ‘node influence metric’ that we calculate using a self avoiding random walk. This is a way of understanding influence in social graphs and it also gives us a lot of flexibility for extending into convolutions of other state channel graphs
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Is the number of nodes fixed?
Wyatt M-F:
No, but in reality there’s a tradeoff between how expensive we want nodes to be for main net. So we’ll decide via governance probably on a cap and queue new nodes when a max is hit. For state channels its totally up to you. It’s just an exercise in resource optimization. That’s the amazing thing about being memory bound
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Q3 from Telegram user @sai_sa “United States air force is your partner. That is huge! How did you manage to establish this partnership? What benefits do you have and what did you propose to do for them?”
Mr. Diggles:
We became aware of what is called Other Transaction Authorities that allow for small businesses to engage with the DoD w/o being squashed by the standard industry primes like Lockheed Martin, Etc.
And we learned that folks inside the federal space really are thirsty for DLT solutions. So we wrote a proposal that was predicated around applying Blockchain to big data initiatives.
IBM has done a great job of establishing themselves for digital logistics but when it comes to Air and Space, we are the only solution to be successful in that realm since the data is just so big. Putting us in a class of our own.
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
USTRANSCOMS — an agency in the DoD — creates about 1.8T of data every 60 seconds. That is a lot of data. They want to better understand where the data came from, if it was manipulated, and how to create a more sound data strategy. Constellation is helping develop a standard for how data is collected securely and transported to other agencies in the government and to commercial partners as well.
Serg | Satoshi Club
This is also related to space isac, right?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Yes — Space is a rather untapped opportunity and a HUGE opportunity for sound data strategies to be implemented early. Space ISAC is new but has a powerful force behind it — namely Aerospace and Lockheed Martin
Mr. Diggles:
When we went into the DoD we thought they would be really excited about thwarting threat vectors when it comes to copious amounts of streaming data. And they were but not as much as they were interested in securing complex data sets all at different classification levels. In short: Sending top secret data in contested or public networks. Something they don’t take lightly so having a Zero Trust solution is very attractive to not only the DoD but pretty much all federal agencies.
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
The worlds global food supply is regulated through satellites. They collect data like temperature, crop productions and yields, and send this data to organizations around the globe to better regulate the global supply chain.
Serg | Satoshi Club
What about the hyped spacex?
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Space shuttles need more security around the data — think if a space shuttle taking civilians to space had compromised security.
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
The business would be destroyed
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Absolutely — and lives.
Mr. Diggles:
SpaceX is very cool for sure but we are focused on the DoD since it’s far broader than SpaceX and they handle more data than all of Elon’s ventures combined.
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Thanks for the explanation :)
Mr. Diggles:
Proving ourselves in federal will pave the way for the private sector, including SpaceX, in a meaningful way. Much like the advent of the internet.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
A lot of innovation comes from the military field
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Keep the good work guys
It’s interesting what you are doing
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Thanks Serg! We are and we are rather quiet about everything we do.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Guess you have a lot of nda’s signed :blush:
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
I feel like all we do is sign NDA’s
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
🤫
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Digital or it’s still pen and paper?
Mr. Diggles:
I’ve done both for sure.
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Fax machines.
kidding
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Q4 from Telegram user @angela_rer “Don’t you think that 5G technology solves the issues you described about Data? I mean about the transfers of GB per second of a lot of data”
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
5G was introduced to invite more connectivity of applications — more data — at faster speeds. The technology is supposed to advance automation at the next level. This is creating more and more data than we ever imagines.
Much of our existing digital infrastructure wasn’t built to safeguard this data…. let alone have a sound data strategy around it.
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
More work for you guys :blush:
More nda’s to sign
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Evolution of the internet is imminent.
Our technology was established to provide a new infrastructure to secure this data and create more efficient and secure means of transporting and collecting this data so that we can build the next evolution of applications that connect the globe
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Q5 from Telegram username @Cryptolover1010 “What your plans in place for global expansion, are Constellation focusing on only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this?”
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
While we are building some incredible things for the DoD, it will be a year out before we can really share the day to day of what we are doing.
We are about to announce a very large partnership and product around DeFi. We can’t say a whole lot, but this will be a product that nearly every crypto asset trader can use.
We have been building a stealth project that will be revealed in the coming weeks with some of the biggest players in crypto.
A lot of data is used and created in the trading of crypto assets — it is time for crypto asset financial instruments to be on par with financial instruments of the equities and public market.
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
And Constellation and our partners will introduce the first ecosystem build on Constellation — using our protocol — to create more reliant algorithmic trading products in the crypto world
This will be one of many and it starts in the DeFi space.
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
We are looking forward to that announcement :)
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
It will happen before you know it and it will take the crypto space by storm.
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
DeFi is definitely cool now and it’s great you are in that space
Thanks for the answer, Benjamin
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Let’s just say that DeFi needs a faster, more secure, and scalable protocol than Ethereum… and we are that protocol
Irina K. | @satoshi_club | Daily Rewards & AMA:admin
Q6 from Telegram username @luckydraw66 “DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, has become a hot topic in the industry. On that front, I’ve seen Constellation detailing DeFi use cases on the website. What would you say is the most promising DeFi application for Constellation at the moment?”
Mateo Gold:
While we cannot disclose all the details of the upcoming project quite yet, you are right there is tremendous excitement and value to be captured. Connecting ecosystems and building the world of multiple concurrent blockchains that interact with each and create a fluent borderless value exchange opens us up to a whole range of applications around tokens and finance. That said this is just the V1 of our vision of an ecosystem where everyone can build on top and create value not only around tokenized finance but also tokenized data and data derivatives.
<At this point the community asked a total of 366 questions (!!) and the team selected 12 to answer>
Q1) Crypto Investor — Satoshi Club Constellation is a token erc 20 actually. Do you have any project to build your own blockchain in the future?
Wyatt M-F We actually already launched main net. Download the Molly wallet and you can send native $dag
Q2) Jonah Apagu | Satoshi Club What are the advantages of Directed Acyclic graph (DAG) over traditional blockchain?
Wyatt M-F With the right provisioning, it scales horizontally
Q3) Happy Boss What features does the Constellation have, and which features are really the main weapon that even other projects don’t have?
Mateo Gold Concurrent consensus -> means true scalability and higher throughputs than traditional blockchains.
- zero fees for single tx below the rate limit but tx fees for validating data streams or sending a lot of data
- being able to validate and notarize all kinds of data from databases, sensors, iot devices, etc etc..
- creating assurance and audit trails around large data amounts and data that is streamed in realtime
- crosschain interoperability
- mathematical theorems proven and turned into code
Q4) Nilanga -bandara What is the vision and mission of your coin? What problems are you trying to solve? Do these problems remain unsolved with the existing public blockchains?
Wyatt M-F the vision has two angles:
- create a protocol that can actually interoperate with real world architectures at the scale of impactful consumer products (can actually act as an oracle at scale)
- to provide in implicit infrastructure for the decentralized data revolution (getting paid for sharing your data, and a new class of ‘miners’ mining for novel data)
Q5) Muw Muw What kind of advantages does Constellation have over its competitors on the market? Can you please give some reasons to convince the users to use Constellation?
Mateo Gold We are the first blockchain company with a live token to be in a partnership with the United States Airforce opening us up to the entire world of military, government and defence. As a US company we have an inroad that many international companies simply cannot access. The barrier of entry for other blockchains is also pretty high (we have never come across them in any of our conversations with the DoD) since they cannot process streaming data.
As a truly decentralized fast and low-fee infrastrcuture people will learn fast that they can build out an entire ecosystem (not just one solution for data) but an entire ecosystem around finance, data and many applications that havent even been thought about yet.
They can create their own DAG tokens with our new token standard that is akin to what erc20 is on ethereum. They can go raise funds for that and have immediate cross chain liquidity not only within the DAG ecosystem but the entire erc20 world as well
Q6) dayuna putu Can you list 1–3 killer features of $DAG that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Benjamin J Jorgensen Yes! Great question:
Our Architecture: Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a common architecture for creating centralized big data distribution. We created a decentralized DAG
Our Consensus Mechanism: We use Proof of Reputable Observation (PRO) and organize the network using topology. Topological ordering of data is required for Artificial Intelligence engineers to add data to their automation workflows. We wanted to create a network of data that can be used by any engineer including the worlds leading data engineers. Our consensus mechanism is the next layer of defense after double spend thwarting.
Cryptographically Securing Complex Data Types (Images, and Videos): While a smart contract is great for programmatic execution and tracking of a digital asset, Constellation goes one step further to cryptographically secure the contents of those digital assets (the features, rows and columns of the data base that makes up the data asset).
Microservice Ecosystem: Microservices are the glue of any application. Think of Facebook — Facebook is made up of a myriad of Microservices that communicate and exchange data with each other. Facebook is not made up of smart contracts (these are not reliable or scalable in a highly engaged environment. Constellation allows any engineer to build a secure micro-service that communicates with existing applications as well as blockchain applications.
Q7) Oreza Molly Wallet is not available for android devices, almost everyone uses android, what is the reason Molly wallet is not available for android devices?
Mateo Gold — We will have having an open sdk and a new light wallet coming soon as well
Q8) Jonah Apagu | Satoshi Club Constellation was built to organize and handle Big and complex Data this type of data can only be sourced and gotten from big companies and organizations that own and control them how will constellation be of use to Individual Machine learning engineers and data scientists who are looking forward to building their own AI products?
Mr Diggles So these big data companies may seemed locked down but this is only because they are so cautious about data security and their IP. Constellation, and the promise of DLT, will give these companies the attribution and security they need to make this data widely available for new forms of data exchange (which means new channels for revenue). This is where the Datapreneur concept takes hold. Companies are shifting to opening up their data since it’s more valuable in use than it is being closed off. This is why Mobility is seeing a renaissance and companies that have traditionally been mortal enemies are now starting to work together. The upside is just too great to not play in the interoperable eco-system.
Soon data will be widely available much like open source development tools became available in the early 2000s. Datapreneur’s will be able to grab open data (like what you’d find on data.gov and elsewhere) combine it with enterprise data and create new insights and value. We are at the beginning of a whole new industry because of this.
Q9) Multab Rojon As a common user, will I be able to run a node? What requirements would I need, what exactly would be my purpose and what incentives are there for this?
Mateo Gold We have a very strong community based governance through our stardust governance collective. All individuals have built strong relationships over the last years and they monitor contribution to the ecosystem. It becomes obvious very fast who is suitable to be part of the collective and able to run a node based on these contributions and the interaction with the group.
Q10) Multab Rojon What is the meaning behind the Logo of Constellation?
the connected and fractal nature of reality
Q11) Xaentiele Where is Constellation Network in 5 to 10 years from now?
Mateo Gold everywhere 🙂
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
This existing environment has accelerated constellation’s roadmap as nearly every business in the world is figuring out their digital footprint. 5G came online recently and this too has accelerated the need to create more robust data solutions.
Working with the US Federal Government, there has been a dire need to secure the data (accessing files remotely and leveraging multiple security clearences for the same data set). For the public sector, we are seeing more enterprises move data, in a compliant way, from antiquated hardware infrastructure to modern cloud infrastructures. Constellation accelerates the transfer of data in a programaticly compliant way.
With everyone moving digital, we have created more potential threats to our lives and our digital identity. Heck — the federal government is looking for a way to digitize and evolve the social security number and your identity.
Q12) Siva What is your biggest challenge at the moment ? How can you overcome this challenge ?
Mateo Gold More awareness about the ground-breaking novelty of what we have built. More deep crypto partnerships and AMAs and exposure like this to people like you
Serg | Satoshi Club:admin
Thank you guys for your answers :) we will proceed to the quiz now, but if you have other things scheduled, no prob. We can handle this :)
Mateo Gold
thank you so much for inviting us to and handling and curating this AMA. It has been a lot of fun
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Thank you all for the amazing questions! 366 questions is incredible. Hopefully we have 366 more followers on our company.
Great AMA! You all killed it.
Serg | Satoshi Club
It was really great. I was impressed by your work :)
Benjamin J Jorgensen:
Thank you! You as well.
Have a great day!
