AMA Recap Vol.134 — — Saito: An open network layer that delivers web3 to users
At 11: 00 am (UTC) on Mar 16th, Richard Parris, Co-founder of Saito was invited to be the guest of AMA in TokenHunter Official Telegram Group. During the AMA, Richard Parris introduced Saito and its unique advantages in detail. Richard also shared the marketing strategies of Saito. Not only that, but he also answered many questions from users.
Saito is a layer one blockchain that pays nodes in the P2P network instead of miners or stakers, delivering a permissionless and scalable network capable of powering decentralized versions of Twitter, Facebook and Amazon without the need for predatory monopolies in the network layer.
Richard Parris’s sharing knowledge points are full, and here we will sort out the essence of AMA for everyone to review.
Q1. What is Saito and brief introduction about it?
Richard Parris: So, Saito is a completely new consensus mechanism and layer 1 blockchain. My co-founder David Lancashire and I have been around bitcoin and blockchain since maybe 2013… Back then it was super geeky and an really interesting community. Some people were interested in ‘peer to peer electronic cash’, but there were also other’s who were intersted in what we now call web 3. One of the obvious early problems was scaling though. Bitcoin is an independent ‘self sufficient’ network but can only do 3 transactions per second… nowhere near enough for global money let alone web 3. the reason that scaling is hard for blockchains is not the tech… we have tech that scales things like amazon, google and tencent… the challenge is doing it — and still being open and self sufficient. That’s hard for bitcoin because the network is run by volunteers… the p2p nodes all run on home equipment — and that is why it’s impossible to scale BTC’s model. You can go the other way and run nodes in data centers, and limit who gets to be a validator… and give them lots of money to run the network. But now you look less and less like a blockchain… and more like a corporate network. Saito consensus is the first way to solve this problem — from the ground up… by changing the incentives and paying for the network from consensus. It’s needed to scale web 3 while keeping it open.
Q2. What are some of the major milestones you have hit so far and why are they important?
Richard Parris: So, we formally started the project in 2018… and started working on our first prototypes. In late 2018 we raised a seed round, and on Jan 1 2019 we launched our first public testnet. In about April that year we launched the arcade and started getting real volume on testent… volume we needed to prove that Saito works at scale. In 2020 we open soureced our game engine as part of a web3 foundation grant, and shared our advances in peer to peer app and game development with the web 3 community. During 2020 we moved past 10,000,000 transactions on Saito networks and at the end of the year we began a more significant fund raise. We closed that with a small IDO in April 2021. Just recently we have our 20,000,000 th transaction on Saito networks and are experiencing great growth. These milestones are important because making Saito a success is as much about growing usage on the chain as it is about any technical aspect. We are set for an amazing 2022 with some great announcements just around the corner, a growing team and amazing community.
Q3. What are the marketing strategies of Saito?
Richard Parris: Saito is a long term project with really strong fundamentals. Our marketing is focused on growing a community that understands and is excited about what we are doing and what Saito can contribute to the industry. So, we concentrate on taking time for activities like this where we can talk to smart folks about what we are doing. We also get a lot out of our partnerships and connecting with other projects in the crypto space. This can result in win-win colaborations and grow everyone’s community and impact. Lastly, building things that people want to use. Passionate users are priceless for getting the word out and promoting the project.
Q4. What is Token Utility?
Richard Parris: So, the SAITO token is the native token on the network and pays node operator in the network for getting transactions to where they need to be… blocks. What is amazing about Saito consensus is because you are using the security mechanism to pay for the network, it is much cheaper to transact on that other chains. In Saito consensus — the rewards are paid to the nodes that do the most for users… rather than for mining or staking. So where in ETH you need to pay the miners (stakers in ETH2) and then find a way to pay for the network (the operators have to have business models for this — or volunteer) … i.e. pay twice. In Saito users only pay once. Because of Saito’s design (Saito transactions can contain transactions from other networks to deliver them) it can do the heavy lifting of other chains that carry value tokens, nfts etc. This also keeps those chains free of the ‘process’ transactions that clog them up. This benefits both chains, and their users.
Q5. What is the Road Map?
Richard Parris: As I mentioned earlier… Saito’s roadmap is as much about building usage on chain, as it is about technical hurdles. So we have many things going on at once. For example we are working hard on some new tech, part of a partnershp, that will make it very simple for app developers to do what i was talking about above and incorporate tokens and NFTs from other networks into applications running on the Saito network. (Think things like NFT trading games or galleries… Or a crowdfunding site…) We are also pursuing futher partnerships and working on tools to make building on Saito simpler and quicker. At the same time — the core team is pushing toward what we call ‘data center ready’ node software that can scale to the massive sizes we are aiming for and beyond. Lastly our tokenomics is carefully managed to help bootstrap the on chain economy of Saito.
https://org.saito.tech/saito-roadmap-update/
Our most recent roadmap update has more detail.
The questions from community question part.
Q1. Saito pays nodes in the P2P network instead of miners or stakers, is there any benefit?
Richard Parris: I mentioned this a bit above. Yes… it’s really important if you want to scale and stay open. By scale I mean a big network that can handle millions of users doing things from sending chat messages, to buying NFTs to turning off their IOT lights. If you don’t pay the network there are two alternatives. 1 — get volunteers to do it. BTC do this on principal… that’s how BTC works… but it does not scale. ETH does this via Infura that provides the APIs and other services that make things like Uniswap and Opensea work. The issue there is that Infura either eventually go bankrupt doing this… or they start charging for these services. Which is fine… but it’s also web 2. You pay a service provider… they run the hardware and control your access to it. Saito solves this by trading how transactions get into blocks and rewarding the nodes in the network that do the most work for users getting their transactions around the network. No volunteers and no permissioned access.
Q2. You guys mentioned community and arcade development in your roadmap, I’m looking forward to your new arcade game, how is it going so far?
Richard Parris: Very exciting… our most polished game yet I think. Very much looking forward to getting it in front of people. One of the cool things about working on Saito is getting called in to play test the games. We have a good pipeline of games on the way and also been working on making it simpler than ever to create and post games to the site.
Q3. Does Gate’s change to restrictions on US users affect your trading volume? Do you consider listing on other CEXs in the future?
Richard Parris: With exchanges CEX and DEX options, our goals have always been to make sure the community has access to cost effective and convenient ways to get SAITO. To that extent we have been in talks for some time with different major CEX platforms (some of which are and some which are not available in the US.) Talks are well advanced, and because we have made good project progress and because the community is growing so fast and so amazing, the options we have are now much more in the community’s interest than previously. (We will need to dump far fewer tokens into circulation as part of listing.) We are confident we will have something we can announce soon. It’s never a ‘one and done’ thing… rather we need to keep an eye on the situation — including changing regulations, and try and do what is best for the project and it’s supporters and community …
Q4. NFT is a hot topic at the moment. Will Saito introduce the function of NFT in the game part? Or launch NFT Maker?
Richard Parris: Saito is not an EVM chain… (it does not have native NFTs)… As I mentioned above, we are working on great tools to make integration of NFTs (and regular tokens) into Saito apps super simple. This will let devs experiment and bring stuff to users way quicker and more cheaply than on other platforms. We are super excited about that. TL:DR; — I am looking forward to NFT trading games on Saito in the not too distant future.
Q5. I’m very particular about network security, so that makes me curious to know, how the participants check that their peers are faithfullypropagating their transactions instead of hoarding them.
Richard Parris: This is just such a good question to answer from a Saito perspective. Transaction hoarding is something that Saito takes genuinely seriously and we have solutions to it that no other chain has. First — a core principal of Saito is that when any node sends a transaction to another node in the network — it signs the the tx including the address of the recipient. This creates a chain of node addresses — a path record — for every tx in the block. So… users (or realistically their wallets) can go and look at blocks and see which nodes are more reliably getting their transactions into blocks. (why keep sending tx to a hoarder when someone else is doing the work…?) Second… the way Saito rewards the network specifically makes transaction hoarding a losing proposition. Nodes are rewarded in proportion to how and where they appear in the paths that transactions (that actually got into the block) took to get there. (basically the closer to the user the better) The reward structure would pay out hoarders who sit on transactions till they can make a block. But it is simple for them to do the maths and see that they would have earned more by sharing than hoarding. So… Saito consensus has both a carrot and a stick to prevent transaction hoarding.
Q6. Hey! First of all, I’ve been playing around with the AppStore and really love the work already done there and see many possibilities! My question is regarding apps/games and such; I see many are turn based and I expect the reason behind this is some kind of latency to send and retrieve info. How does a blockchain-based gaming system compare to “normal” game servers and could we expect to develop other games/apps (ourselves) that are not turnbased?
Richard Parris: Very astute… Yes Saito games are turn based. This is an area we love and are passionate about so we started there. (We kinda think turn based games are ‘normal’ but we might also be geeks…)
I am excited to see what folks build on top of Saito in terms of strategy and adventure games. We have some small trials in the works — but I really feel that it is a third party dev that will set this on fire!
Q7. Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progresses and achievements till now, when you look back to the day when you have started this project?
Richard Parris: Fun question…
I am very proud of what we have achieved and where we are going.
In a ‘founder’ job you can never be satisfied, though… you have to be driven to achieve more, more quickly….
Q8. Please, can you shed some light on the concept of the “POWSPLIT mechanism” and its benefits? How does this mechanism help to improve the security of the Saito blockchain?
Richard Parris: A Saito question…
Powsplit is the value in Saito that determines how much of the fees in the block go to the nodes in the network and how much goes to the mechanism that distributes it.
The original design had nodes and users voting to adjust this over time.
We removed that when we realised that initially people won’t have the experience or data to do this… to vote in their own interest. So we simplified this. In the long term we foresee a protocol upgrade to re-introduce POWSPLIT voting to let the network decide this.
End of AMA.
Let’s witness the future of Saito!
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