18 May — Aventus Telegram AMA Transcript

Following our recent telegram AMA with Aventus CEO Alan Vey, we have included a full transcript of the conversation below for those who missed it to catch up.

Question from Blake:

1) Will Aventus have a “one-click” staking feature that disperses your stake to multiple validators at once, to reduce the stakers risk and improve network security by spreading the AVT concentration among many nodes, rather than concentrating it to a handful?

Alan Vey: Yes — this is exactly how the new staking works. Our first set of validators will receive 25% of the fees their nodes earn. The other 75% is pooled from all validators and paid out to community stakers.

2) Will Aventus introduce auto compounding for stakers without them needing to withdraw their earned AVT rewards to do so?

Alan Vey: This is a feature we have added to the backlog. There are some important ones to get to first, like supporting lifting and lowering comprehensively, and a few UX tweaks to the wallet. But we have already discussed that this will likely be next.

Questions from Corey:

1) When Ethereum 2.0 “sharding” becomes available, will Aventus use this technology to scale to be even faster on Ethereum? Will 10K+ TPS be possible for Aventus on Ethereum in the future?

Alan Vey: Maximum TPS remains a function of our network’s consensus so no, Ethereum becoming faster will bring down our cost and energy efficiency, but not increase our throughput. However, Aventus can do 2,000 TPS per parachain (and potentially more with optimisation) so horizontal scaling makes the total theoretical maximum around 200,000 TPS. However, given Visa’s average daily levels are around 1,700 TPS, we do not feel much more resource needs to go into this for significant time.

2) Aventus advertises stable and predictable transaction costs… If/when Aventus scales to be even faster and cheaper, will all of the clients and developers who use your technology benefit from relatively stable transaction prices, at an even lower cost?

Alan Vey: Yes, that would likely be the case, as long as we are operating below our theoretical maximum we will keep the costs constant. Once the maximum is reached, we would likely first go for additional parachain slots (so scale horizontally) to keep things constant. And in an extreme scenario where more than 200,000 TPS was needed, we would start increasing costs on a quarterly basis with significant advanced warning to our clients.

3) When will the Polkadot parachain auction for Aventus be?

Alan Vey: We hope Q3, but this is completely dependent on community growth and engagement so we will not set a firm deadline until we believe the community is sufficiently behind us.

4) In the first batch of parachain auctions for Polkadot… Some projects apparently raised over 1 billion to secure the parachain slot. Will the next batch of parachain slots cost less per slot, due to increased number of slots?

Alan Vey: Most recently, the prices have been closer to $15 million, so we have already seen them come down significantly and it will be interesting to see the next one post the recent market turmoil.

5) Does Aventus intend to cover the cost of the parachain auction with their own funds, or will it involve raising funds?

Alan Vey: We will look to do strategic deals with partners and also do a crowdloan following the usual process that Polkadot offers for this, where stakers of DOT on our behalf are compensated in AVT fees.

6) Is there any chance of failing to secure a parachain slot?

Alan Vey: There is always a chance of failure, especially in an auction system where you cannot control who your competition is for a particular slot. But as the saying goes — if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again. We will only go for a parachain slot when we feel the probability of failure is as small as it can be with the community support.

7) Polkadot advertises a speed of 1,000 TPS. Will this mean that Aventus will be capable of 1,000 TPS on Polkadot, and 2,000 TPS on Ethereum?

Alan Vey: The transaction speed of Polkadot itself is not necessarily relevant for the speed of Aventus. This will be more relevant for the speed of communication between parachains.

8) Can you explain (to a beginner) how becoming a parachain will make Aventus interoperable? Can you give an example of what this will allow Aventus to do that other technologies cannot do?

Alan Vey: Being a parachain lets you talk to any other layer 1 parachains. This means all the people that are in the Polkadot ecosystem can receive and send messages to each other. Many of them are building bridges into existing layer 1s (like we have done for Ethereum) so you can see how this becomes a connected web of blockchains.

Question from Pazuro:

What is the reasoning for choosing to target Cardano as the next layer 1 to bridge?

Alan Vey: This has been put on halt in the favour of the parachain process first. We have a relationship with the right people at the top of Cardano but we will re-evaluate priorities once we have launched as a parachain and see how the market has evolved. If I had to pick today I would probably say Solana is the primary candidate right now.

Questions from Usagi:

1) How will Aventus attract developers to build on AVN? Will there be any incentives for early adopters?

Alan Vey: Yes, we are about to put forward our first grant to the community to vote on. Furthermore, we are putting live a section on our website announcing applications for grants being open with key areas we are interested in at the moment.

2) As a follow up to the previous question:

It’s sort of a multi-faceted question but would love to hear the Aventus team’s view on this. Does Aventus plan on hosting any hackathon-like events in the future to test AVN integrity/explore new DApp ideas? I know a hackathon was previously done internally and a DApp contest was held in 2017, so there seems to be some prior experience in doing this. If so, has Aventus ever looked into using platforms like Devfolio? Attaching a large prize reward would incentivize large turnout numbers and hopefully garner attention from people who are well suited to develop on AVN.

Alan Vey: Yes, hackathons are key to this, as are bounties. All of this will be rolled out as part of the move to open sourcing everything and having it completely community led.

Questions from Advoce8:

1) What are Aventus’ plans to onboard devs and teams onto the network?

Alan Vey: Mostly through what has been mentioned above and also by building a lot of supporting infrastructure and documentation around the AvN, making the developer experience as good as we can.

2) The recent focus has been on the launch of the gateway API. Has there been significant headway in onboarding transactions on the enterprise end? When can we expect an announcement in that regard?

Alan Vey: Yes, we have been focusing on moving our clients across to all be using the new features of the gateway API. All transactions are visible at explorer.aventus.io so you can watch the progress for yourself — we have done about 2.1 million transactions this month.

Questions from Blake:

1) Miner extractable valve (MEV) is a problem on Ethereum, causing traders or investors to lose value. From the Aventus technical Whitepaper it seems as though Aventus Network is MEV resistant in the form of value extraction by re-ordering as transactions are processed in a-first-come-first-serve basis. Is it true that no one can pay a higher transaction fee to jump the mempool queue?

Alan Vey: Maximal extractable value (MEV) refers to the maximum value that can be extracted from block production in excess of the standard block reward and gas fees by including, excluding, and changing the order of transactions in a block. Aventus Network does not permit that (transactions are ordered on the first come basis). To assure quality of service, clients can use gateway API, where we commit to the T&Cs of the service which prevent us from this and other questionable behaviour.

2) Is Aventus Network’s resistance to MEV in the form of value extraction by denial where a transaction relayer can decide to reject a transaction to replace it with their own, for their own gain?

In short, the consensus algorithm prevents it. A particular validator can try, but the rest of the validators will figure out the dodgy action, reject it and flag it — potentially leading to slashing. If it’s an RPC node then yes theoretically, but the user does not need to use someone else’s RPC node if they don’t accept the risk. They can instead use AVNGW or run their own (in the future) RPC node.

3) Aventus Network recently went to UAE through the London & Partners Programme in an attempt to make connections with the finance sector, mainly with the likes of: Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), National Bank of Fujairah, Emirates NDB, Digital Nexa. Have any new partnerships or further talks developed with the parties Aventus Network met in UAE?

Alan Vey: Yes, we developed two new main partnerships. We cannot mentioned exactly who yet, but one deal is with a business that deals with incorporation of entities in Dubai and their clients have been asking for NFT solutions, so they will be a reseller of Vere essentially. Another client that is looking at how NFTs can represent access rights / queries over datasets for more efficient trading.

Question from Sam Bell:

On the AVN, explorer rewards earned in 30 days is 634 AVT for 2 million transactions. How are the numbers calculated on the explorer?

Alan Vey: I am afraid I do not know the exact breakdown today on what the transactions are over the last month but I believe a majority is from Fruitlab on gaming. There have also been a lot of transactions into staking / some user-based transfers with the wallet and then other client activity.

Questions from Cuakjambi:

1) Listing on the right exchanges, especially major exchanges, helps to increase the token price and is a form of marketing. So where can we buy AVT tokens and what plans do you have for listing on major exchanges (DEX and CEX)?

Alan Vey: AVT is currently on Coinbase, gate.io, Uniswap, Hoo and Bittrex. We have two more major exchange launches happening when we go for our parachain slot.

2) Non-crypto users are very important for mainstream adoption. How are you planning to attract non-crypto users towards your project? Is there any upcoming partnership that will bring non-crypto users and real-use cases?

Alan Vey: We already have over 600k users on our gaming products and have processed millions of transactions in loyalty and ticketing. This is all with mostly beginner crypto audiences and we also have a lot of big announcements coming for NFTs partnerships too.

What next?

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