Recap on Community Discussion #1: 02/02/2020

Paul Nattapatsiri

Published in

Band Protocol

8 min readFeb 7, 2020

Participants:

Soravis Sriniwakoon CEO- Band Protocol
Sorawit Suriyakarn CTO- Band Protocol

Veer Singh: Before we start the discussion. Soravis, could you brief us on the latest announcement on the Alpha release of Band protocol 2.0?

Soravis S: If you have been following us, oracle space has been rapidly developed and talked about in crypto space. There are many requirements when we talk to our partners who require oracle usages. It requires a lot of flexibility which we did not factor in our original design. So after many feedback sessions and iterations, we decide to incorporate all of this into our updated mainnet — which was originally planned in Q3.

So there will be an updated technical architecture as well as new token economics when it comes to staking.

Similar to how Synthetix pivoted with new updated token economics after learning a few months of launching, we take a lot of feedback from our users and want to make sure new design and token economics make sense for every stakeholder.

Question1:

Kyurrr: What will happen to XFN when you launch Mainnet?

Soravis S: Good question — there will be an article to explain this soon along with the updated token economics. To give you some pointer, there will be a way to phase it into our new main-net.

Question2:

Xinha: Could you explain the new staking model and reward mechanism? what change can we expect from the current model?

Sorawit: For Band Protocol 2.0, we are currently focusing primarily on blockchain architecture (consensus layer, message types, user interaction). On the economic side, we will be posting follow-up articles on staking detail and reward mechanism in the upcoming weeks. It will be different from what currently on Ethereum since the next iteration of Band will support multiple blockchains (as outlined since last year).

Question3:

Are you guys still working on Band? Last month Band has only 1 single announcement

Soravis S: The number of announcements does not correlate with actual activities as we mentioned many times. If you want to follow us closely, I suggest you check out our GitHub at github.com/bandprotocol where we have daily commit. Also if you read our recent announcements, we have stated that our direction for the past 2 months and going forward will be the new band chain which will take time to develope, audit, and launch. This is actually one of the big progress and turning point of the project as well.

Question4:

Steve: Will the return on staking remain the same or changed?

Soravis S: The return will be algorithmically adjusted based on the staking ratio — this is to incentivize more participants. The exact amount will be detailed later in a separate blog post but we will make sure it’s much easier for our stakeholders and ecosystem to support staking.

Question5:

Mike Chan: Why did Band choose D3N and not other blockchains?

Soravis S: D3N is just a new name we give to our oracle network. This will be built based on the cosmos with full interoperability to other blockchains in mind. You can check out our tech spec here: https://github.com/bandprotocol/d3n/tree/master/spec

Question6:

Bert: Why did Band choose to have new token Economics?

Soravis S: We have learned from our data users.

For example, many of them prefer not to pay to use data directly due to complications to code and usages. New token economics will allow our partners to utilize our data without direct payment but still accrue value to our network.

Question7:

Alex: Are there plans for burning some team tokens? I have seen other teams doing that? Also, when we can expect the execution of the ambassador program?

Soravis S: There is no plan to direct burn team token at the moment, we don’t see the point for a year anyways since all of them are locked. We also don’t see good benefits to that if you observe what happened to Stellar. With that said, we are always on the lookout for ideas. Right now, we believe the best course of action is to update token economics and tech to drive value to accrue and encourage more staking as you see with the rebranding of Havven to Synthetix for example.

Question8:

Mike chan: Can the team lower the ambassador program token holdings? It is expensive.

Soravis S: Understood, we will take this into account. Re: ambassador program, we expect to kickstart this full gear by this month. Apology for the delay to the community — we have paused since we need to get all of our future spec and roadmap out first before somebody can truly represent us.

Question9:

Jarlord: When will you release the new Mainnet launch date?

Sorawit: We will be announcing test-net release dates in a few weeks. We have already released what we call “alpha-net” that people can start testing. For Main-net, it’s a bit tricky to predict since it will also depend on the result of test-net too. We will keep it transparent and inform everyone as information becomes available!

Soravis S: When we are closer to the launch date but it’s not too far away. One thing we have learned in the past few months is that announcing things way in advance does not generate enough attention and action. We will keep the time long enough for our community to take actions though

Question10:

Prachaya Tong: I hope current XFN holders do not have a disadvantage from the transition to a new chain.

Soravis S: Regarding XFN, we will make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible — the team is working hard on this and will make the announcement on how to transition really soon. We will never make a decision that jeopardize token holders unfairly.

Question11:

Pratik: What are you guys focussing on? It’s been a long time we didn’t see any announcement.

Sorawit: We are focusing on protocol development, again development activity can be seen on Github. https://github.com/bandprotocol/d3n.

Question12:

Alex: Are Venture investors able to provide additional capital if needed?

Soravis S: Yes for sure. With that said, we have a long runway to sustain Band Protocol as outlined in Binance research. We are quite comfortable with the runway and will make sure we always have an adequate runway to get to our goal.

Question13:

Mr. Help: In the future, will Band partner with google, apple, Alibaba … or some big tech corporation?

Soravis S: as we have outlined in our post, one of the main reasons why we rush out D3N (aka band chain) earlier than expected is precisely so that we can work more closely and answer the need of enterprise usages. So yes, we are working on that.

Question14:

Lois Lane: I know it’s inappropriate to ask for listing procedures here, but really is there a reason the team hasn’t looked at other listings? It’s fishy.

Soravis S: We are looking for ways to always improve liquidity and channels to buy BAND tokens. You will only hear from us when it happens because this is very sensitive from both price and legal perspective.

Question15:

Xinha: Could you explain about your partnership with Wanchain? Will it be effected after moving to a new blockchain?

Soravis S: Nope, in fact, we are consistently taking on integration and figuring out the first few use cases that we are supporting. A few of these Dapps will be moved to production soon. I would suggest you look at FinNexus also — very interesting development.

Question16:

Claure: Has anyone been selected as an Ambassador for Band?

Soravis S: Yes, we have already reached out to the selected few. But as someone pointed out, we may lower the barrier of BAND holding and allow more ambassadors in.

Question17:

Marat Ismagilov: The token price is much lower than the seed price. Are the seed investors not concerned about this? Are you concerned about the current token price?

Soravis S: Sorry I do not comment on price but I can comment on investors since I’m always in constant discussion. The answer is “No” since they always know this is a multi-year journey. Funds invest with 5–10 years horizon, not months.

Question18:

Claure: In layman’s terms can you tell us the advantages of this new model? Also, can there be some level of marketing, a good product needs a good Marketing!

Sorawit: Most importantly, the model supports data queries from multiple blockchains through bridges (inter-blockchain communication), so data can be passed to all other blockchains: Ethereum, Matic, EOS, ICON, you name it. It also lowers the cost and allows more data providers as we are moving to our own blockchain that has higher performance.

Question19:

Alex: How is the current communication with Binance? Are you guys still close to them? Is there any chance to perhaps collaborate in any marketing/trading activities? Is Binance able to support BAND in terms of community engagement, community growth hacking, etc.?

Soravis S: This is a bit sensitive topic but yes we are always working with Binance — it’s not a one-time engagement and they do aim to support their ecosystem (Which we pretty much are ingrained into, if you consider everything including launchpad, listing, Binance chain, shared event, etc.). There will be many more this year.

Question20:

Hoso: You(Band) have organized an AMA session that is very rewarding and received a lot of questions related to utilities and technology, future vision, …

So now I want to ask what do you want to receive from the community?

Soravis S: We just want to engage the community and hear from you guys! We are always here to answer questions but I know during quiet time, people don’t take time to read through all of our announcements (as evident here) so we think we will take some time off to talk directly here.

Question21:

James “Normalin”: I just checked Bitswing Band protocol’s Dapp. Looks pretty Dead!

Soravis S: Actually by ‘Dapp’ standard, we are doing okay. Jokes aside, there will be more Dapps, hackathon, dev events to bring more integrations and product to market.

James “Normalin”: Did Band connect(Partner with) any DeFi guys?

Soravis S: As we mentioned before, we are in touch with most, if not all, Defi projects. I would encourage you to look at our latest announcement to see what is going on with our new main-net. which will give a lot of clues to what we are planning to do in the future and the distinction between current and future oracle

Anyways, thank you very much guys for the session — very lively and more turnout than I expect for the first session to be honest!

About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a decentralized oracle framework for Web3.0 applications. Band Protocol connects smart contracts with trusted off-chain information, provided through community-curated oracle data providers. Blockchains are enabled to connect to any web API with assured data integrity through dPoS economic incentives through one simple function call. Developers using Band Protocol will be able to easily build and manage off-chain oracles, reputation scores, identity management systems and much more.