Aaron McDonald AMA 29 September 2020

ODaily hosted an ‘Ask Me Anything’ with our CEO Aaron McDonald and asked him about DeFi, payments and users.

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You and your partners started to do blockchain technology application four years ago. I am wondering what the trend you saw at that time and what kind of ecological products you envisioned. Did you plan to start with payment applications at the beginning? What are the implementation process and important milestones?

I was exploring a couple of start-up business ideas in 2016, and during this period I discovered there were so many hurdles to building a successful start-up that I started trying to solve ‘how do you create an environment where start-ups have a greater chance of success’.

Around this time, I had a conversation with a friend in Zurich about the disruptive power of blockchains on existing economic models. I realised that decentralisation (enabled by blockchain) was the key ingredient to level the playing field and give those with big ideas the same opportunities as established corporates.

We also wanted to make sure that the technology worked for end-users, so you could provide both a platform for new business models but also for users, many projects forget about usability and we can’t have decentralisation without mass user participation.

Centrality has significantly evolved over the past 3 years. We’ve built the platform and core modules and we have over 25 ventures in our ecosystem. These projects span payments, DeFi, traditional finance, supply chain, greentech, retailtech, traveltech and medtech.

We successfully raised over $100m in funds and we have a very loyal community who has been with us since the beginning, we aren’t a pump project we have been building solidly through the bull and bear markets and our community is in control of over 80% of the tokens, with more than 50% of the supply already staked in our main net staking contract.

You mentioned that CENNZnet team has received a lot of funds from large investors. I wonder what attracted them investing in your company?

I think part of the attraction comes from our vision to create something totally unique.

CENNZnet is the first natively permissioned, public blockchain in the world. It provides superior and safe user experience out of the box and is capable of linking applications together to provide a better user experience.

Our in-chain core modules help developers to build new applications faster and as these core modules are built into the chain they provide superior user experience.

For example, our in-chain messaging protocol allows developers to build messaging right into their DApp and automatically connect with 500k existing accounts.

Our in-chain spot exchange and AMM with on-chain order book allows totally transparent trading with instant, trustless settlement.

Smart contracts can access the patent-pending doughnuts permissions framework to provide better usability and better user safety.

We have more than 500,000 accounts on our current pre-net and more than 100k monthly active DApp users, making CENNZnet one of the most active blockchain networks in the world.

Another thing that attracts people is our large and growing list of real-world partners, some of the most famous brands in the world are working with our ecosystem, they are real partnerships and paying customers not just hype.

Lastly, I think our community has seen we are here for the long term we are based in a trusted country and we have kept building in the market highs and lows to achieve our goals.

Except for Ripple (XRP) and Celo, most blockchain projects focus on business end-users. There are few projects that have made great progress in payment. Circle, the earliest star payment project, gained market share but didn’t get through. Does this demonstrate that it’s difficult to bring cryptocurrency into the field of consumer end-users?

This is a great question, I would say that almost no projects have really thought hard about end-users and mass adoption in terms of the design of their protocols, their token models and their network features.

If you don’t think about that you might get a lot of trader adoption, but not much end-user adoption.

We have been absolutely focused on that from the outset, every part of CENNZnet has been designed with end-users and usability in mind. When you think about the user experience for normal everyday people it’s hard to imagine how they will use the blockchain — they have to understand about private keys, and GAS etc, these are things the end-user shouldn’t need to worry about.

You also have to think about the full experience for the user. It’s not good enough to have a cool payments protocol, you have to make it easy to adopt by merchants. Pretty much every other payment token relies on the end merchant doing something different, new software or a new tablet or a new bank account etc. That really kills adoption.

That’s why we built Centrapay, to help close the gap for merchants to accept payments in digital assets. We now have over 250,000 integrated points of presence in Centrapay, making it one of the largest networks in the world.

What difficulties you have met and how did you overcome them?

Blockchain technology has the power to transform the way industries operate around the world, however, many blockchain companies are very technology-driven, or trading and fintech-centric. It’s too out-of-reach for the mainstream consumer who isn’t a ‘cyberpunk’.

CENNZnet was designed with users at its core. It’s focused on mass consumer use cases and increasing the general population’s access to the blockchain, beyond simple currency use cases. It takes a human-centric approach that allows users to seamlessly move between applications.

In fact, the user experience using one of the DApps in our ecosystem should look and feel the same as any standard app on the market (but better of course because it’s decentralised!).

We had to try 3 times to get the technology and protocol right so that it achieved our goals of being usable for everyday people. It was hard to do a lot of work and then start again, but I’m really glad we stuck to our plan and achieved the result in the end.

Because of our focus on user experience and adoption we’re already hosting one of the fastest-growing and most active DApps in the world, with more daily and monthly active DApp users than many networks in the top 20.

Because we are a real team, we don’t hype. We always build before we talk about it. It can sometimes take a bit longer for people to realise how different and special we are when they are bombed every day with some new promise and hype. So that’s why we need your help to spread the word and tell people about CENNZnet and all the cool things that make us different.

At present, what is the logic of the payment business of Centrality? Can you tell us about the process of payment with cryptocurrency?

Centrality isn’t specifically a payment company, we have built CENNZnet to be a user-friendly DApp platform. It contains all the common services you might find in a consumer application already in the core, like identity, messaging, payments etc. Kind of like how WeChat has a framework and developers can just link into all their existing services to build on top of.

Of course, payments are very important as part of the consumer application experience, which is why we built the Centrapay platform; to connect the blockchain with the real world.

In June Centrapay, signed an agreement with Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) in Australia and New Zealand to give users the option to use their Sylo Smart Wallet to use cryptocurrency to pay for items across CocaCola’s vending network.

Now, Coca-Cola Amatil’s technology investment platform, Amatil X, has made an investment in Centrapay. The investment will accelerate integration with point of sale and payment terminals, enable brands to connect more directly with their consumers and drive more innovation in payments and value exchange.

This is one of many major payment integrations with the Centrapay platform and we look forward to announcing more soon.

Are there any achievements so far that you want to share with us? For example, the usage rate of the payment terminal, user scale, etc.

I think the main thing right now to focus on is the number of terminal endpoints we are enabling. This is the egg before the chicken, first, you build the network, then you build the use cases, then you increase the usage. Centrapay has one of the largest integrated networks in the world with more than 250,000 endpoints.

Can you introduce the total amount, distribution and existing circulation of the two tokens of the platform, CENNZ and CPAY, and what scenarios can they be used in?

1,200,000,000 CENNZ tokens were minted and more than 80% were distributed to the community with the remaining for marketing and founder activity. We know that about 15% have been lost, so the total circulating supply is lower than this and we have more than 600,000,000 tokens locked in the mainnet staking contract.

CENNZ is a staking token; it can increase in value without impacting the cost of using the network. The demand for CENNZ will increase as more users join the CENNZnet network and generate more activity in the form of transactions.

Staking your CENNZ enables you to participate in the network consensus by securing and governing the network. It also provides you with block rewards in the form of our fee token, CPAY. Staking CENNZ produces a reward yield in CPAY tokens.

There are currently 16,000,000 CPAY in circulation. CPAY works like gas in the network and will be used for transaction fees and block reward payments for stakers.

It’s designed to be algorithmically stable, so developers can easily predict the cost of their application, and stakers can easily predict the value of their stake. CPAY will initially be tradable on the CENNZX exchange or can be transferred directly between wallets.

As an algorithmic stablecoin, how does CPAY maintain stability? What are the differences compared to other algorithmic stablecoins on the market? In other words, what problems can it solve for other stablecoins?

In congested blockchain networks today, the costs of transactions are volatile and subject to change at any time, which makes it hard for DApp developers to plan ahead or create interesting customer models like ‘fee-free’, for example. If the network gets congested for reasons outside the developer’s control, the cost of running their app goes up.

It’s silly to think that a scalable blockchain with everyday users will have highly variable fees. That won’t appeal to the vast majority of developers, entrepreneurs or users. Imagine if the cost of my Netflix subscription (which is hosted with AWS) went up when the Amazon share price goes up. That’s effectively what networks like Ethereum have with their capital asset and fee asset being the same.

It’s important to strike a balance between optimising for the usage of the network and preventing attacks.

The stability of the CPAY is achieved by controlling the rate that they are minted and burned relative to the network activity and demand for GAS. The tokens are burned when they are spent. CPAY tokens are minted when new blocks are created and the new CPAY tokens are allocated as block rewards. This is what helps keep the price stable.

What products can users use on CENNZnet? Are these products developed by an official team or a third-party team?

There is a range of open-source protocols in the CENNZnet toolkit that developers can use to build their decentralised app.

The Doughnut protocol supports sensitive data privacy use cases with permissioning and access control schemes using digital certificates that are independent of central servers.

Generic Asset protocol enables CENNZnet’s multicurrency economy natively. Different asset types, properties and operations are defined with Generic Asset protocol.

CENNZnet Attestations protocol provides on-chain claim registry for digital identity use cases. This allows personal data to be protected to reduce security risks.

The CENNZX Spot exchange enables seamless fee payment experience on CENNZnet and makes token exchange instant and easy. The CENNZX Spot exchange eliminates rent extraction and centralised services while prioritising decentralisation, usability and security.

The SYLO messaging protocol allows applications to provide messaging, contacts, groups and storage. SYLO Super DApp allows developers to build MINI DApps that can interact with hundreds of thousands of existing users.

Centrapay connects applications to real-world payment rails in over 250,000 retail locations around the world.

Third-party developers can build a range of applications on our network or connect with existing protocols and projects to integrate their idea into the existing user ecosystem.

What is Centrality’s planning for the coming year? What is the focus? (Products design, users and markets expansion, etc.)

The next important step is to enable public staking on CENNZnet this will unlock staking rewards and allow our community to participate in network governance.

In addition to this, we want to continue to grow our active user base. Already we have one of the most active DApp user based on blockchain, with 10x the monthly active DApp users of popular networks in CMC top 10. This is not just “active accounts” or “active holders”, which are easy to fake, these are real DApp users like Sylo!

On our current path, we will have over 1 million active monthly DApp users by the end of the year. That’s huge in crypto!

On top of this, we will continue to improve our technology. Already our patent-pending Doughnut protocol allows developers on CENNZnet to develop more advanced, safer, more user-friendly DApps than any other blockchain but we have a whole range of new improvements to the protocol to allow even more performance as we scale our user base.

CENNZnet is built using the https://www.poweredbyplug.com/ framework.

This is a fork of Substrate (Polkadot), but with a number of big enhancements to enable smarter DeFi apps, better UX, more scaling and more suitability for enterprise environments.

This framework has a lot more exciting upgrades coming too, which we will take into CENNZnet.

The great news is that new token holders are still able to join us before the world knows the true potential of our ecosystem.

3 questions from participants:

Compared with Ethereum platform, what are the advantages of CENNZnet public chain in Defi?

Great question. I think the CENNZnet network offers some distinct advantages for fintech and DeFi projects.

1. We have higher performance on the network so can handle much higher demand
2. We have a more predictable fee economy, so developers and users don’t get surprised by large GAS swings
3. Our permissions protocol, Doughnuts allows developers to build more user friendly, safer and more privacy-conscious applications
4. Our Doughnuts protocol allows you to carry out smart contract and trading transactions off-chain with built-in on-chain enforcement and delegation, reducing issues like front running
5. Our built-in AMM means you can create liquidity easily
6. Our fee exchange means you can onboard users in your own native token and they don’t have to understand how GAS works in the network.

A lot of people think that the current boom of Defi is over. The relevant token cycle is very short, and the crashes keep going on. But you are just about to start. What do you think about it?

DeFi is definitely not over. Yes, there was a bit of hype, but this is not like the ICO boom. These are much more sustainable projects that are getting real interest from new sophisticated market players. It’s only just beginning really. But it’s important to make sure you do good research and look for teams that have a track record of building and working for their community.

What are the private placement price, offering price and current price of CENNZ, and how much has it increased compared with the initial price? Which exchanges are listing it?

At our TGE in January 2018 CENNZ tokens were exchanged for ETH. The price in the smart contract was set at 11507 CENNZ for one ETH, with all available CENNZ sold out within 6 minutes! The current price is 5922 CENNZ for one ETH or 194% of the original price. CENNZ is currently it is listed in ZB.com, HitBtc, MXC, and Bithumb and we are working with more exchanges to help CENNZNet reach a far wider fan base.

The CENNZ price has been fairly stable over the last few years as we have been building our technology, creating our awesome DApp ecosystem and onboarding new users. But now, with the launch of the mainnet, staking and new projects, it’s ready to rise! Keep in mind CENNZnet has a lower price compared to many coins who have less users, less technology and fewer partnerships.