CEO Aaron McDonald answers questions from the Vietnamese community
Aaron McDonald, Centrality CEO, answers questions from the Bigcoin Vietnam community about Centrality ecosystem.
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Mainstream adoption is one of the key goals of any blockchain project. How does Centrality ensure its technology is present in daily life?
The last few years have seen blockchain development focus on the blockchain itself, the infrastructure rather than the users. Just like the early Internet, this has limited adoption as anyone who has tried to navigate a blockchain project’s website or white paper will testify. As focus turns to use cases and encouraging participation, blockchain projects will be competing to ensure the user experience is simple, seamless and more mobile. Centrality has been focused on this from day 1.
Our ecosystem was designed with users at heart. It’s focused on mass consumer use cases and increasing the general population’s access to the blockchain, beyond simple currency use cases like Bitcoin. We believe the future of blockchain is in useful applications you can use every day, across your life.
We already have over 400k people actively using applications in our ecosystem. The most popular DApp at the moment is Sylo — a messaging, voice and video and smart wallet application, which has recently launched to app stores and got more than 100,000 downloads. To put that in perspective just one of our DApps has 20x more monthly active users than the most popular DApp on Dappradar.com and we add more active users every week than the top 10 DApps on Ethereum combined.
While technology alone isn’t enough to create the type of adoption we want to see, it's important to bring new technology that helps solve those usability issues. Our patent-pending “Doughnut” protocol allows users to seamlessly manage multiple accounts and DApps between different blockchain networks. Using the rich in chain permissions framework we can solve many notoriously unfriendly user experiences while enabling complex use cases for business partners.
What is Centrality incentive mechanism and advantages to encourage every developer, business and start-up come to your platform?
The biggest incentive for developers will be wanting to build where the users are. Because our real DApp users are growing so fast, building a new DApp on our network can reach a big audience. Users are the most important metric for blockchain in the next year and CENNZnet is growing faster than anyone else.
We are focused on enabling developers to build mini DApps in Sylo, as we don’t think consumers want to download lots of different DApps onto their phone, it really doesn’t make sense compared to how we use regular apps, so our advantage will be the high number of users you can access through the network.
Developers will also find all the common services they need for applications have already been built into Centrality network’s core, e.g. identity, exchange, payments, communications, etc. so that they don’t need to build those contracts from the scratch and can focus on the things that make their own DApp or mini DApp unique.
One of the biggest problems with DApps is the inactive and useless state. People just create DApps that have no use cases and do not contribute to the blockchain ecosystem. How will the Centrality team prevent and resolve this problem?
It’s true that most DApps have no users, and even the ones which have some users are mostly trading games or decentralised exchanges. It’s terrible that this is the state of things. Imagine a network like EOS worth several billion dollars and its best apps are basically gambling.
Centrality is very careful to ensure we promote Dapps which can really benefit from blockchain technology, so we are focused on making a smaller number of DApps very successful. Blockchains are very good for a small number of things and if you find something that users value which is also a core property of blockchains then you have success. That’s why we are so excited about Sylo as it has a real use case, private messaging, storage and backups not controlled by any one central server or server owner.
The top 3 issues with blockchain are a combination of slow transaction speed, high costs and insufficient liquidity. So how does Centrality solve these problems?
We are focused on making sure that only the things which really matter are done on chain. There are a lot of ways to decentralise technology and blockchains are one of those things, we develop new protocols to allow a lot of the work to be done off-chain (like doughnuts). So only the really important parts happen on chain which significantly improves overall performance.
We developed a new type of token staking reward model which helps keep fees low while incentivising infrastructure providers to grow the network.
I would add that those problems in the question are important but there should be a 4th and that’s usability.
DeFi in recent time appears with all projects and technologies. What is your view about DeFi in market space and how will Centrality.ai be suitable with DeFi in future?
DeFi is an interesting experiment at the moment, but I’m not convinced it will exist in the future in its current form. People need to understand we live in a real physical world with regulations and laws.
However, blockchains are very useful for solving some big market and corporate problems in the banking sector and we are actively working with banks around the world to solve these problems using our technology. I think that’s where the real benefits will come for users, new types of banks with better user experiences and lower cost bases will emerge.
How does Centrality make sure personal data is secured and doesn’t leak?
Users are always in control of their data, CENNZnet has a protocol called doughnuts which allows developers to build deep permissions into their Dapp so you can be specific about what data you share with what parties and for what period of time.
Sylo allows users to be in control of how they store and share content and we have a new API coming shortly for data preferences and metadata sharing.
What is the role and value of centrapay in the Centrality ecosystem?
CENNZnet has a two token economy, we designed it so that the capital asset CENNZ could go up in value without impacting the cost of using the network via the CPAY token. So CPAY works like GAS in the network and is designed to be algorithmically stable so that developers can easily predict the cost of their application and stakers can easily predict the value of their stake. Many networks with a single token economy lack this separation which leads to unpredictable costs to use an application. That’s a silly model and every day users don’t tolerate it in non-blockchain apps, why we should be in our blockchain ones.
We also have the Centrapay service which allows connectivity to digital assets on CENNZnet to be redeemed in the physical world, we pre-connect to merchants, vending machines, POS systems, etc., so DApp developers don’t need to do all that work themselves to find a way to transact in the real world.
What are the ways that Centrality.ai generates profits/revenue and what is its revenue model?
Centrality has 3 lines of business:
1. Making our token successful helps us, we are a big CENNZ holder and so the more valuable the CENNZ asset is the better for us all.
2. We have an enterprise business that helps big companies leverage our technology.
3. We invest in promising startups that have been increasing in value. All of this is done to make CENNZ sustainable into the future.
What is your next big milestone that all community members should pay attention to?
The biggest milestone we’ve been working towards this year is main net launch and move to public staking. Our token holders will be able to stake their tokens into the network and start earning real block rewards. We will achieve the first DApp with over 1 million active users next year and launch more than 5 partnerships with Fortune 500 companies.
