CyberMiles’ MainNet release livestream: Q&A
Published in
9 min readOct 29, 2018
Leading up to our recent MainNet release livestream, we asked you, CyberMiles communities around the world, to ask us anything — and questions you had! Responding to #AskCyberMiles questions are Dr. Lucas Lu and Dr. Michael Yuan, CyberMiles’ CEO and Chief Scientist, respectively.
- How will you prevent validators from colluding on compensation rate to get more reward paid from delegators?
Dr. Yuan: We should worry about the opposite problem: validators compete against each other by lowering their compensation rate, and, then they won’t be making enough money to maintain their IT operations — that is critical for the infrastructure behind CyberMiles. In that case, the validators may lose their security/technical standard and could be attacked by outside attackers, and CyberMiles’ blockchain could slash their staking and cause money loss for everybody. Validators compete against each other to aggressively lower their compensation rate for themselves to attract the delegators. The more delegators stake, the bigger the validators become. The current validators all start around 50 percent, but it will change. Let’s see. Not too high, not too low.
The compensation rate for our DPoS has been discussed already. If you look at EOS or another blockchain, they strictly prohibit the compensation to their delegators. You are not allowed to get compensation from the validators because “they need validators” to be compensated for the safety of the blockchain.
We design a marketplace, so we let our people decide how it should be. - When can we use CyberMiles Tokens (CMT) on the 5miles app?
Dr. Lu: This year. That will be exactly one year after CMT was born. - What are your 19 official Genesis Validators (Supernodes)?
Dr. Yuan: The list is on cybermiles.io. But actually, not all of them are online yet. When we’ve started the blockchain, there is a process. We get the blockchain started and we get the supernodes to join us. If you go to the CMT blockchain explorer, you’ll be able to see them. - When can we start to stake our CMT with the CMT Cube?
Dr. Lu: Right after the conference! - What is the number of transactions per second that your blockchain can manage?
Dr. Yuan: Easily 10,000 TPS, but those are simple transactions like those done on Ethereum. We have significant innovations that we’ve done from our Virtual Machine and that are impossible to make happen on Ethereum at the same speed. The question of TPS is actually misleading, which is only about coin transaction. The main feature of our blockchain is Smart Contracts and Virtual Machine, and the speed of smart contracts really depends on its complexity since they are so different from one to another. However, we’ve made some comparisons between CyberMiles Virtual Machine and Ethereum Virtual Machine, and our VM outperformed by 10,000 times the one from Ethereum. That was achieved by optimizing for specific application scenarios, and not only optimizing the “raw” TPS, which is for coin transactions. - When will we be able to use CMT to purchase NBA tickets?
Dr. Lu: Later this year, in December. - CyberMiles is 18,000 times faster than Ethereum? How does it work?
Dr. Yuan: We optimized our blockchain for different things compared to Ethereum. Ethereum wants to be the world computer. We also want to be a world computer but, we made deep optimization for e-commerce applications, for example. - If you load the Cube with 100,000 (max) CMT tokens, will there be room for your staking rewards? In other words, will the Cube hold more than 100,000 coins for storage? Only 100,000 can be staked?
Dr. Yuan: Yes. The CMT Cube is designed that your stake is 100,000, so you can still get the rewards that exceed that amount.
The Cube acts as a hardware wallet, so it can store more than 100,000 CMT. Only 100,000 can be staked for safety reasons. We are experiencing a brand new protocol. We want, at least for the first year, to make it safe. That is why we added this limition to the hardware so people can’t abuse the system. - If I got a Cube, and I will stake 90,000 and earn 15,000, I will exceed 100,000. What after that?
Dr. Yuan: These 15,000 will also be considered as staking, so, no problem, your Cube will still be working. - Purchase with CMT on Blocktonic or LightInTheBox — are there any other plans for CyberMiles to promote the use of CMT, other than ETH payback?
Dr. Lu: The payback is actually a test. I talked with the CEO of Blocktonic, and they will have a new release of their platform later this month. They may issue their own token called BTT on CyberMiles’ blockchain, and users will get rewarded in BTT — no more in ETH. - Re: Strategic partnership with Google, does this mean that it will be less decentralized than we expected?
Dr. Yuan: No! Let me explain why. If the entire blockchain was built on Google infrastructure, then yes, it would be less decentralized. But it’s not the nature of the partnership we have with Google. The relationship we have with Google is more of an R&D nature. It’s for us to take advantages of their super-infrastructure they have built, like Firewall, load balancer, etc. What we’ve done with Google is to put together a blueprint, so to speak, to find the best practices in blockchain that we share with our Supernodes, but they are still free to choose the servers they’d like. At least half of them are actually using a non-cloud server. However, they will be able to use the best practice that we defined with Google so they know how to set up a validator, not only in CyberMiles, but for all DPoS blockchains. We are going to have a case study that will be released soon, jointly. - Will the Google Cloud Platform fully replace Amazon Web Services?
Dr. Lu: No, it will not. GCP is different from AWS. Many e-commerce businesses and websites are using AWS because it was around earlier. Google has an advantage because Google Cloud has a cross-country connection function, and Google has an inclusive research team who works with us to see how we can use the best of their features on our blockchain. - Will there be other strategic partnerships with Korean corporations?
Dr. Yuan: We already have a Supernode in Korea. Bithumb has listed CMT, and Actwo is really interested in e-commerce. We have a lot of discussions with them, but we have nothing to disclose at this moment. So we already have a large presence in Korea. - Do 5miles and CyberMiles plan to replace the biggest second-hand marketplace in Korea? Or cooperate with businesses like Actwo?
Dr. Yuan: We are entering into a new era of e-commerce. The traditional e-commerce business is outdated. But we are not thinking about who is replacing whom, but we may be able to create a brand new way of operating e-commerce.
Dr. Lu: It’s not our intention even if we have the tools. Amazon is not just an upgrade of Walmart. Blockchain is not an upgrade of eBay or 5miles. But we hope that new kind of e-commerce, such as consumer-to-consumer, can take profit of our blockchain by establishing smart contracts, for example, for their businesses. If it happens in the future, then it’s a new world that awaits us. However, we do believe that the decentralized world will be the future. If developers are looking to create their DApps or projects on CyberMiles, they can contact us and we can help. - What is the next roadmap?
We have three different approaches:
1. We have to make sure the blockchain is running safely. So we work with our Supernodes, who are running the infrastructure to make sure the software is updated because it’s a brand new software. That’s our first priority.
2. We will continue innovating on the infrastructure of the blockchain ecosystem, like the Virtual Machine and see how it can be integrated with the DPoS protocol. We plan to grow a developer community for LibENI protocol that wbloe developed. So people can develop plugins for our VM. It’s a fact that it is really hard to contribute to a blockchain’s infrastructure (because of its complexity), but we have LibENI that facilitates that.
3. We need DApps on our blockchain, and have many that are lining up. We have ways and teams that are looking to issue a stable coin, a security coin, a utility coin, to create a decentralized exchange, and you will see them in the very near future. E-commerce platforms couldn’t run on Ethereum, or EOS. But thanks to CyberMiles’ blockchain, it is now possible. So we hope to help developers through hackathons, for instance, and different events in the near future. - Could you please explain how you plan to move the ecosystem from Ethereum to your platform?
Dr. Lu: We just launched the blockchain. So we want to make sure the blockchain is running smoothly as Dr. Yuan said. We will then focus on very important DApps the base of any blockchain platform, among them: ICO, exchanges, stable coins. We will start to work on these cases as prototypes on CyberMiles.
For the developers, we will help them to develop DApps on our blockchain. - Between the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China, how can CMT play a role as the first e-commerce blockchain?
Dr. Lu: Blockchain makes everything cheap[er], everything fast[er]. That will actually help the countries to go through this “fight.” It will help more people in cross-border businesses. - I’ve heard that you are planning to launch a stable coin. When will it be released, and based on what currency and features?
Dr. Yuan: We are planning to launch a stable coin that is quite different. We’ve seen a lot of stable coins on the existing exchanges. In the future, the biggest stable coins will be on e-commerce. A lot of people tried to add cryptos in e-commerce and failed. But in the end, they use fiat cause the cryptocurrencies are not stable enough. For e-commerce, a stable coin must exist for cross-border payments, for credit card payments. It’s a payment method is to reduce the fluctuation of a currency. that has to be stable for cross-border purposes. In a decentralized world, do we need a bank to watch the stable coins? I think it’s difficult — for USDT at least. Maybe we will have a new approach. Maybe Supernodes can act like oracles; that’s one approach. Another, far more interesting scenario: real-world products that people can really purchase can be an index for a stable coin. Because if you look at dollars or RenMinBi, it lost 99 percent of their value, and it’s because they are produced by their Central Banks. So to have a PPP as an index, that would be a stable coin for e-commerce. It’s a huge project so a lot of work needs to be done. We will need to do it step by step and be compliant with the all the laws, jurisdictions. So stay tuned! - What do you plan in order to grow your ecosystem?
Dr. Lu: We have two layers: developers, only if you have enough DApps, so people can truly experience the blockchain.
The second is how can we help e-commerce platforms grow their business. So the token economy is really important. We already work with several e-commerce platforms, small and large, and we help them to design an ecosystem, a token ecosystem, and token economy. If they are big enough, then it would be a very good example for other e-commerce business and hope they want to migrate to CyberMiles’ blockchain as well. - As CyberMiles, do you plan to build your own e-commerce platform?
Dr. Yuan: As a foundation (the CyberMiles Foundation), we help other people do that. We are focused on infrastructure and technology. - For those who missed the migration period, what can they do?
Dr. Yuan: If you have your private key, you have nothing to worry about. With that, you can access the MainNet (native) CMT. However, using the CMT Wallet will be the easiest way to migrate. Just make sure to keep your private key safe, never lose it and never share it with anyone.
