Jun 24, 2020
Ferrum Network — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — June 9
On Tuesday, June 9, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Ian Friend, COO of Ferrum Network.
We asked him questions about the development of Ferrum Network, currently ranked 354 on Coingecko.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
In this AMA, Ian Friend, COO of Ferrum Network, joined the GAINS community to tell us about his project.
Ferrum is building user-friendly crypto products designed to empower users and bring mass adoption.
Their exclusive product is Link Drop. It enables sending and receiving crypto using a link instead of sending directly to a wallet address. It means you can now send crypto to someone who doesn’t have a wallet address in advance.
The backbone of their project is a DAG-based interoperability network that can connect to any blockchain. Send and receive BTC in milliseconds for near-zero fees.
They started with user-facing apps such as First Kudi (their African exchange and payments app) and now UniFyre Wallet — a global non-custodial wallet with groundbreaking features like Link Drop technology.
Introduction
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Ian, can you tell us what you did before crypto, how you got into crypto, and if you’ve had any other venture in crypto previous to being involved with Ferrum Network?
A nice reminder for those who’ve haven’t seen our interview with Ian: https://youtu.be/cwpoRpY3U_I
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Hey everyone, first of all really happy to be here. I’ve actually known the GAINS team for nearly 2 years now, which is crazy to think about! I want to thank you guys for supporting FRM for as long as you have. It means a lot to me and the whole FRM community.
So, before crypto, I was practicing law in NYC. I got into crypto in early 2017 as an investor and quickly fell in love with nearly everything about the space. I decided to marry my profession with my passion and co-founded the Blockchain Practice Team at my then law firm. Shortly after I met Naiem at an event in NYC and we decided to team up. A few months later, we won a competition to pitch Ferrum on the main stage at Consensus 2018, and things took off from there.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Can you tell us what your role is at Ferrum Network and what the project is about in a few simple sentences?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Ferrum is building user-friendly crypto products designed to empower users and bring mass adoption. The backbone of our project is a DAG-based interoperability network that can connect to any blockchain, but we started with user-facing apps such as First Kudi (our African exchange and payments app) and now UniFyre Wallet — a global non-custodial wallet with groundbreaking features like Link Drop technology.
My role at Ferrum is really everything aside from the dev work. I help with marketing, community growth, biz dev, product testing, legal work, and probably much more that I am forgetting.
Product
Q — Twitter user @Animos24: What are the new features in the next update that can attract new users to Unifyre? Why should we choose to use Unifyre instead of well-known wallets like Trust wallet?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: UniFyre Wallet is a non-custodial wallet like Trust Wallet but with advanced features that solve major problems in the crypto space that no one else has solved.
It starts with Link Drop technology, which means the ability to send crypto using a link instead of sending directly to a wallet address. This is critical for two reasons.
1. It means you never have to worry about sending money to the wrong person because both sides need to confirm the transaction before it gets sent onchain.
2. It means you can now send crypto to someone who doesn’t have a wallet address in advance. This second part is huge for mass adoption because before our wallet, you literally could not send money to someone unless they were already in the crypto scene. This is one of the main reasons we have been stagnant for 2 years with not a lot of new people joining the revolution. So we are changing that with our wallet.
Q — Twitter user @Vyach235: What unique features is UniFyre Wallet endowed with in order to facilitate the user’s work, and what bonuses and rewards are there in UniFyre?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: That’s the other unique and valuable part of the UniFyre Wallet that no other non-custodial wallet can offer.
UniFyre Wallet does not list all the tokens at once. Instead, we do community listings and partnership listings to add tokens one at a time. But instead of taking those listing fees all to ourselves, we actually distribute those tokens to FRM holders.
Last week we listed VRA and LINK and sent out $33 worth of their tokens to everyone holding 100,000+ FRM in their UniFyre Wallet.
Today we announced the Ankr listing and will do the same with their tokens later this week.
Q — Twitter user @DustyLoooza: Staking Programs is a trend nowadays because of the passive income it brings. So, how does your staking 2.0 join this trend? What’s the unique feature in it?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Staking is another utility for the FRM token. Our staking is quite unique for a number of reasons.
1) We don’t restrict it to whales. Anyone holding a minimum of 5000 FRM can stake.
2) Our staking is diverse in that we offer many different staking options with various rewards and time lengths. For instance, we offered a 2 year staking an 85% reward (42.5% per year). This one sold out pretty much instantly.
We will offer another staking round through UniFyre Wallet at some point in the future.
Q — Telegram user Milton “Rockstar” Friedman: Why is the project called Ferrum? It sounds like iron, an essential chemical element in our lives and technology.
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Yes, Ferrum means iron in Latin. One unique property of iron is that other elements eventually fuse to it given enough time. This is similar to our network, which is an interoperability network and connects other networks together, in a sense fusing them together the way iron does to other elements.
Q — Telegram user Vlad Bond: What will be the minimum and maximum we can stake? And what average percentage return can we expect for this?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Last round of staking the minimum was 5000 FRM and there was no maximum (aside from the total size of the staking pool). The next round will be done through UniFyre Wallet and I expect the minimum to be similar. We might change the reward structure somewhat based on our learned experiences from staking 1.0 and 2.0. But in general people like long staking with higher rewards, and we always want to give our users what they want.
Q — Telegram user Nikhil gill: What’s the rationale for creating this staking platform? We’re used to hearing about staking for PoS systems to secure networks, but this isn’t the case, right?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: So we will have a more traditional staking system in place when the main net is launched, whereby those running nodes will receive a portion of FRM based on the number of transactions they confirm. But staking is in very high demand and we did not want to wait until the main net to deliver a staking product to our community. So after the ICO, we spent about 1 month building a staking smart contract and front end platform that allows anyone to stake through Metamask or Trust Wallet (next UniFyre Wallet). Again, we are all about bringing the people what they want.
Q — Telegram user 😎 Holder 😎: What killer feature does Ferrum Unifyre wallet gonna have other wallets don’t have?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Link Drops is the first killer feature that no one other wallet has. You can now send crypto using a link over any medium (like Telegram) and the participants don’t have to worry about whether they sent the money to the wrong person. This is a huge innovation because the traditional way of sending crypto meant you could easily send it to the wrong address and it would be gone forever.
Happened to this guy just the other day.
Q — Telegram user Pubudu Eranga: What is the relationship between Kudi Exchange and Ferrum Network? How is Ferrum able to keep fees at 0?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Ferrum co-owns First Kudi and we built the technology. Fees are not 0. There are standard fees for buying and selling crypto, and we charge people for the Kudi Bank Card which allows users to spend crypto anywhere debit cards are accepted. The 0 fees are achievable only when sending Naira to other Kudi users via Whats App or text message. This is because that part runs on a closed network and there are no miner fees to worry about.
Business Development
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: How do you make money compared to other wallet providers since that’s one less revenue stream (the listing fee that’s now given to holders), right?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: For one, we will eventually charge a small listing fee, but still, keep the same amount of Link Drops for the community. But the primary revenue stream will be the fiat gateway and later the P2P trading platform.
The P2P trading platform is actually another groundbreaking piece of Ferrum technology that will allow our users to buy/sell altcoins directly for fiat. Think Local Bitcoins but for ERC-20 tokens and instead of escrow, we use a smart contract to ensure both sides complete the transaction.
This means you will not have to go through expensive centralized exchanges like Coinbase to buy altcoins with fiat. You’ll be able to do it peer to peer like crypto was originally intended.
Q — Telegram user Infinite Crypto: What’s the main reason behind choosing African countries for Ferrum Network? Also, what response did you get from African users on Kudi Exchange as well as Ferrum Network?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Africa was a great continent to begin the Ferrum journey. We are building user-facing crypto apps for investment, payments, remittance, and other financial features. Crypto and alternative technologies are very popular in Nigeria, where we first launched the Kudi app. We now have thousands of users and a revenue-generating product that was even featured on the BBC so I am happy we started in Africa but now looking forward to global expansion through the UniFyre Wallet.
Q — Telegram user Joxes: I installed UnyFire, my question is if you plan to add other blockchains in the future and under what criteria?
What does the value of FRM represent, is it like a store of value, or by its use case?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: Currently, UniFyre Wallet is running on the Ethereum network, but we will add other chains soon like Bitcoin. Later, when the main net is out, users will have the option to run transactions on top of Ferrum Network rather than Ethereum or Bitcoin. This means the transactions will be much faster and cheaper than otherwise possible. But for now, we are adding BTC, and probably Binance Chain after that.
Q — Telegram user Pani Syanjaya: Technically Ferrum has great potential but something I don’t see that is addressed is your strategy for market penetration?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: We don’t think its realistic that we would build a blockchain and others would just flock to it. The fact is pretty much only people build on top of Ethereum and even the hugely well-capitalized projects like EOS have barely any meaningful traction. This is why we approached things the other way around. First, we built our own valuable products like First Kudi and UniFyre, and will later migrate those products on top of our network, thereby guaranteeing utility on day 1 of the main net launch.
Q — Telegram user David Gentzel: There are many projects based on DAG that have the same target with TPS but which key points make Ferrum Network more confident compared to competitors?
UnifyreWallet is a product of Ferrum Network. Could you share with me which special features it has to attract users using instead of using Ledger Nano S, Trezor, Keepkey…?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: the unique thing about our DAG is that it interoperates with other networks. Most DAGs are really good at sending their own tokens around fast and cheap. But ours works with BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB, etc. so you can send THOSE coins around fast and cheap. Imagine sending a BTC to someone in milliseconds for near-zero fees….that’s what Ferrum Network can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sib9T3-YuZw
Q — Telegram user Ama Hunter: How is the safety of your Unifyre wallet?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: We are very paranoid about security and built a number of advanced security features, such as a 24-word seed phrase back up and other layers of security. We recommend that all users back up their wallets before engaging in transactions and storage and have provided many different tutorials to help.
So the next year for Ferrum looks something like this. In the next week, we will integrate the first version of the fiat gateway into UniFyre Wallet which will allow you to buy crypto for fiat (USD, and other major fiats). Shortly after we will add the selling feature so you can sell BTC, ETH, and DAI for fiat. Then we will launch the P2P Trading platform so users can buy and sell altcoins directly for their local fiat currency directly from each other. This P2P platform is a huge opportunity for us because no one else is doing it and it has the power to transform the industry by taking away power from the CEXs and giving it back to the people. So we must get it right.
After that is complete we will finish the main net. It’s planned to be completed by the end of the year.
There’s a bunch of other small things planned this year as well like something we are calling Pool Drops (sending crypto in a link to many people at the same time).
That’s a particularly useful feature for AMAs, influencers, and the like because I could just generate a Pool Drop with 5000 FRM and distribute it to 100 people at once.
This has a full list of the Unifyre roadmap. Our goal is not to prematurely launch the main net just to get a quick token pump. Our main net must have users on it. And therefore, UniFyre must have users on it. So right now that is our priority, but I am 100% confident we will succeed, and eventually, the main net will come out and really blow people’s minds.
Q — Telegram user Blanca Sanchez: Regarding p2p trading, will there be any kind of support service in case of inconveniences? Will it be necessary?
A — Ian Friend from Ferrum Network: The P2P trading will have 24/7 support and a decentralized panel of judges in the case of disputes. However, the smart contract which is used to ensure both sides perform their end of the deal is designed such that disputes should not arise very often. In addition, there will be a user review system so you know if the seller and buyer have good reviews. It will look similar to Local Bitcoins in many respects, but more decentralized and for ERC-20 tokens and fiat.
Hey Ian, thanks a lot for coming in (again!) and telling us about Ferrum in general and the UniFyre wallet more specifically. The rewards are cool but what I’m really excited about is the link drop technology of course!
Curious to see how people will react to it when they experience it.
Alexandre R from GAINS
That’s all I have for now, but please join the Ferrum channels and download UniFyre Wallet so you can receive your rewards. Everyone who asked a question that I answered will get some FRM Link Dropped to them in PM!
The reactions have been amazing so far! Imagine not having to worry about sending crypto to the wrong person ever again… It’s a powerful feeling.
Ian Friend from Ferrum Network
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