Nervos— Telegram QUIZ & AMA — June 27
On Saturday, June 27, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Matt Quinn, member of the community operations team of Nervos Network.
We asked him questions about the development of Nervos Network, currently ranked 72 at CoinMarketCap.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
Nervos is a system that connects people and businesses to move digital money. It allows any crypto-asset to be stored with the security, immutability and permissionless nature of Bitcoin while enabling smart contracts and layer 2 scaling.
The native token “CKB” entitles an owner to a byte of storage on the blockchain, so, as adoption increases, more users will need CKB to store data on-chain. This creates sustainable supply/demand dynamics for the token.
Nervos is a platform designed to support Layer 2 solutions, currently sidechain implementations, a payment channel network, and support for zero-knowledge primitives to build zk rollup and other similar designs.
Nervos is built on 3 pillars: a strong developer and technical foundation, Business Development and securing high-value partnerships, and building a tight community.
Introduction
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Matt, 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 Nervos?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Sure thing! I got started as a consultant working on financial systems for large organizations, I worked on New York City’s main financial system, a manufacturing/budgeting system for Apple and some stuff in the entertainment space around royalty accounting and distribution.
Bitcoin caught my eye as a way to enable new kinds of commerce and business models online and generally a better system to keep lots of people in sync on the information contained in a shared financial system.
I started an Ethereum meetup in SF. We did some great events and taught a lot of people Solidity. Then I co-founded a blockchain coworking space called Starfish Mission, That’s actually where I learned about Nervos.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Nice, so you got to put the Apple logo when it was FOMO time and everyone involved in a crypto project wanted to show how they had experience in other big companies like Facebook and Google lol
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Ha, I think it did help to have the blend.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Cool stuff. How active is the SF ecosystem in crypto/blockchain?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: We would talk a lot if SF was the top city or if it was Berlin. I think SF had the most vibrant ecosystem, from 2017–2018 so many people jumped ship to start startups in the space. I think it’s why you see a lot of the new chains emulating cloud and other kinds of distributed system kind of designs.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Can you tell us what your role is at Nervos and what the project is about in a few simple sentences?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Yep, I’m part of the community operations team, we interface with all of the stakeholders of the project, we’re focused on getting more people involved, informed, and creating synergy between different teams engaged on the project, like helping grant teams connect with other teams in the community that they could work with to push things forward for Nervos. It’s a community-driven project to build a unique way of approaching a “next-generation” blockchain.
The idea is to stick with proven blockchain concepts, like proof of work and single-chain architecture, optimize them as much as possible for throughput and flexibility, and then pursue scaling through Layer 2 solutions (similar to the BTC approach), like channels, sidechains and all of the exciting research that is going on in the space
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Okay, that’s quite simple, I like it. You could say you’re competing with BTC then?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: I don’t think anyone wants to compete with BTC! We were playing around with the phrase “better bitcoin” at some point, but we’re really just paving our own way. It really has been a source of a lot of lessons for us. We want to have a lot of the positives of Bitcoin and have a lot more flexibility.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Yeah, I guess that’s some interesting marketing decision. It can catch people’s interest but also deter others who will think: who are these guys to say that? lol
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Exactly. It’s hard to take shots at the king, and honestly, BTC does what it does really well. Just to do more, it requires a lot of engineering around its limitations.
Q — Telegram user Gurdeep: Can you explain what Nervos Network is, and what it aims to achieve, in simple terms?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: It’s a system that connects people and businesses to move digital money.
Q — Telegram user Tukai Hasan: What are your thoughts on DeFi? Is the hype temporary or does it have the fuel to grow real big?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: DeFi is getting a lot of hype these days, it is valuable to research around these mechanisms which is good for the industry but it still seems like CeFI is leading.
Product
Q — Twitter user Kazim: If you summarize the Nervos project in one word, what would it be? What are the core features that create the value of Nervos? Can you share some highlights from them?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: I’m going to go with “sustainable”. The blockchain has been engineered to support internet-scale solutions on top of it without changes to underlying blockchain and incentives are in place to keep the system operating as intended.
The native token “CKB ‘’ entitles an owner to a byte of storage on the blockchain, so, as adoption increases, more users will need CKB to store data on-chain. This creates sustainable supply/demand dynamics for the token and also creates an economic security model (like BTC).
Nervos constrains the size of the blockchain state, moves the majority of transactions off-chain, and uses economic incentives to encourage responsible use of the chain and always provides a block reward to miners. With this design, the network and its infrastructure can remain decentralized, users can verify chain history and sync with consumer-grade hardware.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Interesting. How many bytes of data are stored on the Nervos blockchain right now?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: It’s probably in the hundreds of megabytes, I’m not sure on the exact amount in the state right now. A cool thing about this is, if you own the space, you can deploy a good amount of data to it. We were looking at deploying a virtual machine to run the javascript code, which I think was about 5 or 600kb.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Interesting. Code on the blockchain that would run something else?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Exactly, the virtual machine is very low level, you can even run a VM on top of the VM. There’s a project right now to be able to run EVM code on Nervos.
Q — Twitter user Vladamir Smirnov: What’s the story behind Nervos’ success? What was that vision when it first emerged as an idea? Are there any special prototypes or upcoming NERVOS updates that you want to show/share with us?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Nervos really began with a different design decision for smart contract platforms. Nervos uses the “cell model”, inspired by Bitcoin’s UTXO model as opposed to the popular “account model” used by smart contract platforms. It has lots of implications, for scalability, security, and flexibility. Transactions can be processed in parallel without sharding. Users have full control over their assets (not smart contracts).
The project attracted a number of world-class researchers and engineers, and additional innovations such as CKB VM, NC-Max, and the economic model were added to the project. Each one of these is a conversation of its own. The co-founders have deep roots in Ethereum and other crypto communities and this has provided a great deal of support to the project on the research and operational side.
From the start of the project, it’s been community-driven, to me this is one of its greatest differentiators.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Does that mean the community has a say in how things go? Can token holders vote on proposals?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: That is the intention, there is the Nervos DAO, which right now only serves an economic function but it is possible that voting structures can be built on top of it. There’s a community fund that is being burned right now, once the foundation’s ecosystem fund is exhausted, the community can hard fork to turn on that fund and then vote for dispersing it for ongoing maintenance and development.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: What is the current transactions per second btw?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: It’s a tricky question. We haven’t really seen the mainnet pushed yet, and we can do like a 1->1000 transaction. I know people are used to hearing “10,000 TPS” and things like that, the answer I give is “hundreds’’ because Nervos is designed to be on the lower end of throughput at the base layer.
Q — Telegram user Dr John: Why is the ticker $CKB and not NER or NVS?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: CKB is ‘common knowledge byte’, 1 byte of state storage.
Technology
Q — Telegram user Serg: What are the benefits for developers of the CKB-VM virtual machine? What is the security and performance of the environment?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: CKB VM is very low level, developers can use any programming language that compiles to RISC-V
Q — Telegram user Siwi Taetae: Any articles about stateful apps in cells? in the CKB model, does any confirmed tx reading a cell kill the cell?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: If a cell is used in a transaction, it is consumed, similar to UTXO, you can do read of cells into a transaction, similar to a code library
Q — Telegram user LOL Crypto: Seems many projects are offering layer 2 scalable solutions e.g. MATIC. So, how is Nervos different from the others? What competitive advantage do you have? What layer 2 solutions are you targeting first?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Nervos is a platform designed to support Layer 2 solutions, currently sidechain implementations, a payment channel network, and support for zero-knowledge primitives to build zk rollup and other designs like that.
Q — Telegram user Rimjhim: Many projects are choosing efficient protocols like PoS instead of that you guys chose PoW, why?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: PoW is proven, it has been running for 10+ years with no real attacks, PoS is still very much in the R&D phase.
Q — Telegram user Omaha99: How many CKBytes will I earn from locking in Nervos DAO?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: you can check on NervosDAO for current stats
Q — Telegram user Sazzad Al Sephad: What is RISC-V technology and how important is this technology in the Nervos Network & please explain in short how it works.
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: RISC-V is a computing instruction set, it’s the language that a processor speaks. This makes CKB VM very low level and allows for developers to create any application without needing to hard fork to add additional computer instructions for different capabilities.
Q — Telegram user Hermawan | Trader✓: How do CKB machines manage the off-chain transactions and how do they keep the balance between the off-chain and on-chain data?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Users store the off-chain data, they can move it on-chain when necessary
Business Development
Q — Twitter user sEf: Competition in the crypto ecosystem is wild. What marketing strategy is in place to attract users and investors in the long term? How does Nervos plan on achieving this strategy given the fact that there are a lot of competitors out there?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: This is about the hardest question anyone is going to get in this space. The amount of competition in the industry is such a unique situation. In my opinion, building a strong community that is bought into the vision of the network and willing to build for the long term is the only way.
We’ve seen so many projects make a big splash then quickly fade. I thought about it and I think there are 3 components in the way we are approaching it
1) It all starts with developer experience
Nervos has been engineered to conform to industry standards, such as the RISC-V virtual machine, ensuring that a broad base of familiar tooling is available to developers. We are just about ready to roll out smart contracts in Rust, which has been consistently voted as a developer's favorite programming language. With industry standards, devs get to use what they’re used to and the project doesn’t need to build everything from scratch. By leading in developer experience, Nervos can increase the base of developers (so we are not fighting other projects over a small group of “blockchain developers”). If devs can easily implement their ideas, the project can gain mindshare through their creative inventions.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Right. This is something ETH did much better than BTC I believe. If you want to code for BTC, you need to learn complicated stuff. But for Ethereum, you can learn solidity quite quickly.
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: I think we can do even better here because a team actually has to maintain Solidity. Solidity is super easy, we have a team now that is working on a domain-specific language to make programming easier too. Solidity is awesome, but we want to give devs more options.
2) Business Development
The Nervos Foundation does not have a business model (the foundation exists to bootstrap the network), there is a business development team in the foundation that is focused on creating high-value partnerships that can drive the project forward. Recently Nervos core devs collaborated with Huobi to build a high-performance public chain, with major endeavors like this, we can continue to increase visibility.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Do the people contributing to the project in the BD team have tokens so that they’re also aligned economically to find the best partnerships for example?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: They are Foundation staff, so proper incentives ha.
3) Community
I have 2 examples, people may like one more than the other. The first one is Dogecoin. Anyone who’s been in the space for a little while has likely heard a blockchain expert talk down about Dogecoin. It was a joke, and one of the longest-running jokes I can think of, but they have a small committed community, and that is why Dogecoin still is going strong despite starting out as a joke. I have such respect for the $DOGE foundation.
The second example is Bitcoin. There’s not a singular organization pushing Bitcoin forward, it’s a decentralized group of stakeholders. The foundation of Nervos is fixed, so by projecting a clear message that this is a decentralized, community-driven project and living up to this, we can empower people to come in, build, evangelize and make Nervos their own. This can give the project the staying power to continue growing through all of the challenges and rise with the innovation of the space. As we get closer and closer to crypto being accepted on the internet-scale that we are used to.
Q — Telegram user Elias Wagner: Most projects are looking to solve scalability. What’s your view of it?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: Nervos is not focused on TPS, the base layer has been optimized for throughput on a pow network, scalability will come from Layer 2 solutions, Nervos can focus on providing the best support here and best user experience instead of focusing on TPS
Q — Telegram user dhuk naka: How does the Nervos team plan to continue promoting the adoption of their technology? For the vast majority of users, it can be difficult to understand and use.
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: We want crypto to be easier to use, and by making Nervos very flexible we feel we are giving developers the tools to improve the experience for their users so people don’t need to jump through so many hoops to use it
Q — Telegram user Md Shãđìquł Islãm: Why should anyone invest in CKB for long term investment? What is the greatest strength of CKB?
A — Matt Quinn from Nervos: CKB is tied to Nervos adoption, if more users come onto the blockchain, they will need CKB to use it.
Matt, thank you for coming into our community today to tell us more about Nervos, a project based on solid technical principles from people with experience in other great crypto projects. I like that you’re focusing a lot on the community aspect as well.
Is there anything else you’d like to say? Where can we follow Nervos? — Alexandre R from GAINS
I really appreciate you all having me Alexandre, great community your team has built. You can follow us on Twitter. I’m going to follow up on the questions on the twitter thread. Anyone with additional questions, feel free to add it there. Appreciate all of your interest in Nervos, looking forward to chatting more about the project. Our Telegram group is good to watch the project too — Matt Quinn from Nervos
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