iExec x Binance Interview 2021 — LIVE Q&A
On Thursday 18 March 2021, iExec was hosted by Binance for a live question and answer session in the official Binance Telegram group. the following questions and answers are pasted from the Binance Telegram group.
On Thursday 18 March 2021, iExec was hosted by Binance for a live question and answer session in the official Binance Telegram group. the following questions and answers are pasted from the Binance Telegram group.
Binance: Could you please introduce yourself as well as share a quick overview of iExec?
Gilles, iExec:
Hi everyone! I’m Gilles Fedak, my background is in computer science, where I developed various software infrastructures and algorithms allowing people to easily contribute to large Distributed Cloud systems consisting of thousands of machines connected across the Internet.
After discovering Ethereum early on, the idea of being able to use blockchain to incentivize contributors to this distributed cloud was something I found truly game-changing!
iExec was created in October 2016 by two PhD computer scientists, Dr. Gilles Fedak and Dr. Haiwu HE.
iExec is the protocol for trading everything digital. Cloud computing resources such as computing power, applications and datasets can be monetized through iExec. Anyone can join the network and start earning RLC tokens by monetizing their digital resources, with the option to list them as NFT assets.
iExec’s decentralized network is powering the DeFi and applications in many other domains from AI, to big-data, to health-tech.
Q1: What are you most excited about for the blockchain industry this year?
We are happy to have seen an increased interest in blockchain recently, but not surprised. Even long after the crypto craze of 2017, we’ve observed the blockchain ecosystem consistently improve, year after year. Smart contracts are becoming smarter and now with the emergence of new industries such as DeFi, the network that iExec has built is now more relevant than ever.
In the past years, we have built technology that allows trading of everything digital. With the recent craze about DeFi and NFT, we see now the time has come for a decentralized marketplace that would allow anyone to create Dapps, NFTs, and monetize their usage. Moreover, anyone can join this Decentralized Cloud to run applications on their personal computers and get rewarded!
This year, we have also seen a shift from the industry (Tesla, Microstrategy) embracing the crypto space. This does not surprise us at all, as over the past 4 years we’ve been collaborating and working with numerous big industry players, such as Intel, Google, Microsoft or Nvidia on many tech aspects of the project and they are really interested in decentralization! Hopefully, we’ll see more and more industries not only just ‘interested’ in the tech, but also leveraging the products.
That’s why we believe iExec has stood the test of time and will only continue to be at the forefront of innovation on Ethereum for years to come.
Q2. What makes iExec unique?
iExec has several key innovations that distinguish itself from the competition.
First, we have developed a unique consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Contribution (PoCo), which ensures that all trades in the decentralized marketplace are implemented with the maximum level of trust and security.
Second, iExec is a leader in combining blockchain with confidential computing. Confidential or ‘trusted computing’ is taking the computing world by storm (Intel, AMD, ARM), and involves being able to use digital resources while the owner still maintains full ownership over it.
We’ve been working with Intel on the first solution for trusted computing with blockchain since 2018 and iExec is now a service provider for Intel for a private data monetization product. Putting together blockchain and confidential computing is a hard problem and we are proud to have delivered the first working solution.
This is a great step for decentralization! It opens many doors: people or companies will be able to monetize their AI model, their digital arts, their gaming assets, etc… the possibilities are endless.
Try the demo here: https://developers.iex.ec/
Q3. iExec has offered tooling for DeFi developers. What role does iExec play in DeFi?
The surge of DeFi last year was impressive, right? Nevertheless, DeFi faces several key challenges in the future, such as: trusted oracle, privacy, and compliance.
DeFi networks are based on smart contracts and blockchain, but what about the data these DeFi services use? iExec allows developers to easily build decentralized and trusted oracles that act as the bridge between these two worlds. And they can earn money from their oracles.
Privacy is an important matter as the blockchain stores all financial transactions, thus we must make sure that no personal information associated with Ethereum addresses can leak. iExec implements ‘end-to-end privacy-preserving’ computing that ensures users’ private data are never exposed nor revealed. (see the demo here https://developers.iex.ec/).
And lastly, to my knowledge, iExec is the first crypto project to have received official approval from a regulator for its decentralized marketplace: AMF, the French SEC. This allows some companies to trade in the marketplace without fear of “legal insecurity”.
All in all, we think that iExec is the cornerstone technology for future DeFi products.
Q4. So How can people get involved with iExec and what are the incentives?
Our community is vibrant and very active. We are launching several initiatives to encourage anyone to use and build on iExec, This includes a platform giving everyone an identity on the network.
📣 We’ll soon announce an iExec Developer Rewards program, where individual devs or projects can receive up to 15,000 USD in grants for their innovations with iExec!
Also, individuals will soon be able to participate by connecting their machines and becoming ‘workers’ on the iExec network, executing computational or oracle tasks, earning RLC tokens as payment! We also love organizing competitions for the community around our products, and there are always some RLC tokens up for grabs! 🎁
Q5. What upcoming releases are planned in the iExec roadmap for this year?
iExec has a lot of ambitious projects planned for 2021!
⏯️ Next up: a product called the ‘Oracle Factory’, for creating decentralized oracles in your browser in just 5 minutes + a gallery for listing ready-to-use oracles.
🔔 iExec V6, the sixth major iExec upgrade will be launched soon, including a multitude of technical upgrades.
💻 We’ll launch a public pool for individuals to join, in order to contribute computing power for executing oracle tasks and earn RLC tokens!
🧑💻 A community portal to track your activity and earnings on the iExec network
🔘 An NFT product: allowing anyone to easily deploy and tokenize valuable computing resources (such as datasets) as NFT (ERC-721) assets.
🖲 iExec is working as a technology provider for two EU-funded programs (OntoChain & DataCloud) — we’ll have announcements regarding projects in these programs.
🗺 But of course, there are always events, collaborations, and releases that we can’t include in the roadmap for NDA reasons or otherwise, so make sure to stay tuned to the iExec twitter!
Public Q&A Session
- Tell us a little bit about security? Have you done an audit of the platform? Are the smart contracts error-free? What are the test results?
All our smart contracts have been audited by external auditors: openzeppelin for instance. Recently we’re working with Diligence Consensus. All audit results are published publicly: iExec conducted third-party security audits for each of its protocol upgrades:
- Security audit for iExec version 2 (public link) — (conducted by Chainsecurity)
- Security audit for iExec version 3 (public link) — (conducted by Chainsecurity)
- Security audit for iExec version 5 (public link) — (conducted by Consensys Diligence)
- Security audit for the integration of Uniswap into iExec version 5 1 — (conducted by Consensys Diligence)
2. Increasing Token price/make Token Valuable/Building Community Trust. In terms of per capita income for the fiscal year 2020–2021, what do you think needs to be done first?
We aim to give to the RLC token as much usage as possible through our products. This should of course naturally increase the price. Also, we are right now building a specific product to involve more and more the community. Stay tuned!
3. Tell us about your plans for 2021, what are you currently working on, and are you going to expand the list of big exchanges?
In terms of products, we are focusing on Oracles, NFTs and confidential Computing. Several products are in the pipeline right now. We are also discussing with exchanges as well.
4. Can iExec fix all these data leaks, personal data being shared on the dark web and such?
In the long term, we think that all personal data should be privately owned by their users. This is a huge shift for the industry. However, we already have released a demo that shows how you can keep your email address secret, while explicitly allow a company to send you an email. But the company will never see the email address thanks to privacy-preserving computing. The data cannot leak!
5. How do you plan to promote your project in different countries? where English is not spoken very well. Do you have a local community so they can understand your project?
Yes, we have several community managers! Some are based in Korea and some in China. They help us to promote locally iExec.
6. Has your project been completely decentralized, and will there be any risk of centralization in the future?
We are always pursuing the goal of maximizing decentralization. Sometimes however we need to find the tradeoff between decentralization and efficiency. For instance, we released a sidechain that is less decentralized but offers zero gas cost. That’s the user's choice to move on the sidechain. Less decentralization must be an option — not a requirement.
7. What are you most excited about in terms of the upcoming roadmap?
So many things! From my point of view, the oracle factory will be a game-changer! It is very exciting to build one of the key elements of the DeFi revolution!
8. How will more people become aware of iExec and know what is possible with the technology?
We love to incentivize the community. For classic marketing campaigns, we have contacts at CoinGecko, and other major media like CoinDesk of course. For devs, we’ll introduce a rewards program offering individuals 15k USD grants for their innovations (announced soon).
With each of the upcoming product releases (of which there are quite a few!), we’ll run competitions with rewards for individuals who expose their usage of these products, which incentivizes the community to help spread the word.
And if everything goes to plan with our collaborators, their own communications on iExec use cases will bring more eyes to the project!
For understanding the iExec offer, we are releasing various onboarding demos that even anyone without tech or blockchain experience can get hands-on and see the unique value of iExec.
9. Do you have any plan for burning tokens in the future to reduce the supply of the token and increase its investment attractiveness?
One popular way to reduce the supply is to add burn mechanism. This is one of many interesting ways to link the usage of the protocol to the token value. Adding burning to the protocol however would also require adding transaction fees to the iExec marketplace, and at a time where iExec is focused on growing the platform’s usage, we prefer to keep the transaction fees as low as possible, as this is what users care about (and investors care about users)
10. What is your long-term vision about the industry which you are working on? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace your project?
We love to incentivize the community. For classic marketing campaigns we have contacts at CoinGecko, and other major media like CoinDesk of course. For devs, we’ll introduce a rewards program offering up to 15k USD in grants for their innovations (announced soon).
With each of the upcoming product releases (of which there are quite a few!) we’ll run competitions with rewards for individuals who expose their usage of these products, which incentivizes the the community to help spread the word.
And if everything goes to plan with our collaborators, their own comunications on iExec use cases will bring more eyes to the project!
For understanding the iExec offer, we are releasing various onboarding demos that even anyone without tech or blockchain experience can get hands on and see the unique value of iExec.
10. What are the issues of scalability and development infrastructure that can be solved by RLC for the decentralized web?
Quite simply: off-chain computing. Do you have a smart contract that is too complex to execute on-chain? You would delegate the execution to iExec and get the result back to your smart contract on-chain. Plus, you can transfer private data off-chain. More scalability, more privacy!
11. Can iExec fix all these data leaks, personal data being shared on the dark web and such?
With our tech, we can improve the way the world deals with private dats, as you can see in our demo: https://confidential-computing.iex.ec/ So yes, we have all the cards in our hands to do it!
12. The financial markets, cryptos market … all fell due to the covid-19 epidemic. Does this affect your project development plan?
I don’t think we are impacted by the covid-19 epidemic in the sense that more people understand the advantage of a digital world. And nobody from the team has been durably hurt by the disease. Hope you guys are doing well also!
13. Where is RLC road map now? Are all targets in accordance with the current road map? and what are the next steps that will be taken in the future?
You can check out the roadmap here: https://iex.ec/roadmap with a list of just some of the upcoming product releases: for these, we are 100% they will be released but of course, there is a lot more we have not included, but can be announced at any time.
14. What is the utility of your native token iExec RLC? Also what special features do you have or plan to implement that keeps you ahead of your competitors?
The iExec RLC token is the only way to pay for computing resources on the iExec marketplace. RLC tokens are also being staked by resource providers in the network in order to provide guarantees regarding the quality of their contributions. Please head over this article to check the whole tokenomics of the iExec RLC token -> https://medium.com/iex-ec/rlc-token-economics-iexec-34757f4885c2
15. Many new projects made a good impression at first but were suddenly abandoned. My question is, how will you manage the project and token to gain a place in the market and become the best token in the blockchain world?
We did the ICO in 2017 and keep delivering. We’re here to stay!
16. NFTs of computing resources (worker machines, application, datasets) is already possible on iExec. iExec will release NFT product/interface to make this even easier: allowing anyone to easily deploy and tokenize valuable computing resources (such as datasets) as NFT (ERC-721) assets
NFTs of computing resources (worker machines, application, datasets) is already possible on iExec. iExec will release NFT product/interface to make this even easier: allowing anyone to easily deploy and tokenize valuable computing resources (such as datasets) as NFT (ERC-721) assets.
17. It’s easy to make a token but it’s really hard to make this token valuable? So what’s your strategy to make your token more valuable and what’s your plan to maintain token price and supply?
The supply of RLC is fixed (around 87M). RLC is a utility token. It’s the mean of payment within the decentralized marketplace. The more usage, the more value. As the community develops, we may also add more features for the token. To improve decentralization for instance.
18. Do you have plans of partnering with existing Defi projects?
Yes, with the creation of the Oracle Factory, we planned to be integrated into several DeFi projects as an Oracle provider. A lot of these projects are hungry for Oracles, the idea is to give them the most powerful and simple way to do it with our tool.
19. Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?
iExec has a working infrastructure that has been built since 2016, and this has been recognized by the various technical partners we’ve worked with (Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc). What iExec will be working on releasing next is more simple user interfaces for our products, so that anyone can interact and understand iExec, regardless of their technical ability. As adoption increases, we aim to have integrated in more projects, from DeFi start-ups to traditional industry platers use-cases.
20. DeFi is becoming a new trend, many DeFi projects are born. So what makes iExec different to compete with other projects?
I don’t think we’re competing with DeFi projects. We’re helping them actually. For instance by providing a solution for decentralized and trusted oracles. Or to provide user data privacy. Or to provide them interoperability.
21. DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain field. Can you share your opinion about DeFi with us? Do you think DeFi will destroy the existing financial system? What’s your project Approach towards DeFi?
DeFi marketcap should be ~90 billion. Total value locked in DeFi smart contracts is roughly 40 billions, and the total crytpo market cap is 1,8 Trillion.
One should realize that this is a water drop in a big bottle of water when you compare it to the traditional financial markets. I’ve seen estimations of the derivatives markets being roughly 500 trillion. So to put into perspective, derivatives represent only one of DeFi verticals and its size in traditional finance is 250 times bigger than the whole crypto market. So there is no doubt about the growth potential, and until now the last few months proved that the first very tiny part of this potential has realized. From a mass adoption and from a user point of view, decentralization by itself isn’t the main added value. DeFi won’t steal users from traditional finance in the name of decentralization, as that’s not something that improves the day-to-day usability of a product, and people interact with the product, so that’s what they want to see improved. However, the game-changer is IMO the inter-operability characteristic of smart contracts, often referred as “the lego of money”. To illustrate that, we can look at yield aggregators, wherein the matter of a few days, a project was able to plug itself into a large number of different other protocols, and leverage to do arbitrage. Here developers get huge gains in terms of the speed of execution, as compared to what it would take to do the same in the traditional finance ecosystem. Also, from the user perspective, there is a huge gain in the accessibility of the product, it’s really a matter of a few clicks to join the game, as it’s super user friendly, and part of this comes from the permissionless nature of the smart contracts in DeFi.
Now one thing to keep in mind with the DeFi craze that we witnessed during last summer and last few months, is that it was still kind of a dogfooding operation in the sense that a large part of the volume was people locking their assets in Compound as collateral, in order to farm the compound governance token, and also they could borrow another asset with that, and lock in another protocol to do yield farming again, or lend it on AAVE to receive interests, or swap it Uniswap to just make speculative trades ;) This is great, but the next step is probably to onboard more people from the non-crypto world. And to do that, the use cases will have to be more related to people’s daily life, and what they are familiar with like stocks, insurances, and so forth.
So back to iExec, we anticipate the needs for oracles and off-chain computation to grow and the team is working to address these needs 💪💪💪
22. What are the ways for your project to generate revenue in the long run? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
iExec is a protocol for trading everything digital. That includes cloud ‘computing power’ (not cloud storage, like filecoin), or renting out valuable datasets. The lack of computing power for decentralized applications + the lack of privacy-preserving features in dapps that use our data is exactly why iExec users need off- chain-cloud compute from iExec.
23. Do you feel proud about what you have delivered so far?
Of course, everything we promised on the whitepaper has been achieved. Now we are fully focused on adoption through our products and our enterprise marketplace.
24. Your project has great features. There must be an experienced team behind. Can you tell some about your team and their experiences in the market?
Several of us have a background in CS research. That allows us to tackle the most difficult challenges wrt to blockchain, confidential computing, consensus protocol. The business team is growing as well with more and more great people joining us! And we’re always looking for talented people! many positions are opened.
25. We all know that the Ethereum Network has many problems: scalability issues, high gas fees, slow speeds, and many more. Why did you choose to build your token on ERC-20 blockchain ecosystem? Why not build it on some scalable blockchain instead as Ethereum?
There are many other blockchain out there for sure, but at the moment, the Ethereum blockchain is where the majority of the developers build their products. As mentioned in the previous answer about DeFi, If inter-operability is the key added value, then you want to be where all the others are. Regarding scalability, iExec is working on L2
26. Can you give us a demo about what is comparatively better Between standard decentralized oracles and iExec Trusted Decentralized Oracles?
Sure! You’ll will find an interactive demo and explainer in this article:
https://medium.com/iex-ec/iexec-trusted-decentralized-oracle-demo-for-beginners-1d7d6f93e066
27. Do you have any other plans that is not disclosed in the roadmap yet? Should we expect any surprises for communities $RLC?
Yes! Everything in the roadmap is sure, but developments and collaborations can happen very fast at iExec — so always expect surprises! 😄
28. We are living in the advent of YIELD FARMING and Liquidity Mining, can you share your personal opinion on Yield Farming and also Briefly explain your Liquidity Mining Program?
We have two articles discussing yield farming using the RLC token, the most recent one about the Sushiswap liquidity mining program (https://medium.com/iex-ec/farm-sushi-rlc-by-providing-liquidity-on-sushiswap-guide-99f5399cabb7) and the previous one discussing Hummingbot liquidity mining, Uniswap and DEX aggregator Paraswap (https://medium.com/iex-ec/how-to-put-your-iexec-rlc-tokens-to-work-2c7ad5390218)
29. The idea of the IEXEC project is really unique and incredible, how did this idea come about?
When I discovered Ethereum, and mixed it with my own research around parallel and distributed systems. But I think that I always wanted to build a kind of P2P system that would allow people to trade their files, their computers, and anything digital 😄
💡 Want to learn more about iExec? Check out iExec Academy!
iExec Academy aggregates all content related to the project. You’ll find articles, tech documentation, videos, interactive demos, and much more! Whether you are a beginner or an expert, a developer or crypto-enthusiast, you’ll find what you are looking for on iExec Academy!
