Hello dear community members, here is our second part of Reddit AMA recap. Questions are mainly about Nebulas ecosystem development, collaborations among public chains, DApp development, etc. Learn the details here:
1. satoshibytes
First, let me congratulate the PCTA founding members who clearly understand that true growth is easier when working together instead of treating other projects as competition.
I would like to hear your thoughts about projects that have focused on continuing project development during the current cooling phase and what position these projects will be in once more users enter the blockchain ecosystem?
A: AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
First, thanks for your congratulations!
A revolutionary technology will have circle of spring and winter in the early stage. The core team of Nebulas has 6 years experience in blockchain industry. In the winter of the industry, we can truly focused on the development and breakthrough of technology, and meanwhile ignore the distractions. A team with technology vision and believes in the future would not be affected by the “winter”. If we establish the reputation of technology-focus branding, we would certainly be the top project when the industry revive again. The “Bitsclub” “NEO”, even Ethereum sprouted in the winter of the industry.
Hughes_Ching (XMax CEO)
Although we call this a winter for the Blockchain Industry, the entire industry is still seeing large inflows of users. So what we are looking to do is to build portals that can attract and retain these users so that once the cooling phase has passed and more sophisticated DApps come online, we can use the user base that we’ve built up during this period to continue to grow our projects.
2. starkenstay
In hard times (and when runway funding is running out for a lot of projects), how do you cobble together an organization that will work toward a common goal that grabs peoples’ attentions?
For example, privacy communities like Monero are laser focused on the importance of privacy and how that lets people participate freely in an economic system. This laser focus attracts devoted people who will continue the struggle even when funds run out.
Does the PCTA have a “laser focus”/ideal that will keep individuals devoted? What is it?
A: AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
Nebulas will eventually become an “ Autonomous metanet “, with a “network composed of hyper-mapped metadata”, and can be widely used, with searching and ranking, social media, keeping promises …, Nebulas will become a blockchain system that can use and manage the increasingly rich data in the blockchain world. And with the launching of Nova, community will have real experience.
PCTA will help to bring 100 million incremental users to the blockchain world. PCTA aims to promote the collaboration and win-win results of public chain projects. Just like any free market, with each giving play to its comparative advantages, and providing services not only to end users but also to industrial partners. The optimal allocation of resources can greatly improve the efficiency and development speed of the whole industry. The DApp in the future can be exactly the same as today’s APP, not limited to a single public chain closed ecosystem, but can use multiple public chains or other blockchains’ technical facilities. Perhaps only in this way can many DApps generate real use value.
First of all, thank you for organizing this helpful AMA during hard times. I have several questions that I want to ask as a person working in the industry.
One of the weakest parts of cryptocurrencies is the volatility of value. To solve this problem, there became many projects that are working on so-called stable coins. There is no such thing as stable value in the world. Legal tender’s value continually decreases as time goes, it never increases. Pegging its value to a legal tender is not the answer. Value stabilizes as more people actually use. However, most people just hold their tokens hoping their tokens go to moon. If cryptocurrencies continue to be a form of investment, its future is dead. The industry has to find a way to make more people use it, not the way to stabilize its value artificially. How would you distribute tokens and make people actually use them?
According to recent statistics that categorized people in the industry, the percentage of designers is below 2%. Most blockchain teams also look for better developers, but not designers. Normal people don’t care about the technology behind. What they want to see is good and easy UX/UI. There are more than 2000 different tokens. It is impossible for normal people to use them. Current industry just wants to find a way to make TPS higher. How would you make cryptocurrencies simple and achieve better UX/UI?
Ironically, one thing I learned from blockchain is the importance of middlemen. The problem is not the middleman itself. The actual problem is the power centralization of middlemen. A middleman itself gives us huge benefits and conveniences. Blockchain does not acutally get rid of middlemen. Instead, it made every participant middlemen. Most people just want quick and easy, not the meaning of decentralization. Blockchain gives one power, but it gives responsibility along with it. Normal people don’t want to take risk by being responsble. What do you think of blockchain’s disadvantages? And how would you overcome?
I think it has to go step by step. I am developing an app which uses blockchain where it’s actually needed without its own tokens. Going from centralized app to decentralized app directly is impossible and even not efficient. What do you think of this?
Thank you so much for trying to discuss with many people to develop blockchain community.
A: smalloranges (NAS Team)
About Question 2: First, I want to talk about what we do.
(1) Nebulas is keeping improving UX/UI. Please follow us, we will publish some interesting things recently.
(2) And we try to help other developers. For example, we published DApp Design Guidelines during Nebulas Incentive Program Season 1. https://nebulas.io/docs/DAppDesignGuidelines.pdf
Then, about why some people think UX/UI in the blockchain world is not good. It’s a big topic, perhaps I can write a post about that.
It’s not only because there are fewer designers here. We are still in a very early period of the blockchain ecosystem, we should do some basic things first. And we can’t talk about good user experience without users and situations. During the ecosystem growing up, it will be changed.
AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
This is really a good question, we agree with what you think and both Nebulas NOVA and PCTA that we are proposing right now is working hard to form a better ecosystem for developers, users and token holder. Thus to form an ecosystem where more application field of blockchain technology and tokens will be available.
Ironically, one thing I learned from blockchain is the importance of middlemen. The problem is not the middleman itself. The actual problem is the power centralization of middlemen. A middleman itself gives us huge benefits and conveniences. Blockchain does not acutally get rid of middlemen. Instead, it made every participant middlemen. Most people just want quick and easy, not the meaning of decentralization. Blockchain gives one power, but it gives responsibility along with it. Normal people don’t want to take risk by being responsable. What do you think of blockchain’s disadvantages? And how would you overcome?
The key is that the infrastructure of blockchain technology is not mature yet, and the cost of introducing information and assets outside the blockchain system is still very high. In one hand, Nebulas is working hard to form a better collaborative environment and improve the infrastructure of blockchain technology.
On the other hand, most of users in the blockchain industry are still “asset” users, who are more seasonal. In the next stage, the blockchain industry needs to introduce more “service” users, who are more concerned about the convenience blockchain can provide them in their real life, that’s why we say that the vision of the Bitsclub Vision Program is to introduce 100 million quality incremental users to the industry. I believe that when we have stable infrastructure that could afford complicated applications on blockchain and quality users that use blockchain and token in their real life could we expect the world that people actually “use” the tokens.
According to the previous answers, at this stage, compared to Apps, DApps are less competitive in most areas. Similar to the development of mobile internet, the further development of DApp depends on the infrastructure of the blockchain. We still can hardly imagine it. Actually, DApp’s competitors are by no means an App, DApp itself relies more on people to find new application scenarios in the original ecology of the blockchain.
4. wolfershd
How often are developers poached from less popular blockchains by more popular ones? How do blockchains with waning popularity combat this problem?
A: AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
Leaving is not necessarily real “ leaving”. As long as there are good incentives, and the cost for developers to return to a previous ecosystem is much lower than the cost for them to enter a new ecosystem. The point is how to help developers find a role in a public chain’s ecosystem, get continuous incentives, and also share the benefits of the public chain’s development.
Currently, most of users in the blockchain industry are still “asset” users, who are more seasonal. In the next stage, the blockchain industry needs to introduce more “service” users, who are more concerned about the convenience blockchain can provide them in their real life. This is not something that a single blockchain project can achieve. We need many partners. Luckily, we are very happy to see public chain projects begin to collaborate with each other.
Hughes_Ching (XMax CEO)
It’s important that a project fights to stay in front of both developers and users. If a project does not invest in marketing then it will be difficult to build a strong user base. Here is one approach we are taking to bring our project in front more audiences.
Our project has been participating in a Blockchain TV show called “Block Battle” which has been airing every Friday in Korea on Asia Economic TV. To win this show, we need help from the community and could use your help with voting.
In order to attract development, we need to reach out to where the developers are.
How do we engage and attract computer science / programming students and other block chain programmers?
Nebulas has one of the pieces in the Developer Incentive Protocol to provide the monetary incentive to spend the time to produce a working code, but we still need to focus this development on useful / needed applications not simple games or gambling.
The second more basic dilemma is awareness and advertising. How will these potential developers even become aware of the opportunity or possibilities available to develop block chain applications? Be it for Nebulas or any projects, advertisements and incentives for development need to be substantial in scope to reach the right people and it needs to be clear the targets needed for potential projects and areas for development that are identified as needing improvement.
We also, through this targeted development, need to evolve use-cases which attract the users and greater population whom could benefit from block chain applications.
Looking forward for how we find answers among this community, Go Nebulas!
A: xuepeng (Research Director of Nebulas)
Actually, we are working hard to build connections with universities. We have attracted many interns from top universities in China. And they are doing blockchain-related researches and development at Nebulas.
However, we can’t expect that Nebulas is as popular as some long-history projects like Linux and MySQL among computer science / programming students. Nebulas is still a young project. And we are willing to try any short way to involve more developers.
Yet, there seems no short way to achieve this besides making Nebulas better, i.e., better performance, easier development and more active communication.
For the useful applications, we’re facing the same challenges as other public blockchains. We already have some ideas after talking to some professors and community members. And we will propose them to the whole community later.
16. qielan
We’ve all seen how many gambling DApps have recently launched on the EOS mainnet, Do you think Gambling applications on Blockchains have a real future?
A: Hughes_Ching (XMax CEO)
Recently, all the popular games have been simple. Simple games have their advantages, the production cost is very low, and they can be quickly launched to end-users. But the downside is that there is no barrier to entry. There is no moat. It is easy for others to copy you after the game is made, so these games are all springing up. The same game can be packaged as a new game without changing any of the game mechanics. The same game may have dozens of versions. I think that in any world, traffic is the essence of all success because blockchain is only a part of the internet currently.
We believe gambling games are here to stay, but to meet the needs of all users, the gamers, and also the exchanges, we need games which are integrated directly with decentralized application portals, rather than focusing on these games as the applications, the real killer Apps will be the portals that allow users to access these games, in our opinion.
AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
It’s inevitable to have a surge of betting DApps on blockchain, but there are limitations too. Firstly, betting or gambling is a very controversial industry in our tradition, therefore a globalized gambling industry is not easy to achieve based on the existing internet and currency tools. Plus the different laws and regulations in different regions, it creates a “squeezed out effect”, which means that certain needs from the traditional market have been “squeezed” on blockchain.
Secondly, a huge weakness of traditional betting format, is that “the rule makers break the rules.” Relying on blockchain technology, we can change “black-box betting” into “white-box betting”, to build a relatively transparent betting environment, which can greatly improve the betting cycle and scale.
7. gotqks2
Currently the market for block chains is frozen.
I think that a service that shows the advantages of a typical block chain should be released.
If look at the DApps of Nebulas, there is no service we really want to use.
People want a service that can show the benefits of a block chain.
For example, a voting system using block chains…
If there are apps showing the benefits of a block chain,
Many companies will apply the block chain and develop technology.
A: lobatt (ATP Co-founder)
Thanks for bringing this up, exactly we need something that can show the strength of decentralization.
If you take a look at Atlas Protocol’s SmartVoting product, which has just empowered a recent voting campaign for BitMart (a crypto exchange), you will find that we already started exploring this front.
We believe that in a decentralized world, voting is such an essential activity in order for the community to reach consensus. And there is no better way to incentivize the community members to participate in than airdrops(of course, a better one).
Hence at ATP we spent a lot of effort working on an enterprise level solution providing SmartVoting & SmartDrop to the community, and we hope that our tools could be the catalyst within PCTA to make every participating member in the alliance better leveraging the power of Blockchain, the power of decentralization.
8. cssmagic
Developers and DApps are an very important part of public chains’ ecosystems. So, I’d like to ask Mr. Wang (Nebulas) and Mr. Ching (XMAX), could you please talk about your plans to build and cultivate your developer communities?
A: Hughes_Ching (XMax CEO)
We have allocated 40% of our tokens to encourage developers to contribute code to our mainnet development and tools. Now that we have the PCTA, our projects will be pooling our resources and it will be easier to connect developers from various projects.
9. nilaohan
Is the current public chain opening a preliminary cooperation plan?
A: AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
Definitely yes, if you are here with AMA, you will find that we have already starting cooperation in community activities, in the future, there will be more collaboration on communities, activities, bounties, and technology!
10. SteveLevetti
Hi Nebulas and XMAX core team, it’s great to see you guys here.
I’ve been a fan of Nebulas team for really long time( 7 months ). I’ve seen thousands of DApps created during Dapp Incentive program, but also have been generally disappointed by the qualities of those DApps, which I think can partially explain low liquidity for NAS and a continuing drop in token price. Where is Nebulas going and what’s your plan on incentivizing your community to go further?
A: AeroWang (NAS Co-founder)
Thanks for your long last care for Nebulas, we really appreciate that and will work hard and forge ahead for our technical vision. We have been noticed the above issue as well, in the future NIP, we will have more precise incentive and better iterations on the NIP.
Fundamentally speaking, the endogenous logic of the token economy also requires a lot of exploration and practice, and it is also a common problem faced by the entire blockchain community. In the coming Nebulas NOVA, with the realization of our key functions of NR, DIP and NBRE, the circulation and incentive problems of the token can be better supported by onchain data and NBRE function, thus could better addressed the concern of the above issue.
11. pctatdm
What is your guys expansion strategy in other Asia market?
A: Hughes_Ching (XMax CEO)
Well one approach we have been taking is to push harder in the Korean Market, as it is per capita one of the most active crypto markets in the world.
Our project has been participating in a Blockchain TV show called “Block Battle” which has been airing every Friday in Korea on Asia Economic TV. To win this show, we need help from the community and could use your help with voting.
Thanks for all the questions and answers from our community! PCTA partners will jointly hold more Reddit AMA in the near future. So if you still have some questions or suggestions, please stay tuned for our official announcement. We’re willing to hear your voice!
Learn more about Nebulas:
Official website: Nebulas.io
Github: github.com/nebulasio/go-nebulas
Slack: nebulasio.herokuapp.com
Telegram(EN): t.me/nebulasio
Twitter: @nebulasio
