Oct 2, 2020
PARSIQ Q&A #3
Every Friday PARSIQ team answers your most important questions. Join our Telegram chat to ask!
1. Currently, what is the main focus for the team?
We have multiple focuses — one of which is building, we have so much to build, you might not believe all the things we have planned for the evolution of the PARSIQ platform. And at the same time — increasing adoption. Of course, the tokenomics will be an inseparable part of both those focuses.
2. Recently, there have been some very public hacks/exploits (KuCoin + EMN). Are you actively seeking to help in these instances or are companies coming to you? Are you paid for your services in these situations, and have any of these companies/projects become current clients of PRQ?
Do you think companies seeing the assistance provided during these incidents will push them to consider integration with PRQ’s services?
In the case of the Kucoin hack, we were indeed contacted by one of the projects first for help. But then we decided to help others in the same way. We provided the snapshots for free for any project to use to do our part in mitigating the damage from the hack. Yes, it is possible to monetize the service of creating the snapshot + hard forking and I believe various projects who want to token swap or upgrade their contracts would be interested in this service. Again yes, we believe that the assistance we provide in such incidents not only gets PARSIQ attention, but also builds credibility for other projects and exchanges to reach out to us for the solutions we can provide.
3. Can you tell us something about services that you plan to offer governments and enterprises? Do you plan to add new features/utilities specifically for those sectors vs. what is planned for release soon? Are they separate or do they function within the framework you plan to release in the upcoming months?
I cannot give the exact timeline yet, but the sub-product for enterprises and governments will be a service built on the PARSIQ platform, but for specific use cases (like Flashr) with extended functionality. But unlike Flashr, it will be a paid service (including tokenomics implementation). We are already speaking to some government organizations of multiple countries regarding this product.
4. How does the ISO security standard for crypto work? Do you believe other companies will be required to have audits (or services) conducted by Parsiq by law? If not do you think it will be a common practice (standard operating procedure) for crypto companies?
Currently, it works to compliment the traditional ISO standards for IT. So a seal of approval from the EBSec means that you are compliant with those standards, but in the future we believe it will be common practice (and in case of some entities even mandatory) to comply with them. PARSIQ’s role can become crucial in this since one of the pillars for blockchain security is that ALL smart contracts that hold value MUST be monitored in real time. And we have all of that tech ready for that and more.
5. Will Parsiq as a company branch out into other products (maybe even other blockchains), if yes what are they or generally speaking what will they focus on?
We will be releasing a brand new product in Q4 (it is related to wallets/payments). You will also see new integrations of multiple layer 1 blockchain protocols in the PARSIQ platform.
6. What are your opinions about crypto as a whole? Do you like the direction crypto is heading? How about the current DeFi trend? Do you have any predictions for upcoming trends/fads?
What about how the market tends to focus on hype-driven coins with very little to zero utility, whereas projects with real products receive little attention unless there is a major announcement?
DeFi is still in its early experimental stage, but its success could be attributed to strong incentivization. Incentivizing all participants and a user experience that is easier and at times superior than some of what traditional finance has to offer. So DeFi as a whole certainly has merit, but it’s difficult to predict the market because of the hype cycles. Personally, not the biggest fan of governance tokens of some of the projects that are utilizing them (it makes sense for some of the projects, but not all of them). We’ve seen projects come and go in a very short timespan when they are mostly based on hype. I think sustainability and long-term vision is what’s important in the industry. To be able to not only survive, but thrive throughout all market cycles.
7. Can you tell us more about how PRQ assists with snapshots used to track tokens during the Kucoin hack?
As we have said before, PARSIQ applied its technology to take snapshots of all balances of all addresses of these token projects up to the moment of the hack. These snapshots allow projects to reduce the complexity and time spent and to hard fork their token contracts correctly. However, for some of the projects that decided to use these snapshots to mitigate the damage from the incident, PARSIQ also performed the hard forking itself. Here is a high-level overview of the hard forking process that we performed for those projects based on the snapshots that we used our tech to take:
1. Create a new token Y instead of token X that was stolen;
2. Fix the corresponding software to use token Y instead of token X (Forcible transfer of the Utility)
3. Redistribute token Y between holders of X token in exactly the same proportion except the hacker address (Restoring Distribution)
4. Inform all the exchanges that now Y should be used instead of X (just recall that exchanges are holders as well, and they will receive a new Y token during phase 3.)
Voila! Now our token is Y. And the hacker owns totally meaningless token X without any utility. Now the token he has stolen is not recognized by anybody. And the Utility and Distribution of the original token was recovered.
8. The community has noticed you are trying to ramp up the marketing, but would still like to see more. Can you give us any insight into your marketing plans in terms of the content or if you have any media blitz’ planned for the near future?
Are you waiting for a particular moment or the release of some news/announcement before you start really push the marketing/promotion?
The best marketing is organic marketing (and so far it has been mostly organic) because this shows the legitimacy of the project. With that said, we will be amping it up from our side as well, step by step, including more content marketing (both mainstream media and crypto media), events, hackathons, partnership programs. We have plans to target certain user groups, but more on that later.
9. In your opinion, what will be the most exciting feature implemented in Q4 for Parsiq?
We are excited for the upgraded tokenomics utilities as well as the new product that we will be launching, which is not built on the PARSIQ monitoring platform, but will work as a unified layer with it. We have much more coming, so stay tuned!
If you have questions about using PARSIQ you can always ask our team in TELEGRAM GROUP: https://t.me/parsiq_group
