PARSIQ Q&A #32
Every Friday-ish PARSIQ team answers your most important questions. Join our Telegram chat to ask!
As most of our trusted community knows, we’ve switched our Q&A format a bit, with our CEO Tom taking the YouTube stage live every other week going forward.
Below is the transcription of the August 19th, 2021 live AMA with Tom Tirman, CEO of PARSIQ. The bolded questions are links to the timestamped section of the video AMA.
________________________
Hello everyone, and welcome to the PARSIQ live AMA!
We will be doing these on a regular basis, maybe once every 2 weeks. We will also some guests form the team (in future AMAs) — not just myself. So, we are hoping to see you a couple times a month, at least. I will do my best to answer the questions and provide some updates on the project and our progress, when I can.
Let’s start…
Q: Any updated information relating to whether PARSIQ will be doing anything interesting with Facebook?
Obviously I cannot comment on this one. We currently cannot disclose such information.
Q: Can we expect a T1 CEX listing this year?
This a very often-asked question. All I can say is that we are in direct contact with a number of t1 exchanges. We are going through the process, so sooner or later we will be listed: no hard dates, but the work is ongoing. Every exchange has their own requirements of what they need to see — or what progress they need to be shown, and what kind of documents need to be provided — and it varies from exchange to exchange. It will happen. Just no timeline yet. We will also be pursuing exchange listings that may not be considered T1, but are still very big in terms of volume and user-base, very soon.
Q: How do you view Covalent’s offerings? Do you see them as potential competitors?
(This comparison) is similar to the comparison with The Graph: there is some overlap, because all three (projects — PARSIQ, The Graph, and Covalent) are blockchain data projects. PARSIQ will also be providing certain service that allows access to services that allow people to get access to historical blockchain data. But I would say there is more room for collaboration and integration than direct competition. Some of the features might compete, but what they are offering, as a whole, is completely different (from PARSIQ), because our focus is real-time triggers and automated workflows. And even when we push historical data live, it will work differently. You haven’t seen our updated roadmap yet, but something we have planned is to make snapshots, and to allow calculations on, historical data. This is a feature that I do not believe anyone else provides. If you have been following the different hack scenarios — with Bondly, with PAID Network, with the Kucoin project — we have used our technology to take snapshots and run calculations on wallets who might have traded the token after the snapshot, lost money on it, earned money on it. With our product roll-outs, we will be giving users and projects the opportunity to build lines of code, to run the scripts, and take the snapshot, run the calculations not just for hacks, but for anything: without needing infrastructure, or without having to develop any type of solutions. I don’t think anyone else offers this self-serve platform.
Absolutely. We are working on a landing page with more information. It is going to have its own community documentations page, social media accounts, and the app itself. But like we’ve said, this is a mainnet beta, with just one renting pool. But imagine, by October/November there will be more than twenty different projects deploying renting pools. The UI will evolve a lot this year. IQ Protocol will be a DeFi platform of its own. And, in fact, I think sometime in the future we will give the operations of the protocol over to a community dao.
Q: When do you expect the borrowing side of IQ Protocol to go live?
It is ready. It is ready in the staging environment. We will push it live next week. We are just making some additional contents, some explainers, some documents for the borrowing side. It is going to be great. This is — as far as I know — the first trustless decentralized subscription system in the space. We will make an event of it. (Note: It has since gone live, and the announcement can be found here: https://blog.parsiq.net/user-borrowing-live-for-iq-protocol/)
Q: Could you see PRQ integrating with the Terra ecosystem in the future.
Absolutely. We know the Terra team. We have a good relationship with them. We have already discussed adding support for their network, and I think (based on) seeing the adoption-rate of Terra that it makes sense to support their network in the future. Maybe not in the next few months, but Q1 next year, for example.
Q: Any updates on liquidity increases for Pancakeswap and migrating the PRQBoost benefits to UNI v3?
It is a work in progress. We will be integrating Pancakeswap with IQ Protocol, so that the borrowing fees, or the subscription fees can be paid in any asset that Pancakeswap supports. And the swapping is done in a decentralized manor automatically. Before we push it live, we obviously need to increase the liquidity — otherwise it will be very expensive for people. I don’t have an exact timeline, but we’re talking the next few weeks probably.
Regarding UNI v3: We are already testing how the liquidity works there, because it is different. And until we find that it might be possible to provide better liquidity with less assets than on v2 — I’ll keep you posted on that.
Q: Are there any plans for PARSIQ NFTs?
Yea, we have a few ideas. Nothing specific yet. But in terms of the general NFT market, we have put on the roadmap to do a version of the IQ protocol for NFTs. What does that mean? That means that any person owning an NFT (crypto punks, axis, mooncats, anything) can actually put them on rent in the marketplace, and request a fee for renting them out. People can use them, play around with them — for example, in-game assets and such. I think this would be quite a popular feature. This is a next step after we push the next version of the IQ protocol live. But I think it is a great use case.
Q: When is IQ planned to go on the ETH network?
With ETH there is an issue with the fees. Not everyone holds a big amount of PRQ tokens in the protocol. That means that the fees for withdrawing, depositing , or adding can eat up all the profits. It is not really feasible right now. We are looking into the London upgrade, and checking the roadmap for when the fees can actually be better. But I think there is a greater possibility that we will launch on a good layer 2 solution, like Arbitrum. We are researching that extensively. But, in the meanwhile, if anyone wants to rent out PRQ, or provide liquidity, on IQ Protocol — and is not doing it because they are waiting for ETH — I would tell you that you should go ahead and do it (on BSC) because we do not have an exact timeline for ETH or a layer 2. And we are actually planning some serious incentive programs for people staking their PRQ in the protocol right now, that is, for early adopters.
Q: How much interest is there to use IQ Protocol from other projects in the scene?
Quite a lot! And while it may not be for everyone, we have heard good responses — “this is fresh”, “this is innovative”, “this is great”, “very clever model” — but they are afraid to use it because it is experimental (that is, no one has done it before). But we have projects with existing tokens that want to increase the utility of the token, and we have quite a few lined up: around twenty projects right now who want to deploy the renting pools. We have also had interest from non-crypto companies (from traditional companies), who wish to issue a token but don’t know how to model the tokenomics, and IQ has piqued their interest. So, there is quite a lot of interest, and everyone appreciates the innovation. But, obviously, it has to prove itself. So, we need to show a few killer use cases, and that they work. I think we will see a lot of adoption in the future.
The database for public addresses means that, right now the platform works such that you must upload or enter any address of interest (smart contract address, eth addresses, any addresses, any monitoring targets). But we will have a selection of interesting monitoring artifacts, like exchange logs, like whales, like addresses involved in hacks (stolen funds and such), and like addresses belonging to known individuals in the crypto space. And you can choose something interesting from there that you can choose to monitor. So, you won’t have to go look up these on your own — you’ll have a good selection database of artifacts that you can monitor that will be of interest.
Q: Can we have some information regarding the new platform feature that has been mentioned?
The platform feature will go live today. It is quite developer focused — for developers and projects — but it is a great addition and a great value for many of our existing and future clients and users. Stay tuned, you’ll get more information very soon. (Note: this is the feature that was being reference here, and has since been announced: User Defined Streams.)
Right now, it is a bit of a split between the PARSIQ platform and IQ Protocol. We are trying to hire people as fast as possible to be able to move forward with both ASAP. For IQ Protocol, we need to create the next version, which will have a lot more features. We need to flesh out the GitHub code, the SDK, so that other projects can be easily onboarded, can deploy their renting pools, and can implement decentralized subscriptions on their off-chain platforms. This is the goal, and we are planning to support more networks for IQ, either ETH or a layer 2 ETH solution (like Arbitrum). We will also be creating a new version on the Solana blockchain at some point, and a version for NFTs as well (as I mentioned before).
For the platform, we have an extensive roadmap. We will try to publish it within the next two weeks. (We have) a lot of new features, a lot of interesting new concepts: like I mentioned the snap-shot technology for running calculations, taking snapshots of balances of a certain block, or from one block to another. In addition, we have an idea of creating an explorer based on the historical data that we have. The explorer would be different than something like Etherscan: it will be multi-blockchain, and it will have monitoring and trigger functions built into the explorer, so you can put something under monitoring with one click. And of course — I don’t know if you have ever tracked stuff on Etherscan, but you can have like fifty tabs open, because you click on every transaction hash and each wallet — we will make this much easier: you can do it all on one tab, you can cross correlate addresses with each other. So, I think it will be a good addition. And we have more things coming that I cannot mention right now. Hopefully we can put it all in the updated roadmap.
Yes, there is. I think the product has been validated by the market. Product fit has been reached. The only thing that is not perfect is that we do a lot of things — I’ve seen start-ups who do one thing a very simple thing, but they do it very well, and they are successful at this. But we have, literally, hundreds of use cases. So, our focus is split. We cannot improve the user experience, the client experience, for each one of them immediately. And this is something that we are working on, prioritizing the use cases. And we will be doing completely new UI/UX that will simplify everything, a new version of ParsiQL that will allow for far more than the current one does, and other updates.
Yea, historical data: we already have it. Now it is just a matter of providing access, figuring out how to present it to users in the most convenient way. This (i.e., retrospective triggers) is definitely coming this year.
Public marketplace: we are already working on what we call “smart templates” which are like database of different use case templates, ready-made templates that you can use, or that you can fork and modify. And the next step after that will be getting the ability for other uses to put more templates on the marketplace.
For reverse triggers, there are things that are related to Ncase (like the NPC multiparty computation, and where to store the private keys, and so on). So, I do not have an exact timeline for those triggers yet. But they are coming. We have had a lot of requests from clients using us right now, stating that they would like to automate transaction execution using PARSIQ.
Usually it is 3–5 years like this, until it gets lower than 3x every year: this is usually how relatively successful growth startups operate. But considering the crypto market, and how it can grow exponentially, the number could be bigger. So, we will just have to wait and see. I remember a couple of years ago, no one understood why we should monitor anything on the blockchain. The space was changing so fast. Now people understand the value of PARSIQ. And we have evolved the product into so much more during this time.
Q: Interest from non-crypto for IQ Protocol is nice, too.
Yea. There is interest. It is going to be a tough sell at first, because that is how traditional companies operate. They might be interested, but it is going to be difficult for them to move fast. So, we’ll start with crypto companies with either already-launched tokens or to-be-launched tokens. Then we will move to more traditional companies: it can be really anything, from fitness apps to SaaS. This is all part our initiative.
Q: Has PARSIQ talked with AAVE to find a common use case into IQ?
No, not yet. But we know the (AAVE) team — we know Stani, the CEO — and we will be reaching out to not only him, but to multiple DeFi CEOs for potential collaboration and common use cases.
Q: Solana is about to have its own DEX. Any plans on listing there?
I know that Solana has multiple DEXs. Some of them are live already, like Raydium. Sure, why not: we’d be open to bridging the token to the Solana blockchain. Maybe we should do a poll in the community. If the community thinks it’s a good idea — let’s do it.
Q: Where is the team at with developing Public Projects, and what’s the progress on ParsiQL 2.0?
With ParsiQL 2.0 there is a lot of progress. The new version of the language will allow for so much more. For example — just a simple example — you will be able to write triggers that can not only monitor certain addresses, but ones that can also monitor the flow of money. So, e.g., if the monitored funds move to a next address, it will automatically trigger those addresses. And then it flows into 10 different addresses, and the trigger will start monitoring those. So, we can follow the flow, notify you, and bring all this data to you in real time. That is just a simple example. But you can also run much more complex calculations with that language. Once it is ready, we will do some heavy marketing towards developers. We want to build a very robust developer community, an active discord group to run hackathons by ourselves, and with some of the L1 chain partners we have. Developers will be a core focus this year and next year.
Q: Who is the guy in the painting behind you?
Well, this is General Anatoly Ressin. Maybe we can have him over for one of the next AMAs… but then it is going to be a long AMA. So, make sure you reserve enough time.
Q: Are more exchanges listing PRQ for more volume?
Yes, exchange listings are planned. A lot of them are in application review process. Some are farther along than that: we have had clear feedback on what we need to do to get listed. And there are some new ones that we are considering very soon.
Q: What non-crypto sectors are you targeting first?
Entertainment and gaming are two very good ones. But it could be literally something like a traditional SaaS market. So many possibilities: even a restaurant could theoretically use IQ Protocol.
Obviously we will be calculating TVL for each renting pool individually, and for the protocol as a whole. Yes, there will metrics. I don’t think it will require a separate website (like IQscan), but it will be visible on the IQ Protocol landing page.
Q: What has Evan Cheng’s role been so far in the team?
Evan Cheng is our advisor, and he is also an investor in the project. He advises mostly on technical and product-related issues, and a little bit of go-to-market as well. Everything from UI to UX, and even with the language he has been advising us. Also, with technical presentations, and higher-level technical issues.
It started like this: we pursued integrations. A year ago, or two years ago, we had to pursue every integration by ourselves. It wasn’t easy. But now it is different. Now, usually projects come to us, because the word of mouth of the market is relatively good concerning PARSIQ. So, we don’t have to do as much outreach. But we are still doing it, because we want relationships with most high-potential and legitimate projects in the space.
Q: Any updates on Superfarm using PRQ services?
This is something that you should keep an eye out for. We should have more information on this in the coming months.
We have spoken to the Diem team multiple times throughout the years. We do not have any exclusive access, and currently the testnet is live. So, we will see. I cannot comment more thoroughly — you will just have to wait and see.
You are correct. PARSIQ is a very technical project, one not easy for the general crypto community to understand. But the goal is to be the best at what we do. I guess, in general, it is simpler to market DeFi to the retail market because users can directly interact with it. But our project is more btd and b2b oriented. So, users do not usually interact with it directly — at least not as much as many retail-oriented projects. But I think setting the industry standard and showing the adoption among developers and companies will eventually bring awareness from the retail sector as well.
Q: Any news regarding more inroads into Chinese market?
We are still building the community there. It is slowly growing: our official WeChat and Weibo channels, and some content that we are publishing via third-party media publications. But we are not doing it too aggressively, because of the situation in China: we are seeing how the market reacts before turning it up a notch.
Q: How are the plans for IQ Protocol being available on Coinmetro?
Again, no specific hard dates because of pipelines is just chock-full of priorities that need to be delivered. But we have not forgotten about this. We will get there.
I am not aware of such a situation. The Graph and PARSIQ are made for different use cases. We have had multiple different partners and clients say that one is better for a certain use case than the other.
Deanna specializes in growth marketing. She has been with Dropbox and Wealthfront — which are both customer acquisition machines. She has been the global marketing lead at Dropbox, and she has such a wealth of experience that she is sharing with us. She is helping with building messaging, building content, figuring out a marketing plan. She is very involved on a daily basis. But (her work) is focused on customer acquisition, user acquisition, rather than retail crypto community awareness. For this we have other plans to ramp up our marketing.
Q: You used a funny example: that even a restaurant could use IQ Protocol. How would this work?
Well, think of it this way… If tokenization is the future for the whole financial system, and the transfer of value, and you have a sushi restaurant and you issue a token. The token will allow you to raise your seed capital, or any capital on a global level and adapt to global liquidity to finance this business. And you make it, for example, a utility token that gives you the right to have one free set of California monkeys per week. So, what you do is use the IQ Protocol: token holders who invest in the project, they can not only wait for it to do well and appreciate, but they can also put tokens into the protocol and earn income. The better the company does, the more income they earn. While, at the same time, people can pay a small fee — and basically have one set of California monkeys per week, for example. But it can be applied to most business where you can consume goods or services over times in certain volume.
Q: What is Kevin Murcko’s role on the team?
He has been advising us since very long ago — almost since the inception of PARSIQ. We did the ieo on his platform, he helped us with some legal documents, agreements, and generally structuring the tokenomics. He been a very good help, and Coinmetro has been a good partner.
Q: Have you heard about Covalent? I think they are trying to compete with The Graph.
Yes, it seems that those two projects are competitors. We have spoken to Covalent. They have a very nice product. As I mentioned before, there is overlap (between PARSIQ and Covalent) with certain features regarding historical data, but we are not direct competitors.
Q: Will retrospective smart triggers give PARSIQ similar abilities as The Graph?
Yes and no. Yes, because people would get access to historical data (like) with The Graph. But the concept is different. How they work is different. With retrospective triggers, it is not stored in a database that can be queried. Instead, you actually send a trigger back in time — for example, to a certain block, a past block — to parse everything according to your logic, your filters, thresholds, up until today. So, when we play everything that has happened and deliver this data in a processed-valuable way to you. So, it is slightly different (technology).
PRQ will eventually give some governance features over the PARSIQ platform, and possibly the PRQ renting pool in IQ, to holders. But if you are talking about IQ: it has grown into something much bigger, a separate DeFi platform, whose goal is to unlock billions in utility value. It is likely that it will one day have its own governance token and will be governed by a community dao. That is why I am saying that if someone wishes to put their PRQ to work in the renting pools — but are not doing it because they are waiting for ETH — I would suggest not waiting, because early adopters will very likely be rewarded.
Q: When will the marketing start to do visible marketing with results?
This depends on what you mean by results. But visibility will be increasing very soon. We are starting with the campaigns this month already, and wrapping it up through the end of the year. That means more social media activity, more media publications, and, like I said, we will be attending events in person and online, we will be hosting events. Lots to look forward to.
Q: At any point will PRQ be a deflationary token in the long term?
No plans for this right now. But when we transfer governance to the community, who knows. It is possible.
Q: IQ Protocol sounds like it can facilitate some kind of sci-fi financial system.
We are seeing a lot things happening with financial markets, and not just that: the metaverse, NFT markets in-game, etc. We think that in the future, it’s the end of ownership and that subscription-based relationships are (going to be much more) prevalent. People will want to use fungible tokens, or non-fungible tokens, for their utility or for what rights or memberships or access, or reputation, or whatever, they offer. And they will be rentable. Hopefully they will all be rentable through IQ Protocol. We have the first-mover advantage of this part of the DeFi money lego. We are really, really excited, and think that it has huge potential. We’ve been told by partners and investors that IQ sounds like it is far bigger than PARSIQ. It might be so. DeFi is more exciting and opens more possibilities. But PARSIQ is the middleware, the infrastructure behind the DeFi. So, it depends on how you look at it.
Q: Is IQ like staking your shares of a company for various benefits?
Your analogy is more or less (the case). Think of it as if you can actually share in the project’s success in a decentralized, trustless way. I guess you can (use that analogy). But like I said, projects that deploy renting pools can implement a ratio split between how much of the renting fees go back to the project’s wallet and how much is distributed to people who provide liquidity, or lend. And that ratio could be whatever: 90/10, 50/50. Right now, for PRQ it is around 97% in favor of the holders, of the people providing liquidity. But in an ideal world, governance voting will allow the holders to vote what the split should be — which is similar to how shareholders vote (like a company earns so much revenue, so let’s vote on taking X amount out as dividends, and leaving the rest in the company because the company needs that money to grow, and take market-shares, which will in turn increase the stock price). So, the analogy is there with sharing stocks. But this is pure, pure DeFi and done in a utility token manner — not securities.
Q: Will the use case of PRQBoost diminish as IQ Protocol gets bigger?
I think we will at, at some point, end the PRQBoost program and replace it with a more effective liquidity program. Maybe we can even, somehow, connect with the liquidity in the IQ Protocol lending to the liquidity in Uniswap. We are still working on that until we have some great ideas. But, of course, if we end the PRQBoost program, we will make that known months in advance.
Q: Can you expand on how early adopters of IQ Protocol on BSC will be rewarded?
Yes. We have an incentive program we are figuring out. We will announce it soon enough for early adopters. Another thing: if there were to be an IQ Protocol governance token one day (maybe next year), then I think there is a good chance we would do a drop for early adopters of the product home.
We haven’t figured out the model yet. But that is one option, certainly. We’ll need Anatoly on board with these ideas, and on how the governance exactly works.
Q: What are the most exciting things coming up in the next six months?
I think I have covered the ones that I can talk about: the progress with IQ Protocol being able to onboard projects, for these projects to deploy their own renting pools, increase TVL, all these new versions on other chains, for NFTs, and all the product updates for PARSIQ. There are some collaborations on the table with traditional companies — not cryptos — that we should be seeing this year, hopefully. But there are other things I just cannot talk about at this point.
We’re planning for once every two weeks, on Thursdays. I think we’ll have guests here, like Anatoly, Allen maybe, Simon — who knows maybe one of the advisors. So, it won’t be just me.
Q: How early is an ‘early adopter’ when it comes to IQ Protocol on BSC?
Well, let’s say, as long as the PRQ renting pool is the only pool on the protocol, then you’re an early adopter for sure.
Q: Bring Evan Cheng on this AMA please.
I’ll ask him. Sure. Why not? Let’s try. And maybe Deanna as well. If she agrees, she could give some great perspective, from a person who comes from outside the blockchain/crypto world.
Anyway, I think it is time for me to end this stream. Thank you all for coming! Thanks for the great questions! The next one will be in two weeks, and feel free to prepare your questions: forward them to any of the moderators, or come to the live event and ask here. I will be happy to answer. Maybe we will get someone else here — maybe you can do a poll with who you want here with me next. Thanks for your time and see you all real soon! Have a good weekend!
