Welcome again to another insightful Q&A with PARSIQ!
We have had some great updates in the community since our last AMA: not only has PARSIQ been participating in a Gitcoin hackathon, and not only have we updated our subreddit group, but there are also currently some exciting opportunities to receive some free PRQ! First, we have created a campaign for you to learn more about PARSIQ, where we are giving away 10,000 PRQ. Second, the 5,000 PRQ giveaway (hosted by Human & Machine) is still underway. And third, our 1m PRQ incentive program is active and is receiving an impressive amount of attention (thank you to all who have already taken advantage of this incentive!).
Below is the transcription of the October 28th, 2021 live AMA with Tom Tirman (CEO), and guest Simon Harmgardt, Business Developer Officer at PARSIQ.
As usual, the bolded questions are links to the timestamped section of the video AMA. Or, you can watch the entire AMA here.
Be sure to visit PARSIQ on Twitter or in our Telegram, and Tom Tirman on Twitter here.
Introduction
Tom: Hi, everyone. And, we’re LIVE. Welcome to the next PARSIQ live AMA. Two weeks ago we had PARSIQ COO Rong Kai here, and this week we have Simon, PARSIQ’s Business Development Officer (BDO).
Hi, Simon.
Simon: Hi everyone, Hi Tom, how’s everyone doing today?
Tom: Before we get to the questions, I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to the community for their social engagement. All the metrics — according to Lunar Crush, Crowdsense, and CoinTelegraph’s Vortex metrics — have been really impressive, the growth was impressive. So, thank you everyone, please keep it up!
We also updated our subreddit, as per the community suggestion. We are 100% on the ball and committed to getting more social engagement. We have a lot of events and progress updates planned for the coming weeks and months, and we will do everything from our side to amplify through our marketing channels. We hope that the community continues to amplify it even further. It is teamwork. Thanks guys!
Q: Simon, before we get into the community questions, maybe you’ll tell us a little bit about your background.
Tom: A lot of people know that you previously worked at SAP, one of the world’s largest software companies. So, what drove you to work full-time in blockchain, and how do you view traditional tech and blockchain converging, and where do you see PARSIQ in all of this?
Simon: Perfect, sounds great. Yeah, just more of a background about myself: I’ve had various roles, most recently before PARSIQ I was working at SAP, and before that I worked in marketing + sales in different consumer packaged goods companies like Pepsi-Co.
I’ve always loved technology — been obsessed with it — so that’s what really drove me to SAP. At SAP I was part of a global training program at the start where they brought a few hundred people from 40+ countries down to California for six-months for sales training. That was a really good foundation for sales for me to learn a lot of the main skills. Afterwards I came back to Canada and focused on North America for our Customer Experience products at SAP. Those are things like e-commerce software, customer data platform, which is all about collecting customer data and making the experience for the end users, whether that’s whether you’re shopping at one of your favourite retailers, whatever it is, making that experience, your e-commerce experience, how they interact with you in terms of marketing. We sold software that helped create those experiences essentially at the end of the day. Some of the competitors are Salesforce, Adobe, and Shopify — those types of players in the world. So, these are very big customers. My role was to really understand their business needs and then take the technology that we had at SAP and provide demonstrations on how we could specifically solve their challenges.
Going back to Tom’s question there about what brought me to the blockchain world… Last year I got really into crypto and the blockchain space. I had a journey of understanding what Bitcoin was at the start and getting excited about that, then I began doing a bunch of research on Ethereum, and then my mind was blown even further. After getting into all of these projects, I became active in the PARSIQ community, coming up with a bunch of different use-cases (my name in the community used to be windy-something when I first started). Eventually, when I looked at what I was doing every hour outside of work it was researching the blockchain space, finding cool new projects, understanding the tech, understanding how early we are in the adoption of blockchain technology, and getting excited for that. Just take the DeFi space, right? Tom and I were just talking about this this morning. It really changes the entire game: say you want to take a loan out from the bank right now, a traditional bank. Well, you’d have to go right now and get a credit score check, fill out paperwork, all this. With DeFi in two seconds you can get that, just deposit some ETH in Aave for example, and get a loan against that. It’s really going to change the game for so many different industries.
We’re so early! I don’t think in my lifetime there is going to be another technology shift that is going to be this big and is going to change so many things. How businesses are going to interact with their customers with social tokens — everyone’s going to have a token or an NFT soon. We’ve already started seeing that kind of adoption. I really see the need going forward, and one of the reasons I joined PARSIQ on top of just the space, is that there’s going to be this WEB2 world and those people are going to stick in that world. You’re going to need to have your front end on a hosting platform, right? But, you are also going to want to connect into blockchain technology and that’s really where PARSIQ fits in there. We’re at the centerpoint of that. There’s really no other real competitor in the space that’s going after such a big vision of what we’re doing here at PARSIQ. So, yeah, that’s why I really wanted to join the team.
Tom: Thanks, Simon. Yeah, and you’re right the space is really exciting. The disruption we’re seeing: we’re meeting projects everyday who are building all of these creative, exciting things, building blocks, so I think also with PARSIQ and IQ we’re building the foundation here upon which many many can build in the future. So, exciting times are coming up, we are just at the beginning.
Let’s get into the community questions. First, the question is…
Q: How many projects are currently slated to launch on IQ? Also, when is the dashboard going to be released?
Tom: I can confirm that there are dozens of projects, I have counted over 30 projects. Some of them have already started integrations, some of them have soft committed, but the interest has been pretty huge. I was expecting that maybe out of 10 projects that we speak to, that 1 or 2 would be interested. But the rate of positive reactions is much much higher, and that includes projects that want to use it for their own utility tokens, as well as for NFTs. That includes some non-crypto projects like software and apps who want to launch a token and tokenize their services. Simon is actually doing most of these calls, most of the BD work, speaking to these teams, maybe he can comment a bit more.
Simon: Totally, yes, like Tom said, I’m on calls all the time with potential customers, reaching out to them, talking to people that we’ve already met with, just about IQ. IQ has gotten a really good reception from everyone that I explain it to. I really explain it in regards to a Netflix example. If Netflix had a token you could either hold or rent that token to get access to Netflix is one example. What customers really like is the flexibility of the model, it’s not just set in stone. We’re learning new ways that it can be used. Literally every day, every week, there are new use cases popping up: like holding or renting a native token to get access to lower fees, or to get access to gated content, or a similar way to that we’re using it, to be able to get access to more of a traditional type of service, right? Like a SAAS type subscription, so there are all of these ways people want to use it.
We’ve even talked to companies in the metaverse, who are hosting events for other companies in the virtual spaces that they create. We’ve talked to them about how PARSIQ could be of use to them. For example, say PARSIQ wanted to host an event in the metaverse. We would have to hold or rent a certain amount of their tokens to invite our community into that metaverse as well. One of the things that I’m most excited about is that IQ is both an NFT version and the traditional token version. A lot of projects that are focused on NFTs also have a token to power their model and their entire protocol, right? So, we can help them out with both of them at once. We’ve talked to some companies that are NFT platforms but also have a token, and they are interested in both versions as well.
Tom: As long as we are on the topic of use cases, we’ve heard tokenized access, subscriptions, access to software, access to content, any kind of usage of products and services even off-chain or real world ones, using assets in games for play to earn, massive use cases. I’ve discussed with other projects about renting voting power, like when you rent a governance token. Another interesting one that popped up, but we haven’t really decided whether we should go that route because it’s tricky, is financial instruments, like options. For example, you rent an amount of tokens, with a price, let’s say call options, put options, and if it’s on the money you can actually buy them out; if not then you pay the premium and they go back, they expire. So this is something interesting to consider. It’s a tricky market, though, because of the SEC and everything that’s going on with TERRA and Uniswap. But it’s definitely a cool use case.
Q: What are your favourite or the most interesting use cases that you’ve heard, Simon?
Simon: One of my favourite use cases so far is a gaming project that will allow people to easily launch games in one centralized place. It’s going to be similar to — if there are any gamers out there — to Xbox Game Pass, where you can pay a fee and access a bunch of different games. We’ve talked about a lot of use cases with them in regards to holding or renting their token: to not only be able to launch your game on the platform, but also from the user’s perspective, to get access to play all of these different games. I think this is really, really cool. They are also interested in the NFT version as well. Being able to take an NFT, say if you hold an existing NFT to wrap it, and then you’re the only one to play with it in that game. They already have this technology, but we’re going to help them to take their technology and extend it further. We can take their wrapped version and can put it into the NFT version. From there, users will actually be able to have a marketplace and rent their NFTs out to different people within the protocol and within the market. Those people renting them out can earn some extra interest on their idle assets, which I think is pretty cool.
There’s also been other gaming projects I’ve talked to that have some types of tournaments, and they want to allow users to hold or rent their token to get into the tournament, sort of as a payment. And then they have these ideas about half-time essentially (I know FTX just bought a superbowl ad, it was announced yesterday, right?). Say if advertisers wanted to advertise in a half-time show, where the game has a two-minute pause. They could hold or rent their token to get access and advertise in this metaverse type game. There are so many cool ideas and I’m really excited for the gaming space. Imagine for example, the use case that I always say, you had a weapon in a game, and you go to bed or you go on a vacation, and you’re not using it. Why couldn’t you just rent it out, right? Or, maybe you are playing a different game or you stop playing that game for a bit but you still want to hold that asset and maybe come back to it in a month, then you can rent it out and earn some extra interest. Really, really cool.
Tom: Yep, NFT and DeFi money lego. The possibilities are limitless.
Q: How are the listings going?
Tom: Well, they are going. They’re going, we’ll get there, it’s not a cassette, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We’ve heard from the community about maybe not listing on the biggest, but maybe like mid-tier exchanges, so we’re moving there as well. Yeah, they will come. Probably when you least expect it.
Q: Hi Simon, which PARSIQ services would you say are most in demand by clients and/or capture the most interest by prospective clients?
Simon: Yeah, that’s a good question. Different clients are interested in different things. Like we just talked about, every call we’re on about IQ, they find the model interesting and we almost find a use case where they can use it in different ways. But that also circles back to our monitoring platform, right? Being able to monitor the eligibility, it’s extremely easy for these companies — if that user wants to get access to whatever it is, gated content so on and so forth — to monitor if they hold or rent that token. So, IQ adoption will drive more adoption for our monitoring platform as well.
Another thing I’ll say, for PARSIQ monitoring specifically, there’s been lots of new features that we have launched recently. One of the favourites, it’s gotten really good feedback from clients, is the ABI Decoder that we launched over the last month. So, just to explain what the ABI Decoder is, quickly and in simple terms: you can just take the ABI of your smart contract, just that code there, and let’s say it’s a similar type of experience for the client as uploading a file to google drive, right? They just upload the ABI, and we’ll automatically detect the names of the events within that smart contract. Then that will become available for them to use in the ParsiQL programming language up front, and they can monitor internal/external functions call, but also these smart contract events. Say if there’s a mint event in their smart contract, once the status of that event is hit, they can send a notification to their users in real-time, or data somewhere, or alert an endpoint through a webhook, anything like that. I really like to see the reception of that, and as well, I am really excited for historical data that we are going to launch. We’ve had some great calls. I was on a really exciting call yesterday about combining our historical and real time data. This quite large project was having some challenges with some other historical data providers. They saw how combining historical and real-time data together, not only could they get their data faster, but it opens all of these different use cases as well in regards to real-time data. Being that one provider for both is a real differentiator.
Tom: Yeah, there is massive interest in data infrastructure right now because there are just so many projects building complex stuff. They all need that infrastructure, but a lot of existing solutions face some challenges. Hopefully we can solve it for these projects.
Q: iPRQ is more of a non-fungible contract than token (one of a kind of contract between two parties), can this feature alone be offered as a service to other projects?
Tom: I am not sure I quite understand. But iPRQ, you’re right, it’s not a token, it’s an NFT that represents your shares in the pool. I think projects have asked whether they can use IQ protocol for standard staking. In that case, they would actually stream rewards from their treasuries or reward pools, so inflationary type, and again the “i” version of the token that the staker gets would be his/her stake in the pool. Is that correct Simon, I think we’ve had a couple of those.
Simon: Yeah, exactly. There’s been a few customers that want to use it more as a traditional staking mechanism. How that would work is that they would be the only renter essentially allowed in the platform and users would basically be allowed to just stake their tokens. Any rewards would be streamed through at those renting fees. Only the company could stream those through. Then the users also get the benefit of automatic compounding and streaming of the rewards as well. The model is so flexible that a lot of companies like the flexibility and that we can adapt it a little bit as well.
Q: What’s your opinion about ECOMI and VeVe (NFTs). Have you reached out to them about a possible partnership?
Simon: I have not reached out to VeVe, but I think some of our other colleagues have talked to ECOMI before. I will double check and if we haven’t, then I will do that today.
Tom: Yeah, I can’t recall if we’ve reached out to these particular projects, but we’ve spoken to some really really big ones recently in the NFT space, some of the biggest ones.
Q: Here is a question that came up in the community this week: Are there any plans for extra confirmation to switch iPRQ to PRQ on IQ Protocol for extra security?
Tom: Well, this is not how it works. The assets will have to be in the renting pool to actually have TVL and for it to work with the mechanism that Anatoly designed. The iPRQ is swappable back to PRQ at any point in time so that shouldn’t be an issue.
Q: Hi Simon, any comments on the Indian market for crypto and DeFi in general?
Simon: I have no specific comments on the Indian market per se. One company I do follow is Galaxy Digital, they are a venture capital firm in the space. I think they actually just invested in an Indian-based TikTok type of competitor. I don’t know if it’s crypto — it’s more in the metaverse and social tokens and I think they can go there, so that’s something cool. Other than that, not too much to say on that, but I love India. I actually travelled to India for 3 weeks with my wife and got to see a bunch of different places. I love India in general.
Q: I will hold PRQ until 2025.
Tom: Simon, how long are you holding yours?
Simon: Endlessly! We’re so early in the crypto space. As the entire industry grows, more and more data infrastructure needs will arise, right? PARSIQ is really at the centerpoint of this issue. You see people coming from the traditional finance world, who are all very interested in crypto now; and what they’re saying is that if you look at the global monetary system — I think it’s $2 trillion dollars, but maybe that’s bonds or equities — we’re at $2 trillion dollars right now, or around that number in the crypto space. Over the next 10 years, if we were to become the same size of the equity markets, then you’re looking at a 100x increase in the entire space, right? So, once equities and bonds and all of that start getting tokenized, you will see the entire space grow.
That sort of goes back to what I said before. I think we are so early in this technology adoption. It’s so exciting, and I don’t think we’ll see this pace of growth again in my entire lifetime. That’s one reason that I decided to join the space and join PARSIQ, because we can capture all of that value. It’s not just like we are nother DeFi protocol trying to do some swaps or things like that, right? There are new versions of those every week, and there’s probably hundreds of them. We’re really differentiated, and part of the reason why I joined PARSIQ is that PARSIQ is betting on the entire blockchain space. Moreover, there’s not really any real competitors in the real-time data business. Also, we can help out all of those different companies as well. We don’t really have to pick the winners, we can win with all of them!
Tom: So, you’re like this true believer. Forever with $PRQ,
Simon: Diamond Hands! [laughter]
Q: What are the challenges for a company like SAP to adopt crypto solutions?
Simon: I think the challenge for them is that big tech companies sometimes move slow, right? They want to see the adoption of the technology before they go all into it, right? Traditionally with these big tech companies, they probably have research arms and they are already starting to explore it. I’ve reached out to some people over at SAP that I know. I would say that these big companies are at the stage of exploring blockchain technology. A lot of their customers right now are in the traditional more Web2 world. As their customers start demanding more blockchain technology or using it, they’ll move slowly along as well.
A use case that comes to mind for IQ from my previous life when selling e-commerce software, is imagine you were a brand, right? Pick your favourite brand in the world and say they had a clothing line, right? You could actually get a new revenue stream by being able to launch a token, or launch an NFT, and from there the users that hold your NFT or a certain amount of your tokens, could get access to the new clothing line first. So, you can have these loyal customers and you can get feedback from them, you can get revenue by selling your NFT for example, or renting them out, whatever way you want to do it. You could get those loyal communities and loyal fans. I think it will come, it’ll just take some more time. They’re already exploring that type of technology it sounds like.
Tom: It only means we are early. As we’ve seen, Palantir is starting to do stuff with crypto, a lot of the big players are. But right now, they’re just, you know, dipping their toes in.
Q: I read somewhere that PARSIQ triggers had been used to correct the output of an already deployed and malfunctioning smart contract. Is this correct, and can you tell us more about this?
Tom: Simon, do you know about this particular case? A lot of users and clients use smart triggers to monitor whether a contract runs correctly, whether there are some issues with it, and it alerts you at the earliest possible level.
Simon: I know where this question is going now. Yes, this is functionality kinda like smart contract debugging in a certain way. When a company is testing out their smart contract they want to know if the events are firing correctly, right? That could be a mint event, it could be a burn event,or it could be some other event that they coded into their smart contract. What the launch of the ABI Decoder over the last month has allowed them to do, is to be able to do all this super, super easily, and within just a few minutes. The ABI Decoder is perfect for this: basically they just upload the ABI of their smart contract, the names of those events will come up, and if they want to check if the mint or burn event is happening correctly, they can just monitor that event and get notifications in real-time as well. So, I hope that answered that question.
Tom: Yep, and maybe as well as we are preparing to move towards actions on the blockchain, reverse triggers, this could be done automatically.
Simon: Totally, that’s what I’m super excited about. This is sort of one of those building blocks that we’re working up towards. Imagine being able to use this ABI decoder, detecting a burn event — or a mint event, or whatever it is — and then whenever that event happens, you automate the trigger to do whatever you want. I think that’s going to open up a lot of opportunities as we continue to move in that direction. I would just say this is a building block for that.
Tom: Yeah, definitely. And these actions on the blockchain, the reverse triggers, we will also employ them in IQ. This is an opportunity to have recurring payments, so it’s not like you rented some assets for a month to get access to something, to use some products or services. You can actually auto-renew your rental to continue to access this software or service by using reverse triggers. Blockchain automation.
Q: What will likely happen to PRQBoost tokens in future when it is not needed?
Tom: I cannot say yet, but we will indeed discontinue the PRQboost program at some point. It’s probably not the most effective liquidity incentivization program, we have some more interesting things in mind.
Q: Hello Simon, could you categorize how PARSIQ business model is different from other competitors?
Simon: Our business model has traditionally focused on the way we access real-time data, streaming data in real time. If you look at the data platform space, there aren’t really any competitors with streaming data. A lot of other companies have focused on querying data, or pushing data, but not streaming it in real time. So, these other companies are more historically based — that is, looking backward in time at the data. This is needed. But also, streaming data in real time opens up a lot of different opportunities, whether it is notification, or to react to certain things. Like we just talked about, as we work towards reverse smart triggers, being able to detect events in real time in order to program automation, is very much needed. So there is a need for both historical data as well as real time data. I was talking to a big project yesterday about this. They use one of the other historical data providers now, and are having lots of challenges with it. I told them about our approach to real time data, and that we are about to launch historical data soon as well. They really liked our approach. But we also helped them see how we could solve the challenge that they are currently facing. They also began seeing all different kinds of use cases that they could enable with live streamed data, whether that is monitoring top wallets for different protocols, or sending important notifications in real time. If the two kinds of approaches to data are used synergistically, it opens up a lot of opportunities. What I have seen in the software spaces is that rather than going to all the different competitors, some people like to get everything from just one provider. It simplifies their tech stack well.
Q: For a faster growth do you think PARSIQ team needs more 1) product releases 2) manpower 3) social outreach/marketing 4) partnerships
Simon: I would say we are working on all these needs right now. A lot of the people are being onboarded — even since I joined a few months ago. I think the team (and Tom could speak more to this), has grown 300% or something along those lines, since the start of the year. We are a team of 40+. We are constantly looking at hiring more. We are working on manpower, on social media and marketing — so yes, all of this is being worked on right now. And we plan to continue to focus on all of these things.
Q: Is iq protocol on other chains coming down the line or is it safe to assume it will be after the airdrop and the governance token drops?
Tom: It will be at least on one other chain this year. The first few projects will also be on that chain. PRQ will, for the time being, stay on BSC. We don’t see the need to have multiple pools of PRQ on different chains — but that will be added down the line. We urge all projects to choose one chain where they want to start; and later, when things are going smoothly, we can add multiple pools on different chains.
Q: Several million of PRQ were unlocked recently from the development fund. Was it for any major partnership?
Tom: The development fund is used — among many other things — for market making liquidity, for listings, for rewards (like PRQBoost rewards), liquidity mining rewards, airdrops, and similar things.
Q: Do you have any idea on what amazon will use PRQ for?
Tom: It isn’t that Amazon uses PRQ, per se. Being a technology partner with AWS means we can work together. We can get into their infrastructure on good terms. They will help us at optimizing our technical process, and connect us to the vast Amazon partner network. We can resell our services to the thousands of businesses running on Amazon and using the Amazon partner network. We will also build a PARSIQ application and put it on the AWS marketplace. There are a few other surprises we are doing with AWS as well, which you will see in due time.
Q: Since novi has launched. any update on parsiq (potential) partnership with Novi?
Tom: Obviously we cannot speak about any potential, or future, or speculative partnerships. With that being said, we are waiting for the Diem blockchain to launch. We do have plans to support it at some point.
Q: What plans do you have for marketing and brand recognition? It’s funny how meme coins like Shib or Doge have so much hype and a gem like PRQ doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
Simon: This is an aspect of how early in the space we still are. Projects with a lot of fundamentals will prevail and have their time as well. But if we look at how small the space is, in comparison with traditional equities or companies, we are very early. It is a bit irrational what is going on with SHIB. At some point it will become a bit more rational, and true fundamentals will prevail. Regarding branding and recognition: Ross was at TOKEN2049, and we’ve gotten a lot of leads from that. I’ll be going to the Solana Breakpoint conference, where we’ll be hosting an event/party for a bunch of different projects that will come. Our name is going to be out there quite a bit. We’ll continue looking at different events to attend, which we think will be useful. We are also growing the marketing team.
Q: Do you expect any of the new IQ pools to outpace the TVL of the PRQ pool in the short term, or will it be a slower growth?
Tom: That is a good question. IQ will have some projects that have a higher market cap than PARSIQ currently does. So, potentially they could outpace the PRQ TVL. But I am very impressed with the PRQ TVL growth, which is almost at 50m tokens. If you add the tokens that market makers have (which are basically loans), as well as some investor funds (some of which have time horizons of up to 10 years, and so they don’t have plans to touch these), then at least half of our circulating supply is being staked in IQ.
Q: Is PARSIQ talking to Boson Protocol?
Simon: Yes. I have a Telegram chat going with them.
Q: Will IQ Protocol be blockchain agnostic or will there be one IQ Protocol for each blockchain?
Tom: It will be a separate protocol on each chain. Most of the chains are EVM compatible, so it is somewhat easy to move the smart contracts. But they will be independent protocols. But we will aggregate the data and show combined TVLs for both project-specific pools as well as for IQ as a whole, across all chains.
Q: Chainlink just announced a partnership with AWS to allow AWS customers to use their nodes. Does PARSIQ need to build a reputation to see a good partnership with the Big Five (i.e., Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft)?
Tom: Well, that is pretty similar what we have just done. We allow AWS customers to use PARSIQ smart triggers. About the Big Five: just wait; wait and see.
Q: Any update on NFT renting on Superfarm? When will Mysterium be live on IQ Protocol?
Tom: It is all coming. Keep an eye out for the announcements.
Q: Would you ever consider posting a full company overview for the holders (including, e.g., revenue, clients, growth, etc.)?
Tom: We cannot publish all the user data or client data. But we can do a summary of the number of clients, amount of revenue, growth percentages, etc. — Sure.
Q: I’ve been trying to learn about this project. How would you explain PARSIQ to someone who is somewhat new to the crypto world?
Simon: That is a great question. I would say that, in very simple terms, there are sort of two different worlds right now. One is the world we all already know: the world where we access websites, purchase things online, communicate online, etc. These are things many of us probably do every day. That is the ‘Web 2’ world that a lot of people are living in today. There is this other world that is currently being built. We are laying block by block every single day. It is the ‘Web 3’ world: you can think of social tokens, of block chain technology, of metaverse, and all these types of things. Currently, it is hard for these two worlds to communicate, for example when getting data off the blockchain and showing it on a Web 2 front end. The challenge being faced today is connecting these two worlds together. But that is really where PARSIQ comes in: it connects these two worlds together, the Web 2 and Web 3 worlds. It allows them to communicate together. It’s like adding another person to your contact list, and you can now contact them, contact this other world. That is where PARSIQ comes in.
Q: How are you tackling the challenge of conveying information about both PARSIQ and blockchain to traditional, non-crypto companies? What’s your ammo bag like?!
Simon: Traditional companies are just starting to explore blockchain technology. We have started seeing things like Visa announcing that they want to work on layer 2 ETH technology, and to sort of be a hub for that. I think what we will see is that there is going to be some type of adoption. But right now, many are still in the exploratory phase. But they will keep exploring and moving further toward adoption. I’ve reached out to some companies, and gotten some responses, they’ll say, for example, “Hey! This is really interesting! We understand what you are doing, and we will keep you in mind. We are currently researching and exploring. But maybe we will need your services down the line.” That is the type of responses I have received from a lot of the big traditional companies. The blockchain industry is still in its early stages, but traditional companies are going to move over into it. They are going to want a piece of the pie of the Web 3 world, to continue to grow their revenue. They will move towards wherever their current users go. This will all take some time. But it will eventually happen.
Tom: When I have had calls with big traditional, multi-billion-dollar companies, I have mostly spoken to those who have already dipped their toes into blockchain a little bit. I take whatever engagement they have with blockchain — whether it is a small investment in a blockchain company, or an app that connects with blockchain somehow — and I show them the ways that, if they have PARSIQ, how much easier it will be for them. They all understand. But most are not ready to move full tilt yet. Adoption will come, but it’s just a matter of time.
Q: Will the focus on the PRQ token diminish with the introduction of the IQ token. Will IQ token detract from the PRQ token and project?
Tom: I am not concerned about this. They are different projects, completely different in their natures. PARSIQ, for the most part, is an infrastructure project. IQ Protocol is pure DeFi: completely decentralized, open-sourced, public, etc. PARSIQ is partially centralized and partially proprietary, and very developer-specific, specific to enterprises and B2B. In contrast, IQ Protocol has a lot of DeFi retail engagement. So, I think they are completely different projects, with completely different ends. I do not think they will compete in any way.
Simon: To add to that: As IQ continues to gain adoption, you will need monitoring the eligibility of the token holdings, which involves PARSIQ services. As we see an increase of usage of IQ Protocol, there will be an increase of use of PRQ as well.
Tom: Exactly. Every IQ enterprise will also use the PARSIQ platform. The relationship is synergetic.
Q: Have you reached out to IOTA? They are a DAG rather than a blockchain, but they are focused on data streams and could benefit from PARSIQ.
Tom: We have not. We can integrate a DAG and add support for monitoring a DAG. But it is a matter of prioritization. We already have so many blockchain integrations in the pipeline. We will get to it at some point, but we have decided that a few other layer 1 and layer 2 networks deserve our more immediate attention.
Q: Will there be tools that allow users/companies to audit their triggering computation in the past?
Tom: I think you are referring to retrospective smart triggers, which can go back to any block, and with which you can specify any contract that you want to; and you can replay it, recalculate it, from one block to another. Yes, that is pretty much ready for roll-out. It is going to be a great tool for calculating all kinds of things, across the blockchain.
Q: How does SupraOracles monetize their partnership with PARSIQ? Do they get paid in PRQ tokens based on the usage of their data by PARSIQ service?
Tom: Currently we are not paying them anything. It is more of a proof-of-concept. They are just rolling out their test-net. At first, there will not be any payment involved. We will try out the integration, which works from both sides. So, Supraoracles can provide our smart triggers with their data; and our smart triggers can provide block chain data — or let’s say, a combination of on-chain and off-chain data — to their oracles. It is a mutually beneficial thing.
Q: How many PRQ are in the dev fund?
Tom: If you mean the team advisory fund, I think it holds around 23m PRQ tokens right now. Not all of them are allocated, but actually reserved for future team members and future advisors.
Q: On twitter you hinted that some news related to SOL was coming, can you confirm this?
Tom: …So you want me to confirm that an announcement will be made in the future? (*smiles*) I can’t confirm that.
Q: Are there any potential partnerships that you can’t speak about with Bakkt or Palantir?
Tom: *laughing* I think this question answers itself!
Q: Can we expect the 2nd pool in Q4?
Tom: If you mean the second enterprise, after PARSIQ, who will deploy a renting pool in IQ Protocol: yes, at least a second one will be added.
Q: Very insightful session. All the best Simon for the Solana conference!
Simon: Thank you!
Tom: The issue is that I broke a bone in my leg. So, I do not know if I can attend the conference. It depends: I’m in a cast with crutches. Whether they can take the cast off before the conference or not — I’m not sure yet. Maybe I will make it; but maybe I won’t. If I cannot, then Simon and Anatoly will make the presentation for me and attend all the meetings I’ve set up.
Q: On IQ Protocol staking, it says “This project is in beta, use at your own risk!” What risk there is? Is loss of tokens something to be taken into account?
Tom: The risk is the same as with any DeFi Protocol, like using Uniswap. The whole Solana blockchain is also only in beta. You needn’t read too much into the word “beta”. But “use at your own risk” is a staple for any DeFi project. In our case, the smart contracts have been audited and built by engineers who were previously at Blockvis, which is a blockchain auditing company. They do meticulous work. Also, we have governance mechanisms in place to mitigate any potential problems.
Q: Could PARSIQ do a POC for car/bike renting system using the PRQ pool. For example, if one holds PRQ, then they can rent a bike for X amount of days, etc.
Tom: I am not sure PRQ is the right token to do this with. It would be a different token, like a BIKE token, with a different pool for that. Right now, it is challenging to do things like this with real-world items. But this is the direction that I see it going. If tokenization takes over, then why not rent things — property, real-estate, etc. — through IQ contracts? If an NFT can represent a unique piece of property, then why not use it to rent it out, for a day, for a month. This is where the industry will go.
Simon: We have had some talks internally, imagining various use cases. Let’s say Airbnb were to make every property represented by an NFT. As a user, when I book the property, I would rent this NFT. You could build something into this application, such that the NFT unlocks a smart lock at the door, giving you access to the rented unit. That is where all of this could eventually go, as things become tokenized. That is just a fun thing we were brainstorming about, related to the renting of real-world assets.
Q: Will there be a presale or airdrop for IQ token launch?
Tom: We have already announced an airdrop for early adopters and stakers in IQ. Yes, there will likely be a small presale. But more details will come out about this probably after the New Year.
Q: Are there any plans to work with hardware wallet companies, Trezor for example?
Tom: We work with BC Vault already, providing their users with push notifications. So, for example, if you are out, and your hardware wallet is at home, you can immediately know if someone sends you money, and have additional data about those funds. We have talked to Trezor as well. But it is not that high on the priority list right now.
Q: How much TVL do you expect there to be in IQ Protocol by Q2 next year?
Tom: I can’t predict that. But definitely up!
Q: Is nCase on the backlog now?
Tom: Yes. We have pushed back it in favor of expanding the monitoring platform, with the SDK, with the developer hub, with the historical triggers, with the public marketplace, and for IQ Protocol. But we are using pieces of NCase technology already for a lot of things right now. So, we will definitely be getting to it.
Q: The PRQ token is facing huge volatility in the price due to the low liquidity, how the team will deal with this?
Tom: For DEXs, I have found a great solution. It will allow us to have any depth of liquidity across all DEXs. I am looking forward to implementing it within the next couple of months.
Q: What do you think about The Graph? Be honest.
Simon: This goes back to a call I had yesterday, with a top-25 project. They were having challenges with The Graph. Every time they had to make a change to their logic The Graph had to re-index everything. It was taking a week to two weeks to get the most up to date data. We have a very different approach, where changing the logic does not require changing everything. We also have real-time data, which can continue to update that data. But it can also open different use cases. I was talking to them about being able to send notifications to their users, alerting their team of things, and being able to aggregate all this data in a way that updates various graphs and visuals on their front end potentially. They were having trouble with The Graph. I have talked to other teams (some very large projects have reached out to us) as we’ve started exploring historical data and are coming closer to launching that, and they have shared a similar sentiment about the same challenge with The Graph.
Tom: We do think The Graph is a great project. They have a lot of great developers in their community. They are very successful in that sense. We wish them all the best. But we do think that The Graph and PARSIQ cover different use cases. The Graph is trying to be a network, and PARSIQ can be a solution directed to solving problems that The Graph doesn’t cover. There is overlap, but we are indirect competitors. I’d rather see us working together with The Graph: there really are some interesting points of collaboration that are possible.
We are out of time here. I see the questions keep coming. Perhaps Simon can pop into the Telegram channel and answer them one day.
Simon: Perfect. Sounds great. Thanks, everyone. It was nice answering questions!
Tom: Thanks for the great questions and the AMA. Speak to you soon — the next AMA will be in two weeks.
Goodbye everyone!
