Hello, again! We’ve got another great Q&A for you, from PARSIQ!
As usual, before getting to the questions, we have positive community updates we want to remind you about. Once again, we have some opportunities for you to earn PRQ. First, we have just created a PARSIQ + IQ Protocol meme contest, with 3,000 PRQ total in prizes! Second, our #RiddleMePARSIQ campaign is still underway. With that, you have a chance to learn a bit more about PARSIQ and have a chance to win a share of the 10,000 PRQ we are giving away. And third, our 1m PRQ incentive program is active, and will be until the end of this year.
Below is the transcription of the November 18th, 2021 live AMA with Tom Tirman(CEO), and guest Daniil (Danny) Romazanov, Product Manager 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, Telegram, or Reddit, and Tom Tirman on Twitter here.
Introduction
Tom: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week’s PARSIQ AMA. We postponed it from last week, because last week our team was at Solana Breakpoint. I couldn’t go because I broke my leg, but Simon, Ross, and others were there to represent the team. Everything went really really well. I’ll dive more deeply into that later.
Today, on the AMA we have Danny, who is the product owner — basically VP of Product Management for the PARSIQ platform. For today’s AMA, I’d like it to be more focused on the product and its roadmap, and on Danny, of course. I will be taking some other questions in between, the product and Danny should be the main focus of the AMA. We will be having a dedicated AMA for IQ Protocol in December.
Danny Introduction
Tom: Hi, Danny.
Danny: Hi Tom. Hi everyone. Glad to be here today.
Tom: So, you have a background in IT. You worked at quite large corporations, giants like internet and technology companies, unicorns, publicly listed companies, and now you are at a blockchain startup. You’re managing the development of a fairly complex product, maybe you can give the background on why you made this choice and how your journey has been so far.
Danny: Yeah, sure. Indeed, I do come from a technical background. More technical and development than management. I’ve been doing this since 2010–2011. I have been through all kinds of projects, startups, IT giants, Russian ones, Estonia ones, all this sort of stuff. I do think that this experience helped me a lot here. I joined PARSIQ in March of this year. I’ve previously known Alan and he approached me at the beginning of this year. We had a lot of calls, and discussions about the project and the responsibilities. We were trying to figure out whether or not I was a fit for this position or not, and we decided: well, yes. I think so far it’s working out well. My previous experience indeed helps me a lot. Blockchain is an extremely technical space — it’s not just about finances, it’s about the tech itself. It does help a lot with management of the product when you have the corresponding experience.
Tom: Yeah, definitely. Has this been challenging so far? Diving deep into blockchain complexities?
Danny: I would say, of course, it is challenging in some ways. In some ways my expertise does help, my previous expertise, from another angle for me, this was my first crypto project. To be honest, it was my first crypto experience at all. Of course, it’s such a giant field with everything changing so fast. New concepts and new things appear on a daily basis. Of course, it is challenging to get into this space when everything changes and emerges so fast.
Tom: For sure, the Gitcoin Hackathon, this was PARSIQ’s second hackathon. First one was ETH Denver way back in February. There were relatively few submissions for ETH Denver, but quite a lot this time for Gitcoin. It was a Cross-Chain DeFi Hackathon, are you happy with the results? What do you think?
Danny: I’m extremely uplifted about the results. When I was first approached by the team, they said “Hey, we’re participating in Gitcoin.” No one had asked, “Do you think we can participate in a Hackathon right now?” I just faced the facts. At first I was like, we don’t have ParsiQL 2.0, we don’t have SDKs that we want to develop. So, I was a little bit skeptical. But, when we were actually planning the hackathon and the bounties, it started to look much, much better. I really liked what we came up with, in the sense of the bounties. At the start of the hackathon, I was still a little bit skeptical. But, I was very very happy with the results. We had a lot of amazing submissions. We didn’t expect this big of hype around our bounties. In the end we got around 20+ submissions, with really good projects submitted. It was very heartwarming to see that stuff was being built, even though we don’t have ParsiQL 2.0, we don’t have the SDKs that we want to provide for the developers, we still don’t have it, but it’s not the main thing. I mean, those are convenient tools of course, but with existing tech you can still do a lot. It was a really interesting experience, it was really nice to see what can be built when you are not limited by use-cases. You just have the tech and come up with something.
Tom: Yeah, agreed I was extremely happy with the results. I think we had some amazing submissions and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what can be built on PARSIQ.
Tom: Maybe, for the community to understand, what importance does the future Software Development Kit (SDK) have for developers, and what can they do with it that they can’t do without it? What’s the importance of this product release?
Danny: Yeah, sure. We actually have planned not one, but SDKs. They do have different usability. The first of them is the integration SDK. For many projects it’s more convenient not to work with the web interface or similar tools, they want to integrate PARSIQ into their code. So, if they want to subscribe to updates from an Ethereum address, for example, with some certain conditions. But, they do not want to come to our portal, do the setup, and if they want to change something they have to schedule their update and the update on our side, so it gets a little bit tricky at these connection points. Especially if you want to release a new version of your product, and at the same time you have to update all of the stuff on our side as well. What we will offer with this integration SDK is the ability to subscribe to on-chain events right from your code. You will be able to filter those transactions, you will be able to monitor various blockchains, and it will be blockchain agnostic as usual. On our side it’s going to be all the same, it’s going to be the smart triggers, basically it doesn’t matter what it’s going to be on our side, but on the client side it will be much easier to manage all this stuff. Especially if people want, for example, browser notifications, like not-native browsers, but on Uniswap when a transaction is mined, they will be able to connect to our SDK and get all of the notifications to the front end for example.
Tom: Yeah, so it expands the use-cases and gives developers easier access to creating smart triggers without having to go through the portal.
Danny: Yeah, and also it increases the flexibility a lot.
Tom: I’ve been asked a few times in the community about ParsiQL 2.0. I think it is a real underrated milestone, in terms of our product updates. So, maybe you can tell the community a few words on how it’s different and what will it allow that the correct version doesn’t?
Danny: I think the first thing that I should mention is that everyone should understand that ParsiQL — as a whole — is a proof of concept. As any proof of concept that is done, just to deliver and to see how it works, it obviously has its flaws. The first thing that we want to change with ParisQL 2.0 is the technical platform overall: its new core, its new compiler, its new run time, everything new. With this new stuff, what we will be able to achieve is: we will actually be able to expand it as much as we want. Right now we are very limited on the technical side, just because of how it was made initially, since it was made just to prove the concept, to see whether it actually facilitates the problems on the blockchain that it was meant to address. With the new platform, we will be much more flexible to expand the language. There will be many new things coming. But with the first release of ParisQL 2.0, we will allow triggers to work with multiple streams from different blockchains, and those streams will be able to produce events, and those events can be ‘caught’ by another stream’s triggers. For example, let’s say your protocol is on Ethereum, Polygon, and BSC, and you have Smart Contracts on those chains. You will be able to watch all of the information on these three blockchains within one single trigger, and you will be able to push this data further, since you will have three different streams. You will be able to aggregate data and use different kinds of loops to manipulate your data in a similar manner. What is important to us is to be blockchain agnostic. If we talk, for example, about Ethereum-like blockchains, all the information is purposefully structured in one way so that you can easily work with this information, without changing anything in the code. I think what is even more important, which our triggers will be supporting, is that our triggers will be able to follow the reality of the blockchain — it will have all the forks. But your main trigger, and the state of your main trigger will always remain true. So, you will never have information in your main timeline that is not relevant anymore (for example, of things that happened in a fork, and is no longer relevant). Your main reality will always represent the ‘truth’, that is, what happened on the blockchain. It will be supported for all the blockchains we support, and so will be blockchain agnostic. This works even if your trigger reads from different blockchains at the same time. It will still be able to hold the state that is the ‘truth’, the main version of blockchain. Those are the basic concepts that we are working on for the initial version. It will require, of course, a lot of work. It will be a pain to move from one to the other. But when this is done we will have much in the backlog for ParsiQL, and its further iterations.
Tom: Alright. Let’s dive into the community questions.
Q: Can you please provide an update on Reverse Triggers and Ncase? What’s the latest?
Tom: So I did explain in a Telegram AMA that Ncase has been pushed in favor of other platform updates, new functionality, IQ Protocol, and a lot of other things. But we will be using what we have already built for Ncase for Reverse Triggers. When we come to that topic, about the basic version of Reverse Triggers, with on-chain actions. Basically a trigger could trigger another action on the blockchain, if the owner assigns the action. How hard is that to implement with reverse triggers?
Danny: Well it is quite complicated. Ncase is one thing that should have helped us to move further with the Reverse Triggers. Right now the main problem is key management. Of course, we do not want to store the keys on our side. No one would ever actually do that, in their right mind. That would mean full access to your contract, to your wallets, and things like that. We are still blocked by this particular problem. We do have a couple ideas, which we will be testing out as proof of concept, maybe, next year to find out what solution looks the most appealing for us. For reverse triggers we have, first, security.
Tom: The challenge is key storage. The Ncase’s NPC technology is something that will help us build this out. Q1 is meant for some serious testing. After that we will put a hard deadline on when we will release it into production. Now, what if we don’t store the keys, but just give the ability to build the trigger that can sign a transaction (and the user themself signs the transaction). We have discussed this, and I think this will come earlier — like a basic version of on-chain actions.
Danny: Yes. There are still some questions about how to manage this, because when triggers are triggered users are not always on the portal — say, they don’t have access to MetaMask. But there are some options we still have to test out.
Tom: Right. It is not as simple as it sounds. It is on the roadmap, and we are planning to release a basic version first, and then test the full version in Q1. After that we will have a clearer timeline on when we can put it into production.
Q: Can you please address the change in the ‘Total Rented’ on IQ? It was over 30m, now it is <5m? Why are the totals much lower? How does the renting pool work?
Tom: What needs to be understood is that IQ is in beta mode. This is why we need early adopters to test it out. We are still figuring out the correct models on how to do everything. The reason the amount fluctuates — as you’ve seen it go up a lot, down a lot, up again, down again, etc. That will continue for a little while. One of the reasons for this is that some clients pay monthly, but they pay the company in stable coins of fiat. That means we have to manually borrow for them. We do not yet have recurring renting, recurring subscriptions on the blockchain. We have to re-rent them. That is why the rented amount sometimes falls down, as the rentals expire. We do not re-input it immediately, when the fiat or stable coins come in. We accumulate it, and enter it in large chunks. This is the reason for the fluctuation. Of course, in the future we will be automating this. Then, you will actually see it in close to real time, how subscriptions come in and how they flow.
Additionally, the rented amount is actually not as important as you might think. Currently, as we are playing with the pricing and the models and the interest rate, the bonding curve, and everything, the price also fluctuates. So sometimes, 1m rented can produce on APY, while another 1m at another time could produce another APY. It depends on the price of the services, which services are chosen, etc. So it is not necessarily a metric to judge profitability. If you look at AAVE or Compound, you see billions in the pools, with a miniscule amount rented out — like 10% or 1%, or even 0. APRs are even much lower than in IQ Protocol: it is close to zero on a lot of these pools. Yet, people bring TVL there. For some pools, even earning something is better than earning nothing. Compound, for example, also provides liquidity mining rewards in the form of Compound tokens. In our case, the APY is between 1–4%. It fluctuates. We will see what the average is in half a year or so. We expect it to grow as the amount of revenue from clients grows. But, at the same time, if the amount deposited grows, then that will bring the APY down.
While we work on this, we have other incentives, such as the 1m PRQ program. We will also have new ones coming up. Innovation takes time. It takes time to find equilibrium. Additionally, we have the IQ Protocol governance token airdropped for early adopters — and that is exactly the reason: you are early adopters while we are still testing and figuring out the nitty gritty details. That is why early adopters will be rewarded. Without giving much away, in terms of the IQ Protocol tokenomics, there will also be additional liquidity mining rewards in certain forms for certain pools. Keep an eye out for more details. I would say that profitability in APY will not be an issue, at least for the PRQ pool, in the long run.
Q: Can you give any more information or teasers about the IQ Launchpad that Anatoly mentioned at Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon?
Tom: I think we will get Anatoly here before the end of the year. He can share his vision for this.
Q: Do you have any plans for a PARSIQ collaboration with Ivanontech’s Moralis?
Tom: This might be a good idea, and there might be some use cases that overlap. We know Ivan well, so I think we should strike up a conversation with him and find some synergies with this.
Q: How many developers are currently working on PARSIQ and how many on IQ Protocol?
Tom: What is the ratio?
Danny: Very good question. Initially — especially initially — it was a huge mix. At the final development stage of IQ, some developers were taken away from the platform and given to IQ. But now it is all, more or less, settled down. We have, I think, four developers on the platform right now; on the monitoring platform itself, there are also three developers doing ParsiQL. There is the IQ team as well. I can’t say anything for sure about the numbers, but there are also Smart Contract developers, front end developers, and a couple more guys that I do not know very well (that is, I do not interact with them too often).
Tom: Yes, so seven developers, in addition to the QA (quality assurance), tech support, sales engineers, and product managers. Currently the amount of developers is tilted towards the PARSIQ platform, but we are actively hiring for both. If you know anyone — or if you want to apply and you are a developer — then send a message to Danny.
Q: Do we need to do anything after staking BSC PRQ tokens in IQ Protocol to be eligible for future rewards?
Tom: No. If you have staked your tokens, then you are already raking up that eligibility.
Q: What are some non-B2B (business to business) use cases of the PARSIQ platform for end users?
Tom: We have — just today — had a nice discussion about use cases for end users. Without giving things away, maybe Danny can give a little bit of a tease about that….
Danny: Sure. We have been thinking a lot about our notification platform in general, because monitoring is not only about notifications. It is also about triggering 3rd-party systems, for example. Lately we have been thinking about notifications a lot, because there are a lot of people that want to interact with their users directly: they don’t want to go the usual way, for example, and send notifications to Telegram, Discord, etc. Instead, they want to notify their users directly, and do not want to build anything on their side. We have some very interesting ideas about how to solve this particular use case. I think the details will come sooner than later — I am very excited about this idea.
Q: In order to set up a trade not using PARSIQ, I would need to call the orderbook APIs of exchanges and store my credentials or keys — Is this a feature live on ParsiQL?
Tom: The PARSIQ platform works for on chain events right now. Centralized exchange trades are not on-chain events. However, we have discussed the possibility that — theoretically — in the future, we can work with any streams of data, and not just blockchain streams. This would include anything: Twitter feeds, Craigslist ads, or CEX order books.
Danny: This is a very interesting subject. We have been talking about this a little. Being a data platform means that we can be anything, and not just a blockchain data company. The technology we are building, and with the concept of streams — where companies can push information through the streams — the users and customers can subscribe to the streams. What we do on our side is guaranteed that every user gets all the particular information that is sent to the stream. There are actually a lot of different opportunities to discover in the future for how this could play out.
Tom: Yes, definitely. Working with live streams of data is becoming more popular. It opens up a lot of use cases, even outside of the blockchain.
Q: Hi Danny, are there any new ideas for use cases of PARSIQ for retail investors? Would, for example, automated tax reports for every trade be possible?
Danny: Why not? It is a little bit complicated with the real-time data, because with real-time, the moment you start to collect information is the point where you deployed the trigger, for example. This concept doesn’t work all the time, because sometimes your spendings started in the past (i.e., before the trigger point) and you want to aggregate it all. To automate these sorts of processes, we will soon have the historical triggers. They will be identical to live triggers — so you will write the same ParsiQL code — and there will be no difference in how you manipulate the data. It will be all the same information that is available in the real-time and retrospective triggers. But you will need to identify the starting block (and the end point if you want that as well). With ParsiQL you will be able to aggregate this data and further push it where you need it. So all sorts of reports, aggregations, and all of this sort of stuff will be possible. It should be very easy in the future.
Tom: Yep, tax reports, accounting, etc., all of these are all use cases that should be easily achievable on ParsiQL.
Q: How will PARSIQ handle autonomously signing transactions when reverse triggers are released?
Tom: We briefly touched on this. It is related to Ncase technology that we have been developing. The idea is to have a ‘box’ where the keys are stored in a non-custodial way and can be used like NPC multi-party computation. I think this is also a good topic to give to Anatoly. He could give a couple hours lecture on this. He has thought this through quite well, and Ncase is based on this concept from Anatoly.
Q: Hi Danny, can you share the most complex workflow that PARSIQ’s customers are using ParsiQL (or other products) for today?
Danny: The most complex…? This is a good question. It really depends on what you are considering the most complex. We do have various clients who, for some of them, we have built different solutions (or additions to our platform) such as the API decoder, which is huge, actually. The possibility of monitoring any on-chain events and any function calls was quite a big deal. We still get a lot of attention for this functionality. Regarding your particular question: I don’t think I can highlight one client, since most of them are interested in monitoring the blockchain and delivering notifications to their channels or to their users. There are some companies for whom we have built custom solutions, for example, to deliver notifications to end users, two-way integrations, and we do provide some APIs to make it easier. So there are as many use cases in crypto as there are projects, basically. We are trying to make tools that make our technology universal for everyone, more or less.
Q: The hackathon results made us very excited for public projects. Is there any timeline on when it will be released? Also, will the subscription model of the public projects go through IQ Protocol?
Tom: I was excited, too! About releasing public projects: the first step is releasing the new UI/UX, which is almost ready. Right?
Danny: Yes, actually. It goes into internal testing soon. Q4.
Tom: Yes, and after that is what we call “Smart Templates”. This will be a kind of library of premade triggers for specific use cases. I think these will serve as the MVP or the proof of concept for public projects — except that these projects will be first made by the PARSIQ team. But after that, the next step is when we will allow anyone else to put their projects or apps on the public marketplace, for others to subscribe to.
Danny: Yes. Basically, this is the idea. The smart template is basically MVP, proof of concept, for the future public projects. Actually, in the beginning I had mentioned that we have two SDKs, and I have talked only about one of them. I talk about the integration SDK. But something else that we are going to have is a developer SDK. This SDK will provide developers with a way of further extending our platform and ParsiQL. So, developers will be able to make custom functions and custom integrations, and other users will be able to import those custom integrations and functions into their own projects and use them. There are a couple of good ways to incentivize the creation of those. Tom has some great ideas about that, and how it can be made on IQ as well.
Tom: Yes, the basic idea is that the builders who have built applications on the PARSIQ platform — and have put them on the marketplace — could monetize them by using IQ Protocol. They could have small, dedicated pools that others would rent from. The rental fees would go to these builders. That is the general, high-level idea of how IQ can be used for public projects.
Danny: Public projects are somewhat tied to this SDK. When we have that, the platform will be a very interesting place for developers. There are unlimited possibilities to further upgrade the functionality that it has. This is actually a very interesting part of the developer community: they have a lot of ideas and they love to contribute. We can only wait and see what it is going to be like.
Q: Shoot this to the moon, give us financial freedom for our kids!
Tom: [Laughing] The team does not move the price of the underlying asset. But in my experience, it takes patience and it takes time. But when the solutions that catch on and eventually are adopted, have network effects, and are successful, the underlying assets are also successful.
Q: Will it be possible to adapt triggers to a DEX to automate buys and sells?
Danny: When it comes to the reverse triggers — why not? If we talk about DeFi, which means it is all on blockchain (unlike centralized solutions), then I don’t see how that can be stopped.
Q: Will PARSIQ have new use cases in the future or only what is listed on the roadmap?
Tom: I think actually maybe December or January will be a good time to post a surprise roadmap that has all the things we have planned. Definitely new use cases — but I can’t say anything about them specifically. A lot is coming! We are going more heavily after developers and B2B, as we have, and we are going to have products that help us achieve network effects and get a lot of retail exposure. A lot of use cases… I can’t say anymore.
Danny: Yes, and one should understand that new use cases are born all the time. They come in from clients that approach us, because they are interested in the technology but need something a little different than we have. And there are also ‘water cooler’ conversations everyday in the office, where ideas just pop in. It happens almost on a daily basis. Many new use cases are coming.
Q: Will there be plans put in place so that whales will not suppress the price growth when the IQ token is released?
Tom: Well, in terms of the IQ governance token, the current fundraising round (which we are finishing up) has a healthy distribution. That means a relatively large number of investors with relatively small tickets. With PARSIQ it wasn’t so wide, because we raised our initial funds in the depths of a bear market. So there, unfortunately, was not a lot of interest in the public sale at that time, since there wasn’t a lot of interest in crypto at that time. We sourced most of the funding from private investors who got large chunks or the token. This is why it may seem that the distribution has, before, been tilted. But I think it has been nicely redistributed over the previous year. With IQ Protocol it will be different, because there will be a very fair distribution. Secondly, there will be a large community distribution (using the airdrop). Also, we have very long cliffs and lock-up investing schedules for every investor in the private round. In addition, it is worth mentioning that anyone can become a whale by buying enough of an asset — so you could become a whale.
Q: When will IQ staking be available on Coinmetro?
Tom: I think maybe Q1 would be the right time to start working on this. The IQ Protocol will be far enough along that we can begin to have many front ends, on different places, including CEXs like Coinmetro.
Q: With Sandbox and Boson blowing up right now, will PARSIQ create a website for end users to come and rent out digital assets directly from PARSIQ instead of having to integrate with other businesses?
Tom: I think you mean IQ Protocol. The integrations are necessary, because we need the other businesses, dapps, projects, etc., to be able to support the IQ wrapped versions of assets. So far, so good. We have quite a lot on board. But IQ Protocol will also have its own app, or front end, where you can do these things. So you won’t have to go to those projects, necessarily. Being a decentralized protocol, with a blockchain layering, even a community can create a front end for the protocol.
Q: Any T1 listing update?
Tom: Every ama, there is one question about this at least. As we’ve stated, we have updated some governance features and implemented some security measures that two of the US-based, or highly regulated exchanges, requested. We have done an audit for these, and it has been submitted. We are now waiting for the next steps. So everything is in progress. That is all I can share. If I knew more I couldn’t say publicly.
Q: What is the feasibility of integrating PARSIQ with Kadena?
Tom: Yes we can integrate Kadena, not a problem. But what about the pipeline and priorities?
Danny: I don’t think integrating Kadena is a problem, of course. We don’t have it in the pipeline in the very near future. We do, of course, have it in the pipeline, since we have a giant list of things on the backlog. But for now we have focused on other things, but I don’t think I can disclose all of that. But as you probably already have noticed, Polygon is coming very soon. We do have some other layer 2 blockchains coming in the next month and beginning of the next year. There are a lot of things coming. The time for Kadena will come.
Tom: Yes, it is all a matter of priority. First things first. Kadena has been doing really well, and we are hoping to see more adoption and people building on it. We will definitely get there.
Danny: Normally the integrations are not that complicated. Once there is actual interest in the market, from the businesses, then this pushes the priorities up.
Q: Is the price of PRQ going to be affected once the IQ Protocol token goes live? Can you explain how they are connected and work together?
Tom: IQ Protocol is a DeFi protocol, and will have its own token and own dedicated team. It will be governed by a community DAO, and the IQ governance token will give the DAO members the right to vote on proposals, among other things. So it is not connected to the PARSIQ token: one is not connected to the other. I would even say that this is a positive development for PARSIQ. We said before that most of the projects using IQ Protocol will be using the PARSIQ platform. But now, with the changes we have made, it is not ‘most’ but absolutely every one of them will have to use the PARSIQ platform to power their use cases. So, I think it is just an additional revenue stream for PARSIQ, an additional pipeline of projects. I also think that IQ Protocol launching is good for PRQ stakers in the PRQ pool on the IQ Protocol, because there will be additional incentives involved — liquidity mining program, which is part of the whole IQ Protocol tokenomics which we will share at the end of the year.
Q: My son wants a bike but I bought him PRQ. He is not happy, but in the future he will thank me, I guess.
Tom: [Laughing] Danny, would you buy your son PRQ?
Danny: Of course. It’s the best investment. Better than a bike. [Laughing]
Q: Will it be easy for those holding PRQ for a long time to get the IQ token?
Tom: If you are staking, you will be part of the IQ community airdrop. So you will get IQ Protocol tokens. If you are not staking, we will do a whitelist sale, with limited caps in Q1. We are seriously considering giving PRQ holders the opportunity to be first in line for the whitelist sale. Obviously, though, when the token goes live on DEXs and CEXs, then you can purchase it and trade it.
Q: What about integrating services like Netflix or Amazon Prime with the IQ Protocol?
Tom: What I have learned when talking to traditional, non-crypto-native companies is that they are interested in what we are doing. For example, during Breakpoint the team talked to quite a few projects. I have received emails — generally I receive five or so a month — from traditional, private equity VCs, non-crypto, ones who have no blockchain related companies in their portfolio. I receive emails from them, because they are interested in what we are doing. Why? My guess is that they are looking to get into the blockchain space, because they are now understanding that the space will only remain and just become bigger and bigger. At the same time, full DeFi and NFTs are too exotic for them. So they are looking for things like SaaS, infrastructure, and data. So PARSIQ seems like a good fit for them. That is why they often reach out to us. Very big VCs, world-class ones with billions of assets under management — I usually take calls with them, even though we are not fundraising. I do this for general education purposes. What I understand is that we are still very early. Everyone who is in blockchain right now, in crypto — PARSIQ, everything — we are still very early. Once the ‘big boys’ really come in, the opportunities will be massive. Right now, though, speaking to Netflix and Amazon for decentralized, blockchain subscriptions is a bit early. It might be good to begin educating them, but they won’t come on at this point. But when they do get going, one day, they will go in big.
Q: What are Tom and Anatoly’s favorite anime?
Tom: You will have to ask Anatoly. Mine? I can’t say I have watched a huge amount. But Death Note is one of the best. Danny, do you have a favorite?
Danny: Unfortunately, I cannot add much here. I have never watched any anime. It’s not my cup of tea.
Q: How will the IQ Protocol token sale be set?
Tom: The public whitelist sale will be a limited amount. There will likely be a decent amount of demand. Tickets will be capped for participation. But holders and stakers of PRQ might have first dibs on the whitelist sale. However, we are still figuring out how to make this fair to everyone. We want good distribution, and for everyone to have a chance. All details regarding the IQ Token, the tokenomices, etc., will be revealed either in December or January.
Q: Yea, share Netflix subscriptions by renting them out if you are not using them or are on vacation!
Tom: Yes. That is the idea behind IQ Protocol: you have a membership, subscription, right to access things, and if you are using it you can sublease it. That is definitely a use case.
Q: What do you think about AVAX? Is there an integration planned with them any time soon?
Tom: I am bullish on Avalanche. We have spoken with their team. An integration is definitely in the pipeline, but there are just a couple things before that. Right?
Danny: Generally, there is not much to add to that. We have looked into Avalanche, and its time will come, and I think it is not that far in the future.
Q: What is the best response, or interest, you have gotten since the launch on AWS? Anything yet?
Tom: It is more visibility for us. So there is some good context just being in the network. However, we have some very great use cases with AWS, like direct integration and value added for AWS that we have in mind and will not be that difficult for us to implement, since we have all the blockchains ready. We will share more information soon.
Q: Will IQ Protocol be on the Ethereum network?
Tom: It is relatively easy for us to deploy on Ethereum. But with the fees, it is just not very feasible right now. I mean, we might do it. But for smaller stakers and holders, paying the gas fees for claiming the rewards would just eat up all your rewards right away. It just doesn’t make sense. We will focus on other chains and layer 2s.
Q: In terms of Netflix and already-established companies, how does profit sharing fit into their business model? What value or advantage does it give them to give away part of their revenue?
Tom: A lot of these are publicly traded stocks and companies, and they give dividends — which means they give away part of their revenue, or their profit. Anyway, this is just another model of doing that, on the blockchain and in a decentralized way; and to also have participants (think: stockholders, but here it would be token holders who are participating in the network) who are doing work in the network. So the logic is the same. They have stockholders to whom they are giving part of the revenue. But in this case, it will be decentralized, trustless, permissionless, and would be fair, in an ideal world of course. Also the token holders, just like stockholders, can go to meetings to vote. In this case, if there would be a Netflix DAO, then these token holders could vote on which part of the revenue would be distributed and which part would be left to the company. I think we have a long way to go towards a case like this, but this is the goal.
Q: Do you have any plans to launch a series of videos explaining PARSIQ, ParsiQL, and IQ Protocol? Explainers with simple animations would do wonders for educational purposes.
Tom: Yes. We are working on one. I think it is more B2B related. Danny, what do you think about having some more technical ones, regarding ParsiQL and other related stuff?
Danny: For sure that is coming. I know that Ivan is already working on some of them, specified on particular use cases. I think when we have upgrades for ParsiQL, we can do animations, for example, because they are more interactive or engaging videos, compared to just voice-over or web interface of a platform. Animations can be great and informative as a way of showing off the platform. Of course, there is basically no reason to make those in this exact moment, before we release ParsiQL 2.0. That would be a waste of resources, because we’d just have to do it all over in a couple of months.
Conclusion
Tom: Danny, I think we are out of time here. Thank you for joining. Thanks for giving insight on the product and on future developments. I am super excited and hyped about the hackathon. We should do them every month. I think the results were awesome. Once we have the SDK, the developer hub, ParsiQL 2.0, public marketplace, smart templates, and all of this: I imagine the network effects for developers who can build applications on PARSIQ for others to use will be huge. I am definitely hyped.
Danny: Thank you, Tom, for having me. I am really looking forward to the future of the monitoring platform. We have so many amazing ideas, and we shall see what the next year brings us. I believe it is going to be huge for the platform.
Tom: I agree. I agree. The future for the platform looks great, especially with the type of companies testing it right now, with the developers being more active. I see growing a lot, especially considering where the space is going. Thanks Danny and big thanks to the community for tuning in. See you all in two weeks!
