Hello again! We’ve got another Q&A for you, it will be the final one for 2021 so this time our CEO Tom Tirman stopped by the main PARSIQ Community Channel to take some questions directly from the community.
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. We’ve just introduced our Q1 2022 $PRQ 2X Yield Boost + IQ Incentive Program. You aren’t going to want to miss this one!
Stay on top of all the PARSIQ news by following us on Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and Discord. You can follow Tom Tirman on Twitter here.
Below is the Transcription of the Q&A from Thursday 30th December 2021.
Introduction
Tom: While we will resume our regular Youtube AMAs starting January, I thought we could do a quick end-of-year wrap-up Telegram AMA before heading into the New Year.
I will be here for about an hour to answer as many questions as I can and give some insight on what to expect in 2022. Feel free to post them all here in the chat as we go.
Q: How does IQ Protocol plan on making revenue? Is there a small percentage of renting that will go to the IQ foundation, or will there be an initial onboarding cost for clients?
Tom: The IQ Protocol will take a small % of all the rental fees which will be collected to a DAO wallet. The DAO governance can then vote what happens to those funds (for example, used to buy back IQT from the market and burn or stake them to further increase the DAO Treasury etc).
No onboarding costs, but we are contemplating an idea that projects would need to (the project itself and its community) stake a certain amount of IQT for a certain period of time (1 year for example) to be onboarded.
Q: How are things going with the Superfarm partnership? Do we expect to see anything coming of that?
Tom: There were a number of things on the table, but Superfarm has pivoted and reprioritized quite a number of their product offerings, so they haven’t come to fruition yet. We’ve worked on monitoring integrations with their team and obviously there is a great synergy with NFT renting via IQ (can’t share more details at this time unfortunately, keep your eyes open).
Q: What would be your optimistic and pessimistic estimation for the total $Dollar amount rented during 2022?
Tom: It is difficult to say because we will restructure PARSIQ pricing a bit next year. Instead of paying/renting for actions and number of addresses stored, you may have (still being finalized) computational units (sort of like gas on ETH) to pay for consumption of various services. So as soon as we get that settled, we can make some estimations. With that being said, I want to emphasize that the amount rented is not that relevant for APY because APY depends on a lot of other factors (amount stakes, free liquidity in the pool, subscription types etc).
Q: Aave has launched a real world asset market. Are there any plans for IQ or PARSIQ to do the same?
Tom: We will 100% be involved in giving users and customers the ability to monitor representations of real world assets on the blockchain and connect them to off-chain systems. Huge market opportunity that I personally am betting on.
Q: Are there any plans of exposing real-time or even daily usage statistics of the PARSIQ platform to everyone? So we don’t have to wonder if clients are gone when borrowing dips?
Tom: We will do a usage summary in January regarding number of users, usage statistics, what blockchains are they monitoring etc.
Q: What is the long term plan for PRQBOOST?
Tom: The PRQBOOST program will be discontinued at some point after we finalize our mechanism to provide good liquidity depth on Uniswap. It was always meant to be a temporary initiative. We are thinking of giving PRQBOOST holders certain perks after the program is discontinued. More info on that closer to the end of the program.
Q: How long will $PRQ staking / airdrop program continue? How can we calculate the airdrop amount received based on time/amount staked?
Tom: Shortly after this AMA, we will be releasing the details of a brand new PARSIQ incentive program for Q1 2022. Not to give everything away, but eligibility for the $IQT airdrop rewards will continue and there will be new ways to earn additional $PRQ as well. Stay tuned!
Q: Which governments are looking into Parsiq, in terms of size and continent?
Tom: Multiple. One is in Asia, quite a financial hub. One in Europe and a few others that are in early stages.
Q: In the last AMA, you mentioned that a government was interested in the Parsiq technology, has this possible partnership advanced? It would be such big news !
Tom: Yes, it has advanced really well.
Q: Hello Tom! Could you share when it is expected to announce the details of the 1M PRQ incentive program (how many each staker will receive), and the details for the future incentive programs?
Tom: We will run all the calculations in January using PARSIQ’s Retrospective Trigger tech and then each one of you will be able to check how much you are eligible for.
Q: 500 million of IQT will be dedicated to staker rewards, liquidity mining, etc. Does this mean that we will be able to stake IQT and get rewards or will it be the pool staker (PRQ and other pools) who get it in addition to the airdrop ?
Tom: The IQT airdrops will come from the Airdrop/Rewards pool. The 500m IQT pool for liquidity mining rewards, staking, ecosystem grants etc. does indeed mean that you (and also enterprises who deploy pools on IQ) will be able to stake IQT to earn.
Q: Will public sale of IQT will be on a platform that doesn’t require a token of the platform to participate ? These kinds of platforms aren’t really fair to all users.
Tom: We will share more details on the IDO platforms once everything is settled. We have so many options on the table, we want to structure it the right way.
Q: Any plan to do some kind of lottery to win whitelist entries?
Tom: Yes, there will be multiple whitelist slot campaigns, perhaps a lottery as well.
Q: If things go well and the government ends up using PRQ, will it be under NDA or do you think there is a chance it will be announced?
Tom: Once an actual binding long term contract is signed, I think there’s a big chance it will be announced.
Q: I believe earlier in the year, it was mentioned PRQ was on track to reaching 7 figures revenue this year (if I am not mistaken). Now that the year is coming to a close, have we managed to achieve this goal, exceed it, or fall short of it?
Tom: The subscription-specific revenue fell slightly short of that projection unfortunately due to various reasons (changes in BD team, some contracts taking long to close, some product functionality missing etc), but now we have a great foundation to make that up and more so for a great 2022.
Q: Any other funding round/series planned for PARSIQ?
Tom: Not at this point since we have years of runway even with the current aggressive team expansion. Also we do actively manage some of our treasury that is in stables/crypto which has increased our runway even more.
Q: Have you heard of reNFT? They want to do rental NFTs but PARSIQ is way more ahead tech- wise.
Tom: Yes, I have heard of ReNFT. Our approach, both technologically and fundamentally is a bit different from what they are doing. You will see more once IQ Labs teams reveal everything we are working on.
Q: Hey Tom, for you personally what are the biggest milestones you hope (expect) to achieve in 2022 with PARSIQ? Will we be seeing checkmarks on the roadmap next year?
Tom: From a product and adoption side I really want to see the Developer SDK with ParsiQL 2.0 and Developer Hub go live. This will allow devs to easily build retail-facing applications on top of PARSIQ that a lot of people can use. This along with the public marketplace. It will intern drive network effects. I want to see thousands of developers actively building on PARSIQ and pushing their apps live either on their end or on the PARSIQ Marketplace.
Q: Has any progress been made on Ncase since the initial announcement and are Coinmetro, Transfero Swift, BRZ Token, Paybis and Unknown “Payment processing company and its subsidiaries” still using Ncase? Has there been any more interest in ncase from other projects since then?
Tom: We’ve had so many potential clients for Ncase that we haven’t been able to service yet because resources were re-prioritized (IQ, Platform etc). We will make more headway with Ncase in 2022. Really a lot of demand for this, but we had to make hard choices regarding what to focus on first.
Q: Any changes to the team? New members added or positions opened. Promotions
Tom: We are hiring all the time. Almost 50 people now. Quite a few promotions within the team as well. PARSIQ is growing fast.
Q: I am really a great fan of the PARSIQ tech from the beginning of the project. So I would like to thank you for the great products! I would like to ask if you or the team is also looking to have some real developments on the market side of the product; especially $PRQ price?
Tom: There will be marketing pushes, there will be PR, there will be more exposure, there will be exchange listings in 2022. That much I can say. We are better equipped than ever to handle growth in community building, social media and marketing. With that being said, there are many things that are out of our control. For example one is market cycles (downtrend/uptrend).
The other is market trends. After the May crash, the trends shifted mostly to GameFi and L1/L2 blockchains. Everything has its time. Unfortunately, infrastructure projects do not capture as much attention at this stage of the market from retail traders/investors. It is not just PARSIQ, it is pretty much almost all the infrastructure projects (a lot of whom have great products, great teams, top tier backers, major partnerships etc). Things are popular and capture attention at different times. For example, PRQ ran almost 20x in less than 2 months last winter. At the same time Solana price went down for almost all of that 2 months. After that trends shifted. SOL ran. Infrastructure tokens were still or stagnated.
So there will be a time and cycle for PARSIQ and its token. We will keep pushing regardless of the cycles and trends. But when it comes, we will already have the traction, the usage, the adoption, the tech milestones achieved. We will definitely keep working to improve retail community engagement and community growth. We will get many more eyes on PARSIQ in 2022.
Q: Is there a lot of assumption that developers will use SDK or even PARSIQ platform. Is there any data that supports the adoption of PARSIQ tech for retail ?
Tom: The assumption has been clearly validated by the developers already using it. Now we just have to enable them easier access and improved tools. The solutions that those developers would build, can then be used by retail (Cryptopunk tracker, NFT drop alerts, real-time yield farming data app etc).
Q: Can we expect a better UI for Parsiq services in 2022? I can use it in this way quite easily but it might be a bit difficult or complex for newcomers.
Tom: The UI was updated just yesterday. In my opinion, it is much more intuitive and slicker. Should be far easier to use than previously. Now we will roll out the UX and functionality under that UI.
Q: Can we get liquidations notification on parsiq from major exchanges?
Tom: Unfortunately, now PARSIQ focuses only on on-chain data. So only liquidation notifications on DEXes and DeFi platforms.
Q: Analytics in crypto are worth a total of $4B MC, which seems quite under evaluated. Where do you think it will go in the future?
Tom: Blockchain data industry will be worth in the hundreds of billions in some years. At least.
Q: Will NFT collection/series be allowed for renting or a single NFT only?
Tom: Good question. I will forward it to the IQ tech team. Would be cool if collections could be rented in a single transaction.
Q: Is multichain a secure bridge? Is there a possibility of loss of tokens due to a hack. With Polygon/Solana coming in when can we expect another bridge
Tom: We haven’t had any problems with Multichain.xyz. And in an unlikely event of an exploit, we have the governance features to fall back on.
Yes, you can expect bridges to other chains.
Q: Any partnership planned with UiPath? They are into RPA. Will be interesting for them too to get into blockchain
Tom: Haven’t discussed UiPath integration with the team, but trade tech integrations are coming.
Q: When do you think Parsiq would have scaled “enough” to onboard clients easily?
Tom: We are sort of there, but we have some gaps to fill to really provide a full-suite solution. We have clients who we can service only partially because they need additional functionality and want to use it from one place. Working on this heavily.
Q: I believe you mentioned a huge crypto gaming company that is trialling PRQs tech in the last AMA (alongside the government). Has there been good progression on that front?
Tom: Not signed yet, but they are highly interested. Both in PARSIQ tech and IQ. Preparing more documentation for them.
Q: Are you glad you invested in Metis?
Tom: Yes, we were one of the early investors.
Q: The PARSIQ Treasury must be set for years from this alone
Tom: Haha. It was a relatively small investment. We are not VCs, we are builders and founders who want to be involved in high-potential projects that have synergies with PARSIQ and where we believe we can help/add value.
Q: Looking back at Parsiq ́s 2021, what changes would you make? What was the biggest achievement, and was there something you would do differently?
Tom: I would’ve done a number of things differently. Would probably have started expanding the team earlier to have more resources for shipping products, onboarding users and marketing. Would probably have stepped on exchange listings earlier and more heavily (when market was in major uptrend and infrastructure products like PARSIQ had major retail attention). Would have set the roadmap in a slightly different order. And many more. But we live, we learn. Only forward. But a lot has been done. PARSIQ started with nothing, but a few fellas and an idea. No VCs, no crypto industry connections, no big partners, full blown bear market. It has been a hell of a journey.
Conclusion
Tom: As the year draws to a close, I think back to everything that was done at PARSIQ in 2021. Starting from how much the team has grown (almost 50 people now), how much has been built, what milestones have been reached. It has not been without setbacks, but I am really proud of what has been achieved. Achieved due to the efforts of the PARSIQ team, but that is only one part of the whole. The other and at least as important is this great community. New members of the community and those who have been with us for a longer while who continue to support us. The community is a huge and essential part of the project. I want to thank you all!
I have to leave for some calls now, but the couple that I missed at the end, I will try to come back and answer. Thanks to everyone for tuning in and have a great New Year! Happy holidays. 🎉
