Greetings, once again! This past week, the PARSIQ AMA was with Tom Tirman, CEO of PARSIQ. He’s done a great job of answering all of your excellent questions.
Before we get into the text, however, we wanted to take a moment to remind you of some things that might interest you. First, if you are a holder of $PRQ, and you are not already staking your tokens on IQ Protocol, then be sure to have a look at our 2x Yield Boost Incentive + Free $IQT Incentive Programs. Second, if you had been staking your $PRQ prior to 2022, you’re now eligible to claim the first allocation of your rewards from our $1m $PRQ incentive program. Third, if you’re interested in IQ Protocol, don’t forget to participate in our White List Program. And finally, a share of $1000 (paid in USDT) is available for 5 people in an IQ Protocol contest that is currently running — so don’t miss your chance to join!
Now let’s get on to the questions. Below you will find the text to the video AMA that was held live on February 3rd. Feel free to read the text below, or click on any of the underlined questions, which are time-stamped links that will take you to the specific question at hand on the YouTube recording.
Introduction
Tom: Hi everyone! It’s been about 2 weeks since we had the whole team here for the AMA. Today I’ll be alone to answer the community questions as best I can; and in between I’ll provide a bit of an overview of what you can expect in the next few months. So let’s get into it!
Q: What is the reason behind the blackout of PARSIQ’s name from the IQ Protocol announcements? Seems a missed opportunity for marketing.
Tom: It’s important to remember that PARSIQ and IQ Protocol — while still being deeply connected — are separate projects, each with their own branding, their own use cases, and their own target audience. But, you can still see that PARSIQ retweets a lot of the IQ Protocol announcements (and vice versa). And you can see a “powered by PARSIQ” button on the IQ Protocol website. So, I don’t think it’s a missed opportunity for marketing. If you look at some of the publications and blog posts that are out there on different media publications, IQ Protocol is often referred to as “PARSIQ’s IQ Protocol,” so, I think we are covering PARSIQ quite a lot on the content surrounding IQ Protocol.
Q: Why has the APY for $PRQ staking pool fallen so sharply?
Tom: Part of the reason for this is because of the increase of tokens in the liquidity pool: the more liquidity is staked in the pool, the less fees there are to go around. We never expected to have over 40% of the circulating supply staked so quickly! So, that’s one reason for the low APY. Another reason is that the APY rewards are frontloaded. This means that most of the rewards are streamed at the start and less after that.
But I can tell you that with the steady stream and new users and clients, the APY should be going up already within this and next month, for sure. How much will it go up? That is difficult to say. Again, it depends on how many people stake or remove their holdings from the liquidity pool. If the liquidity drops, then there’s more rewards to go around. If the liquidity increases, then the APY will drop again. But the rental fees are going up steadily, and will be going up steadily in this month and the next one.
Q: Am I correct in thinking that if the Multichain bridge suffered a similar exploit as Wormhole did this week, then the $PRQ governance feature would ensure that the stolen $PRQ would be useless to any hacker?
Tom: Yes. We have the governance features which allow us to mitigate such situations, and that’s part of the reason why migrating $PRQ to Binance Smart Chain took us a long time — not just a couple of days. We had to implement smart contracts on the BSC side to retain the governance features. So, yeah, we have the ability to mitigate these kinds of risks when bridging $PRQ.
Q: Theoretically, could a hacker mint $PRQ on BSC via Multichain?
Tom: Well, the problem with Wormhole was that the Wormhole smart contracts (on the Solana end) were compromised. They were exploited; some bugs were found. Is it possible something like this could happen on the BSC with Multichain’s bridge? Theoretically, yes. It is possible. However, it’s unlikely. Multichain has been audited many times, and it’s easier to make EVM compatible chains on BSC and ETH foolproof than it is on Solana. But again, if such a thing were to happen, we have the governance features to fall back on with $PRQ — on both chains, on ETH and BSC.
Q: What can we expect out of the OpenSea Integration?
Tom: The OpenSea integration was a PARSIQ integration. With it, we allow PARSIQ users to monitor different types of events on OpenSea, e.g., for NFTs. We have users actually utilizing this, and we will be looking to expand this to have more functionality. For example, we have some NFT tracking, NFT analytics solutions and, NFT dashboards who want to use our OpenSea integration. So it has a solid amount of traction, and hopefully we’ll see more adoption of it in the near future.
Q: Can we expect OpenSea to leverage IQ Protocol for NFT Renting?
Tom: We haven’t spoken to OpenSea about this. I mean, seeing that OpenSea is the largest player in NFTs, it probably won’t be fast and won’t be easy to get them to integrate IQ Protocol on their side — especially at a point where the NFT rental functionality on IQ Protocol is not live and is not audited yet. We are, however, targeting NFT marketplaces; relatively large ones. Not OpenSea yet, but we will get there. We’ll start by implementing IQ Protocol’s NFT rental functionality on a few mid-tier NFT marketplaces and then work our way up to talking to Opensea when we have something to show. For instance, once we can show that these marketplaces are already integrated, that IQ Protocol is being used, that it has traction, and that it’s working well. After that, we have a higher chance of OpenSea saying ‘yes’, and actually doing an integration on their side.
Q: What is the biggest development you expect to push this year?
Tom: This year we have quite a lot happening. On the product end, the roadmap has pretty much been designed, and we confirmed it here in Estonia (in Tallinn when the whole team was here 2 weeks ago). Now we’re just finalizing the timeline and approximate due dates, finishing the design, putting on the website so on, and so forth. There’ll be a bunch of new stuff there. But I guess I can shed some light on which direction we’re heading in.
First of all, we really want to make PARSIQ a ‘one-stop shop’ for all data on the blockchain. This would include every kind of use case, whether it’s real-time triggers; retrospective triggers, which allow you to go back in time, collect the data, run computations on it, and run analytics on it; and even historical data APIs as well. So, we want to have everything — and we’re pretty close to it. We already have a number of crypto analytics platforms — some pretty popular ones — who want to use it as their infrastructure. Right now these platforms are using like six different solutions, such as Etherscan API, BSCscan API, and other tools to pull different things from different places. But there are issues with throughput, with scalability, and with time for processing all this. With PARSIQ, they will be able to get everything from one place, with minimal friction.
In terms of pulling historical data, we’ve come up with a way to get data, for example, from the last 1 million blocks in seconds, rather than hours like most of our competitors do. So, I think this will be a pretty big hit.
On top of that, we can build some analytics functionality as well. But step one is to get these analytics platforms to use PARSIQ as their infrastructure for all their blockchain data needs: all chains, historical data, real-time data, everything. That’s the goal.
We’re obviously going to continue with the Business-to-business direction and focus: we have exchanges, government law enforcement agencies, different types of DeFi protocols, and launch pads all testing our services. That’s quite a lot of traction. And like I said, the issue has been that a lot of these customers want custom integrations, customizations, or some kind of small-feature gaps that we need to fill. But what I’ve just talked about is going to fill that gap, and we will be able to onboard all of them as full-fledged clients. So B2B is a big, big focus: both crypto-native and non-crypto native.
In addition, we’ll be announcing a new sub-product, let’s say. It will be built on the PARSIQ platform, and will be more retail-facing. It involves a PARSIQ mobile app, so hopefully this will create some network effects that we need to get the retail users interested in using PARSIQ. There are some other things as well, but you will see all of them once the roadmap is out.
Q: What is the current state of retrospective triggers? It has been said that retro-triggers are close to a release.
Tom: Retrospective triggers… yes they’re pretty much ready. Like I said, we had an issue before, where if someone wants to monitor a million blocks or more — or even the whole history of a trading pair on a dex — it would take an hour or maybe more. Other platforms with solutions to historical data have this same problem. But we’ve figured out how to do this in seconds! So, before rolling out we wanted to finalize it. We’re pretty close to launching them.
Q: You have mentioned that 2022 is expected to be a year of growth. Can you share your goals regarding customer acquisition, expected revenue, or any other metric that reflects the expected growth?
Tom: There’s a lot of things here. We have revenue KPIs, we have a number-of-users KPI, we have developer KPIs, and we want to onboard developers. We will also be coming up with a completely new pricing model as well. I feel the current subscription tiers don’t work as well as they should. The goal for this year, definitely, is to go well into the seven figures in terms of revenue.
With that being said, there’s a trend in crypto that some things are free. That attracts a lot of people, but you actually operate at a loss to get the necessary amount of usage. But then you upsell those customers, offering them other features and other types of services. This is something we are also thinking about, to enable more network effects and more adoption of PARSIQ: to give out more free usage — for certain features, not for everything — to get a snowball effect going. In terms of number of users, we have KPIs on the number of developers who we want to attract and who will build applications using PARSIQ infrastructure. We will be doing a grant program, which will subsidize some of these projects. We will also be making small investments into these projects as well, so as to align our incentives, and to support them in more than one way. We want PARSIQ to be a platform that developers can use to build backend for DApps and other products. I think things like this would really facilitate greater network effects.
Q: When do you expect it will be possible for poeple to rent on IQ Protocol by paying in stable coins?
Tom: Dex functionality will be built into IQ Protocol by the time the NFT renting version of the platform goes live. It will work the same way for the fungible token version and the NFT renting version. People will be able to pay in stable coins (or other digital assets) and it will be converted into $PRQ through a dex.
Q: Any ideas of what we might see from the PARSIQ team at ETHDenver?
Tom: We are going to be doing a developer workshop there. As I said, developers are a big focus for us in 2022. We are also running a hackathon there, with some of the other really big projects. We will hopefully see an even better result from the PARSIQ x Gitcoin Hackathon (the results of which were amazing!). We will also be doing some side events — we are quite involved. A lot of people will be coming, and it will be a great place to showcase our technology to developers and enterprises, and to get some developers on board to build with PARSIQ.
Q: Is there any news you can share about the IQ Protocol NFT rental platform?
Tom: It is coming along nicely. It should be ready soon, and then be given an audit. Hopefully in March it can go live on Mainnet. We have an enormous pipeline — an enormous pipeline. There are games, creator platforms, NFT marketplaces, celebrity NFT projects, fan token projects, and all types of interesting NFT use cases with real utility. I am really happy about this. We have already announced maybe over a dozen projects for IQ Protocol. But that is barely 10% of what we have coming. I am really happy with the traction. It is going to be great. We’ll be onboarding them, one by one. And we have major features for the IQ rental marketplace, which I won’t be talking about on this AMA. It will be things that no one has ever done. The ideas that are team is coming up with, and our researching and building — IQ Protocol can be really huge. I’m afraid I can’t share much more than that. IQ Protocol will be more than just rentals; it will be a full-fledged NFT marketplace, with different functionalities. But it will all be based around the core idea of wrapped, expirable derivatives. I am pretty convinced this will be huge.
Q: How are reverse triggers looking?
Tom: The full version is still not ready. We have built something like a proof of concept, that is, a reverse trigger with some limitations for specific use cases (like dex arbitrage). We felt that having the full data platform first — with historical APIs, retrospective triggers, developers, SDK developer hub — is more of a priority than doing full reverse triggers. You’ll see on the roadmap where these fit into the big picture.
Q: How much does Mysterium pay to use IQ Protocol?
Tom: IQ Protocol is open-source, so they do not have to pay to use the protocol.
Q: What is the schedule for $IQT launch looking like?
Tom: That is a good question. It is going to be either the end of Q1 or the first half of Q2, it depends on a lot of factors. For example, we have some investors and advisors who have differing opinions about when to launch, partly because of market conditions. Personally I dont think it is that much of an issue, because if a project has the tech and the users, then things will fall into place, regardless of market conditions. But, at the same time, we are not in a huge rush. We want to be able to integrate more projects, more renting pools, get users, deliver the NFT renting pool, and show as much traction and momentum as possible before launching.
Q: Will the Smart Trigger Marketplace be launching this year?
Tom: Yes, for sure. First we are going to make a marketplace — which is coming soon — of smart triggers that the PARSIQ team has built. After that we will open it for others to deploy smart triggers on the marketplace.
Q: What are you most excited about for PARSIQ and also for IQ Protocol?
Tom: I am excited for a lot of things. Obviously, all the tech and functionality that we are building is exciting to me. I think that there are things we are doing with IQ Protocol that no one else is doing — basically, and industry first! With PARSIQ we are doing some things that I don’t think anyone else is doing, and some things that we are doing in a different way (or better or faster). I am pretty excited about what our tech can bring to the market, and of course, the most excitement I have comes from all the projects that could solve problems using our products. If we can fully onboard with even half of the ones we are talking to, then it will be a great year.
Q: Are there plans to attend other events this year (ones similar to ETHDenver coming up, or Solana Breakpoint from last year)?
Tom: Regardless if PARSIQ is being recognized by big players, we need to stay in the picture. That is quite important. We will be doing events. But we don’t want to just do all the events, or just any event. We will take place in the big ones, where most of the industry players are in attendance. Closer to April we will do ETHAmsterdam, ETHBarcelona, and a few others, maybe we will even do an NFT event. So, yea, for sure: we will have a presence in both virtual and in-person events.
Q: Has PARSIQ taken a backseat to IQ Protocol? How does the work get divided?
Tom: No PARSIQ has not been neglected; it hasn’t been at all! There are separate teams working on the projects. We are not spending PARSIQ resources on IQ Protocol (or vice versa). Both teams are growing on their own, have their own structure, and have their own management. The fact that something is happening at IQ Protocol does not take anything awa from PARSIQ. We are still full speed ahead. And so far it is all looking good. It may seem like IQ Protocol is taking priority, but it is not even close to this — in fact, more resources (budget, people, etc.) are directed to PARSIQ, far more than at IQ Protocol right now.
Q: How much of the NFT rental fees would you expect to go into $PRQ buy-backs or renting? Does the NFT marketplace benefit $PRQ stakers?
Tom: We have an idea, but it is still conceptual. Some of these games that will be integrating with IQ Protocol and deploying renting pools will want to use PARSIQ, since it makes monitoring these assets easier. But what if some of them do not want to pay for PARSIQ services? For this, we have an idea (which is still only conceptual) for how the protocol could take a small cut from the NFT rental fees, using it to convert to $PRQ which would be streamed as rental fees to the $PRQ pool to $PRQ stakers. This would allow us the ability to give the monitoring for free to these projects, but still provide us with revenue for stakers and market participants. We will definitely come up with something that will align with the interest of $PRQ stakers, and bring revenue to PARSIQ, from the NFT rental marketplace.
Q: Is there a plan to release a usage report — or even live statistics — so that we can all see how many people are using PARSIQ, and for what purpose, etc.?
Tom: We will do a summary of statistics of usage, which will include things like number of users, number of triggers, and we can even segment it by which chains are being monitored, which transports are being used. But the ‘purpose’ of the use is a bit trickier: we don’t always know the purpose that some users have, and besides, it would be a kind of invasion of privacy to dive into that. I don’t think we will (or can) publish anything on the purpose of the uses. But about the summary of statistics — this we can do for sure.
Q: Any news on exchange listings for $PRQ?
Tom: I think I have mentioned in the telegram group that some exchange listings are looking close to reality right now. These are not the biggest exchanges, the ones most people are obviously waiting for. But they are quite big ones; the community has asked about both of these exchanges numerous times. We are in talks with them, and it is looking good that we can be listed on them in the coming months. Of course, at the same time, we are still working on getting on the biggest exchanges.
Q: Who is the guy in the picture behind you?
Tom: That is Anatoly! Everyone usually loves Anatoly. We will be doing another 3–4 hour educational video session in March. The date is to-be-announced.
Q: What has happened with Ncase?
Tom: Ncase has been pushed back in the priority list, in favor of the things we felt were more important. But we will definitely shift focus back to it at some point.
Q: What is your personal opinion on the current BTC/ETC market trend? Do you see a long bearish period ahead, or do you think the market will recover?
Tom: The market is completely different than it has been in the past. Those expecting a 2018 or 2020 bear market — they aren’t going to get one. We have too much capital in the space, too many people, too much adoption, too many projects building legitimate products, and the tech is being used. The worst I imagine will happen is a sideways movement: we bounce between 30k and 40k for months, and then we bounce back. That is my personal view on it. No one really knows… at least that is my experience. I have spoken to hedge funds, VC, and everyone. I think a lot of the current downtrend is based on the macroenvironment with the rate hikes, inflation, federal reserve turning hawkish, etc., etc. Once all this passes we will see an uptrend. I think we are much closer to the bottom than we are to the top. Of course, there can be blackswan events, say, were BTC goes further down for a short while. But in my opinion those are buying opportunities, because fundamentally, everything is bullish: the legislation in various countries, the bills that are being proposed, taxation issues, usage and adoption. I am bullish, but I think long term. I might be bad for a number of months, but eventually the ‘up-only’ season will resume.
Q: Are there many projects that are waiting for additional functionality to be available from the PARSIQ platform before they will decide to integrate?
Tom: Yea, quite a few actually. Really serious projects. That is why it is our first priority to get our tech ready, so that we can onboard them. They come from all over the place, centralized exchanges, launch pads, DeFi platforms, and some traditional players as well.
Q: What projects do you think have the most interesting usage of PARSIQ?
Tom: That is a good question. There are all kinds of use cases, which is a kind of challenge for us. When we talk to a team, it is sometimes difficult to understand (in the beginning) what they need, since PARSIQ can do so many different things, solving so many different problems. A lot of work goes into understanding the other team’s project, their problems, and the proposing ways that PARSIQ can help solve these problems. I’ve seen use cases from all over the place, from monitoring smart contracts from various projects, to see if someone is minting tokens, or burning tokens, or transferring governance; I’ve seen risk-mitigation uses, internal workflow use cases, trading use cases, notification use cases, etc. I don’t have a personal favorite. But, again, we are discovering new uses all the time!
Q: How is the development process going of bringing IQ Protocol to Eth and to Solana?
Tom: We have started work on Solana. It is going well. We have a new developer, who is leading the Solana development of IQ Protocol. So far, so good! Regarding Eth… Once we are finished with the upgrades, IQ Protocol can be deployed on any EVM-compatible chain (Avalance, Arbitrum, and Ethereum itself). But does it make sense to deploy on Eth? It doesn’t. All the gaming: its not on Eth. Stakers who have small holdings: they would get all their rewards eatn up by fees. Because of reasons like this, I would rather deploy on Ethereum Layer 2 networks, or alternative Layer 1 networks, rather than on Eth itself.
Q: Are very many projects waiting to use IQ Protocol until the blockchain they are operating on is supported by the protocol?
Tom: Yes, mostly Solana. There are a lot of projects on Solana, and especially games for NFT renting. Our pipeline is pretty Solana-heavy. But there are some other chains being requested, some are EVM-compatible and some of them are not. For example, some games are on immutable X, which is a Layer 2 scaling solution, but is not EMV-compatible. It is specifically made for NFTs in gaming. Hopefully we will get around to integrating with them as well.
Q: How are blockchain integrations going? I remember a team member posting on Twitter that the team is already working on another one. This was in November or December, I think.
Tom: One chain is basically integrated already. It is a big one; it has adoption. Keep your eyes peeled for that announcement (but I am not saying when it will come).
Q: Do you think all of these Solana gaming projects on IQ Protocol will require much usage from PARSIQ? Some seem like they might have high monitoring requirements.
Tom: Yes, I think so. A lot of these games will benefit from PARSIQ monitoring, hugely. Getting data from Solana has been a major pain-point for all Solana projects in general. I am not going to lie, we have had slight issues with the Solana integration. But we have ordered more hardware, and we are going to make it great. I think it will be a major market opportunity.
Q: Will there be a PARSIQ collaboration with Kadena, such as using their bridge as an alternative to Eth bridge?
Tom: I love Kadena. But, the way we work is that we get requests about blockchains from users, clients, and projects. These requests mean that the chain has adoption, and have projects building on them alot. The chains that are requested have a higher priority. Eventually, we will get around to working with Kadena.
Q: Any plans for PARSIQ to support Andromeda?
Tom: Yes. Yes, there are.
Let me sum up what I’ve said today.
Tom: To sum up what I have said: we have the product roadmap coming up. The product roadmap involves building a full-fledge ‘one stop shop’ for all blockchain data needs, which will be a set of tools that no one is providing. Our platform will be a single-package, alot of which will work different and faster than any competition. We have clients in line waiting for this — so it is a big focus. We will continue onboarding customers, B2B. After that we have some retail-facing use cases and a PARSIQ mobile app, which will help with retail adoption. We will continue focusing on developers, and rolling out the developer SDK. We will continue being involved in Hackathons, like ETHDenver (and similar events). In the second half of next year, we will host our own hackathon, and invite other big projects to participate. Full speed ahead here! We also have exchange listings planned, if not the biggest exchanges still very big ones. We have blockchain integrations planned, and one is ready — a popular one — with more to come this year. I will also be writing something called “CEO letters”, meaning I’ll be doing sporadic Medium posts on various topics; once a quarter I will do a summary of PARSIQ, and what we have accomplished this quarter, and what are plans are going forward; and I will also write some pieces on the industry in general, how the blockchain data space has evolved, and how PARSIQ fits into it. I hope you’ll find some interesting content in those.
Well, that is it for today!
Feel free to post any additional questions in the Telegram channel. I will cover them either in the next AMA or on Telegram at some point.
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Have a great day. Bye!
About PARSIQ
PARSIQ is a blockchain monitoring and workflow automation platform connecting on-chain and off-chain applications in real-time, providing transaction notifications for end-users. With PARSIQ you can connect blockchain activity to off-chain apps and devices, monitor and secure DeFi applications, and build custom event triggers and power real-time automations.
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