XP.network — AMA
This is the transcript of the AMA session held on the 13th of September by the RoundtableDAO team with Nir Blumberger (CEO) & Dima Briukhanov (CTO) from XP.network. You can find the full video on the RoundtableDAO’s Youtube Channel.
About XP.network
XP.network will let you build NFT dApps on any blockchain…the best part is that you don’t even have to know how to code: their smart contract editor is all drag-and-drop.
Introduction
Hi guys, this is Astropark from the RoundtableDAO team, welcome to the show, of course, I’m not alone today, “Hi Jay how are you doing”
Jay: Hi everyone, welcome to the RoundtableDAO show. With the rise of NFTs seeming to gain great ground in the crypto space, the creation of applications for them is limited to the developers or the technically initiated, now while NFTs are becoming mainstream more non-developers are taking an interest in the market however acquiring the required tools and knowledge is a significant time and resource-demanding process for them, so XP.network which is with us today is a Polkadot parachain that will allow you to deploy NFT products and services to any supported blockchain including Facebook’s upcoming Diem and through its pioneer application editor, XP.network removes entry barriers for entrepreneurs, developers, product makers, and projects by allowing the creation of NFT dApps using no-code tools.
Now we have with us today Nir Blumberger who is a former executive at Amazics and firmware which was acquired by eToro now a chief executive officer and co-founder of XP.network as well as Dima Briukhanov who has years of development experience in C++ and Rust and Solidity, now a chief technical officer of XP.network. They will answer a few questions for us to help us understand this great new project which is XP.network.
“Nir and Dima welcome to the show and thank you for coming”
Nir: Great, thank you for having us guys.
Dima: Thanks for having us, a pleasure to be here.
So first question where did the idea for the name “XP.network” come from originally? what is the history behind it can you tell us something?
Nir: That’s a good question and the answer to that is that we looked for something at the beginning to do with Facebook’s Diem and we wanted also to do like… let me actually go one step back what we wanted to achieve is to create like simplicity and everything that we do right so when we started, actually we thought about Facebook’s Diem we wanted to create simple tools for the adoption and growth, Facebook’s Diem and we started with the thought about okay so “experiment and express” sound bit like XP we looked for it and then we decided to call it Xpediem and we liked the way that it sounds and after that when we grew, before our pre-sale we had a few months that we have been self-funded and we’ve been architecting and we have been building the whole idea of exponential overseas today and then we decided to broaden up our reach for more blockchains and not to focus only on the agnosticness of Facebook’s diem because we want to support the growth of regulated chains and then we just trimmed the diem from it and we started what we were left with “the XP” and we were lucky enough to get the xp dot network domain so we like it and we think it’s simple, easy to remember and now we’re focusing on the network, adding more chains so it has a broad enough meaning for us.
Why the choice of a Polkadot parachain instead of Solana network for example?
Nir: So from my perspective I take it in technical terms we wanted to join what we believe is the simplest growing ecosystem in the space and at the time six or seven months ago when we started and Polkadot had been really appealing to us and we also have our internal network and projects and developers who knew Polkadot and knew how it works and so it’s been appealing to us to go for Polkadot, while Solana is doing an amazing job and definitely we are also integrating and partnering with the team of Solana to create the integration of Solana into the bridge but we decided to base ourselves on the Polkadot, so from technical side Dima can also elaborate.
Dima: Well the Polkadot community has a wonderful substrate framework that allows you to quickly build very efficient blockchains that are compatible with the rest of the Polkadot system, all the tools are open source they are supported by the teams that develop them and there are many tools still being built and they are compatible with each other so we thought it would be a good start for us to build our own blockchain using such tools rather than inventing the wheel.
And apart from that, there is very good documentation and the ecosystem is very helpful in case you have a problem, very eager to give you advice that’s another reason.
Astropark: I’m a software developer for the center so I like this question but do due to the huge success of NFTs also visa about crypto punk recently we all know, I was thinking of developing an NFT based app where people can use NFT for lending money, can we analyze something similar with the XP.network platform?
Nir: Yes, so the platform that we build is first of all we basically have two paths, the path number one that we work on is the blockchain development team that we are building and it is first of its kind flat ecosystem removing Fungible and Non-Fungible tokens between EVM and Non-EVM chains alike in one click so this is the bridge that is also live right now you can actually go and test this bridge (bridge.xp.network) and this is the first walk in the infrastructure that we do and this is also the base and the foundation of the partnerships and integrations that we create with both chains and projects now for the product that we developed which is the first use case that we are going to launch ourselves on the bridge deck is the codeless application editor and it’s worth to put like two sentences about it that this is the first of its kind codeless dApps builder in the space and this is the first use case that we’re going to launch on the bridge deck and in terms of working application on top of the integration that we do with other chains for their applications and the code is that will provide and will grow into many kinds of use cases like you just described blending and the collateralization and NFTs like it would be for media player, it could be also for the normal use case that we know right now which is marketplace legal contracts ticketing system and many more, so basically for the codeless dApps builder the vision here is to create something like any NFT project that you know right now could be built on that codeless dApps and it will be multi-chain straight out of the box so the experience that we wanted to give we are really addressing to the non-crypto enthusiast enthusiast only so we are also addressing today you know the broad market and we believe that NFTs are currently in a hype state and they’re going to become more normalized over time into a digital assets kind of a state of mind and we wanted to support those product makers, designers, entrepreneurs and founders who want to come in and not necessarily have the army of developers developed to each specific chain, so we wanted to give them the ability to actually build their NFT specifically on the code that would definitely work without the need for codes just like Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and other platforms in the space and it deploys right away to all the chains without even thinking about it so that’s the vision of the code and definitely learning mechanism is one of those.
Astropark: Amazing, so basically giving them as much power as somebody who has more knowledge I like that.
You mentioned that we will be able to create NFT dApps with or without code, can you elaborate a little bit for our viewers on the process like how it’s gonna work?
Nir: So, we have a very short and brief, just to tease the mind, demo on the website, it’s a graphic demo that you can see the downloading process that we do we’re very much aiming to do the same experience if you scroll down you can see that we’re very much aiming for the experience of again Wix, Webflow, Squarespace. We want to bring the simple principles that we see in the market right now and we want to simplify this process as much as possible.
So the thing is that we have the product team that has pre-developed these kinds of NFT dApps use cases and in the future, we hope there will be a community and a whole marketplace around creating those NFT dApps use cases and what we do is that we want to give the experience of just like selecting a template right over one of those codeless builders of the non-crypto space so that you can basically select like a template which could be the kind of dApps that you have and you want to build. After that you select the functionalities you set up basically the smart contracts in a link in a simple way non-technical threatening way and this is the whole process that we built so you can click on the ledger click on it then you can see this is what we have in mind, of course, we are already two steps ahead in terms of the thought process and the actual development but once we release we are aiming to release by the end of this year an alpha version alpha working version of application editor and then all the testers will have the ability to actually practice and share their experience and also share it with us and we will then improve it up to the better version and then to their list.
Astropark: Suppose I deployed my NFT dApps on Ethereum we are the XP.network platform, can I then deploy a similar app on BSC (Binance Smartchain) or Avalanche or Solana, is there also some kind of auto bridge available maybe a future update?
Nir: Definitely yes and if you play with it a bit with the screens here you actually move to a screen which tells you that the dApps is going to be like straight out of the box you don’t even have to think about it, it’s going to be supported and deployed on all the chains supported on XP, so it’s not even like you have to choose which one you’re going to support, it’s something that we see the only future for the blockchain. Only future for those kinds of applications is unified so yeah click on one of those I can enable them yeah include go for continue, yeah and here we go this one so it’s just you know it’s straight out of the box this is the vision that we have we don’t even want you to do selection, every other chain joins tomorrow is supported right of the box so that’s the vision for the dApps editor and that’s the unified vision that we have for this and for the whole space.
Jay: Can you explain in a simple way how it is going to be possible to import or migrate NFTs from other blockchains?
Dima: So, for this we have a multi-bridge and the multi-bridge consists of several parts, one part lives in one chain another part lives in the other chain and usually those are smart contracts or pallets written in rust. Between those parts is a pool of validators each of them runs the nodes of all the chains that are bridged in order to be able to listen to the events of those chains if a user sends a transaction from one blockchain to another, our palette or smart contracts lock or freeze then if the NFTs or fungible tokens and emit a transaction so that the validators get notified the validators see that this event has occurred and they transmit this transaction to the target chain and once enough validators have signed this transaction with their private keys that target smart contract or pallet collect the byzantine fault tolerance threshold of signatures and when this threshold is achieved it means enough validators have approved this transaction it’s valid and you can transmit it to the target chain and then the equal number of tokens or NFTs are released to the target account this is pretty much how it works in brief.
Jay: It’s great, good to hear.
Dima: What is important is that the target smart contract checks this byzantine fault tolerance under the control of the on-blockchain validators which is very secure.
Astropark: So talking about the idea the project will launch on BSC at the beginning? Will we have a network switch also in the future let’s say to Ethereum other networks?
Dima: So the answer to the question is that yes, we are going to have an idea it’s going to be on BSC and Occam’s razor.
Nir: We already have had a successful launch this morning which is actually still out with Gate.io. And XP.network is going to be launched tomorrow (14th of September) with BSCpad and with the Occam so $XPNET will eventually be bep20 on the finance smart chain and because Occam is based on ERC that we are going to launch the token on ERC just for the Occam IDO and then eventually it’s going to end up as an BEP20 $XPNET.
Astropark: There are a lot of questions that people wrote so the first one is XP.network claims to be easy to use and build how easy it is actually this question I guess we already answered with the demo that we showed previously let me check another one so since the blockchain is a living public document you will not be keeping personally identifiable information on the blockchain but you will convert user data to a digital shadow which kind of requires retrace it back to the user how will this data transformation process takes place within the protocol and how will you ensure that the initially collected data will eventually be discarded? So we are talking about privacy basically in this question, how privacy data are used and managed if money is collected, of course.
Dima: Well, like the user initially said him or herself we are not collecting any personal data at all we don’t need it when a user creates an account a private key is generated and is stored on this user’s computer only this user has access to this private key and the user is completely anonymous. We don’t collect and we don’t know who stands behind this or that account in terms of the property our blockchain can prove that this particular account has this amount of tokens and this amount of NFTs, that’s all we can do and that’s all we can expose. This information is public.
Astropark: Let’s talk about marketing strategies.
What features of the platform interest most users, what do you think will be most attractive? have you centered the platform more in the hearing of revenue of our users or solving problems so let’s talk about that.
Nir: I’ll break that down into two and the first is I believe “How are you going to market XP.network” and the second question was about monetization.
So in terms of marketing for XP.network what we do is that we are building as part of the partnerships and integrations that we do with the different chains we are addressing first to their communities and to actually deliver all the promises. Now every minted NFT on Tron, Polygon, Elron, Cardano, you name it, is now fully multi-chain. That’s how we tear the walls between the blockchains. We are truly believing in the sentence that this is the flat ecosystem. Every project that we are going to partner with, every NFT project that has spend funds and energy and focus and brain power into supporting single chain in the best way possible can now simply connect itself to XP bridge tech and now all of the minted NFTs on that project on that chain are now fully multi chained. They can now flow freely through the bridge and this is the work that we do this is this is the important work we believe that we are doing to the space to increase adoption. The marketing that we do is for the communities and you know by us you know so we showed that we share the abilities and we share those the projects and the blockchains are sharing those abilities and you can see that we’ve both been also endorsed heavily by everyone for the technology and more endorsements are going to come soon from our bridge partners and this is this is the best marketing we believe that is we bring real value to the market and we are increasing the adoption now.
Coming to the second question about monetization, so right now the answer is there is no set in the stone decision for monetization there are many kinds of types of monetization that we think about right especially of course involved in the token and also for the dev application that you talked about, now really XP.network completed its pre-sale and one of our main focuses is really to give the market the ability to test it and see how it behaves and create those partnerships, build the ecosystem and monetization will follow from the usage of the XP token and possibly also from the dev application editor from usage and also royalties of the NFTs but this nothing is set in stone at the moment and we will see down the road.
Jay: Another question from our viewer if you click to play the XP.network demo right now the ledger wallet will be selected in wallet settings I wonder if XP.network only supports hardware wallets in the future or any other wallet?
Nir: No XP will support all the major wallets and again this is just a demo you can actually go to bridge.xp.network and you can see that you have demo XP wallet and you can choose like other wallets, we will be prepared to all of the major wallets altogether.
Astropark: Ethereum wallet, BSC, will you support the major platforms?
Nir: So the answer is simple: for every supported chain that joins the bridge we will support its wallet.
Astropark: Is it possible for XP.network to remove any blockchain from its network in any scenario? As you are integrating a lot of networks so there may be some reason to remove one?
Nir: Well it should be a very serious reason for us to make such a decision to remove a blockchain from the integration. We are not having any plans to do so. We can not see any reason to do so.
Jay: We have a question on the funding if you guys don’t mind answering XP.network token allocations are 10 percent, 10 for strategic, and 18.5 for private sales and then the total is 38.5 of the total supply. Do you have a plan to prevent a huge dump at the launch or have these seeds strategic and private sale tokens vesting periods? Also, do you have any plans to prevent a huge dump at the launch?
Nir: The plan to prevent future dump in the launch is our token metrics and everyone is welcome to look over the token metrics over there at XP.network. What we did is that the way that we built it is in with the project in mind so we wanted to keep the project not dumping right away. We wanted to keep as normalized as possible when the launch is coming and to avoid any dumps. Instead of diving into that right now I welcome everyone that wants to see to visit the website, look over the token metrics and if there are any more elaborated questions they can ask the community at XP.network on telegram and one of our community managers would be happy to provide answers.
Astropark: How would you block a malicious user who wants to print NFT from copyrighted works on the XP.network, how will XP.network protect the proven NFT? What rules did you set? But I don’t think this is really a question for you because XP is for dApps development it’s not for mining?
Dima: Well in fact we’re thinking of developing a tool for finding duplicate NFTs but that’s not even on our roadmap this year so maybe next year. This is something that we will about, but the maximum that we can do even with that tool is just to warn the ecosystem and the original owner of the NFT that we see a duplicate.
But that’s going to be a big help for the initial owner anyway because manually finding it would be near to impossible.
Jay: if you guys have something else to say that we didn’t ask maybe any closing statements or statements you would like to say to the public?
Nir: Tomorrow is the launch, XP.network goes live tomorrow and we are going live for the launch of both of our launch partners BSCpad and Occam live right now and right after the launch we’re going to be listed on Pancakeswap and Gate.io as well, so one DEX and one CEX and more information will follow.
Follow us on Twitter we are sharing an announcement every few hours.
Jay: Awesome, Nir and Dima thank you very much for coming to the RoundtableDAO TV show we had a lot of fun today, a lot of great questions, a lot of great explanations, you guys certainly know your stuff so thanks again for coming
Nir and Dima: Thank you for having us. Bye
References
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8jnWmql34o
Project links:
Website: https://xp.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/xpnetwork_
Telegram community channel: https://t.me/xp_network
Discord: https://discord.gg/g3vkcsmd38
Medium: https://xpnetwork.medium.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xp-network/
Github: https://github.com/xp-network
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only. It contains no financial advice. Always do your own research before investing in any crypto project.
