Taraxa AMA Transcript: December 15, 2022

Here’s a quick summary of the AMA on December 15, 2022, with Steven, Justin, and Leonard. Here’s the video replay,

😊 Speakers Intro

• Steven: co-founder of Taraxa
• Justin: co-founder of Taraxa, in charge of overall tech
• Leonard (Leo): lead ecosystem / app engineer

🛣️ Mainnet Journey

Q: What was the goal of these Mainnet Candidate releases?

• Establish a baseline, upon which we could make incremental improvements and conduct stress tests
• Encourage the community to get into the habit of node delegation, an integral part of the network’s consensus and economics
• Act as a basis to talk to exchanges, audit firms about token conversion, and general external collaborations

Q: What new features have we added since the last Mainnet Candidate release on December 31, 2021?

From,

To,

• Technically, the first Mainnet Candidate put in place basic protocol design and baseline network stability
• Incorporated on-chain economics
• Integrated graphQL on the node that enables ecosystem applications to easily access to the node and the network’s data
• Hardened the network against malicious attacks
• Enhanced performance with several thousand TPS, all without sharding or side-chains, still with quite a bit of room for improvement
• Improved stability, especially the network’s ability to automatically recover from crashes

Q: What types of tests were conducted in the past year on the network?

• Stress testing was another key focus for the network during the past year, especially with the help of our community node operators 💚, such as,
• Throughput stress tests to fix performance bottlenecks & stability issues
• Security stress tests that resulted node blacklisting mechanism to filter out nodes exhibiting malicious behaviors, wrong versions, wrong / inconsistent transactions / blocks, wrong genesis block, and near-instant partition recovery
• Thorough security audit with Halborn, a highly reputable audit team that has worked with Avalanche, Polygon, Dapper Labs etc.

Q: What ecosystem integrations were built on the network?

• Integrating on-chain economics into the community site
• Building a new explorer on top of the new graphQL node API enabled us to have real-time data with far less service interruptions
• Maximized the ETH tools compatibility (Metamask, Truffle, Hardhat, etc.) by adapting the way we assign chain IDs, calculate gas, contract deployments / calls to ETH standards

Q: What’s the point of Taraxa’s ETH compatibility?

• Taraxa’s network was designed at an architectural level to be ETH-compatible, its functionalities are a superset those found in ETH
• Allows Taraxa to work with all DApps and tools in the ETH ecosystem right out of the box
• Crypto should be a collaborative effort, where different Layer-1 ecosystems work together

🌠 Importance of our Mainnet Candidate Progress

Q: Why makes the current Mainnet Candidate reset important? Why should people care?

• The recent Mainnet Candidate reset is thus far the biggest technical milestone of the Taraxa Project! 🤩
• Enables us apply for token conversion with exchanges
• Realizes for the first time our full technical vision
• On-chain economics
• High throughput (several thousand TPS)
• Low latency (2–4 sec finality)

Q: Why is token conversion important?

• One of the most attractive aspects of blockchain is that economic incentives are embedded in code
• We’re building an ecosystem and it’s important for the economics to be tied in directly with the mechanics of the ecosystem
• The TARA token is the gas and economic representation of the ecosystem’s activities

📈 How will Taraxa drive adoption?

Q: What’s the overall strategy to drive adoption?

• Taraxa takes a product-driven adoption, first drive adoption of the applications such as Hype, then leverage that to drive adoption of underlying infrastructure
• Driving adoption with a useful product that solves concrete problems while being highly useable & relatable to the average user is the sustainable approach
• Beyond the class of applications the team develops, Taraxa is obviously a far more scalable than the dominant network such as ETH, and can make a compelling alternative to help process ETH’s many DApp transactions in parallel as a part of the larger ETH ecosystem

Q: How does the Ledger’s development support adoption?

• Goals are to make it very economic, easy, and fast to run a Taraxa node
• Light node that demands far less hard drive space
• Fast syncing that gets a node up & running as quickly as we could without compromising security
• Ongoing stress tests to ensure maximum security + stability of Taraxa nodes

Q: How does the Ecosystem development support adoption?

• Start building APIs and SDKs for not just the Taraxa Layer-1, but also the application platforms on top
• Gradually move to fully decentralize these application platforms, such as Echo

🎙️Live AMA Questions

Q: What is your closest goal to achieve besides waiting for exchanges to answer?

• First, we’re constantly adding new features & conducting tests on Taraxa’s Layer-1, we’re not waiting around and doing nothing 😂
• Besides native token conversion, we’re working hard to push out the Hype app, to enable web3 projects to run social campaigns without being plagued by bots, spam, and bounty hunters

Q: How scalable is Taraxa?

• At this very moment, scalability (e.g., throughput, latency) has not been our top focus — security + stability have been
• Throughput wise Taraxa is able to achieve several thousand TPS comfortably without sharding or side-chains
• There are definitely orders of magnitude improvement potential beyond this down the roadmap
• One area where we built a lot of throughput-related functionalities was around the execution layer of the EVM, while it’s not often talked about, the default way EVM reads / executes / writes is a huge throughput bottleneck

Q: When is the final deadline for feedback from the exchange?

• Let’s first clarify how the conversion process will work, please reference this in our documentation,

Introduction

• Technically speaking we can conduct the whole conversion process ourselves in 30 minutes, without anyone’s help, but if we did that without the exchanges’ aligning on the timing, all withdrawals & deposits on exchanges will be disabled, which would be pretty disastrous for the ecosystem
• This is why we’re working closely with the exchanges to make sure we have a smooth, 1-time transition, that is secure, simple, and free for everyone

Q: ( many questions about marketing)

• You can find our product-driven adoption approach earlier in the AMA

Q: is taraxa planning some kind of hackathon to attract devs to the taraxa ecosystem after native conversion? and on the other hand, the taraxa platform layers (hype, marinate, …) will be accessible to developers and in what way?

• Absolutely, hackathons & other activities get the word out about Taraxa’s Layer-1 as well as our application platforms

Stay Tuned!

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