The 1st TomoChain AMA — Written Version
TomoChain’s 1st AMA session with our CEO Long Vuong (L), Director of Marketing and Partnership Nguyen Bui (N), Blockchain Lead Tu Nguyen (T) was held last Saturday.
Thank you so much for taking the time to send us your questions, we absolutely loved reading them all. Here are the questions we were asked. If we skipped yours, please feel free to leave us a comment so we do not leave you hanging.
The AMA Video is HERE
Q. What is Tomo’s plan to foster developer adoption of Tomo? Are tools on Ethereum network such as Truffle, Infura, Web3.js, Etherscan planned for Tomo?
(T) Right now we are trying to be Ethereum fully compatible. The whole developer tools provided by Ethereum itself and by the community will be 100% compatible with the things we are developing here in Tomochain. Developers can switch between Ethereum and Tomochain very easily with the whole developer tools. That is the plan, and we try to be very easy with Ethereum platform.
(L) All the tools should be readily available for Tomochain very soon.
(T) Regarding to the block explorer, right now we have Etherscan for Ethereum. We will publish Tomoscan which is something very similar to Etherscan but focuses on Tomochain.
Q. From all the past conferences and meetings, which projects are Tomo targeting to match in terms of market hype and technical progress?
(L) We don’t particularly target any projects. In terms of technical development, we are in a similar stage with some projects like POA, GoChain. We’re behind Wanchain a little bit because they already launched the mainnet. But I think all these projects are still in very early stages. One of the goals for TomoChain is getting into top 100 in Coinmarketcap by the end of the year. That is still the goal we are trying to focus on.
Q. TomoChain only has 99 masternodes. This could be not as decentralized as Ethereum and not decentralized enough to prevent censorship from governments and financial institutions.
(L) I’m dropping a news. We had some discussions between the research team and the development team. One of the decisions is that TomoChain will have 150 masternodes. The reason came from both decentralization consideration, and also scalability consideration. In terms of decentralization, 150 is better than 99. The more important consideration is the scalability. We want to increase the number of masternodes to better suited to the sharding solution later. Tu is going to talk about sharding later on.
About the aspect of censorship, one of the early reasons for Bitcoin to exist is the censorship resistance. No governments or no entities can be powerful enough to shutdown the network. This applies to a certain degree to Tomochain as well. We are fairly robust and censorship resistant but at the same time I think not all users/people want censorship resistance. If we want to build a platform that is used by billions of people, maybe we have to compromise censorship resistance in favor of scalability and performance.
Q. There were some news in Vietnam like crypto ban. What is going to happen with crypto market in Vietnam? Is it good or bad for retail investors? How does it affect Tomo’s plan in Vietnam?
(N) There have been some crypto scams in Vietnam, which made the government concerned, and ban financial institutions against doing things related to cryptocurrencies. However, a lot of blockchain events have been held in Vietnam recently. In this year 2018, there have been at least 2 big events which were attended by key government officials, key lawmakers. They said that they expected to issue regulations on crypto by the end of this year. The Deputy Prime Minister is also quite positive about blockchain research. That’s good news for us.
(L) I’m going to add that, even though Vietnam market is big for us because our key team is staying in Hanoi right now, we’re still a global project. We’re addressing the need of people worldwide. Blockchain platform is worldwide and global in its nature.
Q. Does Tomo team have any internal target for token valuation for Q4 2019? At what price points do you think the team will unload their vested tokens?
(L) We don’t actually have any internal target for token price. What we are using to measure our progress is our project’s ranking relative to other projects like how we can compare with other projects at the same stage of development. Like I said before, we still have a goal of entering top 100 coin market cap this year. Let’s see how it is going to turn out. What do you think like what the token price will be by the end of the year? Do you have any predictions?
(T) I don’t really know. The higher the better.
(N) I’m very positive about TomoChain. As you know, I’m the new marketing director. We’re having several strategies to shape up our marketing activities and hope that will make Tomo price go up.
(L) Overall I hope the price will follow the project’s technical and product development, partnership development and marketing development. If the project expands and we become more well-known, we make good products, then I hope the price will go up and reflect that development.
Q. How is Tomo positioned to compete against Wanchain? Wanchain is another Ethereum fork that provides cross-chain interoperability and geared towards digitizing financial assets?
(T) To be honest, this is the first time I’ve heard about Wanchain. Currently on the market, there is a bunch of public blockchains with their own targets. Some of them are Ethereum forks. TomoChain is right now still a Ethereum fork but we are doing new developments to be independent of Ethereum. Actually I think every public blockchain has its own market and its own target. We don’t try to compete all of them. We try to do our best. Like you said, Wanchain provides cross-chain interoperability, we also have. About digitizing financial assets, we also have. So we try to do our best and focus on our target and market.
(L) I think one of the main use case for blockchain is to make asset-backed tokens. That applies to all blockchains, not just Wanchain. You can eventually do that on TomoChain as well.
Q. Does Tomo have a target of number of D-apps by the end of the year? Does Tomo team have a target number of partnerships before the mainnet launch? What percentage are you targeting for new D-apps and what percentage is ported-over D-apps from Ethereum network?
(L) So far we have had some good partnerships and D-apps working with TomoChain such as TE-Food, Krambria, ORCA Alliance. They are really good projects and have a lot of potential. We don’t actually have a target number of partnerships for D-apps right now. One of the reason is that if the D-apps are not successful, they are just useless smart contracts on blockchain. What we really want are successful D-apps. That should be the main target, not just the pure quantity of the D-apps. One of the goals we set out for this year and probably next year is to have at least one really successful application on top of TomoChain. What means by “successful D-app” is that it should reach at least one million users. TomoChain will be able to support that kind of number of users. That’s why we build TomoChain as an efficient and scalable blockchain infrastructure. Then we have successful D-apps that can have millions of users. That is actually reaching to the mainstream users. It’s not just for people trading tokens but also for people using tokens in meaningful ways. The answer is that we don’t actually target a specific number of D-apps or partnerships but we want really good D-apps, really successful D-apps and partnerships.
(T) I want to add one more point. You mentioned that the successful D-app is the one with at least one million users. I think the plan right now is to target POSV and sharding which will improve the speed of TomoChain very much. Technically, I think we can do that and D-apps with high loads can run on TomoChain by the end of this year.
(L) It’s really good to hear because Ethereum is doing only 15 transactions per second right now. Of course Ethereum team is also approaching scalability very seriously. But I think TomoChain approaches scalability in a different way, and can make it faster. Then we can look for D-apps to run on TomoChain.
Q. Is TomoChain design final? Do we have any major changes in the near future?
(T) I would like to claim that right now the POSV is the final design for this year. Earlier this year we thought of POA. However, in order to reach the scalability feature faster, in April we went to POSV design. Now we’re targeting to complete the implementation for POSV. We’re trying to roll out the mainnet in Q4 this year.
About sharding, right now we are in discussion of sharding. We have the general ideas, but to be honest we are still not clear about how to implement it. We’ll roll out the technical white paper for sharding this year. The roadmap on the website you’re seeing is the final roadmap. We’re doing our best to reach the target.
Q. What are the biggest workloads right now? Towards the end of the year, do you think we have enough people to compete the roadmap?
(T) Yes, we have a talented team. Right now I think the most workload is to reach the alpha release by the middle of August. Not only TomoChain but we’re also releasing TomoScan and TomoMaster. I’ll talk about it later. You already know Tomoscan. TomoMaster is an on-chain governance D-app. The most difficult problem for the tech team right now is the implementation plan for sharding, not for POSV. We’re confident with the design and the implementation of POSV with the alpha release this month. So that’s not a big trouble. I think we can reach the roadmap.
(L) We have 3 products coming out this month: TomoChain testnet, TomoMaster and TomoScan. I already saw the demo and I hope you’ll love it in the future.
Q. Tech in Asia partnership was a good move from the marketing standpoint as it brought over CEO Willis Wee as an advisor. How will the Tech in Asia partnership help marketing of TomoChain? What is the marketing strategy of Tomohain going forward?
(N) The partnership with Tech in Asia is a big point in marketing. We are going to launch a PR campaign and Tech in Asia is one of the main point we focus on. In this August, we will publish the tesnet and a new website which you’ll be happy with. With the new website we will launch the PR campaign on Tech in Asia with several articles, interviews. We’ll also contact other blockchain news and general news in Asia and in the world to cover the development of TomoChain. We also have some strategies to educate the mass by explaining our POSV consensus. We will have some video tutorials to explain our project better so people can easily understand what we are doing without having to read the white paper, though we encourage people to read the white paper. We will also have community engagements in South East Asia, Japan, Korea and Europe. We’ll also target the US market. Community engagements will be sped up after testnet public release. In terms of partnerships, we will do some joint marketing efforts with our partners for co-branding. It’s important that we increase our partnerships and we do co-branding with them. That will make people understand TomoChain like which industries TomoChain supports and which industries can use TomoChain to run their D-apps on.
(L) We will have many marketing activities towards the end of the year. The general strategy is we wait until the public testnet release because we don’t want to push a lot of marketing before we have something to show.
Q. Will you publish testnet and can programmers check it?
(T) Yes. At the release this month we will publish the tesnet, then programmers, developers can check it, and really deploy their applications on the testnet. Right now we will try to publish everything, even the source code, which will be available on Github when published.
Q. Can you tell more about POSV? What is it?
(T) POSV stands for Proof of Stake Voting. Basically it’s the Proof of Stake but we inject a Voting strategy into that. That’s why we call it POSV. We have a certain number of Masternodes released to the system. In order to be a candidate for Masternodes, 50K coins need to be staked. At that stage they are only candidates. They need more support from the community by voting. That’s why they’ll try to reach out to the coin holders who will try to vote for the candidate. We select from top to bottom for the total coins deposited including the deposit from the Masternode candidates and the deposit from the coin holders, and we take out 150 Masternodes (as we already announced the new number of Masternodes).
Q. With decentralized applications being one of the key features that drive users on blockchain protocols, are there any D-apps and partnerships in the pipeline that have not yet been announced?
(L) We have announced 10 D-apps and partnerships so far (5 D-apps and 5 partnerships). The way partnership works is that it takes from 1 to 3 months to complete a partnership, or to have a good D-app on top of TomoChain. We will announce something when we reach the final stage. We actually have 10 more partnerships in the pipeline right now. When it is concluded, we’re going to announce it.
Q. If Ethereum figures out their scaling issues, then projects like Tomo will not be able to compete. How will you respond to it?
(T) Currently Ethereum runs on Proof of Work, which is quite slow. They are changing to POS with the new casper design including the new sharding implementation. I have to say that every public blockchain has its own approach to scalability. It’s the same thing with TomoChain, we have a different approach compared to Ethereum. Because you know for example, scalability is the layer 2, it needs to be very well fit with layer 1 blockchain. With the new casper design Ethereum is going to have thousands of Validators. They will design their sharding to fit that number of Validators. We have a small number of Validators which we call Masternodes. We already said we have 150. Our scaling design needs to be well fit with the number of Masternodes. It’s very different and we don’t think that we try to compete them or something like that.
One more point is that nowadays blockchain is still in early age. So every public blockchain in the market has to face scalability issues. When sharding is included in TomoChain, we will reach 20–30.000 transactions per second .
(L) With sharding design, we can aim to 20k-30k TPS in the future, not right now. We don’t want to overstate what we can do right now, but that is the target. Tu also said that in software, the architecture design is very important. Architecture designs differentiate between blockchain projects . Later on, when scaling issues are solved, then we will talk about the ecosystem, and different D-apps on top of the chain. I think there are rooms for multiple public blockchains in the future.
Q. Can you elaborate on how we approach partnerships? Do you target them from the beginning or do they come to us from conferences, meet-ups etc.?
(N) We are looking for the partnerships we want to have on our platform. When we consult some projects, when they want to build D-apps, we advise them to build their D-apps on our platform. We also approach some partnerships during events like conferences. As Long already said, there will be 10 more partnerships to come.
From the marketing point, we will shape up our brand so that TomoChain will have a stronger presence in big events. That means TomoChain brand will become stronger. Then we will try to have strong partners from these events.
We are also looking for community partners. If they want our support, we can offer to get them in the communities which we already gain good positions.
Q. There is a widely held belief that most projects will not survive in the long term. That’s probably true. What lessons have you taken from your experience or watching other projects in this space?
(L) I was involved in crypto in late 2013. From my point of view, there are 2 narratives towards building projects on blockchain space. The 1st narrative is earlier. That’s from Bitcoin. Basically that is building the internet of money and programmable money. So the focus is building a very censorship resistant money like digital gold which no one can take from you. It is very strong and against central bank money printing. It can help people to save their assets, and value in a way that no one can take from them. The 1st narrative really focuses on money.
The 2nd narrative, which was from 2015, 2016 and now, focuses on building blockchain platforms that allow for building protocols and D-apps on top of them. That allows a new kind of internet in which the end-users can own their own data, their own digital assets. It’s a very different way to access the internet compared to what we have right now with Facebook, Google, etc. I think Ethereum is focusing on Web 3.0 which is the 2nd narrative. These are 2 narratives which are both valid and probably there will be some projects coming out on top at some points. For the 1st narrative we have Bitcoin, we also have some other kinds of money focusing on privacy like Monero, Zcash. For the 2nd narrative, of course, we have Ethereum which is leading right now, we also have some very strong projects coming out like EOS, Cardano. If you follow TomoChain, you know that Tomochain wants to build a blockchain platform that can be used by mainstream users. I think, at the end of the day, the projects coming out on top being the best blockchain platforms will need to reach the mainstream users. They will need to have hundreds of millions of users, even billions of users. No blockchain platform can do that right now. No blockchain project can do even one tenth of that amount right now, even Ethereum. So i think it’s a very early stage for every project. If you have a good team and a good idea, then you can win maybe in 5 or 10 years. I think that’s my long answer. I still believe in the future of blockchain industry. Like I said, there are 2 ways to do blockchain projects. The 1st way is focusing on money and the 2nd is focusing on blockchain platforms. Both can come out very successfully over the long term.
Q. There is a common train of thought that suggests that projects cannot be successful if they are not listed on a big exchange such as Binance. What will you say in response to this?
(L) In 2014, the biggest exchange was Mt.Gox which went burst. And the next biggest exchange was Poloniex. It was the biggest before Bitfinex. Bitfinex came out in 2015 and became the biggest one at the middle of 2017. Then at the end of 2017, Binance came out on top to be the biggest exchange. But now we are in 2018 and there are more exchanges coming out. There are at least 100 exchanges right now. We have a good partnership with Kyber. We hope Kyber can go up in the ranking and become a big exchange. Because they are a decentralized exchange, and we want to support decentralized exchanges over centralized exchanges. However at the end of the day, my point is that you have to take a long term approach, and to think it over the long term. Of course I’d love to work with Binance. We have people approaching, and working with Binance, Bittrex, Houbi, OKex. So we are working with almost all big exchanges at the moment. But if they ask us for like 3 millions to get listed, we are not going to pay 2–3 millions to get listed. Because it’s changing so fast in the industry, it’s better to focus on your own product, your own business development, and your own community. I still maintain that we are going to get listed on at least one big exchange before mainnet release. We are going to do that. If you love the project, it’s fairly easy to buy Tomo at the moment. You can buy Tomo on Kucoin, on Gate etc. There is no problem buying Tomo. We are going to follow our own plan in regard to exchanges.
Q. Can you bring it up on the development of TomoChain at the moment?
(T) As I said before, right now we are at the final steps to release the alpha version of TomoChain POSV. It’s expected to be at the middle of this month. We’re in a rush right now, we do testing and testing everyday. Stay tuned a little bit for the alpha.
Q. Can you tell us more in depth about how Japan market has embraced Tomo?
(L) I went to Japan one month ago. We attended some conferences and had meetings with BCrypto, Soft Bank, Mitsubishi. We actually had some other private meetings which I cannot disclose at the moment. It is still very early in Japan for Tomo. We went there for the 1st time one month ago, and I’m going to Japan again late August. What I can tell is that we plan to have at least one good project from Japan working on TomoChain towards the end of the year. That’s going to happen. We have a big plan for Japan because it is one market which we can enter strategically, and get a good market share from.
We have a partnership with VNext, which is very good. Because VNext knows Japan market very well . They have 200 engineers serving Japan market and we have a really good relationship with them. We expect more things coming out from the partnership with VNext. We’re going to announce it when it’s ready to be announced.
Q. Are you doing airdrop?
(N) Yes, but not mass airdrop. We are doing airdrops only in the communities that we want to expand. After testnet release we will have many community engagements in many regions (like Asia, Europe, US). You will hear the news from us.
(L) I want to clarify that we are going to do some promotion events in the future but we are not going to just airdrop Tomo freely. We are going to do multiple bounties and promotional campaigns.
Q. Will the code in Gitlab be available to the public soon?
(T) Only in one project we used Gitlab. That’s private for the source code. But now we changed to Github. We’ll publish all source codes of all projects (TomoChain, TomoScan, TomoMaster and other activities using TomoChain). All the source codes are publicly accessible on Github. You can reach them at Github.com/tomochain. For the TomoChain source code, the link is github.com/tomochain.
We also have a Gitter chat. Maybe you know more about our Telegram channel, it is for everybody. However, we like to have another channel and we already did it on Gitter for technical questions. If you’re concerned about the development, technology or you have some technical questions, then you can join our Gitter channel. It’s also public at gitter.im/tomochain/tomochain.
Q. Where will the Masternode rewards come from? Will they be from the DEX?
(L) The block rewards will come from the reserved Tomo. We are going to publish the economic paper which lays out the number in detail in the next one or 2 weeks before the public testnet. And then later on, because we plan to have a built-in DEX, the revenues from the DEX will go to the Masternodes as well.
Q. Once sharding is introduced and enabled, what TPS are you aiming at?
(T) I already mentioned it before, we’re trying to reach 20k-30k TPS when sharding is injected in TomoChain.
Q. Some projects like EOS raised billions of $US and have a large amount of resources at their disposal. How important is it for marketing and for the project to be successful?
(L) TomoChain has much less money compared to EOS and even to Cardano and some other projects. But I think the bottleneck in this industry is the people: The people who can do technical, the people who can do engineering, the people who can understand the product, the marketing and business people who can actually understand the use cases. The people is the bottleneck, not money. When Tomochain comes out, and if we are successful, we will have more money so I’m not particularly worried about it. At the moment we have enough fund for at least 3 year runaway so we aren’t really worried at the moment.
Q. Partner with EdenChain?
(L) We have a partnership relationship with EdenChain. EdenChain came to Hanoi to attend TomoChain Hackathon. CEO James was also a judge in our TomoChain Hackathon. We are going to meet EdenChain again this month. But some partnerships can be announced right away, some partnerships have to wait a little bit because we want to coordinate everything together. I think we can do marketing and technical collaboration with EdenChain. That’s all I can say.
Q. Is Tomo DEX going to be a competitor of Midas Protocol or does the exchange just facilitate atomic swap of ERC20 tokens?
(L) I think it’s a little bit early because we don’t have the design for the DEX at the moment. One partnership we are looking at is the one with Kyber and also Midas Protocol. We can actually partner with someone who knows exchanges and brings exchanges on TomoChain and then we can do like revenue split between TomoChain and the exchange partner, or we can build an exchange of our own. It’s still early. We are going to work on the design and have a plan for it a little bit later.
Q. TomoChain needs more volumes on the exchanges. Are you aiming to get listed on Binance, OKex, Houbi or similar big exchanges
(N) Houbi already visited our office. Next week our CEO Long Vuong is joining an event organised by OKex in Ho Chi Minh City. Being in the same industry means we work with all big exchanges, but no plan can be disclosed due to regulatory reason.
Q. Can you tell us about the Masternode incentive model?
(T) In POSV, we have Masternodes who are in charge of creating and validating blocks. The 1st incentive is the block rewards. When the Masternode creates and validates blocks, basing on the number of blocks they have done by counting their signatures, we send them rewards.
The incentive also comes from the partnerships. We have partnerships with companies around the world and they like a very stable and fast blockchain. They told us they really would like to be one of the Masternodes, they wanted to join and maintain TomoChain network. After joining TomoChain, they will try to deploy their apps on top of TomoChain. We share the responsibility, we don’t control the network, we just build the project. They also have their own responsibility, to be honest, to run the network, to be a part of the network, to ensure the speed and the stability of the network.
Q. Does TomoChain have any plan to support other projects in Vietnam and contribute to build a stronger Vietnamese community?
(L) We are already working with several Vietnamese projects such as Triip.me, BigBom, Midas, Krambria. Kambria is based in Silicon valley. However, Thuc Vu is a talented Vietnamese entrepreneur and scientist. I love to work with Krambria. We definitely want to work with Vietnamese projects, especially because I think Vietnam has a very strong engineering base, and very strong engineering talents, which we want to take advantage of, and then build multiple projects which can go out there and serve communities globally. If you have a good team and a good project and you want to work with TomoChain, please come to us, we are going to talk. We definitely want to support you to reach out to global market.
Q. What can Tomo do that no other projects can do in the blockchain space?
(L) The unique point of TomoChain comes from technology, the products and the ecosystem. For example, no projects have BigBom on top of their blockchains. That is an obvious point. Of course we are also doing POSV. No one is doing POSV with Double Validation. That is our major innovation. We have a very distinctive point of view about sharding, which will come out a little bit later. You can see that, for example, like in messengers, there are multiple messengers around the world. It is consolidating into maybe 5 or 6 big messengers right now. Fundamentally they are doing the same thing but they still have their own markets.
(T) I think there is no single blockchain in the world like what we have. The blockchain space is still a big market so we don’t want to dominate the whole market. TomoChain has our own market.
Q. Bitcoin has not been hacked since conceptualized. Can you talk about the security of TomoChain to prevent malicious attacks?
(T) In POSV — the heart of the system, we also designed a technique called Double Validation. When one Masternode creates a block, we will randomly select another Masternode to validate it. This design will reduce quite a lot of attacks and avoid the forks in the chain because the randomly picked Masternode will be sure that the block provided by the 1st Masternode is correct.
Another thing is that we recommend the Masternode runs in a secure environment like a cloud environment. Because security has multiple layers. For example in cloud environment, they already provide very good security layers (firewalls, security proofs and so on). That’s the technique we have to prevent malicious attacks.
(L) The second Masternode to do the Double Validation is randomly chosen from the rest of the Masternodes. That is a very important point because no one can predict who the 2nd Masternode is. That provides what I call trustless validation into the system, which is new and different from what other POS system is doing.
TOMO ARIGATO!!!
