Velas x DetectiveID AMA Transcript
The Questions & Answers / Ask-me-anything session with Velas Founder & CEO Alex Alexandrov and Velas team members was conducted on June 10th, 2020 on DetectiveID’s Telegram Group.
Velas Network AG is an ecosystem startup based in Switzerland. It was founded in 2019 by Canadian citizen Alex Alexandrov, a prominent blockchain and crypto entrepreneur, and investor. He is also a founder of CoinPayments — world’s #1 payment gateway for cryptocurrencies; advisor and investor of Mind AI — a known Korean AI startup. Alex is consulting the FBI, Europol and several national governments on technology, cybersecurity, blockchain, and AI implementation.
Steven (DetectiveID host):
Can you describe what Velas is about? and its usefulness in the world of Crypto?
Shirly (Velas Project Lead of Switzerland):
Velas is the world’s first Artificial Intuition empowered Blockchain and Ecosystem with its own consensus algorithm AIDPoS.
It is decentralized, open-source and allows high scalability up to 30 000 TPS.
The ecosystem consists of our already functioning and available desktop and web wallets, which can be accessed wallet.velas.com. It serves as a one-stop solution to the whole ecosystem and VelasdApps, to masternode staking, delegate staking, decentralized file sharing, etc.
Steven (DetectiveID host):
I read on the Velas website that there are 5 stages of the network, can it be explained in more detail?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
In order to roll out such a system and prove that it works. We decided to start with the original token on syscoin (like erc20) in 2018. Stage 1. Then in 2019 on the 4th of July. We launched Mainnetvelas pre-alpha own network to start building up nodes and securing our own blockchain.
Once stability was reached in April 2020 we rolled out Alpha allowing groundwork to roll out smart contracts and start live testing AI system while training it in Beta which is next stage whole system will become open source and AI will start getting trusted to run the network decision making.
Steven (DetectiveID host):
Can you describe more about the structure of the blocks in Velas?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
Currently, we use the same structure as in Ethereum written in Rust with AIDPoS instead of PoW and dynamic consensus which is run on smart contract layer, this allows AI tool to optimize everything from gossip between nodes to the length of EPOCH and amount of nodes in block production for best optimization and working on full blockchain upgradability to get dynamic structure implementation powered by smart contracts fully now.
The main reason for this we did not want to go down the path of doing our own smart contracts layer.
As we saw EOS do it and many developers pointed its a wrong direction as Solidity is now well understood, so the goal is to take existing well-understood tools and take them to the next generation.
We huge benefit for all to have ease of switching to us. Unless it cant be done with certain tools, it is the wrong direction. So we took what can be and made what makes us unique added. Think of it as an electric car vs gas car. It still has four wheels and four doors, steering wheel and gas, and a brake pedal.
But why? Well, it does need it, and electric can have it all done with buttons and look different, but people will find it confusing. Same idea here in simple terms :)
Best is to keep it close to established norms and improve key areas then start moving it to the direction of self-driving and so on so it is easy for masses to come along on the trip and it’s not a shock :)
Steven (DetectiveID host):
I see many prominent partners who have collaborated with Velas, what goals will you achieve with them?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
I can’t trade her for electric lol. Yes, we are working with more and more partners now in different aspects.
Speaking of dogs… One of our new partners and another project I am involved as seed founder is a GoChipits. A new five way patented chip designed to be implanted in animals to keep their medical and up today health history on the blockchain. This will run on Velas and will allow easier travel and medical history transferability between countries which I hope someday gets to humans too and will save lives. Mind AI is building their own version of cognitive ai on top of Velasphere.
It will pay users in Mind token. For all questions, they taught it new information about it. We are also working on our own AI to interact in wallet “ELA.” vELAs as you see its 3 letters from Velas or ELA. “She” will handle personal anything from personal finances to paying your bills on time to making trades on your behalf and respond in chats for you as you see fit and only get more and more powerful. Also, Velonian naming system will allow everyone to get a character in their wallet which will generate personality profile for AI and once you name it that tag will be used for sending and receiving coins, not just Velas but erc20 ETH, Bitcoin, Monero, Zcash and so on along with Velas in your wallet under that index like Coinpayments paybyname system, but full decentralized. It’s kinda like crypto kitties, you will be able to correct their traits by playing with them in your wallet and AI will use its random vrc721 stats to pick up initial personality.
Ah yes, thank you. I go off to future stuff too much cause that’s what I find the coolest lol. Coinpayments is launching V3 now and it will take over the current system I’ve been working on with a separate team for 2 years. It’s launching in July.
Alexander (Velas Asia Marketing):
It is the coolest for sure. But Coinpayments was your first love.
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
Velas will be used as a reward so if you get affiliate referrals in VLX you get 33% bonus. Also, you will get VLX bonuses to open new accounts and KYC bonus. This will be enough for users to try Velas and upload files and use it as a personal safe google drive, chat, and decentralized youtube.
So, this way we can get 3 million users from Coinpayments to come to us with ease and use Coinpayments transactional volume to help Velas.
As txs on blockchain form complexity, AI can study and analyze to further improve its performance so we want to load it up with txs. Coinpayments can REALLY help here. So, as you see all the partnerships are designed to drive the use of Velas.
Alexander (Velas Asia Marketing):
AlexanderSegment 2: Question from Twitter
Q1 From @UrbanYoman
I saw in the VELAS roadmap, that VELAS will create New wallet features: decentralized cloud; multi-signature capability, in Q2 this year. can you explain in more detail to us?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
Yes, so Velasphere is the section of the wallet that is getting rolled out now, you can find it under search tab in wallet now as a preview. But, we are updating to have separate tabs for Velasphere and Vortex with its own icons so it’s not confusing.
Velasphere you go to and you can enable sharing of your extra resources to earn more VLX. Think of it as building out our universe or galaxy of resources. Each user who does not enough funds to delegate or stake or who is doing it but wants to earn more can go to that section of wallet and dedicated hard drive space on their pc, with a slider from 5%-80%.
Same with CPU power and GPU and bandwidth this will pay them in VLX for using and will become part of Velasphere now in VORTEX is where it all comes together. And users go there and can upload their own files to this newly formed cloud, steam videos of other users, open images, play music, and chat in groups or one on one like zoom WeChat or signal.
All encrypted and over secure blockchain built on user machines vs centralized clouds. All videos and files are shredded to small pieces and encrypted so no users can open them or put them together on their machines.
So, it’s very safe and unless you publicly share it in vortex only you will see your backed up files. You can also monetize your files and accept tips for content in VLX, BTC, ETH, and all tokens, Monero, Zcash.
VORTEX is where you will have search for all content on velasphere. :)
So, we have VELAS coin, VELASPHERE for resource sharing universe, and VORTEX where it all comes together.
VELASPHERE
To better help understand :)
Also, our community has grown rapidly so far, the number reached 2831 members within 3 months.
In Indonesia, so far we have collaborated with 2 well-known YouTubers to promote Velas in Indonesia such as Om Ehan and Auto Sultan.
Alexander (Velas Asia Marketing):
Things have grown really quickly for us that’s for sure.
Q2 from @gogosimoo1
Is AI can completely remove humans from blockchain? and what is the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial intuition? and How long should we wait until we can then say that @VelasBlockchain AI has learned enough?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
OK, so we are not going to fully remove humans just yet. We are working towards AI speed optimizations vs human code updates or optimization.
Example: if someone is doing something to attack the network on Bitcoin price of TXs goes up to all and the only way to defend is cost.
So, eventually, they stop but it can take days and weeks till they stop. Which has happened many times and the whole world is affected and two way to fix it issue a patch ask all nodes to update to it and miners or mining pools. Which takes WAY too long in my opinion.
AI can see unusual activity and will, then it will look at reputation scoring of previous or prior to the anomaly and mitigate instantly. Over time, it will get better and better at such tasks.
Example: if someone is loading MASSIVE txs it can reject them, or simply fold chain to fewer nodes in the cabinet in the current epoch from 19 to as low as 3 for a few minutes.
This will give it ENORMOUS speed txs boost and the attacker will just lose money and no one will suffer along with endless other cases. Also, just on the date to date operation if the system is processing smart contracts txs.
Which are slower and since we are using ETH VM for Solidity which btw we are optimizing severely now to get desired performance. It can auto prioritize things on the network in a dynamic way.
All these things will not write new code or add new features, so our team and community will still be needed until ELA or Mind gets up to speed, so until that happens we will need people.
Q3 from @AamCrypto
Is there any legal protection for the security of storing assets or doing a stake in the Velas wallet?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
On the chain, there can be no legal protection by definition as it’s all users controlled. You hold private keys even when you delegate your coins to nodes. so if you lose them no one can help you just like in BTC or it would not be a blockchain lol. If that’s what you need I suggest HSBC wallet :P
Q4 from @Cryptochiller
Defi is one of the trendy subject matter in the blockchain space. Can you share your opinions and insights on Defi with us? Do you think that Defi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is the @VelasBlockchain approach towards the Defi sector?
Alexander
Defi is going to get built on top of our service layer other than assisting with cross-chain operability that is not my personal area of focus. We have enough on our plate lol.
I do believe it will disrupt financial systems yes. As it already has and will only continue further down that direction with better tools and improves performance, scalability, and security.
Q5 from @CaptainRi123
Velas network uses the AI-enhanced DPOS which has no difference compared fo the other blockchain project. But my question is, how velas ai-enhanced DPOS will overpower the other blockchain projects and what made it unique?
Alexander
AI part in DPOS is deciding how many nodes enter the current epoch, how long the epoch runs for, and requirements for entry. Not just coin amount like in all others or voting from users with balance like eos. AI gives active scoring or reputation 19 nodes in epoch right now epoch currently is 12 hours also reward is 8% annually for all coins atm. AI can change it if needs more quality nodes, like UBER when there are high demand hours it increases reward to attract more drivers. also to keep things fair users can observe nodes and delegate their coins to them. while keeping private keys no risk and if that node reputation is good they will share their earnings in the epoch.
This further makes nodes behave better as they are now responsible to other users and it is used as another reputation point as to how many users stake on your node. Is a good indication of your stability and long term operability but just one of many so no one can cheat this is the few examples of many AIDPOS functions it keeps the balance between requirements to enter EPOCH and what’s best for the network given current battlefield conditions, no other system does that or even comes close lol.
Segment 3: Question from Community
Q1 from @Aleurich
There are many decentralized wallets on the market, for example, a great competitor is TrustWallet. How does Velas Wallet plan to position itself among the best wallets on the market?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
OK, this one we are not trying to compete on wallet scene but we have a NO back end secure wallet which will be a multi-coin. And a browser to Velas ecosystem where you can have your entire digital life and share or backup personal data.
Organize your life and interact with others. Trust wallet is just a wallet so its a different league. Candles yes I think it’s funny. I was a forex trader before crypto.
Also, Velas is one of few Slavic gods for which evidence of offerings can be found in all Slavic nations. The Primary Chronicle, a historical record of the early Kievan Rus, is the earliest and most important record, mentioning a god named Volos several times. So, it’s a mix of both I was trying to pay tribute to the fact that the main core dev team is Slavic so we wanted to find something pre forced Judeo-Christian agenda times.
Like a good omen to roots and then I realized it means candles in Spanish if we change one letter lol. So, it was a win-win.
Q2 from @JoanaZ
QUESTION 1❤️
Why do you choose to use DPoS over others’ consensus? Why not Just PoS?
QUESTION 2 ❤️
How Velas protect itself against 51% attacks and Sybil attacks?
QUESTION 3 ❤️
Do you know that “Velas” means Candles in Spanish? What is the story behind the name? Is it related to the trading Japanese Candles?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
Well POS does not solve much and creates centralization too just uses less power than POW.
That does not really apply here with AIDPOS as you can’t force your way to epoch.
Q3 from@Rhynn22
Do you have the plan to build your own Dex?
AAA (Alex Alexandrov — Velas founder & CEO):
YES, using cross-chain communication layer smart contracts and dex can use coins from any chain added support wise, this will make DEX easy to build on Velas next.
I will have to end it here and will make sure ill bring along more people from my team next time to help answer more questions :)
Cheers,
Thank you so much, everyone! It’s been a great pleasure for me to chat with you!
Please find me and our team in the Velas Community telegram chat, as well as keep track of our other social media channels. Those interested in technical questions, masternode stakers, potential and existing Velas ecosystem developers and builders, can also join our Velas Developers chat and have direct access to our technical team members.
Please stay with Velas and let’s go on this exciting journey together! I really enjoy talking to all of you and hearing your questions. Please, subscribe to our telegram channel Velas Official for ongoing news and announcements and our team and I will always keep you updated.
Velas Website | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube |Telegram
