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Verasity CTO, Sergey Molybog, gives Insights on the Future of PoV Marker Tokens

Verasity
Verasity
Published in
8 min readFeb 2, 2024

Proof of View (PoV) marker consultation and our plans for token migration are the most highly anticipated part of our roadmap for 2024. In late 2023, we ran a consultation with our community which explored the possibility of moving to a two-token ecosystem. The consultation recommended we burn our 10bn Warchest, which we did immediately, and the community also indicated they would like to see the separation of Proof of View marker tokens to a new chain.

At the time, we shared how the technical effort required to migrate PoV tokens was significantly larger than the burning of the Warchest. This is because, unlike the Warchest, PoV Marker Tokens are being used to power campaigns and move data to the VeraChain — as can be seen by exploring our on-chain data.

Despite this, in late 2023, we identified a number of potential blockchain solutions that may enable us to split the PoV tokens. During this process we have recognised that due to the timeline associated with PoV migration, the community would benefit from a deeper understanding of what this process entails and how far along in this process we are.

Likewise, we have plans to introduce new feature sets for PoV tokens that explain our conservative approach to this process.

Here, our Chief Technology Officer, Sergey Molybog, discusses the technical and commercial considerations for PoV with our CMO Elliot Hill in a Q&A session, and provides clarity on what stage we’re at, how we’re approaching the technical challenges, and gives insight into what’s next for PoV.

Q&A

Elliot Q1: Can you give us a high-level overview of the current plan for PoV tokens, what stage we are at internally, and what our ecosystem is expected to look like once our plans for PoV tokens are implemented?

Sergey: Sure. So, the key thing to mention here is that while late 2023 was dedicated to initial discussions and explorations into different blockchain environments, we are now clear and confident of what an implementation and post-PoV migration environment could look like for Verasity, and how we would implement it.

Verasity is planning to have one chain with VRA tokens that are currently part of the circulating supply, in other words the ‘legacy’ chain that hosts the VRA that our community currently holds. These would retain their current utility for VeraViews escrow pool funding for ad campaigns, staking through VeraWallet, and other utilities we could look to build out in the future. PoV tokens that currently exist on this chain would migrate to the separate blockchain. VRA will remain deflationary after the separation with the fixed total supply that will be reduced by eventual token burns.

The new chain and separate smart contract for PoV tokens would enable us to consider the possibility of adding value distribution features to the VeraViews ecosystem. In other words, not only would PoV now have its own entirely separate smart contract and place in the ecosystem, but we are also looking at enabling new features for publishers and users of VeraViews when deploying the new PoV contract — for example rewarded video or content stake management features.

Similarly, we see an opportunity with our new PoV chain to utilise distributed technology for ad fraud detection via machine learning, that would both give us the ability to expand our network’s computing power through a multitude of client devices. Together, these would provide decentralised network capabilities for PoV, increasing our pace at adapting to new ad fraud threats, and at the same time open the possibility of generating rewards for those who provide their hardware in such a system. This would be a more practical alternative to the node hosting capabilities we explored a few years ago. The introduction of new features is one of the key reasons that we have multiple criteria for a new chain environment, which we’ll discuss later.

The stage we are currently in is testing this functionality in a closed environment with a couple of shortlisted blockchains which could become the carrier of the newly minted PoV tokens. Again, these PoV tokens would be on a new smart contract, wholly separate from current VRA and with their own set of utilities and features.

Post PoV separation, our tokenomics would more closely resemble a multi token system where there is one token to power our tech stack and another to offer functionality to our entire ecosystem. There are several examples of this type of ecosystem in the industry already.

Elliot Q2: Great, so we’re currently in an alpha stage of testing potential blockchain’s for PoV migration. But at a most basic level, why don’t we just pick a pre-existing layer 1 and migrate PoV markers there instantly? What are the limitations of this approach?

Sergey: There are a vast number of layer-1 blockchain solutions, some of which are well established in the industry, and others which are new to market but leverage the latest web3 technology and features. Considering the vast variety of blockchains currently available, we are not looking at simple plug and play solutions, some which may offer a ‘quick fix’, but would likely limit our feature set or capabilities down the line.

This is doubly important given that we want to take this opportunity to introduce new functionality and utility for PoV tokens and enhance our ecosystem. As PoV separation is a large task, it makes sense that we leverage this development effort into something that will add additional features or functionality to our ecosystem.

Each blockchain environment contains a fixed set of base features that provide constraints on how PoV features are implemented, or may even resemble conditions where certain features of our ecosystem have to be dropped due to the lack of important functions. Therefore, testing each of these blockchain environments for their suitability for core PoV functions and newly planned feature sets is essential.

We are exploring the possibility of forking other blockchain solutions with further deeper modifications in order to match the high requirements of PoV implementation, as well as testing new and novel chains for PoV functionality.

Elliot: One of the most important features of a new blockchain environment for PoV that we outlined in our post-consultation article was scalability and throughput. Blockchain scalability refers to its ability to handle an increasing number of transactions efficiently, while throughput denotes the rate at which transactions are processed within the blockchain network. Why are these two features so important for PoV?

There are plenty of blockchain projects boasting this or that in regards to scalability and throughput performance reached, but when you actually start testing those numbers it appears that in order to reach them you need to strip the data on each transaction to bare minimum — which turns the blockchain into a very basic ledger not capable of what we are trying to achieve.

Many bold claims about the achieved throughputs are backed by extremely high hardware requirements or reduction of the transaction payload to the bare minimum or both. This would not be suitable for PoV, which is required to carry a high payload of data with each transaction resulting from many simultaneous advertising campaigns we may run as our commercial adoption scales.

This is another key reason why we’re exploring the potential of a new PoV chain to provide decentralised network capabilities, to increase scalability through access to more computing resources, and to bring down transaction costs while incentivising users. This would enable greater user participation in our ecosystem and provide enhanced utility to our token ecosystem — which remains a key consideration of any planned solution given our status as a utility token.

Elliot: Finally we have the considerations of which technology stack we use. For example, which programming language the underlying blockchain is implemented in, how easy it is to build on top of that blockchain, and so on. What are the challenges and opportunities when considering these factors?

Currently there are a wide variety of tech stacks used by different blockchain solutions, and the future of PoV depends a lot on the selected tech stack by impacting both the overall project scalability, the difficulty of migration, and most importantly client considerations.

For example, the complexity of requirements to run a full node, and as a result the complexity of creating a user friendly PoV featured node client for our users. This greatly defines how hard it would be for an average customer, who bare in mind are likely to be unfamiliar with web3, to become an addition to the network and increase redundancy this way. This may be why building out a fork of an existing blockchain to suit our specific needs is required.

Swapping the heart of the PoV while campaigns are running is something that we really want to be careful about and take measured steps forward, although I hope it is clear that we are deeply embedded in this process and have made good progress.

Timeline and Next Steps

The migration of PoV tokens to a new chain is progressing and the flow of tokens through the existing PoV system is in depreciation, in other words, the process of moving to a new contract is soon to begin in Q2 2024.

Therefore, on-chain metrics could naturally change and fluctuate as we move to a new system. There have been plenty of accounts speculating and attempting to second guess this process in an attempt to increase their profile during this key time for Verasity.

We state, unequivocally, that no one except for our development team has any meaningful insights into the PoV separation process, therefore they cannot possibly offer unique insights into our tokenomics during this period of change in our token ecosystem. Please only look for updates on official channels.

We have now laid out a clear and transparent path forward with key information about our tokenomics ecosystem before and after the migration to a two-token ecosystem.

We have the utmost respect for those community members who have patiently trusted us through this complex process. We would like to remind everyone that it has been less than four months since this process began, and we have also been simultaneously working on all other aspects of our technology stack and commercial requirements, including building out specifications for new functionality for VRA and PoV in its new environment, and thinking carefully about how to retain and enhance utility in our ecosystem and for our token.

Over the next few months, we will begin depreciating old content related to our previous tokenomics distribution. This includes outdated articles, outdated information shared on socials, and other outdated content which does not reflect the current transitionary period we are in. In particular, information pertaining to Proof of View tokens could change, because following this migration they would no longer be on the same smart contract as the VRA main supply and therefore any previous communications discussing them in this context is likely to cause confusion.

You can expect that leading up to and during this process old posts and articles with tokenomics information will be removed or changed.

Naturally, once PoV tokens are entirely on a separate smart contract, we can publish a new tokenomics distribution article that clearly outlines new contracts, new distributions, new functionality, and so on. We will also reach out to relevant audit providers to audit our new PoV smart contract.

We thank you for your patience while we navigate this period of change.

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Token Disclaimer: https://verasity.io/token-disclaimer

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Verasity
Verasity

Written by Verasity

6.5K Followers
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Advertising technology based on open-ledger principles. We have the first patented adtech protocol on the blockchain — VeraViews

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