Wanchain Bi-Weekly AMA Recap

Recap for the AMA that took place on February 9th, 3 PM UTC

To promote open communication between the core team and the community, we are hosting bi-weekly AMAs with Wanchain’s Director of Marketing, Temujin Louie, on Telegram!

Questions submitted on the AMA form:

Q1. Does the collateral ratio to mint wanTokens can be an impediment for large scale adoption? For instance new people can’t join because the price of Wan cannot support too many tokens minted? — mtetaud.

• Interesting question and one that we’ve given considerable thought to. My current opinion is that this type of over-collateralisation can be an impediment to mainstream adoption, but it doesn’t have to be.
• Right now, the quota isn’t 100% filled, so it isn’t currently serving as the major blocker. Several months ago, we did actually hit the quota, so it’s a real issue.
• Ideally, what you’d want to see is that, when the quota is filled, there is organic pressure for people to buy more tokens and delegate their tokens to the bridge node. This would tie crosschain volume more closely to the WAN price. So far, this part hasn’t entirely worked yet, so the product design may need to be tweaked.
• The alternative would be to remove the collateral requirement entirely, but I don’t think that is advisable. It would create security risks, as recently highlighted by Vitalik.

Q2. The community has no idea what’s being worked on. Will there be a detailed roadmap available before the end of Q1? — Theo

• Communication with the community is something that’s been lacking. To be frank, we’ve managed to turn the community — which should be our greatest resource — into something of a pain point. And this is through no fault of all of you, it is entirely on us. So we’re going to try to improve this and keep all of you better informed about what is in the pipeline, starting with these bi-weekly AMAs.

Q3. Hi, thanks in advance for considering my question. The topic of which is scalability. Gas fees are a big factor in choosing to deploy your project on Ethereum, Avax versus Wanchain. Looking ahead, if Wanchain were to have a market cap and TPS comparable to Ethereum right now, how would the fees compare in USD terms? And what kind of scalability improvements are still possible? I read about X-rollups and Wanchain serving as a ‘layer 2’ to Ethereum et al. Is this still a goal of Wanchain and if so how can we get more projects to deploy their contracts on Wanchain as well. — Nick5667

• We can do a very simple mental exercise for this one. It won’t be 100% accurate but can paint a basic picture.
• Wanchain’s TPS is already higher than Ethereum’s. If the market cap were similar, we’d be looking at something like 1500$ per WAN.
• A basic transaction takes about 0.000021 WAN in gas. At 1500$ per WAN, that’s still only a few cents.
• We’d have to see what happens to gas in the case of network congestion, but it would surely be much much much cheaper than Ethereum.

Q4. What is the status of X-Rollups ? Is it still in pipeline? — jrv06

• As far as I know, it is still in the research pipeline. There are still improvements that can be made before it's ready for primetime.

Q5. Wen community DAO ser ? wen will community given chance onchain to vote for critical updates? — jrv06

• Actually, I think something akin to a community DAO will be an important part of Wanchain moving forward. I personally am putting together plans for a smaller scale version to serve as a proof-of-concept. More details about that soonish!

Q6. Wen COSMOS integration ser? — jrv06

• There’s nothing imminent on this front. We’ve found that our network integrations work much better when they are done with the support of the other organisation.

Q7. Wanchain can be official bridge for CARDANO ecosystem and help to bridge all other chain Token there? is there official talk with Charles or IOHK Foundation? — jrv06

• While being an “official” bridge would certainly be beneficial to Wanchain, we also need to think about the perspective of any potential partner. Why would a Layer 1 opt to limit their ecosystem to a single bridge? Especially if they value decentralisation. We’d love to be first though!

Q8. Do you have upcoming big announcements that you expect will cause more adoption in the near future, ie, crosschain adoption? — mikeyDev

• We certainly hope so! Adoption needs to be one of the primary focuses for Wanchain this year. There’s also a few announcements in the pipeline, waiting to be released.

Q9. wen announcements of new partnership and money raise from VCs, NEAR Foundation just did it… — jrv06

• While we can’t announce when exactly new partnerships will be announced, we’re literally always in discussions with potential partners. There’s always things going on behind the scenes and we’ll make the announcements as we’re able to.
• For the second part of your question, as far as I know, we aren’t actively raising money from VCs. The foundation has sufficient reserves to continue building and pushing forward crosschain tech for years to come.

Q10. When will the new website be launched? — mikeyDev

• As far as I know, it’s still expected to be released this month. The team has actually been fathering feedback from select community members and have been making adjustments to the new website accordingly.

Q11. Wen Youtube video from Wanchain foundation? more interaction with Community directly from Team member. — jrv06

• I guess I’ll turn this question around and you can all chime in once we re-open the group. What kind of videos would you like to see on our YouTube channel?
• I also think we’ve seen more activity from the core team in this group recently, and we’re going to continue these Bi-Weekly AMAs to keep information flowing.
• If there’s anything specific that you all want us to do, just let me know.

Q12. Is there a plan to ramp up marketing soon, will it be once the new website is up, what kinds of marketing is planned? What is the goal of the marketing, top 100, top 50 coin? — mikeyDev

• Right now, the main focus is on increasing adoption, not CMC or CG rank. That being said, we can’t ignore the token. The plan is to try and increase support by building more use cases.

Q13. Will there be any developer incentive programs coming soon? Details please? — mikeyDev

• As we’ve mentioned in the past, we are indeed working on relaunching our developer incentive program — but we don’t want to announce anything prematurely. There’s a few approaches that we’re making final decisions on. I personally really like Fantom’s programmatic incentives program. Something like that could be cool.

Q14. Is there anymore State Grid announcements coming soon that can shine light on the power of Wanchain technology? — mikeyDev

• Nothing to share right now.

Q15. Wanchain has arguably the best tech in the crypto space with the most qualified team leading it. Why is it that so few people know about it? — Mikeisnotmyname

• The reason for both is likely that large swaths of our company’s human resources are tech-focused. So, while the tech comes naturally, awareness doesn’t necessarily. That being said, recently (let’s say the past 6 months), we’ve made pretty good progress on the adoption front.
• But we’re nowhere near where we need to be and we’ll keep chipping away at building the awareness and increasing adoption, primarily by:
• improving the state of the community; increasing our advertising efforts; continuing our work with our agencies; continuing our with existing partners; and establishing new, real partnerships.

Q16. Do you think it is possible to be integrated with tools such as Moralis. As a developer it would be much easier. — mtetaud

• It’s possible but I’d be curious to know why Moralis over any of the many alternatives? Perhaps you can share a bit more insight.

Q17. Hello, first of all congratulations for all ur work. Since that u have already created so many bridges but token price did not move accordingly, actually moved opposite direction, when do you forsee the price catching up with all ur hard work? Thanks — Stef

• It’s hard to say, as price is only tangentially related to crosschain development (in my opinion). Long term, it is more strong correlated to product and community.
• For now, we focus on things we can control. We spent a fair amount of time thinking of ways to increase support for the token via product design and other endeavours. And as I mentioned a few times, I’ll be spending more time trying to strengthen the relationship between Wanchain and all of you.

Live questions from our community:

Q: Security is the weakness of any project. Anytime hackers can attack and create huge losses for the users and owners. So what steps did your project to prevent this kind of attack. How do you control risk? —m_ahdh_i

• Obviously, Wanchain has spent the past few years (and will spend the next few years and more) focused on making our crosschain tech as secure as possible.
• There’s a several unique things that Wanchain does to increase security. To name a few:
• We use MPC with a relatively large number of participating bridge nodes to conduct crosschain transactions.
• We rotate the bridge nodes on a monthly basis.
• We require bridge provides to overcollateralise the crosschain assets.
• Some of these security features might not be visible in the UX, but they are nonetheless important.

Q: Thanks for this AMA Tem, hopefully my questions will be answered, sorry I know they are long and not very likable, but I think they are relevant:

1) Is Jack allowed to communicate and make public appearances as Wanchain CEO? If no, is it possible to explain why, otherwise, someone else who is allowed could take this position..Wanchain needs a face like big projects out there.

2) What are the actions that will be done to ensure a bigger adoption? On the tech side: Avax-Solana and NEAR aren’t better than WAN, and yet their community has been highly rewarded for supporting the project unlike wanchain community

3) Can wanchain team focus on ways to bring more demand to WAN token? When VCs are involved they push the project up for a higher marketcap. You said the foundation has enough fund, but what’s the purpose if the foundation doesn’t use them for marketing and adoption? — Ronnydante

• 1) The simple answer is yes. But finding him some more help with the front-facing side of things could be a good idea anyway! Or alternatively, onboarding more projects and letting the projects do the talking can be another good approach. Not every Layer 1 has to have a spokesperson, and bridges certainly don’t.
• 2) There are several actions to be taken. Forming partnerships with clear usage targets is probably at the front of the line and is something we are really pushing.
• 3) Wanchain, in some ways, in a research and academia forward project. We strongly believe there is long-term value to pushing forward crosschain technology as a whole. I also believe this will be for the benefit of all. We aren’t the kind of project that will artificially prop up a token just for a higher marketcap, but I think a similar effect can be achieved by continuing to create new and exciting use cases/utility/products for the token.

Q: Don’t you think a roadmap with a clear objective is beneficial? It would solve a lot of the problems that we currently have with communication. And the community would have something to look forward to. — Theo

• I think a roadmap with only objectives could backfire. You know, this is a problem that a lot of older projects have, especially those that have delivered most/all of what they originally promised on the tech side. Right now, it’s all about awareness/adoption. Of course, there will always be incremental advances on the tech front, and some new products too, but the timing of these almost needs to be fluid. I’m not sure how happy people will be will a vague roadmap and always changes at this point. I think we can solve the problem of communication in other ways. But happy to hear more thoughts on the matter.
• Just as one example, this is Monero:

Q: I remember Jack Lu once mentioned on a video something regarding dual staking rewards. Any light on that please? — Bestlink4btc

• Dual staking rewards or multi-asset staking? I know multi-asset staking for Storeman collateral is still something in the development pipeline.

Q: I think the community would be happy to see Wanchain catching the wave of what’s buzzing. Currently, MetaVerse products and blockchain games are booming. Don’t you think Wanchain is mature enough to officially claim compatibility with this kind of apps? — Genshimaro

• Wanchain’s core capability is still crosschain technology. There can be ties to be made to chase the buzzword of the day, but I don’t think it has much to do with how mature a project is.
• In fact, I’d argue that if there is any relationship, it’s the newer (non-mature?) projects that will continuously pivot to chase buzzwords.
• Realistically, it’s easier to abandon your current approach when you’ve been doing it for just a few months and don’t care about it deeply. Quite different when you’ve been doing crosschain for years upon years and have committed the bullk of your professional life to its pursuit.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our Bi-Weekly AMA, until next time!

PS: Keep an eye out for the next redpacket!