Zendetta Picks & Carbon: AMA Recap
Welcome to the #ZeFi AMA with Carbon!
Today we have Daniel (@DACryptoAus) founder of both DistX & Carbon with us today to feed our curiosity!
To give a brief overview of Carbon: It’s a social crypto hub that aims to eliminate the need for multiple platforms of communication and information for all the people involved in crypto, with the added benefits of decentralisation and encryption. But let’s hear it from Daniel himself!
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Daniel: I’m the co-founder of Carbon, a social crypto hub we’re building right now. The aim is to bring together a range of popular day to day crypto activities into one place. I’m the designer, and our developer is Rob Culley who I also worked with on ClearPoll a few years ago.
Zendetta: For these of us that don’t know about ClearPoll. Can you tell us a lil about it? Before we dive in, to Carbon.
Daniel: ClearPoll was a decentralised polling app, we had a successful token sale and development/launch back in 2017/18. We handed over ownership at the end of 2018.
This is also where I met Adrian Daluz (Co-founder of DistX)
So as things stand, Carbon is a two man team?
Carbon has 2 founders but also a network of developers/designers and marketing specialists. They are freelancers, hired to complete various stages of the project.
What makes Carbon stand out from Uptrennd or other social cryptos?
I think Carbon is quite unique because it’s not “just” a social platform. We have various unique tools we are including in the paltform, both for group communications (direct messaging etc) and for personal use, such as the password vault, and encrypted notepad. We also factor in unique team tools allowing crypto teams to promote posts, host airdrops and choose their userbase right from the app.
Put simply, it’s way more than just another social app.
When it comes to building new products, there’s an old phrase attributed to American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”. In the case of online communications, isn’t there a danger that people are quite literally trapped in their existing social platforms like mice, because of all the history and network effects associated with them?
How do you incentivise people to leave platforms that are quite comfortable and ingrained behaviours?
I think bringing it all together into one place that only requires metamask to create an account and login, will be quite attractive. Also the team tools will bring many, many users to the platform. If the only way to get an airdrop is to follow a team on Carbon, people will come. And then they will stay for the other awesome tools/features.
Imagine being able to live your entire crypto life, right from your browser in one place, and switch accounts as easily as switching metamask wallets. the fully encrypted messenger is another very powerful tool. Encrypted offchain and stored on the ethereum chain. No trust required on central servers etc. no possible way to hang the keys to governments. You want something to be 100% confidential? use Carbon.
Does this mean carbon will be an app, rather than web-based? There’s no cookies tracking IPs or anything?
It will be web based using react. same as most crypto web apps (like DistX).
communications will be as secure as sending crypto is.
I’m just going through Carbon’s list of planned features, and there’s definitely a lot planned, so the first question I want to ask on features is how close to realisation/release it is, before I try to dig further on specific features that pique my interest
We’ve already made good progress on a lot of hte tools. The social feed/profiles etc already work. The encrypted communication already works. We just have to keep building out the rest of the tools but it’s coming together very well and ahead of schedule.
So personally I think there will be a split of audience for Carbon to reach out to
Those that are technical and those that aren’t.
For those that are, I suppose it’s clear why Carbon is a beast-in-progress. But how does Carbon plan to “overtake” the rest and actually reach out to the all the data noobs and their brothers?
Carbon is 100% a crypto focused platform, for people already familiar with using metamask, sending tokens, airdrops, that kind of thing. We don’t plan on trying to crack mainstream markets, this is a crypto hub 100% We will not overtake Twitter as a mainstream platform at all, and we don’t intend to. It’s about creating a world for crypto users to live.
What is the encryption method used? I know Signal messenger uses AES-256 as a primitive, and has become a standard for advanced encryption.
I ask because these encrypted messenger apps have had exploits in the past
Well, me being the designer and not the dev, i’d struggle to get into the specifics. I’d have to get back to you on that BUT it is in the whitepaper
So, in terms of some features that jump out at me, I see
- NFTs for achievements (Will these be decorative or functional?)
- Leaderboards / gamification (How does one “achieve” within the app, and how is it turned into a game?)
- Rewards system for holding CRBN and using the app (Please explain a bit more on this, what form do rewards take?)
Ok so, the NFTs you would earn are purely for achievements, so they don’t really have a function, just collectibles. The leaderboards rank all of your friends and global users in various categories such as upvotes, donations, followers, user ranking and more. The gamification is in awarding points for various tasks while using the app, and competing against all other users to work your way up the rankings which gives you a higher share of the monthly rewards. And the rewards are significant. So instead of just boring old staking, we combine it with rankings which requires using the app, and in popular, successful ways. Rewarding for good content etc.
Rewards:
December 2020–1,500,000 total CRBN airdropped to top 300.
January 2021–1,000,000 total CRBN airdropped to top 300.
February 2021–750,000 total CRBN airdropped to top 300.
March 2021 to December 2021–300,000 total CRBN airdropped per month to top 300.
After December 2021 the rewards pool will be completely funded by revenue.
Top 300 means top 300 ranked users based on their points.
“Completely funded by revenue”; is that going to be through advertising, purchases of add-ons, or what do you see as your primary revenue stream for Carbon?
Yes that’s basically it. A widely used platform can easily be monetised, and we also plan on charging fees for the team tools such as running airdrops, promoting posts etc. Users and teams can also donate directly to us and earn NFTs as a thank you (plus get exposure in the leaderboards for their efforts)
Do you have anything preventing people from making fake accounts to give upvotes, etc.?
That’s very difficult to stop, so we only allocate a small amount of points for upvotes. We do have some spam filters and bot filters in place (although I can’t really get into the technical details of that yet)
Point allocation:
CRBN holdings: 1 Point for every 1,000 CRBN held
Contacts: 1 point for every contact made via the app (contacts book, friend connected)
Followers: 0.2 points for every follower (users following you).
Blockchain usage: 3 points for every save on-chain (anything that requires gas to save)
Donations: 10 points for every 1,000 CRBN donated via Carbon app.
Upvoted Content: 0.1 points for every upvote your social posts receive.
So you see we reward blockchain interaction and donations quite heavily, because they cost something (gas or donations)
Also reward making contacts quite heavily to encourage growth. It’s coming together really well so far too 🙂 All the really tricky stuff has already been worked out on the technical side of things. I know we will get questions about gas costs later so i’ll wait til then to respond to that.
Can you tell us more about the sale on DistX? How would occur? Our community are long term holders of DistX, and it would be lovely to know how can we benifit from supporting both projects
Sure. Well we have early access to the Carbon token sale, if you hold 1000 DISTX. So you can participate 24hrs earlier than anyone else, which is important in a popular token sale.
The token sale link is:
https://app.distx.io/participate/5f98db47fa077723ce294a9e
Please save that for Nov 9
@DACryptoAus one more from me. Being the co-founder of DistX, what made you work on Carbon? Were you always working on both simultaneously?
We began work on Carbon (in a slightly different form) back in 2018 actually. Has been a side project for quite some time and now that DistX exists, we have a platform to really make it happen.
Everyone can see that we deliver on what we promise, we did it with ClearPoll and DistX already.
Now I’m thinking what other projects could be possibly in built in the background as we speak 😮
Haha, no other projects right now. Carbon can be evolved and expanded so much that we don’t need any more projects.
I have one last question. I hope it won’t be personal. Dan, how would Carbon not deviate and distract you from continuing the development of DistX? You are working on both projects now
That’s a fair question, no problem. As a designer most of my workload happens at the very beginning of a project. For DistX I was putting in 60–70hr weeks throughout september and early october doing my thing. After that the focus shifts more to development. As a founder, for DistX we have hired new team members to carry out most of the day to day tasks that take up the time. Now with Carbon, it will take up a lot of my time over the next few months and then it switches over to development releases and marketing. Basically, there is a constant swing between the projects. Busy sometimes on one, other times on the other. Imagine being Elon Musk running Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring Company etc. He doesn’t do them all simultaneously, they go in waves. Also.. I work really efficiently and I work hard, and there’s a big overlap between DistX and Carbon in terms of what is required of me.
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ZeCommunity Time!
Hey Daniel, good to have you back.
1) Here’s a question about the password vault. Is this just a way to save/view all your passwords in one place or will it enable users to automatically login to various sites/apps?
2) Do the leaderboard points reset every month? Or will they just keep adding up and the rewards are based on the monthly rankings?
It’s a nice place to save your passwords as it’s incredibly secure (as secure as Bitcoin is). You would be able to copy the passwords with one click to paste wherever you need to. We are also looking at ways to click and login without copying required. Leaderboard resets monthly, as do the reward payouts. The password vault replaces that text doc everyone has that they really shouldnt have. Lol
Please tell me about gas costs for everything.
Users will actually have the choice whether or not to save their data on the blockchain, or on central servers. Both options are fully end to end encrypted so are basically identical in security, but if they really want it to be decentralised, they just toggle that option on and pay gas for that one transaction. So for ultra important stuff you might pay gas, for group messaging talking about something silly, you wouldnt bother. So for ultra important stuff you might pay gas, for group messaging talking about something silly, you wouldnt bother.
I have a semi-dump question to raise:
- One of the biggest issues in the social media sphere is surveliance and centrality of control and represssion over what is being posted on these platforms. How would Carbon be different? Will there be any limitations over what is being shared? How will it not allow for some money loundering communication, or maybe terrorist groups taking advantage of it to do some shady stuff?
Well, for starters we wont allow images or videos to be shared. The whole platform is text only, and links. So we should be ok in the area of illegal content. There is nothing we can do to stop people privately discussing anything (and there are already apps for that). We dont have the keys, nobody but the content creator does. It’s pointless us handing anything over, it’s encrypted and nobody can access it. If governments ban the encrypted messaging tool, that wouldn’t completely end us. It’s just one part of it.
The password vault for a crypto related platform is extremely scary tbh. This will be prone to heavy attacks due to the data it’s holding.
How do you plan on keeping the environment secure?
password storage is stored on the chain at all times, no central server option for that. It’s encrypted off chain so the nodes cant roll anything back either. It is as secure as your crypto is.
Hey Daniel. As you know at present Uniswap investors have a baby’s attention span with the multi dozen project releases everyday. How do you plan to differentiate your marketing efforts to bring in consistent eye balls and on-going excitement?
We have a staggered launch planned, for a start. Beginning in January, we release tools in groups, to make sure there’s always something coming. There’s no “they launched, time to move on” We haev a lot of marketing planned already including some youtube influencer videos etc.
And thus concludes the AMA!
We’d like to thank you, our community and readers, ZeTeam and most importantly Daniel from CARBON for being able to answer all these questions!
#FastenYourZeBelts and prepare to take part in the next #ReZearch!