Questions from the 1st Graphene Telegram AMA with our CEO Mike Trisko

This is part of the AMA with Mike which took place on the Graphene Telegram.

The first question had to do with Mike’s background in Crypto and Tech which was addressed in a previous article.

What is Graphene and the technology behind it ?

I think a little more on that would be some of the distinguishing features that would distinguish it from something like, let’s say Ethereum, because we do share some of the core protocols of Ethereum 2.0 now, in fact, at a certain point, we were ahead of them in the implementation of certain parts of it and they were using parts of our code, they were using one of our cryptographic libraries for signature aggregation called BLS. But in any case, we’re doing a number of different things as well that are, I think making it, giving it a different purpose than what you would find with Ethereum 2.0. One of those is that Phore and Graphene have always been very community driven at their center and so one piece of that is a budget governance system, so there’s a piece in Phore that we will be replicating a similar system in Graphene where there’ll be a set of development funds that will be completely decentralized. So you could think of it like a DAO and It really is available to everybody.

Our team makes proposals with Phore and gets funding for what we do for Phore, but that same system is available to anybody the same way it is to us, and the same thing would be true with Graphene. So, whether there’s someone in the community that wants to develop a new application that would enhance the ecosystem around Graphene, or whether they want to develop a new shard or whether they might want to contribute to the core code, or even just develop an application using smart contracts on top of it, all of those things could potentially be funded directly from the blockchain using those development funds.

And that’s a sustainable, repeating thing, so every month or every period of time, whatever we designed in there, we’d be able to say, ok, anyone can make a proposal and they can get funding for what they’re doing and then the same thing will happen the next period. And it’ll keep going. So I think that’s a really nice mechanism that makes the blockchain very resilient and also gives it sustainability that I think a lot of projects don’t have. If there’s a project that does an ICO or some sort of initial fundraising, my question is always what happens when that money runs out.

If they don’t have any kind of business model, if they don’t have any kind of sustainable funding, I’m not sure how they’re going to keep operating. So, I actually prefer what we’re doing to something like an ICO, even though we didn’t have that big cash infusion at the start, I think I would actually prefer to have the system we have because I think it gives us more sustainability, and frankly, it also is a lot easier in terms of the regulations, because I think based on the way it’s structured, it’s really not considered something that would make Phore or Graphene a security. So I think basically, we can say there’s never been any public fundraising, there’s never been anything that was really sold as far as funds that were raised from the public, so there’s really no question that these blockchains and cryptocurrencies would not be securities.

Another piece of that with Graphene that goes even further is we will have shared governance, meaning that there will be a system where the community can vote on the new shard types and decide and approve which ones will go live on the system. So, in addition to just the funding mechanism, there’s also the actual shard types where if someone develops a new shard, the community has a voice in terms of deciding which one of those things goes live, and based on the way we’re designing that system, it would actually go live dynamically, meaning you wouldn’t even necessarily need to upgrade your wallet to take advantage of a new shard. A-lot of times that would be a hard fork where everyone would have to upgrade to be able to use the new functionality. In this case, we’re designing it so that it would really go live by itself, kind of like uploading a smart contract where it would just go live when the community approves it, it would be made available to people on the blockchain and it would work without having to upgrade your wallet, so at least that’s the intention of where we’re going with that.

There are some other technical differences. I can’t really go through all the details, but one that I would point out is the shard interface itself is very different than what Ethereum is doing with their version of this. I think Ethereum’s approach has been very abstract, meaning that they have left everything up to the shard developer to decide how to do every single function.

And that does give you kind of ultimate flexibility where you could do really crazy things with it, because it can kind of operate almost completely independently of any other rules on the system, but I think in the way we looked at it is that would create a lot of work for the shard developer because they have to do even very basic things like how do you store data on a block or how do you access things that are very basic things that almost every blockchain that you could imagine would probably do pretty much the same way. And so rather than making the shard developer redevelop that code every time we’re providing APIs to the shard developers so that they can just reuse those very common functions and just do the parts that are different, so I think it’ll lead to a process where it’ll be a lot faster and easier to develop new shard types for the Graphene Ecosystem.

So I think that probably gives you a good highlight of the different technical concepts. If people have further questions about that, I can certainly elaborate on that.

Next question I have on my list is what are some of the use cases for Graphene in the future?

It’s hard for me to nail that down because I think it just, in my mind, has this unlimited potential because you can really design shards that could do almost any type of blockchain. The way I think about it though, is that again, you could almost think of it as having a combination of every blockchain you see out there in terms of like a Bitcoin style blockchain, an Ethereum style blockchain, a decentralized storage blockchain, a privacy blockchain, I mean, all those things could exist in the same system. So to me, what I think we’re creating here is a new generation where you can have all these different things as part of the same system. One of the challenges you have with cross blockchain compatibility is that they all have different confirmation times, there’s a lot of security issues If you’re trying to transfer things back and forth, people are doing a lot of these things with wrapped tokens and things like that. But with Graphene, you could potentially do a lot of those things all within the ecosystem. There would be no need to say, I have to go to this other one to do a smart contract or transfer things across. So you could just have that functionality in the Graphene Ecosystem and have different blockchains that do everything you need to do and just use it within the system and then there’s none of those problems with transferring things back and forth because the security is all built right into the ecosystem.

So I think that kind of addresses the next question. There was a question about why would people use Graphene versus Ethereum and Solana? I think I’ve probably hit on a lot of those points, that I have a lot of respect for all the things Ethereum is doing. I have a lot of respect for all the things Solana is doing, all the other blockchains out there that are doing things that might overlap with what we’re doing, but I do think there’s a lot of unique things that we’re doing as well and I think these different blockchains will have different use cases that they might be best for. I really would leave it up to the community of Graphene to decide what do they think is most valuable and what sorts of things do they want to see?

But I think one of the distinguishing differences is that voice that you have in the process, you know, if you wanted to add a new shard type to Ethereum, good luck, I think because it would probably have to go through the Ethereum team. You’d have to somehow get Vitalik and the rest of his team to approve that and probably implement that.

Whereas the system we’re building is a lot more open where people are welcome to develop new shard types and propose new shard types. Obviously we do want to have the community approve it. We don’t want to have it be something where anything could potentially go live on the system. We want it to be something that’s guided by the community, but it is something where the community has that voice and we want to be very open to having external developers join our effort and be part of our team, essentially. And again, there’s also funding available for people who want to be part of that. So, I do think that’s probably one of the biggest differences in terms of how we’ve structured this, that it really is more like a DAO structure where people can contribute to the code, people can contribute shard types, people can contribute applications, smart contracts, and as the ecosystem gets built out, I think the community will be able to guide where they want it to go and what sorts of use cases they want to see.

The next question is when moon?

I know that’s a common question in a-lot of crypto, I generally can’t really comment on price as it comes to that sort of thing. So that’s really my standard answer when that question is asked, what I would say is the market determines the value and I don’t control the market. So, the market can decide how much Graphene is worth at any given point in time.

What I would say though, is that our focus as a team is to make graphene as valuable as it can be to achieve the vision that we’ve set out, to develop new visions of where we’re going to go and to listen to the community and to implement the things that the community wants to make it into the most valuable set of technology and products that we can make it.

And I would also just say that I really see this as the beginning of a journey. You know, I think we’re still very early in the journey. I mean, I’ve been in crypto now since 2017. So maybe to a lot of people, that’s a long time, but to me, I just see that as the beginning, I think we originally did set out with this vision of having this type of system and we’re getting a lot closer to being able to bring this live as the mainnet for Graphene. But even then I would consider that kind of like the starting gate for Graphene. I think there’s going to be a lot of new shard types that will develop a lot of smart contracts, DeFi capabilities, things that maybe people haven’t even imagined yet that we’ll be creating once we get the full functionality of the platform up and running.

So I just see this as we’re kind of getting to that starting gate. And then I see it from there as just growing and expanding from that point.

The next question I have is what is the schedule of the token release?

Now, obviously the first airdrop was already done from the first snapshot from the Phore blockchain on October 11th. Right now I would say we are discussing the schedule for the rest of it internally (airdrop schedule has recently been released here and here) and we’re also looking for community feedback on this. I think, we certainly expect it to be in the short term, meaning a matter of weeks to at least have the next airdrop. I think, there is some discussion about should we do all the other airdrops at one time once it’s already, or should we do them one at a time and space them out. So if the community does have feedback, I’m very open to hearing about that and I’d like to see how people feel about it. But, otherwise, you know, as a team, we are discussing that and we’re trying to determine exactly what the best timing would be to do the next ones.

There is some effort involved in terms of preparing each airdrop and we’ve been going through most of that. I would say a lot of that is complete for airdrops two, three, four, but not necessarily for all the way through the end of six. So, part of that effort is making sure we do have the full snapshot analysis of exactly what the balances are that we’ve removed all the addresses that shouldn’t be part of that, which would include things like Cryptopia and other exchanges that are either defunct or did not decide to support the airdrop for their users. So we’re going through that due diligence process, making sure that’s all prepared for each of the airdrops as we go through this process.

But, again we were also just discussing different options in terms of the timing and we’ll certainly make announcements once those things are final and as I said, we’re certainly open to feedback from the community about what you’d like to see there.

The next question is when the Graphene mainnet would go live?

I don’t like to promise dates before I’m really confident that we can hit them, so I’m not going to be able to give you a specific date, but I would say I certainly expect it to be in 2022 and that within that timeframe, we’ll have to see exactly where it falls. We’re working hard on it. It is largely complete on the backend I would say and a lot of the work we’re doing right now is just building out the front end interface for the wallet and making sure that we’re going through a thorough testing process and audit process and making sure that everything is really solid before we go live with the mainnet. So that’s kind of where we’re at right now, and we’re moving forward with the rest of the design and the implementation to make sure that everything’s ready and that we’re going to be able to do a successful launch when we get to that point. So that’s the best I can do in terms of timing at this point, but certainly as we get closer, we think we’ll be able to hone in on that timeframe a lot better.

The final question I have here on the list is will the Graphene mainnet bridge to BSC?

I think that the answer is certainly yes, at least, especially from the sense that the BSC token that was launched would be converted into Graphene native coins. So, similar to the airdrop process that we just rolled out for airdropping Graphene tokens to Phore holders, we’re going to have a process to convert those into native Graphene coins on the Graphene mainnet once it’s launched. We’ll actually have to do that because we’re going to need a certain number of Graphene coins to be able to launch the network. We’ll need people to run validators to do a lot of the work that the network requires. So we’ll be looking to recruit people to say, do you want to be part of this launch and do you want to run validators as part of it to help us get this started. So as we get closer to that launch process, you’ll be hearing a lot more from us and we’ll be designing a process for you to do that. I think there probably would be an ongoing bridge back and forth to be able to interact with the BSC ecosystem, so I think there probably would be more links than just that conversion process, but there certainly will be links back and forth between the token and that exists today and the mainnet that we’ll have once the mainnet is available.