Questions from the 2nd Graphene Telegram AMA with our CEO Mike Trisko

The video of this AMA can be found on our Graphene Telegram.

Mike Trisko: I appreciate everyone joining for this, asking me anything. I have a number of prepared questions that have been gathered by the community beforehand, so I appreciate that as well. So I will run through those and then I will open it up to see if anyone else has other questions they’d like to ask and we can do that live.

I will start with the first question I have here is actually having to do a Solana. The question is:

1.) The Solana network recently went down twice due to a supposed DDoS attack. Would Graphene be able to handle it if faced with a similar scenario ?

I am not an expert on the Solana situation, so I don’t know that I could speak authoritatively to that, but I would say that from what I have seen, it seems like that was some kind of, I don’t know if it was actually a DDoS attack, I think it may have been something that was a bunch of really big transactions that required a lot of execution power and that that reduced the transactions per second for a period of time, and that’s actually happened a few different times and I think they’ve fixed that with some kind of bug fix that was helping to calculate the size of the transaction. So I think what happened in that case is they had some transactions that just consumed all of the compute execution layer for a certain period of time so that very few transactions could get through while these big transactions were being processed, and so I think as I understand it, that was essentially a bug in their code that wasn’t calculating what you would consider the gas price, if you want to think of it in Ethereum terms and so it would just reduce the throughput.

I think, what I would say is certainly the design of Graphene would be calculating the cost of different transactions properly as it’s designed. So I would expect the Graphene would be able to handle that sort of thing. If someone had a transaction that was too large, then it probably just wouldn’t process it just like it wouldn’t on Ethereum if there was something that had something over the maximum gas price. So I think that that would be one aspect.

Another aspect of Graphene, is that in terms of how something like that would impact the Graphene network, it would have a more limited impact on Graphene, I think because of the sharding architecture that it would only affect the shard that it was happening on, if something like that were to take place. And so any of the other shards would be completely unaffected by it. So if, for example, we had a thousand shards, then if one shard was having a problem, the other 999 would be completely unaffected by that because they would all be executing independently of each other.

So I think there are aspects of the Graphene architecture that would help with that sort of thing. But at the same time, at the end of the day, it sounds like it was just a bug in their code that wasn’t calculating the cost of a transaction properly and that they fixed that. So I don’t know that it actually would have been something that would affect us unless we had a similar type of bug.

I certainly can’t guarantee that there won’t be any bugs in any sort of code because any code could have some kind of bug in it, but certainly we would fix anything that we find and do a lot of testing along the way. So my hope would be that we’d have very few problems along those lines.

The DDoS aspect of it, I think is something that would be more difficult to do with a decentralized architecture. So I think that’s another aspect of really most cryptocurrencies, but I would say the more decentralized it is the better, and the Graphene architecture is very highly decentralized, which is not true of all networks.

So for example, if a network is more centralized in the sense that there’s only a few nodes that are processing transactions, then if there’s a problem with those nodes, or if those nodes are targeted, then in theory, they could be potentially shut down by a DDoS attack. Whereas Graphene is really designed in the opposite fashion, where you have a large number of validators that would be processing transactions for every shard, and you would have a separate set of validators handling each shard.

So, It would be very difficult, I think, to do a DDoS attack because you would essentially need to DDoS the entire network, every single validator, because there would be no single node that would take down the whole thing. The way it works is that each block would be validated by a committee of validators, and there might be a hundred or even a thousand validators, depending on how many we have running that would be validating each block as it goes through into a shard, and there is a designation of saying which validators should propose each shard, but if they don’t propose it, then another one would take over for the next time slot.

So I think the worst case there would be if a proposer didn’t do their job, then it would just be a few seconds before the next time slot came by and the next block would be processed by the next validator. So again, and it’s all random, it’s not published in terms of who is doing each one. So I think for the most part It would be very difficult, I think, to do a DDoS style attack on the Graphene architecture, the way it’s designed. So hopefully that addresses that question.

2.) The next question I had was actually publishing the airdrop phases.

I think that’s been done. You should be able to find that I believe in the Graphene Discord as well as I think we published on Twitter and other things. So there is a published schedule for all the airdrop dates that we’re planning. I believe the next one’s coming up in a couple of weeks. And so they’re, they’re spaced out a few weeks apart. So we have the entire schedule published at this point. So you should expect that those things will go live. We actually did publish or upload the smart contracts for everything except the part that would actually make the airdrop live, so really a lot of the work has already been done and we just need to do one more publish of another smart contract for each one. So essentially, we’ve pre-staged a lot of the work, and so unless we need to make any adjustments between now and then it would just be doing one more deployment of a smart contract to do each one live.

So we’re pretty confident that we can move forward on that schedule and that’s essentially where we stand with that.

3.) The next one is when would we have a centralized exchange listing?

We don’t really have a specific schedule in mind for that because we’re still working towards the launch of the actual coin.

So I think that would be something we would tackle after we get to the point where we’re ready to start launching. We may start looking to see if there’s a listing we can put together to kind of coincide with the launch of the mainnet so that there isn’t much of a gap between those two points.

But the way I would envision this working is we’re going to be working towards the launch of the mainnet, and then once we have the mainnet ready to launch, we’re going to be focusing on being able to do the, essentially the opposite of what we just did with the airdrop, meaning we would want to be able to have people convert their tokens that are currently on the BSC network, back into native Graphene coins.

So that would be the next step, and we would try and do that as part of the launch. I think it could be that we actually will enable that sort of before the full launch, at least so that people can convert their coins back into Graphene coins and then run validators because the validators will be needed to do the mainnet launch because you need a certain number of validators to run the network.

So it may be sort of a stage thing where we would stand up enough of the architecture, maybe the beacon chain itself, possibly with some bootstrapped validator nodes, just to handle that, that we would handle either internally or through some other process so that we can have enough validators to do the very basic things and then allow people to convert their coins into native Graphene coins.

And then once we have enough of those and people set up validators for those, then we would be able to stand up the different shards and things that require those validators. So there probably will be multiple stages to the launch and then once we have everything up and running, everything’s working well, then certainly we can look at things like centralized exchanges. I would just say that’s not really the top priority right now because we’re looking at actually providing the utility and the ability to use the platform, and that’s really our top priority is to build out that platform and let people use it, and at that point, certainly we understand that the Community may want to have a bunch of exchange listings and we can try and pursue that, but I would just say, it’s not really our top priority right now. I think certainly right now people can trade on the Binance Smart Chain using Pancakeswap, and we may even be able to continue that, so there may be a bi-directional thing we can do where you can convert your coins back to the BSC tokens and be able to continue using Pancakeswap.

So I think there will already be a way to trade the tokens, potentially, and we have to confirm that if we can build sort of that bi-directional wrapped token sort of mechanism to be able to continue using Pancakeswap for Graphene trading, but eventually of course, we would want to have everyone be able to access the coins and buy them directly on exchanges and things, and so we would pursue that once we have the full mainnet launch available.

4.) The next question is how are we unique? What is the use case of the coin? I’m not a technical person, please explain easily.

Really my answer to that would be to point you back to the Litepaper, because I think that is essentially the answer to that question.

I mean, I can certainly offer a few thoughts that are echoing what’s in there, but that was really our attempt to articulate that to a non-technical person. If there’s something that wasn’t easy to understand in there, I’d certainly be willing to clarify anything that isn’t clear and maybe we’ll update the light paper so that it is more clear.

But I think, certainly one of the aspects of it is scalability that a lot of the biggest cryptocurrencies and platforms out there do not have very much scalability in terms of being able to handle a lot of transactions per second, and we want Graphene to be a global platform that everyone could use to do, whether it’s DeFi or e-commerce, or, just currency trading back and forth, all sorts of different things.

So in order to make that a reality, we need enough scalability so that everyone around the world could do that at the same time and not have either congestion on the network or fees that would just make it prohibitive, like you see on some of these current platforms that people are using a lot.

There are other platforms that have been optimized more for the execution layer, but in many cases they have given up a lot of the decentralization that goes back to a little bit of what I was saying about the Solana issue. That, certain platforms that have been kind of designed to be high transactions per second, they don’t have as much decentralization.

They’ve either raised the requirements to run a node to the point where you need kind of like a big data center server sort of architecture to be able to process things, or they just have limited the number of nodes to the point where there’s only a few, and so some of the networks, you, you see some of the bigger ones, they’ve given up a lot of that decentralization.

And to me, that’s a mistake because I think decentralization really is the core of what makes cryptocurrency different. The fact that it’s decentralized is kind of the essence of what cryptocurrency is in my mind. So I think if you give up the centralization, it’s very easy to then say, well, why don’t you just use a client server architecture? Why don’t you just have a server that keeps track of transactions and just start in the database, because it’s not very much different than that, and it could be shut down whether it’s by a government or whether it’s by a DDoS attack or whether it was just somebody who hacked the whole database. So I think the distributed consensus and the decentralization, and the fact that there’s everybody in a large number of nodes that are all following the same rules and following the same protocol to come to a consensus that’s in my mind, something that’s essential.

And so I think what we’re trying to achieve with Graphene is something that would have both high scalability and high de-centralization and also high security, and that’s kind of the trilemma that we discussed in the Litepaper of saying there’s these three things, and a lot of times, you can optimize for two, but you can’t optimize for the third one, and that’s what a lot of the trade offs have been in some of the existing cryptocurrencies and we’re trying to provide a solution that essentially handles all three.

Then another thing that I would say is unique about Graphene is that we are really doing everything from a community standpoint. There’s never been an ICO. There’s no VC, I think there’s some talk going around on social media right now about how VCs are interfering with a lot of the web 3 stuff and potentially ruining what a lot of people are trying to do with it. And I think there is some validity to that, that if someone is looking as an investor, and they’re kind of controlling what’s happening that they have other interests that aren’t necessarily aligned with the interests of the people that are using the platform.

So I think one of the strengths we have with Graphene and with Phore, really, but it’s an extension because we grew out of Phore, is that Graphene doesn’t have any investors that we’re answering to. We didn’t ever do an ICO. We never got any VC funding. There’s nobody telling us what to do, It’s all right out of the community and everybody that’s part of the Graphene team right now came from the community. We didn’t start this based on some launch of a company. Um, certainly we have a company because we wanted to have a legal entity behind it, but that was really just as a way of handling things and being able to pay people and being able to make sure we’re doing things in a legal fashion, but really it’s all based on the community. People are talking a lot now about DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, and I think Phore was a DAO before they had the word.

There was a budget function that anyone can do a proposal for, and anyone can get paid to do development for Phore based on applying for those proposals and that’s what our team does. We put in proposals every month and we asked for funding and the community has given us that funding and anyone else could potentially apply for that as well If they thought they could do a better job or if they wanted to do something different and we would be very supportive of that, If there was something that the community really wanted to direct some of that funding to other purposes and Graphene is going to have a very similar budget function. So it’ll have its own decentralized autonomous organization for that, but it’s even going to go further than that because the shard governance will be there as well, meaning that someone as a developer and anyone is open to do this, could propose a new shard type and say, I want to have a different type of shard that I want to have added to the Graphene platform, and that would go through a review process and a voting process, but if the community supports it, then that shard would go live and it wouldn’t even require people to do a hard fork upgrade to get that functionality. A-lot of other platforms, there really is nothing like that. There’s very few that have that type of capability that would allow something to come in from an external developer and essentially add functionality directly to the platform without requiring everyone to do an upgrade, to get the new code and in most cases I would say a lot of the teams are pretty centralized in the sense that they work together to decide what direction to take things and there really isn’t a lot of input from the community into that. So I think Graphene is adding that capability to say, if there’s a really good idea from someone that’s not part of the core team, they can still contribute directly to Graphene.

They can still design a shard type and they can propose it to the community. And while I do think we should have some kind of review where some people read the code and make sure there’s nothing malicious happenin, I think once it’s past some of those sanity checks, we can leave it up to the community to decide which direction they want to take things.

So whether they want to have a decentralized storage shard or a privacy shard, or an identity shard, or whatever type of blockchain you can imagine, you could potentially add that type of blockchain to the Graphene platform, into the Graphene system, just by going through that process in a completely decentralized way where there’s no centralized control, there’s no centralized authority. It’s not like it’s up to me or anybody on our team to decide, it’s up to the community itself to decide whether or not that shard type would be added to the architecture. And again, I think that is a contrast between a lot of the ways you look at how other projects handle things, where it’s really their core team that makes all the decisions and I don’t know that there’s even a lot of input unless you somehow get your way into that community or team to influence what they’re going to do with the code and what they’re going to do with the direction of the project. So I think to me, those are two of the big distinguishing factors.

There are a lot of other nice things that are part of it. it can handle full smart contract capabilities and it can execute things a lot faster than some other platforms. It just has a lot of flexibility and I think that’s one of the big features that I’m looking forward to with Graphene. I think beyond that, even beyond the technical features, I think just our approach to this from a community perspective is different and our approach to how we interact with other projects, I think is somewhat different. I think there are a lot of projects out there that take kind of a tribal attitude of saying everyone should just use our platform and no one should use anything else.

And we take pretty much the opposite attitude of saying we’d love to collaborate with other projects. So wherever we can find ways to bridge between Graphene and other blockchains, we’d love to do that. And so I think that’s not a direct thing that we’re building as a feature right now, but it would be something in the future that we would be very open, but I think many other projects would not be. So I think the approach we’re taking to it and the fact that it’s really all community driven and it’s really owned by the community as opposed to being owned by some VC or some funding source that came from somewhere else. I think gives us a lot of independence and frankly, it also gives us a lot of regulatory advantages because if you did an ICO or if you did some kind of public sale of tokens, that potentially means that that project is a security, and in the case of, Phore, and in the case of Graphene, there was never any public sale of any tokens. Phore itself, actually wasn’t the beginning, it started as KryptKoin back in 2013, and that was done as a fair airdrop. It was the original developer of that which took one share just like everybody else who received a share. And that was swapped over to Phore when it launched in 2017 and now we’re airdropping the Graphene coins to Phore holders. So it’s all kind of continued down that path. And so really everybody who owns Phore bought Phore at some point, and anybody who owns Graphene either bought Phore, or bought Graphene now, because you can buy it on BSC, of course.

And so it’s really just everybody who bought it just decided it was worth the price and decided to become an investor. And so I think that it’s all been outside of anything that would be considered a security sale or anything like that. So I think we also have some regulatory advantages that a lot of projects could potentially have trouble with because if they have gone through that public sale or ICO or IDO, or IEO or any of the latest acronyms, that they potentially now are a security and that can be very limiting depending on how governments look at it as well.

So I think we have a completely decentralized system that was launched with a fair airdrop from the very start. And so I think, to me, that gives us a lot of advantages and independence as well. All right. So hopefully that gives you some of the layman term reasons why we would be unique. and again, I’m happy to clarify anything that people want to go further into.

5.) The next question I have is when will the testnet be launched?

We don’t really have a date for that. I would just tell you where we are right now that we’re working on the design for the wallet itself, because I think before we do another public testnet, we actually have done some testnet phases in the past, but before we do another public testnet, we’d want to have a wallet that people could use to more easily interact with the platform. So that’s what we’re working on right now is designing what that wallet would look like and going through the development and implementation and testing of that wallet, and once that’s ready, then we would look at standing up another public testnet, and going through that process to get any more feedback or find any more issues or do any more testing. We need to run scalability, testing or functionality testing and other things before we get ready to do the mainnet launch.

So that’s where we are right now. And certainly when we know when we have a date, we will announce it and let everyone participate. But I’m not at the stage right now where I have enough visibility to be able to give you a specific date for that.

6.) The next question I have is how much Graphene will be required for a validator.

That really isn’t set right now, and frankly, that’s one of the reasons, among several why we launched the token on BSC first, I can tell you some of the factors that will go into that is that number one, we need a lot of validators, because as I said earlier, you would need a lot of validators for each shard to be able to form committees and do all the various work that the network needs done.

And so that means you want to make it as accessible as possible and as easy as possible for people to run. Part of the design is that it should be very low resource consumption to run one. So for example, right now, a Phore masternode, you might be able to run one on a $5 a month VPs on Vulture or something similar.

We were expecting or hoping that we might be able to run as many as a hundred Graphene validators in the same footprint. And so it should be very low cost and easy for someone to run a validator. So that means that the hosting costs should be relatively small. I mean, we’ll have to be looking at whether someone would be always running a hundred of them or whether someone would need to be able to just run one and then make a profit when they’re paying $5 a month.

And that’s really the other aspect that we have to consider is that it obviously needs to be profitable for someone to run a validator for them to want to run one. So certainly you would be able to run one on a home computer, or maybe even a Raspberry Pi or something small at home, but I think a lot of people probably would prefer to run it in a hosted environment where you can have the reliability of having redundant power and internet connections and things like that just to make sure it’s very reliable. So we’d want to make sure that we’re giving people enough rewards over time that it would be worth their while to run one while at the same time, we want it to be a relatively low issuance coin. We don’t want to have it where the supply is doubling every year or something like that.

So we want to make it as low as we can, so that it is a low issuance coin while still making sure that it is attractive to run validators. So one of the factors in that equation is what’s the value of a Graphene token or coin. So part of what we’re doing right now is establishing that value. We’ll see where it goes over the next several months as we’re going through the rest of this development process, and we will finalize the value based on that to say, okay, if we have, let’s say we set the collateral for a validator to be a thousand Graphene, then the rewards over the course of the month was 10 Graphene, and that ended up to more than $5, then maybe that’s enough. But if the value wasn’t enough for that, maybe we’d have to give more rewards, right?

So those are all very hypothetical values. I don’t want to give anybody any idea about specifically what value cause we really haven’t set those values, but those are the types of numbers we would use to say, you know, okay, how much collateral should we require? You do want to have enough collateral that people actually care about running a validator, meaning that they’re invested in the project. That’s part of the incentive to do the right thing as a validator, it’s to provide all the services is to say you’ve invested in it in order to run it. So you have an interest in the project being successful. But at the same time, you want to have the cost to be low.

You want to have a lot of validators. And so, you know, that’s, that’s part of the whole design. And so I think we need to do a little more work to understand what the value of the coin is going to be and then how many validators we need, how many people are likely to run those validators to be able to come up with the right collateral amount and then the right reward schedule that goes with that.

And if you’re not familiar, there is some of this in the Litepaper as well, where the reward schedule is different than if you compare it to something like Phore, for example, with masternodes, Phore has kind of a set pool of rewards per day. And it pays that same amount, no matter how many masternodes are running and Graphene is going to be different where it won’t pay the full amount If there aren’t as many validators and it will pay more, if there are more validators. So it’s going to be a variable amount per day, but it’s also going to be kind of a decreasing curve. So it’ll start kind of linearly saying as you add more validators, that kind of adds the same amount of rewards, but then it’ll level off over time.

And so it will eventually reach a point where it will say, okay, it’s not really adding very much more rewards as more validators are added and that should help us reach a market equilibrium, where it says, okay, at a certain point, it doesn’t become as attractive to add another validator. So you don’t want to have kind of an infinite ability to add rewards, but it also has a direct relationship to the activity on the network.

So the more people are using Graphene, the more it would issue, but if less people are using Graphene, the less of an issue, and so therefore it would potentially help stabilize the value of Graphene based on that. So that’s part of the logic behind what we’re putting together as well.

7.) The next question, I’m not sure if I fully understand this, it says: Graphene will be an EVM.

I think the answer would be, yes, it will have the equivalent of an EVM. Like it will be processing smart contracts the way an Ethereum Virtual Machine will work. It’s using WASM which is WebAssembly language as kind of the underlying execution layer for that, but it is essentially an EVM sort of layer that would be running those things. So it will have kind of a sandbox environment just like Ethereum in the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is different than the current Ethereum, but it will be able to do independent running of smart contracts to validate and execute those smart contracts and be able to reflect the results of that on the blockchain. So I think generally speaking, the answer is yes, it will have an EVM layer in it.

8.) Next question I have is, is there a grant program to build applications?

So this is something we were actually thinking about recently. There’s a couple of ways that that could happen. So one is what I mentioned earlier, which is there will be budget governance. So there will be a certain number of Graphene points that will be issued in a decentralized way to people who do proposals that says: here’s what I want to build, or here’s what I want to do and this is how much Graphene I want in exchange for that. And then the community will be able to vote on that and either approve it or not approve it.

And there will be a limit on that. So, over a certain time period, there would be a limit on how much of that could be produced, but, it will be open to everybody. Certainly the core team will be putting in proposals for the core development to help support that effort, but it would also be open to everyone else in the community. So if someone wanted to build an application and it had a great idea and wanted to get support in terms of Graphene tokens to do that, then that would be one way they could go about it.

Another is that I actually added this to Litepaper recently, before we published it was: I think it would also make sense to have a direct reward for smart contract applications that are used a-lot. So, what we’re envisioning is that there would be some kind of rebate on the fees that would be charged to people who are using that application. So we are expecting the fees to be relatively small, but if you have a large number of users and a large number of transactions, those would obviously add up to a significant amount of fees over time.

And we’re thinking it would make sense to provide some kind of rebate back to the developer of that application, as essentially a reward for developing something that people want to use. And so I think that would be also kind of a unique thing that a lot of other smart contract platforms don’t have, which is that you would have a direct reward for building something that people like and people use a lot, and it would be in the form of a rebate of those fees.

So if, for example, over a certain period of time, it generated a hundred Graphene in fees, then maybe 10 Graphene would go back to the developer and that would potentially scale up as they go. So there might be some percentage like that we could set that says, okay, over a course of a period of time, we’ll measure how much fees were captured by that application in terms of the platform burning the fees, and then a certain portion of that would be returned back to the developer to do whatever they want with it. So they could use that as direct compensation or they could use it to build out additional functionality, or they might even be able to rebate it to users if that’s what they wanted to do to give people rewards for using it.

And so I think it could create a virtuous cycle where it would attract developers to the platform and it would give them direct rewards for distributing an application that people really find useful and want to use a lot. So that’s something that I think is a great idea and we’re going to try and incorporate into the platform. That’s not something that’s in the code today, but it’s something I think we can easily add. So I think it’s a good idea and we should build that into the system so that there’s a direct reward for that. I mean, I think the way I think about it is that yes, you want to reward validators because they’re doing work for the platform, but I think application developers are also adding value to the platform by what they are doing, and so to the extent they build useful things that people want to use, I think it makes sense to reward that just in the same way that you are rewarding people for running validators and supporting the network that way.

So, I think there’ll be a couple of different ways like that, that you would have an ability to get rewarded directly for building applications on the Graphene platform.

9.) Next question is, have you considered making a DEX on Graphene and utilizing Phore as its utility token?

There have been a number of ideas like that saying maybe we should make Phore into a utility token and make it part of the Graphene platform.

I don’t think we’re planning on doing that right now. I think right now we’re considering them really independent projects. They each have their own vision for the future, and I think they’re both good visions. They’re just different. And so I think while there may be some synergies and there may be some things we do together, just like I said, we want to be a bridge between projects. We’re not trying to just only compete with other projects that wherever we see the synergies, we may do some of those things. So as an example, we might say, okay, let’s build a DEX on Graphene and maybe there is a role for Phore to play there.

But I think in my mind, Phore is still an independent project and there are good reasons why it should continue on and fulfill its vision; part of that is the Phore marketplace, part of that is other things where I think there’s a lot of things we still want to build based on Phore, and it’s just, it’s a different direction. A-lot of the identity of Phore is more in the e-commerce direction and some of the newer ideas I talked about have more to do with community like supporting private communities and having some social media networks sort of things, but also just tools for private communities, and I think that builds on the Phore marketplace idea pretty well.

You might have decentralized crowdfunding that those communities could use. You might have educational platforms where people can train people or provide training content. You could have something more like Patreon where you can publish content for people who want to support individual artists or publishers.

So I think there’s a very valid use case for Phore going forward. It’s just a very different use case than Graphene, because I think graphene has all these platform capabilities where you could do all sorts of things with it. And it’s built with a very different architecture to support those use cases. So I see them as very different things that are going in different directions and both of them I think are very valid use cases.

And so I think both of them should continue on. But again, if there are synergies between the two platforms, I’m certainly open to looking at those ones, and I would expect that on Graphene, we will have a DEX at some point, just like you have them on VSC and Ethereum, like Uniswap or Pancakeswap and I would expect that if no one else steps up to build one for Graphene then we will, but I would actually love it if someone else took charge of that, just because I think I’d rather have more development teams involved and having someone being able to do that.

So if someone’s interested in starting a DEX, you’re welcome to step up and start working on that and once we have the platform available, of course, we can start looking at building out that Dex on the Graphene platform. But, I think the role of Phore in that I think, I would expect at a minimum, we might have some kind of wrapped token, just like you see wrapped tokens on BSC and Ethereum and other places.

So there would be an ability to transfer back and forth between them, but I’m not sure how much further we’ll go. I’m obviously open to community input on that and if people do want to reach out to me directly and talk more about that, I’m happy to do that. But at this point I would just say that Phore is its own project, It has its own use case. It has its own future, and there’s a lot of plans for that, and so at this point, what we’re planning to do is to continue down that path with Phore and achieve that vision for Phore, and also let Graphene pursue its own path, and achieve its own vision.

10.) The next question I have is, are there any plans to bring in more developers?

I would say we’re always looking for more people to contribute to the project. If you know, people that you think would be well-suited for that, please let me know. If you’re interested in contributing yourself, please let me know. So yes, we’re very open to adding more developers to the team and I’d love to have more people helping us finish the mainnet launch and work on either the wallet part that I just mentioned or any other testing or any other work that needs to be done on the more of the backend of the architecture. So we’re very much open to looking at additional developers wherever we can find a fit for them. That could be on a volunteer basis. It could be on a part-time basis. We might also consider full-time developers. So, whatever you have in mind, let me know and we’ll see if there’s a good fit. All right. Let’s see. I think I answered a couple of the other questions. Looks like they’re the same ones.

11.) The next one says, have you considered some form of a small tax for transactions and some form of auto liquidity?

I’m guessing that has to do with the BSC token and yes, that idea has come up a few times and I would say we’re considering it. I believe what that has to do with really is the ability for some bots to front run transactions and that happens sometimes. I think there are ways that individuals can reduce the chance that their trade would be front run. Essentially, if you keep your transaction small enough, it won’t be profitable enough for someone to try and do a front run because they have to pay fees as it is for their transactions. So unless you’re doing a very large transaction at one time that it would be less likely someone to be able to front run that. But we have talked about that. I wouldn’t say we’ve made any formal decisions about it. I would say that’s something that I am open to community input on. I think, the one consideration that I would add to the mix on that though is, well first let me explain to anyone who doesn’t know what we’re talking about.

I think there are some projects where when you trade them on something like Pancakeswap, that it would charge a fee on top of just the BSC fee for buying or for selling the token. And I think in many cases, the fee for selling would be bigger than the fee for buying. But either way it would potentially take a certain amount of that transaction away from the person who’s buying or selling. And then you’d have to decide of course what to do with that. One of the questions would be what happens to that tax? So one of the things I would add to that is I would want to be careful about that because I think that in itself could again run into some regulatory issues. If you said, for example, the team is just going to take that tax. You know, be something that community would support to say, well, we want the team to take that and use it for development.

But I think to me, that would run into what I’ve seen in the past of how regulators look at this to say, if the team has some kind of privileged access to getting additional tokens, then it looks a lot more like we preminedned a bunch of tokens for ourselves, or we set up this protocol so that we would receive a bunch of these tokens. And since we have privileged access to that, the community doesn’t have, then that would potentially be looked at like as if we did some kind of ICO. So I would want to avoid anything like that because I don’t want to run into those regulatory issues. But I think there may be ways around that. I think if we did it more in sort of a decentralized autonomous organization, fashion, where again, you had some way that the whole community would have access to that and the community could decide how those funds were being used.

Then it would look a lot more like the Phore budget, like a lot like what we were planning with the Graphene budget. So I think that would be valid. It would just potentially take a little more work to implement something like that because it wouldn’t just be taking a tax out of the trade. It would be saying, okay, now we need to deposit into this other smart contract, which has to have all the mechanisms to do that kind of budget transaction proposal mechanism. So we can look at that. It might take some effort to get there, but we might be able to do something like that. I mean, I think we could look at other options as well, where, for example, maybe you burn the tokens, I don’t know if that’s an attractive option or not, but it could be something where that just takes them out and supply or another idea might be that I think there are some tokens that have protocols where the tax is just distributed back to all the holders of the token. And so then that would be something again, that would be very decentralized. It would be essentially fair to everyone. And so when the trade is done, that essentially, if you’re still holding the token, then you’d get a little bit more over time just for the fact that it was being traded and that if you sell the token, then you know, you’re essentially paying that tax to the people who are still holding it.

So I think that potentially could be something that would not benefit someone who was trying to do a front running sort of bot, but would benefit people who are just holding the token, so that may be a good thing for the project overall. So that’s another potential mechanism we could look at. So again, we are talking about some of these things and we may look at implementing something like these things, but, we haven’t made any formal decisions about that yet.

I’m not sure exactly what the second part is referring to in terms of auto liquidity. I think there is a liquidity pool and our team has put in a bunch of our own tokens that were allocated to us to provide liquidity and the community is certainly welcome to do more of that and then that is another way that you can fight some of these front running things because the more liquidity there is in the liquidity pool on Pancakeswap the less profitable it would be for a front run transaction to happen because it wouldn’t move the price as much for a given transaction size.

So, anybody who wants to add liquidity, you can get some rewards for doing that, because it’s a pretty easy thing to do. I think a lot of people seem to like it if you lock the liquidity for a certain period of time, but even if you don’t lock it, if you just add liquidity to the liquidity pool, which is a relatively easy process, then that would essentially mean that when someone does a transaction, it wouldn’t move the price as much when someone does a trade of a particular size. And so it would make it less likely or less profitable for someone to do some kind of front running of transactions. So I think those are all valid approaches that could be done. But if you mean something else about auto-liquidity, I’d have to have some clarification to understand what you’re talking about as far as whether there’s something else we can do to help with that.

12.) The next question is, does the project have any kind of resistance or research in the field of quantum resistance? Is this contemplated in any way?

I think I’m certainly aware of it. I certainly think it may be a valid concern in the future. I don’t think we’re close enough right now that it’s an immediate concern, but the way I would think about it is that I think there are a lot of projects that are working on quantum resistance and there are ways to counter it, and it’s just a matter of developing that research along with the development of quantum computing itself. So that if quantum computing reached the point where it could potentially crack some of the encryption, that we would be able to come up with ways to avoid that or counter it in the same way, or not in the same way necessarily, but, there would be ways to make that more difficult for a quantum computer to be able to crack the encryption. I think again, I don’t think quantum computing has reached the point where that would be a really big concern yet. I certainly think people are working on it very hard, but I would also say.

If quantum computing reached the point where it could crack the type of encryption we’re talking about, it would also mean that your bank account is no longer safe and that all the SSL encryption around secure websites that you use every day are no longer safe. And, you know, so it’s not even just a cryptocurrency thing. It’s everything that you use for encryption on the internet today relies on this same type of public key encryption. And so, I do think there are a lot of people thinking about that and we will be able to leverage those techniques on Graphene, just like anyone else would be able to do that.

And so we would be collaborating with all the people that are doing that research and helping to understand what we can do and how we can incorporate that into our project. But I think there are a lot of methods that I think people have already come up with that they think would work to potentially be more quantum resistant or immune to the quantum computing attacks that might come in the future, and we certainly would be keeping tabs on that and making sure we’re staying ahead of it. But it’s just something that I think is a little bit ahead of where we are right now. So, I don’t think there’s anything I can point to that say here’s the feature that we already have that makes us quantum resistant, but I just don’t think that’s necessarily the top priority right now.

I think we’re, again, we’re still trying to launch the platform and I think we have time to implement those things before it would be needed. So certainly we’ll do that at the appropriate time and make sure that if that is a real threat, that we’ll make sure we counter that before it becomes a problem.

13.) The next question. Any thoughts about the metaverse concept?

It’s kind of a broad question, I think, to me, metaverse, I think of it as kind of a conglomeration of everything that is going on as opposed to some specific things.

So I think a lot of people think of a Metaverse like a virtual reality or a specific instance of that, like what Facebook is doing or, you know, Second Life or, you know, maybe think of it like the Matrix. But, to me, I think of it as all the different things that people are doing along those lines.

I do think that in my mind, I do think that’s the direction we’re headed as a world. I think we’re headed towards more augmented reality and more virtual reality. And I certainly could see a future where most of your life is being lived in a virtual reality. I mean, I think we’re already moving in that direction or already have moved in that direction.

I mean, how many of you spend hours everyday day on your phone or in front of the screen? I mean, I think that that is already happening to some extent, it’s just that, you know that it’s a screen as opposed to being what you consider reality. I think as the virtual reality and augmented reality gets better and it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between the two, then I do think that it would potentially mean that some people may say I’m just going to wake up, strap on my goggles and live that way all day.

And I don’t necessarily think of that as a good thing, but I do think that in some cases it may happen because that virtual reality may be better than the actual reality for some of those people. So it’s hard for me to say that they shouldn’t do that if it’s a way to improve their life. But I do think that it would open up a wealth of opportunities because you would have an entire virtual economy in that sense. And it would provide the ability to create product services, all sorts of things within that virtual world, that people would potentially find valuable. And you know, that that could provide a lot of value to people. It also could potentially provide a lot of ways to have social connections, which I think are missing right now with the pandemic and a lot of other things. I think people are feeling very isolated. And I think to the extent you could at least feel like this is a real connection with another person. And I feel like I’m sitting in the room with them or something that may actually be a positive thing, but at the same time, if you can’t really tell what’s real anymore, I think that’s a big problem.

So, to me, I think we do need to be careful with that sort of thing. Just like any other futuristic technology that we think about that you need to think through all the positives and negatives and all the potential problems that may come up, because, you know, I think I’ve certainly read science fiction where virtual reality comes about and all sorts of bad things can happen from it because it, again, if you can fake reality, essentially, you can potentially fool people into thinking something’s real that’s not and that can go in all sorts of bad directions. So I think there are a lot of questions that I think we need to really think through before we go too far down that path. But I think again, there still are a lot of opportunities with a sort of metaverse concept. And I do think that cryptocurrency plays very neatly into that type of vision because it would be essentially the economy or the financial part of that, and would enable a lot of the types of economic transactions and other functionality even just the things that are happening, you know, it could be essentially the compute layer behind a lot of that stuff. And so it would potentially provide a way that you could have more trust into what’s happening. Hopefully you would be aware that this is a virtual thing that’s happening, but at least you would be able to say, okay, I know this thing’s happening, but I can trust it because it’s based on a distributed consensus, it’s based on a protocol and I know what it’s doing.

I don’t have to just, you know, hope that someone isn’t fooling me on the other side of whatever’s happening. So I think there is a role for blockchain to play in that, and that cryptocurrency would potentially be part of the security behind that. But again, I do think there’s a lot more thought that needs to be put into that. And I certainly place a lot of value on actual reality myself. So I would hope that all of you would as well. And you know, if you’re not getting outside, get outside, there’s a lot of value in nature. So yeah. You know, I do think there’s a lot of potential there and a lot of opportunity, but I think there’s a lot of reasons for caution as well.

So those are some of my thoughts on the metaverse.

14.) The last question has to do with the airdrops and some of the issues that we’ve had with them.

I think the issues actually are relatively rare that we’ve had with them. Some people have had problems doing their redemptions or in some cases think they didn’t get the right amounts. And in some cases they’re probably right. I think with the first airdrop, there were some small errors in terms of which block we were using. And so some people either got too much or not enough in the first air drop, we’ve made some adjustments to that to correct it in the second airdrop. So I think we’re actually pretty close to on track at this point.

Um, but I know there are at least a few users that are still having issues with it. And it looks like this question is just why are we having some of these issues? Because I think, to help you understand, this isn’t just like a plain airdrop, like you’ve seen with a lot of other cryptocurrency projects.

In many cases, when you hear about an airdrop, it’s literally just a giveaway, right? It’s like, hey, if you do this thing or sign up for the social media account or do whatever tasks they give you to do, then you’ll get a share of whatever it is. And that’s not what we’re doing. We’re saying that if you own a certain amount of Phore, you would get a certain amount of Graphene, which that implies that you have to prove that you own that Phore.

And so the other part of it is that we wanted from the very start to do this in a decentralized way, meaning we didn’t want to be like a team on the backend that’s just handing out tokens to people where we might be able to make a whole bunch of mistakes or even just have control over it. You know, we really believe in decentralization and so we wanted people to be able to do their own redemptions and have it be based on a decentralized protocol. And so based on those principles, we needed to number one, develop a way for people to prove their ownership of their Phore addresses. And so that’s why we made a change to the Phore wallet to be able to generate this airdrop file that essentially does a digital signature with each of your addresses that says I’m signing this address with this address, with this message so that you know, that I own this address.

And so that’s what the air dropped file represents. It goes through your wallet. There’s probably at least a thousand addresses in every wallet, but there might be more depending on how much you’ve used it. And so it would essentially have a digital signature behind every one of those addresses and that’s the file that is being uploaded in the airdrop. So that’s one piece that is the beginning of the process. Then once it’s uploaded, we needed to have a smart contract that would validate does this digital signature match this address. So that’s the next piece in the process. And then further than that, It has to go say, okay, now that I validate all of the addresses, which of them had Phore balances as of that block that was taken from the snapshot. So we need to match up the balance for that address. And then when you see your airdrop summary, that’s the result of that process saying, okay, we validated all your addresses and we’ve looked at which ones had balances as of this snapshot date.

Here’s the ones that we found that are valid, and we would be able to give Graphene tokens for, and they would display the number of Graphene tokens you would get. And since we’re doing six airdrops, it would be about 1.666 Graphene per airdrop, because it adds up to 10 overall. So it would do that multiplication to say, here’s the, here’s the amount of Graphene tokens you’ll get.

And then another part of the airdrop file is your BSC address because that makes the whole process more secure so that if someone got your address file, they wouldn’t be able to do the redemption on their own, or at least if they did it, they would only be sending it to your address. So it also has to validate that address and say, does this person own that address in their Metamask wallet? And so that’s one of the reasons why when we’re trying to help people troubleshoot, it’s a little harder for us to like, if someone sends us the airdrop file, if we try to run it, it’s not going to work because we don’t own that BSC address. So we have to work with the person and understand what the snapshot says, what they thought they should get, go back through, we can look at the various blockchain explorers and things to see if it all matches up. And I guess the promise I make to you though, is that we will make everybody whole, you know, if there was an error made, we’ll fix the error. I think it’s all done in a way that was very straightforward from my standpoint, but I understand that it’s complex compared to other airdrops, if you just think of an airdrop for somebody who was doing the giveaway, then it might just be like, okay, if you do these five things, then you get a hundred tokens or something right.

But that’s very easy to do and it probably is a centralized process where someone’s just saying, okay, I validated that they did the five things. And so I’m going to give them the hundred tokens and that’s a relatively centralized thing. Whereas this is a very decentralized thing where it’s doing all that in a very cryptographic way saying, let me prove that they own this address. Let me prove that this snapshot had a balance. Let me calculate the balance of tokens and then let’s validate their BSC address as being part of that airdrop file as well. And then if everything checks out, then it will allow the transaction to go through.

And I think in some cases where people are seeing that it looks like it’s about to charge you a whole bunch of BNB, what that really means is there was just an error somewhere in the process, that one of those steps failed. And so it is actually just saying there was a smart contract error. And so that’s what the Metamask wallet does, I think it just says if there was an error, it just tells you, if you go through with this transaction, I’m going to charge you a big amount of BNB, but you know, certainly don’t do that, If that’s the case, reach out to us and we’ll help you. And we will find a solution for everybody that had it. But I would also say again, this was a very limited set of people. Most people that have done these redemptions have had no problem with it. So it usually is something having to do with that particular user’s circumstances.

I’m not trying to say it’s their fault. I’m just saying there’s something specific to them that we need to work through to figure out what the right answer is and how to resolve it. But, you know, we are working with everybody. It may take us some time, but we will figure out how to make everybody whole and make sure you get the number of Graphene tokens that you were supposed to get and that’s our commitment to you is that we’ll make sure that that happens.

All right. So I think that’s all the prepared questions I have. I think at this point I would probably open it up and say, if anyone else wants to get on with me and ask another question, I’m happy to do that.

The rest of the AMA can be found on our Graphene Telegram.