Aergo QPU 2020 Q&A
You can check out all answers to your questions from the new Aergo QPU 2020 Q&A!
All answers are published on the official page of Aergo in Medium.
You can read the answers on our website:
1. When do you plan on building a developer community to increase the use of Aergo?
Because we are an enterprise-oriented project, we reflect the needs of developers in the enterprise side. We reflect what is needed through talks with clients (of Blocko, strategic partners) and engage in education. Creating an open source developer community requires voluntary participation. We don’t think blockchain-specific events are effective in building up the developer community. We aim to support fan developers by business cases rather than large marketing/developer events. However, we are planning to introduce the project and gather the developers through enterprise developer events.
2. How are you going to compete with other projects?
Currently our primary competitors would have to be those within the enterprise blockchain space. Those include IBM Hyperledger, Quorum, R3 Corda, Ethereum Enterprise, and more. We believe in a hybrid approach to enterprise adoption and has been our mantra since the beginning of Aergo. We will continue to prove ourselves through the continuous business and customers that work with Aergo. We have a significant track record in South Korea and overall over 40 Blockchain systems with major companies such as Hyundai, Samsung, Lotte, that are currently in production, with over 300 Client engagements since 2014 (many are confidential), and have since expanded to Blocko MENA to cover Africa & SEA by targeting distributed finance sector (MESEA) through 3 major international-scale reference projects in the region which you can read about in our latest QPU.
Our goal is to continuously help companies and government entities to utilize our blockchain and bring value to their projects through our continuous support. With 6 years of experience in building enterprise blockchain solutions, I think it speaks for itself how we are to compete with other projects in this arena.
3. How are you going to achieve active token usage in your ecosystem?
Currently we have 3 forms of the Aergo token.
- BEP2 AERGO
- ERC-20 AERGO
- Mainnet AERGO
The first two are focused on liquidity purposes for our ecosystem, as well as integrating ourselves with the Binance Chain ecosystem which has a variety of benefits. We will still be having ongoing programs to benefit our community through various programs — though in terms of Mainnet AERGO there are various benefits too. Primarily being staking and voting rewards for participating in the Aergo network.
With the launch of our Aergo Agora there will be further decentralization of our network and increased participation for our community on the future of Aergo. This will be a massive network change which will significantly require token usage.
Finally, the enterprise clients who are anchoring onto the Aergo mainnet will be required to hold Aergo in order to pay for gas fees and also to interact with other sidechains (of other enterprises) — hence increased utility.
We understand the community’s concern over trying to see immediate mainnet token activity — it is important to note that we are doing our best to make sure that we are pushing regular updates to ensure that our mainnet is secure as possible for the enterprise clients utilizing the Aergo Enterprise 2.0 suite (which utilizes the Aergo main network). We remain as a serious project for our customers and that is our top priority along with our community. Hence these things will reflect over time.
4. What are your plans to be more recognized in the cryptospace? How do you introduce your project to non-crypto users?
We believe we have a solid presence currently and are taking a prudent approach this year due to the recent pandemic. We have previously been extensively attending non blockchain related conferences to acquire new customers — eg. in the Blockchain IoT conference in London we were the only blockchain project involved. Nonetheless, this year we will perhaps consider virtual conferences but we will be taking a steadfast approach in mainnet development to cater towards our community. In addition, we will be engaging with the larger crypto community through various community related programs to be shared soon.
5. Are there currently any dApp developers or startups that will develop a dApp using the Aergo Chain?
Btree is developing and using the reward protocol Aergo Gem, and gamers are using Aergo Gem as their rewards.
6. Why is there no significant traffic on the aergo mainnet, when we can expect more traffic on the aergo mainnet?
Most transactions of Public Projects are based on gambling and lottery. If we develop or make a partnership with a gambling startup, most enterprises will not like it. So we are focusing on actual enterprise businesses. Enterprise customers of Blocko are asking how to use mainnet for public service. We expect to make more transactions on the mainnet over time.
7. Why does the team focus on getting a huge number of projects, why isn’t the team focusing on its first few to complete them to begin with?
This is because a number of projects would require ongoing development, work, and servicing. As a result; it makes sense for us to continually onboard clients onto our platform as we are already able to provide a number of services to our clients (see our use cases with Coinstack and with Aergo on our Blocko site), and also generate ongoing revenue to operate.
8. What is your source of revenue and how much does Aergo/Blocko charge for each project, Is it fiat or aergo? If the team is getting revenue in fiat, will it buyback and burn from its profit/revenue?
Blocko as a solution integration/deployment partner of AERGO within enterprise. Enterprises will need SLAs. Blocko offers its customers this. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a commitment between the service provider and a service user.
Particular aspects of the service — like minimum quality, availability, responsiveness — are agreed upon in advance. This is standard practice in enterprise IT, however, many public blockchains out there simply do not provide this guarantee; and this is how Blocko generates revenue.
9. As per QPU report, the team is planning to pay in AERGO for some activities, it may dip the price of aergo and on the other hand the team has planned about 300k USD for listing, will it be easy for big exchanges to list this token with risk of it bleeding?
Payment plan of AERGO token is based on our whitepaper and QPU. Yes, we are very careful about circulating supply of tokens. In case of listing, we use tokens for marketing activities. If we don’t use these, retail investors will not have interest in listing. Sometimes you can’t help it.
10. Why have you been so silent in the last few months in the blockchain sphere?
Actually we haven’t been silent. In fact despite the difficulties due to current events, we’ve been very occupied with business development and activities regionally in South Korea and MENA and further development of the Aergo Enterprise 2.0 with our technical roadmap to show where we are headed; and to get Aergo Agora live. We’re focusing on real adoption and with the challenge of the current economic environment; we’re taking a very careful approach to 2020. You can see what we’ve been up to in our latest QPU.
11. I am curious to learn more about the new partners and how they will leverage the Aergo mainnet. For example will ShameelPay utilize the Aergo mainnet or just use Aergo technology?
We will release more information about this in due time — You can join the waitlist over at https://www.e24p.com/ to learn more. And the short answer is yes, ShameelPay’s MVP is to be released with a mobile-user focused application front end and has been in development for 4 months + now. We hope to have the Payments Feature Launch by 2021.
Long answer: The project focus is building innovative risk alleviation solutions for banks and insurers to save hundreds of millions of dollars on costs and for businesses and consumers to gain access to cheaper lending rates. To help develop a solution to provide businesses and personal loans that are directly linked to business performance or other collateral assets that are tokenized in the resulting lending system.
This could be lucrative to allow Aergo to establish its technology as a critical part of an emerging distributed “financial services stack” across this region — for Middle East, Africa, South east Asia, (MESEA).
ShameelPay is aMobile-based finance platform, enables long-term financial services for consumers (borrowers) and banking institutions (lenders). First feature released is a smart credit management feature — managing credit for banks & new ways of accepting loans for borrowers. More information is already in our latest QPU.
12. Are there any plans to on-board new technology partners like Blocko to support enterprises by building solutions on Aergo?
As the latest QPU, we are planning to make a new consortium with many participants, we also expect to find new technology partners in this consortium. Please read our QPU.
13. Number of transactions on the mainnet is really low and would be interesting to learn when we can expect on-boarding of more Blocko / new customers to see the utilization of Aergo increase.
This is certainly underway as you may have read in our latest QPU on our focus in regional South Korea and MEASEA. There’s a lot in store!
14. Are you possibly targeting the aviation and airline industry?
The COVID-19 affected the aviation and airline industry badly. We don’t have an actual plan for them, but we want to help industries that have suffered recently.
15. Indeed you have made great progress, like integrating some enterprises onto the Aergo blockchain, but how can all this progress be reflected into the price of Aergo?
Aergo utility tokens gain value through a complex combination of many factors. Some (not all) of these include:
(i) The uniqueness of the potential future problems and new solutions Aergo can deliver to developers, partners and businesses across the world (this is often called NPV or net-present-value of future value)
(ii) The range of directly associated services currently on offer
(iii) The range of services planned
(iv) Current usage
(v) Increased adoption levels by existing firms
(vi) Future usage
(vii) Future demand
(viii) The depth and breadth of complementary services planned by third parties (e.g. cloud services)
(viiii) Existing and likely future target market penetration and finally
(x) Scarcity of available Aergo tokens at any moment in time.
To help you understand, here are five (simple) examples of the Aergo utility; and why it has (and may likely increase) in value as the Aergo platform gets adopted..
(1) Using Aergo mainnet is free, but executing smart contracts requires a (very small) “gas” type Aergo token fee. We expect many many thousands of smart contracts to run on Aergo as it has been built for global enterprise scale.
(2) Enabling and using extra third party compute resources (like storage and CPU bandwidth from a cloud service provider like Amazon AWS) are unlocked via Aergo tokens. We expect many thousands of businesses to deploy hybrid blockchain solutions in the years to come. Many of these (such as banks or governments) will elect to run part of these hybrid systems on Aergo private side-chains that are hosted by security compliant block producers (such as leading telecommunications or hosting firms that we are targeting with Aergo). These side chains will also need Aergo tokens to operate (and to be “anchored”) with the Aergo mainnet.
(3) Obtaining integration, consulting, or subscription support services from specific firms like Blocko to integrate, deploy and manage/support enterprise grade production deployments of Aergo requires Aergo tokens. All of Blocko’s future services will be based on their new Aergo Enterprise product that requires Aergo tokens to work.
(4) Enterprise clients will likely use the Aergo utility token to acquire extra application services from other third parties. For example the future Aergo Marketplace may serve as a location and self-contained ecosystem for businesses to acquire and use dApp’s created on Aergo by professional developers. In effect they may pay developers to use (i.e. licence) these applications in their production systems via Aergo utility tokens.
(5) In order to secure the network, vote and manage block producers, as well as to support the underlying Aergo mainnet ecosystem, Aergo tokens need to be acquired and staked. For example, although there are a total of 500million Aergo tokens in existence, almost 150 million are reserved (i.e. in effect locked longer term) for ecosystem staking and support.
The World Economic Forum predicted that 10% of the worlds GDP (gross domestic product) will be stored on blockchain-based systems within the next ten years.
10% of the world’s GDP equates to 8 Trillion USD (or put another way 8,000,000,000,000 USD!).
This is the market Aergo is focused on.
So, the real answer to the question of “what value does the Aergo utility token provide?” is perhaps simply stated as “the value is proportional to the value Aergo can capture in this 8 Trillion USD opportunity”.
If after reading this (and our prior posting about the Aergo ←> Blocko relationship) you are still confused, then perhaps this is not a project you should be involved with. Aergo is a disruptive, long-term and complex project; so it’s perhaps best not to follow this if you don’t understand our target market, why it exists and how it adds value to developers, partners and businesses across the globe.
16. According to the 2020 QPU, you mentioned retrenching some staff and you will not attend any blockchain/crypto Expo, wouldn’t that plan affect the progress of the project?
It certainly will not. If anything we have mentioned our latest QPU our 2020 Provisional Budget.
To clarify, less will be spent in 2020, whereas 2019 marks the end of a two year aggressive investment period. We will focus on a lower cash burn rate. Treasury funds & token reserves ensure a continuous and rolling 18-month runway for the project. These are the following measures we’re taking:
- Reduce technical & business delivery work contracted out to Blocko to most important areas of Aergo execution roadmap
- Slow down, freeze, or stopping entirely specific R&D projects (such as Captain Aergo)
- Extending & using pre-allocated 2019 budget for 18-month Middle East Investment Plan. To help part-fund specific activities & former Aergo staff until end of 2020 (those joining new E24P & ShameelPay initiatives in MEASEA region).
- Reward certain members of Blocko R&D teams working on Aergo in Tokens vs Cash
- Reduce future payments to Aergo Advisors by releasing remaining Aergo tokens early (end of 2019 completed)
- Reduced Aergo Foundation payments with Phil ‘s departure from Aergo BOD.
- Reducing marketing spend — only participating in customer & partner-facing-activities (no conference attendance planned for 2020)
- Reducing international travel — focusing on 2 major markets (SK / MENA)
- Reduced admin expenses — conducting review whether moving the Aergo foundation to another Jurisdiction other than Hong Kong would be beneficial
- Only spend assets to support certain crypto exchanges that will benefit project & beyond
Final detailed budget finalized in an Aergo board meeting in May but this is what we can assure of.
17. Clarify with me on how Aergo token benefits when either a private or public enterprise launches on the blockchain and chooses to maintain a contract.
As mentioned in question 16, All of Blocko’s future services will be based on their new Aergo Enterprise product that requires Aergo tokens to work.
Side chains will also need Aergo tokens to operate (and to be “anchored”) with the Aergo mainnet.
Enterprise clients will likely use the Aergo utility token to acquire extra application services from other third parties. For example the future Aergo Marketplace may serve as a location and self-contained ecosystem for businesses to acquire and use dApp’s created on Aergo by professional developers. In effect they may pay developers to use (i.e. licence) these applications in their production systems via Aergo utility tokens.
18. What projects are private deployments of Aergo (that will use Mainnet too) and those that will use Mainnet directly? If possible to please name them, it will be good to identify.
You can find them on our Blocko site for our use cases. Furthermore we have this reference from the past which we will soon update and share to the community.
19. I see many partnerships mentioned, land registry with millions of acres etc But why do we keep having 0 transactions done on the mainnet? Will our partners use our blockchain or is there any other solution made for them?
The adoption of Enterprise customers is just beginning. They are using blockchain in the form of the private chains and anchoring. It will take a long time to launch their own business on the public chain. We have to admit that there are steps in the business.
20. How will the Aergo hodlers profit from all the partnerships? Will our partners and the land registry clients have to buy Aergo directly on any of the exchanges, thus increasing the demand?
Kindly check out our answer to Question 16.
21. A common user like me can find it very difficult to use the bridge and stake the coins. This is just a suggestion — please have a look how LTO network (similar focus to Aergo) has integrated the bridge and the leasing options into their web wallet.
We appreciate all feedback and suggestions so thank you for your input. Currently we have several UI/UX upgrades in the pipeline, and are looking to improve our overall staking platform as we approach DAO stage with Aergo Agora. Keep your eyes peeled!
22. Just read that an app used for contract sending and receiving will be integrated in Kakaotalk and will use the Aergo mainnet?? Is this true?
Kakaotalk is the most famous platform in Korea, for the adoption we selected KaKao. Yes, the main UI will be integrated with the Kakao platform, and new features using mainnet (like stamping, verification, payment with crypto) will be launched soon.