luna the fastest easiest way to buy bitcoin if you're just getting into crypto it's the perfect place to start hey guys and welcome back to the lehigh punch show joining me today as you can see is the president and co-founder of silica i'm rit kumar i'm rick welcome to the show how are you thank you very much for inviting me over yeah i'm doing good yourself you okay i'm doing good yeah it's good to chat to you i think the last time we spoke was maybe back in september 2019 in london before covid i think that's when it was right indeed you know a lot of things have happened since since that meet-up i guess um you know in the world and of course in silica as well oh yeah absolutely that's right before the good old pandemic kicked off but before we jump in um i do want to let everybody know that this is powered by um icon plus capital they're a vc firm and it is sponsored by block five so they offer really incredible interest rates really competitive interest rates so i think i've left a link somewhere so you can you can check that out if you're interested so let's jump into this this is going to be a really exciting ama like i said we haven't spoken in nearly two years so for me this is going to be really educational um but i think what would be great would be to start off sort of understanding a little bit more about you so tell me your background before you delved into crypto right so uh my background is in research so before joining and getting involved into crypto i was doing scientific research around security and privacy so essentially i was looking into ways in which you'd you know when you download a certain software systems like let's say antivirus software on a machine what sort of security and privacy implications they have on your system so for example an antivirus may scan your entire file system they can scan all the photos or files that you may have and me send some information you know to the backend vendor so the antivirus so the idea was to sort of understand what sort of information they do send and why they have to send that information so this was uh you know early 2016 i would say and around that time you know bitcoin and blockchains generally speaking were becoming popular you know in the academic circle yeah people were starting to see bitcoin as not just a technology but as a place where you could find and discover interesting challenging research problems as well so that was around the time when you know that peaked my interest as well so i was looking into i started to feel that okay now i have to switch over to blockchains so i moved over to uh to singapore where i decided to look into the privacy aspects of blockchains so as you know transact on bitcoin or ethereum everything that you do becomes public so anyone can see what happens on those chains there there were some privacy chains like dash monero zcash that had come up which can hide some of the traces of your activity that happens on the blockchain but my idea was to sort of look into those uh privacy preserving blockchains and see whether you actually get that privacy in practice or not strangely though since the start of monero and until early 2017 95 to 98 percent of transactions that ever happened on monero were not private at all so you could actually decipher a lot of information from oh wow just by looking at the blockchain that's not good so you know very soon afterwards uh you know my advisor who was at the university back then um he said look this was good fun let's look at something more challenging after this and around that time we had seen crypto kitties happen uh where an icos were happening so this was you know mid 2017 around that time and we realized that obviously the these technologies that we have around bitcoin ethereum they are really good they're very decentralized but they're not very scalable and therefore the idea that we had was to be able to build a blockchain that could scale and that's how you know you know silica sort of came into being uh you know something somewhere some sometime around mid-2017 so that's kind of my background my story so if you had to i guess summarize in a really simplistic way you know what is silica okay so scalability is obviously um you know at the core there but if you could summarize it and tell us a little bit more right so the two when we started silica we had two key problems i wanted to address one was of course scalability so we had seen you know ethereum sort of plug every time there was an ico you couldn't transact on ethereum gas fees went really high to a point where if you wanted to set a transaction worth five dollars you have to pay a hundred dollars worth of fees so it was it was around that time that we had started to look into scalability and the solution that we came up with uh was called sharding what is called sharding it's an idea where which is something that you now see many of the chains sort of pursuing as well but we were the first ones to show that you could actually apply this idea of sharding in a public blockchain like silica so um that was kind of our one usb the second problem that we sort of identified was this idea where you could have smart contracts that are so expressive that they invite a lot of attacks and we have seen that happen every other week you know we have seen starting from dao for example when uh you know there was uh you know the entire ethereum community sort of kind of got divided into ethereum ethereum classic we saw parity incident happen we saw very recently you know some of the hacks are on ed5 it was very clear to us very in the early days that uh you can't just wait and watch you need to be able to build solutions that could prevent if not eliminate completely at least you know mitigate some of those hacks that you see on a daily basis so we decided to collaborate with some of the academics in uh in london by the way uh so we had an academic from ucl london and the idea was to be able to develop a language that could eliminate some of those hacks from happening in the future so we decided this we decided to design a new language that we call cila with the idea of making the language more resistant to attacks and at the same time you could actually make it even more stronger you could even say that look if you have a contract that holds let's say i don't know a billion dollars you want to make sure that no one can come in and steal funds from that contract no one can freeze that money and what you need essentially is a mathematical proof that could say that okay here's a guarantee and my guarantee is that it you cannot break it it's a there's a mathematical proof behind it and languages like cilla um allows you to do that in a much easier way with solidity even if you try to do that it's much more complex so the idea was to be able to design a language that's saved by design at the same time it gives you some stronger properties that's very hard to prove so yeah these are kind of two key areas that you already focus on scalability and and smart contract safety yeah i think especially it's interesting actually to have this conversation now especially given how much this space has developed since our initial conversation you know there's other blockchains out there and we'll talk about that in terms of competitors you know like cardano for example also working with smart contracts um so yeah we're going to go into all of this and i'm really excited to actually um but i want to start off with the ama now because there are some really interesting questions and one of the first questions actually came through on twitter um i'm considering whether to try and pronounce these names but i'm going to put it on pause with a minute um so our first question is so when is the bridge finally going to launch on the mainnet right so um as you know um we and those those people who are following us um we have been using polynetwork which is the middleware for bridges unfortunately middleware got hacked recently which means that we have to be very careful about how we use that middleware polynet has been fixing these issues but it's not fully open in the sense that they have not fully opened up their middleware to everyone to use so they're still you know playing very carefully and we are basically waiting for them to one open up at the same time you're also taking other precautionary measures measures making sure that you know that incident cannot happen again uh you know with silica uh community so we're also sort of sort of hardening our systems to make sure that those hacks and bugs cannot happen we are also sort of reaching out to white hat sort of hackers as well through hacker one and basically throwing them the code and say okay just go and hack it uh the difference between hackers and auditors is that auditors generally try to sort of check whether your contract follows a certain pattern checks whether they check whether it follows a certain security recommendations in some sort so they have a checklist that you try to go with well hackers have you know basically a launch of some sort where they they go and basically try to hack your system which is which can sometimes be very productive because if you want to want to find bugs so we are doing that at the same time we are literally you know i think today started to prepare our main net for an upgrade that upgrade is necessary to be able to enable polynet so i think in a week's time we will be able to have um uh all the features ready to have uh to be on the main it and after that we are basically waiting for the polly net uh and some of the hackers to come back to us uh and once all is done and dusted um there's nothing left to open up the network for for the bridge and given what happened with polynetwork how did that directly affect you in any way can we hear more about that no actually we didn't because uh and we were kind of lucky to be honest because um our bridge was not live yet even if it had been live then it would have been different story luckily it was not live and therefore we were saved in many ways uh which i think we're yeah it was basically lucky and that's why you know we have to be careful of uh how to how to employ that uh once it goes live so we have to make sure that the system is hardened uh poly network uh whatever the code changes that they're making they have to get that code audio test as well so peck shield for example one of the auditors have checked some of the code they are also talking to other auditors they're taking sort of very gradual approach of releasing polynet to other people as well so we are sort of following their steps and at the same time on our end we are making sure that the contracts that we have written are safe to use and you know getting other people to to to to sort of check the code again and again but basically it's we are very close um it's all about sort of preparing the mainnet with all the features and then once uh auditors and once um these hackers give us some feedback then we could launch this and once you do launch is the team working on bringing projects that are currently you know building on ethereum um to move over to zil i know during the bull market we massively saw that happen with um finance smart chain which was really interesting um you know they really became kind of like a die rice competitor in some ways so are you guys looking to kind of do the same thing right so the first thing that happens is so buying a smart chain and silica is slightly different in the sense that binding smart chain is an evm compatible chain which means that uh if let's say if you have a contract that's sitting on a theorem you could basically copy paste that and put that one smart changes could still work um silica is not an evm compatible change it means that it's uh and for good reasons uh in the sense that you know we have seen what's happening with solidity code so we have to be careful about building a building a safer smart contract language and making sure that that doesn't happen and replicate so but what what can happen is obviously once the bridge is live you'll be able to move assets like usdt btc eth over to silica and then put that on zilswap and once uh your assets are swap you can start earning apy depending on you know the the total value log that stay on that on that pool once those assets are over to silica they could also be used in different d5 products that we already have on zelika for example uh there's a pillar protocol that's being built which is a maker dial like system on silica and you could use for example btc and eth as or usdt for example as one of the collaterals or for pillar there are other assets that are other d5 products that are being built and i think this is where these assets can come into play uh to be honest it's not going to be so straightforward for people to just move from from ethereum to silica but there is going to be a little bit of work and and i feel that that work is worth doing it given all the hacks that are happening in the d5 and empty space nft space less so but d5 differently so so we have to be careful about what you bring you don't want to bring things that are already buggy and you have to be careful with that uh and i i feel that it's it's all about making sure that um you know when these assets come over we need to have applications that can use those assets and that's very critical this is where for example has a protocol slight pillar will be will play a key role speaking of pillar um one of the questions that i've come through which is actually pretty interesting is somebody is claiming that the pillar protocol project has gone quiet um so do you have any updates on that is it still going to launch well they are quiet only because i think they are developing so they are quite what's going on behind the scenes um what i know is that again this is a this is a project that's not developed by us it's being developed by committee member and uh which has given which has received a grant from us and uh what i know is that they again they are very careful about uh you know launching this uh this product making sure that it's safe to you for people to use so they have done a round of audit i know that they are uh have literally i think a couple of days ago i had mentioned in one of the telegram channels that they have launched and finished a mechanism where you could use gso which is our governance token to govern uh decisions around pillar so for example which collateral which type of collateral can be used on pillar and people who who come and use their gcl for for governance on pillar would also have an incentive to participate so you would be also be earning a part of the rewards that comes from pillar which essentially the interest rate so when you come and take loan from pillar when you borrow assets you will have to you know return interest rate and a portion of that interest rate could go back to the people who help govern the system so yes it's fully it's it's working uh you know they have already launched i think the version three it's not publicly available to people but they are working behind the scenes so though it's it's more like the you know silently working on what's happening and hopefully they will be able to open this up uh hopefully very soon to to to the rest of the community good well at least uh things are still moving forward which we always like to hear um okay so i yeah i want i do want to talk about the competition in the market um and one of the questions is actually comparing zilliqa to cardano i know you spoke about this a bit earlier um i'll read you the question so silica have many more use cases than cardinal at the moment obviously gibbon cardano hasn't essentially launched has it so has a zilliqa team done any research on why zil may be undervalued in the market compared to cardano and what measures can be done to overcome this so i mean would you say that zil is undervalued in comparison to ada well everything is under valued ideas you would never say you say that okay here's a theorem of bitcoin is it's overvalued you won't see that everything's gone obviously i do feel that we're undervalued um but you know um if you look at uh the projects that existed let's say in early 2017 uh in the top 10 or top 20. many of them don't exist anymore uh many of them have slid down into oblivion it's all about making sure that so these these uh you know market sentiments they keep up and down you know they keep your ranking or your price can keep moving up and down there's something that you cannot control per se what you can control is is the develop and innovation component so as long as you keep building interesting stuff as long as you keep attracting uh more projects and you keep attracting more users to the platform there's no reason why your the market can can stay you know oblivious to what you're building at some point it will come out and that's happened right you know many projects that uh have been building uh quite aggressively over the last couple of years they didn't exist uh in top ten top 3 today you know the top 20 of today is very different from the top 20 that existed a year ago or something six months ago so that that that will definitely happen as long as we make sure that a lot of people actually come and use the platform and the project that we're building and again we're very early stage you know it's not just zelika but i think generally speaking blockchain is a very early stage of adoption right you look at and i keep citing this million times and i will repeat this again but if you look at the number of token holders that you have out there or just for ethereum for example there are around a few hundred million uh 140 million i think uh ethereum token i didn't know that use is is actually less than less than a million or around two million so you can see the gap between number of token holders the number of users i think it's important for every blockchain platform to push for that is to make sure that we can attract more convert more of these token holders into actual users of the platform once that happens you know that network effect that comes with it uh is something that you can't you know the world has to recognize the network right you can't skip it i do want to go back just a little bit um to focus on the polynetwork hack because i'm actually reading the questions as they came in um so this is a pretty interesting question so um the recent polynetwork incident was pretty scary i think everyone can agree um you know i guess it was a good thing that you know that bridge hadn't launched yet so hypothetically speaking could the bridge have been written in cilla and if so would this type of vulnerability have been more easily spotted or even prevented yes uh so the short answer is yes uh if if so but there are two components to it right so yeah the way bridge works is you have an ethereum component you have a silica component so someone who let's say who wants to move assets from ethereum to silica he has to send a transaction on the theorem network first and then this transaction basically gets relayed to the silica network and then uh you know there's a smart contract that comes into play on the zelica site essentially what happened was on ethereum side uh there's solidity code and it had a component that allowed you know the hacker to basically uh do really nasty stuff if you had replaced that contract by a very similar looking seller contract this would not happen you know this attack would could have been averted but the problem is it's on ethereum and the theorem is is you know does not support cellar so you have only solidity so you don't have much choice there i do and that's kind of why i believe that there's going to be you know you will have a point in time somewhere in the future where many of the genes including silica for example could be uh sort of multi vm compatible so you could have you could run solidity you could run cilla you could run rust you could run other chain other languages as well that's where i think some benefit could have come even though for example um you know we have other networks like switcho who were using and polynet they were not affected so not every chain was affected even though they were using it uh should not would not have been affected for sure yes the short answer again is yes if if solitude contract would have been replaced with a silla contract uh this attack uh in a hack would not have happened but again ethereum uh does not support sellers so it's not it's not possible so that nuance is there as well okay yeah i think covering these things is really important i think that hack took a lot of people by surprise um even to the point where i actually just read this today but the news came out yesterday um that i think the polly network are looking to hire the hacker i mean he did i mean okay uh again you could you could probably question the intentions or initial intentions of the hacker and all that you could debate about yeah but he definitely um some people could say look um the contract well this was a very stupid bug uh you know the developer should have detected it but it's quite smart to be honest uh the you know the ability to find some of those uh nuanced uh you know lanes in the co contracts and code it's not so straightforward so uh credit to the hacker to be honest um could great to the hacker to be able to find the find the bug and i from what i'm hearing is he has returned the funds and i guess um you know pollya guys are sort of trying to see if um if he could be helping out in different ways so why not again you know turning from about that great hat to white hat uh it's not so straightforward but um at least it was interesting to note that you know he was able to return the fonts which is which is well yeah i mean if you can go from black hat to gray hat to white hat i see no reason i can't go from white hat to gray hat to black cat i don't know i'd stay away from it personally um okay so again we have more comparisons um this is also pretty interesting so does zilliqa have something to actually counter the api once gzil minting is over and then i'll quote i mean 12 is nice but i can reach almost the same with a stable coin on a few exchanges which is obviously quite true um i know ada is around five percent um on the other hand we can on stake instantly so how's that gonna look right so uh one is you know comparing a stable coin with a volatile asset is i don't think it's it's a fair comparison agreed on because okay sure a volatile asset can go down but it also could go up so uh even though you are and the reason why for example stable coins have a certain api is because there are for example if you look at block file you mentioned right block parts and some of these traditional centralized lending platforms uh if you compare for example the lending rates on different assets stable coins comes first so that could vary from something between five percent up to 10 15 percent yeah then you have btc and eth uh and the apy i mean apy the lending rate uh varies something between three percent two to five percent and then you go even below on alt coins uh or erc20s that drops to one percent or even lower sometimes yeah the reason is simple it's it's demand because when you think about it right why stable coins have higher apy generally speaking it's because they are traders they are market makers they are institutions who want to borrow stable coins to be able to you know put that into work for example a market maker would like to borrow you know usd or usdc and then use that to do arbitrage trading on different exchanges you could you could have institutions borrowing or hedge funds borrowing usd and usdc to be able to invest and take positions on different assets like btc and eth and that's why the api is generally high on stable coins but then again you don't have the same upside as for example in investing in a volatile asset right so even for example in bitcoin lending if it's three percent you do have an upside of potential value you know price increase that you don't get with stable points now coming back to zil's uh comparison uh of course this is just to say that you know zelicah is different for stablecoin and therefore it's not an apple apples to apple comparison we do believe that uh 12 in terms of returns is actually quite high compared to all staking providers so if you look at it many of them uh offer you something between three percent to up to five percent seven percent ten percent max so in terms of api it's actually quite high uh if you add g-cell which is the governance tokens that we're giving out alongside staking then i think the api goes even higher to about 25 percent um so yes there will be a drop once diesel uh goes down uh one once diesel emitting is over but i think you still feel that only 12 is high enough now uh if you compare uh for example let's say cardano is mentioned in about five percent with immediate uh and bonding this is something that could be possible because there are projects out there in the silica ecosystem today which are building a solution where you could bypass and bonding and that that would be possible so you could still have 12 percent apy and be able to unstake immediately through some of those parties some of those products that are being built so uh yes i don't think we would be able to increase that otherwise uh the only way you could increase apy is by you know minting and inflating the supply or increasing the inflation which i think hurts everyone so it's not a good idea but yeah there will be solution i think that people are building solutions where you couldn't bond immediately so just to let everybody know that i'm reading through the comments now and the live comments um so you guys are welcome to send through um any questions we have plenty more to get through but i'm just taking the time now just to read through them all so you're all welcome to yeah add as many questions as you like so i'm going to keep going forward with this um we're going to get a little bit more technical now so the next question is don't you think that there is a problem with decentralizing validation though since these nodes are centralized by the large mining pools each mining pool manages dozens of nodes so it would be great for decentralization to find a way to have more nodes for more users right so uh again it's uh you know it's a discussion that you know happens uh even in the bitcoin community and i think ethereum committee as well so you have i would say in zilliqa you have two types of uh miners uh one miners are obviously pool operators like uh easel like shardpool like russ pool and then you have a lot of individual miners as well so it's not that they are not individual miners so they are individual miners mining mining silica through the old systems and machines and so that's that's that's there of course you know um decentralization is always a spectrum right you know it's not always black and white and say okay this is the decentralized this is uh not decentralized so it's always a spectrum yes um we could encourage people to be um to be individual and solo miners but then sometimes the reward and the and the uh you know the cost that comes out with it is it's not you know and it's not enough for people to have solar minus so what people end up doing essentially so if you have a hardware and you try to solo mine you won't be making too much money so what you end up doing is you end up joining mining pools so even though mining pool you could consider them as one single entity they are actually they actually have a lot of individual miners behind them so that answers a little bit that that part the other thing that we have been thinking internally again it's not something we have acted upon yet but one idea that we had was um that we're exploring some time back was to be able to have mining plus staking as well in terms of in terms of nodes that validate transactions so you could for example right now all the nodes which validate transactions they come through mining but for example we could do 30 mining or 70 mining 30 staking nodes that that will allow more nodes uh which are individual operators to come on board and and and and start validating transactions which probably make things more decentralized but just to give a little bit more context right uh if you look at some of the other chains out there which have proof of stake mechanism none of the chains that out there have more than let's say a thousand nodes so and i'm talking about staking nodes so if you think about having building a network with let's say three thousand or ten thousand staking nodes that's not quite possible because they're not enough stakers out there they're not even people out there who would like to put run an infrastructure uh and and you know increase the account to up to two thousand three thousand the maximum that i've seen so far is around 900 nodes but again that's a extreme so uh hitting 900 nodes with taking it is going to be very challenging yeah i can't remember who i was having this conversation with but i feel like i'm suddenly having deja vu um which is really strange uh this conversation about you know decentralization comes you know with more people getting on board more nodes you know more with more users you can make this happen essentially um i feel like i'm having dslv so that's kind of strange but um yeah it's pretty interesting just off the back of this mining comment um there is a question that's just come through now and i'd be interested to hear your opinion on it um this is a pretty hot topic in this space right now where people are talking a lot about green energy and things like that i wondered if you had any thoughts on this question mining that's pretty much a statement mining is very frowned upon in the green community i wondered if you had any thoughts on that yeah right so uh there are two sides of the story of course one is uh you could argue that many of the uh mining structure is being run by non-renewable sources yeah uh but there are also initiatives where many of these miners are actually using renewable sources as well uh there's also an argument that you could say that look uh if bitcoin is uh you know handling this much of transaction volume on a daily basis if you compare this with traditional uh you know infrastructures and banks they actually consume less so there's that argument as well but let's keep that aside for a moment i do feel that yes uh there is that angle and i think many people are working towards that so and that's kind of why proof is taking also is coming into into play and you know many chains out there now use profit stake um which definitely reduces uh the carbon uh footprint on the zilliqa side particularly and we we did understand this problem you know we knew and reclaimed this problem a long time back that's kind of why we decided to not use mining in the way bitcoin and ethereum you know mining works so in bitcoin ethereum um you have to basically do a proof of work for every single block right yeah in zilliqa we don't do that so what we do is we encourage miners to come in mine for let's say a minute and this mining when they do when doing this money for a minute they basically get an access an entry ticket to the network and once they have the central ticket they use uh something called a bfd so byzantine fault orders mechanism which does not involve mining at all so it's pure voting mechanism something that most pos systems use so our mining basically is utilized let's say once every two thousand blocks probably speaking uh so roughly every two hours which reduces the carbon footprint the second thing that we did was we we used hash and because we don't use uh proof of work every single block what you can basically do is you can mine ethereum or let's say mines and bitcoin and when this two minute block slot comes in you come and start mining silica and then go back so your your hardware basically you can basically do parallel mining of some sort so you could mine silica and ethereum in parallel while only spending a minute of your hardware on silica that's it so it also makes things much more efficient okay that's really interesting yeah no i appreciate you explaining that it's such a hot topic right now and um you know there's a lot of misinformation out there um especially you know when we talk about renewable energy and and things like that so i think it's really important to go through through those topics just moving on um are there any plans for um the zeal networks be accepted by your partner crypto.com since there aren't yet other stable coins on the zilliqa network and this user says i don't like to pay each fees to use xsgd thank you uh yes so uh there's there's a plan but i think there are certain regulation uh regulatory changes that are happening in in singapore right now from where execute which is a stable coin singapore dollar backstable coin so until that regulatory uh you know uncertainty are cleared uh i think it might be a little bit difficult for parties in singapore to to list those assets but yes it's happening and i think that might come very soon so we're just going to keep moving forward um guys please you are welcome to continue putting questions in the live chat i am monitoring it so yeah feel free to throw them in um all right so i'm going to keep moving forward so we have our next question this one is from jerome lin so see i will i will name some of the names um okay so this one says since zilliqa prides itself to be safe and secure and build a programming language from the ground up why are we not doing the same thing for our foundation d5 exchanges as well as our interoperability instead of relying on third-party networks to help us build it because the first thing we can't build everything right you know yeah it's like it's like ethereum foundation building uni swap ethereum foundation building maker diet same foundation building synthetics ethereum foundation building curve and and so on so it's it's not possible realistically speaking what i what we do however is and so from from our angle essentially we're a platform right so we we provide the platform that we encourage in different ways uh one from through marketing developer workshops uh as well as funding to encourage other parties to come and build um and that's why for example we have seen uh switcho in which uh to whom we gave a grant long time back and through that partnership we had we switched was interested in building uh building a decks uh we for example we gave grants to uh to parties like mintable which decided to build a nft marketplace uh we gave grants to people like pillar protocol which decided to build a maker like like system so we give grant so that other people can build because not everything can be built by us same for uh poly data extends super data as well because again yes we could have built this whole system ourselves but then it would have taken much longer it would have taken uh we have taken much more risk and then if we had a party that um again on it is a unfortunately it came in a bad state right now because of the hack but they were one of the parties that had the right middleware that could essentially plug in plug and play and that made life simpler for everyone so again if not polygon it would be some someone else it's like why not go and build a chain link infrastructure yes you could go and build a chain link infrastructure but if there's something that already available why not just plug into that to make your life easier and so that you could focus on some things that are much more important from our side our goal has been to sort of seed projects or insert ourselves into projects that can potentially create tentacles for example once we when we gave grants to uh switcho the idea was to have decks and once we had the decks very clearly and very soon after what we saw afterwards we saw 20 odd projects launching on sale swap so that's kind of our role our role is to plant seeds the right seats at the right place so that others can hopefully build things around that but yeah we can't build everything ourselves that's not in the same way theme foundation could not have built everything that's being built on ethereum today themselves that is that is something that you can't do no absolutely um you know but a lot of people are building a lot of similar things you know whether it's you know d5 protocols you know sushi swap pancake swap um you know everything we've spoken about and mentioned so our final well it's not a final question but one of the the the last questions from joshua wilford is what is zilika's plan to gain more visibility amongst its competition and this actually leads me to an another point um which i haven't actually have written down but it just sort of reminds me of the top of my head a lot of the questions that came through were with regards to your marketing so a lot of the community for whatever reason then they're not necessarily happy about the marketing so i'd also like you to tell me what your marketing plans are sure so look um first thing is uh i do feel that there is a lot of there's a lot of noise in the space and and you have to filter know you know you have to fill the facts out of that noise in many ways uh just to give an example right um you know when we launched uh our decks self swap and we launched i mean which is the team that's building this they launched the the decks when i was interacting with the community it was very apparent to me that many people in the silica community obviously the whole ether and the old bitcoin but they had never used unison before they had never used curve before they had never used one inch before and that made me think that there are definitely a lot of people in the ethereum space today who hold if they even hold probably 15 20 other assets but they are they have never used any single gap on ethereum and that's mind-blowing because then all you're doing is you're selling tokens and not doing nothing else and that needs to change so our approach has been to be able to sort of improve upon that so and and we saw that result very quickly for example in zlswap case uh i was quite surprised to see that uh the number of people the number of unique addresses interacting with zil swap on a daily basis which probably four times higher than the number of people interacting with you know curve which is a stable coin decks on ethereum and that gives you a sense that uh there's a huge gap between you know projects being used and projects being being you know in the news all the time and our our you know focus has always been to attract more and more people and convert these token holders into users in some way and i'm glad that in looking at the numbers it's very clear to me that that's happening now uh now coming back to the to the marketing sort of angle you know marketing is a very broad term and in in the blockchain community one because it is it's something that everyone seems to understand uh you know it's very difficult for people to understand starting is very difficult for people to understand a pollinate hack but it's it's easy to see the impact of marketing very very very quickly i still remember the days you know a couple of uh you know when in in i would say in 2017 or rather in 2018 we had seen um you know ethereum and bitcoin going really down up to a point where there was trading at around 100 or 200 at some point uh there was a lot of chatter in the ethereum community as well and say look we need to build uh marketing dolls to be able to you know push ethereum's narrative and push ethereum's uh you know benefits and attract more people towards ethereum and i do feel that um there is uh if you look at the metrics and there are different metrics you can measure marketing right you could look at your committee growth so you could look at how many people are new people are joining your twitter community how many new people are joining the reddit community and that has constantly been increasing and then there is angle of this price and exposure right which is of course when the price goes up everyone wants to see and wants to be a part of that ecosystem that's built that's being uh you know marketed so there's a lot of effort being put into in from different angles one obviously around making sure that the theme the silica committee that that we have around across telegram twitter reddit keeps on expanding and our numbers show that it does uh is is it indeed expanding we have seen in literally in the last six to eight months the number of projects being built on silk has grown tremendously you know uh you know so after zoo swap we have seen more than 20 45 projects being built over a period of one week or two weeks and that's a sign that there are people who are interested in building unzelican through that uh it comes there comes the network effect because once you have a project building on silica that creates the own network effect they have their own ecosystem and that creates a much broader narrative of course you know we are also we know where we lack we know where uh we can improve and one area is of course influential marketing that's something that we have to focus on and that's why we are here yeah absolutely um we also have a lot of conversation about solana uh i mean just you don't need to answer this straight away but i mean somebody just said you know look what solana are doing that they're doing better marketing apparently but just in terms of solana um this will be yeah in terms of solana someone is asking don't you think solana has taken advantage um or has taken the advantage that zilliqa has not in terms of technology but in terms of adoption and projects built on it how do you intend to reclaim this advantage so do you think your advantage has been taken yeah so look um literally i think uh yesterday someone said uh oh solano has a hundred x more dabs than silicon that's not true yeah you know that's not true uh and then i said look this is not true and then it's okay maybe i put an extra zero there and and even that's not true uh you know it's it's it's of course it's about visibility it's about exposure but if you if you count the number of daps if you count the number of users select actually stands at number five number seven in terms of blockchain that's actually being used today and what i've been what i mean by being used is a number of people who are interacting with the dapps today on silica number of people who are you know who are who are sending transactions on silica and the number of transactions that the network processes on a daily basis i'm not talking about the capacity the network can process but the network i'm talking about the the the number of transactions that network receives on a daily basis and that's quite high so if you look at those numbers it's very clear that you know zelika stats are number five number seven across all across all platforms out there so yes uh you know there could be uh and this some that we have been working on to to improve the exposure but uh in terms of advantage i think we have seen that a lot of you know ethereum for example it does it does around a million transactions per day today uh and and it's very clear that uh dynasty and polychain polygon do a little bit more right now but uh most chains out there they do no more than four thousand to five thousand transactions per day and that's the sad reality and zelika actually does much better so um i do feel that yes there is there could be some work around marketing but if you look at the real numbers uh zilliqa is not far behind uh behind many other chains out there including including some of the popular ones out there so just as a last final question for you um what is zilika's vision and what is the main thing that you are trying to achieve and by which point do you think that could happen look again i've probably said this a couple of times but i do feel that there is a huge gap between token holders and end users so there are token holders who have never used any of the dapps and i'm talking about ethereum even ethereum you know token holders so it's very clear to me that there is there needs to be change you need we need to build products that these token holders can actually go and use because in this you can't have a platform which has a million token holders but five users there's no point in building such a change you need to be able to have convert your token holders into users uh so in ethereum's case roughly speaking around one percent of i mean less than outside one percent of token holders actually are users silica on the other hand even though it has a much smaller community compared to the computer ethereum the conversion rate is actually much higher to around five percent and the idea is to push that even even further so i think if we can and this is kind of our mission is to able to convert our token holders into users and again i think it's not just should be our our mission but should be i think generally speaking should be the mission of of the entire space uh space where we have to not just say okay look here's the token you can invest in and then uh you know put your you know assets and binance or some exchange audio or your ledger wallet and then forget about what's happening on the chain we need to be able to build apps that are easy for people to use for example if you look if you look at uni swap and and make a dial if you're not deep into ethereum space you need to be have to watch a one hour video from your favorite influencer to be able to use that use that dab you can't just download like a traditional app you can't just go an app store download that app and be able to use it you can't do that today and that complexity has to go and there's something that we're trying to focus on as well yeah i think that user experience is the most important thing in this community um you know having a real use case behind tokens um you know i certainly agree with you it took me a while to wrap my head around you know uni swap and pancake swap and even the i've been using the bridge between ethereum and binance recently and you know it takes time to wrap your head around these things so i think making that user experience as easy as possible is so so important um so yeah no absolutely and i'm excited to see how it goes but amer i want to thank you so much it's been such a pleasure um having you and having you on the show i know it's been such a while since you've spoken so it's been very educational for me to see where you guys are up to thank you very much for inviting me over yeah absolute pleasure and i want to thank everybody for tuning in um you have a very interesting community i've been reading the live chats um there's a lot of jokes in there so it's been amazing to see how that goes so yeah thank you everybody for tuning in and america thank you so much for coming on thank you very much have a good day
2021-08-22