AMA on Twitter 10.02.2023
Last update: February 11, 2023
Welcome and updates🔗︎
Alright, good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Let's get it started. My name is Claire and I'm honored to be your host for today. So for those of you who might not joined our previous AMAs, today is an opportunity for you, the community, to ask questions and have them answered in real time. And today we have Bin who will be joining us to answer all your questions and engage in a live and informative discussion. So, without further ado, let's get started. First, I would like to invite Bin to share some of the recent updates about Tropos-5 and what's been happening at Stratos. So I'll pass it to Bin.
Thank you, Claire. Thanks to everyone who joined the AMA. And let me give you some updates. Up until today, the Tropos-5, has been running very well for more than three weeks and there are around 4000 active nodes in the network. And also since we implemented a lot of new features and we forbidden other bad nodes to join. So right up to now we saw that about 1500 bad nodes have been banned from the network. So that's why the current Tropos-5 network performance is much better than Tropos-4 and much stable and the uploading and downloading performance do good. And that's the current update for the Tropos-5. We will continue watching it. If we find any issue, we will solve it. And in the meantime, I know a lot of members want to know about the security auditing progress. After today, we already signed NDAs with different security auditing companies. We share the code to them and we also give them relevant documents. They will evaluate the price, they will also evaluate the workload, how much work they need to take. Probably next week some of them will send them their feedback.
Maybe after a couple of months, they will give us their monthly results. And in our case, we will use three different points of view to make the final decision on which company we will go with. One, the estimated duration, will it fit with our timeline? Do they have enough people to work on this project? The second one, their history, their working appearance, are they familiar with Cosmos SDK? Are they familiar with P2P, and a lot of other stuff, or are they only familiar with smart contracts? Most of the audit companies are working on smart contracts. But what we are doing is very unique. Not only the public chain, but also the resource node and the meta node, which are very complicated elements, even based on their comments at first glance. Their experience must fit with our needs. The third one for sure is price. We will combine all three of them together. Finally we will choose one to start to kick off the auditing process. Hopefully, that will start next week. But this is also dependent on the feedback from them. After we start the auditing, we will work on the bridge. We have three different options for the bridge:
Between the ERC-20 token and the native coin on our own chain. One, we're working with a partner for a bridge. The current bridge project, that's one option. The second option we will implement an ‘in-house’ bridge. This is dependent on our in-house team. The third one, we will be working on the bridge in the exchange, probably since Gate has most of the liquidity. So probably we will start with Gate. We will negotiate with them if this can be made possible: user sends their ERC-20 tokens to the exchange and when they want to withdraw it, they can choose the network they want to withdraw to. Do they want to withdraw to ETH network or to the Stratos network in the form of our native coin for staking or for activating and running a resource node or a validator node. Just like when you withdraw USDT, you can select a different chain. Right? That's the same thing. So there are three options. We're not sure we will support all three of them or we support two of them. But this one we will work during the security auditing. Then there will be mainnet. I know every day there's someone asking when is mainnet for us.
It is really hard to give you the exact date. But you know what we need to get done, right? We need to finish auditing, we need to finish the bridge and we also need to make sure the native token is ready. We will launch the blockchain first so that everyone who wants to participate in the network can get the native coin to run a validator node or to run a resource node. So we will have the blockchain up first in mainnet, then we will start to launch SDS. There won't be a long time between them. Maybe two, three, a couple of weeks. That's the plan. So again, sorry, I cannot give you the details right now. Which date? Morning, afternoon? It's very hard to answer. Okay, that's the update. Maybe we can jump to the questions. Claire?.
Thanks Bin, for the high level summarizations for our communities. So now we would like to open up for the community to ask questions. And of course, we will prioritize those who are live with us to go first. So please don't be shy to ask any questions since it's a great opportunity that we can communicate live. And afterwards, if there's no more questions from today's audience, I will hear a few questions that have been left in our comments. So to ask a question, you can simply just request to join as a speaker and I will let you speak here. Robin is raising your hand. Robin, please feel free to ask your questions.
Question 1 (onboarding)🔗︎
Hey, guys, Robin here. Thanks for having me. Shout out to Patrick. Yeah, I have a few questions on behalf of someone else who wasn't able to attend the AMA. Some of them were already answered by Bin. So thank you very much for that. And the question that I have here is that are we in touch with Web2 or Web3 companies for an onboarding on Stratos once Mainnet is launched? I know NDA can apply. Just want to know if we are in touch in an advanced way with some.
That's a great question and actually we do. Last week and this week we already connected to several companies and projects, I mean companies, traditional companies which require a lot of storage, I even can say, that company is located in Europe. And we also talked to several projects using IPFS and we also talked to other projects so that's ongoing. We want them to try the Tropos-5. We don't want to wait until mainnet. We want them to try the Tropos-5. Tell them to try the SDK, everything. Mainnet is almost there, there won’t be any big chances, if you implement something on Tropos-5, we can now guarantee your data will still be live when we switch to mainnet. So we want them to give it a try and when the mainnet is live, we can launch some projects together with them. And we’re talking to other projects as well. Also maybe something we can announce now, Claire and other team members will go to Denver to participate to ETHDenver because there are a lot of other projects there and we want to go there and showcase our product, to talk about what we want to do, to talk about the vision and we will offer them a chance to try our product, we will bring the computers with us, we will let them try to setup the resource node, to test how fast is it to upload and download a file. Some of our developers will also be there so they can answer technical questions or even code related questions. Basically, we will try to setup more partnerships there and allow more projects to get to know us and let them onboard when mainnet will be launched.
Question 2 (marketing)🔗︎
Hello, just want to say Stratos is doing an amazing job so far. I have a question regarding marketing. Is the marketing going to sync with the mainnet launch or it’s going to be separated, later, sooner? And can you tell us a bit about it?
Yes, actually i think Claire and me can answer this question together. From my point of view, Stratos is not is meme coin and the Stratos project is driven by tech so when we’re doing the marketing, we don’t want to just say what are our innovations, we don’t want to say just what we can accomplish, instead we want to show what we already accomplished so far. That’s the best marketing strategy from my perspective. And also, after a partnership has been accomplished, we will showcase the real use case from that partnership - something already working. So that’s my two cents about marketing and after mainnet is launched, we will probably do something like that. Claire, do you have something to add?
Yeah, absolutely, I’m more than happy to address this question and I much understand that many of community members have been eagerly waiting to see campaigns and launches and stuff, but like Bin said, we are a very technical project and from the previous experiences, it shows that having a marketing partner only to shill the project or just promote it, doesn’t yield the best results so we do want to do the marketing right, do it effectively so that’s the reason why when we’re building this comprehensive go-to-market plan, we always plan it along with our product launch, along with partnerships. At the same time, we have been also non-stop building relationships with external marketing resources from all over the world just to make sure we cover it differently. So, i do want to let you guys know that we are keeping this on our roadmap, along with the product milestones. So we hope that you are as excited as us; we will be able to announce a few of the upcoming marketing campaigns but until then, i think that the community helping us spreading the word is also extremely important and it can also be the best way for the rest of the crypto enthusiasts to know more about us, especially now. It’s proven that we have an amazing testnet product that has been reaching the best performance compared to the past testnets. At the same time, if any of you have any marketing resources, or accounts that you want me to look into it, feel free to send them to me, we’re always open to consider to discuss this. I hope this answers your question.
Question 3 (Binance Greenfield)🔗︎
Yes, thank you very much. Just one more question if possible quickly as I noticed last week or something, Binance also announced a data storage service. Do you think that that's just going to be a competitor or are they going to do something much different?
Yeah, I think Greenfield is their project name. They will be a competitor but its good. We already have several competitors like Filecoin, Arweave. Even when we started the Stratos project, there were two projects already set up for a couple of years already and they are still here. We don’t fear any of the new competitors. And from a technical perspective, there is no magic happening in this field, so we know how it works. Just different people that focus on different ways, like us. Stratos is more focused on the traffic reward and traffic volume. Filecoin and Arweave are more focused on how to store the cold data. It’s the data you don’t need. You start there and you don’t even need to access it. If you access it, maybe it will be very slow but no one cares. So we will focus on a different market. Even in the decentralized storage, we still have the different narrative for us, for Web3 and our social files. Is the data you will probably access very often, like Twitter for example. If we want to build a decentralized Twitter, there will be so many people that will refresh the page they are reading, all the tweets, all the videos, all the images. It’s not cold data, it’s traffic, it’s hot data, even for TikTok. So we are more focused on the hot data. Frankly, I’m not sure about Greenfield, what are the details? How will they build their system? I didn’t see any mention in their white paper. But we won’t know. Will they focus on stalling the information and save it there forever? Ore they want to do something like content delivery and accelerate the process of content delivery? I’m not sure but we are very different from other projects and we are very confident to surpass any competitors. It’s good actually, it's a good sign: people, a lot of VCs will see more projects joining the storage narrative and think this has a lot of potential, it will attract more funds, more people, more resources.
Question 4 (Website roadmap)🔗︎
Okay, so I have a few quick questions. The really small first question is do you plan to rework the website pretty soon? Because I feel like having the whole road map was really good. Now we can't really see the computational database on the roadmap, so I'm guessing after mainnet, you're going to bring it back, is that correct?
Okay, that's one question. Okay, let's do this question first. Yes, probably we will redo our website but just not now, maybe after the mainnet, when the time allows, we will rebuild our official website for sure. As for the decentralized computation and the decentralized database, we didn’t add them to the road map right now because we really want to dedicate ourselves to deliver the blockchain and the decentralized storage first. And probably you are wondering if after storage, we will jump right on to computation, the transfer is no. We will work on computation but not right away. The reason is, we want to work on something to help another project or another partner, if they have any requirements or if they have their own requests. We will continue to improve our decentralized storage for them so it’s a more friendly environment or even improve the performance. Or, if someone wants to use it as a CDN, have some particular features, we will work on that first. We will also implement some DApps on our storage first. If we implement some DApps, one or two of them on our storage, we want them to be open source. We want to show everyone how easy it is to use Stratos and how good it is when you deploy your DApp on Stratos. So we want to get more developers to switch to us and work with us. That’s one reason. The second reason is we want to work on storage to get more traction. Also because we want to get more data stored with some company or with a video or audio project. If they switch to us, they will probably have other needs like encoding for example. They will need to encode, to decode, to do real time streaming so they will raise a demand. Okay, what should we do? Where can we find the computing power for the encoding, decoding and streaming? When we will work on computation, we don’t just want to do it as we think it will fit our users needs. No, we really want to work with them to implement features and computation to directly satisfy their requirements. So there are some requirements we want to get from people that are using our storage directly so that will be a more efficient way to working on computation, that’s why we want to gather requirements first. The same thing applies to database. After we have storage and computation, they will have a requirement to store some final result on the database, right? So when they have a requirement, we will make a plan and we will implement one by one, then we will update the milestone.
Question 5 (Mainnet schedule)🔗︎
Okay, good, thanks. That's super clear. That's super clear. So I was wondering does that mean that blockchain and storage are coming at the same time?
Pretty much yeah, almost the same time. But the blockchain will come first. Maybe after a couple of weeks the storage will come.
Like i just mentioned, we want people to have time to swap their ERC-20 tokens to the native coin so they are prepared to setup their own validators and SDS nodes.
Question 6 (IPFS)🔗︎
Okay, so, final question, so you talked about IPFS on Twitter yesterday and I was wondering does that mean we can use it? Because I have an energy project, I want to host it on Stratos. Is that possible? Can we host images files and use them in smart contracts just like IPFS?
Yeah, actually we implemented something to make SDS compatible with IPFS. You may have to use the API, maybe some SDK or you can even use our code. You don’t need to change your code if it’s already implemented on IPFS. But some projects will still need to implement them into the code in order to store anything, images, video or audio, on Stratos storage. Be we also think about different ways to make it easier.
Okay, thank you. That's right, I'm probably going to use it. That's why I was asking. I wasn't really sure about this. So thank you for the answer.
I encourage you to try. You can try to upload a file right now and you just have to have an SDS node and I know you have a digital asset. You upload it and you download it right now. It's command prompt. Also we have some SDK you can try out. It will be very similar when mainnet launches.
Does anyone else have questions to ask? Please raise your hand. Otherwise I'll pass it back to Robin because I know he still has a few questions in mind. Robin, I think you can ask the rest of your questions.
Question 7 (AI)🔗︎
Awesome. Yeah. This is a question I quote from another community member regarding the recent interest and hype around AI technology. I understand that with the decentralized computation part of Stratos we can train deep learning algorithms, et cetera. Can't we also advertise this feature on our website and be in the AI category on CoinGecko and Coin Market Cap to raise more awareness and new public for Stratos network?
Yeah, that could be done but since we’re not implementing that feature yet, the computation component isn’t even started to be build yet. But we can add a tag on coingecko and coinmarketcap and when we rebuild our official website, we can add that to get some feedback. Yesterday we had a conversation internally to add some use cases on our website so that more people could learn about our capabilities more easily.
Question 8 (Exchanges)🔗︎
Awesome. Yeah. Two quick questions, one personal question. Have you ever considered listing on other exchanges? For example, on Kucoin just to spark up some volume and get some more recognition?
Yes, we do. But before we launch the tokens on a new exchange, I prefer to launch the mainnet first. The reason is, if we launch before, the ERC-20 will need to be migrated to the native coin and that is very much work. So everything will happen together, we make some announcements, then we launch some partnerships with traditional business or a crypto project, then we will have some traction. Also, when the traffic picks up on mainnet, probably some exchanges will come to talk to us, or we go talk to them. But once we have more traction, it will be easier to make the deal with new exchanges.
Question 9 (Marketing)🔗︎
Last question. As a community, what can we do and what should we absolutely not do to promote Stratos on social media? I know certain influencers who we already have on board, but for other community members who are excited to share the news, what would you like to see us do as a community and what are the absolute don'ts?
So first of all, I think we all should give a big round of applause to the Stratos community. As I always said, I think Stratos community has a much better and deeper understanding in terms of navigating the whole tech space in this crypto space. So we definitely welcome everyone to share more content on social media, whether it's Twitter or any other platform that you're more familiar with. On the other hand, I think we're never afraid of comparing ourselves with other competitors. And like you said, we are always confident with the performances. So I suggest that we always keep our narrative around decentralized storage and decentralized cloud. So no matter whichever new narrative comes in, bear in mind that the whole storage industry, the whole storage space can be utilized for any kind of projects. Whether you are in crypto or not, whether you're a Web2 or Web3, whether you are AI or you are just simply traditional financial companies. It covers all, literally. Plus that the whole decentralized storage gives you full ownership of the files and also the security. So I think these should be the messages we all should focus on when you're helping us, spreading out the word.And on top of that, I do think the community power is indefinite. So a lot of you guys may have in contacts or connections with different kind of projects or companies, whichever you think there will be an opportunity for us to talk, feel free to put us together. We will also consider how to give back to our communities who contribute a lot to the growth of the whole ecosystem. But those are some of the things I can think of right now. And on behalf of the team, we do appreciate everyone has been fully believing us and helping us, promoting the technology that we are actually building nonstop. So I hope this covers it all. And again, my DM, my Telegram is always open. If you want to exchange ideas about marketing, feel free.
Yeah, totally. I think your marketing is spot on. Absolutely. And if something comes up to my mind, I'll definitely know where to find you. Thank you very much. Both and have a wonderful day. Thank you so much.
Question 10 (Use cases)🔗︎
I just have a question for Bin, I'm just wondering when the real world industry would be ready for decentralized storage and what can Stratos mean in that concept? And in what time frame do you think this can happen?
Okay, this is a great question. So actually I can give you some feedback. Actually, I mentioned last week when we talked to some traditional business. Their concerns where the following: Okay,we really like Stratos. We want to try to deposit the data to your platform. One is, what's the price? Because for them, they don't care about Stratos. They don't care if storage price is one dollar or $10 or whatever, but they care about paying by fiat currency. Okay, that's one. The second one, what's the capability of the network? If I want to put huge amounts of data on your network, is your network strong enough, it's big enough? That's the second concern. Okay. The third one, is this network an open network. It's not like Google, AWS all the other clouds. If they have an issue they cannot deal with because of any political issue or any other issues, they probably could shut you down right away, but we won't. So that's the real challenge question from the traditional business. So how can we make adoption for them?
And we are thinking maybe we will be working with a third party or we will be working by ourselves to build a middle layer between Stratos and traditional businesses. That middle layer will then charge the fiat currency directly and then convert it to STOS and pay fo the storage on the Stratos network. So ourselves or alongside a 3rd party, we will work to make this middle layer more friendly, to get more traditional businesses on board.
For the second question, actually, in our field, everyone knows about crypto. But we are still a small group compared to the real world. In real world, maybe 10 people out of 100 know about crypto or hold crypto. But in the following couple of years, more and more people will know about crypto. And i feel maybe in a couple of years, countries will have different regulations. I’m waiting for that time when the new regulations will allow big companies to directly purchase eth or stos to store and to pay he consumed storage. So, if I were to give you and estimated time frame, I think that could be happening in roughly three years.
Question 11 (Stratos Database)🔗︎
I’m looking at the old road map you had on the website and on that road map, we can see that computation and database will take a full year after all the storage and blockchain, is that still accurate? Let’s say storage and blockchain come in six months. Does that mean that a year later we probably have computation and database?
Actually I think I covered that question earlier. It’s hard to give and estimated date for mainnet. We don’t just want to deliver the project, we also want people to use it as a real se case before we go on with the next step. Because most team members of Stratos come from traditional businesses. We developed products for traditional businesses and now we have switched to the crypto industry.But we just feel the bar is different to be honest. If a project in traditional business just works, it’s a bad product but in crypto, even if a product just works, it’s an awesome thing, it doesn’t matter if it’s easier to use or not so that’s why up to now, everyone is talking about Web3. Everyone talks about DApps except the DApps are used for swap, for transfers on blockchain, to pay for gas. But for DeFi, we really didn’t see much. Real GameFi or real SocialFi projects, there are no real products there at all. They are actually centralized projects just to have a token, that’s all. But for us, we really want to build a real user case. For someone to really use it everyday or every month. That’s what we want to dedicate to for now. That’s why we will take some time to onboard some projects, maybe during the onboarding they will have certain requirements, we will work to satisfy them. So before we have real use case, before people really store their data on storage, we won’t start the computation phase. Sure, we have the documentation, we have the designs and plans for how we will be building computation and database but before storage is totally working, we won’t kick off that plan.
Question 12 (Webcam storage)🔗︎
What I think that is very suitable for Stratos is if the webcams recordings can be stored on Stratos because the fees in all the apps that are on the place, on the App Store are very high.
I agree with you. I think this is a very good use case for storage and computing. Now, that camera is everywhere. You put that camera in the house, in the warehouse, in front of your door, in your car, in the office, everywhere. And there is a lot of storage in Gigabytes. That camera is very storage consuming. They probably want to store all the recorded video and keep it for one month, three months or even longer. Since Stratos can provide a solid and cheaper storage solution. It's durable for sure. And by that one I feel we will do this in two steps. The first step is for anyone that is using a camera and since most of the web cameras right now, the storage is kind of expensive and if you don't want to lose your history web camera data, videos, probably you can manually or you can write some code to transport your videos from the expensive storage solution to Stratos. That's one. That's the first step. The second step is when the computation is ready and probably we can work with some camera companies, they can direct it to streaming the data to storage. Looks like they are just streaming the data to storage, but streaming and encoding, they need computation power. That's why that will be the second step when the computations are available. So after that maybe some people could make the choice. They want to continue the centralized storage of cloud to do the streaming or they could choose the stratas as a decentralized solution to store under the streaming of their data.
Awesome. So I think we do not have any further questions. If you do, please take the last chance. Otherwise we'll be ready to conclude today's AMA session. So once again a big thank you to everyone for joining us today and especially to thank you for following along Stratos journey. We hope you find this AMA informative and engaging. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Telegram or discord. Feel free to chat in our communities if you have any questions and hope you have a great afternoon. Night everyone and we will see you at the next community event.
Final thoughts🔗︎
Yeah, sorry Claire, actually I remember someone asking a question recently, why recently a whale or an early investor dumped their tokens. But I want to be honest with you guys. We have a very good relationship with most investors, we have routine conversations with them weekly or monthly, I can give you some names like Fenbushi. We also talk to Fundamental Labs very often, with DFG, as well as with several others but unfortunately, not all investors in Stratos are very active. Some never had a conversation with us after they invested. Probably they have their own issues, they were a long time holder, they hold it from one dollar, two, tree, five, then back to two dollars, one dollar, they never dumped. But I guess this is a free market. Maybe they had personal issues or maybe they had company temporary issues so they wanted to sell. It’s normal. It doesn't mean that they lost confidence or lost faith in us. Just like in the real world, everyone can make their own decisions. So i just wanted you to know that we have a very good relationship with most of the investors and they keep supporting us and some investors keep introducing even more projects and partners to us. I know maybe you are a bit worried but I say don’t worry, everything is good. But we need to accept that someone in a particular situation, they need to make their own decisions.
Okay, yeah, it's a free market. That's exactly what it is, man. But thank you so much and I trust you guys completely and I think a lot of us do.
Thank you
Well, thanks Bin. I'm sure our community really appreciates yours and our team's honesty and transparency. So thanks for addressing this special topic and I fully agree with you that I do think we have been maintaining a very good relationship with our investors and other partners projects. But this is a free and public market, right? So we welcome everyone who supports us in continuingly joining our ecosystem. So thank you guys so much for your time. Let's continue our conversation on our community chat and hope you have a great day. Thank you.