On June 2nd 2021, our community had a chance to welcome Beni Issembert – CMO of Concordium and Suhas Hegde – Tech Marketing Of Concordium to join in an AMA to give fruitful information about the key features and roadmap of Concordium - is deeply rooted in science and brings to the world tech advancements on all levels of the protocol, resulting in a blockchain unmatched in cryptographic security and transaction speed.
This AMA was held by CryptoFamily Group – the top crypto community in Vietnam, where investors and traders can obtain the lastest news and signals from bot/ admins, as well as discuss and share investment experiences in the crypto space.
At this AMA, the Beni Issembert and Suhas Hegde directly greeted the community and provided detailed information on Concordium as well as some key products and future plans.
Time: 08:30 PM (UTC + 7) on Wed, June 2nd, 2021
Venue: https://t.me/CryptoFamilyVn
Airdrop 300 USDT for the best questions in the AMA.
Below are some main points of this AMA:
Question for Part 1- Project overview
Question 1: Firstly, please give me brief introdution about your team and Concordium.
What are the occasions that lead you to the industry and this project?
Beni Issembert: My name is Beni, 44 yrs old. Living in Israel. Philosopher of sciences by education, marketer by passion. In the crypto since 2012 as a BTC and ETH miner and I've co-founded in 2018 Beam Privacy where I've led the marketing until 2019. Published author, humble blues guitarist and an happy dad!
Ataraxia Celeste: Hi everyone, I am Suhas, I lead Tech Marketing at Concordium. I have always been a strong advocate of free software, open source, open data collaboration models for fintech. I am a Computer Science Engineer by education and have worked with reputed blockchains like Waves, Digibyte, GXChain, Beam in the past. During my time at NASDAQ I worked on protecting Cyber Security Data without losing forensic detail using Blockchain. Encrypting data without impacting integrity of the high volume processing data with the use of Blockchain.
I have been passionately involved in the blockchain industry since 2014.
Question 2: Next, please tell me some major milestones Concordium has achieved during its development process.
Ataraxia Celeste: Good question!
We have been working very hard for the past 3 years, lots of scientific research, and building. Finally we are close to the much anticipated Mainnet Launch this month. And are very excited.
Let me share with you some of the achievements this year:
- We have successfully prepared to launch both our MVP and our Mainnet in a couple of weeks from now.
- We have signed a JV agreement with Geely Cars, the strongest car manufacturer in mainland China.
- We have raised around $40m this yearin our private rounds of funding.
- We have launched the DevX initiative with the RustLang community to support Rust Developers.
- We have identified and engaged with more than 50 partners to secure the network, from professional node runners, to builders and system integrators.
- By this, we are confident that we are delivering what is needed from a pure tech and biz point of view to build the Present and support the Future. We leave the Past for our competitors.
- And last but not least, we are the proud tech support and sponsor of the #WeToo initiative that fights child abuse and that will host a giganstic music show in Europe with Drake as main star.
- For this purpose, Concordium will deploy for free a charity tracking dapp based on our Blockchain and that will be released in open source. What we do, we don’t do it for us, our mission is also to fix the world.
Lots of stuff in store. Exciting times ahead.
Beni Issembert: Amdax, Digital Strategies, TNS Capital, Ark36, and many more.
Question 3: Could you tell us about the short-term and long-term goals of Concordium in the future?
Beni Issembert: We have built a strong MVP that will be released along side with our Mainnet next month,.It means that most of the functionalities are available with Mainnet launch. Our progress has been tested and proven, we say so because we have been researching and formally verifying the research to build technology that works for the business world. We have 40+ research papers ( not many projects have this research based approach btw ) and with successful testnets we have proven our MVP which is ready for release next month.
Here is the link to our Technical Roadmap :
https://medium.com/concordium/concordiums-roadmap-f61c546c2d80
The technical Roadmap will show you what we plan to do in the coming days and progress according to the needs of this world.
Short term goals are around usability of the network by businesses and long term is to be the referent when it comes to compliant by design blockchain for the business world.
Questions for Part 2 - Pre-collected questions from Twitter:
Question 1: Now, the token launch process is very easy, but to develop the ecosystem, stabilize the price, expand the market is a challenge in every project? So what is your team's first step to solving this problem? @duminh18
Beni Issembert: Turning science excellence into code isn't an easy task, let's begin by that. But i think that the main challenge we are facing now is located at the bridging level between blockchains. I mean, if we cannot communicate between chains, the industry will die. We are working a lot on this. Plus, education is not easy when it comes to explaining the differences between a DLT design and Public and permissionless blockchain for enterprise.
Ataraxia Celeste:
We want to support the opensource ecosystem, hence we have starte the DevX Initiative.
The idea is to enable the Builders and coders to build usable applications of tomorrow.
We believe that once businesses and Enterprises start harnessing the power of public decentralized blockchain we willhavemore adoption that will take care of more usability
We have lots of interest coming from different parts of the world! We have many unofficial communities already.
Question 2: During your project development, did you consider community feedback or requests to further expand on new ideas for your project?many projects fail because they don't understand their target audience and customers. So who is the most ideal customer of your product? @g76974594
Ataraxia Celeste: Yes we have always been actively listening to the community. We had 4 different testnets for this very purpose in addition to stress test the network and to improve our technology. We got a lot of bug reports during testnest that helped us improve our software and we are very thankful to the community for helping us identify these pain points.
New ideas are what drive the innovation, hence we have lots of grants in place to fund some of themost interesting ideas, not only will Concordium Foundation fund these ideas but also make sure we support them with the right resources and advice to build practical products.
Our main target audience would be Enterprises that require Blockchain. Even small businesses can utilize Concordium Blockchain. Since blockchain has a wide array of applications, it can be used in Healthcare , supplychain , manufacturing and Iot Specefic industries.
Beni Issembert:
Concordium’s two layer approach helps with fast transactions and high throughput for global scale. This is important for businesses that deal with a number of transactions on a commercial scale.
Concordium’s two layer approach helps with provable and fast finality – Finality as a Service (FaaS), which can be used even by blockchains that are built on top of Concordium to use Concordium’s consensus layer.
Question 3: Please list some advanced techniques of Concordium to achieve fast transactions and high throughput for global scale as you mentioned. What make users choose you instead of other projects out there? @luna1112021
Ataraxia Celeste: Users prefer Concordium because we are the world's first regulatory compliant blockchain with an in biilt ID layer at the protocol level. Doing business should be easy but also lawful. Concordium enables this. We also use Rust for our smart contracts hence it has many advantages.
We believe things like regulation should not hinder innovation. Hence, we make sure there is 100% regulatory compliance
Question 4: You mention Concordium is deeply rooted in science. Can you name a few scientific partners who made a major contribution to the project? In the future, do you plan to find other partners and what will they assist you in? @HuynhSterling
Beni Issembert: Concordium aims to build the world’s leading open-source, permissionless, and decentralized blockchain with built-in user identity at the protocol level. Concordium supports regulatory compliance, allowing businesses to harness the power of blockchain technology.
Some of our Scientific Partners are as follows :
COBRA ( Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus ) :
The goal of the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus (COBRA) is to provide the basic research needed to build energy-efficient and scalable blockchain technology that is provably secure. COBRA was created as a partnership between Aarhus University and the Concordium Foundation, which committed funding of DKK 50 million (EUR 6.7 million) over five years.
ETH Zurich in Switzerland:
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich is a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics university with the mission to educate engineers and scientists. As of August 2018, 32 Nobel laureates, 4 Fields Medalists, and 1 Turing Award winner have been affiliated with the Institute, including Albert Einstein. The most recent Nobel Laureate is Richard F. Heck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2010.
IT University of Copenhagen :
IT University of Copenhagen is one of Denmark’s leading universities on IT research and education.The university collaborates closely with industry, the public sector and international researchers and is characterized by a strong entrepreneurial spirit among students as well as researchers.
Indian Institute of Science:
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is India’s leading institution of advanced education and research in the sciences and in engineering.The Institute has a student population of around 4,200, of which there are about 2,750 doctoral students, roughly 950 master’s students, and about 500 students in a four-year, research oriented undergraduate programme in the sciences. It is one of the top research institutes in India and also the world when it comes to science and technology.
Question 5: The blockchain at its core is a distributed ledger. However, to provide more security, everything needs to be inspected by a third party. Have you done an audit or planning? What is your next step in enhancing users' security and privacy? @Zafiyakhan2
Ataraxia Celeste: Yes, audits are happening as we speak and will be made public around the TGE/Mainnet time.
Here is one for our mobile wallet made by Now Secure: https://medium.com/concordium/concordium-mobile-wallets-penetration-test-dd8b86369313
Concordium has created and is deploying a unique solution relaying on strong cryptography, understanding that's security is vital for the users. We encourage the community members to identify potential vulnerabilities and alert the team. We had 4 testnets like I mentioned earlier and 2 were incentivized. We even have an active bug bounty for the community.
Concordium at it's core is more a decentralized pubic , permissionless Blockchain. Hence, decentralization is very important for overall security and health of the network. Without decentralization, it is not a blockchain but a DLT ( distributed Ledger Technology )
PART 3: 5 CONCORDIUM QUIZ AT TELEGRAM GROUP CRYPTOFAMILYVN
Q1: Which high level smart contract language does Concordium use?
CF: Congratulations on the fastest right answer @starshades007
The correct answer is Rust!
Q2: We have launched an initiative with the RustLang community to support Rust Developers from a pure ad-hoc point of view. What's the name of the initiative?
CF: Congratulations on the fastest right answer @congacongaz
The correct answer is DevX initiative (https://devxinitiative.org/)
Q3: Who leads the Tech Team at Concordium? (Hint: He is also the father of the Pedersen Commitment. :)
CF: Superb, congratulations to the one who has the fastest and right answer @dvidcop
A: Torben Pryds Pedersen
Q4: What's the name of the native token of the Concordium Blockchain?
CF: Congratulations to the one who has the fastest and correct answer @cengizhantekin
A: GTU / $GTU
Q5: What sybil control mechanism Concordium use?
CF: Congratulations to the one who has the fastest and correct answer, also the last winner of Part 3 in today's AMA @LePhuocDat
A: Proof of Stake
PART 4: 5 LIVE QUESTION AT TELEGRAM GROUP CONCORDIUM
Question 1: Hi!.. I am dreaming that there is Concordium Logo on banks debit cards and credit cards in the future. Can they use Concordium Blockchain for their payment system and do you have any work on it? Thanks @Cymballand
Concordium: Concordium does not plan to replace the banking system, rather Concordium wants to bridge the existing gaps between the legacy world and the digital world.
We believe that building applications and software infrastructure is the right way to support it. Eventually, there maybe radical changes in the banking system, and if banks, with rise of technologies like Blockchain. But we believe that Public Decentralized Blockchains is the way forward to drive this change. So the way financial services/applications that are being consumed is changing. Innovation is great but also that means that one needs to be mindful of the jurisdictions they are in for example the laws of the place they live in. Concordium will ensure that this transition is smooth rather than replace something.
In this aspect, we should note that most of the founders and board members are coming from a banking / FX background so we could expect collaborations between the banking world and Concordium in the future!
Question 2: How can developers contribute to your project and how do you make plan to get them involved?What products have been launched by Concordium and is there a new product from Concordium that will be introduced in the future? @uaemne
Concordium: Yes, everyone is welcome to join Concordium and use it as well as build on top of it
And we focus on building by not only empowering the open source world but also supporting them independently, Our DevX Initiative is a testemant to that. If you are a Rust developer and want to build Concordium reach out to our DevX Initiative for an introduction to Concordium ecosystem. Things are still on the early phase so joining now would be more beneficial for you and us! :)
New ideas are what drive the innovation, hence we have lots of grants in place to fund some of the most interesting ideas, not only will Concordium Foundation fund these ideas but also make sure we support them with the right resources and advice to build practical products.
Here is the twitter page: https://twitter.com/DevXInitiative
And here is the website: https://devxinitiative.org/
Shoot a dm to our Developer Evangelist Ernest to get in touch!
Question 3:. What is the Concordium’s Two-Layer Consensus Mechanism and how important is it for the proper functioning of Concordium. could you also add a brief explanation of how it works @quachthingoc
Concordium: A major innovation of our design is the two-layer consensus approach, which combines a Nakamoto-style consensus blockchain with a novel finalization method, providing fast finality.
The Concordium Platform uses a proof of stake (PoS) mechanism to ensure resource efficient operation of the network along with enhanced security among participants. Users that hold GTU in their account can either stake some of their GTU and run their own node or delegate their GTU to a so-called delegation pool. Across the network, the more stake that participates, the harder it becomes for malicious parties to control a majority of the stake. The effective stake of a node equals the stake of that node plus the node’s part of the delegation pool.
Our two-layer consensus design ensures that the platform remains available and secure in
the most adverse conditions. Blocks are correctly added to the longest chain when less than 50% of all stake is controlled by malicious parties, and we achieve significant speedups and efficiencies under normal conditions, when less than 33% of all stake is controlled by malicious parties. Furthermore, the safety of our finality layer holds even under catastrophic failures to the network that causes messages to be delayed much longer than under normal conditions.
And let's not forget that we do have an ID layer at the protocol level, and we are the first and the sole to do so.
And this allows us to create Finality as a Service. Meaning, our finality is portable.
Question 4: Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn? @galdirik
Beni Issembert: We dont aim to burn tokens. And I respectfully disagree with you. I rather see the tokens distributed to the community of developers as an additional allocation than to kill them.
Question 5: In decentralization, We all know that speed is needed, as is the current problem faced by the expensive Eth Gas Fee and the slowing of the transaction process. what are your plans to deal with this problem on your project ?@Scikit_Lrn
Concordium: We will have a predictable and stable payment system, which means that transactions will have a known value in advance, and the GAS table will be published with mainnet release. We also have killer things like finalization-as-service (faas) and dynamic block time. All this makes the use of our currency efficient, fast and with cheap commissions.
For all of the questions that have not been answered yet, guys feel free to search for more information or ask directly to them on the links provided below:
Website: https://concordium.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConcordiumNet
Telegram group: https://t.me/concordium_official
