We interviewed Metanyx to get a little background on Metanyx, a full highlight and review of Metanyx’s recent trip to the Malta Blockchain summit, positives and negatives on Facebook’s Libra coin, and his musings on IOST adoption and pricing.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Tell us what country you are from? What is the pivotal moment when you knew technology was a field you wanted to work in? Tell us about the moment when crypto clicked and you decided to shift focus to the field.
I grew up in Canada and moved to the UK in 2005 to join a flourishing IT industry which had a serious skills shortage. I hold Redhat’s top certification of RHCA and have over 15 years of enterprise Linux experience. After moving to the UK, I joined an e-commerce platform responsible for approximately 10% of online payments in the UK for about 5,000 merchants. Working in the payment industry was a 24/7/365 position; within the first year I designed, implemented and managed a distributed platform with over £5 billion in annual transactions.
I have followed crypto for a number of years and as much as I love Bitcoin for being a truly decentralized permission-less network, the power consumption is somewhat unnecessary to achieve the results of having a decentralized currency. I still think Bitcoin will retain the overall top spot in crypto, transitioning to more of a store of value than a day to day currency. Layer 1 transactions are simply not fast enough for on chain transactions without some Layer 2 scaling solution which has been problematic for a number of reasons. During the ICO bubble of 2017 and 2018, I reviewed hundreds of projects and most seemed to be completely useless or none protocol-level implementations (utility tokens on Ethereum). Proof of Stake seemed to answer the question around wasteful power consumption but introduces many other issues of its own.
Q: What was Malta like in relation to cryptocurrency?
Malta is trying to position itself as a crypto friendly country. It is part of the EU, which is also attractive to many businesses as it affords a variety of protections and regulations. Many exchanges and other blockchain projects are setting up businesses in Malta knowing the regulatory framework, which has been engineered to ensure they are protected.
Malta is trying to attract these projects, organizations and investors to boost its own local economy. The government is making a lot of effort to attract business to the island nicknaming it “Blockchain Island.”
Q: A brief explanation of your Malta experience?
Malta is an interesting mixture of different cultures with the locals speaking in English, Italian or Maltese (a mixture of Arabic and Italian from what I could tell). The island is very small, surrounded by the Mediterranean. Mixed in with hundreds of years of history are little signs of Britain such as red telephone booths and post boxes. I found the people there very friendly and welcoming, and the food was a mixture of Italian to Arabic in its origin.
Q: Which blockchain leaders or CEOs were present for the summit?
There were many crypto personalities present such as Roger Ver, Tony Vayes, Brock Pierce and Michael Nye as well as many CEOs from a variety of startup blockchain projects. Most of the attendees were more business oriented than technically oriented. I did have some good conversations with representatives from Maker Dai, BXB Exchange and a couple of dApp developers.
Q. What was the reception of the blockchain community to IOST ?
Many people came up to talk about IOST and were very interested in the project but equally, there were many people who had never heard of IOST before. IOST is still very much an underrated network in comparison to EOS, TRON, and Ethereum. When people asked if IOST had functional dApps it was very good to be able to show them https://dapp.review and https://dappradar.com which really shocked so many people seeing IOST sitting along the big chains. I myself am not so interested in game-based dApps but this is the default starting position, having IOST sitting right there beside the other three certainly leaves you with the impression it is punching well above its weight class and can only get better.
Q. Do people feel IOST is undervalued or overvalued or not rated at all?
Rating coins (rather than technology) is very difficult because it is not necessarily based on technology or usage alone, due to the nature of crypto industry. A coin that has no development can easily sit in the top 20 simply because it has high trading volumes; it may never serve any other purpose than as a speculative asset. If we evaluate IOST on a technical comparison to other chains it is significantly undervalued. IOST has the fastest UTXO-based transactions, it is built on a modern programming language (Golang), it has a novel first-of-its-kind smart contract language based on a Chrome V8 Javascript engine and has the most decentralized validators using PoB consensus algorithm (effectively a DPoS variant that ensures rotation of validators on a 10 minute basis).
Q. One of the discussions in Malta is “driving legislation in technology.” What can you say about that?
The Malta government has made the strategic decision to define legislation around the usage of crypto assets and blockchain technology. I believe this is a wise decision for a country so small and in need of foreign investment in emerging technology.
Q. What do you think can promote mass adoption of the IOST blockchain?
IOST has many challenges ahead as it has positioned itself as both an end user and enterprise-ready blockchain. The technology is far more advanced than other solutions out there but it is difficult to penetrate the wider market. A focus on Point-of-Sale and e-commerce integrations for day-to-day transactions, as well as user cases around registering assets such as land, would be great to see.
Q. What is Metanyx doing to hasten the adoption of IOST?
Metanyx have been assisting the community and fellow node partners from the very beginning and we will continue to do this. We are also actively looking at how we can promote IOST to other businesses by attending conferences like the Malta and London Blockchain summit this quarter.
Metanyx is also working on integrating IOST into a real-world use case for transactional-based advertisements. We are hoping in Q3 to make more announcements around this. but with any work in progress it may also not materialize and we are not in the business of making false promises ahead of delivering.
Q. Are there new developments from Metanyx that we can expect in the coming days, weeks or months?
Metanyx will be releasing information on a trading competition for METX on IOSTDEX as well as our METX buyback and token burn program that will be introduced in Q3 (instead of Q4). Currently, all voters of Metanyx receive a weekly distribution of METX based on your current vote percentage for our node. This allows you to share a portion of Metanyx ServiNode rewards. If you haven’t checked out Metanyx as a node partner we encourage you to do so.
For more Information on Metanyx, read the following articles:
- Metanyx Launches METX Token to Share IOST Servi Rewards
- 25 Million METX for Our Voters!
- METX Balance Reaches 500K IOST
Q. Do you have candid advice for the IOST team?
IOST needs to become more globalized and focus on US and European markets. The big nodes in IOST are all based in Asia and the distribution of these nodes needs to be more even for it to be properly adopted or accepted in other regions of the world. Supporting growth at the grassroots in these regions should be a priority of the IOST Foundation.
Q. A little talk about price — any insight as to why IOST prices continue to drop?
The IOST price has always been extremely volatile, and in the last 2 months it has actually been more stable than most of its history. After the successful main net launch, IOST price surged from $0.006 to $0.018 in a couple of weeks, in fact from its lows in December to its highs in March it was one of the best performing tokens (0.0036 to 0.018). After the April surge, the price retracted and at the same time Bitcoin surged so the BTC comparative looked pretty harsh, but really it went down 30% from its recent high. Most coins since April have been falling against BTC — maybe not as significantly as IOST — but they also might not have had such an upswing beforehand. Unfortunately, price does not always correlate to technology or usage.
Q. We have to ask, what is your prediction for Bitcoin and IOST prices by December?
Probably around $10,000 to $15,000/BTC and $0.03/IOST
Q. What is your thought on Facebook’s venture into cryptocurrency through Libra? What are the positives, negatives and any effect or relation to IOST?
I think Libra will make end users more accepting of cryptocurrency globally. A cryptocurrency does not need to surge in price upwards to be successful. Introducing a stable coin pegged against a collection of traditional fiat currency holdings, effectively creates a new currency that can be used for day-to-day transactions, which is a big concern for most cryptocurrencies available today.
I think IOST and other cryptocurrencies with leading blockchain technologies will benefit from awareness and acceptance by the general public. I would really like to see a cleanup of most coins that are so-called utility tokens that actually never will be implemented for their so-called utility. IOST is very different as it has a protocol-level implementation, but can also act as currency in its own right.
Q. Finally what are your plans for other blockchain events?
We will be attending the Blockchain Summit London on the 26th and 27th of June as an IOST partner.
You can reach out to Metanyx on the following platforms: Telegram, Medium and Twitter