OceanTalk is bringing its community, including comprehensive information and communication channels, to its projects. To celebrate IOST’s new token listing, OceanEx will hold this session to inform and update the community with the latest IOST progress.
I am thrilled to invite Terry Wang (Co-Founder and CTO of IOST) to join our community to introduce IOSToken. Looking forward to learning more about the project and the team.
Terry Wang: Hi everyone, this is Terry from IOST, really glad to be here today.
Starry: Awesome, I have pre-collected some questions from the community. Before that would you please introduce the IOST project and the team?
Terry Wang: “I am an ex-Uber, ex-Microsoft software engineer, who used to study computer science at Princeton University. After college I worked in the Bay Area for several years before I went back to China and started my crypto journey with IOST. Very excited to share today.
Top Tier Investors
IOST is funded by top investors in the world including Sequoia China, Zhenfund, Matrix Partners, FBG, DHVC, and 30+ institutional investors.
IOST has been listed on all major exchanges in the world, including Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Huobi, Upbit, Bithumb, OKEX, etc.
Top Performing Team:
With over 70 blockchain professionals, the team hails from Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Berkeley, Cornell, Tsinghua University, Uber, Google, KAYAK, Morgan Stanley, Linux, LinkedIn, and Deloitte, with awards and recognition from National Olympiad in Informatics Gold Medalists, ACM/ICPC Gold Medalists, Forbes 30 Under 30, and 500-startup.
DApps
IOST has More than 90 DApp teams working with us now. Recently, new DApps keep being released. Every week, more and more DApps are on their way. Many DApp platforms such as DappReview (https://dapp.review) and DappRadar (https://dappradar.com) have listed IOST DApps. We see IOST as the one of the Big 4 public chains.
As of today, IOST has over 300,000 mainnet accounts, with more than 280 nodes (still growing & we welcome you guys to join!). The mainnet has almost 50,000,000 transactions. We would say IOST has more transactions when compared with other mainnets in the corresponding period.
Starry:
Cool, thanks for the introduction! Glad to learn about IOST.
We are all intrigued by your consensus protocol POB. Can you explain it more and tell us how it can outperform the other blockchain algorithms?
Terry Wang:
Ofc PoB stands for Proof of Believability. Basically every blockchain system is in itself a micro-society — an adaptive organization comprised of network nodes. The operation of this organization is regulated by a consensus mechanism. The consensus mechanism is a programmable benefit transfer rule that engages people, forms a secure network, and operates in a deterministic manner.
In the IOST PoB consensus mechanism, the block production committee has 17 seats, which are changed every 10 minutes. The 17 nodes with the highest Servi are selected for the committee in each round, and then take turns to produce blocks and claim rewards. Each time a node is selected to participate in block production, all committee members consume Servi. In the PoB mechanism, the entry barrier to becoming a candidate is lower than other DPoS networks, therefore more community members are able to participate. At the same time, the committee members will have increased variation and change with higher frequency. The committee’s mobility is very dynamic, and the degree of decentralization is much higher than EOS which is based on a small number of super nodes and candidate nodes, thereby achieving better community autonomy while also guaranteeing higher security.
Therefore the unselected nodes will have more Servi and will have a greater chance of being selected for the committee in the next round. Under this mechanism, there may be hundreds of different nodes selected for the committee each day.
Starry:
Thanks Terry, so IOST is a very outstanding and promising project that claims it can resolve the problems of ETH and EOS. Can you tell us how it works?
Terry Wang:
For sure, and that’s actually one reason we started to build IOST.
I invite all of you to think about what comprises a blockchain network. The list includes all running nodes/computers, the network that connects these nodes, and all data that’s processed and stored by each node.
Every transaction on the blockchain consumes resources, and each blockchain needs to have mechanisms for managing the usage of these resources.
EOS network has abstracted these computational, network, and storage resources as CPU, NET and RAM.
In Ethereum, all these resources of the network are bundled as one resource — GAS.
Having three separate resources to configure is making the system complex and hard to use. But having one computation-network-storage bundled resource is making the bandwidth and storage utilization really low.
In reality, the applications are either CPU-sensitive or storage-sensitive. Computing and network resources are always used jointly. So we integrated the computation and network resource as iGAS, and re-designed the storage resource as iRAM accordingly. Our resource model is a dual-resource iGAS-and-iRAM model.
By having iGAS-and-iRAM resource model, we enhanced the utilization rate of both computational and storage resources and lowered complexity and barriers for users.
DPoS based blockchain EOS is facing a CPU crisis. The available CPU on the network fluctuates tremendously and makes EOS simply unusable.
Some observations of EOS:
- You don’t use any resources and your CPU is fully used and all of a sudden you cannot do anything.
- You spend $100 to stake for CPU and after playing a few rounds of a cards game, you are out of CPU.
This is why several EOS token leasing services have emerged, such as Chintai, CPU Emergency, EOS Bank etc to mitigate this severe issue.
IOST uses a different staking approach. In the IOST staking model, the system is designed to make user’s available resources NOT diluted or fluctuate. Any users’ available CPU and NET resources are stable. The generation rate of iGAS is fixed. 1 IOST is generating a certain amount (currently 10,000) iGAS per 24 hours. On the other hand, EOS CPU generation rate fluctuates from 0.1 to 120 milliseconds CPU time per 24 hours. EOS CPU variation is over 1000 times and makes the user experience unpredictable. Our fixed-rate generation model makes transaction experiences stable.
Let’s think about Transaction Scheduling Model.
In the Highest-Fee-First-Serve (HFFS) model, transactions are processed by block producers (or miners) in the order of their transaction fees. When the network is congested, users can pay higher fees to get their transactions processed faster. In the First-Come-First-Serve(FCFS) model, transactions are processed by block producers (or miners) in the order they are submitted. If the network is congested, transactions needs to wait in line and may get dropped over time. With this model, there is no way to guarantee transactions will be processed.
In the IOST transaction scheduling model, we use a HFFS model without transaction fees. IOST generates iGAS for a user when the user stakes IOST tokens, which is then produced at a stable rate every day. The gas generated for a user will not be diluted (discussed in 1.3). Users can use iGAS to send transactions and get transactions processed faster at a user’s discretion. Thus in the IOST scheduling model, users can have free transactions and can also adjust transaction processing order.
Starry: Thanks for the explanation.
We have heard about a lot of great news from IOST lately. One is IOST’s recent collaboration with Amazon in Baas system. It is quite interesting. Can you explain it more and what is the further direction of IOST partnership based on your technology?
Terry Wang: Glad to know it. 😀 So we made IOST’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform live on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.
It is here – http://bit.ly/iost-aws-solution
Now developers can launch blockchain solutions in as quickly as 5 minutes. Developers can easily deploy a blockchain infrastructure with dev tools to develop DApps, projects and test out IOST’s high-speed infrastructure with just one click.
Offered through AWS Marketplace and available to millions of developers globally, we expect this platform to significantly accelerate DApp development and network growth for the IOST ecosystem. For more developer documentation and information, follow this link: https://developers.iost.io
We will be launching on other cloud platforms soon so stay tuned!
Starry: We are looking forward to more exciting news🙌🏻
Why do you choose to cooperate with OceanEx? Which aspect of partnership do you want to explore in the future?
Terry Wang: We are very pleased to work with OceanEx. Super pumped. And today I find the community is super active, haha, so OceanEx has a large presence around the globe, and we wanna leverage that.
It’s also led by a proven strong founding team who are techies. We like the AI powered asset trading platform and of course we wanna be like the 2nd Vechain on OceanEx 🙂
Starry: Haha. Thanks Terry, the community valued the most by us. And we do hope our collaboration will bring more to our community and users, along with the strong technology from both sides. I believe we can present more together with VeChain eco. Can’t wait to build and contribute to the whole blockchain industry.
Terry, DAPP is considered the nucleus in the blockchain 3.0 era. Will this become the key aspect that IOST focuses on in the future? Or are there any other aspects that IOST plans to focus on in the future?
Terry Wang: DApp is a major focus for IOST.
So far IOST has lots of DApps already listed on DAppReview https://dapp.review/ and other sites like DAppTotal, DAppCC, DAppBirds (we are talking to more dapp info platforms). Developers on IOST are very active — we have over 50 DApps under development now. As for how they have performed, some of our gaming related DApps have become top 5 DApps among the whole network (including ETH/EOS/TRX), and ofc we have other DApps/applications like enterprise solutions. (https://medium.com/iost/iost-ehang-civil-aviation-administration-of-china-strategic-public-private-partnership-takes-flight-a4d50086977f). We even make gift cards for artists (https://medium.com/iost/cao-jun-digital-gift-cards-collaboration-ibank-xpass-powered-by-pundi-x-and-iost-blockchain-467c6d89aa1b) and recently, we listed on DappRadar.com.
IOST started building the developer community 2 years ago. So far, we have 1000+ developers worldwide working with us on SDKs, IDEs, wallets, DApps etc. – https://invite.iost.io
We see mass adoption as the key. We have incubated a project called Berm in NYC. They built two products already to help us with adoption. The first one called Berminal (it’s a hybrid crypto news app; the source of the news is decentralized and the front end is centralized for now) and has acquired millions of users. The 2nd product is called Bermi, which is a short video/news distribution app in South America, which acquired 2M+ signups with 150k+ DAUs in just 2 months. Both apps are rapidly growing and will issue their tokens on IOST (yes, there will be an airdrop) & support IOST wallet natively.
This year, we are confident to bring in over 20M users to the IOST ecosystem from sources like this. And of course we are constantly working with other small/big internet companies to explore opportunities. There are also many Enterprise/government solutions we built like the the one we have been working on with a leading drone company to help the Chinese NASA record data. (https://medium.com/iost/iost-ehang-civil-aviation-administration-of-china-strategic-public-private-partnership-takes-flight-a4d50086977f)
Starry: Thanks for all the responses and explanations! We have collected many questions. Let’s move to the second part. Terry is selecting questions from the list.
So, the first question Terry picks up is from @baredevel
When will IOST get its own wallet?
Terry Wang:
We have already got a lot of wallets.
Many are top crypto wallets that support IOST, including TokenPocket, Cobo Wallet, Huobi Wallet, Pure Wallet etc.
Trust Wallet, Maths Wallet, Bitpie are in development and we also have a chrome wallet like Metamask and Scatter. It’s called iWallet.
You can find it here – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/iwallet/kncchdigobghenbbaddojjnnaogfppfj
Starry: Thank you Terry, I will definitely check them out. The next question is from @cyrelb
What are your next country targets?
Terry Wang:
Mainly in EU, so we are looking at Russia, UK, Germany, etc.
Starry:
We have a strong EU community, looking forward to expanding and visiting together!
The third question is from community member with ID @784759685
Will IOST DEX be based on pairs with IOST or will they cover all kinds of pairs?
Terry Wang:
There is already one DEX on IOST, and there will be another DEX coming out in two weeks.
There be IOST pairs and USDT, USDC, TUSD pair and also in the future maybe other stable coins pairs and other native token pairs.
Starry:
Next one is from @priyankg3
“I heard IOST has a partnership with codecademy. What contents will be on codecademy then? Writing smart contracts on IOST platform?”
Terry Wang:
We are working with several online institutions on making blockchain education materials. And we just got good news: we are included in the Singapore Government Textbook for Blockchain education!
We will be announcing the relevant news very soon, so stay tuned. Actually the best way to follow us is through our Twitter – https://twitter.com/IOStoken
Starry:
Sure will! Okay, so the last question is asking about the team.
@crypto_philosopher: “How many developers are on the team and how is the team organized and spread out geographically?”
Terry Wang:
We have around 50 developers now, and the whole team has 110 people. Our main office is in Beijing. Other branches are in Korea, Japan, Singapore, the US, and Germany. We are looking forward to expanding in Europe.
Starry:
Awesome! That’s all for today’s OceanTalk session.
Thanks, Terry, for joining our OceanTalk and sharing all these insights.
Terry Wang:
Thank you a lot Starry!
Looking forward to working with you!
Thank you folks!