HOST:
Q1: Can you briefly introduce yourself ?
Marco Chen:
Well. I am a blockchain tech early adopter and bitcoin miner since 2016. With BA degree in business and finance, also proactively participating in Stanford programs in Economic and Computer Science etc. In 2018, I built a decentralized Medium alike product Ticktack, using libp2p and SSB protocols to support 10k people relaying chats only via a $20/month cost node. This project educated me to dive deep into the infrastructure level in the blockchain industry. Afterwards, I started the project ParaState which I will present today.
HOST:
Q2. Can you provide a brief overview of the Parastate project?
Marco Chen:
ParaState aims to bring Ethereum protocol support to the Polkadot ecosystem. While it is backward compatible with today’s EVM applications, it is future-proofs the Ethereum protocol by bringing the LLVM and WebAssembly developer communities into the Polkadot ecosystem. It is your best choice of next-gen Web3 applications one-stop developing platform. It is Ethereum on Steroids.
HOST:
Q3: Your technology is massive so a feature I can see that you will be able to bridge ETH and Polakdot in terms of application and developers, can you present that? How does it work?
Marco Chen:
The core competency of ParaState lays in virtual machine level, in Polkadot word it calls vm-pallet. Virtual machine is the core component in a blockchain, it is a runtime environment where smart contracts execute. It’s kinda like the operational system on a computer. ParaState is the only project within Polkdadot ecosystem now that both support EVM and EWASM (Ethereum favored WebAssembly). These two infra are able to talk to each other and share the same account system.
And ParaState is also have Vietnamese community, don’t forget join it: https://t.me/ParastateVietnam
HOST:
Q4: ParaState is using multiple programming languages to write an ETH compatible smart contract and can run much faster in Polkadot. What’re the key advantages for the community?
Marco Chen:
I assume the community here refers to the developer community, correct?
ParaState can not only support developer to use Ethereum native languages ie Solidity and Fe to write smart contracts, but also bring LLVM standard into the ecosystem which can support 20+ popular programming languages like Rust, C/C++, Java etc and even Domain Specific Languages like Move from Facebook. So we can unify a broader developer community to boost the cross-chain software portabilities.
Further, ParaState is backward compatible with all EVM applications. It enables all mature tooling supports on Ethereum right now like Remix, Truffle and Infura etc can also support developer development on ParaState at the very beginning. That’s why ParaState aims to bridge application and developer ecosystem between Ethereum and Polkadot.
HOST:
Q5: How ParaState compares to the current Polkadot?
Marco Chen:
Quoted from Dr.Gavin Wood and Polkadot white paper, Polkadot only focuses on two things: provide consensus security to parachains/parathreads, and enable interoperability. So I assume the question is asking how ParaState compares to other projects which also aim to provide Ethereum compatibility?
Currently I know Moonbeam, Plasm and Clover are also aiming to provide Ethereum compatibility. Among all these projects, only ParaState is building the virtual machine pallet from scratch by ourselves. For others, they just integrate the EVM-pallet into their parachains. This EVM-pallet (modified edition SputnikVM to enable it running in Substrate framework) is developed by Parity. And only ParaState has EWASM production ready.
Further, we prefer to say projects ie Moonbeam, Plasm and Clover or others those want to provide Ethereum compatibility as well, are more like collaborators than competitors. Since we can help them to integrate with EWASM into their blockchain, they could get a high performance runtime infra and improve user experiences, so ParaState will benefit as well. After five years development, EVM seems still to be dominant the VM market share in the blockchain industry. So our main goal is to bring the EWASM infra for massive adoption. This will be a winner take-most game. EWASM is actually an EF official roadmap back to 2019. We just fulfill it by our internal development force and even running ahead of ETH2.0 roadmap for a year.
HOST:
Q6: An important token question can you share some of your token sale plans? How many rounds will be sold? Can you share some token metrics- What role will tokens play in the ecosystem?
Marco Chen:
The native ParaState token is named STATE. The STATE tokens are minted and awarded to node operators who secure the network and are required as transaction fees (gas) .
There is a fixed supply of STATE tokens. As STATE tokens are paid as gas to the network, a part of the gas STATE will be burnt. It will cause the total supply of STATE to go down over time. Applications deployed on ParaState will also get rewards from STATE gas.
Final edition of the tokenomics will be ready before mainnet alive.
HOST:
Q7: Could you tell us more about what is going in the development of Parastate upcoming platforms, and address the current Parastate Roadmap?
Marco Chen:
Testnet will be launched soon in March, ideally around end of the first week of March.
yes. we will have reward program for users who participate in the testnet and perform bug findings. Stay tuned
HOST:
Q8: Which are the key ParaState competitors?
Marco Chen:
I think I’ve answered a bit for this in Q5. But I’d like to iterate it again
After almost five years development, today Ethereum is still the №1 public blockchain with most applications deploying on it, even it is running with limited performance and unsecured programming languages.
How to solve the problem?
One approach is to build a bridge to transfer assets from Ethereum to the new infrastructure chains for higher performance, like Solana (bridge assets via FTX), Near (bridge assets via Rainbow bridge), and Polkadot (bridge assets via Snowfork/Interlay). This approach cannot solve above issues perfectly, since it still requires developers using new programming languages to build applications on the new chains.
The second approach is to provide seamless compatibility for existing Ethereum applications. Moonbeam, Plasm and Clover are projects within Polkadot ecosystem who aim at this goal.
How ParaState approach is different?
While supporting EVM pallet to provide seamless compatibility to all existing Ethereum applications, ParaState also provides developers a next-gen smart contract implementation environment, EWASM (Ethereum favored WebAssembly). These two infrastructure are ensured to talk to each other and share the same account system on ParaState. This is the differentiation ParaState provides to the developer community, to enable them surfing in the highly optimized industrial standard infrastructure and exploring brand new possibilities for Ethereum frontier.
Another competitor could be Ethereum Layer 2 Blockchains. We have summarized in this post how our value proposition is superior to Layer 2 Protocols.
https://medium.com/ethereum-on-steroids/why-us-and-the-tradeoff-of-layer-2-14a3adc03e97
HOST:
Q9: You have been among the project received a grant and support from Web 3 Foundation. Can you provide more information about the grant you have received?
Marco Chen:
The Web3 Foundation has awarded us with a grant to bring the Ethereum flavoured WebAssembly (Ewasm) virtual machine to the Polkadot ecosystem.
The virtual machine is a key infrastructure component for public blockchains. It allows any user from the public to submit untrusted code to the blockchain platform, in the form of smart contracts, and pay for its execution based on resource consumption. The Ethereum flavored WebAssembly (Ewasm) virtual machine is posed to be the dominant virtual machine in the upcoming Ethereum 2.0 blockchain platform.
Through the Web3 Foundation grant, we will create extensions to its high-performance WebAssembly virtual machine, the SSVM Ewasm pallet. Those extensions would allow the SSVM to function as a blockchain virtual machine in accordance with the Ewasm specification. It will develop the necessary software to bootstrap and load SSVM as a Substrate module. The SSVM-Ewasm Substrate module will allow developers to create blockchains that can deploy and execute Ethereum smart contracts in the Polkadot ecosystem.
So it will add value to both the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems. Ethereum developers will have more choices in deploying their applications, and the Polkadot ecosystem will be able to directly leverage efforts from the large Ethereum developer and tooling communities.
HOST:
Q10: What’s your Go to Market Strategy?
Marco Chen:
In short, we have two major approaches for go-to-market and bringing our core tech to massive adoption.
The first one is to build a first-party substrate blockchain. ParaState will be developed as a stand-alone substrate blockchain to interact with Polkadot through parathreads initially.
This decision is made mainly in the view of how we could launch a Layer1 project in a manner both securely and economically. If a project allocated small percentage token rewards for parachain auction, it will be failed to attract Dot holders’ support as Dot holders will simply compare the APY of Dot staking rewards and the offer from parachain auction. To solve this dilemma, ParaState will launch as a stand-alone blockchain to interact with Polkadot via parathread first, and focus on bringing applications matrix onboard at genesis. ParaState will be both evm & eWasm featured, with built-in DeFi infra like lending protocols, DEX, and data feed oracles. In order to activate liquidity onchain once mainnet is live.
When the ParaState native token, STATE, achieves a stable and reasonable market price, we could step into parachain auction.
The second approach is to open license of the ssvm-pallet to all other substrate blockchains and projects which also aim to provide Ethereum compatibility.
Our tech team is endeavoured to fulfil our Web3 grant which is porting the ssvm eWASM pallet into Substrate ecosystem.
We will be the first-ever production-ready eWASM pallet for the whole Substrate ecosystem. According to Web3 official data, there are more than 100 projects under development to build their own substrate blockchain. All these projects are welcomed to become our partners to integrate with ssvm-pallet into their blockchain system as the core runtime pallet.
For such collaboration, we will implement pay-as-you-used(PAYU) business model. This means there is no upfront deployment fee for the party that wants to integrate with ssvm-pallet into its substrate blockchain. We will only charge a small % gas cost for each smart contract txn via ssvm-pallet as a license fee. Our partners can gain high-performance runtime infra/developer tools/developer community from ParaState.
These license fee will be collected based on the participating blockchain native crypto currency and we will convert the basket of license fee into our native token, STATE, on open market time by time.
That’s why STATE value can be back by a basket of native crypto currencies when our core tech ssvm-pallet is widely adopted.
For more information about our Go to Market Strategy please refer to our Medium Post
End of AMA Summary, Thanks ParaState project for trusting and organizing AMA with us !!
- More detail social :
🗣 Website: https://www.parastate.io/
🗣 Twitter: https://twitter.com/_parastate
🗣 Discord: https://discord.gg/DgKNeJFBXA
🗣 Telegram Offical: https://t.me/ParaState
🗣 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ParaState.io
