Ergo’s weekly AMA from December 3rd featured a discussion between Dan Friedman and Joseph Armeanio. They provided numerous updates on Tier 1 exchanges, marketing and rebranding, as well as some important information on the upcoming softfork discussion and emission schedule.
In his address to the community, Dan discussed the recently announced partnership with Kairon Labs and how this firm has a proven track record in dealing with top blockchain projects. As Ergo works towards listings on large exchanges, he reaffirmed the importance of having healthy and established liquidity and volume. Without this, there can be serious problems if an individual attempted to sell a large amount of ERG. Dan highlighted that Kairon Labs’ work and reputation will help set Ergo on the path to Tier 1 listings. They will work on securing books and increasing volume (“in an algorithmic kind of way”) while ensuring that there is balanced liquidity. In addition to discussing the new partnership with Kairon Labs, Dan revisited the importance of having legal opinions when securing a Tier 1 exchange listing. He informed the community that the team has procured the services of a prominent firm and they will be working on creating a legal opinion for Ergo in the US market. This work is integral to future Tier 1 listings and he gave the community confidence in knowing that the firm Ergo has engaged is a company that Tier 1 exchanges also retain for their legal opinions..
Dan provided the community with some exciting updates about Emurgo’s work on the Ergo Yoroi wallet. He mentioned that there have been some concerns about the UX with Yoroi and that Emurgo has recently committed to addressing and fixing these issues. Ergonauts can expect more information about this development in the coming weeks.
With regards to ongoing marketing developments, Dan discussed how the team has been very active online as well as in the media - and that the next step in the process will involve some rebranding of Ergo. The website is going through an overhaul and the goal is to make Ergo more approachable to people who are not yet familiar with it. This rebranding will see web data and archival material organized in a way that ensures increased web traffic.
Dan revealed to the audience that he is working with the rest of the Ergo Foundation to establish an ecosystem fund that will encourage future development projects and adoption. He conveyed that this fund needs to “align with the fundamentals and mission of Ergo - it needs to be community driven, decentralized, democratic and egalitarian.” Discussions with ecosystem funders and firms have already started and more updates will be available as they unfold.
Last but certainly not least, Dan announced an exciting business development. The team is working to establish an autonomous commercial arm for Ergo to increase wider adoption. Dan emphasized that this venture is necessary for developing real world use cases and bringing blockchain services to everyday people. Ergoanuts can expect to hear more about this project in the near future.
Armeanio shared updates on new tutorials and education programs on Ergo. In addition to new tutorials from LAD0PIXEL, there are an increasing number of tutorials for Ergonauts in multiple languages. The ErgoLend platform is launching a pseudo-academy on Ergo with a series of education courses. Participants can start with an overview of UTXO and work their way up to smart contracts. Armeanio highlighted the importance and need for this kind of application on Ergo - he compared it to Cardano’s Plutus Pioneer program and hopes for similar success. With these kinds of programs, the goal is to attract new developers to ErgoScript and create more development on top of the Ergo ecosystem.
Ergo’s emission schedule was discussed and Armeanio reintroduced Alex Chepurnoy’s proposal for a soft fork to rebalance Ergo’s emission. This proposal has arisen from the previous hard fork that switched off non-outsourceable puzzles in the mining protocol. He asked the community to please weigh in on the discussion at ergoforum.org.
With regards to the recent client upgrade, Armeanio informed the audience that Morphic would be releasing test data for that upgrade to version 5.0. He said that the costing mechanism is going to be shifting and that they should be getting additional data and an overview of the TPS potential.
AMA Questions and Summary
The following is a summary of questions posed by the audience during this AMA. Dan and Armeanio answer questions about oracle pool data, blockchain enterprise solutions and bridges to other chains. There is also a deep discussion on the future of NFT’s and their application. Dan even gets a shout out for his likeness to Mel Blanc - would you believe he once met Mel in Los Angeles?
Can you speak more on the Ergo-Waves Enterprise oracle implementation, and how this could expand Ergo’s presence and utility against Chainlink?
Answered by Armeanio
- “One thing about oracle data that is interesting, is as a blockchain you have a massive amount of energy or, in the case of proof-of-stake, money that is in essence being used as a mechanism to secure consensus. That consensus is built on a tremendous amount of value. Then in these systems, we have smart contracts that require oracle data to function.”
- The consensus of that oracle data is just one data point
- You can have hundreds of millions of dollars supported by one data feed.
- “If businesses are going to transition to a smart contract model we need to have oracle data that offers a range of assurance.”
- “Once you start getting into smart contracts with more value on top of them, it makes a lot of sense to have greater security assurances.”
- “You may want multiple sources, you may want multiple actors and for your data to be hardened.”
- Thereby having better assurances
- Need a flexible solution
- Want to develop security models that are tailored to the needs of specific businesses
- “What I’m trying to do with Waves is create a sandbox where we can say for low priority what does that look like? Where does it make sense for medium assurance? What does that look like? What’s the cost? Where does that make sense for the higher level hardened data? Where does it make sense in the market? How much does it cost?”
- “Having a framework that I can go into the community and say, hey guys, who wants to participate? Because my end goal with oracles is not to be in the middle. I just want to facilitate the community being able to spin up and support this so that people that run infrastructure on Ergo can create revenue streams.”
Do you have a commercial sector you will target for adoption (ie. retail, supply chain, etc)?
Answered by Dan Friedman
- “Yes. I believe that one of the greatest things about Ergo is it’s fast, it’s compact, and it’s scalable to meet small and mid-sized business demand.”
- Governments are getting into blockchain
- Big conglomerates are getting into blockchain
- Believes should focus on small and mid-sized businesses
- “we should create and start with supply chain. Basically traceability and authentication and like I said it has to be created to be accessible for small and mid-sized businesses.”
- believes using Ergo that can be achieved
How many developers are working on Ergo (full time, part time or anonymous contributors)? How do they get paid?
Answered by Armeanio
- Variety of developers
- Don’t know the exact number because a lot of teams are anonymous
- Proof of Work encourages that sort of thing
- Some developers bring a pretty deep understanding of Ergo and tooling on Ergo
- ErgoMixer has an anonymous developer with a subset team of developers under them
- Core developers who work on reference client/node - there are 12-15 developers
- We have bounty hunters that come on Github and chase down bugs
- They sometimes end up working for Ergo
- There is a space on Github that advertises open positions
- Most in demand skill set is probably Rust
- They get paid from the Ergo Treasury
- we have brought on Anastasia,
- She’s doing a three-part role
- Treasurer
- Kushti’s personal assistant
- acting as a liaise between the Ergo foundation and developers, or dApp developers
- Putting together an information pipeline to get a clearer perspective of who is developing on Ergo
The biggest issue right now is low volume and the best solution is to leave our little island with bridges. Can you talk about the wormhole?
Answered by Dan Friedman
- It’s all about bridges right now
- Have had several discussions with prominent projects about working together
- Will be able to inform the community after paperwork is signed and things are official
- It is a great way to increase traffic
Answered by Armeanio
- It’s a priorit that we are actively building towards
- MHS is actively working at porting wormhole to Ergo
- Plugging into Solana first - USDT may be the first non native asset on Ergo
- Working with Graviton
- Getting their native token on ErgoDEX
- Going forward the question will be what makes sense
- Gives a way to plug liquidity into our ecosystem
- Later, can use the bridges to function outside of the ecosystem
