BlockTalks x GreenPower (GRN) AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with GreenPower, on October 27th, at 11.00 AM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Michael Mathias, CEO GreenPower (GRN) so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
Michael Mathias — Hello everybody! Nice to have the opportunity to chat with you about GreenPower (GRN). GRN is the core currency within the GreenEcosystem, which is a decentralized alliance of companies that I helped to establish in 2016. The primary objective of the GreenEcosystem is to develop a global system of blockchain-based marketplace incentives aimed at accelerating economic growth and widening the circle of prosperity throughout the world. Programmable contractual money, made possible by distributed ledger technology, has immense potential for resetting the economic incentives built into the existing global economy. The passion within the GreenEcosystem is to help turn that potential into reality so that the as many as possible can enjoy the benefits of a more enlightened global economy.
The pursuits of the GreenEcosystem are influenced by my long-held interests in complimentary currencies, quantum economics and systems innovation. I am heavily influenced by mutual credit systems and believe that with distributed ledger technology and several core principles of DeFi, it is now possible to create a global mutual credit system, which has been the primary long-term objective of the GreenEcosystem.
I am a long-time entrepreneur who has founded and developed multiple technology-related businesses over the past twenty years. Before that, I worked in the financial services industry for JP Morgan Chase, American Express and T. Rowe Price.
Never has there been a time when the need for innovation within the global economy has been more critical. The challenges to the established centralized economic model (that dates back to the 16th century) are now terminal. While this will lead to massive disruption, it will also give way to a new and vastly improved economic model. This is what all of us in the blockchain industry are helping to birth. I believe it is such an exciting and interesting time to be involved in helping to co-create this new future. It’s time for the kind of innovation that’s only possible through collaboration. And this is why I am here today to share with your community.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. What are the advantages of Green Power to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — GreenPower is going after a unique area of the potential applications of blockchain technology: we seek to have GRN be the membership currency for the world’s largest marketplace network. This is a global economic cooperative involving consumer and business members, and the objective is to maximize value for its members through Web3 technology. We actually don’t see any direct competitors in this area yet, but we welcome them and hope that this realm becomes legitimized as we continue to make progress.
Q2. What are the major milestones Green Power achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — During the past three years we have built out a community of 150,000 account holders from over 180 countries and distributed 3.2 billion units of GRN. Our mainnet has been operating continuously since March of 2017. We have brought a range of utility to GRN through various marketplace opportunities, focused initially around health products.
After some recent changes (including the transition of GRN to the Ethereum network), we are now in position to begin the build out of our marketplace network and the wide spectrum of incentives that will be offered. During the next six months, we will be transforming our Graphene-based mainnet into a loyalty points platform (for companies who want to offer their customers blockchain-based loyalty points), introducing vault strategies to our community, launching the PowerDAO (our community governance organization) and launching two new currencies (a universal loyalty point and a marketplace rebate currency), both of which will compliment GreenPower.
Questions Asked on Twitter For GreenPower Team!
Q1. Why do you think $GRN token is necessary for your project? What is the main role of $GRN in your project? What are the benefits of holding $GRN in long-term?
Ans —Since GRN is the membership currency for a marketplace network, the GRN token determines the level of discounts and other benefits that member is eligible for within the marketplace network. The more GRN held, the greater the value that can be unlocked within the marketplace network.
There is a fixed amount of GRN and all of it has been distributed. No more will ever be created. As the marketplace network develops and the membership benefits become increasingly more compelling, there will be increased utility of the network and increased demand for the GRN token as more and more members seek those benefits (and existing members increase their stake of GRN in order to unlock more value within the marketplace network). In addition to the benefits staking that is offered within the marketplace network, there is also the basic economics of supply and demand to ensure additional benefits to those who choose to hold GRN over the long term.
Q2. The distribution of GRN was what we call a Fair Launch, no ICO, IEO or any capital taken from community, so where did the funds to add initial value to GRN came from? How is that an advantage to the development of the token and its holders?
Ans — A license model was used in the initial stage of our development. As part of the license, purchasers received a certain amount of utility tokens for use in powering applications on our mainnet blockchain. These utility tokens could alternatively be submitted to a minting process in which they were converted into units of stored value (which are the units of GRN).
The main advantage of the license model is that it doesn’t rely on the market for the token to finance the development of the project. Furthermore, it doesn’t create the downward pressure on the token that normally occurs when projects try to finance solely through their token market. There is also tremendous dilution of value and downward selling pressure on projects that over-distribute tokens to their management/dev team, and these dynamics can become even more burdensome when there’s an over-distribution to a treasury fund. We wanted to steer clear of all of those unfavorable dynamics. We are also introducing a new phase of our licensing model in Q1 with the introduction of the two additional currencies I spoke of earlier.
Q3. GreenPower has migrated to the ETH network to take advantage of certain strategic advantages. What exactly are the strategic advantages that you believe will benefit the development and evolution of your project.
Ans — There are many strategic advantages that come through the ETH network. First of all, it has proved itself to be a highly reliable security layer for smart contract infrastructure. Secondly, it has the largest blockchain development community in the world, and especially when combined with open source development, creates immense potential value within its ecosystem. Thirdly, it is where the majority of the activity and innovation is happening within the realm of DeFi (and we believe DeFi will not be a passing fad but is the foundation for a revolution in global financial services). We plan to build on the foundation of Ethereum, benefit from its security later and the innovations of its development community, and benefit from its DeFi developments as well as make our own contributions to the fast-growing DeFi subsystem. We realize there is a high cost to using the ETH network at the present time (and do expect that to improve over time), but particularly given the measured way we plan to use the Ethereum within our ecosystem, we believe its advantages far outweigh its costs.
Q4. In Bithumb is listed Green Power, my question is, are these tokens the ones in the Ethereum network or are they the ones that have not completed the swap yet? Is it reliable to buy at Bithumb? Will I need to swap later?
Ans — All of the tokens on Bithumb Global are the new Ethereum-based GRN tokens — so anyone acquiring GRN on Bithumb will NOT have to swap later. Bithumb Global is a world-class exchange that is highly secure, has excellent customer service and has significant daily altcoin volume.
In addition, the Graphene-based GRN coin (our old coin) no longer trades at the other four exchanges (where it formerly traded). Instead, all four of those other exchanges listing GRN are only trading the new ERC-20 token. Swapping is only a concern to those who held GRN previously.
Q5. How your staking model works? And how encourage you user to do staking in $GRN?
Ans — Our GRN staking opportunities will not launch until Q1 2021. We have an outstanding staking model that is not the same as what is typically being offered out there. It starts with the inherent marketplace rewards offered as the incentives to stake GRN in a vault contract, but there is a range of additional value that comes through the vault staking strategy. This includes the token for our DAO which is received for every unit of GRN staked and is itself convertible to additional forms of value (similar to DAI, but not on the Ethereum network). Can’t get into the full range of benefits right now, but we are very excited about the unique staking opportunities we will be bringing to the industry. Please be on the look out for those in the first quarter of 2021!
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to GreenPower Team!!
Q1. Why you decided to transition GRN token to the Ethereum Network? What’s the main purpose behind that?
Ans — The main purpose behind the migration from our mainnet to Ethereum has been to better facilitate GRN’s positioning as a membership currency for the marketplace network, and to be able to more easily integrate a number of DeFi elements into our ecosystem. We are currently in the middle of this transition, but once it is completed at the end of December, there will be a range of new functionality and utility available to holders of GRN. There will be other currencies introduced into our ecosystem that are not inherently part of the Ethereum blockchain but will be able to interact with it. Additional systems of value will include our Graphene mainnet (which again is going to be converted into a blockchain-based loyalty points platform) as well as other complimentary distributed ledger technology.
Q2. How will Green Power solve the scaling problem? And how will it overcome the threat of centralization in the community?
Ans — I believe that scaling can be solved through the integration of side chains that are more efficient to operate. Our Graphene-based mainnet is a key example. It has immense transaction capacity (realistically capable of handling 100,000 transaction per second), extreme speed (confirmed 3-second blocks) and is very efficient to operate. However, Graphene has a considerably smaller development community and no where near the amount of applications, market acceptance and infrastructural security as the Ethereum network. However, there is no reason (especially with the advent of bridging technology like Polkadot and Cosmos) that this technology can’t work together. We believe in using the right tool for the job — not one tool for all jobs. That’s our solution to scaling. Synergy.
Q3. How does the Green Power protect it’s users from hackers?
Ans — We strongly encourage our users to hold their ERC-20 GRN in a hardware wallet (like Ledger) — particularly if it’s a large amount — and to carefully manage the seed words to that device. Next best option from there is an Ethereum ERC-20 wallet in which you have full control. We advocate that our GRN holders use centralized exchange accounts strategically — limiting their use to only a portion of their holdings. It’s up to our users to research the reliability and security of an exchange. We do our best to seek out the highest level exchanges and this is why we selected Bithumb Global. If a holders manages their holdings carefully, hacking can be avoided. The risk is not in the infrastructure of the blockchains (as those have mainly proven themselves over the past ten years). The most significant hacking risk lies with centralized exchanges. Some within our community know these risks first hand from the past with IDAX exchange. To avoid future possibilities like that, it’s imperative to research an exchange before you rely on it heavily. And again, also limit the amount you hold in each centralized exchange.
Q4. What is your strategy to marketing and for Mass Adoption? What message do you want to send to community through AMA today?
Ans — We started this ecosystem with a prime objective of helping to create mass adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. We believe that there is a financial revolution that underway and we want to help spread the world and help people to take full advantage of what is now possible with Web3 technology. We believe that it requires compelling incentives for people to start paying attention. We believe DeFi is the beginning of the kind of dynamics that will introduce blockchain technology to the average and make it relevant and worthwhile for them to engage with it. We have a marketing plan that is designed to give a rewards wallet to virtually everyone who interacts with the marketplace. We are stacking incentives as part of our growth strategy (in a similar way as yield farmers are now stacking yields). We think rewards is at the core of this revolution and we have extensive plans to incentivize the adoption of rewards wallets and their everyday use by the average consumer throughout the global marketplace.
Q5. Can you tell us about the motivation and benefits for investors to keep the GRN token in the long run? What plans do you have to help drive the demand and scarcity of the GRN token?
Ans — There is a fixed amount of GRN. All units have been distributed. There will never be more.
GRN is the core currency of what we intend will be the largest marketplace network in the world. All benefits derived from this global cooperative will be dependent on the amount of GRN held in an oracle-verified vault contract. The greater the amount of GRN, the greater the amount of value that can be unlocked in the marketplace (in terms of discounts and exclusive offers). As the marketplace network grows, the collective benefits it can offer will increase in quantity, value and geographic scope. As those collective benefits increase, demand for GRN will increase. Long term holders of GRN will be able to enjoy the inherent benefits of holding GRN that come through the marketplace network and benefit from what the increased demand for GRN does to its price given its fixed supply. Again, it just becomes basic economics at that point. The key is driving utility and broad usage. Everything else follows from there with a deflationary currency.
Here are some important links of GreenPower (GRN) 👇
Official Website — https://grnpower.io
Blog— https://blog.grnpower.io/
Telegram — https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAFGvALq43sCHapvQYA
Twitter — https://twitter.com/greenpower_grn
