BlockTalks x Nervos Network AMA Transcript!

Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!

We recently hosted an AMA with Nervos Network, on September 15th at 1 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Matt Quinn, part of the operations team at the Nervos Foundation. 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

Matt Quinn: I am part of the Operations team at the Nervos Foundation, we handle the internal workings of the foundation and coordination as well as the managing the ins and outs of the grant program. I was a financial software consultant before falling down the crypto rabbit hole from the promise of Bitcoin.
It seemed like a really good idea.

Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks

Q1. Could you please introduce Nervos Network to our community in layman’s term?

Ans — I think the simplest way to say it is, we want to build a Bitcoin-like network that does the things that everyone wants out of smart contract platforms today. This means we want a single-chain with a store of value cryptocurrency, that everyone can validate and is secured by the long track record of proof of work and allows for programmability, user-created assets and all sorts of scaling solutions.

Q2. What are the advantages of Nervos Network to other alternatives in the Blockchain field?

Ans — Nervos has a lot of considerations when it comes to the sustainability of the blockchain, the economic model has been designed such that the blockchain will remain secure over time and not have to be re-architected as usage scales up.

Nervos also offers superior flexibility compared to all other blockchains, for example there is a dapp, ckb.pw that allows a user to interact with Nervos using Metamask or any other web3 Ethereum wallet.

The team recently wrapped up support for TRON wallets, this should go live soon. This is possible because of the cryptographic flexibility of Nervos. This flexibility also allows for a variety of programming languages to be used to build on top of Nervos.

Q3. What are the major milestones Nervos Network achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?

Ans — Launch of the mainnet has been the largest milestone thus far, it took roughly 2 years but went live on time as projected.

Since then we’ve had a major tooling delivery, which created a framework for building contracts in Rust, support for Ethereum smart contracts on Nervos and some tooling to build dapps.

Looking forward toward the end of the year, we had a roadmap call last night I suggest everyone check out on youtube. The focus will be on supporting deployments of user-created tokens and other primitives necessary for DeFi.

We expect to have production-ready DEX software ready that can orderbook style and AMM, running inside of an optimistic rollup for scaling purposes. We are also expected to have the software built to create bridges between Ethereum/Bitcoin and Nervos so users can easily move assets over.

Questions Asked on Twitter For Nervos Network team!

Q1. I understand that Nervos Network uses some basic principles of Bitcoin for its development
what are the best inherited parts of Bitcoin that Nervos has used to bring about multiple solutions to blockchains?

Ans — It all starts with what we call the “cell model”, it is inspired by Bitcoin’s UTXO model. It’s probably beyond the conversation here but there’s lots of resources we’ve published on it. It opens the door to light clients and more secure assets on Nervos compared to other smart contract platforms.

We also target a large network of decentralized full nodes, that can be run on average hardware, so anyone can always validate the chain’s history and sync up with the network.

Lastly I’ll mention that we have also been inspired by Bitcoin’s economic model, in which the block reward increases in value with the demand of Bitcoin. We had to tweak this a little bit, because Nervos is a smart contract platform and have emulated this model with the CKByte utility token, which provides a user a claim on a portion of the “real estate” of the blockchain. When demand to store data on-chain increases (for instance from more dapps or users), the block reward on Nervos will increase, increasing the incentive to add hashpower to securing the chain.

Q2. I’ve understood that your block rewards to miners are denominated in CKBytes but what kind of use cases does the CKB token itself have and is the value of it intrinsic or what it’s based on?

Ans — The CKByte’s utility is for storing data on-chain, it’s unique compared to other native currencies of blockchains in this way.

Dapps and users storing data on-chain will need CKB to utilize the chain.

Q3. Is The CKByte represents ownership of the Common Knowledge Base blockchain & is designed to be used as a store of value and for resource management?

Ans — That’s correct, when a dapp developer pushes their contract to the chain, they’ll need to own the CKB required to store that data.

Similarly when a user wants to store a token balance on-chain, they’ll also need to own the CKB required to store that data.

So we see here the utility.

We know that as usage increases, the demand for CKB will rise as well. Issuance is a little more complicated on Nervos than other chains, we also have some articles about this. Users that solely want to hold CKB as a store of value can lock their tokens in the Nervos DAO and receive a portion of issuance. They lock in a fixed percentage of total CKB issuance as a result while their tokens are in the DAO.

Q4. What is the Eaglesong hash function? Why is it important in safety?

Ans — Eaglesong is a new hash function that was created as the proof of work function for Nervos.

It has been designed to be simple, so we lower the barrier to entry for ASIC manufacturers. By making the hash function simple to implement in hardware, a diversified hardware manufacturing ecosystem can emerge, instead of a well-resourced player or 2 producing all of the miners.

By embracing ASICs, Nervos will never be susceptible to a 51% attack from rented GPU or CPU hash power.

Q5. Nervos Network recently integrated with Chainlink, Band protocol and Grin Community. How will these partnership help Nervos Ecosystem to scale? What unique solutions is Nervos providing by these partnerships?

Ans — Chainlink and Band will bring oracles to Nervos, an important part of DeFi. These solutions are well understood, but DeFi on Nervos will be novel because of the interoperability and flexibility I mentioned above

The work on mimblewimble on CKB is something very unique, as we are working on implementing privacy as a feature of Nervos. Users will be able to opt-in to a private pool of assets and move assets out of that pool later, this is possible because of the flexibility of Nervos.

Grin, Chainlink and Band all have their own followings and it has been great to see the number of people engaged with the project grow as these partnerships have rolled out.

Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session for the Nervos Network team!

Q1. What is the point of clients computing new state if (a) block producer has to re-compute it and (b) the data is fully on-chain?

Ans — One of the biggest advantages here is: because state is synchronized in blocks this opens the door to much more viable light clients and trustlessness than is possible with on-chain computation.

Q2. Ethereum is saturated and makes dApps expensive, and low cost on the other hand is cause for spam (like EOS). So how does Nervos plan to reconcile the two aspects?

Could you explain the economic model, monetary issue and incentives of the network?

Ans — Nervos has always been about moving the majority of transactions to Layer 2, and providing the broadest support for possible solutions, I spoke to the economic model a bit in the AMA, suggest checking out the positioning paper or “Intro to Nervos” on youtube for more details.

Q3. Yeild farming is a new trending so Nervos have any plan to yeild farming system development?

Ans — There is a lot of implementation work around supporting all of the common DeFi primitives, suggest to staying tuned over the next few months.

Q4. Most investors often care less about the technology, but more about the value of the tokens. Despite the cutting-edge architecture that nervos is based on, how do you balance technology development while increasing the value of the nervos token?

Ans — Because the demand of CKB is tied to utilization of Nervos, give developers great support and do lots of BD outreach to get them to build awesome things users are interested in using.

Q5. Any articles on stateful applications in cells? in CKB model, does confirmed TX read cells kill cells?

Ans — There can be cell dependencies, which are read only, like code libraries, these don’t remove the cells.

Q6. What defines Nervos Network as an outstanding brand in the crypto space?

Ans — I think a compelling vision, creating a community-driven ecosystem that is adding new functionality to the internet as we know it, in a way that is easy for users to adopt.

Q7. NERVOS is a community governed platform thanks to the DAO system? or really what system do you use for effective community administration?

Are CKB and CKByte tokens really necessary? why not just use one? both work together or are they totally independent?

Ans — The Nervos DAO today only serves an economic function, but it is possible to build governance mechanisms that utilize it, over time the project will transition toward community governance, it is a tricky process through bootstrapping the project and moving governance to the community (the thoughts around this are outlined in the positioning paper and there is a portion of issuance designed to be allocated to a community fund, it is being burned now.

CKB and CKByte are two ways of referring to the same thing, there is only 1 native currency of the blockchain.

Q8. I see on website, I found that Nervos Network uses RISC-V technology.
How important is this technology in the Narvos Network & please explain ini short how it works and role RISC-V on Ecosystem ?

Ans — RISC-V is a very important part of Nervos, because it is a stable computing instruction set. It also allows developers to use common tools they are used to, instead of having to learn new ones for a custom virtual machine.

Q9. Why use CKB as a reserve, since its price fluctuates, isn’t it more practical to use stablecoin?

Ans — Stablecoins are a very important part of the future of Nervos, however CKB underlies the economic model and it is not clear how a similar design could be created using stablecoins (though I know projects are trying this now.

Q10. What is your long-term vision about the industry which #you are working on? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace your project? Because we can see many crypto projects related with this concept recently.

Ans — If we look at Bitcoin, we can see that if a blockchain does it’s job well it can have a market that values it very highly, even if there is something newer that has come out after.

The longer a chain runs with no issues, the more trust is developed in it, and the more compatible it is with things in the ecosystem that emerge around it.

We are focused on building something valuable today that can last and be adaptable in the future, there will always be innovation but it seems like the short history of this industry shows that new does not necessarily displace old.

Q11. Do you have plans to spread Nervos ecosystem across other continents. if yes, what are the strategies & how can I as a community member contribute to making it possible?

Ans — I would say to join the telegram chats and Discord server and be an active community member. There will be grants for community engagement in time if you would like to start a meetup group or organize people in your community around Nervos, it all starts with joining the community.

Q12. Is it possible to implement a layer 2 DEX in Nervos? what kind would it be?

Ans — Yes, there is work now to create the software to run a Layer 2 DEX, and a design specification we laid out in a recent article on Medium, I would say to stay tuned over the next 1–2 months for more announcements around this.

Here are some important links of Nervos Network 👇

Website: http://www.nervos.org

Telegram: http://t.me/NervosNetwork

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NervosNetwork