BlockTalks x Rio DeFi AMA Transcript!

Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!

We recently hosted an AMA with Rio DeFi, on 28th August 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 James Anderson, CEO of Rio DeFi. So here we are up with AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be saver & feeder of knowledge for them.

INTRODUCTION

James Anderson: I’m the CEO of Rio DeFi. Rio DeFi is a Blockchain technology company. Our mission is to accelerate the mass adoption of digital assets by bridging traditional and decentralized finance.

Our vision is a world in which everyone has access to decentralized financial (DeFi) services.

I got into blockchains through my interest in economics and my research of gold, silver, and alternative currencies after the financial crisis of 2008. I believe it was 2012 that I really started looking into Bitcoin, and I met Vitalik Buterin and Erik Voorhees back in 2013 at a conference called Porcfest in New Hampshire.

I invested into Ether in 2014, into The DAO in 2016, and over 40+ different cryptocurrencies since then. I believe there are so many different ways of creating value in this rapidly evolving digital economy. I really enjoy the passion and optimism that people in the cryptocurrency space tend to have.

Introduction Questions Asked By BlockTalks

Q1. Could you please introduce Rio DeFi to our community in layman’s term?

Ans — RioDeFi is a blockchain technology company that develops applications that connect people to digital assets, mobile payments, and DeFi services such as savings and lending. Our solutions enable lower transaction fees, faster confirmations, energy efficiency, secure storage, and global reach. We’ve created RioChain, RioWallet, RioPay, and RioExchange to form a user-friendly, compliant fiat to crypto gateway. This will help bring the other 99% of the world into cryptocurrencies.

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

At the heart of the RioDeFi ecosystem is RioChain, a powerful digital infrastructure tailored for mass adoption. When designing RioChain, we prioritized security, speed, scalability, and interoperability. We operate across blockchains to leverage the strengths of each.

Ans — RioChain can process up to 3,000 transactions per second, processes blocks in 2 seconds, and is highly secure — it has been audited by CertiK, which is one of the leading blockchain security auditing firms.

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

Ans —

We started developing RioChain in early 2019, and launched our beta-net almost a year later in April 2020. We’re gearing up now to launch our main-net at the beginning of October.

Questions Asked on Twitter For Rio DeFi!

Q1. Tell me more about how Rust Programming Language run and What is its node operation principle in RioChain . As far I know it is multi-paradigm programming language focused on performance and safety, especially safe concurrency. Is it suitable for RioChain’s technical solution?

Ans — Rust is the programming language used by Substrate-based blockchains, which can connect to the Polkadot network. Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.

Rust’s rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory-safety and thread-safety — enabling you to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time.

Rust has great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling — an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more.

Q2. RIO WALLET is coming on the app stores, great news! So what are the distinguishing features of Rio Wallet which can help us prefer to use it?

Ans — RioWallet will have an OAuth system to allow users to easily create a digital currency wallet using their Gmail, Facebook, or other social media logins. It will also come with some free RFUEL to use on transactions within our ecosystem and on third-party dApps. With the ability to securely store assets from many blockchains, transact them quickly, and connect to DeFi services like staking, savings, and lending, we think RioWallet will become people’s preffered cryptocurrency wallet.

Q3. Does Rio Defi have a reliable Interoperability infrastructure that would efficiently connect businesses with users?

Ans — Rio infrastructure efficiently connects organizations (banks, merchants, dApps) with users across multiple blockchains. We do this by having an seemless, integrated experience when users move between fiat currencies to cryptocurrencies and back again. We’ll have an integration with MoonPay that enables users to purchase cryptocurrencies directly through RioWallet using their debit card.

Q4. You say that you will distribute RFUEL for new users registration. How much was distributed until now? Also, there are 350 million RFUEL reserved for staking. How much is stil left and how is the process of staking?

Ans — We will distribute 10 free RFUEL to new users of RioWallet, which is enough for 100 transactions since the current transaction fee is 0.1 RFUEL. These promotional RFUEL can only be used for transaction fees; they cannot be transfered or traded.

We have not distirbuted any of this free RFUEL yet, nor have we distributed any of the staking rewards, because we haven’t generated the Rio Fuel (RFUEL) token yet (except in a test environment for internal use).

Q5. How will RioDeFi generate profitable income to sustain your project and what is the revenue model? How will it make a profit for your investors and your project?

Ans — Every action on RioChain has a transaction cost (0.1 RFUEL for basic transactions) that is paid in RioFuel (RFUEL), which is its native platform (gas) token. The more dApps that build on RioChain, the more demand there will be for RFUEL, and with a fixed supply of 1 Billion and a rapidly expanding ecosystem of dApps, users, and businesses built to support the ecosystem, we believe that RFUEL will increasingly gain in value over time in proportion to the growth of the network.

RioDeFi will also earn revenues by engaging in new ventures with entrepreneurs and businesses who seek to build products and services on RioChain. We have arranged our business model so that we can get paid in tokens for assisting projects to grow.

Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session for the Rio DeFi team!

Q1. What are the benefits to any decentralized application project using Rio Chain core technology?

Ans — dApps that build on RioChain benefit from faster speeds, greater scalability, low transaction costs, low energy consumption, strong security, and access to fiat currency on- and off-ramps. For Rio Chain, this translates into 2 second block times and up to 3,000 transactions per second.

Additionally, 20% of transaction fees generated by the network are payed back to dApps.

Q2. What is the mutual development between Mantradao and Rio Defi? Will you share users or business value?

Ans — MANTRA DAO was incubated by RioDeFi. Because MANTRA DAO is built on RioChain, users of MANTRA DAO are automatically users of RioChain since the OM token will soon utilize the RST-88 format (RioChain standard token). Every user of OM tokens’ many features will use RFUEL to pay for transferring, staking, and lending OM and other RioChain assets.

MANTRA DAO is a community-governed DeFi platform, while RioDeFi connects DeFi to CeFi through licensed businesses such as our licensed cryptocurrency exchange in Estonia.

Q3. The covid-19 will have a long lasting effect. How does it affect Rio DeFi and how do you look for a solution to align?

Ans — COVID-19 has been terrible, but one positive effect that came out of it is that it gave us time to focus and build. Without much else to do or conferences to travel to, we’ve been able to do more work and build faster than we ever have in the past. This has allowed us to accelerate our plans. We think COVID-19 has also helped to spur the adoption of digital assets and mobile payment solutions, as these can be utilized 24/7 from around the globe. No visit to a bank needed.

Q4. DEFI is currently a trend for investors. What do you think about the competition with other DEFI projects? What are the points in which competitors in the market cannot beat Rio DeFi?

Ans — RioDeFi‘s fully integrated ecosystem of technologies and solutions enable a seamless Fiat/Crypto interface, which will help more people gain access to cryptocurrencies. Our wallet is very accessible through our OAuth solution, and we are very excited about our dApp store that will feature amazing projects like MANTRA DAO, Bitpool, KQJ, and others.

RioChain’s CrossFi (cross-chain DeFi) dApps, such as MANTRA DAO, are on the cutting-edge of blockchain technology, and will enable many new financial services.

Q5. What is Riodefi’s strongest advantage that you think will make your team lead the market? And state what strengths to beat competitors?

Ans — Our main competitor is Crypto.com. We both offer a digital wallet, payments, merchant services, an exchange, and a blockchain that interact in a fluid manner.

Where we think we can add more value is with our end-to-end fiat to crypto back to fiat gateway that will provide users with access to both DeFi and CeFi in a secure manner. Our chain is also open for other third-party dApps to come build on it to grow the ecosystem together, whereas their chain is primarily focused on supporting their own applications.

Crypto.com offers fantastic products, but we think that being built on Substrate and operating within the Polkadot ecosystem will enable us to grow beyond them in the coming years.

Q6. Recently Rio Defi announced that it has partnered with BCW Group. Can you talk more about this partnership? What solution will you jointly provide and will the community members benefit from it?

Ans — I’m good friends with Kyle and Dewey, who are two of the partners of BCW Group. They are leading the way when it comes to integrating payment solutions with blockchain systems.

BCW brings with it a breadth of knowledge and experience through its work with notable industry leaders such as MakerDAO, Klaytn, and other fintech organisations looking for global payment gateway solutions for onramps and offramps into their digital platform offerings. BCW from the onset will bring its technical expertise to strengthen the underlying network infrastructure for RioDeFi to enhance security, stabilisation and decentralisation of the network.

Q7. What new crypto business models can be created after the launch of the platform, Rio DeFi? What are the use cases for RFUEL coin holders?

Ans —

RFUEL can also be used for staking to help maintain the security of RioChain’s ecosystem. Our staking & validation rewards make up 35% of the total supply of RFUEL. Here’s our planned staking rewards distribution model:

Q8. Can you explain what you mean when you say that Rio-chain operates a blockChain federation “hybrid federation model” rather than a permissionless blockchain?

Ans — RioChain currently operates as a federated blockchain rather than a permissionless public blockchain. As noted above, we use a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus model. In the early phases of its development, the Rio network will only have a handful of nodes that are run by Rio DeFi and our founding partners. This will ensure the security of the network from the beginning.

Within 3–6 months, we will be moving from PoA to a Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) model, which will be very similar to what’s currently used by both Polkadot and Kusama.

Q9. Do you consider Compound and KAVA to be your competitors? What are the benefits of Rio DeFi in terms of functionality and security?

Ans — We love both Compound and KAVA. In fact, MANTRA DAO, a dApp built on RioChain, is planning to integrate Compound into its ecosystem, and we’re actually planning to run a KAVA validator node in the future.

MANTRA DAO, powered by RioChain, will make it very simple and user-friendly to stake crypto-assets with just a click of a button to earn both native staking rewards & OM rewards.

Q10. How can Rio DeFi help people in countries where banking is not available?

Ans — RioWallet can easily be used to access cryptocurrencies and dApps from either a computer or mobile phone, allowing many more people access to financial services.

Q11. Can you explain what Rio generic Asset bridge is and how it works?

Ans — Rio Generic Asset Bridge

For cross-chain interoperability, the core developmental task is designing how to bring one blockchain’s assets onto other blockchains in a secure and transparent manner. Currently, many blockchain networks are pursuing “trustless” cross-chain approaches, such as Lightning Network and Liquid sidechain. But, after years of development, such applications are still not mature enough for mainstream adoption. Either the user experience is too complex, or there is not enough functionality to cover the cross-chain assets. We prefer to adopt a Federation based cross-chain mechanism (Federated Blockchain).

IRioDeFi has partnered with Hex Trust, a licensed and regulated Trust company in Hong Kong that’s focused on the custody of diigtal assets. They use bank-grade Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and a multi-sig process to secure cross-chain assets on RioChain. This process creates a seamless, cross-chain transfer link, ensures security, and eliminates the risk of a single point of failure.

The Rio Generic Asset Bridge supports simultaneous cross-chain transfers of multiple assets, and the end-to-end functionality can be summarized as follows:

1. A user locks an asset (e.g. Bitcoin) on the original chain by depositing the asset in the custodial account.

2. The mapped asset is issued to the user’s address on Rio Chain.

3. The new Rio Chain asset can then be transferred between users or used in dApps on Rio Chain; all Rio Chain asset transactions are finalized within 2 seconds of transfer.

4. A user with a non-zero asset balance requests a withdrawal from Rio Chain to their designated address on the original chain (e.g. Ethereum blockchain).

5. The asset is then unlocked and sent to the user’s designated address on the original chain.

The design of this universal gateway is mainly divided into Generic Deposit Gateway and Generic Withdrawal Gateway.

Q12. If we compare Rio Chain with Ethereum Chain, what are the strongest points of Rio Chain?

Will Rio Chain be used only to host DeFi projects? Will there be room for other projects that do not want to get involved in that system?

Ans — RioChain is faster, more scalable (up to 3,000 TPS compared to Ethereum’s 17 TPS), and has lower transaction fees than Ethereum.

RioChain is already hosting different kinds of dApps than just DeFi ones. We’ll continue building out our functionality so that we can hve a healthy, robust dApps ecosystem.

Q13. Why Rio Defi?

Ans — https://riochain.io/article/why-did-we-create-rio-defi

Here are some important links of Rio Defi 👇

Website: https://riochain.io/

Telegram: http://t.me/riodefiofficial

Telegram ANN: https://t.me/RioDeFiNews

Twitter: https://twitter.com/riodefiofficial