Thank you to the NanoNews Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Ardor on September 15, 2020. This guest star Francisco Sarrias, Jelurida Senior Sales Engineer. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 62th AMA recap!
We are glad to meet here:
Francisco Sarrias, Jelurida Senior Sales Engineer
For taking your time out from busy schedule for the AMA!
Introduction Session
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Ardor?
I studied telecom engineering in Barcelona and after working for a big corporation I decided to work on my own collaboration with different companies and planned to create a couple of startups. In 2016 I owned a small web hosting company when cloud computing went mainstream.
I was trying to make some profit from all the hardware and datacenter space I already invested in, and this is how I discovered cryptocurrencies and I was shocked when I learned about NXT, a crypto that did not need expensive mining because it was based on the Proof of Stake algorithm.
As I have been always concerned about protecting the environment and the development team was amazing I quickly became part of the NXT community. After the Ardor ICO in 2017, I joined the Jelurida staff as a Senior Sales Engineer.
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Ardor?
Around 2016, the limitations of the existing single chain / single token architecture of existing products (BTC, ETH, NXT) were already clear to us. The problem with these early products is that for example if your token becomes very popular it also becomes too expensive to use as we clearly see with BTC and ETH these days.
And this is how Ardor came to be, with Ardor/ARDR as the parent chain responsible for the PoS consensus and multiple child-chains which provide the platform for decentralized application development.
The benefits of this design include the bundling process which improves on-chain scalability to around 100 TX/Sec as well as the ability to remove child-chain transactions from the blockchain after they are confirmed to reduce blockchain bloat. An additional asset for the businesses is to sponsor the transaction fees for their child-chain users.
This whole architecture was launched on mainnet in January 2018 and it has been working without problems ever since.
We top the architecture with multiple transaction types, hundreds of available API which the wallet user interface we provide out of the box implements as a reference implementation.
The design is very flexible and easy to enhance with, for example, a contract framework, server-side add-ons, and wallet plugins.
All of this is available today on mainnet, ready for use!
Q3: What companies/projects do you see as competitors, and how does Ardor stand out compared to them?
We have a lot of respect for other projects with a real developing team behind them trying to bring the latest state of the art to a production mainnet.
Unfortunately when you look at Coinmarketcap sixty percent of the more capitalized cryptos are pure bitcoin clones with no real innovation behind them, ERC-20 tokens that are simple speculative instruments or just plainly Ponzi schemes and alt coins were there is simple no development since months.
Competition is very healthy for the blockchain environment and we can all learn from each others but market speculation obfuscates and confuses the uninformed investor that puts her money into dead coins or into pump and dump schemes.
Jelurida launched in 2018 the first multi chain network which allows sharding of networks and applications, it is running in the same Proof of Stake consensus algorithm that NXT is using for seven years now and has a incredible lightweight smart contracts framework in Java that avoids gas collapse, so basically everything that Ethereum 2.0 is trying to make a reality unsuccessfully and still they are much more know that we are, you realize that hype and marketing in the crypto space is much more important that robust and good technology, we need to learn about this lesson.
Q4. What is the use-case of the Ardor Token?
If you stake Ardor in a forging (mining) node you earn the fees of the blocks you mine plus a special reward that we are sponsoring for 6 months to help you cover the costs of the server hosting until the transactions increase. I see that many of the questions can be quickly answered simply by heading to jelurida.com and reviewing the resources and extensive documentation we already posted online. So I’ll focus on more up to date and trendy questions.
Each time a customer (startup, corporate, community) asks us to include a new child-chain they choose what it will look like, what features are included, which permissions, etc… We can customize it, the advantage for the $ARDR holder is that it represents more transaction fees for their stake.
Q5. What are the major milestones Ardor achieved so far & what are in future pipeline?
Ardor is the first PoS multi chain architecture on Maine right now. The idea is to split the responsibility between a parent token used for securing the proof of stake consensus ($ARDR token) and multiple child tokens each dedicated for its own decentralized application.
The first permissionless child chain was IGNIS, it has all the features enabled. One of the benefits of the software architecture is the bundling, it is a process that receives the fees in the child chain token and pays in the ARDR token. It improves the scalability to give or take 100 Tx/sec.
The Proof of Stake protocol of Ardor is a reliable protocol, very extended worldwide with more than 1.000 nodes and running for many years (inherit from the Nxt public blockchain launched in 2013). This whole architecture was launched on mainnet in January 2018 and is working without problems ever since.
If you want to launch your blockchain (child chain), you have to contact Jelurida and get a license. The main reason for this process is to prevent scams that are very common in the decentralized sphere.
When you have a child chain, you can also sponsor the fees of your customers, which increases the easiness of adoption of the technology
the Ardor ecosystem currently has several projects and child chains. Let’s start with the child chains: – MPG, which is a real estate company that is innovating this field with the Ardor technology. It was recently approved by the regulators – Bitswift, a Canadian company that is building many tools. They recently launched pegged assets to Bitcoin and Ethereum – Triffic, the new child chain to be launch in mid-september. It is a gamification app that enables to earn tokens just looking for beacons with your phone – Ignis, the fully decentralized child chain for everybody to use
So, as Ignis enables also other projects to come, we also have several projects launched in this child chain. To name a few:
- A-trust, smart voting, Hotcity, Cycle4Value, Gallery Defender, ArdorRocks
We also have agreements with educational companies that are in touch with top professionals. For instance: ISDI school, IEB…
Tarasca as well, it is one of the most important projects launched in Ignis
This month it will launched on Ignis a very important project that is currently under the radar. I am looking forward to it. Also, I don’t want to forget the recent project called GiveSafely, which the giant give.org is behind it
Twitter Session
Q1: Explain more about multi-signature configuration, why do you use This Configuration, what’s the advantages over Single – signature configuration?
Multisignature is one of the different transaction types available out of the box in the Ardor blockchain and its child-chains. You can use it without coding a single line of software, just using the web wallet or a Rest API call.
Multisignature is used when you requiere more than one blockchain account to approve a transaction, for example imagine an account that holds the funds of a company, you will use multi signature to enforce that at least two of the directors of the company approve any transfer of tokens to avoid a single director to behave dishonestly.
Q2: Is parallel transaction processing of child chains possible? How do you get them to be processed at the same time without any errors?
Yes. Transactions from each child chain are handled by a process called bundler that’s not part of the consensus. Bundlers of each child chain process only transactions of that child chain and are independent of each other, so they operate in parallel. Bundlers generate a parent transaction called “child chain block” that goes into the next block.
Q3: Jelurida has $NXT, $ARDR, $IGNIS, and $JLDRA tokens in it ecosystem. Can you explain what main use and role of each token simply? Do these token related to each other?
The $JLDRA token was only used during the ICO and it does not exists anymore.
NXT was our first cryptocurrency (ticker $NXT) born in 2013 when almost all alt coins were clones of the Bitcoin code, NXT blockchain software was written from scratch in Java and implemented successfully for the first time in history the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm, it’s name means that NXT was the “next” thing after Bitcoin
ARDOR is the name of the cryptocurrency ( ticker $ARDR ) and multi chain architecture blockchain launched in 2018 by JELURIDA as a new version of NXT with the capability of having Child-Chains ( or shards ) for each customer or application, this is revolutionary because it allows solving the blockchain scalability problems that other one layer only networks suffer nowadays. Her name comes from the dictionary acceptation “extreme vigor or energy “.
IGNIS is the name of the first Child-Chain in ARDOR and also its native cryptocurrency ( ticker $IGNIS ), IGNIS allows anyone to launch create their tokens and market them in its integrated DEX ( Decentralized Exchange) without coding, just using an intuitive web wallet. Her name comes from the dictionary acepción “a light that sometimes appears in the night” , IGNIS is the light that makes smart contracts available to non tech savvy people, everyone can enjoy powerful preprogrammed smart contracts in the platform just using the computer mouse.
Q4: Why does ARDOR’s source code come from Java and not from another computer platform? What are the advantages of Java over others? They could clarify.
For those who just want to build crypto applications but do not have the development skills, we launched a child-chain in Ardor called Ignis, which holds a dozen pre-programmed smart contracts that you can use via the wallet web interface. So you can issue your own equivalent to an ERC-20 token, sell it on our decentralized exchange, pay dividends, organize a poll and send encrypted messages without having any idea about Solidity or Java — just an easy to use web interface.
NXT was our first cryptocurrency (ticker $NXT) born in 2013 when almost all alt coins were clones of the Bitcoin code, NXT blockchain software was written from scratch in Java and implemented successfully for the first time in history the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm, it’s name means that NXT was the “next” thing after Bitcoin
Java is the most established programming language in the world for business use. This means that existing businesses are much more likely to have Java developers than solidity developers. Add to the amazing tools Java has for development, refactoring, debugging, profiling compared to the not so good solidty tools and you can see that it makes a lot of sense to develop in Java specially when integration with existing tools and services is required
Our smart contracts are also written in Java with a more secure approach than their counterparts because they do not hold token balances, so they are more secure and less prone to hacks.
Also we do not execute the smart contracts in the whole network but only on selected nodes, which makes interfacing with the external world very easy using Java libraries. our goal is to bring more devs to our platform that create exciting things with them
Q5: What does Ardor expect from its partnership with the Give Safely donation platform? What have been the results of working with this project so far?
For those who just want to build crypto applications but do not have the development skills, we launched a child-chain in Ardor called Ignis, which holds a dozen pre-programmed smart contracts that you can use via the wallet web interface or through the ResT API.
So you can issue your own equivalent to an ERC-20 token, sell it on our decentralized exchange, pay dividends, organize a poll and send encrypted messages without having any idea about Solidity or Java.
Give Safely uses these set of tools for the project and we are willing to help them make it a success but they run the project autonomously and maybe they could better answer this question than me.
Live AMA
Q1. Does the Ardor team have a training and orientation system for crypto newcomers? How do you attract and reach them?
We have a very friendly documentations at https://ardordocs.jelurida.com/Getting_started
Q2. Most Investors often care less about technology, but more about the value of tokens. Despite the state-of-the art architecture upon which ARDR and Jelurida is built on, how do you balance the development of technology, while increasing $ARDR token value?
In the long term if you do not have the technology you will not have customers and then your blockchain and tokens would be useless, we focus on technology not just hype and market fluctuations.
Q3: Trader are only think about profit that they can earn. As a coin, what can Ardor offer to trader and investor? And how can Ardor convincing them to trade and invest on $ARDR?
Once transaction fees increase on the network due to more child chains using it staking Ardor will have a nice return on investment.
Q4. Security, Liquidation and Slashing risks are associated with Defi protocols.What are ARDR countermeasures to deals with such risks? What are ARDR Risk to Reward ratio, compared to other DeFi protocol platform?
Our smart contracts do not hold token balances because they are stateless, so they are not prone to hackings and lock downs.
Q5. Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake,Dapps..) and what is your goals in this year ?
Our focues is in launching new child-chains in the platform, you can thing about them as virtual blockchains that use the same nodes, each child chais has an application and a promoter, they could be used for DeFi, logistics or whatever application.
Q6. Are you planning to promote your project in different countries, where English is not good? Do you have a local community for them to better understand your project?
We already have subsidiaries in Nigeria and Korea, we are working with a local company in China and we are always open to persons interested in becoming our ambassadors in particular regions and languages, just send us your proposal at info@jelurida.com
Q7. How will Ardor blockchain solve the scaling problem? And how will the threat of centralization be overcome? How does Ardor enable high blockchain speed?
Our multichain infrastructure solves the problem of scaling, because each application has its own shard on the network.
Q8. Blockchain has many Disadvantages as well, How do you plan to merge Blockchain as well as existing Technology to make it more Secure?
When we talk to corporations the firts yhing we do is find out if they really need a blockchain to solve their application, blockchain cannot be used for everything but as we recently saw after the Twitter hack and Facebook data leak, centralized platform are very weak once they become too big, decentralization provided by blockchain is a good solution for that.
Q9. You recently mentioned that you don’t want to scam tokens on your platform. How do you make sure there are no scam tokens? What security mechanism does Ardor use?
For launching a child -chain we ask you to pass a process involving explaining Jelurida which is your business model or application, in the case of using the IGNIS child chain anybody can launch their own tokens without Jelurida’s intervention, and there you could have SCAM tokens, this is the price you need to pay for real decentralization.
Q10. Blockchain has many Disadvantages as well, How do you plan to merge Blockchain as well as existing Technology to make it more Secure?
Our technology stack is written in Java language which has a lot of libraries to talk to legacy systems running the corporate applications, this makes very easy to interface those closed systems with a public blockchain and bring transparency to their processes
Q11. There we see many projects that claims they are fully Decentralized. But they done their work in a Centralized way. How can we sure that $ARDOR is fully Decentralized? Can you please tell us what’s $ARDOR working method?
Any one can setup a validation node in Ardor, you just need to incest 1000 Ardors that cost less thant US$65, there is no voting to becoming validator, nor a big quantity f money to be locked, etc…more over are our consensus algorith is PoS you can run a node in a tiny raspberry pi or in your Android phone, this really decentraliced because ANYONE can particpate in the network
Q12. Most proof of Stake implementations are subject to attacks, Whats different with the Nxt/Ardor consensus protocol, how secure is it against such attacks and what’s steps have been taken to fix this major issue?
The recent attacks to ETC, Bitcoin Gold etc…where to PoW chains, it is very easy attacking a PoW blockchain just by renting some hash power from a cloud provider, I do not remember any PoS succesful attack, in fact our original blockchain $NXT has been running without any issue since 2013 without any succesful attack
Q13: According to Jelurida’s whitepaper, the Roadmap stopped in 2018. How are Ardor journey after that and what are major milestones that Ardor achieved during that time?
We are going to update our roadmap in the website soon, but it is not true it ended in 2018, we have been updating it in the website althouh not in the whitepaper, our later release included ful support for Ledger hardware wallet, HD seed addresses and very exciting features for our smart contract framework
Q14. Yeild farming is a new trending so Ardor have any plan to yeild farming system development?
Yield farming means paying holders an interest, we are seeing the recent DeFi tokens that they create artificial yield out of thin air by issuing new tokens or giving away money to increase people staking them. This is a bubble and we do not play bubbles because they pop after some months because they are not sustainable. $ARDR token holders get the transaction fees of the block their mine by staking their tokens and using them for forging, this is sustainable and more profitable in the long term, the more child-chains that use our platform the more fees the token holders will earn.
Q15. There we see many projects that claims they are fully Decentralized. But they done their work in a Centralized way. How can we sure that $ARDOR is fully Decentralized? Can you please tell us what’s $ARDOR working method?
Any one can setup a validation node in Ardor, you just need to incest 1000 Ardors that cost
Q16. From a startup project to a mainstream project, being a pioneer in the industry, does the team anticipate that many new startups will show up and compete?
We already saw a boom of blockchain projects financed by the 2017 ICOs, most of them have already burnt their capital in useless initiatives ( i.e. NEM ), do not know what to do with the raised money ( i.e. XRP ), do not know how to fulfill their roadmap ( i.e ETH 2.0 ), we are confident our strategy of building a solid infrastructure and investing in sales people visiting CiOs of brick and mortar companines wil have a return in the medium term.
Q17. Why did you choose our community to host the AMA today? Can you list 1-2 killer features so that it can compete and outperform other competitors? What are your plans for 2020? Do you have plans to get users to choose your platform?
Your community is very tech savvy and want to know what is behind the tokens where they insvet the money, it was logical to come here and answer the question you may have of our platform that tradictionally has not deployed big marketing efforts
Q18. Truly, you’ve done AMA in many telegram groups, so what next, what other way will you make your project more popular?
Our projects becomes more know as new decentralized applications launch their child chains on it, for example this 22nd september it will launch a mobile phone game call triffic.app, TRIFFIC IS A FREE AUGMENTED REALITY APP THAT REWARDS YOU IN CRYPTO CALLED GPS TOKENS, that’s aour strategy for marketing, the succes of our customers dApps will be our success
I think this has been a lot of information for today
Please go to our website www.jelurida.com and social networks for more info
Host: Thanksyou sir for answering all question on this AMA event, Its great to having you on our AMA Series
Website: https://www.jelurida.com/ardor
Ardor Forum: https://ardorforum.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArdorPlatform
Telegram: https://t.me/ardorplatform
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/wkcmqff
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ardor/
Thank you for trusting NanoNews as the organizer of the event today, hopefully everyone can understand about Ardor
Join our Telegram group and you can talk directly with other Communities and enjoy some of the events that we created for Nano Gang, We are always here to suppor
