Steven Pu on informal transactions with Taraxa

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have stephen pooh the founder of taraxa steven welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here today yeah it's really a pleasure to be invited and uh i've been a longtime fan of your show ashton great to be here thank you so much

0:19steven that's wonderful and i'm really excited for taraxa and i know your team's working on a lot of different things right now if we could kick it off the show with just an overview and the focus of taraxan what are some of the problems that your team is solving for yeah sure i'm happy to talk about that so taraxa is really designed to track informal transactional

0:38agreements um what does that mean right i mean the vast majority of agreements that are generating the world today are informal right so people are texting each other um you know chatting with each other giving each other a call and say hey we're gonna do this you guys okay well let's just get on with it right so that type of agreement is often uncaptured and very difficult to verify

0:59uh it's over 80 percent of the world's agreements are like that i mean it makes total sense because you and i are not walking around signing legal contracts every single day every single moment of the day right yeah so um these type of agreements are very convenient but they lack clarity and can often lead to a lot of confusion and disputes right adding a lot of

1:17friction to our business um yeah so that's what traxxas really designed to solve is to make these agreements very capturable easy to capture and uh highly verifiable with the tamper proof who said what when um you know yeah definitely that's a great introduction thank you steven and i completely agree that no one has the time to go around and you know get a notary or get a a lawyer

1:40involved just to for a simple informal transaction or even to sign things most of the time it's a handshake or just a word um so i'm curious more on if you could elaborate into the platform and how are you making this more formal in terms of capturing that informal transaction without adding in all of the complicated steps yeah sure um so we have several platforms

2:01with the the one that i'll tell you about is marinate which is designed to track informal agreements that are made between people so the first principle that we have is that we actually get you where you are right so for example you and i are texting each other and i text you and i say hey ashley we're gonna you know i owe you you know a beer and you know i'll i'll buy you a beer next

2:22friday right and then i will cc marinate and then marinade would then just shoot back um uh the message and say hey we received an agreement and uh do you agree or just and that's right there in your text right you click on it it takes you to a web app and you don't need to do anything and just you just come back and keep keep on texting and that's it so number

2:41one the user experience is very very um frictionless uh if you like using texting if you like using chat if you like using whatever keep using whatever it is that you're using uh we integrate with them and not the other way around we don't force users to actually learn the application and that you don't even need to download an application or register

2:59right um the the the second value i think we create is that we actually add clarity we help bottom line these informal conversations because you and i could be talking about i don't know three other things in our conversation and there's a little bit of business here that get that got mixed in and it's sometimes very unclear sort of like we walk away from the conversation

3:17having different understandings of what we agreed upon or if we agreed upon anything at all right so this action of actually you know saying say hey you know we have an agreement committed yes or no that adds you know that adds an additional layer clarity oh this is what we agreed upon helps you bottom line is conversations and the third one is really the audit

3:36trail right so what happens when you click on that agree or disagree link well it takes your web browser in the background um there's a local uh private key that you're actually signing the message right so the message gets hashed and you're signing it and if you agree or disagree obvious uploading to the blockchain for an audit trail so later on if you're sending

3:56confusion like you know i show up next friday you're like where's my beer i'm like what are you talking about right here i know right here very very clear i lost my phone i don't remember the text i did the text all right it's right here right yeah you know you said this is your signature um you know who said what when so this is really really designed to

4:14manipulate help very easily capture these informal agreements which are flying everywhere uh there's no centralized place for to uh for them to be stored and also make them very very easily verifiable so that we really shortened the time when people are getting very very confused about things definitely and great explanation there and i wanted to touch further on the

4:34the last part you mentioned about the audit trail and that's sort of where the blockchain comes in i was looking into tarexa you have the afro jenny's if that's right the test net in your own protocol can you talk about the need for a main protocol from your firm to track it and if there's something unique about that i know it's like a dag uh mechanism yeah so i mean i think

5:02philosophically i just want to explain that um you know we very early on we recognize that if you only build applications right um very often you become bottlenecked by the fact that you don't understand or or or have the capability to modify the underlying infrastructure to fit the application's needs blockchain technology is by no means mature or standardized or commoditized

5:23maybe in 10 years it will be this right now it's not so we need to have that capability um so that's why we built the layer one because we wanted that flexibility to be able to adapt it um you know we have a lot of interesting features built into it um i'll talk about some of the technical throughput features and i'll talk about some of the future application specific features we're

5:42actually going to build in so technically speaking the first thing that everyone needs to solve is throughput right so we have a blog that topology that actually allows us to scale throughput way beyond you know what single chain topologies allow without sacrificing security or decent transition so that's a very very interesting innovation the second thing that we did is that

6:02we added true finality into the block data and the interesting thing about adding true finality is that we're actually able to optimize the executional layer by writing into numerical database in a concurrent manner rather than having to do it sequentially and that's just 10x is the throughput potential um and then of course third uh one of the interesting innovations we had is we

6:23replaced proof of work with a combination of a verifiable delay function and verifiable random function so we reproduce a random fair random delay of proof of work without you know the earth environmental destroying power drink i think maybe the world only needs one proof of work chain that's probably enough um so these are some of the innovations that we've created to really address the

6:44scalability problem some of the application specific things right you know for example the um later on we're going to actually integrate these um data anchoring uh uh functionalities which is how we build these other logs we're going to integrate these primitives directly into a protocol layer so it's not a generic vm interpreted kind of a generic contract but something that is

7:07at the protocol layer can be executed much much more quickly and much more efficiently um another thing that we actually try to do is that um interesting is that these data anchoring transactions are stateless transactions which means that they don't really need to be executed in any particular order which means we can execute them concurrently without worrying that you

7:27know you run into a double spend or anything like that because they're stateless transactions so there are a lot of these application specific features that we've been actually going to build into our layer one to make sure we fully take advantage of the fact that we have the capability to modify layer 1 to optimize it for our applications purposes yeah

7:46definitely and that sounds like you're building it you know with a specific purpose to make sure that these informal transactions are uh done properly but in a way that doesn't necessarily need to be done in the way that it's on ethereum where you know it's costing a lot and you need to have specific orders and because they're stateless transactions

8:05non-related uh you don't really need that exact you know functionality which will make it lighter and faster and cheaper and i'm curious a little bit more on the timing i know you've built the test net out and the timing of the application as well where are you at right now is the full informal transactions live and testing on the test net and then as you go to the main net how does that

8:30relate to the release of the application right um so the main network um so okay so let's go to the application first i mean we spent a lot of time actually market testing the application we uh piloted with a few construction companies and uh and actually a logistics company um and uh yeah and then we you know but that's by no means where i i would say that we're not anywhere

8:50close to product market fit it usually takes anybody anywhere between 12 18 13 hit that um so where we are is that we have a working prototype of the application that has been deployed uh with a few test customers and we're using it giving us feedback uh we're doing a rewrite of the application uh to uh to improve his architecture um and then uh and introducing a lot more integrations

9:11with these baseline communication tools that we're talking about so we're going to be rolling out our api layer public api layer and also we're going to be rolling out integrations with things like whatsapp uh wechat um and telegram right so i mean if you cover what's happening with chat that's like most of the world's traffic right there um we're also going to be rolling out

9:30sms integration as well so we want to make sure we cover all the mainstream um all the mainstream uh communication tools so that people can truly basically stay using whatever tool that is they want to use uh in terms of the mainland and testnet is that we have a relatively stable test that you can't say perfectly stable until until you are perfectly stable

9:52um test that has been running since or the end of last year and it's getting more and more stable every single year um and launching a main net this year is one of our priorities so we will be rolling out incentivized test net and staking very very soon very very soon actually um as soon as we are able to uh fully stabilize our test network now um having these applications running on top

10:15of a test net is relatively okay as long as we have a mechanism to uh uh to recover the data or retain the data even if the tester crashes so that's that's also a very very critical thing uh you need to go into any blockchain network is because you can never guarantee it will never ever crash right so we do have that mechanism in place we're in the process of refining

10:36it um so having it running on test network um it's not really functionally any different than having a main network um and but of course you know one of the critical things we're driving when we get to main net is also decentralization you have to continuously make sure that more and more people stake their coins and and actually um you have a decentralized

10:54network so um these these goals are not necessarily sequential um they can be done concurrently and we are doing the concurrent to make sure that we don't lose any time definitely thanks for that and i'm excited to see that product market fit continue to grow and when i'm looking forward to the whatsapp integration and telegram specifically i think a lot of people will be using

11:13that especially people that are crypto natives that are ready to start using the functionality because then you're reaching likely billions of people in a short amount of time and you you mentioned you mentioned there that you're working on the staking really soon i'm interested to hear about the staking which i'm guessing has to do with the taraxa tara coin and also just overall about

11:36about the coin and how it functions in the ecosystem does it need to be required to be used within the application um and what else it is used within the ecosystem yeah that's that's a really great question so um our our coin on the terrace of doterra token um it's a pretty standard layer one token right so uh being layer one you know you use it for gas fees and use it for staking

11:58um and you're staking rewards right so we have a you have you know a similar setup compared to some of the more mainstream um layer one infrastructure out there like you know polka dot or cosmos is another thing we have a whatever target um we have a target um staking threshold of 67 once you hit that there's an annualized return of up to maximum 20

12:18for people who actually do stake and run notes right so it's pretty standard now um the way that we actually think about the relationship between application and layer one um is that um is that you know this this is a this is a sort of a work utility token so the more traffic the application drives uh into uh well the more traffic the application has then the more demand it generates

12:41um for the token because you use the network more and more so that's the fundamental um i think mechanism by which applications drive demand for layer one um we do have this interesting setup in which the application itself is a semi-centralized platform right because we want to make sure that uh we get the the best advantages the both centralized systems as well as decentralized systems

13:04so centralized systems uh one of the things that is you know very very good at well first of all it's very scalable it has excellent user experience people are used to sort of the seamless user experience um but the problem of course with it is that it can cheat it's a black box no one knows what exactly it's doing with your data with anything right

13:21so all you have to do is make sure that decentralized networks are used um uh to make sure that the centralized networks are kept honest and kept transparent so that's really our model right so the end user never really comes into contact with blockchain or coins from wallets or secret keys or anything like that because we all know as soon as that's

13:40exposed to the end user you lose 99 of your potential addressable market right people get scared off they can't they can't deal with it so they don't need to deal with any of that now the application server is the one that actually is sort of it's a it's sort of like a notary right it it takes all the stuff that's signed by the end users and it throws it onto the blockchain on

14:00their behalf right and that's the one that's actually consuming these uh uh these these tokens and using interface in the transit network um and later on you know as we start opening up our apis other people can develop on top of it and then you know they similarly can actually do the same thing so we have this structure in which the application is the only thing that

14:19interface the application back-end server is only in the interfaces with the transfer blockchain and the more traffic the application gets the more demand that the uh that the blockchain has right and that's a great symbiotic relationship and i think both of those application and the layer one protocol will need to work together and grow together and that sort of leads

14:41me to one of the last questions because we are running short on time but in terms of the longer term success of adoption of the application and the blockchain what do you think will be one of the main factors uh to success as you continue to grow it out yeah so we're um we're pretty focused on this idea that an ecosystem is only successful when you are

15:02able to demonstrate that uh developers can make money by developing their ecosystem it's just as simple as that right i mean it's a no-brainer if you think about it um people don't come to your ecosystem develop on mass because they think it's quote unquote interesting um that might be a short-term interest but long-term they have to make a living out of it

15:22so um what we're doing right now is that we are going out there building these application platforms ourselves we're driving adoption for it um you know uh finding customers and we want to make sure that this application is a cell standalone viable economic entity and we need to prove that to the marketplace right and once we prove that to the marketplace people think oh yes so

15:43informal agreements that make sense right that isn't viable business model right so if you integrate this into other applications you can also similarly you know charge a premium for it because people are willing to pay for this service right so when we prove that out our own application platforms will have a much much easier time and a much stronger value proposition to

16:03third-party developers and say hey integrate this functionality into your application staff and you you also could charge for it right so it makes sense um but before you prove it um people would just be like i don't know like what are informal agreements never heard of it how does that make money i don't know right so um you're gonna have a very hard time convincing

16:22others to come and participate and grow the ecosystem and this is really i think the pitfall that we're seeing a lot of later when projects fall into is that you know they really have to sort of build it and they will come mentality and that typically does not work out as the market has enough for now so definitely a great answer and i completely agree steven

16:39and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with the layer one protocol as you head towards mainnet as you release more information on the staking and just as the application gets built out and the integrations come with more chat platforms what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved yeah i mean i think the easiest way is to

16:58follow us on twitter at taraxa underscore project so t a r a x a underscore p r o j e c t um and uh follow us there i mean uh all you can also join our telegram um uh at thruster project as well sounds great stephen i will leave both of those links in the description box below for the viewers as well all the best with traxxa moving forward i will definitely be following along

17:19myself and let's follow up in the near future great it's great talking to you ashley and great talk to you to your community as well you