Ergo AMA Wrap-Up February 4, 2022

Last week’s AMA featured Dan Friedman and Alex Chepurnoy fielding questions from the Ergo community. During his opening comments, Dan updated the community on Marketing and PR initiatives and revealed that the PR partner the Ergo Foundation has been working with will be actively assisting in media pushes, articles, and blog posts. One of their primary goals will be to establish and maintain a strong media presence, promoting the Ergo brand into more mainstream and electronic news platforms. In addition to this media push, Dan said the new website and rebranding are almost complete and will allow for greater ease of access of information.

Dan reminded the community that ErgoHack III starts next weekend and that the team has been preparing videos and content for the event. Discussing the community, Dan revealed that the more he gets into the ecosystem, the more he feels like the ecosystem is like a family and that it is an incredible feeling. He acknowledged that it may seem like a lot of projects have not yet been executed but that he expects to see exponential growth in the ecosystem over the next six months. Once things start to happen, the community can expect a snowball effect and Dan stated he is confident that the community will be pleased with what they see once plans come to fruition. 

Updating the community on exchanges, Dan conveyed that the team has stepped up preparation and pivoted some teams to concentrate on what is needed for DEX listings. This work will entail creating bridges and wrapped ERG as the team works towards Tier 1 listings. This work will not happen overnight and Dan suggested that the answer to promoting Ergo rests more in utility and user acquisition. Although listings will help onboard more people, Dan suggested that the community focus on what is being built on Ergo to promote the expansion of the user base. 

Concluding his opening remarks, Dan reminded the community to check out the latest Ergo Pulse episode, featuring Rob from the GetBlok smart contract mining pool. He also informed the audience that he will soon have a presentation detailing his plans for the commercial project he has been working on. He has also been invited to Dubai for an upcoming convention to speak about utility in blockchain and he relayed that he is excited to reach a new audience about Ergo while in attendance.

In Alex’s opening remarks, he reflected on the success of last year’s Ergo Summit and announced an invitation to the community to join Ergo for three different Summits in 2022. The first one (focusing on privacy and security) will take place shortly after ErgoHack III and will begin on February 17. Ergonauts can expect technical presentations as well as discussions covering regulation in regards to privacy and cryptocurrencies. Following this event, the next two Summits will highlight decentralized finance and Layer 2 solutions (side chains and interoperability), respectively.

Alex provided some insight on the amount of work going on behind the scenes. He discussed how current work is just as intense as the mainnet launch and that the priority has been to work on “improving stability and resilience everywhere,” especially as it applies to the protocol client and applications. These kinds of improvements will be ongoing and the community can expect to see new features and improvements over the coming weeks with the protocol client and nodes. 

Alex concluded his updates with a discussion on wallets. He acknowledged that Yoroi has had issues, especially during high demand time, but that two more wallets are coming: Nautilus Wallet and SafeW wallet. These are significantly faster and support mnemonic phrases from pre-existing Yoroi wallets. In addition to these wallets, ErgoPay support is coming to ErgoDEX, meaning ErgoDEX and other dApps will be able to support mobile wallets as well as browser wallet extensions.

AMA Questions and Summary

The following is a summary of questions posed by the audience during this AMA. Last week Dan and Alex answered questions on mining, commercial adoption, Kairon Labs, atomic swaps, digital identity, oracle pools, and the upcoming soft fork EIP27 vote. They also talk about wallet developments and Dan playfully engages with a community member about the reality of UFO’s. To view the full AMA, please head over to Ergo’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtwT9c_wQUo 

How do you think Ergo would compete with ETC, Ravencoin, etc. in terms of hashrate and attracting miners?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• With regards to utility, Ergo is way ahead of Ravencoin, which is just a Bitcoin fork with custom assets
• Ergo has decentralized auctions, crowdfunding, etc
• It’s just a question of time when Ergo will gain wider recognition
• The same for ETC, which has not been actively developed 
• With ETH going PoS, ETH miners may come to our chain
• For PoW coins, it seems that Ergo is already far ahead in regards to utility

Could you elaborate on what you said last week about the 1 million commercial users of Ergo in the next 2 years?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Will be doing a special video in the next couple of weeks to explain what he has been building with his team
• It’s an NFT powered ecosystem
• All these different entities will provide utilities
• Some of the utilities will be targeted towards small and mid-sized businesses
• Other parts will be designed on a nano level 
• The deployment of this suite of products will enable national adoption
• With national adoption, you open the market to millions of users
• Once these products have been developed, he will make an announcement
• National adoption will bring at least 1 million users in the next two years
• Thinks it is a conservative estimate 

Do you think devs are becoming increasingly susceptible to rushing work and not testing things properly? I feel “older” devs seem to be more pragmatic in their approach. Can Ergo combat this?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• There are different developers in the community
• We are not in charge of all of them
• We are trying to raise the bar whenever possible
• There are some community developers and their share is increasing
• You have a lot of stuff with very different quality
• With regards to the node, we have a lot of contributors
• We are trying to raise the bar all the time
• There is no reason for us to rush
• Always doing the appropriate testing and documentation
• Things are much better now in Ergo than one or two years ago
• We have a lot of external contributors

Any updates with Kairon Labs?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Yes, they have been actively working, making sure our liquidity is steady
• We will invite one of the guys from Kairon Labs to a future AMA very soon

Are Monero-like cross chain atomic swaps between Ergo and Bitcoin technically possible given that taproot is up?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Yes, we can do private swaps between Ergo and Bitcoin
• Have done demo swaps with Bitcoin Cash
• The only issue is if we look into DEXs built on atomic Swaps, unfortunately volume is not very large
• Does not expect private swaps will take the “cross-chain interaction field by storm”
• Maybe with recent events (like Wormhole hack), more secure cross chain solutions like swaps will be more popular
• There are certain problems with swaps - you need liquidity on both sides
• Can’t transfer something unconditionally to another chain
• Security is more tricky when more blockchains are involved

The Ergo ecosystem has been expanding fast lately. What recent project has impressed you the most in terms of code, smart contracts, functionality, and/or UX?

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Been impressed with the projects we’ve had on Ergo Pulse
• Big fan of ErgoLend
• ErgoDEX - thinks the UI and UX are very good
• • The attention to detail in the code is “top notch”
  • Behind the scenes, they have been working hard to make sure the dApp connectors are working well.
  • Working to get the Cardano side deployed soon
  • Not seen anyone complain about ErgoDEX yet - that’s a good sign
• GetBlok - amazing for governance and making a more democratic model for voting within the Ergo ecosystem
• SigmaValley is a really cool project!
• • Would like to host a Virtual Ergo Summit in SigmaValley

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Has been very busy and so hasn’t caught up on all the projects yet. Doesn’t know too much yet about SigmaValley and NFT projects
• Auction House and ErgoMixer
• Also in touch with ErgoPad team, Getblok, ErgoLend and ErgoDEX
• helped with auditing contracts for ErgoPad
• Talked with Getblok guys about their work as well
• Thinks they are doing great things

Is there a plan for digital identity on Ergo similar to Atala prism? It seems like that is a roadblock to expanding DeFi. Curious to know your thoughts on digital identity vs privacy in terms of DeFi.

Answered by Dan Friedman

• As far as digital identity on Ergo, that is in the works
• Discussed earlier in the beginning of the AMA
• Actively working on projects that will bring digital identity solutions to Ergo
• Once these projects are ready, will announce their deployment on Ergo

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Sometimes digital identity could be very useful
• • For example, lending
  • If you are talking about uncollateralized lending, you need some sort of reputation to be taken into account
• Privacy must be respected
• When reputation is not needed, privacy should be respected
• You can already do a lot
• • Mint SigUSD from the mixer
  • You can mix the stablecoin 
  • Can do a lot of things thanks to composability of contracts in the UTXO model
  • For example, he did oracle funding from the mixer 
• Potentially, privacy is already superior on Ergo
• There are a lot of exciting things still possible

Any plans for more oracle pools?

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Depends
• Everyone can launch oracle pools
• There is Oracle Pools 2.0
• Usually need some DeFi application to run an oracle pool

Tell us about the Nautilus Wallet audit. I want to swap my Yoroi for it but I'm worried about security.

Answered by Dan Friedman

• Security audit for Nautilus - have been in talks with Captain Nemo
• Going to be helping Nautilus with the security audit
• It’s in the works
• Once it’s complete, we will inform the community
• Then you will be able to fully utilize Nautilus without worrying about security
• “Nautilus is a really well built product”
• Dan is currently using the wallet
• Audit is coming and will let you know when it’s done

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Discussing different options
• It could be done with a grant from the Ergo Foundation 
• Other option is to have a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the security audit
• • Use Ergo Raffle

When will the soft fork vote be decided? I feel we have to get over this hurdle ASAP.

Answered by Alex Chepurnoy

• Timeline - will update EIP27 document and send to the pools again
• With regards to community support, there was a poll showing more than 90% of voters are in favor
• There is voting on GetBlok - will be starting shortly
• Big pools will decide later 
• However, it seems that they may support the proposal but they are neutral at the moment