During the last AMA, Joseph Armeanio hosted the show solo since Dan Friedman was still working in Dubai. Although quite busy at the conference, Dan did take the time to record a brief update for the community. 

Recording from his hotel room in Dubai, Dan revealed that it has been an eventful and productive week at the conference. He spoke on two panels and met some new people that he believes will be very beneficial for the Ergo ecosystem. His discussions included interactions with two new exchanges that are both “very good and up and coming” in the industry. Follow up conversations have continued since and there will be more details once Dan has official information that he can share. For the moment, Dan shared that he is confident something could develop from these meetings.

In addition to talking with new exchanges, Dan informed the audience that he had meetings with several different projects. Dan is working to get one particular project (Unigrid) to consider utilizing Ergo for their smart contract functionality. Unigrid specializes in distributed internet and Dan said that talks will continue after the conference. Other meetings have included discussions with various projects that work in identity solutions as well as supply chain tracking and traceability.

Regular viewers of Ergo AMA’s will note that Dan frequently discusses the importance of increasing volume and liquidity for potential exchange listings. During the conference in Dubai, Dan revealed that he has had very productive meetings with a couple of European liquidity providers he believes could assist in bringing more liquidity to the Ergo ecosystem. He said that conversations are ongoing and more will be revealed if the involved parties come to any agreements.

Dan concluded his pre-recorded updates by informing the audience that he will be staying on in Dubai for a second conference: ETHDubai. Building on the work he has already been doing in Dubai, he said he is looking forward to continuing to meet new people and projects while promoting Ergo at this event.

AMA Questions and Summary

The following is a summary of questions posed by the audience during this AMA. Last week, Armeanio answered questions on Ledger support, measuring growth in the Ergo ecosystem, LETS, cross chain bridges, exchange listings, and much more. To view the full AMA, please head over to Ergo’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Q36x_ZYM0 

A few weeks back it seemed like Ledger support was just about to happen. What is the current situation with that?

• Last time he talked to the team was that morning

• They are working on that and back in their office

• The team is primarily Ukrainian and was dealing with getting their families out of Ukraine during the last few weeks

• It was not the easiest situation in terms of finding housing for their loved ones

• They are now back to work

• Once there are updates, the community will be informed

• They do have basic ledger support completed

  • However, the team has asked them incorporate P2S (pay to script)
  • It will allow users to interact with dApps from their Ledger device
  • This will greatly improve the user experience

What’s the most meaningful metric for understanding true growth in the Ergo ecosystem? TVL? Transactions per block? Value of transactions? Number of addresses? Or something that can’t be quantified?

• One of the most important metrics is hashrate

  • Ergo is a PoW chain and that’s where we derive our security
  • What’s the security of the network?
  • Are miners profitable?
  • Everything that’s built on top of the ecosystem is dependent on the security they bring to the table

• TVL

  • A set number is not a reflection of liquidity
  • DEXs can have an impressive market cap but may not be very liquid
  • Doesn’t think it’s the best metric to gauge things

• Transactions per block

  • Dependent on what’s happening

• Number of addresses is something that is hard to quantify because Ergo is UTXO

  • If a firm is going to be analyzing the amount of value that is moving around in a UTXO, are they aware that you always send your entire balance, then you get change back?
  • Do firms calculate the value sent or are they analyzing the full amount?

How do you envision the first iteration of LETS operating? What would be the things you’d like to see most traded on a LETS?

• LETS - local exchange trading system

  • Create a unit of account to encourage people to trade goods and services with each other

  • A LETS token is like a community credit and debt based system

    • Not usually meant to be monetized
    • It is a tool to move outside the monetary system

  • Blockchain brings a few interesting things to the table for a LETS

• It’s system of account where people can work to collaborate

Do you see any risk for the network security in the short term because of EIP-0027? I suppose that the total hashrate is going to drop proportional to the block reward reduction.

• The reduction in block rewards is less than 20%

• In crypto, that can happen in a day depending on price action

• That kind of movement is not that extreme in crypto markets

• Doesn’t think there is a large risk

• Long-term, there are considerations to take into account

• He is an advocate for developing framework to launch native tokens to miners

• We have the potential to build out side chains

• You could even potentially have a PoS side chain where the mining pools operate as some of the validators

• Would like to see miners get paid

• It’s important as a community to think about what is the best way to incentivize mining

• Would like miners to be profitable

• Hashrate will probably drop proportional to reward reductions

  • It’s something that can be offset through growth
  • Ergo is well positioned to grow well this year
  • A lot of development with community wallets and dApps
  • ErgoPad has a staking framework
  • Foundations are coming together

How are bridge developments going? Any ETA?

• Alex is in Dubai 

• Will be working with the Susy team

• They have the Ergo bridge on testnet

• That bridge will bring in stablecoins that exist on other ecosystems

• USCD and USDT

• Will be making a video about the Rosen bridge

• Mhs has been putting together parts of the bridge that will work with Cardano

• It’s based on Ergo

• When using bridges, you have to ask where is the logic that is controlling the bridge

  • When distributed by two partners, whenever you had another chain, you had additional complexity
  • And potentially a point of failure
  • Rosen bridge is anchored on Ergo
  • The logic occurs on Ergo
  • Adding new chains to that framework minimizes risk
  • That should help with auditability 

Why is it taking so long to list Ergo in another exchange?

• Ergo has a disadvantage - we are an actual mainnet blockchain

• We are custom built

• Looking at how a listing occurs on an exchange, is it a mainnet or is it a coin

• If you are a coin on top of an existing blockchain that an exchange already supports, their engineers have a framework for onboarding the coin

  • That process is relatively fast when plugging in a new native asset

• Ergo has to work with the exchange to build the underlying infrastructure.

  • Have to build a wallet to synchronize it with their trading engine
  • Have to go through testing
  • When using exchanges that potentially move millions of dollars a day, testing needs to be rigorous
  • It creates a longer integration period

• In order to get listed on an exchange, there is usually an ask involved

• As we see projects being built on top of Ergo, exchanges start to look at the network differently - it creates more interest in incorporating Ergo wallet integration and native token support

• Starting to see that change

• Being a custom main network, Ergo is unique when it comes to building exchange support

How will we prevent network issues by noodle based tokens in the future?

• We have a new noodle token that someone minted and airdropped to approximately 50k wallets in 3 transactions

• Impressive but it created some issues on the network

• It was kind of like an organic DDoS attack

• A way to deter that in the future is to potentially raise fees

• With low fees, it becomes easier to spam the network

• Miners should probably consider raising the transaction fees on Ergo a little bit to prevent that in the future

• What else can be done?

• It’s been built into the node that it will mute those types of transactions

  • If too large or appear to be a DDoS attack

• Alex pushes reference clients on a regular basis - it’s a sign of the backend development

• That is kind of uncommon

• Part of the issue with the noodle token was there were people who were not running the most recent version of the reference client

• May need to try and improve communication from the Ergo Foundation side of things with these kinds of announcements

• This issue did not create any lasting issues

• It did fill up Kucoin’s mempool with noodle tokens

• That caused them to go offline

• This is just growth pain

Can you confirm or deny that Ergo is in the testnet phase with any exchanges?

• Yes, we are in the integration and testing phase with two exchanges

Have you considered adding Ergo full nodes to Umbrel or Start9? It seems like it could capture some of the Bitcoin maxis attention.

• Thinks we need to build out a robust full node wallet that has support for off chain infrastructure
• It would allow more full nodes in the network
• It would lower the barrier of entry for people to run bots
• With eUTXO, will see an increased need for people to participate in off chain services
• Will probably see the tokenization of that - incentives for people to run off chain services
• Doesn’t see the need to attract the attention of Bitcoin maxis

How would the Ergo Foundation use their funds if Ergo mooned? How would they use it if it tanked?

• Alex is pretty conservative

  • He tries to look at the best long-term return for potential spending
  • Been development focused
  • The Ergo Foundation is relatively small in comparison to DAO’s and other entities in blockchain
  • Need to deliver the maximum amount of development and tooling at the lowest cost
  • Thinks Ergo Foundation should promote education and develop open source frameworks
  • ETH promoted the education around Solidity - this was well done and very successful

What are your thoughts on BTC and ADA pairs on ErgoDEX? Do you like the wild wild west style or do you prefer dictatorships?

• When ErgoDEX allowed custom pool creation, one of the first things that occured was someone created a fake pool

• If we want to be decentralized, what can we do to educate users or to notify or warn them?

• Easiest solution is for an entity to whitelist or blacklist tokens 

  • Creates gatekeeping

• Central exchanges are gatekeepers

• The wild wild west approach is to allow anything to play out

• Doesn’t think that is necessarily the best idea

  • Can create scenarios where people get taken advantage of

• Thinks the best option is to create multiple, competing solutions

  • Maybe have a DAO/individual, devs, users, etc
  • Audit projects as they pop up

• Education will be key to preventing scam coins

Is the Minotaur wallet going to be listed in the Apple App Store under the Ergo Foundation umbrella or individually?

• The Apple App Store has been a bottleneck for the Ergo Foundation
• Needed to create an official account in the App Store
• Needed official banking for that account
• Been incredibly slow, especially with current geo-political climate
• Banking has been slow 

Can you release any info on marketing plans? I know you guys have hired a marketing manager and would love to know some progress on this.

• Ergo Foundation goal is to empower the Ergo community
• Hired a new marketing manager that represents the community
• The Ergo Platform Twitter is now managed by the leader of the Sigmanaut Training Program

Is the Nautilus wallet officially approved by you?

• It’s open source
• It’s had a lot of developers from different projects play with it
• Nemo has done a great job in terms of building and communicating about it
• With open source tools, it’s important to bring in as many people as possible to review and test the work
• He likes it
• Also likes SAFEW 
• Doesn’t have a favorite at this point
• If he was leaning towards one wallet, he really enjoys the cold storage feature with the Android wallet

Dan has mentioned before how he sees synergies working with other UTXO alliance members such as Nervos. What are your personal views on this and what use-cases would you like to see?

• Long-term, thinks there is a lot of value in Layer 2 solutions
• That is probably the area that shows the most promise
• The alliance is already a group that works together
• Thinks it’s a future that we can grow into together
• The alliance is more research focused at the moment
• Thinks the alliance is great and creates solutions to common problems
• Hopes to see implementation from the various research

What are some dApp ideas you want to see made on Ergo?

• Competing stablecoins is a nice framework to build out
• Doesn’t think one stablecoin will rule them all 
• Would like to see a commodity basket or currency basket that’s tied to inflation
• DeFi is something the community could build out
• What level of inflation or use case is viable?