Held on 16th January, 2020 at 13:00 UTC at t.me/oddgemsfamilia Telegram channel.
It was my pleasure to host TomoChain’s CBDO Kyn Chaturvedi for an hour long AMA session. It was divided into two parts, First part being Kyn answering 13 questions chosen by the Tomochain team, followed by the second part which was the live session where everyone was open to ask him anything.
I assure you that this will be worth the read as the answers are well detailed and explained in a very comprehensive manner.
Just to clear things up, this was an entirely FREE AMA session and I was the one who reached the team in order to get more insights as to what TomoChain was upto, and this resulted in this epic AMA.
Faisal: Welcome to OddGems Family Kyn Chaturvedi , Hope you have a blast here! 😊
Kyn: Thanks for the warm welcome everyone! I’ve been peering into this group for a while now and I’m impressed with how intelligent the conversations are. You guys have me a bit intimidated hehe.Faisal: First of all it’s a huge pleasure and an honour for us to have you here in our TG group. Let me assure you that everyone is equally excited as You and I are.
Kyn: Awesome! This is gonna be fun for sure.
Faisal: To start with, can you tell us a little about yourself and what Tomochain is & the problem it’s trying to solve?
Kyn: Sure. I’m the Chief Business Development Officer for TomoChain.
Educationally I graduated university with degrees in both Industrial Engineering and Economics from Georgia Tech, and later earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
I grew up as a gaming addict and have a video game collection that is a bit unwieldy. Dozens of consoles and, at one point, over 13 classic arcade machines.
So, before crypto, I spent much of my profession in the gaming space. I was a Game Designer, Game Producer, and eventually Studio Head for a major games studio that was recently purchased by Rockstar Games. I have run my own game-related tech businesses as well.
I fell into crypto back in 2014, and over time it became a second passion of mine as I began to truly understand the value of decentralization. True ownership of data was not possible until Bitcoin came along and that is simply a powerful and game changing message to a world structure built on an opposing foundation.
Now as for TomoChain.
So TomoChain is a Public Blockchain powered by Proof-of-Stake Voting. TomoChain launched into Mainnet 1 year ago in December 2018. It is secured by 150 Masternodes, of which I’m proud to be an operator myself. TomoChain is EVM Compatible and runs at a speedy 2000 TPS with a 2 Sec Blocktime. Gas fees are almost nil too.
Based out of Vietnam, TomoChain is Southeast Asia’s largest public blockchain. We have enterprise clients, a suite of DeFi products, and have been expanding into Gaming.
TomoChain has a number of major crypto-partnerships including notables like Neo Blockchain, Chainlink and Crypto.com. Our Masternode network is run by some of the most recognizable players in the space as well, including NGC, CoinGecko, 1kX, HashQuark, and KuCoin.
TomoChain earned its place onto Binance.com with a free listing last year. Binance has written us up in a detailed Binance Research Report and awarded us the V-Label.
We have also been in a number of their reports, including their latest related to dApps and DeFi. We have been interviewed by Forbes official and had an in-person interview at NASDAQ, in the heart of Times Square about TomoChain and our upcoming TomoX Protocol.
TomoChain has a number of real income generating companies that have built on us, from exchanges to payment services to enterprise clients! Not bad for 1 year I say, especially during crypto winter.
Faisal: That was an amazing intro tbh..Excited for whats coming!
Q Are there any active or on going talks with Tomo and the Vietnamese government to further bring crypto and blockchain to the people of Vietnam?
Absolutely. TomoChain has been advising the Vietnamese government for some time now. Back in September we even participated in a Symposium by the Ministry of Justice to discuss setting up sandbox regulation in Hanoi, Vietnam (where TomoChain’s HQ is).
We have also been working with the Ministry of Education to develop blockchain-based curriculums and to use blockchain for issuing official certificates to students in order to provide proof of degrees earned.
The thing is all of this takes time. This space is very new… just 10 years old. And since it’s still wearing proverbial diapers policies to guide its growth require considerable deliberation. Vietnam is also observing what its neighboring countries do before taking action. This includes weighing the idea of Blockchain technology vs Tokenomics usually associated with it.
Q Its been stated that tomochain was on track to be a cash flow positive business, is it currently cash flow positive? What services or products is it offering to bring in this revenue?
Yes, absolutely. Our plan is to be cash flow positive this year. This really goes back to the level of experience our executive teams has. Everyone is seasoned, having come from different fields, in big business and startups. Before the crazy boom of ICOs and IEOs, raising funding for traditional startups required considerable proof that there was market fit, that there were actual customers to drive revenue, and a model for growth.
We knew that TomoChain’s funds raised during the ICO were for a space that has yet to prove itself so the company had to be smart in budgeting for an uncertain future. And part of that initial preparation was selling much of the ICO proceeds into fiat. Something MANY crypto startups did not do, largely due to ambitious teams that are also headed by very inexperienced leaders. So while the bubble burst, we had capital to continue operations and scale it.
And, we ARE running a business. A sustainable business requires us to identifying areas to generate income in order to minimize risk and to sustain the business in the long term. So we do both consulting and services work by helping clients to develop wallets, launch tokens (Orbyt), build exchanges (AIS), and of course enterprise solutions on the blockchain.
One such enterprise example is with our client UcarPac. It’s a Top 10 company in the Used Car space in Japan. We completed Phase 1 of a pilot with them on a traceability solution. We’re now moving into Phase 2. Development had been ongoing for a year before we could reveal it!
Q Has tomo ever thought of re branding its name? If so what other options have there been?
Haha we really like the name TomoChain, don’t you? :) As a name we don’t see any need to change it. “Tomo” has different meanings in different languages. In Japanese Tomo means “friend.” In Vietnamese it’s “curiosity.”
It’s easy to remember, to say, and carries a positive connotation.
That said we are doing a refresh of our core website and logo. Stay tuned! 😉
Q Its been said Long does not believe in marketing but rather to develop a great product and that will bring people to tomochain. Is this true? With so many other projects/businesses each with their own advantages and disadvantages towards tomo how can we stand out more when everyone believes they have the greatest and best tech?
Running a business also means budgeting and spending wisely. We’re VERY particular with expenses. This is why you rarely see TomoChain doing excessive marketing. It’s not that marketing is unimportant but you have to weigh the kind of marketing you’re doing and the timing of it.
When the macro conditions during 2019 were bearish, what would it do for us to pay thousands of dollars to Twitter shills? Pump price only to meet a sell off? What’s the long term value there in that kind of marketing expense?
So while we faced criticism from some investors for not engaging on that front, it was the right decision. Instead, we focused on quality marketing that builds on our fundamentals. For example, Long (our founder) did an official Forbes interview. Then, we were invited to Times Square in New York City and Long did a sit-down interview at NASDAQ. That’s international recognition across industries, and evergreen content for those researching TomoChain.
From there it’s about smart partnerships. I actively push back on partnerships nowadays unless they have some form of tangible value. Chainlink and Neo Blockchain are recent examples. So when someone eyes TomoChain, they’ll see that we aren’t simply shilling ourselves for the sake of it. We are taking strategic steps to build our technology, products, and our reputation within blockchain and in the non-blockchain world.
Finally, developing products that actually use our blockchain. What’s the point in simply developing tech for tech sake, right? We’re looking at Payments, DeFi, and Gaming/Entertainment heavily. We already have key partnerships with companies that allow for $TOMO to be used for purchasing real-world products and services (Beer, Lipsticks, house warming goods, etc.). It’s a start, and proof of what blockchain can do if it’s built right.
Damn that’s a wall of text 😅
Q What is the best thing about working for Long and Tomochain as a company?
Never been asked this Q. Love it. ❤️
TomoChain is one of the absolute smartest organizations I have had the pleasure of getting to know. And being able to work with them is one of the greatest professional experiences of my career. From the top to the bottom of the hierarchy there is a thirst for knowledge, a deep desire to improve, and a common/shared respect of each other’s skills and capabilities. Everyone is so motivated, you cannot ask to work in a better environment.
Working under Long is also an absolute delight. He’s the most researched and broad thinking individual I have met in the space. He’s also the type that affords his team tremendous flexibility and works to accommodate individual styles. It’s a big reason why the employees at TomoChain are very independent and just get stuff done without prodding. Those that can’t cut it either leave or are asked to leave. As a result, the internal intelligence quotient keeps rising.
Q For now a portion of coins are reserved for meeting staking rewards once they are finished then would it be done by buyback of coins from the market?
It’ll take about 8 years from the mainnet launch for the staking rewards to dry up. We plan to launch a Masternode Council sometime in 2020 and so when it does come around to that 8 year mark there will be a solution that they’ll make.
There could be a new fee structure added, or the council decides to use its funds to augment and extend the staking rewards schedule. Maybe they’ll consider your suggestion as well. But it’s way too early to be concerned about that honestly.
Let’s first ensure that TomoChain is one of the core surviving chains in 8 years time. This will be the most minor issues to worry about honestly 😉
“You really have to be willing to learn all the time to stay relevant inside the TomoChain office.
I get grilled by our marketing team every week or so with some very challenging questions that made me sweat bullets last time. They are always questioning. It’s a great thing too.” — Kyn Chaturvedi
QRead long’s views upon limitation on sharding, I believe it should also be done when others are also trying to achieve it. When 25000 TPS will be achieved?
We have a very brilliant R&D team and they did research sharding earlier. The thing is we don’t jump into development of new technology for the sake of it, or because it’s the hot topic of the day. Our team realized the potential and possible limitations of sharding early on. So, we decided to put it on the shelf for the time being partly due to the uncertainties around it.
But more so because you have to ask yourself, who actually needs 25K TPS in today’s environment?
Transaction activity on the blockchain is more than satisfied at under 1000 TPS today. And we’re doing 2000 TPS, fast enough for payments. Anymore than that today is overkill and would only be playing to the crypto pool of investors, not to the needs of bringing blockchain to the mass market.
The question always has to be where should our resources be placed? Every decision we make is part of the same time + cost equation. So until the market demand is there we’ll take a wait and see approach.
As a small and nimble team, when the need arises we’ll be in a position to upgrade our network to the next best thing.
QWhat is the most strategical step TOMO is doing to bring adoption of TOMO coin to our daily lives?
Empowering businesses with a truly scalable blockchain that can be used by thousands and millions of users. How about an example from this month?
A Vietnamese company called Coin98 launched their mobile app powered by a TomoChain token $C98 using our TomoZ protocol. Within 2 weeks they have 20,000 users and have generated 60,000 transactions. Their users are using the $C98 token to make purchases of products within the app! It’s all powered by TomoChain!
A key direction for us is to integrate TomoChain into real world applications that already have millions of users. End users shouldn’t need to know they are using blockchain either. It should be a hidden technology layer. That removes the need to onboard new users to crypto, the main friction point for our space today.
We have been building up a suite of products to enable this, including TomoZ (as with Coin98) which allows for token issuance and use by having gas fees paid by the token itself.
If we talk gaming, this means a gamer playing a free-to-play game could earn and spend virtual currency that are blockchain tokens without even knowing that fact. It means that items in those games could truly be provably unique (NFTs). Earning NFTs and trading them could happen without knowing anything about wallet addresses, gas fees, etc.
Been really impressed with the Vietnam entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve met so many of them in the crypto space and it’s just amazing the level of ambition they have
Q Since block rewards will be decreasing in the future, and number of voted tomo increasing.. this means the reward voters recieve will decrease quite a lot in the future.
I would look at this very differently. When the block rewards are halved with Bitcoin, what tends to happen is the token value appreciates largely because miners still have to pay their bills at the end of the day.
If the token value doesn’t appreciate, then what incentive is there to continue mining? There is an inherent fixed cost structure to maintain every network.
The same goes for TomoChain Masternodes and the incentives for the Masternode Operators. As an operator myself, this is what I’m counting on.
Btw, TomoChain’s first halvening will take place in January 2021. 12 months to go. Let’s see if my hypothesis holds 😄
QThere have been many partnerships that had been made in the previous year like Chainlink, Terra, Axie Infinity, Georgian Government etc. Hows the progress of those partnerships so far and what can we expect in the future?
Yep, many partnerships for sure. In the earliest days there were many exploratory partnerships and as time went on some evolved and others didn’t. Regardless we have very strong relationships with most of these teams that has helped open doors.
In terms of tangibles,
- Chainlink will be integrating their oracle system onto TomoChain.
- Neo Blockchain is working with us to build out the blockchain developer ecosystem.
- TerraMoney and TomoChain are constantly discussing collaboration options on the payment and remittance side.
- Axie Infinity already has integrated TOMO into their game. In fact, their largest user contribution came from TOMO! Some $200K in TOMO to buy Axies!
Recency plays a big role in the development of partnerships. Being 1 year post mainnet, we have figured out our strategic direction so it’s easier to work with newer partnerships in the space that are equally aligned. It’s no longer about pure co-marketing relationships.
Faisal: Must say that the standard of the questions have been quite good. Not the usual stuff that we can find it on yourwebsite! 😊
Kyn: Bro, I was astonished. I’ve done AMAs before and nothing compared to the quality of these Q’s. I really enjoyed answering them
QDo you believe TOMO has the potential to atleast give ethereum a hard time in future, or atleast be sharing space as one of the best blockchains along with the likes of ADA, NEO, XLM, EOS, TEZOS etc? How confident are you?
I get asked this question a lot. Today, TomoChain has one of the fastest and lowest cost systems there is. 2000 TPS, 2 Second Blocktime, and near Zero Gas fees. And we’re building an ecosystem of products to support real world usecases with (1) TomoZ where gas fees are paid by the token itself, (2) TomoX for DeFi trading + borrowing/lending, and (3) TomoP to send truly anonymous and private transactions in less than 10 seconds! (< — TomoP is going to be epic once it launches. 😆 )
But, let’s go beyond just the tech aspect since it alone will not drive the success of any blockchain. One of the questions I ask myself is how do I bring businesses w/customers onboard and enable them to be successful? Because that’s where the value generation will come from.
When I think of Ethereum, its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness in this regard. It is a decentralized organization operating in a centralized world. It’s forward thinking but unable to cope with today’s business needs. And I’m not talking about its scalability issues either. I’ll give you an example:
A recent project, Wadz, launched by a former Mastercard Vice President for Asia & Pacific, is empowering vendors in SEA through its Point-of-Sale system + crypto wallet. Wadz decided to migrate from Ethereum to TomoChain.
Why? Yes our scalable tech was immediately attractive since they focus on payments. But, that isn’t the whole story. Wadz is an independent startup building on the blockchain, but not part of any inner Ethereum dev circle. Their team is not comprised of a bunch of hardcore blockchain devs. So, when they were looking for a technology solution who do they reach out to if it’s Ethereum? Who is going to help them think through blockchain as a solution and aid them with technical issues? Google Searches? Message Boards? There certainly isn’t a help desk.
And that’s the point. Without customer support and a team that is actively in your corner there is a lot of wasted time and effort in even getting going. We are in constant contact with every project we work with and provide on-the-spot assistance. Time is money, and help from anonymous message boards is not going to work to onboard business to blockchain at this stage.
Don’t get me wrong, TomoChain is building for a decentralized tomorrow, but we exist in a world that isn’t ready for it today. So, we bridge that gap by providing traditional services expected by the modern world to any project building on TomoChain.
Vision wise, we believe the TomoChain blockchain will take on a life of its own through the community/DAO structure and our company will be one of many to support development on top of it.
QCan you introduce some information about TomoX protocol? What is Relayer-Masternode and why is it necessary in TomoChain?
TomoX is exciting :) It’s a decentralized exchange protocol we’re launching in Q1/Q2. There are many cool things about it.
First, it’s a Layer 1 Protocol, built right into the fabric of the TomoChain network. The Masternodes on TomoChain directly manage the order book and handle all transactions. That means it’s just as fast and secure as our network, and as close to a centralized trading experience as we can get today.
Second, we built TomoX to be a near turnkey solution. That means anyone with a wee bit of technical knowledge can launch a DEX (i.e. Relayer) in minutes! We provide the bac- end and a template for the front end. That means businesses can be up and running in no time.
Third, there is a shared liquidity pool across all TomoX DEXs. So a bid placed on one DEX will be seen on every other DEX and can be interacted with by traders on those other DEXs. Of course, DEXs can decide whether to participate in the pool. They can also choose which coins to list independent of what’s available across DEXs.
Fourth, we are looking to launch decentralized lending/borrowing on TomoX. Another DeFi product that will likely generate a lot of interest. I can’t wait to use it myself.
Finally, we’ll be supporting wrapped versions of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT via our TomoBridge. More tokens to come as well. We have a number of partners keen to bring wrapped tokens into the TomoChain ecosystem.
You can experience the Testnet for TomoX right now actually. https://dex.testnet.tomochain.com/
And get some free testnet TOMO here: https://faucet.testnet.tomochain.com/
QCan Dapps be made with staking mechanisms built into them . IOST has this ability and its attracts a lot of users because it provides a way to earn twice through the Dapp . Zero sum games no longer are zero sum as the staking rewards are distributed as revenue to the players.
Absolutely it can be done. Smart Contracts within a dApp can interact with other smart contracts to allow for staking on the Masternodes as long as the token being used in the dApp is TOMO. Hope that makes sense.
And there is also no reason dApps can’t issue their own tokens and also create their own token staking mechanism too. Power of smart contracts!
Now we jump into few live questions which were answered by Kyn as well.
Q: With the advent of TomoP protocol, Are there plans for anything along the lines of a TOMO MasterCard/Visa that will hide our TOMO or crypto balance while transacting?
A: We are working on a P2P solution for crypto in Vietnam, eventually we may extend it to some form of an eWallet payment solution. As things continue to evolve I’d love to see TomoP be used in this way. There are really many uses for TomoP. Beyond simply masking TOMO through transactions, we hope to expand it to allow any token to utilize those unique privacy features… even within dApps.Q: When we can see TOMO at Middle East, is there any partnership?
A: We’re always open to any geography for partnerships. At this stage our focus has been on SEA and China/Japan/Korea But if opportunity opens up in the Middle East, no reason to say no! :)Q: Will there be any big news in the next three months?
A: By our track record over the last 6 months, I sure hope so haha. But yes, with the launch of TomoX, Decentralized Lending/Borrowing, TomoP Testnet, P2P mobile app 😉 and hopefully new partnerships, lots to look forward toQ: Is there talks with Binance in regards of opening staking or something like kucoin and be an operator, and Is the team working on getting listed with more exchanges, Like US based exchanges?
A: Yes, we are discussing soft staking with them. They are keen. But this requires negotiation and timing. I am confident we’ll eventually get there. And we are always looking to get listed on more exchanges. We have been listed in the past couple months on new ones includes MXC and we’ll have more coming in the near futureQ: How can holders get benefits of holding tomocoin?
A: Stake it 😉 Easiest way to get rewards if you’re not into trading. And you help to secure the network. Double benefits!
Faisal: And with that my friends, we conclude this AMA. Thanks a lot Kyn for answering all the questions in such a comprehensive manner. It’s been an awesome session to be honest and looking forward to all the great things which are coming our way in 2020 and beyond. Wishing the entire Tomochain the very best for their future endeavors. Hopefully we see you again soon :)
Thanks for your time Kyn! 🙌
“Thank you everyone for participating here. And for your patience through it all :)” — Kyn
TomoChain Links:
Website — https://tomochain.com/
Telegram — https://t.me/tomochain
Github — https://github.com/tomochain
Twitter — https://twitter.com/TomoChainANN
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/tomochainofficial
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/Tomochain/
Medium — https://medium.com/tomochain
Oddgems Links:
Twitter — https://twitter.com/oddgems
Medium — https://medium.com/@oddgemsofficial
Telegram Group — https://t.me/oddgemsfamilia
