(Interview English Transcript) Komodo (KMD) Platform, BarterDEX: An Advanced Blockchain Technology, Focused On Freedom

Interview Link

See Eun : S Goldenman : G PTYX : P

(S) Okay, welcome everyone! This is See Eun from the Blockchainers and we’re propagating from the heart of Korea. We’re here to tell the world and the internet about everything that’s going on in blockchain and cryptocurrency in Korea, bringing you that news, interview, general goodness and all of that Korean soul. If you like this content, please like, subscribe and comment below. And if you want to collaborate on a project, we’re always open to do that. And, as part of our collaboration today, we have a very special project with the extremely thorough whitepaper which I was really surprised to read. And, we have none other than team Komodo with us. PTYX and Goldenman who represents Komodo and out here in Korea. Guys, please say hello.

(P) Hi, guys. How are you?

(S) And, Goldenman, do you wanna say hello?

(G) Hi, this is Goldenman.

(S) Okay, so, as this goes, because I’m a Komodo noob and I just went through 79 pages just a couple hours ago. Goldenman is going to be carrying the majority of this interview and then I know that PTYX has a presentation stored up, so please, please be excited for this interview. I’m looking forward to it. I’m very stoked for it, so let’s see where it takes us. So, what’s first on our agenda guys?

(P) Okay, so I guess I’ll give a little introduction. I’m known as PTYX in the Komodo community, the support manager of the platform. I do other things but mainly people know me from the support channel. Also, I do a little bit of business development in terms of reach out and doing stuff like this, meeting with the communities and whatnot.

(S) What are you planning to share with us today? I know you’ve got a presentation.

(P) Yeah, it’s a little presentation just to give you a little bit of basics of Komodo. Such as what type of coin it is, what kind of blockchain platform it is, and also what other features it has… because Komodo is many things into one. It’s not just a one thing.

(S) Okay, let’s get started with that right away.

(P) Sure. Perfect! Let’s go ahead and.. This is just an overview of Komodo. You can see, I guess, see a little bit of the comparison. Komodo is based on Zero-Knowledge protocol. So, you’re gonna have the privacy features of it. And, that compares to Zcash, Monero, Dash or VERGE which actually use coin tumblings. So, sometimes it’s interfered technology.(inaudible) As for the blockchain platform aspect of it, you have platforms like Ethereum, NEO, Qtum or EOS, which Komodo is comparable to because it’s made to create smart contracts and also to develop apps on the blockchain. Also, you can see the decentralized exchange, which is comparing it to Bitshares, Waves and Kyber Network. As some people know, I think, the BarterDEX is quite big right now in the Atomic Swap space. So, we can go ahead and start the presentation here.

(S) I like the fancy animation.

(P) Yeah. That’s thanks to Audo. He actually used this in one of the conferences in Korea. That’s why I thought we’d use it because it covers the basics. So for people who don’t know, Komodo was a fork from ZCash, right? So a lot of people see this as “Okay, so it’s just another fork!” But if we look at the code, the only thing that is left that resembles ZCash is the zero-knowledge protocol. JL777 who is the lead developer… He has literally expanded the code so much that it’s a completely different platform. So with the zero-knowledge, you have a provable privacy, so that’s really the advantage of using that technology. I think some people have asked us why did we go with zero-knowledge instead of other protocols. And it is really… Because it’s the only provable one at this point. Komodo is flexible enough though. That in the future if something comes along that’s better, we will definitely consider it. Another aspect of Komodo that a lot of people aren’t familiar with is the delayed Proof-of-Work(dPoW). I think you told me you read the whitepaper yesterday, right?

(S) Yes, I am really feeling delayed Proof-of-Work(PoW). It’s like reminiscent… Kind of like plasma kind of like lightning network, so yeah, I really liked it.

(P) Yeah, well it’s amazing because James has been talking about this for forever. The idea is… Instead of fighting Bitcoin, right? Because that’s what a lot of projects are doing. They are literally creating coins to go head-on against Bitcoin but the hash rate is so tremendous. It really makes no sense trying to duplicate that type of hash rate. So you should be able to reuse that hash rate. So with delayed Proof-of-Work(PoW), you have the second layer. Think of it like as 2FA for blockchain, right? So you have the Komodo hash rate. This blockchain information is getting notarized onto the Bitcoin blockchain. So we always have an anchor. Even if the Komodo blockchain is hacked or something happens, we always have a full copy literally on the Bitcoin blockchain. So, that gives this huge security layer that most of these coins don’t have. And this actually passes over to our Asset Chains too. In comparison to, for example, Ethereum, right? Where you launch token through the Ethereum platform. You’re not deriving any security from the Ethereum’s hash rate. That’s not the case with our parallel chains or Asset Chains. You’re actually deriving security from the Bitcoin’s hash rate, so.. This is very, very important part of Komodo because it really helps scale Bitcoin. If you can imagine the Komodo blockchain and you have thousands of transactions in the Komodo blockchain. And those thousands of transactions are represented by literally one transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. All that information is, I guess, you can say compacted into that one transaction. That means we can literally scale this to no end, and still give people the Bitcoin level of security.

(S) I have a question about delayed Proof-of-Work. It’s a twofold question. The first question is… Because Komodo is in essence… You guys are issuing crypto assets, crypto assets on blockchain. It seems like… a competitor that people might naturally think of is something like Counterparty(XCP). Can you please explain… I know you kinda lightly touch upon it in the whitepaper. Can you please tell us like how the idea of colored coins and what’s Counterparty is trying to do and what you guys are doing. Are they diametrically opposed to each other? Will people prefer one over the other? What do you think?

(P) No. I think… Obviously there is limitations, and there is pros and cons to each one. To me, in my own mind, I believe that each one will have its own purpose and have its own crowd. Now, the reason why the Komodo solution is superior… It is simple. We’re not providing any Meta Tokens. We’re literally providing native blockchains. And, the reason for this is because we want to follow Satoshi’s vision, which is native blockchain(s). So, basically when you create an Asset Chain or a parallel chain on Komodo, you are creating a copy of Komodo which is fully integrated. But you are completely independent, right? So… That’s where we really are going for. It’s more of a decentralization, independence. These parallel chains are not tied to Komodo in 5, 10 years. They’ll be able to migrate if they wish. That’s how independent they are. They even have their own CLI, their own wallet. It’s a fully independent blockchain. So yeah. But I mean for example… I guess you could… Let’s see. The thing about the Atomic Swaps is that it’s confirmation based, right? So I guess I could see how proxy tokens would be better in some cases. Because it’s faster to trade. Because you are actually… You are not really making Atomic Swaps that are not confirmation based. So I can see how a blockchain, I don’t know, I can’t think of one right off the bat. But the uses of proxy tokens would be useful in some situations. And then ours would be useful in other situations, for example, like a startup launching a blockchain. Why would a start-up…

(S) Along the same line of thought, you guys were in Korea with the Blockchain Korea meet-up, right? One of the criticisms I can throw maybe as an investor is… It seems like Komodo is extremely technology heavy, which is understandably important. But then, it has a particular privacy thing. So how would it benefit… What kind of people, start-ups would like to use Komodo platform? In Korea, what kind of Korean startups have shown interest in using Komodo platform?

(P) Well, we can put it as simple as “anyone who wants a blockchain that is secured by Bitcoin” has a reason to use Komodo. So that’s pretty much anyone. Anyone who launches a blockchain, (he) doesn’t have the infrastructure as secure as Bitcoin but they definitely want that security, right? So, any start-up, I mean… We can go… For example, right now we are talking to people that are not even speaking about launching actual coins. They are speaking about launching utility tokens to integrate with apps, so I mean it could be anything, literally anything. Also, you have to understand too that we not only have the coin feature, but we also have the KV(KeyValue) storage. So you can literally create an app. And if this app needs to store value on the blockchain, then you’ll be able to use KV storage to do it. So you can think of any type of solution and we can integrate it.

(S) I think it will be really interesting to see because now we’re getting more and more platforms. I’ve heard some people who are launching utility tokens straight up say ERC20 on Ethereum is bullshit. That’s the reason they’re going over to Waves. But, hopefully, because you guys have such a privacy-centric and then your whole vision is providing every single asset that is released on the Komodo platform with their own blockchain, I hope a lot of people will take this into consideration when they’re trying to launch their project.

(P) So if you think about it. For example, let’s say you launch a blockchain on Komodo. And it gets huge and it just clogs up you blockchain. If this happens in Ethereum, there’s going to be an issue. It will usually carry off into some part of the network. With Komodo, it literally is isolated to your blockchain. So, problems in one parallel chain will not affect another. This is huge for scalability for transactions that are stuck. I mean you name it. You can solve issues this way. Just keeping things separate, but fully integrated.

(S) Yeah. What I think is awesome is that in some ways you guys went ahead and solved the sidechain problem. So nowadays, people are talking about sidechain and add that with proof of Proof-of-Work. And that’s how we’re gonna scale the Bitcoin blockchain. But it seems like the method you guys chose is basically doing that because you’re adding a proof of Proof-of-Work. You’re notarizing everything onto the blockchain that is right above it. So I have a question. In your whitepaper, you say that the way you did this is by OP_RETURN right? And, you clearly say that… In the case that maybe an OP_RETURN transaction is too expensive we might consider utilizing other Proof-of-Work blockchains. Has there been a case where you’ve put a notarization on another Proof-of-Work blockchain?

(P) Not fully. But I don’t know if you know that I am notary node as well. I’ll have to take care of my notary nodes. And it was… I want to say like 6 months into last year’s run, we had an issue with Bitcoin getting super slow. It was literally unusable. So, we got the notary nodes ready to notarize onto Litecoin. We had them prepped up. We had everything ready, literally. We just had to press the button to start notarizing onto Litecoin. And that just kinda shows the flexibility of Komodo. We’re not tied down to Bitcoin’s hash rate. We literally can switch it at any time. We picked Bitcoin because it’s the strongest one.

(S) So when I’m going through all the history from the back in the days, right? Would I be saying like… Let’s say up till block 50,000, it was on Bitcoin. And starting from block 50,001, you started notarizing on Litecoin. Then, would the way that I look at the history of the blockchain up to 50,000, I would just be centered on Bitcoin. And then 50,001, Komodo platform would know to… direct this attention to the Litecoin blockchain for the notarization.

(P) Yeah. Well basically like, if we were to switch notarization, we’ll pick a block. A block in advance whether it is 1,2,3,4 or 5 blocks in advance or whatnot. And as soon as that block hits then the notarization switches over. Yeah, I mean since the OP_RETURN is the same for all Bitcoin compatibles, it works out.

(S) Alright. You solved some of the questions I had for now.

(P) Cool. Perfect. Let me see what we have next here. I think I already went over this , which is… In the event of a devastating attack on Komodo, there’s always a copy due to the delayed Proof-of-Work(PoW) on the Bitcoin blockchain. So as we move forward to the platform evolution and then we get into the Asset Chains. So there’s a little bit of confusion about the Asset Chains because… I think you mentioned this. Because people do think that it’s just like another Meta Token or sidechain or whatnot. But, what we want to do is we want to build a modular platform that is literally like the framework for people to just come on and start building their own applications whether they want to store… I don’t know… Video game data, real-estate data. It doesn’t matter. We want to make it as simple as possible, and we want to make it to where everyone does not actually depend on Komodo, and at the end of the day, they have their own native blockchain. Do you have any questions about the specifics or the parameters of the Asset Chains? We’re debating on what to call them because we’re really thinking parallel chain might be a better word for it because an Asset Chain doesn’t really explain what it is really.

(G) What is different from other blockchains or tokens, like ERC or Ethereum?

(P) Well, the ERC20 Tokens are not actual coins. They are Meta Tokens. I think that’s the word for them. Basically, they are smart contracts. I think my main problem with that is that you are not deriving any security at all from the hash rate. At all. You are literally at the mercy of whoever wrote the smart contract. You’ve seen what’s happened with just little errors and smart contracts. People lose millions. So, until there’s a way to really really check these contracts and, or find a language that avoids these problems, I think native is the way to go. So that’s really my view on it. But, if we speak of other things, for example, like the Atomic Swaps, right? This is a huge topic right now, ERC20 Tokens don’t have OP_RETURN. Ethereum doesn’t have OP codes. So there is a disadvantage. However, we’ve actually been able now to make Atomic Swaps with Ethereum. This happened like last week. It’s recent. But, it’s very new and you know the mechanism will get more mature and will make it even more decentralized. But… James called it a Charlie Swap because they are not really fully decentralized.

(S) I think that’s beautiful. Something that people are overlooking right now. It seems like everybody wants to be like “that general-purpose crypto asset exchange”, right? “That general-purpose decentralized exchange” and there’s that way to do it. There’s a way where you could try to on board as many projects as possible. And, there’s the other way where you’re just working on the interoperability and you’re taking advantage of all the features from all the blockchains.

(P) Yeah, I think you know… I think you mentioned this about the marketing. We are like very tech-centered, we are not… Now actually our marketing team is getting very very good and I’m very happy with it. But I don’t know. I think what we want is… We are thinking about 5 years ahead. We are not thinking about today. I look at Dash, Litecoin. These are coins that were solving issues when Bitcoin came out. You know this Atomic Swap thing…. I read someone the other day say, “Why are you guys focusing on Atomic Swaps? They’re gonna be irrelevant until like 2025” or something like that. But you know what? It’s gonna be relevant sooner, and when it is, we are gonna be ready. It’s going to be fully ready. By that time, people are still gonna be trying to catch up. Okay, I think I’m digressing but.. Goldenman’s question. You asked what are the comparison, right? Is there any other platform that you’ve heard about like that you wanna compare to?

(G) If there are more platforms… And Ethereum and other platforms… Do you have any comparison for them?

(P) I think we were talking about this the other day. The only one that would be like more similar would be the Kyber Network, I think. That is more like a modular platform. But, really… There’s no comparison to me because we would have to take many projects, put them together, and then say “Okay, now this is compared to Komodo.”

(S) I thought Waves was similar until I realized like they don’t issue their token. They don’t give their own tokens separate blockchain.

(P) Yeah, that’s the thing you know they’re creating islands. Each blockchain is an island, and we need to start creating bridges to talk to each other and have these islands move… So we can move coins freely from one blockchain to another instead of… Pretty much, I think of it like proxy token thing. It’s for me like dependability issue. Like you’re depending on the platform fully, completely.

(S) You wanna go on with the presentation? That presentation talk about a lot of these really interesting… I really like the fact that the presentation is extremely interactive by the way.

(P) Yeah, we are getting better! Okay so… Let me see. I think I already mentioned this. The Asset Chains are not affected at all. For example, if Komodo died completely, the Asset Chains would still survive. And, I think not a lot of platforms can say that. So… Oh I like your mug. Did you see that? He has the Komodo mug.

(S) Komodo merch!

(P) Yeah, yeah. Nice! So, this gives you the specs of the Asset Chain, so basically you can scale on demand. For example, if you launch an Asset Chain… Actually people don’t really realize how easy it is to launch an Asset Chain. You can launch an Asset Chain with one line of code. So, it’s very very simple. Literally, it is just the Komodo CLI command, the AC name with the coin name, the coin ticker, the supply and that’s it. I mean there are other parameters like… I think you can make it mineable and stuff like this. But, for example, Monaize did theirs instamine. So when they created the Asset Chain, all of the coins are created at once. And you have that 1-minute block time. So with the Asset Chains actually… When there’s no transactions, no blocks are mined. And that’s what the “on-demand block” means. As soon as it detects a transaction, it’ll mine the block in the next minute.

(S) Okay. That’s cool.

(G) Since you said Monaize… Many people are asking these days about Monaize… When it would come out.

(P) Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. I can’t really like speak about when dICO will be. That’s something Monaize will decide and they will announce. What I can say is that we are completely ready. The technology actually was tested a week and a half ago with the Bitcoin Hush stress test, which went perfect. So now basically Monaize has… It’s a different app than the one that we tested. It’s a very simple app. It’s called the AtomicDEX. And the AtomicDex will literally work like a light wallet. So you’ll be able to create or put your seed in. Then, you’ll get your Komodo address and Monaize address. You deposit your Komodo, actually we had ZCash too. You deposit your funds and then at the bottom it says “Buy Monaize.” You just click and it does Atomic Swap and you buy your Monazie. So, it’ll be a very very simple app. I’ve tested it. I’m so happy with it because it’s so simple. You don’t really have to think about it. And that’s what we really wanted. So I can say that we’re fully ready, and you guys should expect other dICOs too. Not just the Monaize one. We’ve been working at…hard on…I’m getting the BitcoinDark swap fully (inaudible). Once this is all over, then we focus fully on the other dICOs and the things that are actually coming down the pipeline.

(S) How many dICOs do you have in the pipeline right now? Just the number?

(P) I mean I would like to say… Yeah, I don’t wanna say a number. There are a few projects that are there, and they vary in industries. It’s not like a coin creation for the sake of it. Yeah but that’ll come soon. I’ll let our marketing… I won’t steal our thunder.

(S) Alright. Thank you.

(G) I have more question. You said there’s AtomicDEX. Is it simple version of the BarterDEX?

(P) Yeah, much simpler. Much, much simpler. The BarterDEX really is going to evolve into like a swiss knife for the Atomic Swap trades. But the AtomicDEX? That’s what people would use for dICOs and also what we are getting ready is full package for anyone who creates an Asset Chain. They will have the explorer, the wallet. They’ll have the atomic explorer fork. So, they’ll be able to actually have all these tools forked to their Asset Chain. And yeah, it’s just simpler because if we did it through the BarterDEX, it would be a long learning curve because it’s so many things, and I still think that the BarterDEX in a way… We are still testing it to see what works and you know we are putting it out so people tell us “Okay, this works. This doesn’t work.” But the AtomicDEX is so simple that it’s literally just deposit-buy-here’s your Monaize withdrawal. That’s it. It’s really beautiful. The Atomic Swap takes place in the background. You don’t see any code or none of that crazy stuff.

(G) (Inaudible) … BarterDEX is one of the biggest services. So Atomic Swap? So is there any services using Atomic Swap?

(P) Is there any what?

(G) Any service from the Komodo platform?

(P) What do you mean… a service?

(G) I mean, the product? BarterDEX is one of the products. So…

(P) Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess I don’t understand your question.

(G) Like Jumblr or any other things?

(P) Ah okay! Yeah, I mean you have the BarterDEX and Jumblr which actually you can use together. So the Jumblr is anonymizer, it’s a blockchain agnostic anonymizer. So you can use the Jumblr to anonymize your transaction pretty much to cooperate with dICO in a private way. That’s something that you can do with the Jumblr. So yeah, let me see there’s anything else…

(S) Can I ask one question about dICO?

(P) Yeah, of course.

(S) You know, Korea recently… We have been having discussions about regulating ICOs and like banning Koreans from entering ICOs overseas. And I know there are some ICOs that have started doing, whenever it comes time to do KYC, AML for Koreans. Now if you from a Korean IP or if you have Korean nationality… Some people, just because they have no idea where the regulation is going to turn, they are trying to blacklist Koreans. For dICO, let’s say I’m from a country that I’m not supposed to participate in ICO. Can I still participate or how does that work?

(P) I mean that’s something that’s really up to the user. It’s not like we make the technologies to curtail law. I think it’s the responsibility of the user to know what law or what jurisdiction they are in. However, technology-wise, if you were to use Jumblr with VPN, for example. It would be very hard to trace it back just because of the nature of Jumblr. There’s no data matching when you look into the z-transactions. So what it really… It is something that’s up to the discretion of the user. I know that we created these technologies, like I said not to curtail the law, but we want to empower people. And I know that in countries where the people can’t get money off for X or Y reason, things of this sort will help because it’s a way for people to use their funds without having the fear of “Okay, this is tied to me” or whatnot. As far as dICO, some investors don’t want people to see how much they invested, and literally all dICOs are public. I mean, you can see the addresses and collaborations and whatnot. So I mean… But yeah, there’s uses for it, but I guess it would depend on the country, it will depend on how much they’re monitoring, and many things.

(S) I love the answer that you gave me. It just made my day. I’m serious. I will later on ask Goldenman this question. But one of the things I was concerned about is… Because we are a channel focused on Korean audiences, how significant… Why is the Korean market significant for Komodo other than like us having a huge trade volume. Like, what can Koreans benefit from Komodo? Let’s just say that the government does take a very harsh stance to ICOs then you know… If it comes to any ICOs that’s done on ERC20 or any ICOs that’s done on Waves like… ㅑt’s closed off to the public. No matter what you wanna do, you can’t do it anymore. Then, dICOs added with like Jumblr, probably like TOR and routing… You know routing through the VPN, that’s the way people can participate.

(P) Here’s the interesting thing. When you participate in ICO, you’re literally sending coins to someone, right? And you’re waiting for those coins to be accepted, processed, and then you get your funds back. With an Atomic Swap, you’re doing 1:1 trade. So, this is something that I was thinking about. Because in China, it is illegal to do 1:1 trades. And, the Atomic Swap is not dICO participation, it is a 1:1 trade. It literally is what it is. So… When you’re buying into dICO, you’re not buying into ICO as in a normal term. You are just trading your coin for another coin. It happens automatically and trustlessly. So that’s another thing. I guess if laws do come to illegalize… I mean… It would be very hard, and this technology could help out a lot of people and in many ways. Just like encryption did, right? When privacy was being broken and whatnot, and people created encryption to get some power back.

(S) Hopefully we don’t have any back doors for Komodo like we did with some other encryption key.

(P) Everything’s open source so they’ll be able to check if there are backdoors.

(S) Has there been a surge of interest for Komodo coming from the Chinese market? You know people said like the recent price drop was because of the OTC banning scare that happened in China. Was there any surge of interest for Chinese?

(P) Yeah, we actually do. You know it is strange because I get mixed signals. I see these things in the news but we are receiving invitations to go present our technology to not a small group of people, literally like government officials and whatnot. It amazes me because I think…. So… ‘What is really happening? Is it really gonna get banned?’ To me, the government is just trying to get some kind of control on it and tax it. Tax it one way or another. And I’ve seen… Actually way before this… Probably like around a month ago, I’ve seen a surge of interest coming from China. And from the Korean community too, thanks to Goldenman as well. He’s been very present in promoting stuff.

(S) Okay, thank you. Do you still have more with the presentation? Should you go back to that?

(P) Yeah, well let me… I mean it’s pretty much it. As far as… I don’t know. I guess If you wanna talk about the Atomic Swaps, there’s other platforms claiming to be making Atomic Swaps. So I wanted to detail what are the advantages of our Atomic Swap exchange. Our Atomic Swap exchange has a fully automated order matching. So… Where you have Decred and Litecoin making swaps that are command-line swaps that are prepared prior. And then, they’re set up in an environment. They are aimed at each other, and then they happen. You literally are just putting a buy order or sell order in it and it does it all out automatically. Just like you are on Bittrex or any other exchange. So that right there is huge because that actually gives you an exchange or a market maker experience. Aside from that, you are also not trading proxy tokens. You’re trading blockchain to blockchain. We did… I think I mentioned we did Ethereum to Komodo swap. Even those… That are not fully decentralized, you can still track completely on the blockchain. That’s something that I’ve not seen 0x. I think it’s 0x or altcoin.io. I wrote them on Twitter. I wanted to see the back-end of the swaps they were making. They never sent it. So you have to be careful when people claiming Atomic Swaps and actually not seeing what’s really happening. If it’s really happening on blockchain or not. Let’s see…

(S) I don’t know how strong you guys are at the market… at ETH-Komodo Atomic Swap. But that’s huge, in my opinion.

(P) A few days before, Coindesk… I think it was Coindesk. They published an article about Atomic Swaps. They mentioned Litecoin, they mentioned Decred, they did not even mention us. At all. So… That shows you. It’s okay. I mean it’s fine. I think once people actually understand what we’ve done and now that the actual GUI is ready, like people don’t have to make command-line swaps. It’s gonna catch on. But… I don’t know. I think, unfortunately, the market doesn’t reflect the true value of the coin or the project, you know.

(S) The way you do approach this whole Atomic Swap though… It is quite different from other projects’ way of doing it. So for example…. I was looking through Decred’s Atomic Swap, right? You guys have… You guys actually have another step added there where… You want one of the… I think it’s the person who’s wanting to make the initiator, you want him to put up a deposit, right?

(P) Bob. It’s actually Bob. For example, if you are liquidity provider, you would be Bob. You are selling. So Alice is buying. Bob puts… Bob makes the deposit which he gets back once the actual transaction is finalized. This all happens in seconds. So it’s not like you are waiting for someone to clear transaction. And it’s done through the opcodes. So… It’s a different type of transaction. It’s a time-locked transaction. cf) (Tier Nolan Protocol)

(S) And for you, yeah… Because everything is done in a gooey environment. It’s just a couple of clicks as opposed to like Decred where you still have to go through command-line interface. There’s no other way to do it.

(P) Yeah I actually… You know it’s really crazy. I wish I had more time to investigate and really test these other platforms, but I don’t. And I wish I did because I think we are super far ahead with a lot of these projects. And you can see it, see it just in the tech and the way that the Atomic Swap is handled. We are showing people everything. I mean… From the initiating to the finalization of the swap. Back-end, front-end. But I think it’ll take us a few months to actually polish this GUI up and get it to where people are just really pleased to use it.

(S) So, I had a question. For a significant portion of your whitepaper, you talk about UTXO sets, right? You talk about how BarterDEX is primarily focused on making sure that you can break down the UTXO sets, and you can trade one sort of asset to another. Does that only come for assets that are on BarterDEX, namely like the Komodo Asset Chains? That doesn’t include what you said about ETH to Komodo Atomic Swap or Bitcoin to Komodo Atomic Swap, correct?

(P) I guess the mechanism will be a little different. But, it’s still UTXO base in a sense that you’re spending (or basing) the Atomic Swap on an unspent input. So, I think for the Ethereum swap that the only difference is how it’s still controlled by one party in essence. There’s still trust being placed in one party. That’s what I’m trying to say. That’s what the difference is.

(S) Okay. Makes sense. I have a question for Goldenman, if you don’t mind answering to this. I know that your background as a software engineer, and second of all, you’re a Korean. So, why Komodo for you? Why was Komodo so attractive to you? How do you see it playing a role in Korea in the future?

(G) Well, do I speak in English? Doesn’t matter? okay.

(S) You can speak in Korean.

(G) 저도 처음에 다른 분들처럼 생각없이 샀죠. 초보일 때 아무것도 모르면서 작은 거래소에서 샀어요. 걱정이 됐죠. 내가 스캠을 산건 아닌가? 사고나서 공부를 했죠. 백서 공부도 하고, 공부를 하다보니까 괜찮은거 같아서. 그래서 열심히 파고, 또 내가 알고 있으면 다른 분들이 물어보시는게 있더라구요. 그러다보니까 점점 더 찾아보게 되고. 아무래도 한국에 내가 코모도 관련 글을 많이 쓰다보니까… 좀 더 비전이 더 있더라고요 다른곳보다도. 계속하다 보니까 더 열심히 하게도 되고. 사실 코모도를 열심히 공부해가지고 번아웃되가지고 다른 코인은 더 못보는 면도 있구요. 약간 코인이 더 활성화 된 세상에서, 물론 비트코인을 비롯한, 암호화폐들이 지배하는 세상에서 역할을 할 수 있는 플랫폼 기반이기도 하구요. 물론 다른 코인들과는 차별화되는 면들도 있고. 그리고 ‘아직 마케팅을 적극적으로 안하냐’는 질문도 많이들 하시는데, 제가 봐서는 아직 마케팅을 열심히 하는 것보다는 기술적 기반을 먼저 하고 하는게 낫다고 생각하는 것 같더라구요. 개발진들도 그렇고, HQ에서 생각하는 것들이… 그런 면에서는 저도 엔지니어 입장이다 보니까, 해놓은거 없이 말만 하는 사람들보다는, 알맹이 가지고 준비된 걸 가지고 말하는 사람이 좋은 것 같아요. 그런 면에서 제가 좀 반한 것도 있고, 그리고 앞으로 더 해야할 것들이 지금까지 해놓은 것보다 더 많으니까 잠재력을 전 더 높이 평가하는거죠.

(S) So, let me quickly translate that. Goldenman basically said that he was initially attracted to Komodo, and he was, at the beginning, afraid that it might be a scam. But the more he studied about it and deeper and deeper he looked into it, it became more attractive to him. And then his thing with Komodo was that it was tech-centric, and that right now it is the time to focus on the technology, and maybe it’s not the right time where you need to go all in on marketing. He was looking for it in a long run. He thinks that it’ll really pay off, looking into the future.

(P) Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree, it’s good.

(S) I really don’t want to steal marketing team’s thunder. But when you came to Korea, did you meet different corporations? Were there any partnerships that were formed or some sort of understanding that was formed?

(P) I think that’s our Goldenman.

(S) So, Goldenman, were there any?

(G) So far, no. Someday, I hope.

(S) In my opinion, I really think a lot of Korean corporations are trying to figure out like what can we… not like forget enterprise blockchain I think enterprise blockchain is just database it’s just next iteration of like the whole like private database thing, but when it comes to like public blockchain they’re really looking for like just the other day i had someone from a major conglomerate message me and they said, “Hey i want blockchain teams that are very tech-savvy and i want to contact these people and i want to work with these people. And because we kinda wanna kinda have a project that we could show, we really prefer it to be a korean project.” But I mean right now korean blockchain teams we are working but we are in nascent stages. If there were teams like Komodo in Korea, I would have definitely recommended you guys.

(G) Actually Monaize is one of the good examples for corporations. They’re not a blockchain company. They are the real world company. They just joined blockchain to empower their works and their industries. It’s going to be a good example for other industry to cooperate for the platform someday. And, the blockchain is more common in the real world.

(P) As we move forward and make it easier to actually integrate into the platform, we have more presence in Asia and all these markets. I think more people will come. Right now, we’re still taking baby steps, I think. The technology is so new that it’s like trying to sell someone an airplane when there were buggies and horses. People are like “what is that stuff?” But, when it comes to time, people will come to understand the significance of it. Then, we’ll really have to prepare because we’ll have a migration to the Komodo platform. I don’t think a lot of people know this, but you can see Ethereum, ERC20 token, you can swap it for the Komodo Asset Chain. Then, you’ll have a native blockchain, and you’ve been migrated away from Ethereum. I think we’ll see a lot of migrations.

(S) I love what you just said. I was at the EOS party one night. Just to give everyone heads-up, we’re gonna see a lot of reverse ICOs, right? So, pre-existing companies who want to issue tokens, now they’re about to do it. Everything that they’re concerned about, their whole business model relies on which platform they think are going to make it. But, everyone knows that no platform is so secure. Whatever the platform that gives the most flexibility when it comes to migrating their tokens, just in case for that particular platform shit hits the fan, it’ll attract a lot of people.

(P) Exactly. It’s beautiful, like literally… If Komodo dies, the Asset Chain can set up their own notary node. So, they can start notarizing onto Bitcoin. That’s the beauty I think about Komodo. We’re not aiming our software at people’s pockets. We’re aiming at it solving issues. I think it’ll pay out in the end.

(S) Yes, I think so too. I have a question. There’s a question from the audience. RTP asks any views on Loopring technology with regards to the BarterDEX. (cf. Loopring https://loopring.org/en/index.html 을 지칭하는 것으로 보임.)

(P) Any of you what?

(S) Any views on Loopring technology with regards to the BarterDEX.

(P) I’m actually not versed on Loopring. I can’t answer that one.

(S) For everybody that’s tuning in, if you guys have any questions, you might wanna shoot at PTYX because I think he’s done with his presentation. So please go ahead.

(P) I think this is it. What follows is just a little bit of… What’s coming as far as the marketing schedule. They released an update. So as you can see, there are going to be quite busy in the first and second quarter of this year. Quite a lot of stuff coming on. It’s not only just about revamping what Komodo looks like. It’s more literally like a restructure of how the marketing is done and how it’s collaborating with support and with development. So where Komodo was, I guess, inefficient before. Now we’re really starting to work dynamically. And we’re seeing the results. In the past few months we’ve done quite well in regards to getting the information out there and doing it in a good fashion. I think a lot of good things are coming. All of these good things come from the community because they tell us if something is wrong. If the marketing sucks, we have to fix it. All these feedback is great because we’re really growing with people’s feedback.

(S) The marketing is an easier part to fix. The tech, the blockchain? Once you have it deployed, you can’t fix it.

(P) You’d be surprised, but I know what you mean. Usually it’s the other way around. You have good marketing and low tech. I think that’s usually the case.

(S) Blockchain is… It is closer to being like hardware than being like software. It’s not forgiving. If you make a mistake, you are just screwed.

(P) Yeah.

(S) Here’s another question from ShiptarLany194. He asks “I remember reading that Komodo will be doing one ICO at a time. Do they plan to change this if there is demand. Can they handle more than 1 ICO each time?”

(P) Okay. I think I mentioned this earlier, about creating, I guess if you want to call it an SDK, some type of the development kit where someone will be able to launch an Asset Chain, and they’ll literally have the wallet, explorer, and everything set up with a one-click option. That’s our goal. What this will do, it will allow anyone to launch not only their own ICO but their own Asset Chain or parallel chain. However, we’re not going to be able to to give our full attention like we did with Monaize to everyone. So when we say we’re going to be doing 1 ICO at a time, what we mean is that we’re going to be taking one strategic partnership at a time. So, as the Monaize’s partnership flourishes and we’re done with ICO, then we’ll move to our next partner and focus solely on them, and move to the next. However, in the background, there will be many things happening. So yeah, there will be many ICOs happening at once. Maybe we will not be sponsoring or be standing behind all of them. I think I’ve discussed this with someone and the team’s been discussing it. We need to find a way to vet these projects. So, in my mind, what I was thinking is coming up with community vote-based mechanism to where a project that we’re not actually saying this is our partner, but they create their Asset Chains and they create all their stuff. And they can present their project then the users vote if they want that project launched or not, depending if the project has everything in order or just vaporware. But I think this stuff will come as we grow. It’s part of the governance. And it’s really what blockchain is evolving into.

(S) One more question from XOHeron. “How can we have a look on the AtomicDEX which is simpler than BarterDEX use.” So can regular people look at the AtomicDEX? Can they access this?

(P) Yeah. I guess I can send you the link when we’re done. I don’t wanna take the presentation down. I’ll send you the link when we’re done. But we actually made it available in the tradebot’s channel on Slack. It’s on the GitHub. It’s made available for anyone who can build it. It’s very easy to build on Mac or Windows, but it’s not packaged yet. So it’s not like a one-click app. So basically, you just launch it and then you’ll be able to use it. I’ll send you the link and then I’ll ask also our developer and maybe if we can package it to get it out. We didn’t wanna put it out because we put it out for the Bitcoin Hush(BTCH) test, and it worked very very well. But Monaize is actually taking it and making their own version of it. Like they’re making it, putting their graphics and stuff on it. We wanted to wait for them to give us their version so we can actually test that. And then put it out so people start to get used to their graphics and whatnot for ICO, but I can do that.

(S) Just one more question. The Rebel Awakes asks “when will BarterDEX be able to take fiat currencies?”

(P) That’s something that would depend on the liquidity providers. For example, Komodo is not going to get itself involved in KYC or fiat-crypto exchanges. But, what’s gonna happen is that partners like Monaize or licensed liquidity providers will be able to set up liquidity provider nodes that do these USD, Euro, fiat-crypto trades. So basically, what we’ll have is… We’ll have our partners who will be offering fiat gateways and we’ll also have the liquidity providers that offer decentralized “via-gateways”. Decentralized in meaning that it is not centralized and it is not held by us. It is literally just a decentralized network of specific providers. I think we can see this happening by next year or within this year. It really depends on how fast this space moves because what it’s going to come down to is how easy it is for someone to set out liquidity provider node. It is a learning curve. They’ll have to tweak it for the percentages for their spreads. So, we really have to get this prepped so anyone can just come in and… Get it ready quick. It could be this year, it could be next, but it’s definitely gonna be happening.

(S) Oranid asks “the white-labeled dICO is a great concept but how do you address technical issues if you’re not focused on non-partners?”

(P) Technical issues in what sense? As far as the kit we are gonna be providing, the kit should provide everything. As far as any knowledge to solve any issues and it should assist that chain that has their own support. And, this is what this vetting thing is coming down to…The vetting process. I think it is the community’s choice if they want to launch a project that maybe doesn’t have support or maybe they do. And they really have great support. So, it is something we’re not going to be able to control fully, but we’ll definitely give people everything they need to get themselves prepared. Imagine if we focus on non-partners, that would be crazy.

(S) When you say the vetting process, are you just talking about they’re technical savvy or are you also talking about the ideas behind the project and whatnot?

(P) For example, if I wanna launch a project and I go through the vetting platform of Komodo, and I upload all my documents and I put up all my team’s information, and I show that I have a company, our registration, contracts, I have substance. You know the community will see this and say, “okay, this is an actual project.” But, if I have a whitepaper and I have no teammates and I have no visible substance, then why should we let this launch on the platform. Obviously it’s not our decision because it’s open source. But I do think that there should be vetting mechanism for the community to say that project is not going to launch. It is vapor. I think we’ll be able to tell also very quickly which projects are good and which projects are not. If we set up… For example, if you want to launch dICO, you pay us fee which this fee is held for the development or whatever. But this also will cut down on spam. You know like someone making random massive chains to spam Komodo.

(S) I think the vetting’s helpful because… One of the horrible use cases we thought for a theory with Ethereum would be assassination market. I mean it’s horrible but like… Assassination market smart contract. But that’s what happens if you have zero vetting processes. Anyone can take ERC20 tokens and you can just spin up off dICO, spin up off some market, and then what are you gonna do? The whole platform gets bad rep or the regulators are gonna come down extra hard just because you allowed that to happen.

(P) Exactly. I think that’s another thing too. If we have one person saying this project is good and this project is bad, then this puts all that pressure on one person. And we’re a community so it should be all of us looking at the project and saying “This one is gonna launch and this one isn’t for X or Y reason.” So… I mean it’s something that is not concrete yet. And obviously it’s not like we have permanently thousands of dICOs so we’re not getting overflooded or anything. We are getting a lot of requests and a lot of them are vaporware. Some of them are not. Some of them are real projects. I mean I think this thing will come into place, but it is something to think about for dICOs are gonna be happening especially with the anonymity feature… where people are gonna be able to invest with privacy of JUMBLR. Now this does not mean that dICO issuer is gonna be anonymous. That is completely incorrect. dICO issuer should be the most unanonymous person. We should know everything about that person because why? Because we should’ve vetted him before, right? So…

(S) Thank you. That’s really insightful. Alright, I think I’m done with everything that I have prepared for today. Goldenman, do you have anything to say? PTYX, do you have anything else?

(P) No, I think we pretty much covered everything. Goldenman, do you have any questions? Go ahead.

(G) You already answered!

(P) Great.

(G) Do you have anything?

(P) No, I think we had it all.

(S) Before we sign out, any last words?

(P) I wanna thank everyone really, people that have stuck with us. Recently, we’ve been dealing with this BitcoinDark swap. We gave people a year and there was literally the last swaps that did not process gave us more trouble than the whole year that we gave their people to swap. So I just wanna thank people for bearing with us and also the notary elections are coming up in March. I think they will happen and a lot of information will come out before then. So, we’ll have a voting system or the elections. We’re gonna try. Well, I mean it’s not that we’re gonna try and fail. We’re gonna make it a blockchain voting system so people will be vote for their notaries through the blockchain. If we speak about the notaries, it’s about the delayed Proof-of-Work(PoW) so the notary nodes are the ones that run the servers that protect Komodo or the second layer of Komodo. I just wanted to let people know. You know keep an eye for that. Always try to pick the best candidate because we want good people on the servers.

(S) Goldenman, any last words?

(G) Many people said, “why Komodo do not marketing on our products?” but maybe we’re starting to do that. We’re warming up things. Maybe this year is gonna be the year of Komodo, I think so. Please keep an eye on us and expect what we are gonna do and we’ll show you something.

(S) Hey, thank you guys. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you everyone for tuning in. And once again, this is See Eun from the Blockchainers. And we’re propagating from Gangnam which is in the heart of Seoul, which is in the heart of Korea. We’re trying to tell everyone around the world about what’s going on in blockchain-crypto ecosystem, bringing you new news, interviews, general goodness and that Korean soul. If you like this content, please like, subscribe, and comment below. If you have further questions for the Komodo team, please write it down the comments. I’ll try to relate to them as much as possible. We’ll probably be getting like English and Korean transcript out. So, please refer to it later on in the future. And one more, If you wanna collaborate on a project, if you wanna get your favorite project on the show, please drop us an email at the theblockchainers@gmail.com. Because we’re always open to do that. So everyone have wonderful evening and we will see you next time.

(P, G) Thank you, Blockchainers!