Celer Jan.10th AMA Summary

Dear Community,

Thanks for participating our AMA with DBCrypto. For those who missed it, this is a summary of Celer Network’s Telegram AMA with @dbcrypto on 10th Jan.

AMA start: Welcome to our Telegram AMA with Celer Network.

This message is to formally begin the AMA. We are joined by Mo Dong and Qingkai Liang both founders of Celer.

Celer Network is an Internet-scale, trust-free, and privacy-preserving platform where everyone can quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications.

There is a lot to discuss, I would like to begin with a bit on each of your backgrounds and your personal motivation for working on the Celer Network project

Mo: I graduated from UIUC with my PhD degree in computer science and all of our cofounders are also PhDs found universities including UC Berkeley, MIT and Princeton. We all worked in the area of distributed systems and I also worked in the area of game theory, so blockchain has been an area of interest for us for a long time.

We started Celer Network because we really see scalability is the main pain point preventing blockchain reaching real adoption. And after careful examination of different solutions, we believe a layered blockchain architecture is where things will go. In the meantime, there are so many unknown spaces in layer-2 scaling that is not filled and under researched. That’s when we started to pour in a lot of energy and efforts and came up with Celer Network’s coherent technology and crypto economics architecture.

To see why we say that scalability can definitely make a difference in terms of user adoption, just see this gif.

A visual "before vs after" comparison to show the instant interaction enabled by Celer! We invite you to download cWallet and try out cGomoku game. Today’s game codes will be out at 13:00PM in our telegram group! Play and win ETH. More: https://t.co/G5ot56ixfF pic.twitter.com/VTwmzLuu9s

— CelerNetwork (@CelerNetwork) December 28, 2018

Q) How do you see the space developing? Do you see Celer working alongside layer 1 projects at some point in the future, or do you see them as competition?

A) Great question. We are definitely in collaboration with layer-1 projects. For example, we are now working on Ethereum by default. We are also the first layer-2 solution on DFINITY and we are also in process of supporting other blockchains like Thunder Networks, Oasis Labs, Nervos and more. Layer-1 scalability is great, but it has its own limitations. Even with sharding, Amdal’s law dictates that as long as there is a small percentage of unparallel transactions, the benefits of parallelization, in this case sharding, will deminish quickly as you add shards. So to support real-time and interactive applications, layer-2 is not optional, it is a must.

Now onto layer-2 space itself, Along with the rising general awareness of a layered blockchain architecture, the layer 2 technology space is also flourishing. Generalized state channel, side chains, interactive computing and ZK-SN(T)ARK are all being developed. One trend we do find is that most of the teams are fixated on a specific technology piece. For example, some teams are working on generalized state channel, some teams are focusing on Plasma side chain, some team only focuses on Truebit-style interactive challenge compute. As our own technology development unfolds, it becomes clear to us that the future of layer 2 should not be that one team tries to use only a single technology piece to form a solution. Instead, multiple technology pieces should be merged organically to forge a single solution. This is Celer Network’s layer-2 2.0 vision.

In fact, Celer Network is executing this vision. At Celer Network, though we started in the area of generalized state channel, our whole architecture does not have a dedicated tie to a single piece of layer 2 technology. For example, our cChannel realizes the generalized state channel capability, but the State Guardian Network is a special-purpose Plasma-cash-like side chain to ensure. In addition, when we are doing settlement and dispute, we employ the principle of interactive computing that the initiator of the settlement starts an interactive challenge game with a direct claim of the final settlement result. This technique significantly reduced the gas cost of channel settlement. In the future, we plan to also add side-chains into our off-chain payment and smart contract transaction abstraction. We are also pioneering new technology trend in layer-2, such as Oracle as an Execution Engine. We are building Celer Network as the first ever layer-2 2.0 platform supporting a wide range of use cases.

Q) What’s the nature of some of your strategic partnerships with other blockchain projects? I am especially curious about QuarkChain

A) We are working closely with some emerging public blockchains to complement their layer-1 scalability and also at the same time collaborate on potentially modifying layer-1 to support layer-2 better. We have done some work with Nervos on that and some recent EIP merged in the Constatinpole release also took our input to better support serialization and deserialization of off-chain state in Ethereum.

So we basically naturally support all EVM based blockchains including Thunder, QuarkChain, Oasis Labs and more.

Q) Do you see Celer working with Bloxroute? Who do you see as your closest rival and what competitive edge do you have over them?

A) bloxroute works on layer-0 to speed block propagation for blockchain, so for now, there is no direct interaction.

Q) Hello, Celer team. Why do you need your internal token?

A) This is a relatively long question to answer. The short answer is that CELR token provides security for Celer Network and also incentivize liquidity for Celer. It solves the critical challenge of liquidity shortage in layer-2 scaling network and also solves the “watch tower” problem nicely.

Q) Your cWallet app for mobile… can you tell us about it?
A) cWallet is a native Ethereum mobile wallet with ETH and ERC-20 support. But cWallet is also much more than just a wallet: it acts the gateway to Celer Network (testnet as of now). Through cWallet, you will enter a new world of off-chain applications that are more than 10000X faster than on-chain applications. Since we launched cWallet on our testnet, the user growth has been super encouraging. 😄😄

Note that this is the number on testnet without real token flowing through the network.

If you are interested, you could definitely try out some off-chain smart contract based board game in Celer. Once we launch on main net, there will be a matrix of application you can use on Celer.

Q) I was wondering if apps that require a lot of bandwidth and network infrastructure like Netflix could run on top of Celer?
If so, do you forsee celer ever using or even requiring hardware for improving networking/routing etc? Or will it be strictly software which runs on top of other infrastructure and networks?

A) For streaming services, we can support pay-per byte streaming services. The data itself does not need to flow through Celer, just like the video data does not have to flow through blockchain. However, the underlying payment can flow through Celer in a pay-per-minute basis.

Q) Why do you think you achieved those results without any marketing push, token, or money incentives?

A) And that’s why we believe Celer is going to bring new user growth and adoption to blockchain as the application experience is seamlessly smooth without the slightliest feeling of the underlying slow infrastracture.

Q) So…what actual applications or services do you think will become more feasible with the use of Celer?

A) There are several class of applications: gaming being the most obvious one. You don’t need to have a game that is 100X better for people to play this new game. As long as it is genuinely fun, people are going to play it. The thing about Celer’s game is that it enables the in-app asset transactions without compromising any kind of user experiences. In small games, it can be the board game that we built and in bigger games, it can be part of the game where interaction is needed.

Q) Aside from games or gambling; what use case do you see Celer most likely to fill?

A) There are other avenues for sure as well. For example, non-custodian decentralized exchange with the UX of centralized exchanges. Decentralized derivative trading marketing with centralized exchange experiences. Another big class of application will be micropayment. These can be blcockhain-native applications such as paying small computation fee in a decentralized computation power market. Such as Ankr or Golem. Or like this one https://devpost.com/software/micro-subscription using Celer to provide micro cloud hosting services with SLA gurantees. And machine to machine payment, decentralized power grid with a decentralized energy exchange but without compromising user experiences.

Q) Do you guys plan to do any for profit Red Hat-like open source support/development services on Celer?

A) anything is possible, but our focus now is to deliver and build the Celer Network platform. To bootstrap a healthy network, we will definitely provide all the help we can to the initial full node runners.

AMA End: This message concludes today’s AMA with Celer Network

Thank you Mo Dong for your time and for being open to this kind of unique dialogue with the supporters and those interested in Celer. Thank you everyone for joining us today. (t.me/celernetwork)

Thank you everyone for your questions, please stay tuned for more updates!