On May 28th, we hosted another AMA with Dr. Mo Dong, co-founder of Celer Network, in our telegram group. If you missed our live AMA, no worries! Here’s the summary for all of the Q&A. Definitely join our telegram to stay tuned for our next event.
Q1. I was curious to learn more about the game side of CelerX. Will you be able to transport value across game app platforms for instance? I have been playing around with Gomoku and find it very interesting except I have fat fingers and keep putting my tokens at the wrong intersections so my stats are horrible 🙂 I notice it uses game tokens so was wondering if those would be transportable or will CELR serve that purpose?
A1. This is a great question. eSport gaming will be one important focus of Celer Network’s use cases. e-Sport gaming is an already huge market and growing extremely fast. Traditional blockchain application cannot access this market because it is not possible to do low-fee micropayment and also high frequency interaction between humans. Celer Network is running on top of existing blockchains so that it immediately accessible by global users due to the global nature of blockchains. The most important thing is this: only Celer’s layer-2 scaling technology can support this use case: it enables highly interactive games with ZERO transaction fee and also support arbitrarily small payments globally. Comparing to running games directly on blockchain, Celer Network provides the same level of user experience as if you are using a centralized application and 100X cheaper comparing to using blockchain directly.
You guys probably have already seen CelerX mobile application. If you haven’t, please try out at celerx.app. CelerX is not only a user-facing application with smooth UX, but also a developer extremely-easy-to-use toolset to make applications, and specifically games using Celer Network’s layer-2 infrastructure.
We care about user experience and also developer experience for blockchain. Using CelerX developer SDK, developer does not even need to understand anything about blockchain to be able to harvest the global financial access potential brought by blockchain technology.
Just two lines of code needed.
Blockchain space has been missing a sustainable business model where developers can actually get benefits of blockchain and turn that into positive profit that is better than they can earn using traditional financial systems. Celer is enabling that and we are very confident on the direction we are moving.
Longer-term, there will be a matrix of product all using the decentralized Celer Network state channel as a backend. We do hold the vision that all layer-2 scaling technology should work together as a coherent solution and to solve the scalability challenges of decentralized applications.
To answer your specific questions, the Gomoku game is one example application a developer can build on top of CelerX platform. We will open it up for a lot more developers to build so hopefully you will be able to see a lot of dApps and decetranzlied games using CelerX technology. But, notes taken in terms of the game’s user experiences, we have fixed that problem as well in our new version 😀
When we launch on main net, the games available in CelerX are going to be able to support ETH, DAI, CELR and of course, you can use your tokens in many of the games without any friction when switching.
Q2. A technical about the whitepaper if you can answer: how is congestion on the network resolved using the distributed balanced routing algorithm (DBR) instead of the shortest path? Would wireless transfer of packets to nodes present chance of loss or security breach?
A2. The congestion is handled transparently. The congestion is modeled as part of the pressure in the backpressure routing algorithm. Therefore, if there is indeed congestion, the payment will automatically switch to a less congested route.
Q3. Just wanna know more about the poLC mainnet launch ? what features will be added in SDK public v3.0 release? and also wanna know more about Croute initial deploy?
A3. SDK release 3.0 will be very interesting. We are focusing on a wrapped API of the underlying Celer Network API so developers can immediately start to build eSport games using CelerX SDK. This part is elaborated in the previous question, so I will refer you to that.
Regarding cRoute, we are doing the initial deployment so that users do not need to create channels directly with each other but be able to route their state and payment across the network. We will give users a feeling of “Wifi”, you just need to connect once with Celer Network and continously
PoLC launch will gradually roll out as the liquidity demands increases. In the beginning, we will roll out PoLC for ETH, DAI and CELR tokens and for limited amount to ensure the security of the contract, as we continuously conduct formal verification of the contract. In addition, we are doing some further game theoretical analysis and see if we can further improve the efficiency of the PoLC process.
Q4. What has been the biggest technical challenge that you overcame this year? And what from your pov is the biggest one to come , this year and beyond?
A4. I think the biggest technical challenge is that literally no one has done this before. After Ethereum, it has become relatively easier to build blockchain with smart contracts and there are so many different flavors of off-the-shelf blockchain solutions like tendermint.There are indeed some very interesting challenges left like sharding and scalable PoS, but the basis are all there after so many years.
However, layer-2 is very new comparing to layer-1 technology. It started from lightning network which only support payment. No one has build generalized state channel technology before, we are going to be the world’s first one launching this. We are literally breaking new ground that no one has travelled before. I have to say, leading the space feels awesome, but also comes with tremendous undertaking of building new things. However, we are confident that this generalized state channel, or layer-2 smart contract capability, will be as transformative as Ethereum itself when it first introduced smart contract concept to the world,
In the future, we will continue to break the ground of new technology. In addition to pinoineer the development space of layer-2 scaling technology, we are very much focused on cultivating sustainable business models in the space. The only way to let this space grow sustainably is to actually create income and profit for projects and developers building on blockchain ecosystem. I think this is our theme in 2019 and probably beyond: find a business model or commercial use case that can significantly benefit from blockchain technology. We are confident that we can achieve that. So if you are a developer, please do tune in to our main net launch in the next month or so.
Q5. What kind of entities will be running the guardian network? Do you need to be registered somehow, or have big number (10mn+) of tokens and have powerful machines/servers?
A5. Guardian network will use delegates and voting model. You can delegate your tokens to people who have powerful machines and servers to run the state guardian nodes. The number of guardian nodes can be pretty large and you can always easily switch your vote whenever you want.
Q6. If there is a bad/malicious actor whose tokens are taken away for the benefit of good actors , how are those distributed？
A6. In state channel, the entire setup is still trust-free. If a bad actor is trying to cheat, the other parties can always open a dispute with this bad actor on-chain. Even if the other parties are not online, State Guardian Network will ensure the safety of the network.
Q7. Are there going to be separate guardian networks and liquidity auctions for different blockchains or there will be a central platform? Maybe more details on that.
A7. When we start expand on new blockchains, we are considering using a central sidechain that is connecting to multiple blockchains to hold the liquidity backing auction process and also the state guardian network. So this sidechain will become a bridge across different blockchains for Celer’s layer-2 network to work really well. As I mentioned, we will start to see merged technologies like side-chain and state channels in Celer Network to become a coherent solutions with multiple technologies.
Q8. One thing i didnt quite understand is when you provide say 100ether of liquidity , you get interest etc but what if the borrower has no intention of repaying , how is that mitigated?
A8. Great question. Collateral is optional but accepted. So the borrower can provide collateral like ETH, ERC-20 or even NFTs to this contract. In the end of the day, it is a free market. Liquidity backers can choose to back based on reputation or collateral. More collateral usually means less interest rate. In addition to collateral, the LiBA contract to implement additional features to control the lended out liquidity. For example, the LiBA can issue a new ERC-20 that is effectively a one-to-one backed IoU to the underlying liquidity. This ERC-20 token cannot be used in any other place other than opening state channel with users. And when users try to issue claim to this contract, there can be a chain of evidence to see whether the off-chain service provider is malicious. However, that involves additional work in State Guardian Network to verify that a off-chain service provider’s balance is “correct”. This will be gradually implemented as the liquidity system grows.
Q9. I hear rumours that celer has been working with Coinbase. Can you please confirm if this is true?
A9. A lot of wallet providers and exchanges are interested in Celer Network technology. We have announced collaboration with TrustWallet. We will continously update the community whenever new information is available.
Q10. What don’t Celer move on to Binance Chain?
A10. Celer Network is blockchain agnostic. We already support Ethereum, DFN and more. Whenever Binance Chain support smart contract, we can definitely support that !
Q11. When app celerx on android launch?
A11. you can download the test version at celerx.app today and the 1.0 version will release with the main net.
Q12. What’s your relations with Matic are you going to be strategic patterns moving forward? Any chance of you both merging to become one company with one token?
A12. We are strategic partners. Celer Network and Matic Network are both layer-2 scaling solutions. Celer Network uses state channel technology and Matic Network uses side chain technology. There are different tradeoff for these two technologies and they are complementary to each other. Celer can enable real-time and high-frequency interaction between users of blockchain applications and is horizontally scalable. The smart contract transactions on top of Celer Network is also free. You can have millions of smart contract function calls on Celer and pay 0 transaction fee. The more people joining Celer Network and interaction with Celer Network, the higher the TPS will be and latency will not be affected and still instant. Streaming-like micropayment-based services can also be fully enabled by Celer. Side-chain is great for state scaling and also reducing on-chain transaction cost. It can significantly help state channels to operate at lower cost and lower user on-boarding friction. Please stay tuned as we update you on how these two solutions are complementary to each other. In addition, Celer Network will be the world’s first generalized state channel network goes live.
Q13. Why are you waiting until 30th June to launch. Seems pointless if it’s ready to not launch earlier and foster organic marketing for the product.
A13. The entire team is working hard on preparing for the main net launch. We want to launch to be perfectly executed on multiple fronts.
Q14. When there will be POLC mainnet launch?
A14. Sometime after the initial main net roll out. Around 1–2 months, the cEconomy component will grow as the network itself grows.
Q15. Quarkchain already have the scalable blockchain solution — what is it that makes your solution better?
A15. QuarkChain is actually one of our partner blockchains. Quarkchain support layer-1 sharding scaling but even with sharding, the layer-1’s capability is limited. It is not possible to achieve instant and free smart contract transactions. That is only possible with Celer. Our infrastructure actually can support Quarkchain’s VM already. We are a blockchain agnostic layer-2 solution.
Q16. Will Celer be able to have games with EC1155 token like Enjin and able to keep items in the wallet?
A16. That is definitely a possibility. In the future, I see a combination of collectible and interactive games. Where NFT tokens will serve as on-chain gaming assets and Celer will be used in the gaming interaction process.
Q17. End June is mainnet alpha or…?
A17. It will be main net alpha. However, it will be fully functional and usable. We do not want to launch something and :1. no one is using it; 2. no developer can build on top of it. So we very much focus on developer experience and also user experience. Hopefully the product we release will transform the user experiences of blockchain today.
Q18. Will Celer’s currency burn coins this year? What percentage and when? Why they removed 1% from the Foundation instead of the Team? With so many coins in circulation that were sold, will they invest in marketing? Every day 25 of each month will be unlocked a large amount of coins? For how long and why?
A18. There will be no burn coins this year. Regarding the 1% locked token, this is a very unfortunate event. To ensure safety and information isolation, we have financial and wallet custodian operation as two separate teams. We use a smart contract to distribute tokens to our private sale purchasers. During the last distribution process, there was a miscommunication about the token address and a wrong CELR token address is written in the smart contract. Financial team then transferred the CELR token to that distribution contract. However, the distribution contract cannot move the CELR tokens due to wrongly encoded token address. We will have the contract code open sourced and there is really no benefits for the team to lie about this. We do take this incident seriously as we have reviewed and improved the internal process of all token related operations to ensure that the communication regarding system and token parameters is always done through a verifiable version control system. We take responsibility of this and none of our token holders will be affected. This will never happen again. This is a collective responsibility and not any individual team’s responsibility. We will help to grow Celer Network’s ecosystem with the fund we raised. The unlocking will be seed investors and it’s not a lot per month. We will have a report to detail the unlocking schedule to make it publically available.
Q19. Is Celer focusing only on gaming development? Or they are plan other usability? Like online payments, paying goods with celer, and others?
A19. Payment is definitely bread and butter of blockchain and also for Celer. But, to achieve real adoption, we gotta find where blockchain technology works best and where the traditional financial system incurs huge overhead. And the gaming is definitely one of them. However, it is not to say that we don’t do payment. Micro-payment-based services is also definitely a huge gold mine of commercial opportunities.
Q20. Is the celer product just a game? or are there others?
A20. CelerX is a user facing application demonstrating the layer-2 scaling power of Celer Network. Developer will be able to build on Celer Network with all sorts of applications.
Q21. How closely are you working together with the technical partners and are you helping projects with programming to integrate and compliment the different projects you guys are working with?
A21. We are working with our technical partners very closely. Real integration are happening. For example:
Q22. First thanks for the answer to my question and secondly is there any info about staking such as the amounts that will be required to stake?
A22. Not yet, but we are fully focusing on launching the main net alpha and will put more efforts to detail out the staking metrics following that.
Q23. So you will put many applications into the Celerx application? like tencent game desktop applications?
A23. Just like dApp browsers today for layer-1 blockchain, CelerX is a dApp browser for layer-2 dApps
Q24. Do you only handle UX?
A24. No, we are a layer-2 scaling platform that if developers use, will accelerate their application greatly.
Q25. Hi, Mo. Celer Network, like the Counterfactual, is working on the implementation of state channels. I am far from the technical part. But I would like to ask about this. Correct me if I am somewhere wrong, or my question will be incorrectly constructed. One example. Suppose wallet “A” will support the state channels implemented only by the Counterfactual, and wallet “B” only from the Celer. Would it be possible in that case to make transactions between these wallets using the state channels of both projects (for example, the state from one network would be transferred to another network, if this is of course possible at all)? How is competition possible in the future if each project successfully implements its ideas? And will there be any competition at all? Perhaps each of the projects will be in demand in some of its niche, or they will complement each other in all without competing?
A25. Great question. Celer Network is going to be the first one launching a production-ready generalized state channel network. So far as we know, no one has come close to us on that point. In terms of interoparation, we are helping to defining the community standard for future compatibility *if* there is any other implementation popping up.
Q26. Hey Mo, got question from earlier. Is it right to say that essentially your mainnet is ready you are just waiting now (for the audit)? Have you had to make any changes as part of the audit?
A26. No, there are still components and applications being actively developed. After the initial main net launch, we will also have continous developmenet as well to push for continous evolution of the protocol and applications built around it .
Thank you all for joining and asking all those great questions! Please stay tuned for our next AMA soon. 🙌
