Translations :Q and A :Q:1. Which blockchain will be used to broadcast the messages between the users?
2. Are you developing your own blockchain? Depending on the answer, followup questions are about scaling and network clog.
3. Are all privacy issues tackled by the same chain? Addresses, Timestamps, Chat etc.
4. Your competitors are not clear in the paper, you mention Jabber; who are your main competitors? What about Signal, FrozenChat, ChatSecure, Wickr Me and others.
5. Could you please provide more information about the crowdsale. How will it be structured? You mention 500.000 ETH (max), is that the soft cap? Is there an escrow service?
6. What about the funds you will collect, is there a vesting period? What is the breakdown of the coins, how many will be sold during the crowdsale and how many will be kept by the developing team.
7. What is the total number of coins?
8. Talk to us about the team. About previous start up experience, about the CVs, work experience and education.
9. On your website the team seems anonymous since the surnames are not mentioned. Why do you need anonymity for such a project?
10. Have you received any funding from other sources? VCs, Angel Investors or some grant.
A:We will be developing our own blockchain to process interactions between users. Everything regarding the messaging protocol and privacy issues will be managed by this blockchain. As mentioned in the whitepaper, we'd like to run a few hundreds (thousands ?) of nodes at the beginning to avoid network clogging. Scalability shouldn't be a concern, as various project based on blockchain proved before us. However, we can not foresee every problem that might be occurring in the future, especially on those points as they highly depends on the success of the project and how quick the users are willing to adopt it as a mean of communication. Only time will tell, and necessary actions will be taken to fix potential issues with the protocol.
We do not see ourselves in a "competition", even though I understand what you mean by asking this. We aim at creating a new messaging protocol, not an application/service. What we are talking about in our whitepaper concerns mostly protocols and not how they are actually implemented.
By enforcing encryption and anonymity at the protocol level rather than application level, you ensure users that applications actually using that protocol must comply to these rules to be able to work. It eliminates the risk of a point of failure in implementation at application level.
Checking the example you've given, FrozenChat and ChatSecure are applications using the XMPP protocol. Wickr as far as I know is entirely closed source (?) while Signal actually provide source code and probably a proprietary protocol but they are not communicating on it. It also misses the point of Decentralization and Zero-knowledge principle.
We want anyone to be able to build his own application on top of the WWAM protocol, and not just provide one implementation of a chat client.
About the crowdsale structure :
We are conducting a 4 weeks ICO, divided in 3 stages :
First stage starts on August 9, 2017 and last until August 16, 2017. People investing in that time frame gets awarded a 15% bonus in tokens on top of the total amount of their investment.
Second stage starts on August 16, 2017 and last until August 23, 2017. People investing in that time frame gets awarded a 10% bonus in tokens on top of the total amount of their investment.
Final stage starts on August 23, 2017 and last until September 6, 2017. People investing in that time frame are awarded tokens according to the base rate without any bonus.
You can find a live status of the ICO on our website along with useful tools and tips on the following url :
http://wwam.io/ico (
http://wwam.io/ico)
You can also check the contract source code on github here :
https://github.com/wwam/WWAM (
https://github.com/wwam/WWAM)
Or alternatively on etherscan.io where the contract source code have been verified (You can also interact with the contract functions there if you wish) :
https://etherscan.io/address/0x59a048d31d72b98dfb10f91a8905aecda7639f13 (
https://etherscan.io/address/0x59a048d31d72b98dfb10f91a8905aecda7639f13)
We have a minimum funding goal of 500 ETH actually implemented in the source code of the contract, a refund will be automatically triggered and available in the contract itself if that funding goal isn't reached at the end of the ICO. We think that it realistically the bare minimum to be able to develop and maintain and project of this scale. It also provides investor a guarantee of investing in a project that will be alive and backed up by enough funds, as well as providing a comfortable small market value for the ERC20 tokens issued.
If we reach that minimum goal, the ICO continues with the guarantee that the project will go live, to maximum amount of 500,000 ETH (We do not want this to go out of hand either, that is just a safe cap in case the projects gain insane popularity).
We do have a lot of ideas for possible future improvements and extension of the projects, but we do not want to make promises that will be left unfulfilled. Everything will depend on the amount raised during the crowdsale, and we will make proper announcement of what we are planning to do and how we are going to do it depending on the amount raised during the crowdsale. We do not have any escrow service for the ICO as we've been part of the "silent" community for years and no not have any meaningful contacts we trust in the crypto community. However our contract source code is publicly viewable, and has been verified on etherscan.io. We did our best to be as transparent as possible on the ICO and will publish regular breakdowns on how the funds are spent.
There's no vesting period for the funds collected during the ICO, we need the investment to actually start the project, that's why we are conducting and ICO in the first place. As for now everything has been payed from our own money, that's already a big personal investment but it would be unreasonable for us to try to go anywhere with that project without a proper investment. There are no pre-allocated tokens, they are dynamically generated by the contract every time an investment will be made. The team will receive 1% of the total token supply at the end of the ICO that will be generated and added on top of the total existing supply.
Considering the unlikely event where we reach the hard cap of 500,000 ETH investment during the first round and that the bounty budget has been used to 100%, the total amount of tokens available would be 100 000 000 + 15% bonus + 1% team share + 1% bounty = 117 000 000 WWAM tokens (Or 117 000 000 000 mWWAM as it is a 3 decimals token, and contracts works in the lowest decimal unit). That's the theoretical maximum supply of tokens.
The minimal supply would be in the event of only the bare minimum funding goal is reached, and every funds are invested into final rounds, with a 0% usage of the bounty share, leading to 100 000 + 1% team share = 101 000 WWAM tokens (101 000 000 mWWAM).
So the total supply will range somewhere from the bare minimum of 101 000 000 mWWAM to the absolute maximum of 117 000 000 000 mWWAM.
About the team : We are passionate software engineers (Including myself, even if I don't take that role in the team). We met during our school education, quickly finding common interest in new technologies and global security and anonymity over the Internet. We all attended the same software engineering master degree education, which is mostly based on pure group project software engineering. We've worked for small and big companies over the years, however we're not willing to share that kind of information to the public as of now. We're not tinfoil hats, but still we are very concerned about how Internet is exposing private life of individuals nowadays. That's why we're not much into giving out public information that could backfire on us freely on the Internet. However, I, Xavier, as a founder of WWAM am endorsing responsibility for this ICO. I will be pleased to provide official ID documents if any publicly recognized representative of a viable crypto-related entity wants to confirms our identity.
There's also another quite important thing that is the legal aspect. In France (Where we're all located), crypto-currencies are still a grey area. We would need to convert a good part of the ICO funds into fiat, and that's need a lot of paperwork, creating a company for it and doing things right isn't something that can be done over the course of a few days. We're not willing to expose ourselves before anything is done, as the project won't even start if the minimal funding goal isn't reached.
About your last question, we've not received any funding from an external source, the only funds we are using right now are ours as we do believe in our project. The total funds raised for the project will be by the mean of the ICO, and what this project will become is now in the hands of the crypto enthusiasts willing to support WWAM.
Q:Could you talk to us about the blockchain you are developing? How is consensus managed. Who runs those nodes and how is the reward determined for running the nodes. Is it a clone chain or something you are building from the ground. What are its unique characteristics?
My only objection regarding the project is the anonymity of the team, it will be harder to gather the required funds, anonymity creates compliance issues. I am sure investors would feel more comfortable knowing the team they are sponsoring.
A:Most of those answers can be found in the Whitepaper. To keep it simple : The blockchain will be built from scratch, as existing one doesn't exactly fits our needs. You can think of it as the bitcoin blockchain running at a 0 difficulty level with very fast block times. The concept of the blockchain will remains, and every interaction between users will be considered as transactions. A transaction will include the message to be sent, as well as the associated fee. The nodes are confirming the transactions are legitimate and include them in the next block. The nodes are being rewarded with the transaction fees for processing the messages.
The node source code and binaries are expected to be available around Q2-Q3 2018 and anyone would be bale to run a node. Again, this is still subject to changes depending on how the successful the project is going to be. It's hard to describe something precisely when we don't know yet the scope of the funds that will be available for us to work with. We prefer sticking with a basic concept as of now rather than promising things that won't be possible to do.
As said in the previous post, we have our reasons to not publicly give out personal information. I'm still up to get my identity verified by a reliable and trusted member of a crypto community or institution, as long as it's for verifying purposes only and not publicly available.
I'dd add to that that ICO is not the essence of the project. What we are promoting is our project, not the ICO. It's just a way for us to raise money for our cause.
We tried being as transparent as possible with the ICO contract, providing a reasonable funding goal and a solid codebase.
Q:I am struggling to understand what the ERC20 tokens will represent. An ERC20 will be used to gather funds, investors will send you ETH and they will get WWAM token (?) but how this WWAM token will be tied to the success of the project? Since the nodes, ledger with the info and fees will be in a new blockchain the ERC20 tokens will not be useful to end users, how will they carry their value?
A:The contract is actually including an interface to make the tokens upgrade-able. This give us the possibility to issue a child contract (tied to the main contract) on the Ethereum blockchain when the time comes , allowing users to switch to new tokens. These new tokens will be burnable in exchange of the WWAM currency running in our blockchain, givng WWAM a full autonomy, running on it's own without depending on Ethereum.
Q:1. Will the WWAM team create a system that will redeem WWAMtokens for WWAMcurrency?
2. Which coin will be listed in exchanges? the WWAMtoken or the WWAMcurrency ?
3. In order for a developer to create a chat application using the WWAM protocol he needs to stock up in WWAMtokens or WWAMcurrency?
4. Is there a premium converting WWAMtoken for WWAMcurrency? what is the competitive advantage of an ICO investor? does he get more WWAMcurrency because he/she redeemed WWAMtoken (proving to be an early investor) thus buying the service at a discount.
5. Does each application have its own "'branch" of the chain? or all messages from all sources use the same chain?
6. How does this kind of blockchain interoperability work out? are you using rootstock/cosmos/smart bridges or something similar?
7. The more an application uses the chain the coins the users (or service provider needs), will the coins needed gain value due to their scarcity? (a fixed number of coins with no additional minting)
8. If all the tokens will be created at the funding events, the "end users" will need to buy the coins off the initial investors at whatever price they set?
A:As you said there will be no additional creation of coins. the WWAMcurrency will be fixed at a 1:1 supply rate with the WWAMtokens. Both are one, in fact, 1 WWAMtoken on the Ethereum blockchain will have it's equivalent 1 WWAMcurrency in our blockchain. There will be no premium for converting WWAMTokens to WWAMcurrency, as the only way to actually acquire WWAMcurrency will be WWAMTokens. It will just be like switching the currency from the Ethereum blockchain to ours.
The conversion from WWAMTokens to WWAMCurrency will be external, most likely by providing an automated platform interacting with an upgraded version of the WWAMToken contract, burning tokens in exchange of WWAMcurrency. Integrating it at the protocol level is out of the question, as it will impact the performance heavily and rely on another blockchain to process transactions.
It will be a one-way conversion, burning tokens definitively in exchange of WWAMcurrency. At that point, probably both currencies will be listed on exchange, and their price should be the exact same for a given supply. Days after days, the supply of WWAMTokens should reduce to increase the WWAMcurrency supply, until we reach a the point where no WWAMTokens will be leftm and the full supply is converted into WWAMcurrency (Ideally). The currency used by the protocol will be the WWAMcurrency, the WWAMTokens serve the only purpose of being converted to WWAMcurrency.
Moving onto the application development part, the blockchain will be unique, there's no branching system for applications. It's just aprotocol, and each application will have to comply with the protocol rules to be able to use the blockchain. As it will be standardized, it will allow any application to be able to initiate a communication with a different messaging application (As it would be the case with an IRC or Jabber client for exmaple, you don't need to use the same client as the person you're chatting with).
Regarding your last question - Yes, the WWAMcurrency is expected to gain value over time, due to the limited supply.
Thanks to @GintoniK from
whalesfriend.com for that Q and A session. You can alternatively read an article on their blog compiling all these information together.
