Jun 1, 2021
BitWell Ecological Development of Polkadot Zone
BitWell is an international digital asset derivatives trading platform, with team members from more than 10 countries and regions around the world and core cadres who have worked for Morgan Stanley, IBM, Paypal, Tencent, Baidu, Sina, Binance and other globally renowned financial and technology companies. BitWell currently has several product lines such as Options, Perpetual Contract, Spot, and BitWell Savings, which is the options platform with the most complete product lines and the most varieties in the industry. It is also the platform with the fastest and most complete spot trading of BSC quality projects and the highest return on demand finance, which can meet the needs of users at all levels and provide users with one-stop digital asset trading and financial management services.
As the most representative cross-chain project, Kusama (KSM) slot of Polkadot parachain auctions will be held soon, and the development of Polkadot network will enter a new stage.
In order to support the development of Polkadot eco-projects, BitWell will soon launch the Polkadot Eco Zone to select high-quality eco-projects for users and provide a richer variety of trading.
The first batch of projects to enter BitWell’s Polkadot Eco Zone are Phala Network (PHA), Crust (CRU) and Darwinia Network (RING), which are the more familiar and head projects in the Polkadot Eco.
In today’s AMA, we have invited the leaders of these three projects.
Phala Network（PHA）
1.Please introduce yourself and explain what is Phala.
Marvin Tong: Hi guys I am Marvin, the co-founder&CEO of Phala Network. I was Senior Product Manager at Tencent & Didi. and led the million-users-level trading strategy design with profound experience in strategy design, data-driven decision, and business model design.
Phala Network tackles the issue of trust in the computation cloud.
This blockchain is a trustless computation platform that enables massive cloud processing without sacrificing data confidentiality. Built around TEE-based privacy technology already embedded into modern processors, Phala Network’s distributed computing cloud is versatile and confidential. By separating the consensus mechanism from computation, Phala ensures processing power is highly scalable. Together, this creates the infrastructure for a powerful, secure, and scalable trustless computing cloud.
As a member parachain of the Polkadot cross-chain ecosystem, Phala will be able to provide computing power to other blockchain applications while protecting the data layer, enabling possibilities like privacy-protected DeFi trading positions and transaction history, co-computing DID confidential data, developing light-node cross-chain bridges, and more.
On-chain services currently being developed on Phala Network include Web3 Analytics: high-performance smart contracts from Phala enable highly concurrent mass data analytics with privacy, paving the way for an alternative to Google Analytics that inherently respects individual confidentiality.
2.Has Phala made any breakthroughs or innovative developments recently?
Marvin Tong: There are two pieces of important news about Phala. The first is, we have released the Confidence Level Mechanism of a Miner. The other is Phala launches its mining pool protocol component — Runtime Bridge.
The confidence level measures how secure the SGX Enclave execution environment is. It’s determined by the Remote Attestation report from Intel. Among them, isvEnclaveQuoteStatus indicates if the platform is vulnerable to some known problems, and advisoryIDs indicates the actual affected problems. Read more:https://wiki.phala.network/en-us/docs/poc3/1-4-software-configuration/#confidence-level-of-a-miner
The mining pool protocol component is an open-source development component for miners, Runtime Bridge is designed to manage TEE equipment for anything from public mining pools to clustered mining sites, users can have additional development.
The component is divided into two major sets of functions:
System infrastructure: Acting as a connection bridge between Phala Runtime and Phala Blockchain.
User functions:
Generating mining machines accounts automatically
Checking Controller account balances automatically, providing balance warning
Generating mining machines and accounts lists
Collecting mining machines and account states
We expect there will be more and more miners and mining pools joining the Phala network to build out the Phala ecosystem when we win the slot and launch pre-mainnet. Read more：https://medium.com/phala-network/phala-launches-its-mining-pool-protocol-component-1e7373ca5629
3.How’s your preparation for the Kusama slot auction？
Marvin Tong: We have prepared for a long time, kept tracking all the news and development upgrades. If you follow Phala tightly, you probably know that Phala practiced all the things before Rococo launched.
First, at the end of 2020, we released the cross-chain demo based on Rococo v0 made with Acala.
Then, when the Rococo testnet online, Phala connected to it successfully and win the test auction.
And now, Phala’s pre-mainnet registered the Parachain on Kusama and its ID is 2004.
All of these can show that Phala is a technically complete competitor in this big event. Except for the technology part, we have released ours Kusama slot auction strategy. Phala’s pre-mainnet Khala will join it when the second slot is released. As for the product, our team developed the Khala Crowdloan Dapp for all the people who want to support Khala in this event. You can get an additional reward by the referral reward campaign.
4.Please tell us the strategy Khala prepared for the Kusama slot auction.
Marvin Tong: Literally, it can be summarized in 8 key points.
Phala Network will launch pre-mainnet Khala Network on Kusama (mainnet Phala will follow on Polkadot.)
Khala Network’s native token will be K-PHA, which is PHA on Khala. No new tokens are being created. K-PHA can be swapped with ERC20-PHA (and with PHA on future mainnet) at a 1:1 rate.
Khala Network will join the Kusama slot auction when the second slot is released. Khala will bid for an 8-period slot, which means Khala will lease the slot for 6 * 8 = 48 weeks.
Every KSM that supports Khala in the Kusama slot auction through the Crowdloan will be entitled to 100 PHA as rewards (PHA: KSM = 100:1). The fixed reward ratio for the Crowdloan is intended to provide each participant a full 100 PHA per KSM, regardless how many KSM are raised.
There are 15,000,000 PHA set aside for rewards on Kusama auctions. Based on the above ratio, when the KSM in the Khala Crowdloan reaches 150,000, there is no more PHA that can be distributed to contributors.
When Khala wins a slot and runs as parachain successfully, 34% of the PHA in the reward pool will be vested to contributors’ addresses immediately. The remaining 66% will be vested monthly over 11 months.
There is an additional reward available for Referrals. If a Crowdloan participant invites an additional participant who makes an additional contribution, they will each receive an additional reward: an extra 0.5% on the additional contribution.
Khala will also leverage the on-chain dApp deployed by the Phala team and several top centralized exchanges’ collaboration channels to participate in the Kusama slot auction.
Read more:
https://medium.com/phala-network/phalas-kusama-slot-auction-strategy-34cb93e07f3a
5.What is your biggest advantage to win the auction?
Marvin Tong: I think Phala has many advantages for winning slot auction:
Well-prepared strategy and roadmap
The good use case for cross-chain apps:
The solid development history in Web3, Polkadot, and Kusama
Long time running community with Polkadot community
Phala is building many Public good things for Polkadot and Kusama community.
Well marketing and token performance.But the killer benefit would be: Phala WON’T create a NEW token for Kusama!
Let’s see what the community said:
https://twitter.com/PhalaNetwork/status/1353607204004376577
so Phala won’t create a new token for Kusama.
https://forum.phala.network/t/a-unified-token-or-2-separate-tokens/1385/4
We have faith in Phala can manage well in business ability, funds, market management, and auction strategy. Also, we have the support and recognization from the Polkadot community.
6.What’s the impact if Khala wins the slot?
Marvin Tong: We hope that Phala Network, the Substrate-based project, can be the parachain on the Polkadot ecosystem, connecting to the cross-chain protocol of Kusama and Polkadot and having interoperability, providing the ability of confidential smart contract to other smart contract platforms, making the privacy computing and protection come true.
As we mentioned above, the cross-chain demo on Roococo testnet, Phala, and Acala, as the “L2”, hardly changed anything but achieved the call between each other, because we used the XCMP protocol, which is low cost and high efficiency. So we can see that technically, Polkadot has achieved a major function on interoperability between heterogeneous chains.
If Phala wins the slot, Phala can be what it wants to be and provide privacy protection to all the ecosystem and expand its utility bonds.
7.What’s the plan for Phala next？
Marvin Tong:
https://medium.com/phala-network/phala-roadmap-of-mainnet-and-parachain-auction-d85066306d60
According to this roadmap, we can see that there’s plenty of work this year. To be more specific, we are going to:
Prepare and win parachain slots auctions on Kusama and Polkadot
Launch parachain mainnet.
After this, we will:
try to run WASM in Phala TEE.
Launch a general confidential smart contract, Web3 Analytics, and complete the decentralized governance.
Build tools for TEE workers, we hope to cooperate with five mining pools to get at least 10000 TEE workers mining for Phala
Launch Darkpool on Kusama.
Develop over 50 active developers.
Finally:
We plan to launch our most POWERFUL weapon: Launch Privacy Cloud Platform.
I believe privacy cloud will replace Amazon and Google cloud as someone in tech who has used those platforms — they are antiquated.
Crust（CRU）
1.Can you briefly explain what Crust does? What problem does it solve?
Youanzzang：Crust is a decentralized storage application based on IPFS storage network and Polkadot ecology. We provide storage to users by providing incentives for IPFS storage nodes.
Our initial team was established in 2018. Our founder is a practitioner with more than ten years of experience in the field of data and cloud computing. With the advent of the data age, human demand for storage has exploded, and the world’s cloud storage and cloud computing markets are almost monopolized by several Internet giants. The shortcomings of centralized storage began to emerge gradually, such as the most important privacy security, transmission speed, and service quality and price issues brought about by commercial monopolies. Our founding team discovered this pain point in the market and believed that decentralized storage can efficiently solve these problems. At that time, there were few blockchain applications on the market, so we determined to make a Cloud storage application which can really be used by everyone.
2.How does Crust achieve decentralized storage? How is it different from other storage items on the market?
Youanzzang：As a platform chain, Crust links storage nodes and users as a bridge. The storage space is provided by the Crust node. The Crust public chain is responsible for monitoring the workload of the node and distributing salary to the node. Crust does not participate in the storage and retrieval of user files. We use the TEE technology. In Crust, TEE exists on the CPU of each node. It is an engineering-level trusted technology that is responsible for supervising the workload of the node and ensuring that the node cannot read the user’s data. As far as I know, Phala and Oasis Network also use this technology. In fact, TEE is also widely used in electronic products on the market.
Crust uses Filecoin’s model of connecting IPFS nodes and users, but the workload proof method is different from Filecoin’s zero-knowledge proof. The TEE hardware we use greatly accelerates the speed of file packaging and node proof work, which also makes Crust easilier used by users. Our guarantee model GPoS also continues Polkadot’s DPoS, without deep binding of nodes, but dedicated to pursuing a virtuous economic cycle.
3.Where is Crust’s roadmap? Has your storage application landed?
Youanzzang：After two years of development and testing, on November 30 last year, we launched the first phase of the incentive test network ‘profit ark’ and started the layout of the nodes. On February 4 this year, we launched the Maxwell preview network, which is a chain independent of the main network. We have developed all functions, including storage node storage and guarantor pledge. Another achievement we are very proud of is the opening of the storage function on February 28th. This is a very important milestone in our application landing process, which means that all users can now transfer and store files through Crust.
So far we have been working hard to accelerate the large-scale implementation of applications. A while ago, Uniswap merged the website deployment code we made for him and officially opened the application.
https://blog.ipfs.io/weekly-131/
Recently, we have also reached a storage cooperation with Cow Transfer. There will be 4000w users going to decentralized storage through Crust.
4.Will Crust participate in the upcoming kusama auction? How do you plan to attract users to pledge votes for you?
Youanzzang：Yes, as an early project to join the Polkadot ecosystem, we will definitely participate in the slot auctions of Polkadot and Kusama. We have included the slot auction and maintenance costs in the economic white paper plan. It accounts for 40% of ecological development, which is about 2 million CRU.
Crust uses the parallel network Crust Shadow to participate in the Kusama parachain slot auction, using 90000 CRU + 18 million CSM dual currency rewards. CSM is the original Crust Shadow token. It plans to land on mainstream exchanges in the near future.
During the crowd loan campaign period, the reward ratio distributed every week is 1KSM: 0.07CRU+14CSM. Participating contributors will receive rewards regardless of whether the auction is successful or not. If the number of successful crowd loan KSMs is less than 50000, the ratio of the lease period is 1KSM: 1.5CRU+300CSM; if the number of successful crowd loan KSMs exceeds 50000, 75000 CRUs and 15 million are divided equally according to the percentage of contribution CSM. 30% of the reward will be released immediately, and 10% will be released for each subsequent lease period.
After receiving the reward, the CRU can participate in the pledge guarantee of the Crust validator/candidate node to obtain additional rewards. We are also planning a series of activities “Data Creates Value”. CSM can be used to guarantee data storage and obtain additional benefits.
https://crustnetwork.medium.com/crust-updates-kusama-parachain-slot-auction-rewards-2f6b32c682ec
At that time, Crust will launch crowd lending through the cooperation of the community and top exchange platforms. Welcome everyone to follow our Twitter / Medium to get first-hand information.
https://twitter.com/CrustNetwork
5.Apart from slot auctions, what is your focus this year?
Youanzzang：Accelerate the implementation of applications. The result of our work that we are very proud of is that Crust’s storage is now available.
Decoo is to provide services and technical solutions based on the Crust protocol layer.
Three real application cases
Decoo provides automated IPFS Pin/Host service for Ethereum De-Fi giant Uniswap
·Decoo helps Dairy Cow Express to create a “distributed cloud” version of the Express product
·Decoo and BCA collaborate to create an off-chain storage solution for NFT data
Similarly, we launched Crust Grants this year, giving rewards of up to $3w to encourage developers to develop applications based on Crust. Currently Skyekiwi has become the first first Grants winner.
https://crustnetwork.medium.com/crust-grants-projects-may-2021-12929d3312c8
Darwinia Network（RING）
1.Please briefly introduce Darwinia？
Bree: Darwinia is a decentralized bridge chain built on Substrate, providing the safest heterogeneous cross-chain solutions, connecting Polkadot, Ethereum, BSC, and different blockchain ecosystems.
2.What are some innovative progress of Darwinia?
Bree: I would like to share our cross-chain bridge usecases
1.Defi use cases
use cases like say DEX and aggregators on Ethereum can upgrade into a cross-chain version.
Users can trade native DOT and KSM, those Polkadot ecosystem assets on Uniswap
not just direct derivatives and wrapped tokens.
One great thing about this ishow it makes sure the value consistency on different chains
On the Polkadot side, we’re directly able to build cross-chain DEX like Subswap, supporting Metamask as well, decentralized lending and cross-chain stablecoin are also bridge usecases.
2.NFT usecase
more and more outstanding NFT artists and DeFi plus NFT projects are creating and building on Kusama and Polkadot. But we have to admit that NFT markets on Ethereum like say Opensea ，still captures the largest traffic.
So leveraged by Darwinia cross-chain bridge, NFT market like Opensea can update into cross-chain version.
supports native Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem NFTs
3.Darwinia is going for the Kusama parachain auction. What preparations having been done?
Bree: Nice question！
Darwinia Crab Network (Crab for short) is the canary network for Darwinia. It is the first cross-chain NFT blockchain in the Polkadot ecology and provides the smart contract solution. Crab is going to participate in the Kusama Parachain Slot Auction.
It has been running for a year.
Ready for the auction.
It is featuring：
Providing smart contract solutions
Crab Network DVM is compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, and supporting Dapps such as Defi and NFT to easily migrate to Polkadot and Pangolin testnet.
Relying on the innovative bridge technology of the Darwinia Network, it also provides an entrance to the Polkadot ecology for projects that have been deployed on public blockchains such as Ethereum and BSC.
Evolution Land Crab Continent GameFi system
The new continent of Darwinia ecosystem cross-chain game Evolution Land has been deployed on Crab, will soon launch the new NFT+Defi GameFi system.
Upgraded User Experience
Low gas fee + support NFT cross-chain transactions
How To Develop On Crab？
Crab is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (DVM). DApp Based on the Ethereum virtual machine, can be migrated to the Crab network seamlessly.
More projects that have been deployed on other public chains can directly choose to develop on Crab and easily enter the Polkadot ecosystem leveraged by the Darwinia cross-chain bridge.
Thanks！
4.Please introduce Darwinia’s PLO strategy.
Bree: we have made a summary of the PLO strategy.
BTC super prize+RING&CRING+NFT pacakge
For detailed strategy，please read：
https://twitter.com/darwinianetwork/status/1396714986626445312?s=21
And we are offering 100000CRING for the warm-up campaign.
Today is the last day！
Go for it！
5.What’s Darwinia’s advantage to win the parachain slot?
Bree: Well, BTC super prize is really amazing！
And NFT package can be used for mining！
Earning more profits～
How？
Evolution Land is like a mini nature of the Web3.0 multi-chain crypto world ，but also amazing playground.
Also，we have won the auction test on Rococo！
6.What’s the impact of winning the parachain auction?
Bree: Sure！
Darwinia can better empower other parachain projects.
Become the bridge hub of Polkadot.
They dont need to build wheels.
Pannel: Parachain auction is approaching, what changes will the ecology bring and what opportunities will it bring?
Bree: The launch of the parachain is one of the important milestones for Polka. It’s because everyone is on a crowded data highway and wants a fast pass, the fundamental solution is cross-chain and scalability.
The fundamental solution is cross-chain and fast pass. With Polka, parachains are linked together to provide multiple scaling data highways, and with Polka as a transportation hub to achieve connectivity, all roads lead to Rome and the congestion problem is solved. Each chain, providing personalized services, is more high-end, faster, lower cost and better experience than the contractual realization of Dapps, and the multi-chain assets can also be interoperable, realizing the vision of web 3.0, permissionless, open and de-trusted.
Youanzzang：If it can be photographed, the project information interaction in the parachain will derive a lot of interesting gameplay:
bifrost: Cru pledged on the crus mainnet can be used for liquidity, attracting more people to participate in the pledge
Darwin: Projects outside the ecology use Crust storage through their cross-chain bridges.
phala: Achieve double privacy
There is also acala stable currency payment, and Litentry helps to realize storage confirmation/copyright
When Crust joined the Polkadot ecology, it was because of its huge ecology.
In the next few years, if the parachain can run smoothly, and achieve barrier-free information interaction between projects, and smooth upgrade/governance on the chain, the influence of the Polkadot ecology will be immeasurable. These are the problems that Ethereum 2.0 is committed to solving.
An excellent and huge ecology, on-chain governance/upgrade, can attract more developers to develop projects, and derive more and more novel and useful functions. In fact, one of the big challenges of blockchain projects is that there are not too many projects out of the circle, failing to bring value to people outside the circle. Although the storage of Crust is a good application that can go out of the circle, the project and the ecology are complementary. Only with such a good ecology, Crust can be paid attention to and used by more users.
Marvin Tong: I think the launch of parachains represents the real launch of Polka. It means that the value of Polka’s advantages can be reflected by the parallel chains. This matter has been dragging on for some time, and we can see the value of the ecology delivered in the month behind.
The first five parachains, with both DeFi infrastructure and smart contract chains, scaling, privacy, bridges, and storage, should quickly make up for the many applications and few facilities compared to Ether and BSC
Taking advantage of the market buzz from the slot auction, we believe the first wave of card DeFi will win an explosion, followed by combinatorial use cases for each protocol, which may be more fun than the DeFi portfolio for ETH.
