Konstellation Ask Me Anything Summary (AMA) — October 26th, 2021
On October 26th, the founders of Konstellation completed another Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. In the #AMA the founders provided information on company updates, what the team has been working on, and more.
If you missed the AMA and want to follow what was discussed directly, you can find a zoom video of the AMA discussion here and a Youtube video here.
The Konstellation Ethos
A little over a year ago, we decided to migrate to Cosmos SDK. We believe that the Cosmos community and tech are the best fit for interoperability — which is the core vision for Konstellation. Konstellation wants to create a framework that allows for true DeFi capital markets. We believe the future is going to be a seamless mesh web of protocols that can talk to each other, while users are able to transfer assets across chains without worrying about gas fees.
Konstellation Company Updates
In Q3, we hit testnet. And not long after that, we launched mainnet, which is very exciting. However, mainnet is not available to the general public as of yet. At the same time as the mainnet launch, a new litepaper and website for Konstellation was released.
Having said that… we screwed up the dates a lot. So that's mea culpa. That is something that we're either going to improve. Or, since people are getting upset when we're always late, even though we're always trying to stick to deadlines, we may stick to ranges going forward at the bequest of a lot of our community members.
Particularly in technology development and particularly with financial applications… I know a lot of people like to ship. Our core developers tend to be more careful because they don't want anybody to lose money. So a lot of it is taking more time than we expected. We're very, very deliberate about that.
As much as we love Cosmos, and as much as we love these libraries that are being developed for bridges and DEXs, it's still a work in progress. We’re building a plane as we jump off a cliff — as the saying goes.
Technical Updates
We, as a network, need to upgrade DARC for Binance Smart Chain purposes and bridge purposes. To do this in the most systemized fashion, we're going to be releasing specific announcements that will allow for these things to occur in a very seamless way. That's what we've been developing — is that bridge between Binance Smart Chain and Konstellation. This will allow for the consistent open interface between the DARC token that trades on Binance Smart Chain and the Konstellation network native DARC version.
Details are coming. The reason we haven't done formal announcements or specifics is that we ran into tech delays.
The new wallet interface will be called Hubble, and it will allow you to interact with the new DARC and have a seamless way to interact with the bridge. I think you can think of Konstellation Hubble as a more advanced DARC wallet, which you guys are a bit more used to. We need that gateway to be robust because the first use case we have on the network is staking. There will be a yield that comes out from inflation that's going to only increase from now as DARC continuously gets used through both staff development and in our interoperability projects.
Updates on the Konstellation Ecosystem
Alkemy is a synthetic asset protocol. We're still putting that into development. So that's gone back to feasibility, to be completely frank. We're hoping to release that Q1 2022, but our target was initially to release in November.
We have new projects that have taken different priorities, which we're going to be announcing soon. One is an NFT focused project. It's going to be very unique. It will allow for certain gamification features and was inspired by a very popular show. The other project that we're contributing to is a decentralized exchange.
We're also looking at a potential partnership with Solana. The Konstellation team is working on something called Dalgona Mint — a decentralized, single reserve algorithmic stablecoin that allows for multi-currency FX. We believe that a censorship-resistant solution to stablecoin trading alternatives will be necessary, which is why we worked on the Dalgona Mint project as an applicant for the Ignition Solana hackathon. Dalgona is also going to be used on the decentralized exchange that we're contributing to.
That DEX is probably going to be our biggest rollout for this year. We are targeting before the end of the year, which is why Alkemy has been put on the back burner. It all drives towards the building outDARC use cases.
The key to what we're trying to communicate here is that we've got a lot of things that we're moving towards to create more value in use cases for the DARC ecosystem as a whole. Though we have run into delays with some of the releases, know that we have been actively building, and we do have a lineup of really exciting features and projects that are part of the Konstellation network that will allow for more DARC token usage and activation. Some of it just takes time to build, as we build some of these layers to allow this ecosystem to connect properly.
We want to thank everyone for your support and understanding of how much work it takes to coordinate these things.
Community Question And Answer
When will the listing happen?
We're going to be driving towards the bridge first, which will allow the token swap, which will allow for the exchange. And then we're looking at exchanges after PancakeSwap as well.
It's not going to end at Binance Smart Chain. There are exchanges for some of the other protocols that we're exploring. Obviously, we're built on Cosmos, so that means there are Cosmos options that we are in discussions to get done. There are some Solana-based options that we'll be looking at too.
For Cosmos to be truly inter-chain operable, it needs to connect with every chain that's being used. We want to be a catalyst for that. When we talk about many different technology products and a lot of different moving pieces, it's driven by this as well. We have to work with other development communities, and we have to work with various technologies.
There's a lot of work to do beyond listing dates. It's coming, and it's coming very soon. As soon as the bridge announcement comes, you will hear right after that the announcement for PancakeSwap. Then we will continue to look for additional liquidity options and other communities that we can plug into to help grow the Konstellation network.
That's the update on the listing date. As I said, I'm intentionally not giving out dates here because we've run into two issues, unfortunately, during final testing for mainnet and bridge, which we are still working through.
If it had occurred live, there could have been a lot of issues. There is a problem with users requesting multiple swaps on the mainnet at one time. We're facing another issue where users cannot swap into multiple wallets. The bugs stem from library issues with Binance Smart Chain.
It was the team's idea to delay. We could have announced it sooner. But because these bugs were found, we didn't want you to deal with the bugs just so it would be on time. We decided to take a couple of days to go through a much more robust process without the looming guillotine standing over our core developers' heads. Once these things are resolved and announced, the listing date will also be announced shortly afterward.
We just need to fix some of the specifics, and we'll let everybody in the community know.
Does mainnet have any transactions going? Do you accept public validators there?
Thank you very much for that question. Validators — I forgot to talk about it. Right now, there is not a public validator system. We do intend to go public, though, if you have enough tokens and you can run the node. The system capabilities require validators to run a command-line interface, so it is a technical endeavor. The requirements are pretty similar to a Cosmos SDK. It's not about minimum token usage. Essentially, the top hundred token holders are able to become validators. Everybody else, if you can't run a validator, you're free to delegate to one of the nodes, and you can look at the commission rates on the nodes to get the fee.
The network, we call it internally mainnet beta. Solana does that too. It's not open to the public as of yet. Once the first staking starts occurring, and the fees are getting paid 8%, there will be transactions.
For public validators, we'll be making the announcement that will allow folks to come on and tap in in November. But on the private validator side, we are talking to the major Cosmos validators right now. We're onboarding them as trusted partners. So we'll have a separate announcement on that.
How many people are working in the Konstellation ecosystem?
We have 32 people spread globally across both Konstellation and the ecosystem projects. We're contributing to the ecosystem projects that I mentioned. It leans heavily towards development — like 75% development team, which includes design, QA, et cetera. And then, the rest is split between marketing and business development.
We're in the United States, which is remote. Korea still has the office, and Ukraine also has an office as well.
Do you have any plans for VC investment?
Like with any project or any startup, particularly in the token space now, because of how hyped it is and how bullish it is, it's not something we're ruling out. But raising money is not a top-of-mind priority right now. Of course, if it's super strategic and we think it's important, I think we can still do that. Regardless, it'll probably be a secondary or one of the ecosystem projects that we look to for investment. It's never something that we rule out. However, right now, we're more focused on building.
As the Konstellation network's size and the community get better and more robust, we'll get investment inquiries naturally because you guys support us so well.
Are any massive marketing campaigns lined up?
So quote-unquote, yes. I want to just put a quote around massive because we want to focus on the dollars we're putting around marketing, especially as we look at PancakeSwap as our first DEX listing. We have a few that we are working on lining up for the ecosystem. So the short answer is yes because it will be more massive than we have done before on Konstellation.
If you have further questions, feel free to reach out to us here. You will also have the chance to ask more questions in our next AMA on Wednesday, December 15th— check here for the 2021 AMA schedule
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