ChainX AMA Transcript

ChainX
6 min readMar 1, 2022

1. Explain the Validating nodes and trustees of ChainX? What are their functions?

ChainX adopts the POS consensus mechanism. Validating nodes are miners. We vote our PCX for validators, who in turn can earn more by creating blocks. We also get a portion of PCX in return. This is the essence of staking mining.

ChainX is the BTC layer 2 network. People can cross-chain Bitcoin to ChainX and get PCX in return. The user’s bitcoin is kept by the custodian hot address formed by the trustees of ChainX. When the user initiates a withdrawal, the custodians initiate a multi-signature and returns the bitcoin to the user.

2. What are the two ongoing upgrades of ChainX?

The first upgrade is the Substrate code upgrade, which is currently in the referendum period. After the 7-day voting period ends, there will be a nine-day implementation period, and the upgrade will be completed subsequently. This upgrade is mainly a step in the direction to pave the way for the second upgrade. The second upgrade is to enable Bitcoin custody on ChainX to use Taproot technology, which also requires a referendum. This is significant for a Bitcoin Layer 2 network.

3, What is Taproot?

Taproot is a technology that enhances the functionality of Bitcoin scripts. It was announced by Greg Maxwell (Bitcoin Core Developer) and others. They hope to use this technology to improve Bitcoin’s privacy, security, and scalability. Simply put, Taproot is a combination of MAST script structure and Schnorr signature algorithm.

MAST

Addresses using the MAST script structure will only display the conditions used when the transaction is completed, without exposing all possible conditions (including unused ones), thus improving privacy.

Schnorr

The Schnorr algorithm is different from the ECDSA signature algorithm used in the past. The linear feature of Schnorr enables the private keys of all parties participating in the signature to be aggregated into a threshold signature under the chain, thus saving the handling fee.

Taproot

Although MAST does not need to display all possible capital use conditions, it will still display the conditions you use, such as multi-signature, which still adds certain risks. Taproot uses the Schnorr multi-signature algorithm while using MAST to make this multi-signature look like an ordinary single-signature to the outside world and this step further enhances the privacy of transactions.

4. How does Taproot apply to ChainX? What does this Taproot upgrade mean for ChainX?

Let’s have a look at the involvement of a ChainX custodian. When a user initiates a Bitcoin withdrawal request, the custodians need to perform multi-signature. After the Taproot upgrade, the custodians will sign using a threshold wallet with Taproot technology. The benefits are stronger privacy and lower handling fees. In addition, theoretically, due to the characteristics of Schnorr’s algorithm, there can be no upper limit on the number of trustees in theory. ChainX will also increase the number of trustees, which makes the custody of users’ bitcoins more decentralized, and at the same time, more trustees for custody of user assets also mean higher security.

5. Some people still cannot understand what the launch of ComingChat means for ChainX. Could you please explain?

Regarding this issue, Guanghua once explained in this article: https://chainx-org.medium.com/to-the-chainx-community-the-road-is-far-away-wait-and-see-804f78e4618b

I’m sure some of you have already gone through this article.

To further explain i quote a part of this article:

“Even though we can achieve the great thing of empowering Bitcoin through our technology, how can ChainX attract users to use it in the current situation of such a flood of public chains with smart contract functions? In other words, the traffic issue is very crucial. In order to solve the traffic problem, I decided to make a social product that really belongs to Web3, which is now ComingChat. ComingChat has been online for a few months, has 5 million downloads and will soon exceed 10 million in a short while.

The success of ComingChat has brought two points to ChainX: one is sufficient traffic. There is no doubt that ComingChat users will all be ChainX users. The second is to provide a perfect entry for Dapps built on the ChainX network. Whether it is DeFi or GameFi, people will be able to use these Dapps directly in the interface of ComingChat.

In this way, the ChainX network will build rich Dapps and it will be widely used by users, just like Ethereum and BSC and also PCX will be widely used as gas fee for these applications.”

6. What about the relationship between ChainX address and ComingChat CID address?

In ComingChat, CID NFT is on the MINIX chain, and MINI is the token of the MINIX chain. That is, NFTs can only be viewed in ComingChat on your MINI address. In some activities, NFT is issued to the user’s ChainX address. At this time, the user needs to compare whether the ChainX address is the same as the MINI address in ComingChat. If it is different, the user needs to transfer the NFT to the MINI address.

The transfer process of NFT involves another problem. ComingChat uses the sr25519 algorithm in the process of generating the account from the mnemonic phrase, while the ChainX address created before December 2020 adopts the ed25519 algorithm. So, when you log in with the mnemonic phrase of the ChainX account created before December 2020 then a ComingChat address different from your ChainX address will be generated and you will not be able to view the NFT rewards received by the ChainX address. In this case, you can only use the method of transferring assets by using the website: https://twitter.com/chainx_org/status/1493560525174759431?s=20&t=-gLlXmIMYNHM3vy1l7RKJw

For ChainX addresses created after December 2020, you can directly use the mnemonic to log in to ComingChat and view the NFT on the ChainX address.

7. ComingChat now supports ChainX wallet. Do you want to share more about this new feature with users?

Yes. First of all, this is not a very easy task; one might think that it is as simple as connecting to the sBTC faucet, which would be to just connect a link in ComingChat. This is not the case and you need to realize that users using ChainX Wallet in ComingChat are not a simply visiting but this involves a lot of interactions. For example, when people use ChainX Wallet in Coming to sign and complete a transaction, Coming needs to process the signature and submit the transaction. In other words, Coming undertakes the work of the Polkadot.js extension at this time.

The significance of this is also obvious in the following use-case: Users can now complete operations in Coming that were earlier being done on a PC, such as PCX pledge mining, etc., which brings great convenience to those who are find PC’s inconvenient. At this stage, voting activities such as of ChainX democracy cannot be carried out in Coming, but this feature is included in our future plans.

8. Could you explain the BTC DAO?

I believe some people in the community have heard about The BTC DAO. Yes, BTC DAO is expected to be launched in April. BTC DAO is essentially a DAO smart contract deployed on the SherpaX chain. The biggest beneficiaries of the BTC DAO are first and foremost holders of PCX. PCX holders can transfer the PCX to the smart contract by calling the contract interface. The usage of the raised PCX will be voted by the token holders, and the relevant proposals will be supported by the smart contract.

PCX holders can vote to use PCX to fund projects such as SoSwap, and will distribute 50% of $SOS tokens (the upcoming tokens of SoSwap) according to the investment ratio of PCX. In addition, ChainX and SherpaX are the second layer network of Bitcoin and all future projects listed on SherpaX and ChainX will be proposed by The BTC DAO, and PCX holders will vote to decide whether to fund these projects. The tokens of these projects may also be distributed to PCX holders as dividends.

On the other hand, BTC DAO not only directly distributes a large amount of other currencies to PCX holders, but also further increases the lock-up amount of PCX. We know that when the lock-up ratio is high, it usually means that the selling order is exhausted, that is, very few people will sell PCX. In this case, the buyers will be more likely to push the price of PCX up.

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ChainX

ChainX is a BTC Layer 2 solution compatible with EVM that utilizes Bitcoin as a gas fee, serving as the predecessor network of BEVM.