Fresh from the press, here’s a transcript of the AMA with Guanghua Guo, the CEO of PolkaX, about developing ChainX, SherpaX, MiniX, Coming and much more. What’s in store for the future and where are we headed!?
Below is an unfiltered, uncensored and quickly translated transcript of the AMA. Between brackets is the editor’s addition to the Chinese translation for it to make sense. There will be grammar and spelling errors…. You have been warned!
AMA Friday 14th May 2021
ALEX: Welcome everyone to the AMA with Guanghua Guo, the CEO of PolkaX!
Guanghua: I’m here, hello everyone
ALEX: For those of you not in the know, I will be translating Guanghua’s answers from Chinese to English. Please bear with me as I try to not destroy my keyboard.
We have gathered your questions over the past few days and unfortunately had to cut a couple of them out. If your question isn’t answered here today, send them to me personally and I will try to get them answered outside of this AMA.
Now without further ado, Guanghua are you ready for the first question?
Guanghua: Yes.
ALEX: Good, here it comes.
How confident are you about obtaining a parachain slot? If you had to give a percentage from 0–100% sure. And why are you confident? Is it because you have a lot of DOT and KSM personally? Or will we use only the crowd loan to win the auction?
Guanghua: We are confident. Gavin Wood has said that he supports nearly 30 parachains. ChainX is the earliest ecological project based on Substrate. (And was launched into the mainnet) even before the launch of Polkadot/Kusama.
ChainX, which has been online for 2 years, proves the development strength of our team, but we have not made a good effort in the direction of operation (community management and marketing). That’s because of our regulatory issues in China. But now it’s okay, chainx is halved (soon), and we no longer accept dividends. This means we are fully legal and compliant in China.
We can take time to start operating ChainX vigorously. Of course, we are still under pressure to run for the first slot as Acala/Plasm are excellent. But it’s okay, we are all good friends and we are also very good.
ALEX: I’m assuming you mean that you are good friends with Acala and Plasm Guanghua?
Guanghua: For 30 outstanding projects, we think we have been ranked in the top 3, which is undisputed. Of course, our community has not been up and running. It was caused by my compliance issues in China. I am here to apologize to the community.
Now, I (have made sure) our Coming app and our MiniX-chain are legal and compliant in China, and came back to our community.
We personally hold a lot of DOT and KSM (individuals, not ‘PolkaX’), but we will use the Crowd loan for its functionality, because the project is a community, we hope that more people can participate, of course, in return, we took out a lot of KSX as excitation. That’s me finished with answering the first question
ALEX: Thank you very much Guanghua for all your hard work!
We might not have seen a lot from you guys, but we’ve secretly been admiring your hard work.
Guanghua: Thanks
ALEX: Being a little closer to you personally, I know you are always very busy with making sure everything works smoothly.
In regards to [earlier message], Do I understand that you mean that you are good friends with Acala and Plasm Guanghua?
Guanghua: Yes Acala/Plasm I have invested in them too. Because I am also very optimistic about their projects. Of course, creating win-win cooperations is the road to development. Like the Ethereum community, we can build excellent ecological projects in the form of building blocks. Mass outbreak (expansion of interoperability), this is the future of Polkadot ecology. Just like a brave lion can’t beat a pack of wolves.
ALEX: There is not one that is the best, but together we are stronger. Polkadot and the polkadot parachains are the wolf pack. I like your analogy there.
Guanghua: You can continue, my English is not good, which greatly affected the community communication.
ALEX: Haha, sorry! I was quickly reading back to see if I missed some translations.
Guanghua: When Coming is online, I can learn English hard. My Chinese can be expressed very quickly.
ALEX: Good good! Work hard and you will master English within no time!
Guanghua: (My) English, it did affect the promotion of our community, but fortunately, there is Alex and Kristen’s persistent promotion. We can move to the next question.
ALEX: Yessir! I’ve paraphrased this question from the community, as there were multiple versions: Some people might want to sell some of their PCX rewards to buy KSM and support SherpaX in the auctions. What are your thoughts on this Guanghua?
Guanghua: (personally) We will not sell PCX to support Crowd loan. Our position on ChainX is quite high. We cherish every PCX in our hands, even more than BTC. Finally, we implemented a ChainX project in China that does not touch Chinese laws and regulations. This project took us 3 years (to develop). (If the) People in the community want to trade PCX to KSM for KSX. I don’t make too many suggestions. (it’s their) Freedom to choose.
We are only responsible for maintaining ChainX and ChainX ecology. One of our ChainX parachains, MiniX chain is an open consortium chain that is legal and compliant in China. We can utilize MiniX chain for Chinese government agencies and large commercial organizations (to expand the ecology).
Coming is the number one project within the ChainX ecosystem. We’re positioning it as the WeChat of the next era. Coming has the potential to bring a huge amount of users to the community. MiniX is for Business, Coming is for the Community.
Coming will be launched soon, with the Coming ID as an NFT (as your very own DID). For the most active community users and outstanding contributors, we will be giving them the ability to reserve a 6-digit Coming ID as encouragement and a thank you. (normal Coming IDs are 7–12 digits).
ALEX: Thank you Guanghua. I’m assuming we will be hearing more about the Coming tests soon then?
Guanghua: You are very welcome.
ALEX: Ok so, you mentioned that after the halving, the team no longer receives PCX. The community had a question about that though.
“After the halving, when PolkaX no longer receives tokens, what is the incentive for the team to continue to develop the project over the coming years?”
Guanghua: This question is like asking Bitmain 8 years ago, how do you continue to survive? The market value of BTC at that time may not be much different from the current market value of ChainX. But Bitmain is still very successful, maintaining the security (and hashrate growth) of BTC.
Of course, Bitmain is relatively successful. But the team had a problem that made it less successful. But we as ChainX, The (PolkaX) team is different. We stand united. We believe that as long as we operate ChainX well, we can get a lot of returns (and growth). The surrounding area (ecology) of ChainX is enough for us to make a profit.
For example: Spider network, we have received tens of millions of technological innovation funding from the Chinese government (editors note: Chinese Yuan).
Although the Chinese government is not as open as the United States now, it has not yet formulated the legal and regulatory issues for China to issue tokens.
But it’s okay. As long as China comes up with relevant laws and regulations, we are definitely the most legal and compliant in China. Because the PCX we issued is purely community-issued, there is no financing, and it will not touch any Chinese laws. (editors note: No presale, no premine, no ico, no nothing).
We have seen the innovations around ChainX in China, and we hope that we can use these technologies to bring China out into world. So, now is the best time for us to promote chainx and operate chainx surroundings. There is no better time than now. I can’t control my excitement anymore. My main company in China is “Lianwang Technology”. At the side of Alibaba, we are the blockchain innovation star company of the future science and technology city. We have received over 10 million government subsidies. We have gathered 40 full-time outstanding members here. Our company has done a lot of technical output for relevant units of the Chinese government and well-known Chinese enterprises.
Haha, the above words are written by me before, I copy pasted them by the way
Below I also excerpt a paragraph of what I said:
“ Oh, more interesting, our open alliance chain MiniX chain is also being promoted to these partners. As you may know, MiniX chain is a parallel chain of chainX. This series of things that I have done can be introduced, how important and meaningful to chainx. Inspiring our team to do things is that we revolve around the entire ChainX ecosystem. Just like BTC does not have any institution to distribute dividends, then how BTC iteration and development are completed. The same goes for us, we are going to be the ecological periphery of ChainX, and the periphery will be up, and the periphery will be profitable, such as being a node and an application. The Xpool node we are currently running, the MiniX chain we are making, and the Coming APP we are making are all around ChainX and enriching ChainX. Of course, it’s still early days. We still need ChainX to give us chain outlets a little bit in return, just the basic development and operation expenses. We require that the monthly subsidy to Chain Network Technology does not exceed 100,000 US dollars (from ChainX’s parliamentary expenditure, This fund is a small amount for the ChainX Council, and it can only support a development team of about 20 people. For the rest of the development costs, we will use our parent company Chain Network Technology to raise funds and sponsors, such as the government’s Funding, to provide technical services, and even MiniX and Coming APP in the chainx ecosystem, we will profit.)”
ALEX: Haha a shameless plug for MiniX, I love it 😂
Guanghua: Yea, our MiniX chain testnet has been running as the background of Coming APP. Next month, our MiniX chain and Coming will be available to all ChainX community members at the same time
ALEX: Woohoo!! So we’re moving the community to Coming then. Ok, maybe not yet.
Guanghua: As you can see, what we have been working hard and doing is so good, haha, a little self-obsessed, haha. But we have this confidence. Yes, starting next month, we will start migrating to Coming. Coming ID, it will be a particularly interesting NFT after the dongle (release?).
Going back to the previous question, we have done so much, we are very confident that we can bring prosperity to the ChainX ecosystem and achieve large-scale profitability for our team in the future.
Secondly, our technology and community services and investment in other partners, we can also get considerable returns. But we will invest these returns and increase investment in our development. Because we believe that the age of Web3 is here. Our Coming, we must work hard to grasp the opportunity of this era. The ChainX community began from 0 to 1. With this 1, we can grow from 1 to infinity based on the excellent people that have joined the community. We are responsible for working hard to develop and are responsible for formulating strategies. The community can give us encouragement and criticism. We want to hear the voice of the community.
Our team is All in on the ChainX ecosystem. I am just 30 years old now. My wife and I have a boy and a girl. I have given them enough protection for their basic life. Next, I want to realize my big dream.
Starting tonight, I am back.
I want to start working together with global community partners and users excitedly to create a Web3 future. For my remaining 30 years, I will fill the first 5 digits of our Coming ID. The first 5 digits are for our company colleagues. That is, my goal is to be a multinational company with hundreds of employees fighting for the Web3 world for the next 30 years.
Of course, for all of this, we have to rely on our ChainX community. Because the ChainX community is our 1, without this 1, all our efforts are 0.
ALEX: I’m getting sentimental and I wish there was a happy smiley with a happy tear.
Guanghua: So excited, Alex, can you ask the next question? If you don’t interrupt me, I can’t stop speaking.
ALEX: I’m having trouble keeping up with you. Ok ok. Next question. This should be an easy one:
“After the halving, what will happen to the 20% block rewards that are now free? Where do they go instead?”
Guanghua: 20% are given to Staking incentives. After the halving, the 20% block reward will no longer be distributed to the development team, and he has entered everyone’s staking and node dividends. So halving, for users who hold PCX mortgage mining, there will be no halving of income, because now everyone’s mortgage dividend ratio is: 1- 20% (PolkaX development dividend)-about 20% (parliamentary funds)- XBTC mining incentive = about 60% is for staking dividends, after the halving, about 80% can be for development dividends. Probably means: 20% of the PolkaX dividends began to flow into the later staking incentives.
Every PCX we hold is equivalent to a BTC mining machine. It is just our mining machine, which has more benefits than BTC mining machine, is more environmentally friendly. Moreover, our mining machine is more valuable than the BTC mining machine. There will be no excessive mechanical loss due to time, hahaha.
ALEX: Thank you for keeping it shorter this time Guanghua 😂
But that’s good. So basically the leftover 20% now gets added to the other mining distribution pieces. I’ll have to dig into the whitepaper again to find the full formula later. I will try and make a solid explanation later @ everyone!
Ok ok ok, next question before you get excited again. I think we briefly touched on this before as well.
“As far as we know, ChainX favours the natural growth of investors. The tokenomics also point in this direction. Are you satisfied with the growth so far? Is the market share you have captured at the moment meeting your expectations?”
Guanghua: Yes, I’m very satisfied with ChainX’s token growth and market capitalization growth model. Let’s not look at the change in the unit price of PCX, we need to look at the change in the total market value of PCX, because ChainX’s economic distribution model is as beautiful as BTC, which can be said to be the POS version of the BTC token philosophy.
I really want to thank our product managers and designers they’ve designed a growth curve with the market value of chainx from 0 to 100 million US dollars in the past two years. This growth curve is healthy. Chainx was dug out from 0, and its market value has slowly risen from 0 to the current 100 million US dollars. Although the current market value is far below our expectations, his market value growth rate is relatively healthy, and the tokens distributed to everyone are sufficiently decentralized.
Of course, the tokens in our own hands, including sometimes, we also go to obtain tokens from the secondary market, that is because we believe that the future of ChainX is great, even if it is not comparable to BTC, but what we are doing is rich His ecology is all very remarkable things.
For example, ChainX’s Parachain MiniX, we want it to occupy China’s open consortium chain market, which is the same track as Alibaba’s Ant Blockchain. For example, in our Coming, we are working on the next version of Wechat, and we want to reach the number of Wechat users. MiniX is for enterprises, Coming is for individual users. But this is a market with a market value of tens of trillions. I don’t believe it. Our efforts will not get any return. So we are full of hope and expectation for the future of ChainX.
Okay, some of the long messages above I had already prepared. But now that im here in the community, I can add more at any time, insert what I want to say.
I’ve been on telegram for more than a year, but I joined (ChainX) for the first time today. (It’s) Very exciting to see this group is almost 30,000 members. Thanks again to everyone in the community for their efforts, our community is huge.
So that I am full of confidence, in my upcoming 30 years, (I will) organize society to do a glorious and meaningful thing.
Hey, my long lyricism is about to begin again, Alex, let’s have the next question, (before I) be excited again. Otherwise…
ALEX: Wait hold on you’ve never been in this group before? 😮 You slacker! 😂 Well, you’re here now, and everyone knows who you are, so you will receive a lot more attention going forward >:D
Guanghua: No, I have been developing our products and technology before. Our Coming APP has been developed for 6 months. A lot of the development we did was not synchronized with the community in time. I basically didn’t join the community earlier because, as I mentioned before, Chinese laws and regulations are a problem on one side. Secondly because I am really doing products and technology. But now that Coming APP has been launched, I hope everyone in our team and the community can communicate with each other.
Now the above regulatory issues no longer exist, and our product Coming APP has also come out, I started to take part of my time to face the community because I found that the community is especially important for doing things now. It used to be Trump’s power, now Musk’s power. We can see the power of the community.
ALEX: “Will PCX be participating in Polkadot DOT crowd loans? (will PCX borrow DOT for any reason etc?)”
Guanghua: We will participate in the crowd loans. ChainX is based on Substrate. Substrate was written by Gavin, the founder of Polkadot. As a thank you (to him), we also have the responsibility to promote and enrich the Polkadot ecosystem.
Of course, because I don’t speak English, I can’t communicate with Gavin directly, and I haven’t had better communication with Paritytech. Secondly, ChainX has built BTC/ETH/BSC/Doge/USDT/BCH and other cross-chain transfer bridges. We can bring these valuable assets to DOT and enrich the ecology of DOT.
But we’re starting now, we’re going to start global operations. We recruited a lot of excellent English employees and we started to work with Parity tech and other institutions, as well as our community. (we will have) adequate communication and exchange. Before, we only focused on development, not expression. Now, we are starting to strengthen our shortcomings, business and operations
ALEX: Given the separation between the Chinese community and the Western community, is there a way for us to share our questions and concerns more regularly with PolkaX? For example once a week, where we (the overseas community) have a more personal connection with the PolkaX team. We hope to get a better insight into the developments within the project and create a sense of accountability to the investing community.”
Guanghua: This question, my previous answer involved. I’ll post another piece of my answer that was better earlier.
Of course, this is a good suggestion. We have answered the previous question. Because of the continuous 2 years of dividends, we may have compliance issues in China. Now there is no dividends. We don’t have any worries. We can do it every month. Even organize our user meeting every week, even we can video conference. The second and most important thing is that we will push the Coming APP, ChainX’s largest application, to our community. In the future, our community construction can communicate on applications that belong to our community.
Coming is enough to protect everyone’s privacy. At the same time, it will support BTC/DOT/PCX and other red envelopes, and it can also allow us to meet online just like Zoom.
ALEX: Guanghua I think the question meant to aim more at ‘How can the community best communicate with the team’? Like when they have suggestions, or improvements, or simply bugs on the website?
Guanghua: ah okay. You can bring it to our development warehouse (github) We currently have at least 3 github repositories. Issues and advice can be provided there (in the issues section). Any related questions can be submitted to it’s corresponding place. You can also communicate with us through Wechat/Telegram.
ALEX: Guanghua would it be ok if I, together with the community, made a list of questions and concerns every week and send that to you and the team?
Guanghua: Of course, we most hope that everyone can use Coming APP, a communication tool belonging to our community, to communicate. …Thank you community, thank you Alex for your feedback. We do our best.
ALEX: “Does the PolkaX team have a marketing strategy for English-speaking markets?
This community has discussed the possibility of submitting proposals to use treasury funds for the payment of exchange listing fees and marketing efforts. Do you think these things would be a good use of treasury funds? If not, what do you think would be a better use of the treasury funds?”
Guanghua: Yes, we are now focusing on recruiting people related to English-speaking markets. We will build our English community. Including myself, I gradually practice my English so that I can communicate with everyone.
Of course, we also have very good community members here, such as Alex. We encourage community members to actively participate in the construction of ChainX. Of course, we also encourage council members to vote on the decision of the council fund and support our English speaking markets operators.
(and I’d like to add, you should all start voting for your councillors too 😉 )
ALEX: I think I can speak for the entire community and say ‘Thank you’ for hiring new people and getting the marketing machine pumped up!
Next question: “Is ChainX guaranteed to become Polkadot’s secondary relay chain, or will it have to compete with other projects for the right to fill that role?”
Guanghua: It is guaranteed to be completed. This degree of completion is promoted by the ChainX development team. From the continuous development and construction of the ChainX community for 2 years, I believe that most users in the community can believe that our strength can complete this second level of Development of the relay chain.
(editors note: I don’t think there’s an official ‘role’ within the Polkadot ecosystem. It’s more of a name for what ChainX will become)
In fact, Gavin is doing cross-chain related work for Substrate. We also connected to this research a long time ago For example, that MMR algorithm. I will post a link for everyone. https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/tree/master/frame/merkle-mountain-range
ALEX: I’ll have to check that out after the AMA, I’m curious.
Guanghua: This is a cross-chain related super light node algorithm. Our secondary chain crosschain can be used for more. Because of the (limited) time here, I’m not looking for the other ones.
But the approximate meaning is: Gavin and the others have already completed the prototype of the cross-chain transfer bridge between polkadot and kusama. Our chainx and kusama/polkadot are both based on substrate.
(if) Kusama can be used as a secondary chain bridge to connect to polkadot, then our chainx can also be used as a secondary chain bridge to connect to polkadot. Even bridging with Kusama.
ALEX: I have two more questions I wanted to ask, then we’re wrapping this up.
“Can you give us an idea of what some experimental use cases of SherpaX might look like?”
Guanghua: The 2+1 test network that will be launched soon is a good example, and you can see it soon. Our recent Chinese AMA twice a week has published issues related to sherpaX. But it’s much more than that. We will build a perfect cross-chain world for SherpaX.
For example, we can cross any assets on Statemint and DOT/KSM to Ethereum’s uniswap, BSC’s Swap and other smart contract platforms to provide these platforms with asset liquidity on Polkadot. Similarly, we can make BTC, ETH , Assets on excellent platforms such as BNB flow to the DOT chain, providing sufficient liquidity for the DEFI of the DOT ecosystem
ALEX: Cooool! So the bridge is back AND forth. Ok, final question before you get excited again.
“Can you elaborate on the scope of the potential partnership with the Spider Network? And which Spider Network is it actually?”
Guanghua: Spider Network’s partners are government affairs chains of government agencies,
commercial banks, etc., oh, of course, including our ChainX’s Parachain MiniX chain. The Spider
network is to allow the chains of these partners to communicate with each other.
(Editors note: As per the last AMA, the Spider Network or SpiderX is something created by the PolkaX Team to have these networks communicate with each other)
ALEX: I want to thank you so much for your time and your wise words 😊
And to the community too, thank you all for tuning in!
Guanghua: Thank you, Alex for your patience. It’s okay
About ChainX
ChainX, the earliest launched project in Polkadot’s ecosystem, is committed to the research and application of Bitcoin layer 2 expansion, digital asset gateway and Polkadot second-layer relay chain, to realize cross-chain asset exchange, leading the new direction of Bitcoin Cross-DeFi.
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