Fireside AMA Recap
After the release of the updated Roadmap, a lot of questions were raised by the community about the future of Saito. Because of this Founders David Lancashire and Richard Parris wasted no time setting up an cozy AMA by the fire while enjoying some Whiskey to answer all those questions. As usual, we’ve compiled the best of them here:
What is happening with the liquidity removed from Uni?
Richard Parris: When we IDO’d we put about double what most projects do (or about double what our advisors were saying) into liquidity on the SAITO/WETH pair. Since then, we also added the SAITO/USDT pair. With price action on ETH and SAITO this means we have about 5 to 6 times the liquidity needed to ensure smooth transactions and stability. So, we have removed some, in anticipation of providing some or supporting liquidity on Pancake and to have money in reserve for CEXes or other opportunities that come along.
Where are the commissions earned on Uniswap as the volume has increased significantly being used?
Richard Parris: These, in part, are the bulk of the liquidity that was removed. The part that we don’t re-deploy on BSC and other platforms will go to paying project costs like wages.
Is any support for the BSC pool coming?
Richard Parris: Yes, we are working on a model that supports and rewards the community as much as it can. The project actually makes decent money with liquidity on Uniswap. With BSC we want to make sure that that it’s not just providing cheaper trading but also provides earning opportunities for holders.
This has been slightly delayed by hiring, but it is coming.
Can you give us some staff and team updates?
Richard Parris: Great question, sent out two offers today; Developer and Product Manager. We are working hard to expand capacity, in part because we are also tightening up plans.
Speaking about CEXs, Gate.io is a relatively small CEX. How likely is it for Saito to be listed on a bigger CEX before the end of the year?
David Lancashire: We haven’t focused on it aggressively and specified in the roadmap when we think that needs to change — we know what we can move forward with and have options if and when we decide it makes sense.
Just pulling back, a lot of people focus on CEXes because they’re primarily interested in price activity and if you’re building something like a meme-coin that is basically what drives things. We’re obviously concerned that Saito is a good project for people to support, but there’s also a huge difference in terms of engaging with exchanges, to what extent you need them and they need you. I think right now the balance falls towards wait-and-see while we keep executing. It can be the difference between an exchange buying its own liquidity or asking for a significant listing fee.
Richard Parris: Gate is not tiny (it’s top 5 or 10 depending on measures). We are not against listing at further exchanges. But we need to know it’s going to have the impact folks want. Listing on a big exchange can horribly damage a project if all it creates is an unpredictable pump and a bunch of paper-handed holders leaking liquidity into the market. So, we need a partnership and to be sure that the exchange will work with us long term and frankly not ask for an absurd ransom.
Most roadmaps provide some high-level dates. I noticed that this is not the case with the roadmap that was released yesterday. Don’t you think this will have a negative impact on the community?
David Lancashire: OK — so there are two explicit dates — the first is when the network software updates to support the dev work that we’ve been doing for the last few months. The second is the date when token vesting stops and we have a zero-inflation token. There’s a reason that the stuff that touches token distribution or meta-incentives is pushed off until Era 2.
If anyone really wants us to put dates on the end of Era #2 or anything after, I don’t think that’s realistic. We can talk about what we are thinking tonight if people want, but it has to be a more substantive discussion than “why isn’t there a date on stuff more than a year out?”
Richard Parris: We will always do our best to provide as much clarity as we can about dates and progress. Sometimes that means not saying things that we can’t back up. With Rust on the network, we will be quickly gathering information on progress and what is left to achieve.
It’s important to remember two things:
- It’s not just development, we need to build and bootstrap a community and an economy around Saito.
- No one has done specifically this before.
So, we will try to be open about what we know and can say with precision.
Richard Parris: (I like this – everyone is getting the David take and the Richard take.) Proof of Founder Alignment.
Can you give us more information about the partnership with Elrond?
Richard Parris: Next steps with this will be part of the workaround extending crypto integration beyond Polkadot. Polkadot got the first call as part of the web3 grant, but we are planning to extend this work to Elrond and other ecosystems in the future.
Could you elaborate on how Saito would facilitate the actual usage of other blockchain’s P2P networks, such as BSV? Presumably, on the longer timeframe, do you expect Saito to simply engulf these more crude economic systems?
Richard Parris: David will have a differently nuanced take on this, but for me, the question for say BSV, like any token with a permanent ledger, does the complete ledger offer value to your users? If it does, then there is space on top of Saito. Similarly, if you have an EVM that delivers value for users in itself.
For other layer one blockchains, the economics mean that the future is limited.
David Lancashire: I don’t think we really know how PoW will play out in terms of what happens when the supply curve of hash power commoditizes. And BSV has powerful on-chain scripting capabilities that we will not have for a long time, so there are a lot of different ways that they can help us, and vice versa.
Over the long term, BSV is showing that our critique of network centralization is dead-on. TAAL is stealing the whole show, and it’s now being leveraged to “unlock” tokens that are unspendable on other chains. I don’t know why people think that this sort of taxation of the token holders is going to magically stop. It’ll continue because that’s how to make money. One way that Saito can help is by creating a counterbalancing application layer that can’t be dragged into monopolistic control. Maybe that will help. The application doesn’t need to be locked to the token transfer like with something that runs purely on BSV, so Saito can help create a world where people still get the benefits of using a PoW-coin without suffering the drawbacks so much.
How can you help other blockchains with the Saito consensus?
David Lancashire: I think the most practical short-term aim is ELROND Arcade. POLKADOT Arcade. BSV Arcade. Work to get the applications running with the communities that care about Saito. Promote the use of their tokens and promote adoption of the platform. Use these communities as a stepping-stone for onboarding other cryptos. This stuff is in the roadmap. I’m not sure how explicit it is. But the idea is bringing these other communities to a more polished suite of apps that have had UI love because we’ve gotten enough Core dev sorted out it can continue while we turn our public-facing focus to the UI side. A lot of people say, “how can I earn Saito tokens by running a routing node.” —> “Fork our software suite, hook up a crypto you want to support, and get people using Saito” is a good answer
With a lot being said about energy use. It would be great to have a one-liner about why Saito might be better in that regard.
Richard Parris: I loved David’s answer to a question on Twitter – get more bandwidth by paying for bandwidth, not by setting the couch on fire. Saito incentivizes efficiency and despises waste.
Would you guys bother if Saitozens advertise Saito on social media?
Richard Parris: Quite the opposite. Nothing makes us happier than seeing ‘independent’ talk on Saito.
Is there an official name for the Saito consensus? e.g. Proof of Transaction?
Richard Parris: We used to use Proof of Transactions – but you know what, people call their ‘fancy consensus’ “Proof of X” because they want it to sound official.
It is important for blockchains that block production is expensive – there has to be a cost. People grok that and come up with a ‘Proof of Something’ where the something is supposed to be hard to get, or fake, or gather, so that’s supposed to make block production expensive. But that does nothing to solve the fact that if you can use revenues from block production to get more Something – the whole thing is broken. You can pay for your something with something and we have a 51% attack or worse. The way to get out of this is not to have a Proof of random expensive thing, it’s to use the only thing that is scarce and valued, internally in the network. Transaction fees.
Saito is quite deliberately not a ‘Proof of’ consensus.
We are more and more on social media. How can we help?
Richard Parris: Original content. Does not have to be a novel or a 20,000-word blog post. Something original and genuine will stand out – much more than an army of drones or paid shills.
Without a block reward, how are tokens being distributed? And how is it being approached to minimize excessive bag holder dynamics and unhealthy future implications?
David Lancashire: “yes.” And our challenge is not only doing this without stepping on a landmine but doing it in a way that deals with drive-by-shootings from people who don’t understand Saito. Practically, this is one of the reasons the roadmap doesn’t tackle tokenomics or anything that touches rewards or subsidies until everything has vested and we are zero inflation. We only want to be releasing tokens through any mechanism if it makes sense for Saito. that necessarily involves not undermining things we have already accomplished, including community and existing distribution. in the meantime, we are doubtless going to get FUD from people about tokenomics, but we can deal with that.
Do you have an idea about the staking percentage?
David Lancashire: We’re trying to keep the staking tables open, and we don’t know what percentage of mainnet tokens will drift into the staking tables. If you mean ROI for staking? that’s one of the reasons we are starting it in the #2 era. Before then someone can put tokens into the staking tables and Rust Consensus will support it, but without tokens flowing out into the network there won’t be a ROI. So why will people do it? My thinking is that in Era 2 we’ll probably start with a small-scale incentive for staking that comes from the token treasury, but nothing major. Enough to incentivize participation on a growing scale — and bring on stakers who then have an incentive to increase their incomes by marketing and promoting. Once we’ve got a functioning ad faucet that is reasonably secure against being gamed, the ROI scales with network usage and we’re in a position to turn on the tap and actually drive adoption. That can’t happen until we know everything works.
Has there been any discussion or planning regarding jump-starting the network once it’s live to get other projects to build on top of Saito?
Richard Parris: Yes, a lot. Set one is extending the web 3 work we have done with Polkadot to handle a variety of chains and tokens. That will let us get people started building and discovering the business models, and most importantly building userbases.
David Lancashire: We’ve done some exploratory work in the past with outside parties. There is the DHB supply-chain work. There was another Australia-focused project. That stuff is still ongoing, but it isn’t moving quickly because we don’t control those companies and you’re generally dealing with underdog firms that don’t have huge budgets. Do we want our progress to be depending on outside businesses having viable business models on the blockchain? I don’t think so.
There’s a mix of opinions about how quickly we need to get Saito to the state where outside developers will feel really comfortable building on the platform, and whether that will drive growth. The roadmap has us focusing on our own application suite — particularly the Arcade — for the next era in part to get the polish and documentation and software build-upon-ness that we can make it easy for outside devs and it isn’t such a leap of faith.
In one of the townhalls you mentioned that you want Saito to be easily usable by developers so that they can quickly develop something. When is work on this (i.e., making easy-to-use JS libraries) going to be done?
Richard Parris: As David mentioned above, you can develop now. Framework integration will come as part of the SDK work. The issue there is that React, Vue, and friends are the end result and expression of web 2.0. Everything, including your data, is behind a proprietary API. To re-use these in a genuinely web 3 context, you have to rip them out of their standard mode and bring them into the client/user side and have a block-API-UI model. If you don’t, you have web 2 reality with web 3 overhead.
David Lancashire: Every single dev has tried to develop on Saito like it is a web2 app that pulls JSON from somewhere. We know it’s hard, that’s why dogfooding with the UI-facing developers has to come first, and we’re focused on that Era1 as we push the platform up to React, etc. standards. We’ve got to move from having these application demos that are showcasing what is possible to something that people can build on without feeling like they’ve wandered into a weird and unholy API.
When can I start to develop applications on Saito even if it’s not production-ready? Is this possible at this point in time? if it is where can we find information on getting started? SDKs, etc.
David Lancashire: yes. https://github.com/saitotech/saito-lite
Windows isn’t a good install platform but Linux and macOS are reasonably easy. You can ping me if you have any trouble and I’ll help you get a local install running. Then you can uninstall or install any of the existing mods and play around with building your own, or grabbing a task to help out with if you want to contribute (we have a bag of stuff we could use help with, like N > 2 group Diffie-hellman is not coded, but that unlocks on-chain TG and is just cool to have).
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