Recap AMA Sperax x VCM Community

16 min readAug 8, 2020

Hubert: Hello everyone,

Only 15 minutes left and the AMA event of Sperax will be started

The representative for Vietnam Coin Market (VCM) is Admin Owner @taitan296 who will run AMA and Sperax project’s representative is @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87.

Translator: @nguyetvcm

Vietnam Coin Market Group (VCM) will be locked to make the event convenient.

After Segment 2 of the Vietnam Coin Market group will be opened a chat so that the community can ask the project.

How’s everything going?

Again, it’s been my greatest pleasure to announce today’s special AMA session

“Sperax”

Today’s AMA session is composed of 4 parts:

1 — Say hello, introduce the project

2 — AMA moderator asks the project 5 questions that will be selected first.

3 — Ask the community (unmute the channel and let the community ask questions freely on telegram. Then the guests will choose about 10 good questions to answer)

4 — Quiz — Give 5 quizzes to the community to answer

You must complete the task at this Tweet. All violations will result in cancellation of AMA results:

https://bit.ly/3fHRvEQ

Craving for the question rain ahead after I unmute the group.

Anyway, let’s get the curtain roll-up and welcome @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87.

Frida Cai_Sperax: Hi everyone!

likewise. We are happy to be here :)

Hubert: It’s a pleasure to all of you who participated in the AMA today.

Hubert: Could you briefly introduce about yourselves as well as your project?

Frida Cai_Sperax: Hi everyone, I am Frida Cai. I live in NYC. I am the Global Strategic Partner of Sperax.

I hold a bachelor degree in Foreign Affairs and a history minor from University of Virginia. I just recently graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a Master of Science degree in Data Journalism. With extensive experience in reporting the latest technology trends in Asia, I was mesmerized by the potential of crypto and blockchain industries and has been devoting mine career into the space ever since.

done~ It is Joe’s turn

Hubert: Welcome Joe

Zhou Yu: Hi this is Joe. I am currently studying in UCLA for Mathematics of Computation (mathematical side of computer science) and pursuing a Philosophy minor. I have been working as research assistant for Prof. Rafail Ostrovsky for cryptography and theoretical computer science. I contributed significantly in the design of the Sperax BDLS protocol under the supervision of world leading cryptographer Professor Yongge Wang. I currently work as a researcher for UCLA and Sperax.

That is all :)

Hubert: You can introduce basic Sperax project.

Frida Cai_Sperax: Sperax aims to make DeFi services accessible to all.

Built with our original blockchain design — — BDLS consensus protocol, Sperax offers a high-performance blockchain that is truly secure in the real internet environment compared with other top-ranked BFT consensus-based blockchains, such as Cosmos (Tendermint), Polkadot (GRANDPA), and Ethereum (Casper FFG).

On top of Sperax blockchain consensus infrastructure, the Sperax Foundation issues a native multi-currency stablecoin sCOIN, the first among public blockchain ecosystems. It bridges the gap between Internet users and crypto-native applications. In Sperax, we believe that more people deserve to enjoy the benefits of blockchain-enabled Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications.

In January 2020, Sperax secured over 6M USD in seed funding round, with leading investors including Outlier Ventures, FBG Capital and Newstyle Capital.

On March 18, 2020, Sperax launched its first public sale on Cobak, Korea’s largest cryptocurrency community, with a 200K USD allocation sold out in less than 20 minutes

Hubert: Welcome!

Looking forward to have our audiences to know more about the project and the views.

Let’s get to the first question we’d like to know from you.

What makes the Sperax project stand out more than the projects in the same direction at the moment?

Frida Cai_Sperax: 1. High Performance: Sperax BDLS consensus protocol requires only four rounds of communication to reach consensus, much fewer than other BFT consensus protocols.

2. Security: Sperax overcame the liveness vulnerability under partially asynchronous networks widespread among BFT consensus protocols, saving its consensus from being led into unrecoverable deadlocks and guaranteeing security.

3. Dual coin system: Sperax ecosystem issues two tokens: SPA as the network token on BDLS and sCOIN the native stablecoin. Sperax is the first decentralised system with a native stablecoin.

4. Embedded Financial Services: Sperax introduced a financial layer, including stable coin and financial products, to enable developers and token holders to create an ecosystem that connects to the real economy.

5. Decentralised Governance: Sperax token holders have the right to governance. Collectively, they make the network better by contributing to the design & upgrade of the ecosystem.

6. Designed by world-leading cryptographer:

Sperax consensus algorithm is designed by a world-leading cryptography research team from top-ranking universities (UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of North Carolina) led by Professor Yongge Wang. Prof.

Wang is among the top cryptographers in US. He has published over a hundred peer-reviewed academic papers on various fields of cryptography including pseudorandomness, fault-tolerant computation, dependable distributed computation, and secure communications.

His academic achievements speak to his expertise in designing a safe, efficient, robust blockchain system. BTW, you can check out his publications here: https://webpages.uncc.edu/yonwang/papers.html

Hubert: Thanks for this impressive information. We will go over the next question.

Who are some business partner/clients for Sperax?

Frida Cai_Sperax: 1. We just integrated Chainlink oracles into our network. You can check out the whole release here: https://medium.com/sperax/sperax-integrating-chainlink-oracles-to-power-its-decentralized-financial-services-915f3e2ac5f2

Our other alliance include:

2. Xiaomi’s virtual financial bank with full licenses authorized by Hong Kong Monetary Authority

Proposed Sperax stablecoin for the following uses cases:

use the fiat gateway and accept cash equivalent

Support cross-border transactions based on the stable coin network and offer more competitive rates

3. A Sand Hill Road based Venture Capital

Tokenization of its emerging crypto-focus fund

Integrate its mobile gaming portfolio companies on Sperax networks

4. A costume martial-arts TV series with 8 billion views on Netflix and WeTV

Tokenization of its worldwide fan meet-ups and concerts tickets

Tokenization of celebrity merch’s online marketing place

Hubert: Thank you, we could give some mins for our audiences to read more about the comment.

Hubert: We will come to the next question:

What are the memorable milestones of Sperax in the research and development process?

Frida Cai_Sperax: The first one is definitely the birth of BDLS consensus protocol that could achieve security and efficiency at the same time. As the foundation for DeFi services, it incorporates a convenient global payment system that minimizes remittance charges, including financial institute charges and exchange rate margin. In addition, the software that implements the Sperax blockchain will be open source.

1. Secure and Unpredictable random beacon/ RANDAO: RANDAO not only has the characteristics of unpredictability, which it inherits from the common random number generator, but it is also more accessible and provably fair.

2. Security design in the type II partially asynchronous networks

Our internet is best modeled by the type II partially asynchronous network. Without special security design, consensus in this network can be easily led into unrecoverable deadlock and its liveness property broken. Sperax designs its BDLS consensus protocol based on the type II partially asynchronous network model. It is mathematically proven that BDLS protocol is truly secure (both safe and live) under this realistic model.

3. High efficiency consensus algorithm design: While scalability is one angle to evaluate the performance of any blockchain system, understanding its communication complexity is also crucial. Though performances of blockchains vary, current public blockchains all need at least O(n²) communication complexity. Sperax blockchain, with its original BDLS consensus however, manages to achieve linear complexity O(4n), which greatly improves performance.

Our blockchain technology innovations include:

1. Secure and efficient BFT consensus protocol BDLS.

2 .Sperax Virtual Machines (SVM) that supports Solidity programming language (Sperax will also support Libra’s Move programming language in the future).

The latest one would be that our team’s latest paper, Sperax: An Approach To Defeat Long Range Attacks In Blockchains, was accepted to the top-ranking computer science conference IEEE INFOCOM Edgeblock. Sperax researcher @yuzhou87 Joe was invited to deliver a keynote speech at the conference.

IEEE INFOCOM is one of the top-ranking academic conferences in the field of computer science.

Aka International Conference on Computer Communications, it covers both theoretical and systems research. For INFOCOM 2020, the conference includes a legion of paper from internationally renowned academic institutions (e.g. MIT and Princeton) and global technology enterprises (e.g. Microsoft and Amazon). The Technical Program Committee consists of worldwide academic experts. Thanks to its strict peer review process, the widely-recognized conference maintains a high standard.

Sperax team was informed that our paper got accepted by IEEE INFOCOM at the beginning of this year. IEEE INFOCOM has a rather rigorously-high bar of admitting blockchain-related studies. Only a handful of blockchain enterprises have been able to publish their academic papers, including Ethereum foundation ConsenSys and ZCASH.

Because it has always been a core value to Sperax that research is the foundation of blockchain projects, this academic achievement on IEEE INFOCOM indicates an acknowledgement of our technology, furthering our dedication in blockchain research.

Hubert: Thank you. What does Sperax plan to do to attract more users in the upcoming time?

Frida Cai_Sperax: We are a new generation public blockchain that aims to build a truly secure and efficient infrastructure for the decentralised economy that renders greater efficiency, flexibility and self-governance than the traditional economic model.

We noticed that the current blockchain industry is not for the mass consumer groups: the complexity in setting up wallets, the chronically-fluctuating market,cryptos without real currency features. Due to the lack of financial infrastructure, the current design principle of public blockchains is to create a prepaid SaaS model rather than an economy that runs on smart contracts. These all make it difficult for crypto to be integrated with the real economy.

After seeing this severe lack of user friendliness, we want to overturn this pain point.

At Sperax, we take a layered approach to solve the problem. At the infrastructure layer, we developed BDLS protocol, which is an innovative consensus module that is more secure and efficient than other Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols. On top of it, we introduced Sperax stable coin system. It is backed by fiat currency and is the first native stablecoin in public blockchain ecosystem. Developers could build decentralised applications without worrying about educating users about cryptocurrency.

So essentially, to attract more user, Sperax provides a layer of financial services within the public blockchain stack through a native stablecoin and decentralized financial service providers.

Hubert: The last question is already done. Thank you @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87 for bringing the above useful information.

Next, the Vietnam Coin Market team (VCM) will open a chat for the community to ask questions to the project. We will have 3 min to ask. The Sperax project will then choose 10 questions to answer.

Let’go!

Now!

Let’s give some mins for @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87 to choose 10 questions to answer.

@FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87, you may proceed now.

Question 1. Sperax has two different tokens ($SPA and $sCOIN), why did you implement the dual token model? and what is the utility of both tokens.

SPA is the utility token in the Sperax blockchain just like ETH in the Ethereum blockchain. It ensures the economic incentives for participants in the BDLS consensus. It also reflects the network value for Sperax. As users join the Sperax network, they could earn SPA as they run nodes and validate transactions. Similar to other public blockchain, gas fees are collected in SPA as transactions happen on the Sperax blockchain. Moreover, SPA is also the governance token for the protocol.

sCOIN is fiat-pegged stablecoin issued on the Sperax blockchain. Moreover, it is the native stablecoin of Sperax blockchain. It is minted through depositing fiat currencies by users and is issued by financial nodes (regulated financial institutions with fiat custody) in the network.

There are multiple benefits introducing a native stablecoin. By providing a digital token with a price pegged to fiat currency, sCOIN could lower the barrier for users to adopt the usage of blockchain. Moreover, by partnering with licensed financial service providers in different countries, sCOIN network is able to serve a global user base. At launch, payment, global transfer and remittance would be supported for stablecoin users; however, the network will be an open platform for developers and liquidity providers to launch innovative products based on the blockchain and financial infrastructure.

For more details, please click here: https://medium.com/sperax/decentralized-finance-infrastructure-sperax-releases-its-economics-white-paper-and-launches-c9cb1e3ff5fe

Question 2. After SPA does the Token Public Sale, what steps will be taken in the future?

We would spend energy mainly building the ecosystem with contributions from many many many developers who share our aspiration. So I would say, definitely research and development, though we will also be listed at a major exchange by the end of this year.

Question 3. What is the greatest challenge have you faced in building Sperax project? How did you overcome it?
I think the greatest challenge would be that our team, besides our chief scientist and advisory board, is pretty young. We are a group of aspirational young people who share the same vision that is to **make blockchain-enabled decentralized financial services accessible to all*. But vision alone is not enough. We need to implement it. So there is a lot of hard work to do: business development, product management, web design, technology deadcorners, recruitment, etc. All of these need to be handled by ourselves. But we truly appreciate this learning process. It makes us better and stronger.

Question 4. Sperax recently announced their partnership with chainlink.so, what is the main reason behind this partnership. What kinds of positive result can we expect from this partnership?

By integrating Chainlink, we can finally bring real-world data into the Sperax ecosystem and connect to traditional non-blockchain systems. This allows our developers to create smart contracts connected to off-chain data feeds, APIs, traditional payment infrastructure, and more, which greatly expands the number of use cases we can build solutions through DeFi and other large markets.

Within our DeFi ecosystem, Chainlink oracles will aggregate market information from a variety of high quality data sources to serve as reference prices for assets such as cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, commodities, indices, and more. DeFi applications can then use those price feeds as the basis for making automated decisions like how big a loan a user can take on, whether or not to liquidate someone’s collateral, and whether or not a payment actually occured off-chain.

This integration will enable Sperax to leverage Chainlink’s decentralised oracle network to bring real-world data to any smart contract running on the Sperax network, and ultimately steer users and developers towards better financial decisions and more passive incomes through highly accessible and reliable financial products.

Read the full story here: https://medium.com/sperax/sperax-integrating-chainlink-oracles-to-power-its-decentralized-financial-services-915f3e2ac5f2

Chainlink tweet: https://twitter.com/chainlink/status/1291526745255018511

Question 5. We all talk about Positive points/Pros/Good Points & Features of any Project, no one Project tell about there Cons. So can you tell us Honestly the Cons & Lacks of Sperax?

Thank you for your candor. I would say because Sperax is still relatively new in the industry. We are still exploring our niche audience. Plus, our testnet or mainnet has not been officially launched by this moment. We could not build a truly-healthy ecosystem without it. But the good news is that we are backed by some of the best investors haha. So more to come, more to come. Please join Sperax family and we welcome you to grow together with us.

Question 6. You’ve got sCOIN which would serve roles in DeFi. But DAI is still the leading utility stablecoin in DeFi. How can sCOIN rival DAI, especially in terms of usability, acceptance and interoperability?

For security, as our answer for BDLS has explained, our BDLS consensus protocol is designed in the most realistic network model so the security of blockchain is greatly improved.

For scalability, I prefer a more general term — performance or efficiency. Since the main goal here is for us to improve the processing speed in blockchain.

Our BDLS protocol has significantly improved processing speed or efficiency by enhancing communication complexity of our consensus.

The last one is interoperability. I guess here you mean how our Sperax blockchain can be interoperable with real world finance. We connect our blockchain ecosystem with the traditional financial world by our unique design of financial layer. It consists of our native stablecoin sCOIN and a group of authorized financial institutions. We believe that our unique financial layer can truly integrate the new blockchain world with the traditional world.

Question 7. Can you list 1–3 killer features of Sperax that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?

Our technology is gonna disrupt the industry. As a new generation BFT consensus protocol, BDLS has 2 major advantages.

1. The first one is security. Our Internet is an open network which is best modelled by what we call a partially synchronous network model. Previous BFT consensus are designed based on a simpler model, synchronous network model. Although it is more intuitive and easier to design blockchain consensus protocols in the synchronous network model, designs under this model can oversee some significant security vulnerabilities since this simple model cannot reflect the reality of our internet. In contrast, Sperax BDLS chooses the more complex and more realistic model when designing and takes into account all potential security vulnerabilities.

2. The second one is efficiency. The most common angle to measure efficiency is “scalability.” However, there is another important angle from which to evaluate the efficiency of any blockchain system — communication complexity. Most current BFT consensus blockchains need O(n²) communication complexity. Since it is a “square,” it requires plenty of efforts to accomplish the communication task before reaching consensus. Even the fastest current BFT consensus needs O(7n) communication complexity, which means multiplying 7 to the input task. By comparison, BDLS consensus only needs O(4n). This means that BDLS nearly has double the speed of the current fastest BFT consensus in terms of communication complexity.

Question 8. I wonder what kind of efforts you are making to make this work. You’ve recently met up with Algorand, and I wonder if you’re planning to collaborate with the projects in Algorand?

That is a fantastic suggestion.

Besides technology, we have been partnering with other projects, including Harmony and AVA, during the past few months.

You can read one of the event recaps here. Or watch the recording on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGg3X8qPQoX5GJel611cTsg

Question 9. How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates about $Sperax?

Question 10. BDLS vs TENDERMINT. Why did you choose/build BDLS, despite that TENDERMINT is more popular?

Tendermint BFT is a BFT protocol developed by the Tendermint team. It is commonly used to achieve consensus in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Tendermint BFT has been used by many interesting projects such as Cosmos blockchain, Oasis Labs, and Binance DEX. According to recent statistics, Tendermint BFT is used by around 40% of PoS blockchain systems.

Tendermint BFT works under a partially synchronous network as we have previously explained the term.Tendermint’s protocol consists of 3 steps at each block height: propose, prevote and precommit, where the initiator of each round is determined by a public function.

However, the problem is, if a malicious node becomes the initiator of the round, it can successfully carry out an attack so that each node in the blockchain network will lock a different value before the GST is reached.

And, these locked values cannot be removed even after GST. Thus, the whole system goes into a deadlock. So in short, Tendermint BFT cannot guarantee the liveness property required for any secure blockchain system.

That is, a malicious group can successfully launch an attack to Tendermint BFT network, lead the whole system into a deadlock, and no new block will be produced.

Frida Cai_Sperax: I am so sorry that I could not address all your questions. I am so honored and overwhelmed by your enthusiasm.

Hubert: Thank you @FridaCai_Sperax for replying to the community.

We will go to Segment 4, the Sperax project will ask the question. All correct answers will be eligible to win. I will spin after AMA with these cases. Choose the luckiest one of these to receive a reward / each question.
Each person can only answer 1 time / 1 question

Please join Sperax Vietnam group to join segment 4: https://t.me/speraxvietnam

Please @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87 to ask Quiz questions.

Quiz 1. When and where was Sperax founded?

2018 in Menlo Park, California

Quiz 2. What conference accepted Sperax’s latest paper? What is the paper name?

The latest one would be that our team’s latest paper, Sperax: An Approach To Defeat Long Range Attacks In Blockchains, was accepted to the top-ranking computer science conference IEEE INFOCOM Edgeblock. Sperax researcher @yuzhou87 Joe was invited to deliver a keynote speech at the conference.

Quiz 3. What problem does the paper solve?

In the paper, Professor Yongge Wang and Sperax researcher Joe Yu proposed a solution regarding the innate vulnerability of PoS (Proof of Stake) consensus protocols, Long Range Attacked-based costless simulation attacks.

After extensive research on various current PoS consensus protocols, Sperax team ingeniously introduced its original smart hardware to the Proof of Randomness consensus protocol as the first PoS blockchain that truly overcomes this problem. The paper presents an innovative layer-1 consensus protocol which is proven to be able to withstand attacks that exploit PoS’s innate vulnerability.

Quiz 4. What are the two major advantages does BDLS have compared to other consensus mechanisms such as BFT, POS …?

1. The first one is security. Our Internet is an open network which is best modelled by what we call a partially synchronous network model. Previous BFT consensus are designed based on a simpler model, synchronous network model. Although it is more intuitive and easier to design blockchain consensus protocols in the synchronous network model, designs under this model can oversee some significant security vulnerabilities since this simple model cannot reflect the reality of our internet. In contrast, Sperax BDLS chooses the more complex and more realistic model when designing and takes into account all potential security vulnerabilities.

2. The second one is efficiency. The most common angle to measure efficiency is “scalability.” However, there is another important angle from which to evaluate the efficiency of any blockchain system — communication complexity. Most current BFT consensus blockchains need O(n²) communication complexity. Since it is a “square,” it requires plenty of efforts to accomplish the communication task before reaching consensus. Even the fastest current BFT consensus needs O(7n) communication complexity, which means multiplying 7 to the input task. By comparison, BDLS consensus only needs O(4n). This means that BDLS nearly has double the speed of the current fastest BFT consensus in terms of communication complexity.

Quiz 5. This question is for our huge fans: when does our next round of public sale start?
The token sale will run from August 14th, 2020 at 10:00 AM ET (UTC-4) until August 21st, 2020 at 10:00 AM ET (UTC-4).

So the AMA Sperax at Vietnam Coin Market (VCM) is also coming to an end. Hopefully in this direct exchange, the community has a basic understanding of the Sperax project. I am the moderator today. Congratulations to the Sperax.

Thanks @FridaCai_Sperax and @yuzhou87 for joining AMA with the VCM community today. Wish you much health and success.

Again, don’t forget to join the Sperax community for further assistance. Thanks everyone.

https://t.me/sperax

https://t.me/speraxvietnam

https://twitter.com/sperax_io

Website: https://sperax.io/

VIETNAM COIN MARKET COMMUNITY

INFORMATION:

Vietnam Coin Market

Website: http://vcmcommunity.online

Medium: https://medium.com/@chocoin_VN

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/vietnamcoinmarket