September Town Hall | 2.0+ Mainnet Launch

Hello Creditcoin frens. Our monthly town hall event returned once again last week, but we hear that some of you have better things to do on a Tuesday than listen in! That cuts deep, we’re not going to lie. Luckily, though, we planned for just such an eventuality. Waiting for you below you'll find the listen again audio plus a full transcript.

There was only ever going to be one subject for this month and that is, of course, the recent successful launch of Creditcoin 2.0+ mainnet. Given just what a momentous event this is, we went straight to the top and collared none other than Creditcoin Founder and Gluwa CEO Tae Oh to talk everything 2.0+ launch and what it all means. So without further ado, let’s get stuck in. (TIP: Go straight to 6:12 in the recording to skip all the waiting around and head right into the good stuff).

🔊 Audio File 👇

September Town Hall Transcript - 2.0+ Mainnet Launch

Quick intro

Toby: All right, it's almost 10 past, so why don't we get started? First off, let me quickly just go through all the important announcements, technical notices, PSAs, etc. So obviously Creditcoin 2.0 mainnet is out, exciting times. The protocol before we'd already recorded over 4 million loan transactions.

How to get involved with mainnet for free

Toby: And now the protocol is leveling up again. And now is the best time to join because you can do so completely for free. I'm sure many already have, but if anyone hasn't we've got a big QuestN running right now. Go join that. You can get your free staking token. Start staking on the network and get started.

That's got two different [00:07:00] prize pools. One, everyone gets a guaranteed CTC reward at the end of the day. And the other one is based on the leaderboard. So, the more QuestN missions you complete, the higher chances of winning from the other pool of 75,000 Creditcoin, which is worth quite a bit, together it's something like 23,000 US dollars. Not bad.

Some advice about staking during the incentive program

Toby: So technical notice. We know there's a lot, a lot of new nominators joining the network. And that has created an issue of over subscription of certain validators. We would advise people to make sure that they nominate validators who are not oversubscribed.

Essentially, that just means you have a higher chance of your nominations becoming active and earning rewards. So, that is recommended. Normally, we'd encourage you to nominate [00:08:00] several validators but for this, for the incentive program only, for your one free CTC, it probably makes more sense to focus on one or two validators just to make sure you become active.

Now, we're still going to reward everyone, no matter what. But for future reference, that is what you should do. And this is the reasons for this kind of complicated, essentially the NPoS, the nominated proof of stake algorithm is somewhat complicated in the way it handles staking allocation, et cetera.

So we've got an FAQ coming out, which will just help explain that simply, and also give you a few ideas the kind of strategies you can pursue either as a nominator to maximize rewards or equally as a validator to attract more stake and become active. So that's the 1st most important thing. 2nd of all, you can also now all do that [00:09:00] in SubWallet who have been brilliant and they've added an in app staking feature to make your experience super easy.

Introducing the guest speaker - Creditcoin Founder Tae Oh

Toby: And yeah, those are the two important technical notices, which means we can now introduce our special guest today. We've got Tae Oh. Why don't you introduce yourself?

Tae: Hi everyone, I'm Tae. I'm founder of Creditcoin, CEO of Gluwa. Nice to meet you. It's been a while. Last time I was having a long podcast like Q&A with Toby.

I guess that's not all out there yet, but that's how we met last time.

Toby: But this time it's all live. So yeah Creditcoin 2.0 is out. I mean, we'll talk about that in a second, but yeah, incredible milestone. How do you feel [00:10:00] to finally have this upgrade out?

Tae: Oh, we have been working on this consensus switch from PoW into PoS for a while now since we proposed a change and the team has been working diligently and it has been a huge, huge amount of investment and resource allocation from the foundation side also.

And now I'm very relieved that it's finally out there and everything working as planned. And I see all the changes that we had anticipated to happen, it's all working as planned.

Creditcoin 2.0+ launch facts and figures

Toby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it has been a, a very smooth launch. I mean, we've got over 50 active validators already the same as Polkadot with another 26 or so waiting validators who will probably get elected at some point.

And so far we've got almost 5,000 [00:11:00] active nominators as well. That's gonna just increase over the next few weeks and...

Tae: We, the number that I have from Alan, just now is we have 5,149 nominators participating so far in the first week.

Toby: Damn, that's really increased from when I wrote down my stat sheet. And that's awesome.

How is the new mainnet different from the old one?

Toby: Yeah. Well, okay. It's been a success so far, but can you just introduce quickly what 2.0 plus is and how it's different to the old mainnet, what are the main changes?

Tae: So the biggest change is the consensus switch from proof of work to proof of stake, NPoS to be specific. And the difference between proof of work and proof of stake is mainly about how we decide who is going to produce the next block.

And the difference in algorithm allows proof of stake blockchains to [00:12:00] produce blocks in a more consistent block time. So when we were running a proof of work, while the block time on average was very close to what we have aimed for, but the production time was inconsistent, which means when the block production is slower than we have anticipated, then we will have a lot of backlog of transactions that cannot be processed until the next block is produced.

And there was... constant, which was a consistent problem and issue raised from our partners. Now, given that we switched to proof of stake, the block product production time is very consistent around 15 seconds. And now we have more predictability of how when the transaction is going to get processed, which gives more stable processing time [00:13:00] for our partners.

And also because proof of work is more based on the investment that you have made on your machines, proof of stake, on the other hand, it's more about how much investment that you have made into the stake, which is CTC in this case. So it aligns a little bit better with the holders and the investors and traders of the Creditcoin ecosystem.

Those two are the biggest change and so far when we announced the switch proposal and we actually had a huge uptick in the hash power on our proof of work network. We took it as a great sign because our existing validators and proof of work validators were investing a lot more [00:14:00] into the proof of work version of CC2 and which means they have a positive anticipation about the switch.

So we took that as a great sign and we prepared diligently for the switch and after going through the the QAs through our test net and whatnot. And when we actually did announce the proof of stake version of CC2 is live we were able to fill out validator slots and because they were filled out so quickly and there were a lot of outstanding values.

One is we was waiting to get at it. We were able to increase it from five validators to now 50 validators and that's also a great sign because that is actually a way of the community of voting for the switch [00:15:00] from the original version to the current version.

Toby: For sure, for sure. And it's not just the old members of the community.

We've obviously had now hundreds well thousands of new people coming in to secure the network. Obviously before with proof of work, it was a very technical process also very expensive in terms of hardware, et cetera. But now the whole process is much more accessible, and I think we're seeing also interest in this protocol increase as a result, which is absolutely fantastic. Which I know you already mentioned, mentioned the block time reduction as well. Could you just comment on how that helps improve the sort of real world asset performance for our partner institutions? I know stability and predictability as well, right?

But does that also mean that they can record more loans in the same amount of time or...

Tae: They can record more [00:16:00] loans in the same amount of time because, from 60 seconds, now the block time is reduced to 15 so they can 4x the amount of transactions that can process. And also their borrowers, users, do not have to wait 45 seconds more to get a loan process.

That, that's a greater UX on their borrower side also. And in general, because they don't have to wait they can process things faster, and because things are getting processed faster, they can process more subsequently.

How can I get involved in securing the network?

Toby: Yeah, totally. And you know, as a quick reminder what is the best way for people to get started and secure the network today?

Tae: For people to secure the network I encourage people to participate as either a nominator or validator. I cannot get [00:17:00] into details to cover every step over this call, but we have a great documentation at docs. creditcoin. org, so I encourage people to go through our documentation.

It's a lot simpler compared to our proof of work version of validation, so I encourage people to try it out. Now average time to set up I heard, I heard it's less than an hour for a new people to set up a new validator. Probably that's because they are already experienced with a proof of work validation, but still it's, this is much smoother compared to what we had before.

Toby: And I will shout out a few members of the community as well who have been very active in helping out in Discord and the forums, etc, creating guides. That's been super helpful because it's hard to cover every single [00:18:00] base. And, and yeah, it's never been easier to join. I mean, as I mentioned before, there's the, the nominators, there's a free incentive program right now where you can get a free token begin staking. With the new sub wallet integration, it's even easier than before. You can just download SubWallet, complete the QuestN and do your staking from that. So really, it's, we've gone from several hours and mining hardware to downloading an app, which is fantastic in terms of decentralization.

Tae: Absolutely.

How does the NPoS consensus mechanism work?

Toby: All right, so yeah, and also on that topic again, I mentioned it but NPoS is, I mean, it's slightly different to PoS and see that offers, you know, a lot of advantages in terms of security. Maybe we can just quickly talk about that.

Tae: [00:19:00] NPoS algorithm is slightly more complicated and there's straight PoS network.

So you have two roles, nominators and stakers. Nominators are the one vouching for which validator to be voted for the next group of validator who was going to produce block actually and that algorithm is slightly complicated to cover over orally. So I encourage people to read through our documentation to get the exact detail, but the overall, the aim is what we aim for is more security and quick decentralization so that more people can have a chance to produce a block and not get dominated by a certain number of validators only.

Toby: Yeah, yeah, indeed. Like, and we'll, a lot of the problems users are having with over subscription, et cetera, at the moment [00:20:00], this is basically, NPoS is slightly complicated, so a lot of people might want a simple answer for some questions in terms of why they're not getting elected or how their stake is assigned. Like I mentioned, we've got a FAQ coming on that but the basic underlying mechanism is that there's a sorting algorithm and the sorting algorithm tries to assign user's stake to each node equally, so that each node is roughly the same size, so it doesn't matter if one node has way more stake.

Yes, they're almost certain to get elected, but it doesn't mean they'll, for example, earn more block rewards, which means as a smaller validator, there's actually a good chance that you'll be earning more rewards. So that's why there's, you know, the whole idea is to encourage competition. And prevent centralization around just like [00:21:00] 2, 3, 4, 5 big, big node operators.

What’s going on with G-CRE to CTC swap?

Toby: So, yeah going on to the next topic, that's basically it Creditcoin 2.0. I know we've got our next sort of feature coming soon, which is a swap feature. Now this is only going to be one way. Can you just talk a little bit about that? I mean, is there a way?

Tae: Right. So you can now use a command line to swap your G-CRE to CC2.

But then that is not a great UX for average person. We are now working, we, we now worked on UX UI that allows people to do it visually switch their GCRE into CC2. [00:22:00] I would like to stress that this is a one way swap from G-CRE to CC2. You cannot swap CC2 back to G-CRE using the same feature.

For that we are planning to work on a, a liquidity provider on the both sides to allow some CC2 yeah, to, to get converted back to G-CRE, but that will be based on the liquidity on the both sides.

Toby: Yeah, I mean these kind of things they're hard to, unfortunately, we're working on like both shorter and longer term solutions to the liquidity, right?

Tae: Right, right, right. To clarify, to clarify. So the first feature that will come out, come out soon for everyone to use is a swap from G-CRE to CC2. Period.

Toby: Yeah. And in terms of the longer term and both shorter term [00:23:00], we are, we are working on liquidity solutions for mainnet CTC, but there's for legal reasons and other such there's, it's quite hard to comment precisely on those for now.

So that, that covers the next thing coming out basically and and also right now, I mean that tool is also, in case you haven't participated in the QuestN etc, you'll be able to basically exchange your tokens and start staking.

What’s next for Creditcoin and when can we expect it?

Toby: So yeah, I mean, can you share, with 2.0+ out now what's the sort of big thing that the team is working on next?

Tae: So now the team is switching their focus from CC2+to CC3, which we proposed earlier this year. CC3 will be EVM compatible off chain [00:24:00] with a built in oracle that is accessible from smart contracts and the smart contract of this category we call universal smart contract and this is essentially an enhancement of the technology that we have been building so far on CC2 so instead of having a set logic accessing off chain information we are now making it more generic so that you can now build whatever logic that you want to implement on using EVM, but also access various types of blockchains using the built in Oracle directly from the smart contract and you are going to build, this allows different types, this only, does not only allow the current code implementation of CC2 functionality, but also variously different type of use cases where it wasn't possible before.

Toby: [00:25:00] So, I mean, CC2 currently is, it's basically, well, in terms of real world assets is focused on bullet loans for our institutional partners. We talked about then sort of Creditcoin 3 has sort of two main components.

Firstly, Evm compatibility. Do we know when roughly that will be coming out and also how that will help our various institutional partners sort of create more complicated or personalized or basically use cases and learning structures.

Tae: We're expecting to release CC3 in series we are of course expecting to release the EVM compatibility first and we will subsequently release the Oracle part after.

And we're expecting the EVM compatible CC3 to happen [00:26:00] Q1 next year and Oracle in Q3 next year. And we, so the use case of CC3 for our partners will be something like this. So for example one, the simple use case will be instead of just bullet loan, if you want to implement a different logic to your, to your loans or any different types of real world asset and investment product that you want to implement, given that EVM is true and complete, you can implement it, you can implement it however you want. The other use case for real world asset is, so when you are raising, for example, when you're borrowing from one blockchain, you don't necessarily have to pay it back on that specific blockchain. So for example, you can borrow USD Tether on Tron, and instead of paying it back on Tron, you can pay it back on, for example, BNB Chain.

Toby: You'll be able to coordinate [00:27:00] sort of.

Tae: Okay, right. So that kind of flexibility is allowed in the universe smart contract.

Toby: So that that side is coming in towards Q3, correct?

Tae: That's the plan.

Toby: Okay. Awesome. So you mentioned that it functions as an Oracle. I mean, very briefly, could you just touch on how that's different, for example, to something like Chainlink?

Tae: Right. Chainlink is an Oracle protocol and they mainly, so you can think of chain link as a group of Oracle and each Oracle is serving a different purpose. For example, one Oracle may be serve a feeding temperature or weather data to of a certain region to a blockchain and other Oracle may be feeding price data [00:28:00] to the blockchain.

So they mainly tend to focus on non blockchain data, but our Oracle is more focusing on blockchain data of other blockchains. So, for example, reading a generic transaction data payload of a certain transaction ID from one blockchain to another. And this is different from Chainlink because there's a different focus.

We focus on blockchain data over the real world data.

Toby: And does that make it, I guess, slightly more sort of easy to use and secure as well?

Tae: Right. And also it facilitate different purposes. We are more, more interested in deterministic data or a certain data, not data that, it's can be subjective. [00:29:00] So we are focusing more on orchestrating blockchain activities among various multiple blockchains instead of getting a price data of a certain asset and make an execution based on that price.

Some planned strategic partnerships to make staking easier in future

Toby: Awesome. Got it. Yeah. So that's a rough outline for the, for the real big brushstroke events in. I hear we're also working on with Subscan and Etherscan in an effort to increase the sort of visibility of the new staking features and such. Can you just elaborate on that slightly?

Tae: Right. We're currently speaking with Subscan and Etherscan to support a better UI for our users to, for example, Subscan will be supporting the PoS part validation part of our blockchain.

And when we have [00:30:00] EVM, we want to provide a ether-like UI for our users so that they can they can be interacting with our blockchain, similar to that they have been interacting with Ethereum or the likes of Ethereum so far. So that's in the discussion.

Community question - are there plans to change numbers of active nominators and validators?

Toby: Awesome. So I think that pretty much closes out the internal stuff, which means we can now go on to some of the community questions. One question, which I've been asked is obviously the validators has now hit the cap. There's around 25 validators not getting elected equally there's several nominators or nodes rather who are oversubscribed. Are there any plans currently to change the numbers of active validators and or [00:31:00] nominators?

Tae: We currently don't have a plan to change the number of active validators or nominators yet. If anyone has a case for it, please feel free to share the proposal. We'll review and we'll... put into consideration. But for now it is expected to have some outstanding validators who is not getting elected.

That is for the security reason. We don't want to be certain which validator will be elected for the next batch of validators. So the not everyone getting included is actually a part of the security feature of NPoS. But then if you have it, if you have any suggestions that you would like to make, please do share. We would like to look into it.

Toby: Yeah. So, I mean, I think it's important to mention that, you know, having a limit and having more than that is important for the competition aspect of the elections, [00:32:00] because it encourages also nominators to be a bit more, you know, careful and active in who they're nominating, because you can earn more rewards for nominating essentially smaller validators so...

Tae: Right, right. And also, if you know who's going to be out here of the next batch, then, and if you are in, if you're connected with all of them, then that can, that means that we can have a collusion and we can decide to do, the validators collectively can decide to do a wrong thing, but them having a chance of having a validator that is now within the group allows people to invalidate wrongdoings.

So that is why I said it's a part of the security feature.

Community question - what is the purpose of the Credit Penguin Colony NFT?

Toby: Got it. Got it. We've got, we've also got a great question here in discord, which is "What is the [00:33:00] credit penguin NFT for? Is there any function?" Well, obviously the function is being uber, super cool. I mean, I'm not joking. That is probably the main function that.

Tae: I'm not, I don't, I didn't, I didn't take that as a joke.

That is the function. Yeah, that is the function. So, so Creditcoin NFT. If you were not, if you weren't here when we issued it it was shared freely for free to the community who was holding CTC and we are mainly considering as, just as a membership that you got really, and we will basically use it as a cool PFP to recognize one CTC people to another CTC people.

So that's essentially it. If you, if you want, if you have any suggestion, [00:34:00] anything that you would like to do around the Penguin NFT, let us know. We will consider that also.

Toby: Yeah, I mean, and there is one massive exclusive exciting benefit, which, you know, I'm sure you all want is there's an exclusive Discord channel, which you can join and you can share your penguin means with us.

So, you know, if you, if you want to join the discord channel and you want your alpha penguin or penguin role, then yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna need a credit penguin NFT. Yeah, I mean, that's basically it. And also on that topic I know we reserved some NFTs. I'm, I'm pretty sure for future events, etc.

So if you don't like, you can get one now, obviously, by heading to OpenSea or you might be able to get one [00:35:00] as part of one of these events in the future. So, yeah, I think that's it. Anymore questions please get asking in the next one, two minutes and then we'll, we'll probably sign off for today. Anything else you want to add Tae?

Shout out to our community!

Tae: I'd like to thank everyone who joined as a nominator and validator of CC2 it was, it was really helpful. You joining means a lot to the network, because essentially you joining as a nominator or validator means you voted for the new version that we have proposed. So thanks for your vote of confidence.

Community question - I only nominated one validator, does it matter?

Toby: Yeah, thank you all guys. [00:36:00] Maybe, maybe we've got a question from let me just check the chat. NBA, I made mistakes. I nominated 95 Creditcoin on one validator. I mean, that's fine. You should still, as long as that validator is active, that's not a problem, NBA. I mean, ideally, if you still have some CTC in your wallet you should make some more nominations. That is also just in terms of maximizing your rewards. It's likely that nominating more and smaller validators will end up netting you sort of better staking yield. In fact, you can go to the Polkadot JS interface. And you can kind of look at things like the return percentage for different [00:37:00] nodes.

I mean, at the moment I think the Creditcoin run nodes have the most CTC stake behind them. And I mean, they're probably, I mean, very safe, but they also don't offer the highest returns because there's basically more stake behind them, even though the nodes still earn the same amount rewards every era.

So, but this kind of stuff we'll talk about more in the staking FAQ. We'll talk about strategies and such.

Concluding remarks

Toby: All right. That looks like it for today. Yeah, I mean, thank you very much for joining us. Everyone. Well, maybe do we have any more questions quickly in? No. All right [00:38:00] yeah, thank you all for joining us and we'll be having another town hall next month as usual where you can join me and as of yet unannounced guest. We'll obviously be sharing information close to the time and yeah, you'll see me in the Discord. Bye from me and yeah...

Tae: See you guys again next time. I'll be on Discord too, so if you mention we'll get back to you. All right. Bye bye guys.Toby: Thanks all. Bye.