SPERAX AMA Recap : Cryptoscreen Community

13 min readAug 14, 2020

Earlier today the SPERAX team joined the Cryptoscreen Community Telegram to connect with the community and answer any questions they had relating to SPERAX mission, tech, progress on our journey so far, recent updates and our plans moving forward. Frida Cai Sperax Global Strategic Partner and Joe Yu Sperax Top Research took part in a particularly exciting AMA session which included introductions, questions from twitter, and a live AMA session with the Telegram community. If you missed the AMA live, have a read through this recap to gain some deeper insights into SPERAX, You also need to know that our AMA this time has a $200 prize.

INTRODUCTION

Guz Fahlev :

before we start, I will ask a little about your background. Can you tell us about your background?

Frida Cai :

Selamat malam teman indonesia, my name is Frida Cai.

I am the Global Strategic Partner at Sperax.

I hold a bachelor degree in Foreign Affairs and a history minor from University of Virginia.

I am a fresh graduate 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 my career into the space ever since.

Guz Fahlev :

Can you explain us, what is sperax?

Frida Cai :

Sperax is 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 released our BDLS consensus module on GitHub in March 2020 and plans to release its testnet in a month or two from now.

Sperax closed a 6+ million USD seed funding round in January 2020, 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 200,000 USD allocation sold out in less than 20 minutes.

"Sperax.io is going to surprise a lot of people this year when they launch," said Ryan Zurrer, the former partner of Polychain Capital and Web 3 Foundation, who joined us as Sperax advisor for token economics and governance design.

Guz Fahlev :

what is the currency name of sperax? how many quantities of supply are available? and where will the supply be allocated.

Frida Cai :

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.

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.

You could kindly check our token economics whitepaper and refer to our PR release:
https://medium.com/sperax/decentralized-finance-infrastructure-sperax-releases-its-economics-white-paper-and-launches-c9cb1e3ff5fe

Guz Fahlev :

What really sets Sperax apart from other projects, especially in terms of profit?

Frida Cai :

What really sets us apart would be our original BDLS consensus protocol, which enables our decentralized financial services and dual coin system, which is mentioned above already.

Our project is designed under one single principle, which is to bridge the gap between crypto and real world users. This is our ultimate goal, our dream.

Sperac team vision a blockchain infrastructure without “blockchain”. We believe that the best blockchain applications are the ones that do not require users to interact with the blockchain itself. With our technology, Sperax guarantees security and efficiency at the same time. While holding in mind that security is the most important feature of a public blockchain compared to a centralised solution, we continue to improve on the performance of our protocol; algorithmically, the current consensus that we are using is the most efficient among BFT-based consensus.

With this vision, we ultimately hope to connect a decentralised economy with real world finance. Through partnership with regulated financial service operators and payment integrators, applications built on Sperax could be offered to end users without interacting with the blockchain directly. That would bring more possibilities for application developers to offer the best use cases to consumers.

Guz Fahlev :

For now there are many defi projects with various concepts and partners. can you explain the purpose of sperax? And who are the partners who have supported Sperax?

Frida Cai :

We noticed that the current blockchain industry is not for the mass consumer groups: More specifically, crypto is difficult to integrate with the real economy: It is difficult to onboard users; the token price is chronically fluctuating; and a majority of these cryptocurrencies are currencies without currency features, let alone creating killer apps. 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.

After seeing the 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: Sperax provides a layer of financial services within the public blockchain stack through a native stablecoin and decentralized financial service providers.

Sperax BDLS is mathematically proven to provide an extra layer of security against DoS attacks in an asynchronous environment with fewer safety assumptions — such as on the open Internet. 2019 saw Sperax enthusiasts recognizing this potential at meetups with our current investors and partners, including Outlier Ventures, FBG Capital, Newstyle Capital, etc. We’re also proud that we’ve been able to partner with various portfolio companies in the China Academy of Science Holding (CASH), the largest state level tech investment firm.

Our current use cases include:

1. Xiaomi Financial Virtual 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.

2. A Sand Hill Road based Venture Capital: Tokenize its emerging crypto-focus fund & Integrate its mobile gaming portfolio companies on Sperax networks.

3. A costume martial-arts TV series, The Untamed, with 8 billion views on Netflix and WeTV: Tokenize its worldwide fan meet-ups and concerts tickets & Tokenize celebrity merch’s online marketing places

We’re always looking to foster healthy community discussion surrounding the benefits that Sperax presents to the PoS community, as well as the larger blockchain ecosystem. At present, the Sperax project has established R&D teams in both the United States and China, carrying out collaborative development, researching key technologies, and simulating and testing key modules. We host meet-ups internationally, so please keep an eye out for a future one that might be near you!

Guz Fahlev :

In the roadmap layout, how far has sperax been at this point? and what will be realized in this year or the next year?

Frida Cai :

One of our latest achievements would be our paper accepted by IEEE Conference and our integration with Chainlink Oracles.

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. @yuzhou87 Joe was also 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. Due 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. For example, 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.

As for Chainlink, we are thrilled to share with CryotoScreen friends that our mission to make decentralized financial services globally accessible is marking another milestone, thanks to our upcoming integration with Chainlink. 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.

Chainlink official tweet: https://twitter.com/chainlink/status/1291526745255018511
Sperax & Chainlink Youtube LIVE Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrK6pPOGp0k&t=12s

See how cool this is. You can click it yourself here at our new website sperax.io

TWITTER QUESTION

Question 1 :

Is there a special reason why you chose ChainLink as the Oracle network of Spera X? I know that Spera X is a project famous for its own technology, but I would like to know why you choose to use the ChainLink.

Frida Cai :

First of all, we truly appreciate your interest. So please refer to our real name: Sperax. haha

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that allows blockchain applications to import off-chain data to use as contract inputs, as well as export data outputs to external systems, both in a highly secure and reliable manner. It provides several advantageous features to Sperax developers, which allow them to:

1. Incorporate decentralization of both the oracle mechanism and the data source to ensure data is delivered in a highly available manner that is resistant to manipulation
2. Connect to high quality data and permissioned backend systems through their external adapter technology to provide wider access to key data resources and enterprise systems
3. Utilize a large collection of security reviewed, Sybil resistant node operators for oracle services instead of provisioning your own from scratch
4. Build stronger security guarantees for the integrity of data through Chainlink’s upcoming service agreement framework and TLS solution TownCrier.

Question 2:

SperaxBFT requires only four steps of calculations to reach consensus, much less than other PoS protocols do. Does it affect the security of the consensus? it is guaranteed for users in such a shorter process than we are used to, can we trust it?

Frida Cai :

As for ‘Trusted’, we guarantee to deliver efficiency and security at the same time. As a new generation BFT consensus protocol, BDLS has 2 major advantages, of which 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.

Question 3:

What was the vision of creating this project & Where are you now according to your roadmap & What are your Greatest Achievements till now?

Frida Cai :

I think my previous answer has already addressed this question, plus Q5 at the first section. So please forgive me for not spending additional explaining this :)

Question 4:

How does Sperax engage governments and businesses using blockchain technology?

Frida Cai :

Our current use cases include:

2. A Sand Hill Road based Venture Capital: Tokenize its emerging crypto-focus fund & Integrate its mobile gaming portfolio companies on Sperax networks.

Question 5:

Currently SPERAX token is in the phase of a public sale, and we hope it will be a complete success. After this successful phase, what is SPERAX’s closest target? and what is SPERAX’s best strategy for pursuing other DEFI projects that are currently successful?

Frida Cai :

1, launch our testnet, mainnet, stablecoin wallet and get listed at a major exchange before the yearend.

2. We Sperax designs a unique financial layer in our blockchain system to further the development and mass adoption of DeFi. We invite every DeFi projects to try on our Sperax blockchain and I am sure they will not regret haha.

LIVE/FREE QUESTION

Question 1:

Sperax builds trusted infrastructure for decentralized economy, now I already build with ETH solidity and Cosmos SDK, Why should I switch to Sperax, what's your competitive advantage for Developers?

When you look back last year, which achievements make you proud of most and which targets that Sperax need to touch in 2021?

Frida Cai :

The Internet is an open network which is better modelled by what we call a partially synchronous network model. A partially synchronous network is one which alternates between a synchronous network and an asynchronous one with an unknown transition time called Global Stabilization Time (GST). We analysed many widely deployed BFT protocols for blockchains and to our best knowledge, all of them could go to deadlock before GST and then remain deadlock forever (even after synchrony).

In contrast, Sperax BDLS protocol is designed exactly based on a partially synchronous network model. In other words, our protocol is based on a more realistic model of our internet. So our protocol can provide a more secure method of consensus.

Also, our protocol doesn’t make the strong assumption of the existence of reliable communication channels for each node pair in the network. Thus, we take the possibility of DoS attack in a partially synchronous network into account.

Since our protocol is a blockchain version of the famous DLS protocol in the traditional cryptography literature, our protocol is thus named the BDLS protocol.

As for the second question, please refer to my answer in section 1.

Question 2:

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?

Frida Cai :

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.

Question 3:

Most investors only focus on the price of the token in the short term instead of the real value of the project. Can SPERAX tell me the benefits of long-term investors?

Frida Cai :

Question 4:

Alternatively, if you don’t think there are direct competitors, what sort of trends or obstacles do you think need to be overcome in order for Sperax to capture more market share?

Frida Cai :

Sperax is a young team. We are learning by doing. As for competitors, we do not see other platforms as competitors but instead potential partners.

Question 5:

For the past month #DeFi is the Newest trend or craze into the cryptocurrency world. Do you see DeFi is a kind of solution for stronger economy in terms of decentralized financial system?

Frida Cai :

On the one hand, DeFi must embrace mass adoption for it to be really revolutionary. On the other hand, I do not think any current DeFi project is ready for a dramatic increase in its users or stored value.

Written by CRYPTOSCREEN