Ardor AMA Recap: What We Learned!
The Ardor AMA we hosted on May 16 on our Discord was a great success, allowing our community to come together to ask Ardor staff direct questions, make new crypto friends, and even earn SPEND tokens in the process.
We’re delighted to collaborate with projects in the crypto space. We have a huge list of projects we’re working with, and we’re looking forward to doing many more AMAs, so stay tuned.
Here’s the rundown on how the AMA went!
Contents
- What is Ardor?
- What is CryptoWallet.com?
- Who Was There?
- General Questions
- Twitter Questions
- Live Questions
- Thoughts from CryptoWallet.com
What is Ardor?
Ardor is an open-source platform aimed at improving blockchain scalability, meaning the project helps make blockchain networks run more smoothly and with a higher volume of users. Crucially, Ardor also allows people to deploy a blockchain project using Ardor without launching their own bespoke blockchain network.
Blockchain networks typically don’t delete any information and require a lot of storage and energy to operate, making scalability a major issue in the industry. That’s where Ardor comes in!
Ardor helps solve scalability by introducing a parent-child blockchain system. The child chains take the pressure of processing transactions away from the parent chain, which essentially processes summary information from the child chains. So instead of one network, there are lots of smaller networks feeding into a main network.
What is CryptoWallet.com?
We’re a neobank launching a suite of financial services including the world’s first crypto card to support direct spending of over 800 cryptocurrencies. This is an extremely community-focused project — we aim to grow with our community, and we have a thriving Discord server where supporters of the project hang out, receive updates and rewards, ask questions, and share memes and other fun content.
Who Was There?
Our AMA was really fun! We had members from both the Ardor and CryptoWallet.com teams present, as well as a bunch of community members including 137 users live on Discord.
Ardor Team
- Francisco Sarrias, Ardor Web3 Evangelist
CryptoWallet.com Team
- Pauline Shangett, CMO CMBDO
- Moody Hallab, SPEND Token Lead
General Questions
First of all, please introduce yourself to us. How did you get involved in the crypto? What’s your role in Ardor?
I started in crypto back in 2016 when I was running a web hosting company and did not know what to do with my old hardware. I thought I could use it to mine crypto, of course, I was wrong but I got hooked on the crypto ecosystem.
Then, I discovered the NXT community that developed the first Proof of Stake crypto. I started collaborating with them until they launched their ICO and founded Jelurida, in 2018, the company released NXT 2.0 or Ardor as it is known officially.
I am their Web3 Evangelist in charge of explaining business and administration, and how they can use Ardor technology in their particular business.
Now please tell us about your blockchain project “Ardor”. What were the initial thoughts behind this project?
The project idea was to develop a multichain based on the NXT technology. There is a parent chain that uses the Ardor token for consensus and then there are child chains with their own tokens that serve for specific applications. Therefore, anyone can launch their own blockchain without investing in deploying their own infrastructure.
For example, one of the child chains is Ignis. IGNIS is the name of the first Child-Chain in ARDOR and also its native cryptocurrency (ticker $IGNIS). IGNIS allows anyone to launch and create their tokens and market them in its integrated DEX ( Decentralized Exchange) without coding, just using an intuitive web wallet.
Her name comes from the dictionary definition “a light that sometimes appears in the night”, and IGNIS is the light that makes smart contracts available to non-tech savvy people. Everyone can enjoy powerful preprogrammed smart contracts on the platform just by using the computer mouse.
There are some participants in the network that run nodes that exchange the tokens of each child chain for Ardor tokens, they are called bundlers and compete in an open market for intercepting the child chain transactions and changing their token fees by Ardors. The Stakers only stake Ardor and only get Ardor tokens for their work.
There are no new Ardor tokens created, the stakers only get the Ardor tokens fees of the block they mine. Each child chain token may have its own token economics incentives. For example, you can stake $IGNIS and get airdrops from new child chains created on the platform. Also, the platform includes a DEX for exchanging the different child chain tokens between them. We can say we invented DeFi back in 2018!
Can you explain what is the function and value of the $ARDR token? How is it used in your ecosystem?
A3: The public token ARDR is a utility token used to secure the PoS algorithm used by the Ardor platform. When you get ARDR tokens, you get two things at once: The possibility of launching a node and forging (or mining) new blocks, hence earning transaction fees.
The utility of paying fees to issue transactions. So, it is about the regular token economy. The more companies we have, the more demand we will have for the ARDR token. The more transactions we have, the higher our chances to get blocks with very profitable fees when forging.
If you stake Ardor in a forging (mining) node, you earn the fees of the blocks you mine plus a special reward that we are sponsoring for 6 months to help you cover the server hosting costs until the transactions increase.
Collaboration and partnerships are one of the cornerstones to making blockchain more widespread. Can you share some of the partnerships you have formed with other integrators or corporations recently?
A4: We are now working with Augmented Reality provider to include Ardor as their blockchain backend in a port maintenance application called PantalAR.
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We have just finished an EU-funded project for the Spanish postal operator Correos, which we started two years ago in partnership with Accenture.
We try to focus on real-life use cases and less on crypto speculative projects. Public blockchains have been almost ignored in the corporate world, which has benefited so far from private blockchains.
We believe Ardor has a big potential for development in that area. In the gaming industry, we are developing in collaboration with some Israeli experts, an online version of the contract bridge card game. We believe Contract Bridge can be as impacting as Poker and Chess in online gaming.
Can you please tell us the current Ardor Roadmap? How far has Ardor been developed at this time? and what will you realize in the future?
A5: We are finishing Ardor 3.0 which includes several scalability advantages, but we will not release it until the network gets more transaction stress, this allows us to experiment new optimizations and features, anyone can enjoy Ardor 3.0 in our testnet.
Questions From Twitter
What strategy will you implement to bring non-crypto-natives into your ecosystem? How do you keep a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of your token?
We try to make things easy for non-crypto natives, for example, transaction fees can be subsidized to end users, so they do not need to handle tokens or wallets themselves. We have several feedbacks from our Bridge game project on that subject.
Regarding your second question, in the long term, if you do not have the technology, you will not have customers and then your blockchain and tokens would be useless. Therefore, we focus on technology not just hype and market fluctuations.
We do not burn our ICO money by just pumping the tokens, rather we try to keep our resources and invest them in developing the technology and onboarding new use cases.
Did you consider community feedback/requests during the creation of your product in order to expand on fresh ideas for your project?
Honestly, we do not pay much attention to community comments because they are biased towards token price increase and not the long-running of the company. We pay more attention to real customers that are using our tech for applications, like the ones I commented on before, it is while developing those use cases that we find the real needs.
For example, working with the DAO behind MythicalBeings.io, we find out that it was necessary to develop a bridge between our tokens ecosystem and Polygon, so their cards could be traded in a more liquid market like OpenSea, thus we helped them to develop that bridge between blockchains.
How will the new use cases for Ardor that are on the horizon lead to easier availability of Ardor?
A8: Availability is a tough aspect. We are getting a lot of pressure from exchanges when listing our tokens. Exchanges do not care about the real vision or technology, they just care about their trading fees with the tokens, so they are more willing to list and promote meme coins like PEPE than a token that is being used to track the delivery of packets in 50 million-people country.
The whole exchange panorama needs to professionalize more and probably the only path to that will be strong regulation. Right now, exchanges are like casinos. When dramas like FTX and Gemini occur, people scandalize, come on!
What are the top 3 features of why investors should invest in your project Ardor?
It is very easy to use, anyone can download our wallet and will be able to launch smart contracts without a clue about programming.
For companies, it is very easy to integrate into their applications because most common smart contracts are already embedded in the blockchain core and accessible through an API. Transaction fees are very cheap so it is ideal for industry applications and games.
Are you a global project or a local project? At present, which market are you focused on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users and partners?
We have residual activity in North America because of the continuous aggressive regulators policy and we have not yet explored Latin America seriously, although we know great things in crypto are happening there, maybe next year.
Live Questions From 137 Discord Users
Can you provide insights into the criteria or requirements for individuals or organizations to become official node hosts within the Ardor network?
None, just download the software, buy ARDOR and start staking.
As blockchain technology continues to evolve rapidly, how does Ardor plan to stay ahead of the curve and adapt to emerging trends and advancements?
We are working in the space since 2013, Ardor 3.0 has amazing innovations that other projects cannot dream of.
Interoperability among different blockchain networks is a hot topic in the industry. How does Ardor approach interoperability, and what steps have been taken to establish seamless integration with external platforms or networks?
We have developed the EVM bridge and we can develop other bridges in it makes sense for a particular use case.
Will you have regional channels for different language communities?
Yes, in our Slack there are different channels for different languages, also there is a Discord channel although not moderated by us.
Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to join your project? Because the success of a project attracts more investors who haven’t yet entered the crypto world.
We get offers of investment from non-crypto actors, but as far as we can manage with our own resources, we will not open the door to external investment that may change our roadmap.
One of the main problems with smart contracts today is that there is a very high risk of bugs that allow Hackers to Steal the Funds and incur significant losses for the project and its users. Can you tell us about the solutions that you offer to prevent this?
Our smart contracts are not executed in the consensus, so they are stateless. If they are hacked only the nodes actually executing them are affected and no balances can be changed you can learn more about it here.
Do the token holders have the right to participate in the governance of the project? What kind of decisions can they vote on about the community project?
Ardor is a staking token, not a governance token. So, it only serves to contribute to the security of the network, not the direction of the Jelurida company.
That’s an interesting project as we hardly see “child chain” use in the ecosystem nowadays. I remember only a few projects that have focused on this area. So, with unique token economic incentives, tokens of those child chains engage with each other to create “elder chains” let’s say?
We charge a fee to launch a child chain as currently, this involves forking the whole code. This is a barrier of entry for some actors that can easily clone the code of other open-source projects, but the initial savings then are lost in the complexity of deploying the network infrastructure.
Thoughts From CryptoWallet.com
The Ardor AMA was a great success, with hundreds of people coming together to learn more about the space and interact with each other!
We really love doing these AMAs and working with fellow crypto projects. We host regular AMAs from major projects in the industry. Join our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay in touch for the next one!
You can win 1,000 SPEND tokens for asking a single question in these AMAs. SPEND is our native crypto token, and it’s one of over 800 cryptos you’ll be able to spend directly from the crypto card we’re launching in Q3 of this year!
To be among the first people to get a low-fee crypto card with more currencies than any other, join our exclusive whitelist here.
See you at the next AMA!
