AMA, March 17: the mainnet launch preparation and marketing, the new service and development progress

During the regular Thursday stream, the CEO of Cellframe, Dmitriy Gerasimov, talks about the mainnet launch preparation and marketing, the new service, and development progress.

New markets

The mainnet launch is scheduled for March 31. The developers are working, and everything is on the plan. While the CyStack team is auditing more than one million lines of Cellframe project code, we are taking care of our development after the mainnet launch. A massive advertising campaign is being prepared and aimed at emerging markets like India, Vietnam, China, and especially our local market, Russia. By the way, we were less present in Russia. Now it is time to change the situation. It doesn’t mean that we left Western countries. We are still staying there because our main capitalizations are from the UK, Canada, the USA, some African and Arabic countries. We are an international project, and we don’t want to forget anyone. We want to increase our capitalization in these difficult times. And here we have a fud wave against us, and we want to deal with it by raising our local markets like some currency, WAVES for example. And they are pumping now because of coming income from our local markets. So we want to be with all nations on both sides of the Iron Curtain 2.0.

Simply put, we are pulling out our secret marketing weapon, the Russian market, in which we were not present. The middle class in Russia has traditionally invested in stocks like Tesla, Amazon, The bank of America, and similar. And some of them are in dollars. Now it is not so easy because the capital is locked inside the country. People don’t want to invest in foreign currency because they fear possibly blocking it. In this way, they will lose their savings. There is also some destruction of existing cryptocurrencies because of refusal from some unscrupulous exchanges to serve people. They just have stolen the money of Russian investors. By the way, they are all against the war. More than 90% of investors have a closer mentality to western people; however, they were punished first. They are interested in Russian-made native protocols, and we have a success story. The recent explosive success of Waves is proof of interest. We do not have a high capitalization. So any income that comes suddenly with huge amounts will raise us to the high peaks.

We need accordingly to reach the Russian market. It is very conservative because there are a lot of native protocols. We start the massive advertising campaign with the mainnet launch. So, with the mainnet launch, we could bring up exchanges connections with current smart contracts on Uniswap and Pancakeswap. We are talking about new stocks and cexes. And we were suddenly listed on WOWswap. It was their proposal, and I appreciate it in such difficult times.

We are looking for massive work with the second-tier foreign exchange market based on some trust. Also, we are thinking about Peer-to-Peer exchange.

ConfCall business messenger

IT- companies have been involved in politics. One of them is the Slack application. It has started to close the accounts due to the sanctions. And our Slack account is dropped down to a free one despite being paid for a few months. That’s why we should have everything dedicated. In this regard, we have begun the replacement development of the services of unscrupulous companies blocked or refused to serve, or at least have a threat to block. I want to repeat they have not blocked us, and we just have a free version of Slack. However, we don’t see the full history of our messages, and we can not download it and move to another platform because they don’t accept payment from us.

By the way, we could say that we are an American company. They suggest proving it, and we’ll need to pay them again just to have access to our conversations. Now they are locked inside Slack. And we’re thinking about the payment for this access. That is not a question of money but the question of some honor.

Slack was one of those prevented applications for communication between the employees. And we like this application, but we don’t like the IT company’s involvement in politics. Shame on those IT companies that violate human rights and freedoms.

In this regard, we have started to develop our business messenger. The working title is ConfCall, but it could be changed. It will be a secure service. No intermediary can see the materials in chats. It will be cheaper than Slack, non-blockable, with the ability to install local service and not so slow, with all the necessary and usual features to work better, be more reliable a vast set of features that we lacked in Slack. Generally, it was a nice application, and now it’s a set that we need to start to replace. We could focus on other development, for example, some more interoperability with other protocols. Still, we don’t know what protocols will keep connection with us or what will ban us, or who will cancel us. Anyway, we are open to everyone who is not involved in politics. So I believe in nearest future everything will be good.

And about our replacement. With all the usual and necessary futures for work, better, more reliable a vast set for features that we lack and Slack. We have to make it better now. Okay, we have competition, no problem. I was talking before that we compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Okay, let’s add in this list Slack.

We haven’t used Github. Instead, we have a local copy of Gitlab. We need a replacement for them as well. Some third companies will try to make such a replacement. If it is not, we’ll do it on our own.

“It is really sad that we have to develop such a replaced application because we need to focus on another development, e.x. some more interoperability with other protocols. But right now, we don’t know what protocols will keep connections with us who will ban or cancel us. Anyway, we are open to anybody who is not involved in politics. I believe that everything will be better in the nearest future,” said the CEO.

Auctions

New projects will take part in the auction, which is started after the mainnet launch on native protocols. All of them could participate.

We finished refactoring the code prepared the site UI update, which is coming in a few days. We also rewrote the auction’s rules a little to make them more understandable; the basement isn’t changed. The terms of participation in the auction haven’t been changed, but now they will become more evident.

Dashboard app

The new release is 2.5. Some changes, such as Notify Socket launch, are needed to make it more power effective and save a battery in mobile devices. It is still being prepared to be runnable on iOS or Android. Added some automatic reconnections to make it more stable. We fixed some bugs improved Certificates, Settings, and Wallet tabs.

TON consensus

We fully implemented the consensus logic from multiple attempts. Consensus round logic is implemented. Changed the logic of working with the new block from the validator and suggested consensus. We also need to have protection logic elements of Proof-of-Authority to protect our network in the beginning stages. We will look at this in manual mode, and if any malicious actions appear, we will notice something strange. We could prevent it — roll back, stop, ban.

“We are preparing some security tools. I do not want to disclose them all. Be sure, everything will be safe”,- said Dmitriy.

Debugging of the consensus in simulated conditions has been done. Problems of implementation identified and corrected. Now we have a better implementation of this consensus. And we could suggest it for the Free-TON team and make the network quicker and more effective.

Cellframe SDK

We have debugged a token creation, issued transactions and 256-bit blockchain, and checked its compatibility with old 64-bit types. Then Python Cellframe is improved to implement a paid custom service. Notifies for mempool and rounds are implemented. You need it for l2 solutions, where you form your consensus, and you could use callbacks. Edit paid mode for services like VPN and edit service client built-in SDK. Updated Cellframe and Python SDK. Wrappers, plugins and some bugs have been fixed.

The mainnet launch

It is going according to the plan. There will be an intermediate testnet 2.5. We will test the TON protocol and launch by next week, and there will be a new release candidate, a new version of the SDK node. These binary builds will be published on our site, and soon we’ll update node rules. Every masternode should nest sources and have verified binaries proved on a blockchain. It’s a bad idea to spread verified git commits in blockchain and allow any master node to spread verified binary bills. So there we’ll be a new release candidate with a new version of SDK and node.

Our place in the world

The world is changing with threats hanging over the centralized networks of information and finance. We see this as a pentest of our project designed as decentralized and straight against any attempts to block it, to have censorship inside, to block savings. We aim for financial freedom, informational freedom, property protection, and personal freedom.

“If you share these ideas, please, stay with us, and we’ll win,” — said the CEO.

Some questions:

I’ve learned that there may be other projects that have shown interest in building on the Cellframe blockchain. If so, can you shed light on their pending status and what it takes to be accepted to build on Cellframe?

I was talking to some ex-employees of Jetbrains about this. Jetbrains are the authors of the Kotlin language, and some of them were dropped into the Russian department.

So we’re talking about something like GitHub, but not Microsoft-owned, but people-owned, for humanity, open-source, where everybody can install it. Everyone could provide their hard drive and some CPU power to create a GitHub-like system. Let’s say that because it has to be better than GitHub, of course.

We need to have some other projects in our ecosystem. Some of the projects built in our ecosystem are at the idea stage, and I don’t want to share them until they are completed, at least until the white papers are completed.

Can I run a node on a cloud server instead of running it on raspberry pi?

Yes, you could run it on any ordinary hardware, e.x. cloud server or your computer. We prepare non-builds for Android. So you could run it on your old phone. There are some differences for VPN users. The cost will depend on the IP address.

Running it on a Raspberry pi in your home will bring you a little more money, but you can run it on a cloud server with no problem.

We already know it might be ‘quantum computer safe,’ but how about the real privacy transferring coins and not getting tracked by the government? For example, everyone is talking about bitcoin, how is “decentralized, it is. But it is not true. Monero is a real decentralized blockchain, how can be cellframe compared to monero?

I like the Monero project. It is a source of inspiration. But there is a problem in cryptography, Monero is not quantum-safe.

Right now we have in development some post-quantum ring signatures with Zero-knowledge SNARKs.

We need some algorithms, and we want to run maybe first in time post-quantum aggregative signature. Rollups usually are not quantum-safe. Who has quantum-safe post-quantum zk rollups? As I understand, no one. We will have it. It will be the ultimate l2 solution with such things.

About the decentralization. In the beginning stages, we will have some centralization.

I was talking about security, but after growing, we replaced some root nodes with proof-of-work or maybe just proof-of-stake after this beginning stage. We will keep proof-of-stake based consensus on the top-level chain. I don’t see any problem with that, but mining is a classic solution.

It’s been proven for years. So what does that mean? A really decentralized blockchain, we can remember a hack of the Monero site, and the sources and binaries were infected, and thousands of people downloaded the infected wallet. So it was a decentralized blockchain, but it has a centralized site.

We won’t have that problem because we will have a master node, a build system that will prove that all the builds all binaries were built from source, verified, and signed by the cellframe developers.

I don’t know anyone, including Monero, who provides such a service. This solution would be the most secure and most decentralization for distribution.

Blockchain can be decentralized, but you, for example, use Metamask, which works with one node, one for everyone, and if someone replaces it, it could compromise a lot of Metamask users.

In my opinion, it should be a special light node with a limited amount of downloadable blockchain. But all blockchain must be downloaded by you.

About Monero’s ability to be anonymous. We will be more anonymous because we are at least quantum-safe. And all such tricks, like mixing on zero-knowledge ring signature, we also will have it. We have some candidates for such algorithms. We are currently developing our own post-quantum signature for zk rollup aggregation. The next stage will be our own zk ring signature. So we’re working hard on this.

What is the plan for dapp migration and EVM compatibility?

First, we need to complete WASM smart contracts. Then we could talk about EVM, which is in our roadmap. Let’s turn to this question in May or June. The most significant step now is the mainnet launch.

Will we be able to use a 3rd party staking program e.x. like Gpool?

Yes, we think about the aggregation with other liquidity providers and our partners’ other protocols. We have a built-in decentralized exchange, and there are limited orders in the test net. They have their problems like liquidity lack at the beginning. Also, we are thinking of having an automatic market.

What are the penalties for a node that goes offline for seconds/hours/ day due to electricity or internet shortage? I am gonna risk my stake?

We accept that nodes will be running on some weak hardware and maybe with such troubles with electricity or internet shortage. So, I believe there will be no penalties at all. And your Cell stake is not at risk. Don’t worry. Anyway, it could be banned but not for a stake. So, your stake delegation will be safe.

I would like to know how will team change actual ERC-20 and BSC CELLs into native CELL after mainnet release?

It will be decentralized at two side exchange based on l2 solution, presenting a bridge between two networks. There will be some special smart contracts in ERC-20 and BC-20 networks. They will be locked in the smart contracts for immigration tokens, and then they will be unlocked for our native protocols. Everything is usual.

How will be Cell tradable on UNISWAP and Pancake SWAP after native blockchain release?

It will be continued. Some parts of trades go on our protocol until Ethereum protocol and BSC protocol are not hacked. If they are not stopped from working, we’ll continue to work with them. By the way, they may not be hacked, and they may implement their post-quantum signature. But not everyone migrates on this signature. And after the quantum apocalypse, we’ll see some drop down on the second generation networks, and preferable to trade on our native protocols. But it’s your choice to stay with the Ethereum protocol and BSC till the end.

Many such people will stake our tokens on non-native protocols.

How much is difficult and how long it will take for an existing blockchain to have post-quantum cryptography?

The implementation itself is not complicated. But you need to get all your holders to transfer their money from old addresses to the new ones. You cannot transfer them because it’s a self-sovereign identity. They store their classical keys, and your private key is the only thing that gives your access to your funds. Any third party can not replace these keys with something else. You need to pass all your users through this process. Not everyone will do it because he may have a cold wallet with a split seed phrase that stores somewhere we’ll have no access for years. And nobody knows when the quantum apocalypse starts. So, in the beginning, I think, it will start before all existing blockchains will have post-quantum cryptography. The Bitcoin community says that it’s not a problem of nearest years or nearest hundreds of years. They are trying to hide their head in the sand. I think they will implement post-quantum cryptography as well. But not all protocols will implement, and both protocols will implement after the first is stolen.