AMA with Dmitry Gerasimov, December 25, 2025

Hello everyone! My name is Dmitry Gerasimov, CEO of Cellframe Network. Welcome to our regular AMA session, the final one of 2025. Let’s begin with the questions you sent us in advance. Here is the first one.

The latest release of Cellframe Wallet (4.4) introduced the Shared Funds (collective account) functionality. Could you provide more details on the opportunities it offers to users and what purposes it is best suited for?

Shared Funds can be described as a DAO-like mechanism — essentially, a wallet that is jointly owned by multiple participants rather than controlled by a single owner.

Users can create a Shared Funds wallet, specify a list of owners, and, most importantly, define a consensus threshold. This threshold determines the minimum number of approvals required to authorize a transaction from the wallet.

For example, if a Shared Funds wallet has five owners and the consensus level is set to three, any transaction will require at least three signatures to be executed. If the wallet contains one million CELL tokens and one of the owners wants to transfer, for example, 1,000 CELL to another address, the transaction will only be completed once three owners have approved it.

This functionality enables a wide range of use cases. Shared Funds can be used to manage collective assets, serve as a reserve wallet for asset recovery in case a primary address is lost, or support other collaborative financial scenarios.

We also use this mechanism internally — for instance, as part of the bridge infrastructure, which is built on top of this functionality. There are many ways this feature can be adapted, and we encourage users to explore how it might fit their own needs.

How is the process of adding Cellframe Wallet to the App Store and Google Play progressing? Where will the launch happen faster?

The App Store is likely to be the first platform where Cellframe Wallet becomes available. The application is already undergoing internal testing within Apple’s App Store environment, and the next step is to submit it for review. Once approved, it will be published.

We expect this to happen before the end of the year — possibly as early as Monday or Tuesday. I will check with the team tomorrow to confirm the timeline.

The Google Play release will take a bit longer. At the moment, we do not have an active Google Play developer account, so a new one needs to be created and verified before the review process can begin. After that, the full submission and approval cycle will need to be completed.

As a result, the Google Play launch is expected to take place after the New Year holidays.

The team has updated the bridge website design, making it more user-friendly. What has changed "under the hood"? Will the speed of bridge transactions also increase now?

Thank you for the feedback.

In short, the update involved replacing the minting and burning mechanism with a model based on collecting funds in Shared Funds wallets. While this approach is inherently less secure than a dedicated emission mechanism, it was a necessary interim solution ahead of the release of a purpose-built emission system for cross-network connections.

That said, we have implemented the highest possible level of security for this model, and we believe it is sufficient for its current use. The main benefits are improved stability and reliability. Transaction speed may see some improvement, but this is not the primary focus of this update.

For a significant increase in speed, we are planning a new mechanism, which will be introduced in version 6.0, the next major release of Cellframe. For the current bridge, the transaction speed will remain largely the same, but stability will be greatly improved.

Earlier this week, the partnership between Cellframe and NONOS was announced. While this collaboration is of strategic importance for the project as a whole, what advantages/benefits can it bring to an ordinary user or a CELL holder?

Such collaborations are primarily focused on technology exchange.

First, they attract tech enthusiasts, developers, and potentially startup founders. In this partnership, we are sharing our cryptography expertise and some dedicated network technologies. How does this matter to ordinary users? It helps bring more people into the Cellframe ecosystem and increases awareness about the project.

For example, as people learn about Cellframe through such collaborations, some may decide to purchase CELL tokens. Often, we hear questions like, “You have a token too? Where can I buy it?” Every new participant can have a small positive impact on the token’s value.

So, for an ordinary CELL holder, these collaborations can be quite meaningful.

When will the voting on the emission of validator reward tokens for the next year be launched? How will the issuance of these tokens be carried out?

The voting will start immediately after this AMA. The process is handled automatically through dedicated minting, so we don’t create the tokens ourselves manually.

Essentially, we issue a network decree that adjusts the block reward. We have the ability to decrease it, but there’s no mechanism to increase it. When the reward is decreased, validators will simply receive a smaller reward. That’s all there is to it.

How is the investigation into the incident with illegal m-tokens progressing? Are there any interim results yet?

The investigation is almost complete, but currently our focus is on technical issues. We are still addressing some significant technical debt.

The challenge began when we needed to issue patches to unlock m-tokens while avoiding illegal outputs. This led to unexpected problems, and the code is still being refactored.

Why is it taking so long? Every time we make changes, the code has to pass through multiple layers of testing — automatic, semi-automatic, and manual. Some automatic tests require running dozens of virtual machines or Docker containers with nodes to emulate a large blockchain network, which is time-consuming.

Over the past few weeks, we completed the Cellframe StageEnd project, which provides new testing scenarios for developers. This should dramatically reduce the time needed for full end-to-end tests and help us complete not only this investigation but other tasks more efficiently.

Overall, the investigation faced technical challenges, but progress is being made, and these improvements will also help our partners run their tests faster in the future.

How is the work on implementing the second tier of sharding advancing? Will it be implemented within the node version 6.0?

Currently, in version 6.0, we are finalizing the hardfork. The last few tests have been completed, and everything is working well. We are planning to release version 6.0, likely in January.

The second level of sharding, however, will be implemented in version 6.1. While 6.0 includes the hardfork and other improvements, the second-level shards — also referred to as “cells”, which are homomorphic shards — won’t fit into this release and have been postponed to 6.1.

How will the TPS metrics change with the launch of two-tier sharding? Do you have any forecasts on this matter? What will be the order of magnitude?

We will be able to measure the exact impact once the two-tier sharding is live.

As mentioned earlier, with two-level sharding there are essentially no limits — we can add additional shards, which will increase the total TPS. While there are limits at the individual shard level, the overall network throughput will be effectively unlimited.

In practical terms, this means the network could handle thousands of transactions per second. With the current network of about 100 masternodes, we can form roughly 10 cells, though realistically, only one or a few cells are fully utilized.

So far, we haven’t even reached the capacity of a one second-level shard, meaning one shard is sufficient for today’s network. The real advantage will become more significant in the future, especially after the so-called “quantum apocalypse”, when blockchain networks implementing post-quantum cryptography could face heavy transaction loads. Cellframe is already prepared for this scenario, and we aim to demonstrate how quickly the network can operate in this new reality.

We expect these effects to become noticeable around 2026–2027.

How is the development of auctions progressing? What challenges is the team facing while developing this functionality?

The auction feature is almost ready for launch.

During the last update, it was in the final stages of testing, and we were considering launching it immediately. However, with the Christmas and New Year holidays, the release has been postponed until after the holidays.

Previously, you mentioned that the number of project slots would be limited to 40. Some will be taken by ecosystem projects, and some will remain for new ones. If the demand is higher, will you have the ability to add new slots?

At the moment, the number of slots will likely be fewer than 40, due to current network throughput limitations.

If all 40 slots were filled, every masternode would need to support being a full node in all 40 networks simultaneously, which is not feasible. For now, we expect the number of active slots per node to be closer to 10, perhaps slightly more.

We are also developing new technology that will limit the number of nodes participating in inter-network transactions to specific “cells” (second-level shards). With this approach, only designated cells would handle inter-network transactions. If successful, this could create a partial consensus mechanism for interoperability and effectively remove the current limit on project slots.

Until then, the limit remains, which is why we use the Auction system to allocate slots. Projects wishing to connect to the Backbone network may need to go through intermediate networks rather than connecting directly. We are considering various solutions, and using specified cells for this purpose seems to be the most practical approach.

What are the prospects for the DapCash project? Do you have any plans to revive it?

Yes, DapCash will be revived, with a stronger focus on anonymous cryptography. It will serve as a kind of sandbox for upcoming Cellframe projects, featuring a fully automated system for adding new projects connected to it.

We plan to make an official announcement about this after the New Year holidays.

The team announced the relaunch of the ambassador program. Does the ambassadors' activity truly help in expanding the audience? At what stage of the project's development is it most significant?

It’s not a silver bullet, but it does help.

It’s difficult to give a definitive answer. Ambassador programs are probably most impactful in the early stages of a project, but even at the current stage, their activity remains useful.

Overall, while the effect may vary, ambassadors continue to contribute to audience growth and community engagement.

Please share the team's plans for 2026 regarding the development of the mainnet and the ecosystem as a whole.

Regarding the mainnet, our primary goal for 2026 is to complete all planned deliveries. This includes implementing two-level sharding, native smart contracts, and several other key features.

We also plan to finish our refactoring efforts, release a new API, and potentially add support for additional programming languages. More details will be shared later, as there are many specifics to cover, but these are the main priorities.

As for the ecosystem, we plan to place even more focus on its growth and development next year, alongside the ongoing work on the mainnet.

You previously mentioned that the chain size in a shard (cell) would be 10 GB. Will this size be the same for all networks in the ecosystem? Or will developers be able to adjust this size when launching their own parachain?

The 10 GB size is a recommended limit for second-level cell, which are still under development. For developers, this limit will be transparent — they won’t need to manage it directly.

Technically, it is possible to adjust the size within other networks, and network owners can decide how to handle it. However, the recommended size is designed to fit within 16 GB of memory. Since a masternode may host multiple cells, keeping them all in memory is essential, so increasing the size significantly is not advisable.

What do you think about the idea of ​​integrating Cellframe and the new x402 payment standard?

I don’t have information about this standard at the moment, but I’ll look into it.

That’s all the questions we had for today. Since this AMA is a recorded session rather than live, we weren’t able to answer all the questions in the chat.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and a Merry Christmas! See you next year.

We are CELL! We are here!