Co-Founder AMA Recap / 2021.01.28
Our team just finished the first AMA of the year on our Telegram Channel. Below is a quick list of recent events mentioned throughout the AMA.
- How Syntropy Can Revolutionize e-Sports
- Syntropy Stack Launches Chainlink Integration
- Syntropy Stack Launches Integration For Minecraft
- Introducing Syntropy Builders
- Syntropy Stack Is Now Live
We appreciate the high volume of quality discussion, and have posted the transcript below. As always, we’re excited to have such an engaged and savvy community.
Business
Domas: Things are accelerating fast since Syntropy Stack launched. We are gearing up operations and scaling sales. Here are the key areas regarding user acquisition:
Enterprise adoption
- Security
- Edge connectivity, IoT
- Global network optimization
- Remote work, distributed workforce
Developer acquisition
- Gaming
- DevOps
- Blockchain
The upcoming few months are looking very active and we’re super happy to reveal more and more details.
Q: How is the project/collaboration with Oracle progressing?
Domas: It’s progressing really well. We’re establishing new conversations within the company and the partner network. It’s one of the key relationships we value most because we received so much early support and understanding. The relationship is ever-growing.
Q: Bill, you helped turn Equinix, one of the biggest Datacenter companies in the world, into what they are today. How excited are you in regards to Syntropy’s future, and do you believe that we will be able to reach large scale adoption across these various industries?
Bill: I see massive disruption to the Internet transit market when we are successful. More so than establishing colocation centers and convincing everyone that the economics pay off when you connect together networks using dark fibre interconnections. I wrote a white paper that documented the costs of doing interconnection inside the colocation center versus leasing point to point circuits. The same math applies here but doesn’t require millions of dollars to deploy. So, I need to write a much easier “A Business Case for Node Operation”.
Q: This team is characterized by its professionalism and great vision about the future. Where do you see Syntropy in 5 years?
Domas: That’s a very good question, although it’s not easy to answer. A lot of can happen in 5 years.
We see more and more technology applications which broaden the vision even more and kinda leaves us with the New Internet vision, where Syntropy becomes a layer used for every connection, facilitating seamless security and performance for the whole world. Eventually, having an ability to just “connect to Syntropy” for all. No carriers, just One smart Internet.
Q: How many undisclosed NDA do you currently have?
Domas: We’re constantly working with various new companies and sign NDAs. It’s part of our Enterprise operations. The exact number is hard to say because it needs a careful review of all relationships we had in 2,5years of active operations.
Q: With the recent Syntropy builder announcement, team committed 1$M to fund the program. May I ask where is the team getting the funds from?
Augustas: We are compensating developers in an equivalent amount of $NOIA tokens to the compensation’s USD value. Also, tokens unlock so many possibilities. Syntropy Builders is a natural evolution of developer communities, the next level if you will. Open source communities are remarkably active; hundreds of thousands of developers contribute to them. We enable these communities not only to contribute but actually work directly for the technology, and in a completely decentralized manner.
Q: Which are the most important goals that you are working? And which are your perspectives?
Ryan: Now that a lot of our tech is production-ready, here are the two biggest strategic priorities right now via Dom:
- User acquisition. Enterprise — Security, Edge connectivity, IoT, Global network optimization, Remote work, distributed workforce. Developers — Areas like Gaming, DevOps, Blockchain, etc.
- Blockchain roadmap. DARP, Network launch, Tokenomics, etc.
Q: Are there EEA members looking into the tech for potential integration?
Ryan: We’re actively working with EEA. Great way to connect and share with potential partners. We are looking to get more involved this year.
Q: Would a drop in the price affect the team development and/or processes?
Domantas: No. Some of our team members get their salary in NOIA tokens for some time now, so I guess maybe they would receive a little bit more tokens — that’s the only thing I can think of.
Q: Does Syntropy have any real competitors? Especially within the “crypto world”.
Domantas: I’d probably know if there were any. And I mean the full focus of what we’re doing, including the vision we have for Syntropy. I don’t believe we’re competing with anybody there. If you look at the components of the project, so sure, there are a bunch of companies that create network software, etc. The only real competitor (or rather opposition) when you consider the full scope of what we’re trying to achieve is the status quo.
Q: How is the revenue allocated? For example, when Syntropy has revenue from commercial clients, where does it go and how is the use of the revenue decided?
Domas: Revenue is allocated to the development of Syntropy Stack and marketing/sales for getting new users. This is an essential relationship because the aim is to have Syntropy fully enabled through token and then all users Syntropy Stack has, are directly generating value into the token ecosystem.
Token is the most important element of the whole ecosystem we’re creating. It is the only way of enabling an open-source economy where internet security and reliability is transparent, fair and equal for all Internet users.
Q: Any update on Q4 2020 revenue, and who was the paying customers?
Domas: From the ecosystem perspective, revenue is not the main focus for us now. Q4 we established some of the most important enterprise relationships, and the main goal is to help them adopt our technology and support the whole project for the long term. Revenue is in the funnel, but it’s not the main thing we push for.
For the project — we need to generate as many users as possible in the upcoming 6 months. Both enterprise and developers using the stack daily and building more use-cases. Adoption is the critical element for growing ecosystems and we feel strong about it.
The more users we generate, the more value is generated for the economy and the token. Since the token is the key element for the ecosystem, it’s where the main focus will go.
Marketing, Exchanges & Operations
Domantas: Quick update on the operational side of things. We’ve successfully integrated the newcomers from the previous hiring sprint into our processes and delivered on the tech goals. We’ve already mapped out the next phase of expansion that should come into effect as soon as next week. We’re looking to increase the team by 9–12 new people over the next 1–2 months. That includes 4–5 developers, 3–4 people on the business side, and another 2–3 on the content/marketing front. After this hiring sprint, we should be looking at a headcount of 40–45 full-time people, not counting any external freelance/part-time employees/teams we’re working with.
Domas: I think the main focus point is that Syntropy is expanding operations rapidly and we’ll be having double, triple outcome than we had last year. We validated the market fit and now scaling and growthing became the most important thing. We expect a lot of developments coming in Q1, Q2.
Q: What’s the status on bigger Exchanges?
Domantas: Regarding exchange listings, as we said before, we are in discussions with a number of different exchanges to get NOIA token listed and therefore improve its liquidity and availability. Exchange listings are likely to speed up as we come closer and closer to some of the more major milestones in our roadmap or right afterwards. We remain fully focused on the roadmap because we have full certainty in our ability to secure exchange listings when the time is right. And delivering on the remaining items is our number one priority. Everything else will follow too.
Q: Is this in reference to your 6 month sprint or a longer roadmap vision, and if so do you have a link to a longer roadmap?
Domantas: I am mostly referring to the current roadmap. Actually, since you asked, we’re also already working on the extended roadmap and that should go public before the current one comes to an end. It will include much more details about the future of Syntropy (longer-term).
Q: What is the status of updating the website?
Domantas: We’re rolling it out as we go, we have a few releases planned for the upcoming couple of weeks.
Augustas: We are covering all fundamentals. We are continually working on updating and optimizing both Syntropy websites. Moving forward, you will start seeing more content in there. We will also be creating custom landing pages and relevant materials for all potential use-cases of our technology, starting from blockchain and gaming.
Q. Are you on schedule with the roadmap? What’s the progress there?
Domantas: It is looking good so far. We’re putting 150% of ourselves into this mission, and the pace of progress is always increasing. Whether we finish 80, 90 or 100% in time — that I can’t tell you now, sometimes delays happen but everything is progressing pretty well. We’ll do what we have planned sooner or later. Sometimes we might use Elon’s strategy, be too optimistic and then miss deadlines by a little bit, but having high goals makes the team work harder.
Q: Is collaboration with Minecraft actually between two companies or are you just presenting gamers Syntropy capabilities?
Ryan: Just presenting capabilities. But important to note that it’s not theoretical. The video in our announcement showed a live demo of this. I’d love to set up a community Minecraft game with all of us using Syntropy. Jonas also mentioned there is more in development here, gaming is a great use case of our tech.
Q: Will the jobs postings be listed on your website?
Domantas: 100%! new roles will be seen there, I’m hoping our community will fill some of those.
Q: Are there any mentors outside of the team that you can mention, who are helping the project?
Domantas: I wish I could disclose more right now. All I can is yes. 100%. We do have external people that guide and advise us in tackling the main use cases of our tech. We’ll become more open about it just a little bit later.
Q: Jonas did a great in-depth presentation back in March 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Der5rTXv9Ls, are you planning to do any more recorded discussions like this? I’m a lay person but reading the tech is fascinating and standard crypto interviews never really allow that much depth to be discussed.
Jonas: Yes, great point. We have plans to represent technology more and there will be academy style initiatives where we’ll work on getting adoption by developer communities.
Augustas: From a marketing standpoint, attending and speaking in local and global meetups, conferences, podcasts or even organizing hackathons is a great way to tap into developer communities. Props to Bill and Jonas who are already active on that front. This is not only a great way to promote Syntropy, but also educate and share ideas we all care about here.
Tech & DARP
Jonas: I saw some questions about the integrations. I think its the coolest thing we’re doing because we’ll create many very interesting integrations which have millions or very important target users and give them as Bill says “the easy button”. It is so cool to see when you build a low-level technology layer the use cases are endless for someone using 1 connection to another business being built on it and building your own ecosystem, but not only between blockchains but an ecosystem of real-world business being built on Syntropy or using it.
Minecraft integration is of immense opportunity. P2P play or distributed play where one party hosts servers other play, includes both regular people and e-sports tournaments. We will show how and encourage people to build their own apps to use Syntropy as easy as possible for their game or any other unique use case.
Chainlink as well, if you watch the demo video it just shows and explains the benefits, not much more needed. Multiple blockchain architectures use different types of architectures and types of deployments, because of the slight differences and individual ingenuity. Some need Sentry nodes, some databases some other blockchain clients. And then imagine the whole of private blockchain infrastructure. You need secure and optimize connections, easy deployments, networks being saved as code, and monitoring. And that’s even with current Syntropy Stack.
Once we have our blockchain-based solution i’ll tease your imagination: Do you think a blockchain should be able to boot another node of a validator or service node itself using a smart contract? Decentralized secure connectivity is required if you want a Smart contract to connect 2 devices together securely without a central entity. This is not DevOps or people making VPN connections. This is software connecting software, with 100% redundancy as long as there are several blockchains still running in the world.
Q: Is there any use cases that you have found, that surprised you guys? If so, please share.
Ryan: I suspect we’ll continue to get surprised simply because the tech is very flexible. We try to avoid words like “every” and “all”, but a ton of the current web can be built on Syntropy. And our tech should also enable new technologies/building. Gaming and Blockchain use cases (as discussed in this week’s Minecraft and Chainlink announcements) should be important target areas.
Q: We know Bill is working hard on DARP. When can we expect its implementation on Syntropy Stack?
Bill: Thanks for the question! The DARP code really provides the syntropy stack with the answer to the question: is it better to send a packet directly or is it better to send that same packet through an intermediary. As you know, it does this with continuous one-way latency measures between nodes where the payload is the previous measurements to that node. In this way, the upper layers (syntropy stack modules) can use a matrix of routes rather than the single default network path given by your ISP. Jonas can speak more to the integration — I will share a little more bout the patents filed and to be filed to protect the tech for the community.
Jonas: Yes, we’re getting ready for first DARP production version which will have a larger group size, low-level language implementation and will show better intermediary paths within the network, followed by v.02 which will also be connecting and finding best paths to other networks.
We’re also working on a lib-p2p version for DARP which is relevant to our blockchain-based implementation. A super interesting implementation of DARP to act as a distributed IP distribution layer. We have more power working on DARP now to make it interoperable, pluggable and supported by more hardware.
Q: Lately, the team said we will hear news regarding DARP soon. Any ETA on that?
Jonas: A release within 2 weeks, and continuously developed further on. The first version of several new implementations going public.
Bill: A number of things are cooking in DARP. First, we have filed the full patent for the DARP framework, and about to file the second of maybe a dozen patents on things like how groups are optimized, how encrypted mesh networks can be autonomously formed and routed, and various areas of development and research. Second, I have a follow-on DARP white paper “DARP Inter-Group Routing” that extends the previous DARP white paper (identifying better path) to include forming a new pulse group composed of selected intermediaries from the source side and the destination side. This “cross-pollination” of groups will install some randomness and therefore facilitate automated discovery. At the end, this method provides the “autonomous” in DARP. I am currently walking developer’s through this white paper and refining it based on their feedback. Finally, DARP allows me to examine the data, and gleen insights as above (for example, that multi-cloud use in Asia will yield hundreds of better paths) and this data quantifiable proves our value. So, very exciting.
Q: Bill, are you doing it all yourself or do you have friends and/or former colleagues helping you? Seems like such a big task.
Bill: DARP is a labor of love — a continuation of research I have done on the underlying tumultuous path your packets travel. For example, between my Internet endpoints, why are my packets now taking 15ms longer on a continuous basis? There are tones of paths like this that we measure and route around. Inside Syntropy I have some great developers that implement while I explore and document, and outside Syntropy I have a large group of fellow network geeks that dig this stuff as I do.
Q: How many nodes will you need for DARP?
Bill: Interesting question because I generally see better paths popping up with more than 5 nodes or so, depending on lots of factors. For example, Southeast Asia is a region of the Internet characterized by lots of competing providers, each with different culture, language, operating models and regional coverage. So it is not surprising that there are non-overlapping areas where better paths pop up — I see hundreds of optimizations possible when I deploy DARP covering an Azure and AWS in southeast Asia.
Q: There are fewer data centers in Africa and with the Node reward program we had already seen on the map how there was a lack of nodes in Africa. Are you going to propose a solution to this problem?
Bill: I spent a lot of time working in Africa promoting my book a few years back (Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Morocco, etc.) and one characteristic of the African ecosystem is what will make DARP work well — that there is a wide range of diverse operators across a continent the size of US+Russia+China with hundreds of languages and they have fought with each other longer than the rest of us. That variability is what makes DARP valuable — many better paths possible. But, about 95%+ of all content is delivered out of Europe (London/Amsterdam/Frankfurt) , so not as much local ecosystem development to be optimized but there is a long haul to optimize. The node program should work well, particularly as the regional ecosystems develop into stand-alone regions.
Q: When will NDA’s be disclosed and are any of them linked to the launch of DARP?
Bill: As surprising to me was the number of better paths that emerged between cloud operator networks. Across Azure I found a few betters relaying through other AWS regions, on AWS I saw maybe a dozen better paths that lasted a long time. But when I spread DARP nodes across Azure and AWS in Southeast Asia, hundreds of better paths pop up. I showed this in a video: Video 14 — Multi-cloud deployments show tons of better paths between AWS and Azure
https://www.loom.com/share/153c0460b6de41968022122a58d96f79?sharedAppSource=personal_library
Q: Is anybody building web filtering on top yet? We pay 1000s a year for a subscription and hardware.
Virginijus: We are operating on Layer 3 (IP), and Web filtering is a Layer7 (application). So for us it’s not possible to filter L7 traffic.
Q: Difficult question, but what is the most interesting/exciting thing you guys have found whilst deploying/testing the tech?
Jonas: For me personally is the optimization testing results, the sample size was big enough, 200k internet paths and the results were distributed in nice charts showing sort of the “function” of the internet not being optimal, optimizations were everywhere across every provider, region and so on, so not like 1 or 2 problems but many optimisations of varying sizes everywhere. I genuinely thought results will be of several specific categories but findings confirmed its internet being in general suboptimal
Blockchain & NOIA Token
Q: Tell us about the role of the NOIA token in the final form syntropy ecosystem.
Jonas: Final role is for the token to make sure economic stability of the network using nodes so there is always enough nodes providing capacity, we do that using economic incentives to grow the network until it drives enough traffic to become self-sustainable and profitable for the nodes which acquired most reputation and have a seat. Smart contracts on blockchain providing platform functionality are also paid in a token so any use of creating connections and other transactions of managing the network through the blockchain will require tokens to be used and provides utility, like “gas” for the Internet. The end vision is for the token to exist on all compatible blockchains so the Syntropy network is a trusted layer of internet connectivity managed and facilitated by interoperable blockchains using NOIA token.
Q: There’s been a lot of speculation on tokenomics, nodes/masternodes and staking specifically. Can you tell us anything in general about this or do you have an ETA on when we’ll see it?
Jonas: We’re working heavily on tokenomics and having our QR team already do modelling and also involving partners to help us finalize and test the model. The exact details won’t be shared as they are variables within the model and will be set when announcing phases of the upcoming programs to run relay nodes. There will be the model explaining the token utility as well as mathematical value relationship with the utility. Then the variables will be selected to launch the model. Token will be used both to secure the network and used as a utility. Any speculation involving numbers now won’t be accurate as the model will dictate the variables upon launch. We will release the whitepaper for a wider audience as soon as the model is formulated while we’ll continue working on the numbers!
Q: Are you guys going to have your own decentralized ledger supporting smart contracts to pay gas for different services within the network in NOIA tokens or you’re gonna take some technology like Polkadot/Elrond/Solana or ETH 2.0 with a possibility to pay NOIA tokens?
Jonas: Great question. 2 or 2/1 hybrid or 2 moving into 1 in phases! Using the newest blockchains, very interesting software systems can be built.
Q: Can you disclose any information on the Ethereum Alliance? and is Syntroy the backbone infrastructure for Ethereum?
Ryan: We’re members of the EEA, actively working with them. Still early but we’re excited to connect more with the membership base. A great fit for what we’re doing.
Jonas: We’re part of Ethereum Alliance as our token is currently on ethereum and we’re building out our blockchain-based system where the token will be used. So us working together when we need support is a fantastic fit.
As for the second part, once the technology is ready to create any connections between internet-connected devices, anyone can establish connections, including blockchains and validators.
Q: So Syntropy is running well down the line. Will token holders and/or node operators have power in deciding the direction of the protocol?
Jonas: We’re working on a solution to have structured governance over the protocol and the network.
