PlatON X WePiggy AMA Recap
On April 28th, 2021, an AMA session was broadcasted live on PlatON’s channel, featuring our CTO, Mr. James Qu, and CEO of WePiggy, Mr. Ron. Together we discussed the partnership between PlatON and WePiggy as well as our DeFi visions and collaboration for the PlatON ecosystem.
Both teams received so many interesting questions from the community about our development plan, vision and the future of the DeFi privacy ecosystem. Thank you so much for supporting our AMA. Now let us enjoy the recap!
Part 1. Questions from the host
Q1. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us what makes you to join the blockchain industry?
Ron：Ok, nice to meet you guys! I am Ron, the founder of WePiggy lending protocol.
My story with this industry starts with two experiences of mine.
At first, it was probably in 2011. I saw some news about Bitcoin from Weibo and Twitter. I was very interested at that time, so I started to try to mine with a computer. In addition, I would go to the Bitcoin forum to register and leave a message on the blog, which was also a way to get bitcoin. In this way, I accumulated bitcoins for a year on and off. But unfortunately, one time when my computer system was upgraded, I accidentally lost my Bitcoin wallet, so the first contact with Bitcoin ended. However, I didn’t care too much about this at the time.
As of June 2017, someone in our small Internet entrepreneurial team mentioned the concept of blockchain, so I re-focused on Bitcoin and started buying and speculating on Bitcoin. Because at that time, I gained some experience in speculating, and then I built a market platform similar to Coinmarketcap with my friends. However, I still had Internet projects at the time, so I only used my spare time to participate.
I really decided to go all-in Blockchain starts from “9.4” — China’s ICO Ban. I already knew enough about Bitcoin to believe that it would not be influenced by policy. So, I’ve only bought bitcoin since “9.4” and never sold it.
James：Guess is my turn? Hi everyone. I’m James, CTO of PlatON. Welcome Ron to PlatON’s home group:) I feel honored to be here with Ron today.
To be honest, I’m a newcomer to the blockchain industry. Spurred on by the Chinese stock market in 2015, a year full of fluctuations, I quit from Morgan Stanley where I worked for over nine years, and started a company of algorithmic trading technology, which remains one of the top among its peers in China. I had my first introduction to blockchain technology in 2016, and I knew it was in essence a distributed and immutable ledger. I believed, by instinct, this technology would disruptively innovate the financial industry. At the same time, thanks to the openness, open-source code, global collaboration and other features of the blockchain, it has been iterated rapidly these years, revealing its epoch-making potential. Having seen all these, I devoted myself to this industry without a second thought in 2017, in a hope to do something useful and valuable in my limited life.
After all these years of work at PlatON, I have gained deeper insights into the integrated architecture of blockchain technology, economic incentives, and ecosystem governance, which in turn further boosts my confidence in the prospects of blockchain.
Q2. Would you mind telling us more about your products and its features?
Ron ：WePiggy is an open-source, non-custodial crypto-asset lending market protocol.
In Wepiggy’s market, users can deposit their crypto assets to earn interest or borrow others by paying interest.
At present, we have supported the five major cryptocurrencies (ETH/WBTC/USDC/USDT/DAI), as well as UNI and YFII, and launched the LRC lending market this Monday, and we will continue to add new lending markets in the future.
From the product point of view, we have three main characteristics.
First of all, Safety Is Our First Priority
This is different from many DeFi projects. “Test in Prod” is currently very popular, that is, the concept of testing in a production environment, and it is often an anonymous development team. However, we always put the security of users’ assets in the first place, and our entire set of smart contracts will be audited by a professional auditing company before going online.
The current online version of the WePiggy protocol V1 has been running stably for nearly 4 months without any security incidents.
We have recently developed some new functions to differentiate ourselves from the Compound step by step, but we are still waiting for an audit from the safety audit company. All subsequent new businesses will also go online after a complete audit. Please rest assured that we always put safety first.
Secondly, we have paid great attention to governance since the first day we went online.
We have designed a very complete governance framework. We hope that in the earliest stage of the project, we can set down the values of the community, governance processes, governance interaction nodes, and the corresponding basic principles of governance. We want the entire project can have a very good foundation so that the follow-up governance work can be justified and has a soul.
At present, we have also achieved unexpected gains in community governance. Data from recent proposals show that our user’s governance participation is better than many excellent DeFi projects. We have not mobilized the community much, and users are still willing to participate in governance with a bad snapshot voting experience. Such a good effect and atmosphere is not expected before.
After joining the PlatON ecosystem, we will actively integrate into the network node construction and governance, and strive to cultivate the soil for the prosperity of PlatON’s DeFi privacy ecosystem.
Thirdly, we are a protocol dedicated to cross-chain lending and providing users with a full range of services.
In addition to the Ethereum mainnet, WePiggy will be deployed in OKExChain, Binance Smart Chain, Huobi Eco Chain, PlatON, and other well-known public chains and layer 2 networks, and realize cross-chain asset exchange and lending.
Our cooperation with PlatON combines WePiggy’s brand strengths and expertise in DeFi applications with PlatON’s leading privacy computing technology for the creation of differentiated lending protocols.
Based on the above three points, WePiggy has been recognized by the market and has performed well in various data.
In terms of funding data, during the blind mining stage, WePiggy’s TVL exceeded 41 million U.S. dollars; when the lending protocol was officially launched, the total deposited funds exceeded 80 million U.S. dollars, especially after enabling “borrowing mining”, the amount of borrowing has also begun to grow steadily, and the current borrowing amount is fluctuating around 10 million.
This data shows that the market is very confident in our project.
Moreover, our protocol has always been stable in both development and operation, and there have been no safety incidents so far.
In terms of ecological construction, WePiggy established in-depth partnerships with 8 mainstream wallet apps including imToken, TokenPocket, and Math Wallet at the beginning of its establishment.
In terms of media, WePiggy is supported and promoted by many leading media and communities, such as Mars Finance, ChainNews, Odaily, Jinse Finance, etc.
In terms of security audits, WePiggy has reached long-term cooperation with SlowMist Technology, and will gradually expand the scope of cooperation in the future.
In terms of international cooperation, WePiggy has or will integrate with many well-known projects with strong overseas academic backgrounds including Chainlink and Oasis, and plans to carry out more cooperation in the future. WePiggy has been included in most of the Tier-1 data platforms such as DeBank, OKLink, DappReview, DappRadar, DeFiBox, DeFi Pulse, etc.
James：First of all, I would like to talk about the characteristics and orientation that make PlatON distinct from other blockchain ecosystems. PlatON is committed to being the world’s leading privacy-preserving and distributed AI open-source community as well as the pioneer and leader in the global privacy-preserving industry. It has long focused on the high-performance distributed computing network featuring scalability and privacy preservation. Through a next-generation computing architecture jointly assembled with cryptographic algorithms, such as verifiable computing, secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof, and homomorphic encryption, we provide public infrastructure under an open-source architecture for global developers of AI and distributed applications, data providers, and various communities, institutions, and individuals with computing needs.
Since its establishment in 2018, PlatON has kept the privilege of data at the core of its ecosystem, as it believes all the privileges are derived from computation, instead of being inherently protected and tradable.
The Web 1.0 era, when we felt thrilled to download emails and news via a telephone modem, was predominated by one-way data communication. In the era of Web 2.0, countless social software, map navigation applications, and applications for online shopping have emerged, facilitating everyday life. Meanwhile, Web 2.0, represented by these social software, intelligent devices, and cloud computing, has also driven the aggregation and monopoly of data, catalyzing the birth of data giants. With the iterative development of AI models, data has become the oil of the digital economy today.
Our daily life has been dominated by advanced IoT devices. Data are collected everywhere, consciously or unconsciously. Advanced AI models tirelessly mine big data and do federated learning to work out accurate digital portraits. The added value of data is growing, making data providers a fortune coveted by many.
How to redefine a new sustainable and fair distribution model? How to gain the trust of the rising data providers? How to prevent the abuse of data? All these questions boil down to one: how to establish a verifiable “trusted” environment based on “trust” technology . Blockchain, decentralization, privacy computing, verifiable computing, etc. have emerged as a result.
In response, PlatON has prepared itself, both theoretically and technically, for a long time.
PlatON has long been dedicated to the research on cryptography and privacy computing. It boasts an industry-leading cryptography R&D team that brings together well-known cryptography professors and researchers from top universities both at home and abroad, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Wuhan University, University of Maryland, and Northwestern University.
At the same time, PlatON proactively supports cryptography-related academic and technical events. We continuously sponsor Crypto, Eurocrypt, and Asiacryptthe, top three conferences in cryptography, as well as ACM CCS, a leading seminar in the field of security. As the main sponsor, we have worked with Chinese leading universities and scientific research institutions to hold Crypto Innovation Schools for two years in a row, with thematic training sessions on secure multi-party computation and lattice cryptography. Also, we have independently organized the Crypto Innovation School Competition (CISC) 2019, aiming to encourage and promote creative cryptography technology works in global cryptography. Our efforts even include the sponsorship of the world’s top cryptography conferences and organization of cryptography winter camps and competitions. Moreover, the PlatON team has contributed its achievements in secure multi-party computation to Ethereum, and worked closely with Ethereum, constatnly receiving many grants from Ethereum in secure multi-party computation.
In terms of the underlying implementation of the blockchain, PlatON’s Giskard Concurrent Byzantine Fault Tolerance (CBFT) algorithm has been formally verified by Runtime Verification and has been verified on the Alaya sandbox network. Its mainnet also started to operate stably yesterday. The governance mechanism based on the PoS mechanism also ensures the high performance of the network. You can get more details through our Github open source code and technical articles published on Medium. Community technicians who have participated in our testing and sandbox operation may be more aware of these. All of our code has passed SlowMist’s security audit.
In terms of privacy-preserving AI, PlatON released Rosetta, the world’s first privacy-preserving AI architecture, which is also open source. It aims to makes the development of privacy-preserving AI, an essential technology for the next data era, faster and easier for developers such as TensorFlow. We have provided financial-level privacy-preserving services for well-known banks.
Q3. PlatON and WePiggy are the leaders in your respective fields. What advantages will this cooperation bring to each other?
Ron：WePiggy will work in-depth with PlatON to combine WePiggy’s brand strengths and expertise in DeFi applications with PlatON’s leading privacy computing technology for the creation of differentiated lending protocols.
Besides, the WePiggy development team will provide intellectual support for PlatON’s DeFi application incubation and public chain infrastructure layout, cultivating the soil for PlatON’s DeFi privacy ecosystem to thrive.
A sufficiently decentralized network of validators has always been the cornerstone of the survival of any public chain. The WePiggy development team has operated large server clusters and has three years of experience in public chain validator construction and optimization. After the launch of PlatON’s MainNetwork, WePiggy, as a synthesis of DeFi applications, communities, and developers, will put its business features in to play and actively participate in the construction of PlatON’s validator network, contributing to the decentralization of the PlatON network and the spread of PlatON’s new technical features.
In the near future, the two companies will also explore how to implement privacy Token casting, destruction, and the ability to interact with standard Token (non-privacy Token) in the DeFi lending protocol through the privacy Token contract standard, and use cryptography to implement new user identity algorithms to help users better protect their private data and information.
James：To become part of the other side’s ecosystem, new ideas and new thoughts will emerge for sure.
PlatON has been committed to building a global distributed privacy AI network to provide infrastructure to support future large-scale data asset exchanges.
This partnership with WePiggy will continue to expand PlatON’s footprint on the brand market, ecosystem development, and the underlying levels of technology, and will work together to empower DeFi application with security defence capabilities. By doing so, we can jointly build a secure ecosystem for PlatON technologies.
I believe as we work together to explore new world.
In the new coming data market with privacy protected data, new type of DeFi will be there. A lot of cool stuff ahead of both of us.
Q4. What new plans do both parties have in the near future, can we post them here in advance?
Ron：The first is the cooperation with PlatON, and the second step will be executed. After introducing WePiggy’s community resources into PlatON, and establishing a preliminary trust and communication mechanism between the two teams, we will begin to build PlatON’s network nodes in the next step and participate in PlatON’s network construction. This is the node information page made by our product manager. You can preview it.
After completing the node deployment, we will begin to familiarize ourselves with PlatON’s governance rules and participate step by step, to lay the foundation for subsequent product-level cooperation.
In addition to PlatON, WePiggy will go live on OKExChain mainnet in these two days.
Everyone is welcome to experience our products.
After the OKExChain mainnet is stable, we will start to carry out some incentive activities one after another.
After OKExChain, WePiggy will launch on BSC, Heco and other emerging networks at appropriate time.
What’s more, we will build a new lending market on Ethereum, cooperate with a world’s famous and leading institution, jointly build the Chinese version of WBTC and RenBTC.
James：This year will witness several major milestones, such as the mainnet release on April 25 and Plato’s statement inscribed in the genesis block. Afterwards, PlatON will launch a privacy-preserving AI network around the end of the year, which is the discoverable and tradable network based on data, models, and hashrate on the blockchain layer as mentioned in the white paper in 2018. A variety of protocols for privacy-preserving computation will be released at the same time. The one for a privacy token published early this year is far from enough.
From this year, we will follow two parallel business paths. One is Alaya sandbox, with the focus on financial services. The other is PlatON’s long-term development in the privacy-preserving AI network and data market. Alaya sandbox turns out to be a good solution as financial data is relatively complete and easy to process and implement. PlatON and WePiggy will work together to create some new privacy-preserving DeFi applications and abstract DeFi protocols to further improve security as well as privacy.
PlatON feels obliged to improve the extensive data applications that are relatively complex and the immature protocols and infrastructure. We appreciate support from the community, especially in know-how and ecosystem development.
Q5. Both WePiggy and PlatON have excellent teams behind them. Can you talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the domestic blockchain team compared to foreign blockchain project teams?
Ron：
The biggest advantage of the domestic team is that we are backed by the huge market of China and can carry out localized marketing and promotion. Any segment of demand has enough volume in our huge market, providing entrepreneurs with a lot of room for development and growth.
In addition, compared with foreign teams, Chinese technology developers are more resilient, pay more attention to product experience, and focus on long-term operations and promotion. We have the most diligent engineers, designers, product managers, and marketing teams in the world.
The disadvantage is that we lack the adventurous and innovative spirit, which may be related to our traditional culture. At the same time, whether in terms of policies or regulations, the financial market is not mature and clear enough, which also hinders more excellent talents from entering the blockchain industry.
James：Agree, I will speak highly of the engineering ability of the Chinese teams as they boast a wealth of R&D talent who can work out delicately-designed products with a better user experience. This is very important. Another strong point is an all-around consideration of compliance, which is necessary at the beginning of design under the strict supervision.
The shortcomings are evident in innovation and the internationalization of the community. We can solve these issues by increasing transparency and releasing a large number of English documents and events to draw international communities to join and enhance innovation.
I am really dreaming to have an international team, with all strength. Clash and debate between different culture, different ideas. Hope there will be international talents join us soon.
Q6. Many projects are working on the issue of privacy. Does it go against the openness and transparency advocated by the DeFi?
Ron：Ok, I don’t think it is contradictory. DeFi is decentralized finance. The environment built by contract code and blockchain network avoids or reduces excessive reliance on centralized institutions. Openness and transparency are just a way to ensure credibility and facilitate supervision.
If technology and algorithms can be used to ensure that the entire network, protocols, and applications are in a trusted state, then whether it is open and transparent is not so important. In other words, if it is technically possible, users should have such a choice.
Not only individuals, but blockchain without privacy protection is also difficult to carry out large-scale commercial applications. Imagine which team wants its competitors to peek into their secrets? Which financial institution is willing to expose its investment records to the entire network? Which trader wants his long and short positions to be watched closely by others?
Obviously, blockchain technology that can achieve privacy protection can enable users to truly own their data and introduce more application scenarios.
James：Totally agree, blockchain is transparent and trust worth, so public is not a problem. it only appears as a problem when all your transaction details there, and your portfolio be calculated. for traditional institution, how to protect position details to avoid attacks, front running etc are required.
it will be good to provide this capability. use it or not up to client. Let client choose the best for them. PlatON is good at privacy protecting technology.
Q7. The theme of this AMA is to jointly build a DeFi privacy ecosystem, but the world is still under the shadow of the COVID-19. What kind of impact do you think the epidemic has on the construction of DeFi privacy ecosystem?
Ron：We have Zoom, nice tool for the meeting. The COVID-19 has led to a significant reduction in business cooperation, personnel exchanges and tourism activities between countries. Every country and region has to concentrate on the local epidemic prevention and control, and through the issuance and distribution of money directly to people to prevent economic recession and maintain social stability.
Although the wave of globalization has been greatly impacted by the epidemic, capital will never sleep. The excess funds in the market will not stop looking for a stable and reliable source of income worldwide.
People are increasingly aware that Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies may be the answer to the depreciation of fiat money and the appreciation of their assets.
DeFi is also likely to be a way to allow capital to flow freely around the world, making cryptocurrency a high-quality interest-bearing asset.
To support the flow of a large amount of commercial capital, DeFi requires both a high-performance public chain and the protection of private data.
The construction of the DeFi privacy ecosystem reflects the needs of the Information Age: value needs to be able to flow freely in a safe, reliable, fast and privacy-protected environment.
James：Just echo and add a few comments from me.There are no impact on development progress. The remote working, remote shopping, electronical daily life style and Covid19 tracing requirements did give us a lots of lesson how easy human sensitive data can be leaked, tracing requirements vs privacy, data could be abused. we feel the pain and the team want to deliver useful solutions as soon as possible.
Then we found it is hard to collect live feedback from user, from experts due to this situation. Well ,we will do our best. Like selective data disclosure technology etc.
Part2. Questions from the Community
Q1. Many projects rug pulled and exit scam recently. Why should investors trust your project not to do the same?（@tony05019）
Ron：1. We are real name team;
2. WePiggy has been audited by a well-known security company;
3. Four months after the protocol was launched, it was running safely and stably without any accidents;
4. The most important thing is, which scam has you seen like us, till now did not release the token transfer since it was online for several month;
5. We will not open token transfer until we are recognized by the market and used by users as a real decentralized bank.
I hope my answer can get your trust.
Q2. Great ama! What is the advantage or difference of platON with other privacy network，like oasis labs?( @wenson)
James: This is a relatively new area, I am expecting more players joining. From technical point of view, I really encourage more investment onto so called three typical tracks, MPC driven mathematically proven privacy, distributed federal machine learning, and TEE driven trusted third party solutions. all have different strength. we are focusing on MPC — mathematical proven data privacy, rather than third party dependency TEE direction. depends on scenarios, we use them all by decouple real cases.
Q3. Most of the smart contracts of recent projects are prone to errors and even the previous major DeFi projects have had the same problem, making you face a lot of difficulties and a great impact. to the user, How do you guys improve that?(@tinhle102）
James：This could be question to both of us. smart contract formal verification is on my schedule. Recently we invited runtime verifications CEO Professor Rosu join PlatON as technical advisor, his formal verification expertise will help PlatON to provide trust worth business solutions.
Q4. Will LAT get listed on WePiggy?（@poniponi）
Ron: We will launch LAT in our protocol built on PlatON or Alaya. Of course, if the community of PlatON decide to let LAT cross-chain to Ethereum or other public chains, we will also evaluate actively the lending market of LAT in accordance with our risk assessment standards.
Q5.How can developers contribute to the WePiggy project and what are the incentives for developers? Are you planning to launch Bug Bounty and other programs?(@oherzogr)
Ron：1. We have a volunteer program, welcome to visit our governance forum for more details；You can also join our Telegram group, our community welcomes you to join and discuss.
2. We have launched Bug Bounty, you can check the details on our announcement；
In order to make it easier for developers like you to participate in, we will make a page to introduce our security system. Bug Bounty is an important part of it.
We would like to sincerely thank everyone who participated in PlatON and our partner, WePiggy‘s AMA. We appreciate all of the questions asked and your big support for both projects. We hope that you will find our answers helpful and keep supporting our AMA series! Subscribe to our channel for more updated news.
About PlatON
PlatON is a Singapore-based public blockchain network, which strives to lead in privacy-preserving computation and become the next-generation infrastructure for the distributed economy. It is dedicated to developing a secure, scalable, and high-performance computing network with first-class privacy preservation features, built on its advanced computation architecture and cryptography algorithms, including verifiable computation (VC), secure multi-party computation (MPC), zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), and homomorphic encryption. PlatON aims to become the open-source public infrastructure for AI and distributed applications for developers, data providers and institutions and individuals with privacy-sensitive computing demands around the world.
Website · Twitter · Telegram · Medium · Discord · Github
About WePiggy
WePiggy is an open-source, non-custodial, crypto-asset lending market protocol. In WePiggy’s market, users can deposit their crypto assets to earn interest or borrow other crypto assets by paying interest. WePiggy aims to spread the benefits of cryptocurrency’s freedom and transparency to the widest possible user community in a more friendly and simple way, as well as be a good partner for them in wealth management. WePiggy will do the best to provide you with a safe, stable, and efficient DeFi lending market.
