ParaState — Telegram AMA — April 04

On Sunday, April 04, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:

Marco Chen, Co-Founder.

We asked him questions about the development of Parastate.

Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.

Summary

Parastate allows users to write Ethereum-compatible smart contracts in popular programming languages, & run them much faster, on Polkadot. It is a decentralized open-source business model funded by developer
treasuries on participating parachains.

ParaState provides a smart contract virtual machine (VM) for all Substrate-based blockchains. ParaState’s Pallet SSVM is a leading implementation of Ewasm.

ParaState comes with core DeFi infrastructure built-in, including the Uniswap exchange, stable coins, lending protocols, as well as price oracles. ParaState is fully compatible with Uniswap and related smart contracts (e.g., ERC-20 tokens traded on Uniswap). As part of the built-in DeFi infrastructure, Uniswap will be available on ParaState at network launch.

Introduction

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: Let’s start by hearing a bit about you. What did you do before crypto and did you have any other previous venture in crypto?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: Well, I am a blockchain tech early adopter and bitcoin miner since 2016. With a BA degree in business and finance, also proactively participating in Stanford programs like Economics and Computer Science, etc.

In 2018, I built a decentralized Medium alike product, Ticktack, on top of SSB protocols to support 10k people relaying chats only via a $20/month cost node. This project educated me to dive deep into the infrastructure level in the blockchain industry.

Afterward, I started the project ParaState with my Co-founder which I will present today.

About ParaState

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What is the ParaState project about in a few simple sentences

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: ParaState has officially launched the public testnet, Plato, running as a standalone Substrate blockchain right now. ParaState aims to bridge the application and developer ecosystem between Polkadot and Ethereum, and other chains that want to provide Ethereum compatibilities as well, which extends the frontier of Ethereum with Substrate framework.

ParaState aims to bring Ethereum protocol support to the Polkadot ecosystem. While it is backward compatible with today’s EVM applications, it future-proofs the Ethereum protocol by bringing the LLVM and WebAssembly developer communities into the Polkadot ecosystem. It is your best choice of next-gen Web3 applications one-stop developing platform. It is Ethereum on Steroids.

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: For how long have you been working on ParaState? And how many people are on the team?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: We have more than 12 ppl and 80% are devs. We invested in the project from our own pocket for more than a year before we started fundraising last year. That’s why we can deliver things faster than other projects only having white paper before TGE.

There are 2 co-founders in ParaState. My co-founder Michael is an early employee of JBoss, which had been acquired by RedHat. JBoss is the first company that commercialized Java in the enterprise server segment successfully all over the world.

And most of our core team members are coming from the open-source community. Awarded Ethereum Foundation Grant and Web3 grant.

Q — Twitter user @meml1997: I saw that ParaState brings Ethereum protocol support to the Substrate ecosystem. Can you tell us more about it and how do you make it possible? What benefits do you obtain for your platform and users from bringing Ethereum protocol to the Substrate Ecosystem?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: While supporting EVM pallet to provide seamless compatibility to all existing Ethereum applications, ParaState also provides developers a next-gen smart contract implementation environment, EWASM (Ethereum flavoured WebAssembly).

These two infrastructures are ensured to talk to each other and sharing the same account system on ParaState. This is the differentiation ParaState provides to the developer community, to enable them to surf in the highly optimized industrial standard infrastructure and exploring brand new possibilities for the Ethereum frontier.

The EWASM is an Ethereum Foundation roadmap published in early 2019, we just fulfill it with an internal development force in advance.

ParaState can bridge the application and developer ecosystem between Ethereum and Polkadot through a unified developer community by supporting more popular programming languages, bootstrapping the cross-chain software portability.

If you are interested to dive deep into it, please head to our Medium post

Q — Telegram user tehMoonHunter ?⚡️: Has your dev team managed to break the barrier between the Web3 EVM and EWASM to achieve the perfect match between Polkadot and blockchain?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: Yes. We fulfilled more than 60% of our goals in our whitepaper when our testnet is live. Plato is a full-featured public testnet that enables smart contract deployment already. Check the tutorials here.

Q — Twitter user @MaxiVV05: In your medium’s article introducing Polis, I realized there are some paths as evangelists, citizens, and spartan. What is the aim to make this division in the ambassador program? Can a user choose the path or is it assigned by ParaState?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: We have recently announced our Ambassador program which has three key roles- total incentives $100k worth of $STATE and many other benefits for those participating.

I will explain the three categories briefly, but please refer to our Medium Post for details.

Citizens: A big part of this experiment is unlocking ideas and resources lying untapped within our community. This role is ideal for leaders with the ParaState community without a prerequisite to have an audience. Citizens should create and share content, support new node operators, oversee community building & management

Evangelists: This refers mainly to those who have established mediums, networks, and they are influencers. Among their tasks is to support ParaState, drive partner developers, organize educational workshops, and introduce ParaState to their communities.

Spartans: The role is ideal for community members with technical backgrounds or deep users of blockchain networks. The role requires running a node, deploying a smart contract on the testnet, identifying a bug, building a better explorer, or claiming a bounty. You are the guard of the ParaState Polis.

Applicants are encouraged to provide their background to apply for the above roles. The total budget of the Polis Program exceeds $100,000 in rewards! You can learn more here.

Token

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What is the token use case and how does it capture the value of the ecosystem you’re building?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: ParaState pioneers an innovative model for sustainable and decentralized open-source software development.

All Substrate blockchains that utilize the Pallet SSVM agree to collect a percentage of gas on all Ewasm transactions and contribute it to a developer treasury managed by the ParaState foundation.

The intrinsic value of the STATE token from ParaState is “backed by” a basket of native tokens of participating blockchains as ParaState gains more adoption and use.

More details can be referred to below article

Competitive Advantage

Q — Twitter user @AugustK95: I can understand that ParaState is the pioneer in an innovative model for the development of open-source software, but are there really no competitors that provide similar or even better benefits than ParaState? or is it still the only one in ETH?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: Currently I know Moonbeam, Plasm, and Clover are also aiming to provide Ethereum compatibility in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Among all these projects, only ParaState is building the virtual machine pallet from scratch by ourselves. For others, they just integrate the EVM-pallet into their parachains.

This EVM-pallet (modified edition SputnikVM to enable it running in Substrate framework) is developed by Parity. And only ParaState has EWASM production-ready.

To be honest, more and more parachains are going to integrate with the EVM-pallet like Acala, Darwinia, etc. And even some new public chains like Near, Oasis, Avalanche, and even BSC, Huobi Heco, and Okex OKT are integrating EVM to enable Ethereum compatibility to interact with the huge Ethereum ecosystem.

In a foreseeable future, there won’t be any differentiation among those projects that are integrated with the same infrastructure.

However, ParaState can provide such differentiation to the industry which is EWASM, a highly optimized, industrial standard smart contract execution environment.

Developers can explore brand new possibilities of the Ethereum frontier here while maintaining seamless compatibility with EVM applications.

Further, we prefer to say projects ie Moonbeam, Plasm, and Clover, or others that want to provide Ethereum compatibility as well, are more like collaborators than competitors.

Since we can help them to integrate with EWASM into their blockchain, they could get a high-performance runtime infra and improve user experiences, so ParaState will benefit as well.

After five years since Ethereum ICO, EVM seems still to be dominant in the VM market share in the blockchain industry. So our main goal is to bring the EWASM infra for massive adoption.

This will be a winner-take-most game.

EWASM is actually an EF official roadmap back to 2019. We just fulfil it by our internal development force and even running ahead of the ETH2.0 roadmap for a year.

Q — Telegram user Marian Merheb: Right now, not only ParaState has the goal of bringing Ethereum on Polkadot, other projects such as Clover, Moonbeam or Plasm, are aiming to provide Ethereum compatibility as well. So, what would you say are the advantages ParaState has over its competitors?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: I’d like to iterate my previous presentation again. Among all these projects, only ParaState is building the virtual machine pallet from scratch by ourselves. For others, they just integrate the EVM-pallet into their parachains. This EVM-pallet (modified edition SputnikVM to enable it running in Substrate framework) is developed by Parity. And only ParaState has EWASM production-ready.

In some simple conclusion, we can provide what Moonbeam, Clover, and Plasm do, but they can’t provide what ParaState is doing. We prefer to say projects ie Moonbeam, Plasm, and Clover or others that want to provide Ethereum compatibility as well, are more like collaborators than competitors. Since we can help them to integrate with EWASM into their blockchain, they could get a high-performance runtime infra and improve user experiences, so ParaState will benefit as well.

Financial

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: Talking about fundraising, how has it gone so far? How did you handle the funds raised? And are you planning to do any future raises?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: ParaState has raised $1.3 million in a seed fundraising round. Led by CMS Holdings, other backers including Block Dream Fund, Kenetic Capital, FBG Capital, LD Capital, JRR Capital, and SevenX ventures, etc. And we just closed a new strategic round.

The biggest breakdown of funds will be used to expand our devs force, developing the project in the long run since it’s resource-intensive.

Currently, there are no open rounds, though please subscribe to our Announcements channel since we will have a couple of announcements shortly.

Business Development

Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What stage would you say the project is at? And what should we look forward to in the coming months?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: One week ago, we launched our public testnet, Plato.

We are planning to do a 3-month warm-up before public sale and mainnet launches.

Already we get great traction with an average of 3000+ participants daily engaging to set up wallets and get faucet STATE.

We just announced the Polis Ambassador program to encourage more talents joining our community to play with Plato, deploying smart contracts and exploring bugs.

Please test yourself and provide feedback to our team

ParaState is prioritizing and emphasizing fast execution and delivery of novel research on production while committing to radical transparency and open-source values on our development journey.

Q — Telegram user Jemo Kedurang: What’s ParaState’s community-building strategy?

How does ParaState bring the community as the power of project’s support?

A — Mc0xCrypto from ParaState: ParaState is a community-driven grassroots project — with open source development values. Hence a critical role for the growth of the project will be engineered to originate from the community.

Please check our extensive Go-To-Market strategy, which is time-sensitive to solve the current pains of Blockchain developers.

Thank you for joining us today for this session, Marco. Anything else you’d like to say? Where can we follow you to stay updated? — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah

Thanks for hosting us again! Go apply for our Ambassador program if you are interested in working with ParaState in the long run. Have a good day y’all! — Mc0xCrypto from Parastate