Huge thanks to everyone who made it to our AMA on Tuesday night! Some really great questions and insights all around! We'll push to do something similar on a regular basis. For those who couldn't be there and want to catch up, here's a sightly edited for readability transcript of the Q's and A's!
Q; When will Dune be listing (on a bigger exchange)?
A; Thanks for being here and this first question. We're acting to ensure Dune is listed in a larger exchange by the end of the first semester. It's not a decision we're taking lightly and won't rush, so we'll only move forward with the right partner. Rest assured it is part of the roadmap for the near future.
Q; Hi team, about being a Bitcoin sidechain, do you have any technical stuff to share with us?
A; We are still very early in this topic, there are many issues with becoming a Bitcoin sidechain, some of them are technical, some of them are on the business side, as we will need to get more partners to create trust...
...at this point, our plans are to make Bitcoin, or "DBTC", a native coin on Dune, but Dune will still remain the main token for fees Every account and contract will have both Dune and DBTC balances, and contracts will be able to work with both tokens
Q; At present, do Dune have some customers to develop application/smart contract for their use case (web 3.0) ? There is dev team, they are focused on development, is this step done for pertinent use case on collaboration with customers (agile dev)?
A; We were really focusing our last months developing to get Dune working like it is right now. Customer acquisition wasn't our focus. Now that we’re live in production and stable, we’re starting discussions and have some pro active and interesting leads. Phase 1 was about building and launching. Phase 2 starts now, in 2020, with usage, dApps and customers joining along the way.
Q;Have Dune enough investments actually in order to achieve 2020 main objectives?
A; The Dune Foundation have been selling tokens in Jun 2019 and November 2019 in order to finance its development. Last private round to our strategic investors was priced at $0.05. We are still using these funds, and starting projects with customers to get more funds for the Origin Labs team.
Q; If I'm a company, why I will choose Dune to develop my web3.0 contract and not tezos? If both are existing? What is our advantage?
A; It's a large topic :) We have been working at making Dune easier to use for such projects. We have developed tools such as Metal (the browser extension), that can already be used to ease Dapps. We are also adding features for private deployments (projects may want to have the possibility to switch between using the public blockchain or a private one), permissioning and confidentiality for example. Love will also be a big step, it adds many features that Michelson lacks: possibility to use code from other contracts (libraries), to call "viewers" on other contracts (easier than asynchronous calls between contracts), etc. but keeping the same advantages (strong static typing and formal semantics to decrease bugs) .... ...we have a really great team, technically we have one of the best, our business partner is really good and we are open to discussion with other blockchain and different projects. This is really exciting to talk with others and start partnership. and you guys know that we are here online (discord, medium, etc.) to help people.
Q; Is Dune team confident? Have you face any brake or any slow-down or all is going the way you wanted this project go and in time you planned it?
A; Still 100% motivated and focused on building :) As said previously, we're preparing phase 2: companies onboarding, maturation of existing tools, DApps development, standardization, ... The team are friends since decades and enjoy working together everything :)
Q; Thanks for answers, I would like to know also when the upgrade is expected to be done?
A; We are doing the last tests of the upgrade, and we will announce it before the end of the week, to happen in the first days of February. The upgrade will contain the first release of Love.
Q; Are you collaborating with Polkadot project at the moment?
A; We appreciate a lot the Polkadot team, they have been at The Garage several times for meetups and other events, we also discussed with members of the Parity team. We have also discussed with the Tendermint team. Polkadot and Cosmos are high as our targets for interoperability.
Q ;Is it upgrade mandatory if we are only baker? Any limit date to upgrade as I will be off on the first 2 week of February with limited access to the Internet.
A; Yes, it will be mandatory to upgrade the baker. The code will be published this week, so you will have 2 weeks before the upgrade to restart your baker. You will just need to launch both a baker for Athen and Babylon+
Q; When the governance is going to be create? And when its role will be necessary ?
A; The onchain governance is planned for September 2020.
Q; I understand that new code, 2 bakers will need to be started? During the transition period?
A; Yes, the baker for Athen will stop automatically when Babylon+ will be activated, and the Babylon+ baker will start baking blocks at that point. There is no problem running both for 2 weeks before the upgrade block.
Q; Thanks..Other subject, what about the burning of not claimed coins? Did the Team is able to communicate something about it?
A; We are going to announce soon that undelegated tokens from the airdrop are going to be slowly burnt. It is already implemented in the next upgrade, and should start a few cycles after the upgrade.
Q; What, if any, fallout has there been from the "board member sell-off" scandal? That all happened well over a month ago. Things have been very quiet since then. What is the current state of all that happened?
A; After our investigation, we decided to stop working with the board member, and all the tokens held by the dev/biz teams have been locked for 4 years (see https://medium.com/@dune_network/long-term-stability-on-dune-network-8d1c82c83b6d ).
Q; Hi guys, thanks for the AMA. Quick question. What are the tools Dune is working on/ is going to be working on to interact with other Defi projects?
A; This is definitely an important topic for us. We are working on the infrastructure to facilitate the interaction, we are also working on token standard, stable coin, metal browser extension, etc. We are now ready to answer to the demands.
Q; What will happen to my tokens which are on the dune wallet?
A; If you have delegated your tokens, they will not be burnt. By the way, they are not on Dune Wallet, they are on the blockchain, and they can be accessed from any wallet.
Q; So, in order not to loose my tokens I need to delegate them?
A; Dune is a proof-of-stake network, holders of tokens have to participate in the network for the good health of the network. Holders should either run their own baker, or delegate to an existing baker, to make the network stronger, so yes.
Q; If my dune coin are not baking or not delegate . But have recent withdraw, will it be burnt? What is the condition for a token to be burnt?
A; We will give all the details in the post at the end of this week. Only accounts that have never done a transfer and are not delegated will be burnt, and the burn will be slow (about 10% every month).
Q; Dune Notarize dapp was discussed in Stakerdao telegram. Perhaps Dune project can collaborate with Stakerdao in the future?
A; We were not aware about that, but we are open to collaboration like we said.
Q; As a C/C++/PHP/Go/Python/JS programmer, I find ocaml to be extremely difficult to comprehend. The syntax is so far removed from these "traditional languages". Are there plans to create any "higher level" languages that are more familiar to developers? I ran through the CryptoZombies tutorial on ETH and it was amazingly simple and easy to understand because Solidity is so close to JS.
A; Yes, Liquidity already has ReasonML (a JS like syntax). This will compile down to both Michelson and and Love. There are also plans to add more native smart contract languages in Python and/or Solidity syntaxes ...
Q; Any chance in making a pegged BEP3?
A; We will probably implement something around these lines for Bitcoin, every DBTC will be pegged on the Bitcoin blockchain
Q; So Dune aims to become a Bitcoin sidechain and to bring smart contracts to Bitcoin that way. What projects are competitors? Rootstock?
A; RST and Liquid are similar projects, but they don't bring the reliability/viability of Dune yet, they have started before us, they are a good source of inspiration.
Q; With the plan to burn unclaimed/undelegated tokens, is there a plan to change the current bond ratio required from bakers? Also, should we assume the burn (10%/month) will impact the calculation of staking ratio
A; 1) not currently, 2) this will impact the global staking ratio but will not make bakers over-delegated
Q; How coins will be burnt? There balance will progressively disappear without any transaction?
A; Yes.
Q; When is the next fundraiser for your angel investors? can we know a little more about future partnerships?
A; There is no open fundraiser for the moment. Public partnerships are already known (The garage for instances), Ongoing ones will be announced in due time
Q; Dune has what I believe are truly some of the best devs in this space, hence my involvement. What is the business side roadmap? What will 2020 bring? What are the main focuses going ahead, and what foreseeable obstacles are there to overcome Next steps for The Garage? When will we begin to see incubation, on-boarding of projects, etc?
A; There are already projects being onboarded in The Garage, and we have already started working with some of them on Dune. 2020 will be an exciting year, 2019 was the year of birth, we hope 2020 will be the year for Dune to enter the grown-up age.
