Comprehensive AMA in ARPA’s English Community
On November 28, ARPA’s cofounder Felix Xu and Yemu Xu conducted a comprehensive Q & A session in ARPA’s.
The AMA was broken into 2 parts. In part 1, Yemu and Felix answered the questions that were pre-collected from the community, the community was muted. In part 2, the group chat was unmuted to raise any questions they had. Our community manager, Thomas, moderated the whole AMA.
In case you missed the AMA, here’s the recap.
— Chat is MUTED —
Thomas: Welcome Felix and Yemu maybe a small introduction, although everyone knows who you are and let’s move to the questions that were collected from the community.
Felix: Hey guys, I can also do audio if you guys are tired of reading typed messages.
Thomas: We will also make a summary after wards :)
Felix: I’m in Thailand for blockchain week and Yemu is in Turkey.
Yemu: Hey guys, Yemu here, cofounder & CGO @ARPA. Just arrived in Turkey to meet local crypto circle and community here. @felixxu I will introduce today’s format a real quick?
There will be 2 parts in this AMA.
1) Chat is muted. Felix and I will answer the questions from the form that you guys filled out.
2) After that we will open up the floor for freestyle Q & A. Sounds good?
Yemu: Basically after Binance listing there are lots of questions from the community and we find that it’s very necessary to do an thorough AMA to clear the cloud and to strengthen the confidence in the community
We will do our best to keep the communication channel clear and smooth between the team and our supporters.
Q1: After listing on Binance exchange, the ARPA token price continuously dropped, did the ARPA team sell off the ARPA token to take profit?
Felix: First I will address on circulation and tokens.
ARPA is 1.5 years old now. We founded in April 2018 and many partners have been with us for a very long time.
Team token is 20% of total or 400m ARPA, quarterly release over 2 years starting July 27th 2020. When we did our TGE in April 2019 for first exchange listing, all team members decided to extend for another year, governed by smart contract. So no team part of tokens are available until July 27th 2020. The release will last for 8 quarters.
Tokens for foundation, ecosystem and private sales are released according to schedule. We started with English and Chinese communities but now have 8 language groups. In future we will penetrate into more countries and markets. Yemu will address on this later.
Foundation tokens are used mostly for airdrops, marketing campaigns, events for vendors etc.. Ecosystem tokens are distributed to corporate partners, advisors and key external BD personnel to bring more attention from enterprise side, which we are working on pilot programs and early products.
Please keep in mind that ARPA is under development for over 1.5 years, and our partners and private sale investors do need some liquidity.
Q2: What is the exact current circulating supply?
Felix: Sure. Binance’s report has circulation in percentage. Please check this link. I will also post exact number here as well.
https://info.binance.com/en/research/ARPA-2019-10-25.html
The current circulation is 631.6 million ARPA, which gives ARPA a 7.7 million USDT market cap, relatively small compared to some other tokens/coins on Binance. I believe as more people and enterprises using ARPA, our cap should grow.
I would also like to apologize for the delay in Binance Info page. We forgot to submit the latest info prior to listing. And after the listing Binance had some technical issues to update the correct circulation.
Q3: What is the next plan of ARPA team to restore community trust with ARPA token?
Yemu: ARPA is a tech-driven project with a long-term vision to revolutionize the data industry. Born in April 2018, we are still young but we are honest, forth-coming and never-resting.
We are working relentlessly to raise the awareness globally about MPC, privacy-preserving computation and APRA. This past month and December we have done a lot, which I will elaborate in more detail next. We will mainly focus on 3 crypto markets outside of our base: Korea, Vietnam and Turkey.
We have been invited to Thailand Blockchain Week on Dec 1.
- We were invited to join the Disrupters panel at the Blockchain Thoughts Leadership Conference in Bangkok on November 29th. Bitmain, Bitkub, btc.com and Matic Network are also attending.
- ARPA will be co-hosting the Exchanges Night meetup in Bangkok on November 30th with WXY group, Forber and MXC.
ARPA will speak at Korean Fintech Summit hosted by IT Chosun on Dec 5. ARPA CEO Felix, R3, Kakao Bank, Woori Bank, Baidu, Samsung, Nestle will give speeches on various topics.
ARPA will be co-hosting meetup in Seoul with Gate.io on December 9th, more info to come soon.
Korea’s leading crypto platform Cobak has joined as ARPA’s supernode program. Cobak is ARPA’s first Korean-based supernode and will help ARPA increase awareness in Korean market. ARPA is also Cobak’s first-ever project that it became supernode for.
I am currently in Turkey to meet the local entrepreneurs and crypto/blockchain communities here. Turkey is one of our most interested markets and we will make some noise there soon.
In December we will have our milestone event — mainnet launch. The mainnet launch is still on track and we will make the detailed announcement on December 23rd.
We are also planning on a trading competition with Binance, most likely in mid- to late-December but we will have to work with Binance’s schedule. More to come on that date as soon as we have updates from them.
Felix: Let me add something.
Global events are important to raise awareness for ARPA and privacy-preserving computation, to attract computation nodes and developers interested in ARPA upon mainnet v0.1.
As many of you know, ARPA helped China’s CAICT to draft multiparty computation standard along with Ant Financial, Baidu etc., We are currently invited to contribute on global level standard for MPC as well.
http://databench.cn/evaluate?standard_id=2158678246588314
ARPA is now working with leading companies in IEEE, and a IEEE SA member for standardization.
https://standards.ieee.org/about/corpchan/mbrs1.html
On open protocol for cryptographic algorithms, we work with COSIC at Leuven University directed by Professor Nigel Smart since the very beginning. His student Dragos Rotaru is our researcher. We are working towards a partnership with the state of the art SCALE MPC with Leuven.
So really next step for ARPA is to do two things — 1) raise awareness to enterprises and crypto community about ARPA and multiparty computation. 2) contribute to standardization and open protocol.
Q4: Recently, many coins have been delisted from exchanges. How do you plan to prevent this from happening?
Yemu: Recently there’s been a crackdown from the Chinese financial regulation authorities on crypto. Some serious actions and measures have been taken. These have been mainly targeting at unregulated, small and scammy exchanges and projects that have ties with ponzi schemes. This is what I believe one of the main contributions to the market slide the past few weeks.
ARPA is a tech-driven project and has been listed on some of the largest exchanges in the world — Binance, Huobi, CoinOne, Gate.io, KuCoin, MXC and there will be more. Huobi announced that it it will re-do DD on over 200 projects to re-evaluate their listing status, but I am sure ARPA will pass with high-flying scores. I haven’t heard any delistings from Binance. ARPA will not be delisted from any major exchanges in the foreseeable future.
Felix: Blockchain tech is encouraged by Chinese gov, as well as innovation in data privacy tech.
Brief history about China’s data privacy legislation: China introduced its Cybersecurity Law (CSL) in June 2017, the first of its kind serving as a “Basic Law” at the macro level. CSL bans network operators from gathering certain types of data, bans sharing identifiable data without consent, and requires companies to safeguard personal data.
In March 2018, the Personal Information Security Specification covers the collection, storage, use, sharing, transfer, and disclosure of personal information and recommended best practice.
Increasing calls to set comprehensive standards for data protection in line with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
For blockchain: October 24, 2019, President Xi Jinping underscores blockchain a core tech innovation. Xi highlighted blockchain for data sharing of gov data across departments and regions.
To sum it up, 1) FUD is not the case for ARPA and no exchange will delist us. 2) Crackdown for ponzi is good for ARPA as the industry is getting healthier.
Q5: Will mainnet be on time? And what will happen with ERC-20 and BEP-2 tokens?
Felix: Short answer is yes.
Before going into mainnet details, I would like to remind everyone that ARPA is a layer 2 computation network for privacy-preserving computation, enabled by cryptographic Multi-Party Computation (“MPC”).
Our goal is to enable developers building privacy-preserving dApps on Ethereum and other blockchains with ARPA protocol. Some immediate use cases include: credit anti-fraud, secure data wallet, precision marketing, joint AI model training, key management systems, etc. For example, banks using the ARPA network can share their credit blacklist with each other for risk management purposes without exposing their customer data or privacy.
ARPA has always been part of Ethereum ecosystem. And mainnet token for ARPA is still ERC-20.
For BEP-2, we will activate a bridge between ERC-20 and BEP-2 tokens to convert freely. For mainnet v0.1 that is going to be released in late December, exact date TBD.
Users can join ARPA computation network to perform MPC tasks and earn bootstrapping rewards with mainnet v0.1.
Q6: Suppose that a company has partnered with ARPA and started sharing data. A crime has been committed in the country where the company is located, and the crime-related data is available to the company but does not accept sharing of it in his country. What is your approach when that country applies to you to obtain data for a crime committed?
Felix: Interesting question, data is never revealed to “me” or ARPA team or ARPA company. We provide infra for secure data exchange / data sharing / data renting but don’t collect data as a middleman in any way.
So in this case the gov has to go after the company that has the data.
Part 2: Community Q & A
Q1: Until now I still hold ARPA in my wallet, there was a doubt when the value of ARPA dropped dramatically. To convince us, is there a relationship between the recent riots in Hong Kong and the decline in ARPA prices? What is the main priority at end of year 2019?
Felix: A lot of things are going on in China and Asia creating fear in market. Chinese gov crackdown on exchanges, ponzi projects, turmoil in HK region etc. The crackdown of BISS exchange (where we first get listed) made some people to question if ARPA is going to be affected. The answer is NO. China is supporting blockchain tech and we are the leading player in MPC standarization and adoption.
The main priorities are mainnet release, offline events and trading competition for the rest of the year. It’s going to be very busy times for us.
Q2: As I read in your Roadmap, could you please tell us more about, “Proof of concept” & its utility?
Felix: proof of concept means early product development to testify if the concept makes sense, and to find product market fit. For example we work on black list sharing across financial institutions together with JD Digital (fintech division of JD.com, second largest ecommerce co in China). JD is the industry expert and we provide tech in MPC.
Proof of concept is NOT our consensus mechanism.
Our consensus algorithm is the verifiable computation characteristics of Multiparty Computation cryptography. Basically the correctness the ensured following the protocol given there is ONLY ONE honest party within a single computation task. Therefore MPC is very powerful. Think of blockchain as a set of trustless nodes together to maintain a ledger. MPC is a set of trustless nodes together to analyze on private data. Both MPC and blockchain are decentralized.
Q3: When you are planning to visit middle east? The market here is huge and data privacy and blockchain are in demand.
Yemu: Hi King Kava! We are making our best efforts to increase global user adoption as we believe a strong, international, and diverse user base is essential for crypto projects and even for all future enterprises — that’s also the beauty of blockchain. I am currently in Turkey and we plan to expand into Turkish market very soon. So far we have relatively little knowledge about the Middle East market but it is indeed one of our future main focuses. There are several reasons for this.
Innovation is longed for in the middle east. Capital-rich governments are trying to open up for human capital and global enterprises. In the past, natural resources are what middle east is proud of. In the information age, data is the new oil and there is no way that the middle east countries will let this opportunity slide. I am pretty confident that the regulators here will set the bar for both data and crypto regulations.
Q4: You have clients that is using the ARPA technology?
Felix: Yes! We work with Sinochem Energy, a Fortune 100 company, and JD Digital, fintech division of JD.com, second largest ecommerce co in China. For MPC standard we work with Ant Financial and Baidu. The standard is the first-ever in China and is going to implemented to whole industry
Q5: What’s the team size?
Yemu: We have 10 ppl full time team and 5 researchers who are in KU Leuven, Aarhus University, Zhejiang University, NYU and HK Poly Tech University.
Q6: When Binance stake?
Yemu: If our community calls for it we will talk to Binance to get it on. Currently staking is live on Huobi, gate.io and mxc.com.
Q7: So what is the impact of this technology on individuals? As ordinary people, how do I sense the changes brought about by ARPA?
Felix: The immediate benefit for ARPA fans is to join computation network and earn bootstrapping rewards as 1st batch of computation nodes.
We are currently more enterprise-facing. But future use case for individual (and our ultimate goal) is personal data wallet to let vendor perform analysis on your data, and you can earn token without worrying data leakage.
Q8: Will Mainnet be postponed?
Felix: Mainnet v0.1 will be delievered on time this year
Q9: What will drive the price of ARPA token to benefit the investors?
Felix: 1) Demand from enterprise side — currently our Chinese corporate partners only pay fiat not crypto, so we do burning token on a monthly basis. In future we will introduce a more suitable burning mechanism when more people use ARPA via Ethereum. 2) Global community building and awareness. Currently ARPA’s market cap is still low. 3) More computation node providers, computation nodes need to lockup certain amount of ARPA. 4) Developers to contribute on MPC cryptographic algorithm.
Q10: What’s your plan after Binance?
Yemu: In short, global user adoption via online marketing, offline meetups and campaigns, enterprise partnerships, international MPC and blockchain-related standard-setting. In terms of exchanges, we will continue to get on large exchanges.
Q11: Will you broadcast your events live in Thailand and Korea?
Felix: I am alone in Thailand so broadcasting is going to be hard. But we will send out pictures. For Chosun Korean conference we can record video and send out. Or if you have any broadcasting app, we would love to try
Q12: It is spoken in many places where it is very clear for the future of the project, and there will be, but there are countries and places that see you as an intelligence organization. What do you want to say about it? Thank you.
Felix: That is exactly what we are working on now. Data privacy is turning to hot issue recently with regulations in China and US kicking in. Governments and enterprises are looking to solutions and MPC is a potential one.
Yemu: ARPA merely provides a safe, secure and private data sharing and computation infrastructure. Data is never revealed to us during the sharing process. We provide infra for secure data exchange / data sharing / data renting but don’t collect data as a middleman in any way. With open-source plans in the future, we can be well scrutinized for every line of code with micro scopes. That is self-evident.
Thomas: Looks like our time is up. It’s time to conclude our AMA today.
Yemu: Great! We are so glad to see so many of you have waited for and participated in this AMA. Thank you all for your support and please continue to do so!
Felix: Again thanks for all the questions you have, please be confident that ARPA will rise as a global project for data privacy.
Thomas: Thank you all for participating in the AMA a summary will be made later. It was a very detailed AMA !: )
About ARPA
ARPA is committed to providing secure data transfer solutions based on cryptographic operations for businesses and individuals.
The ARPA secure multi-party computing network can be used as a protocol layer to implement privacy computing capabilities for public chains, and it enables developers to build efficient, secure, and data-protected business applications on private smart contracts. Enterprise and personal data can, therefore, be analyzed securely on the ARPA computing network without fear of exposing the data to any third party.
ARPA’s multi-party computing technology supports secure data markets, precision marketing, credit score calculations, and even the safe realization of personal data.
ARPA’s core team is international, with PhDs in cryptography from Tsinghua University, experienced systems engineers from Google, Uber, Amazon, Huawei and Mitsubishi, blockchain experts from the University of Tokyo, AIG, and the World Bank. We also have hired data scientists from CircleUp, as well as financial and data professionals from Fosun and Fidelity Investments.
For more information about ARPA, or to join our team, please contact us at about@arpachain.io or reach us at:
Learn about ARPA’s recent official news：
Telegram (English): https://t.me/arpa_community
Telegram (Việt Nam): https://t.me/ARPAVietnam
Telegram (Russian): https://t.me/arpa_community_ru
Telegram (Indonesian): https://t.me/Arpa_Indonesia
Telegram (Thai): https://t.me/Arpa_Thai
Telegram (Philippines):https://t.me/ARPA_Philippines
Telegram (Turkish): https://t.me/Arpa_Turkey
Korean Chats: https://open.kakao.com/o/giExbhmb (Kakao) & https://t.me/arpakoreanofficial (Telegram, new)
Medium: https://medium.com/@arpa
Twitter: @arpaofficial
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/arpachain/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ARPA-317434982266680/54
