On Tuesday Oct6, 6PM SGT, SSL and Zilliqa held an AMA to the SSL community in regards of their recently announced collaboration. Colin JG Miles (Co-CEO), Han Wen (Senior VP Ecosystem Development) and Milan Shoukri (Marketing manager) of Zilliqa joined us to answer all of the community’s questions as well as giving a look into the future of Zilliqa and SSL. During the AMA, $ZIL rewards were given by Zilliqa’s Telegram wallet bot ‘Zeeves’ for users who came up with good questions.
Han, you have quickly become a household name in crypto. Most of us here know you and the team but why don’t we start off the AMA with an introduction about yourself and the team.
(HW) Hey all! Haha I am not a household name. But thanks for the compliment. We are the core team behind Zilliqa blockchain, the world’s first sharded blockchain launched in Jan 2019. We are currently a team of 32 and growing, building the infrastructure for it and working with the community to build Dapps within Zilliqa’s ecosystem. Some of you might have used some of these Dapps, including UnstoppableDomains, ZilSwap, and Mintable. The goal has always been to build a healthy ecosystem of dApps in the mini-economy of Zilliqa. Powered by $ZIL.
Thanks for the introduction, Han! Many people have already called you “Oracle of Singapore”. How do you feel about that?
(HW) Haha I hope I can be that! (laughs)
With regards to the AMA, one of the most buzzing questions here is to know what your first impression was when you came to know about this project since It was basically a meme project with zero utility. How did CF (red. SSL founder Crazyfrog) approach you guys in such a short span of time?
(HW) I got to know about SSL during our first meetup over drinks with the frog. The frog is determined to create usecases around the SSL token, and we are happy to provide advice and suggestions to how the Dapp powered by SSL can look like. There we concocted the plan around using SocialPay to distribute SERGS token and the NFT rarity farming (with YOU, JUST, WIN tokens) with staked SERGS. It is a crazy project but rlly fun!
To us, we are not hard pinned on only supporting enterprise projects. We are happy to work with community-drive projects like this one, especially if they are interested in building on top of Zilliqa. You have to have some craziness to have innovation. (laughs) Also, I hold some LINK so…
Many of our community members over here were impressed with the SocialPay + NFT concept. SocialPay was a crazy social campaigning back in May when Zilliqa did the pilot rollout. How do you think it will bring more exposure to our project and what’s your take on NFT’s future?
(HW) I think SocialPay’s use case can be expanded beyond just rewarding Tweeters $ZIL. It can theoretically support any ZRC2 tokens, and changing the codebase to do so will not be difficult. I am bullish on micro-rewarding potential users of the dApp as a form of viral marketing. It can change the way advertising works, in the sense that you are not free for advertising companies to exploit, but you are interacting directly with the product owners and getting rewarded for your engagements.
Distribution of SERGS via SocialPay will be a good proving ground of that! And I am very glad to see the warm response to it. Looking forward to more community members in Zilliqa launching their very own coin distribution campaigns in the future.
As for NFTs, I think collectibles on blockchain is just beginning. It will take a while for the concept to take hold in mainstream users’ mind, but we already are seeing some breakthrough apps reaching wider audiences (such as CryptoKitties and NBA Hotshot). I am quite bullish on it becoming a viable marketplace for creative artists to sell their creation on the blockchain.
So the possibilities with NFTs could seem endless and very exciting?
(HW) Yes, NFTs that are tied to real world assets is something very interesting. If provenance is done right, maybe via Chainlink! (laughs) These art assets that are worth millions can be ported to the digital world. Ownership of such NFTs can be also be fractionalized and distributed if it is held by a DAO, and the DAO issues the ownership tokens.
One last question for you before we ask frog a few and open it up to the community. We understand that scilla is a programming language similar to solidity, which is getting its adoption pretty fast with more devs building on Zilchain.. what’s your take on the SSL NFT dApp that’s built on the ZIL platform, and how is the Zilliqa team assisting us in terms of development?
(HW) Actually, Scilla is a language that is very different from Solidity. Scilla is a functional language, while Solidity is Object-Oriented. They both have their pros and cons, but our belief at Zilliqa is that a functional language provides much better security guarantees, and that is crucial in smart contract development. We can’t afford mistakes like in normal development world.
That is one of our pain points though because developers have to learn this new language from scratch, and we have gone out of our way to provide all developers the materials, templates and courses required to get them accustomed to Scilla. ZILHive is our through-train programn that educates individuals, give them grants and help them find PMF throughout their journey with us.
As for SSL NFT Dapp, we are helping the frog with providing the codebase required to launch a SocialPay campaign, tweaking it to suit distribution of SERGS instead of ZIL. 2nd, we will provide technical advice on how the rarity farming of the YOU, JUST, WIN tokens will work. Third, we are helping the frog to liaise with our community devs to develop the rarity farming and NFT creation mechanism.
Here’s a question for you Mr. Frog. We are super impressed and excited with the interoperability bridge in play in SSL ecosystem. That is something nobody in crypto space have experienced yet. How does that bridge work. And how is the SSL incentive treasury converted into LINK for SSL holders via the bridge?
(CF) Interoperability is something challenging and not met by anyone so far yet. Currently Zilliqa team is working with Switcheo to build the bridge between two different chain, which is Zil and Eth. There will be two contracts in both the chain which does the interoperability between BUSD and zBUSD. It’s a Binance USD stable coin. So the swapping of 25% of fees will take place between this two contracts via the bridge. In short, contract swaps the fees to LINK.
Whenever people buy BUSD in the eth chain, the contract actually mints zBUSD in Zilchain. It’s automated. That’s how they are building the bridge with Binance USD stable coin.
Interoperability and scaling are definitely two of the hottest to do things in the cryptoverse. It’s super exciting that multiple ecosystems can function under one umbrella. The possibilities again are endless. Also, a serious reduction of the gas fees are also in play since that’s been an issue in DeFi.
Final question for you Mr. Frog , The community is excited for the SocialPay and NFT to go live. Can you drop a few bread crumbs regarding it ? Can we expect a surprise this Halloween ?
(CF) Yes, we all know that crypto is a fast moving space! Investors/Community always expect things to go live asap!
But they have to also understand development take some time. I have engaged Zilliqa’s community developers for assistance with the dApp. I will be working with them to get this ready. This will be done in phases. Aiming to get SocialPay rolled out in 2 weeks latest or earlier than that. Followed by staking + NFT !
We are in good hands now with a very good team. Give us the time required for development and we will deliver it! Cheers.
Well Rome wasn’t built in a day. Patience and time are the need of the hour. There has been steady growth and progress since day one when it started off as a meme and now we have some of the esteemed members of an industry leader doing an AMA with us.
Gentlemen, I would like to thank you for attending this AMA and giving our community some more insights of what’s to come!
