On Tuesday June 9 we had the pleasure of hosting a TomoChain AMA in our Telegram group. The turnout was excellent and in total we gave away $700 in TOMO during the AMA. Thanks to the TomoChain team for dedicating their time to tell our community a bit more about their business.
Below is a summary of the AMA.
Part one
In the first part of the AMA the Trust Wallet team threw some questions at TomoChain so the participants could learn what they are all about. Following this was a short quiz which gave those present the chance to win TOMO.
Today I have Long Vuong, Founder and CEO at TomoChain and Kyn Chaturvedi, Chief Business Development Officer at TomoChain here with me. Please can you introduce yourselves and give us an overview on TomoChain?
Long Vuong is CEO and founder of TomoChain. Prior, Long Vuong was co-founder and the former project lead of NEM blockchain (New Economy Movement) back in 2014. PhD candidate in economics, Massachusetts, U.S.
Kyn Chaturvedi is Chief Business Development Officer for TomoChain. Professional Game Designer and Producer as well as Game-related tech entrepreneur. Full-time blockchain evangelist. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and dual B.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering & Economics from Georgia Tech.
TomoChain is a scalable blockchain, powered via Proof-of-Stake Voting consensus and used commercially by companies globally.
TomoChain’s technology and DeFi (Decentralized Finance)-focused flagship products include:
- Fast & Near-Zero Fees: 2000 TPS, 2-second block-time, ~$0 gas fees, and EVM compatible;
- An array of original features and protocols is designed to support speed, privacy, usability, and liquidity needs all in one platform.
What is the TomoChain vision and mission? Can you share more about TomoChain DeFi-focused flagship products?
Our goals is to build a more transparent, global and trust-worthy financial infrastructures. I believe finance is the next sector to be transformed by the Internet and the ledger technology, and consequently the transformation will create more values, transparency, and efficiency to everyone. TomoX is our latest client upgrade that enables an on-chain matching engine, and stores order books for P2P trading and lending. Many applications can be built upon TomoX, and we wrote a series of articles on TomoX’s applications in our blog.
What is your business strategy to get more investors/users since you develop many products and protocols?
Everything we do is about unlocking financial value in a way that can empower businesses to provide unique solutions to their customers through the TomoChain Blockchain.
We want billions to be using Blockchain, but we don’t believe that means every single person needs to understand the underlying technology as it is today within the crypto space. For example, in the 1990’s to be computer literate you needed to understand command lines, program compatibility, and even how to handle IRQ values when installing hardware devices like Printers. Today, smartphone tech is so user friendly that installing and using the Facebook App is done by our grandparents’ generation with relative ease. Experiences interfacing with blockchain needs to be as simple and straightforward.
So, TomoChain is being built to empower businesses to operate with the benefits of blockchain while hiding the friction of the technology itself for their customers. Super fast transactions, no need to hold native TOMO tokens to pay gas fees for stable coins as an example, privacy features to protect users, and the ability to buy, sell, lend, and borrow in a trustless manner.
And the approach has been working. For example, a company called Coin98 launched a mobile app powered by their own TomoChain token, C98. They have over 100,000 users using that token to purchase products and pay for services. Every transaction uses our blockchain but for Coin98 users, they don’t need to be concerned with that.
We’re working with key players interested in building out entire NFT marketplaces that allow users to control the content they produce and allow some of the largest brands in the world the ability to issue unique digital items. The items may reside on blockchain, but the end user won’t have to deal with the technical mess.
And, of course, we just introduced TomoX, the first turnkey solution to launch a DEX in minutes. We are currently working closely with over a dozen Operators who launching exchanges across the globe, from Japan to Turkey to Canada. Each DEX is run on top of TomoChain, and, again, does not require users to hold TOMO to access or trade value.
The beauty of the technology is though we mask blockchain, the use of our token TOMO is always used to pay gas fees in the background for all work done. That means as more businesses and their customers utilize TomoChain, the greater the need and use of TOMO.
Let’s talk about the latest product built by the TOMO team. Can you introduce TomoDEX and its advanced features that differentiate it from other DEXs?
TomoDex is a DEX and P2P lending platform building on TomoX-SDK and TomoChain. It is a user-custodial exchange and very secure as there is no single party holding all of user assets. Meanwhile it is still very fast, and user-friendly as it uses very fast 2-second block TomoChain. The P2P lending is entirely automated via TomoX and smart-contracts which reduces the cost of operation to a minimum. It currently provides fixed-term USDT loans of 1, 7, 30 and 90 days based on interest rate and position which is different from most of the lending/ borrowing pools on Ethereum. Borrowers can flexibly back their loans through a choice of collateral like BTC, ETH, TOMO etc. We will add more assets to TomoDex in the future. All the softwares are open sources and there is a full set of APIs for developers.
What is your plan to attract users to come and use TomoDEX?
Part of attracting users is in providing a unique service that can’t really be found anywhere else.
As Long mentioned, on TomoDEX, we just launched Lending this past Saturday. Borrowers can back a USDT loan by their choice of collateral – BTC, ETH, and TOMO. And we already have lenders earning 18% for lending out USDT. That’s 18% in DeFi.
We’re planning to list more quality projects and enable lending for them to open new use cases & value to their communities. I’d love to see dozens of quality tokens available as collateral to back loans in this way.
Another key component is enabling fiat on/off ramp on TomoDEX. This, I’m sure, will be incredibly attractive for those seeking alternatives from the standard fiat ramps of centralized exchanges.
TomoChain is still completing work on TomoDEX but we are still conducting a variety of competitions to attract users. Once the important features are implemented and the system is purring, we’ll be putting a lot more marketing muscle behind user acquisition for TomoDEX.
Part two
In this part of the AMA we opened the chat to give the community the chance to ask the TomoChain team some questions. Here’s what was asked and answered.
Who will have the final say in development and business decisions? How much will the elected representatives be able to influence when it comes to business and development decisions? Will the the company have some kind of veto when it comes to decision?
TomoChain is an open decentralized network in which all participants can contribute and do businesses without restrictions. TomoChain Pte. Ltd. is the founder and core developer of the core client. We are also running a few products in TomoChain ecosystem such as wallets, DEX. You can look at the Ethereum network and TomoChain as similar.
Southeast Asia is a very challenging market and many are competing campaigns here to attract investors, users and grow, with TOMO do you see how Southeast Asia is and do you plan to develop & update here?
The great thing about Southeast Asia is we’re the largest public blockchain in the space. As a result there has been incredibly interest from various players in the industry to partner together. Being a first mover here, and having strong business partnerships is a great start. And considering SEA is the hottest market right now, we’re in great shape
Stablecoins in Tomo, is there something to tell us? so that DeFis on Tomochain can be feasible.
There is ERC21 USDT on TomoChain. We will bring other stablecoin such as BUSD to the ecosystem in the future.
How does Tomochain achieve a speed of 2 seconds per block and have almost 0 $ gas fees?
In short, we use a different consensus protocol called PoSV, and optimize the network a lot. Feel free to check out our technical paper and our open source Github repo for more detailed technical answers.
TomoChain is constantly criticized for not doing marketing or being inadequate in this regard.
But I think the team will do aggressive marketing after getting the basic products completely ready. So it seems that when you eliminated TomoDex’s bugs and when you launch TomoP mainnet, you gonna start it. So if I am right; after taking these steps you gonna start aggressive marketing; will you especially target Asian countries or Europe and the USA also be in the list?
TomoChain came into being during the bear market. As a result we spent considerable time focusing on building our product while working to gain a solid, organic community. If you look at our validators, they include CoinGecko, NGC, KuCoin, Binance, Xangle, and other key blockchain players. So the work we’ve done has really built up our credibility across the space.
This approach has allowed us to expand our runway to continue developing for the next few years as well. And once our product development of TomoX is completed, as well as TomoP and other products planned for launch, we’ll be in a great position to do heavier marketing/BD.
What are the ways that TOMO generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model ? How can it make benefit win-win to both invester and your project?
We have an enterprise and services business as well, called TomoChain Japan, based out of Tokyo. We work on developing solutions for businesses in healthcare, automotive, food, and others. We also help businesses launch exchanges, design their tokenomics, and wallets. This allows us to operate as a business, not just a funded project
Can you introduce some information about TomoX protocol? What is Relayer-Masternode and why is it necessary in TomoChain?
It is best that you consult our introduction and TomoX’s paper here.
Since the TomoChain company was created until now, how many Dapps have they built? Is Dapps one of your main goals today?
What idea do you provide to attract developers to create Dapps on your platform?
Building applications on top of TomoChain is certainly important. The way we look at it is they can be “Dapps” or standard “Apps” that simply plug into our ecosystem. It’ll be possible for companies to build typical finance mobile apps and plug them into our DeFi protocols, like TomoX to trade value and provide lending/borrowing. This increases the potential for applications to be built on blockchain and opens the doors to allow the masses to use it even if they don’t realize it’s “blockchain”.
Will the pomo token be included in the dex tomochain?
If it has value it will be listed in due time.
Tomochain has 150 open relayers slots. How can Tomo keep up with Ox as you’re a latecomer?
0x is slower, but I think both has strengths, and users can choose which one they like and use it.
A large amount of investors prefer to use centralized exchanges to trade now. Tomodex is a DEX and how can you guys do the promotion about the Tomodex ?& What is your opinion on Dex Vs Cex?
Coinbase recently released an article which stated that DEXs are a major threat to Centralized Exchanges. The key is in providing the same experience (fast and easy), fiat on ramp/off ramp, while providing the added security of being non-custodial to begin with. But then there have to be other hooks. For us we just introduced a unique form of lending as an example. And there will be more innovations coming too.
DEXs on TomoX also share liquidity so it makes it easy to launch an exchange so we have the ability to scale overall through collective efforts.
Tomochain is known as an ecosystem that can support many industries, such as finance, games, etc, it confuses your customers and potential partners to find the main goal. Can you tell us which priority product you are developing and what are the difficulties in its development?
Finance is the public chain primary focus. P2PLending is an exciting application we have. We will try to do more in the future.
Can I have some statistics on how many transactions are processed since mainnet launch, or average/month?
You can check it on https://scan.tomochain.com/; Beside regular txs, TomoChain also processed matching txs for TomoX.
For me it’s an incredible pleasure as a videogame fan, have in this AMA someone who worked in the industry as Game Designer, currently many blockchain projects have a specific niche in the development of games, many bet on VR, EGames, RPGs and Dapps Games, What kind of development video game Tomochain have a good potential?
Absolutely, Blockchain and Games can really go hand in hand. In my view the problem always comes down to not being able to give gamers an easy experience. Managing blockchain tokens, gas fees, and understanding the entire blockchain ecosystem is just too much.
When reading through Dapp Radar’s Dapp Review 2019 they stated that Games represented the largest # of transactions on the Ethereum network over anything else. So there is real potential here if we can reach the masses.
We have a small group inhouse that is working with game devs on TomoChain to make it easier for anyone to play blockchain games. It’s a passion project for me.
One thing I’m seeing are innovations around NFTs, including augmented reality games using them. You can win and collect 3D figures of your fav characters as an example. Simple tech demos but it’s proving the power of the tech.
Very few Vietnam projects are as successful as Tomochian, so what is the reason? Is Tomochian planning to cooperate with a number of Vietnam projects to develop together?
Vietnam is a major economy for crypto. We are in the Top 5 for Binance and Huobi as daily active users on their platforms. So a large part of what we do is focus on Vietnam, and partner with the right entities. We advise the government on crypto regulation, and are exploring utilizing blockchain with the Ministry of Education too (i.e. Digital Certificates). There is a lot that can be done.
However success has little to do with being from Vietnam. It has everything to do with the right idea and finding market fit.
Few users use DeFi. What strategy does TomoChain have to get many more people to start using it?
DeFI is small, but it is growing. We try to build products that normal users can use and receive values from, and that is the key thing to move the DeFI space forward.
As China is the largest democracy in the world, how you are seeing China Market for project adoption and growth? Recently, #tomochain has partnership with #Neo, what are the advantages?
Due to the growth of SEA we have developed multiple partners in China, from Blockchain companies to the Media. Neo is one them. All of these entities are looking to enter Vietnam and we’re looking to grow further in China. So there is a strong symbiotic relationship here, since as you pointed out, China is a major market for growth.
The other market we’re looking at is India. We recently listed on CoinDCX and WazirX, and that market is growing massively now that things have legally opened up again.
For creating DApps, Why should any developer choose Tomochain instead of any other Blockchain? What are the additional benefits are provided by Tomochain than other Blockchains?
That’s a good question. I think developers should choose TomoChain because using TomoChain will make your dapp more reponsive to users (2s block time versus 15 second block time on Ethereum), and it will cost you less money to make on-chain txs (~ zero versus 0.2 cent per tx on Ethereum). Besides that our team and community will support your dapps as much as we can.
At the moment, there was a lot of blockchain tech that offer fast and secure tps. And in my opinion utility adoption will the be main role to chose which blockchain going to stay. So my question is how you will provide more utility rather than other blockchain or how you ensure developer to use your blockchain rather than other?
What role do you think TOMO plays in increasing the adaptability of the blockchain on the global stage? How TOMO solves Interoperability problem? with Which blockchains, TOMO is interoperatable?
Can you elaborate on the product and comment on the amount of interest with individuals/businesses you’re seeing in this product?
Our blockchain operates at 2000 TPS, fast enough for pretty much anything you’d throw at it today. If we need to scale we will. When it comes to attracting developers, I’ll point you to Bacoor, which runs the largest Ethereum Wallet in Japan. They have moved to TomoChain and introduced Pantograph Wallet —- and they have convinced some of their game devs to move over to TomoChain, ditching Ethereum entirely due to the speed and near zero gas fees. We don’t have congestion issues.