Ask Me Anything part 3

Original Post: May 11th, 2020

41. What does UNspecified balance sheet look like? Where does the funding come from?

The UNspecified balance sheet looks very similar to many other privately held startups. The company is bootstrapped, supplementing private funding with professional services.

42. ROADMAP- any plans of creating a new roadmap to let us know what to expect in the future.

Yep, we hear you. The website will begin reflecting changes frequently and regularly in the near term future, so please keep an eye out there. Otherwise, please see AMA 1 questions 1, 3, 13, and 17, and AMA 2 questions 21 and 28 for deeper information.

43. Bitcoin halv bitcoin price any thoughts on a work around when gas price goes up

The Bitcoin halvening is happening tonight! Time has gone by in a flash! It does not have a direct impact on our project or tokens.

44. Does the team have reserves to weather yet another bad market?

So much fun! I really liked this question. Today is May 11, pretty much 2 months into the current economic crisis. We are still here, though the company looks quite different now than it did 2 months ago, and it has brand new short- and mid- term goals as a result of the current conditions. We retain the flexibility to shift our focus where needed in order to get through difficult times.

45. Has there been any changes with coval LAW or Emblem sidechain is it working just like indicated?

Software necessarily evolves over time. The original vision necessarily needs to adapt to technology changes, changes in regulation, in worldwide sentiment, in business direction, etc. Since I didn’t write the LAW or Emblem documents from that long ago, I can’t speak to them. You can definitely find our current status on protocol, technology, and roadmap throughout all of these AMA questions.

46. CIRCUIT BUILDER… How many more components will be added to ckt builder before release?

We’re not sure the answer to that, BUT … it will likely not be much more than the current set of components upon commercialization release. Our goal with the initial set was to prove the concept, and include a set of different types of components that could be used to begin to build real, production circuits. Once we are collecting real numbers on what our users are doing, we will begin to derive the direction for adding more components.

47. Animated image of off-chain action for Emblem…data flow

Yes! That is a really great idea! We look forward to harnessing our community for fun little things like this that we can share more regularly as we expand our outreach. This will definitely be on our list.

48. Why does Stacy Howerton have an image of squirrels on the emblem.pro site.

Our team makes sure that we both work together and play together. In this case, while Eric was updating the UN web site, he asked everyone for a “headshot” image and short bio. There were a couple of people who lagged in responding to this request. We ended up telling the team that anyone who did not provide a headshot and bio were vulnerable to whatever I decided to put together for them. She was subject to that threat, and I delivered on my promise.

Luckily, it was only the squirrel picture that stuck. You should have seen the original bio I wrote for her! But the team wouldn’t let me go that far :)

pro tip: Next time you happen to have drinks with Shannon, Dawn, or Eric, ask what Eric’s headshot was in the draft page!!!

49. What platform might be best to get the word out on Circuit Builder? twitter is the average joe but where are the people that want to learn and start with drag and drop low code.

We agree completely. We did register CircuitBuilder on BetaList and have talked about it on the web site and in blog posts, on Twitter, and via the entire list of people who have signed up to receive information on anything Emblem or UN. We’re beginning to target corporations who we know have a need for building workflows and monitors without developer support. As we build revenue later in the year, we will be putting money toward expanding our reach beyond our current scope.

50. Price of Coval…When do you see a price increase for Coval what will it take why has it not moved even with plenty of news….Someone had to ask it:)

I think the price of Coval is pretty dependent on the market conditions. So, want to see it go up? Buy more, sell more, exchange more :)

My guess on your real question — “why has it not moved” — is that the community is concerned that Coval will somehow get “left behind” if Emblem takes off as its own entity. Someone had to say it :)

That’s not on our radar, but remember that thing about price being dependent on market conditions? Market conditions include people’s feelings.

Check out these questions from the other AMAs: AMA 1 q 2 and 4, and AMA 2 q 23 — and many more there, but they all refer you back to the other ones listed here.

51. Is there something for early investors early adopters a reason new investors should jump in now besides price?

I think you are asking 2 questions. I will do my best to answer them as I understand them.

The first, I think, is asking “what’s in it” for early adopters. People who bought Coval early and those who have invested their time, energy, support, etc are getting to ride along for this whole crazy journey. The hope of all early “investors” in anything (I put quotes around “investor” because the financial term “invest” has real, regulated meaning, and we are not referring to that) is that their “investment” will pay back many times over. In doing so, you are risking losing everything that you “invested”, in the hopes that you will personally benefit from climbing prices. Obviously, then, the more you have “invested”, the more reward you hope for. You acknowledge that this is risky, like the lottery or gambling, by putting any real value into your “investment”.

The second, I think, is “what’s in it” for people jumping in now. There may not be a better time to get in than now. The Coval/BTC conversion is very low, due to “market conditions” (partially described above). All of the previous paragraph applies in the same way here.

52. As other off-chain options hit the market what benefits will we have over them how will we stand alone. is all off-chain the same better worse?

Seeing other solutions come out that are also “off-chain” does lots of great things for us. First, it validates that the original vision, the idea that Shannon had, was completely legitimate and needed in the world, and that that belief is held by complete strangers who independently came up with the same idea.

Second, it kicks in one of the earliest values baked into Coval: Coopetition. Coopetition is the idea that others who are doing similar things are best utilized by being seen as being part of an unspoken cooperation. The chances are highly likely that 2 similar products have solved some of the problems that the other is still struggling with, and that by working together, the whole can be worth more than the sum of its parts.

All of the pieces of the Emblem ecosystem are being built in a way that encourages integrating new technologies as seamlessly as possible, including ones that could be seen as “competing products”.

We do also frequently review, internally, what we believe differentiates us from any others that we have ever learned about. In fact, we literally did this today. We continue to focus this message and will continue to massage it and make it available via our official media (web, social media, etc).

53. I’d like to know commercial usecase for your applications. For instance, can hotels.com make use of your service?

When I started answering this question, I just jotted down the strongest use cases that have been a part of our journey, ranging from just ideas we have seen come up frequently through real projects we are working on, today.

I came up with 9 of them. This list is by no means exhaustive, but should get the gears going for possible use cases.

We see Emblem Vault as most valuable in any process that needs to be able to handle and manage multiple types of digital assets. “Digital assets”, technically, means any file that can be stored on a computer, from private keys to Word documents to cryptocurrency, and we have decided to focus first on cryptocurrencies.

We sometimes talk about Emblem Vault as being like the “PayPal of crypto”, and we tell a story very similar to what made PayPal big in the fiat (USD) space. We want to make it so that if you want to send some cryptocurrency to someone, you do not need their involvement first. Those words are key, and very close to what PayPal first offered people. In crypto terms, it means you no longer need to walk your mom through setting up a Coinbase account, doing her KYC, copying her BTC address and sending it to you in order for you to send your mom crypto. With EV, you can put the BTC into an EV and send her an email to transfer it to her. She can receive the BTC through following the steps in her email.

We had an early use case for EV that involved crowdfunding for buying a house. Using EV technologies, the system could create a single vault to represent all of the gifted money and documents that needed to be collected to close on a home, ensure that the hopeful home buyers could not “take the money and run”, and ensure that the money and documents got handed over to ONLY the intended recipient (most likely the closing attorney).

We frequently talk with middle to bigger companies about their desire to make it easy to onboard employees (en mass) and manage their tokenized assets. Think about an example like a large corporation, such as an IBM, who wants their employees to be able to collect their IBM learning points with their Walgreens points with their FitBit points with their Headspace points, and use any combination of all of them to buy IBM branded socks, or a gift card for Amazon.

We have previously talked about Emblem Vault as the “exchange killer” — see AMA 2 q28.

You all know already that EV is used in the back end for CyberFM, where they are creating wallets for their users upon signup, and are streaming CyberFM tokens to their users for listening and sharing independent music.

Right now, we are focusing on the case for blockchain backing the supply chain in multiple industries. We have a couple of current projects where the Emblem blockchain will be the “source of truth” for information about an item, anywhere (and hopefully everywhere) throughout the entire supply chain. For Mission-R, that looks like tracking durable medical equipment and medical consumables (think: covid-19 test kits), mitigating human error all along the process, exceeding FDA regulation standards.

How can our products be used by hotels.com? I can spitball some ideas, but I’d much rather start with talking to someone at hotels.com so I can learn what they struggle with most and what they want out of a blockchain system.

54. What is going with this address? https://etherscan.io/token/0x3d658390460295fb963f54dc0899cfb1c30776df? a=0x166c5d3b7f6046168d2f630b8c96e6533d90dea9

Looks to me like some coval is being sent to STEX.

55. I like some features and information in this website https://www.thundercore.com/vision/

I like what they wrote there, too. Thanks for sharing that!

56. How long is the swap deadline from CovalXCP to CovalERC20? Reason for question: Existing holders will think that if the deadline does not come indefinitely, no listing on new exchanges or an increase in new holders will take place. From an external perspective, there is a bad image that development is slow if the deadline is too long. I think it is necessary to decide a good expiration date and burn a certain number of burns.

I understand the concern about optics to holding swapping open indefinitely. We had not determined a date. If the general community thinks we should, then okay. ~throws a dart~ September 14, 2020. You heard it here first. No more swaps after that date.

57. I like how the dapps are laid out might look good for the coval site and layout for the market place for ckt builder pre built ckts. https://www.authoreon.io/dapp-store/

Yes! I agree completely. This is very similar to what we have seen from another potential partner for a “dApp store” they would like to create. We have always looked, loosely, toward the Zapier or IFTTT apps for inspiration for a marketplace for circuits.

58. Why has the development of Circuit Builder been prioritized over that of Emblem? Or is CB essential for the Emblem application?

AMA 1 q1 and AMA 2 q27 go over this pretty well.

59. How much a Coval is expected to worth once Emblem is launched?

Your guess is as good as mine. I have tried to personally predict crypto prices, both via reading/research/anecdotal techniques, and via machine learning algorithms. Still searching for something to predict accurately.

60. Is Shannon the only one working on this project? If yes , why no one else is involved, if no, who is involved in it

Currently, this project has 3 dedicated full-time team members: Shannon, Dawn, and Eric. They are augmented by members of the Coval community in various supporting roles.

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