Ask Me Anything Part 4

Here is part 4 of our AMA Question 61–86
Questions answered by Dawn Code

Original Post: May 8th, 2020

61. When do you believe that Emblem will be released?

Check out AMA 1 q1, 3, 17, and AMA 2 q1.

62. Coval had been known for its listing strategy in bittrex only. Now that Bittrex delisted coval, has there been a change in listing in more than one exchange?

Coval is currently listed on STEX and Lukki exchanges. There are some other questions scattered throughout the AMA pages, too. Give them a scan.

63. Do you plan to make emblem decentralized. If so, how do you plan to do it? (see 81)

Yes! We definitely plan to.

The current plan involves HSM (hardware security module), homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation to eliminate any remaining centralized operations.

(clearly, I’m being coached)

Want a deeper technical dive? Send us an email at emblem at mail.emblem.pro. As we prove out the technical details, we’ll write up some deeper technical documents in the future and release them on social media.

64. When we will be able to send vaults?

When Emblem is released.

65. Do you plan to make emblem wallet? When can we expect it to be released?

Check out AMA 1 q17 and AMA 2 q1.

66. Can the things inside emblem vault be hidden, so no one can see its contents?

Most certainly can be, including an EV inside of an EV. This is a planned feature for Emblem Vault.

67. Can you describe in detail what role is coval going to have in emblem? We heard that it’s going to provide a discount? Can you give us exact numbers?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We definitely don’t have any exact numbers to give you, because we have not yet settled on the exact tokenomics. I can say we have talked about Coval used to buy Fuel (MBTS) at the highest discount, we have talked about Coval used as a staking mechanism rewarded with Fuel (MBTS), we have talked about how to combine the two into a single token, we have talked about creating at least 5 more tokens to the economy, and we have talked about working at a craft store instead of all this. We’re figuring this out still, and any guesses I could publicize about them would only be exactly that: guesses. What I do know for sure is that Coval is a part of Emblem. Period.

68. Is it true that it will be possible to stake coval for emblem fuel? When it will be possible?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Staking is a possibility that we are investigating, but at this point, those details are not settled.

69. Is your company trying to get investor or VC funding?

The Emblem Vault LLC company has begun preparing an investor package and asking for feedback from a metric shit-ton of friendly resources.

70. Did any large company/or well known company in crypto world showed interest in this project? Are you in contact/working/cooperating with any?

YES! This is both one of the most exciting and most painful questions to answer. We are having conversations with a small number of some very well known and large players in crypto/blockchain, but … almost every time you get into any depth of conversations with companies like that, NDAs are put in place before they will even continue conversations with you. What that means is that we are not allowed, then, to say the names of the company we are talking to until some specific next steps happen. It is one of the hardest things about doing business, to have what feel like exciting partnerships or clients developing, and not be able to talk about them. Given that, as SOON as we are allowed, we will be posting these connections via website, blogs, and social media.

71. When is emblem going to be integrated into cyfm app. Are the users going to be able to exchange cyfm tokens for eth/btc? If so, who is going to provide liquidity? How is that going to work?

CyberFM has now released their new crypto wallet (powered by Emblem) to both Android and iOS! All users who sign in with an email address are now using Emblem services.

We’ll continue working with CyberFM about their goals, but as of right now, we have a few plans in discussion, including what users can do with CYFM tokens, both inside the ecosystem and outside the ecosystem. There is nothing specific yet on our project plan.

72. What’s the most important use case for circuit builder in your opinion? I’m talking about real problems. I’m looking for company “x” could use it for “y” and gain “z” type of answer. Or maybe you think that the value of emblem/coval and your company will come from mass adoption by the private users.

CircuitBuilder was originally conceived to be a front-end interface to be able to demonstrate workflows that involved Emblem Vaults. We envisioned sales calls being able to use it to showcase integrating EVs into their workflow, right there, live, in front of the potential client or potential investor.

But then, as we talked to our internal network about it, we realized that there are a lot of opportunities for Circuit Builder in companies that just KNOW that blockchain offers them something that increases the value of their product, but they don’t really know HOW.

Our target market for CB became the companies (starting with SMB where “blockchain solutions” like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum were overkill) who wanted to be able to experiment with blockchain quickly and cheaply.

We have talked to those interested in AMA/KYC who want to watch some crypto address and be notified immediately of activity into or out of it, but who don’t want to wait 6 months for their “IT department” to provide them a tool.

We have talked to platforms who want their users to build decentralized apps and sell them on a marketplace within their app space.

We have talked to countless developers who have been told that they need to figure out how blockchain fits into what they do, who want to quickly prove out how to back their data on a blockchain.

We have even talked to systems where they care less about blockchain and more about event orchestration, allowing their customers to build their own workflows. Maybe the customer wants to be alerted when certain events in the logs happen within 3 minutes of each other, or they want to receive an SMS when a job is completed.

In our eyes, CircuitBuilder is more of an “end user” application, and the Emblem Blockchain and Emblem Vault are used for enterprise applications.

73. What is the source of the funding?

See AMA 3 q1

74. How much funding is remaining (how much runway is left)?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When the remaining team are all “all in”, what does runway mean, really?

75. Do you plan to hire more personnel?

See AMA 1 q12.

76. What’s your budget plans for 2020, and what is the 3+9 forecast?

At this exact point, there is a new entity, Emblem Vault LLC that represents the Emblem ecosystem and IP. That company has zero revenue yet and is being bootstrapped by its 3 owners. Forecast? We have guesses, and a shitty track record for our revenue forecast guesses coming true. Also, we keep our models and forecasts internal because we are a private company and we will continue to act as a private company until we’re not.

77. What do you think is an appropriate value for 1 COVAL?

1 Coval will always be exactly valued at 1 Coval.

78. How much COVAL is held by the development team? (Approximate breakdown)

How much Coval do you have?

See AMA 1 q5 and q18.

79. Is anyone on the development team responsible to keep volume on STEX (wash trading)?

Nope. Also, wash trading is illegal in the US. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/washtrading.asp

80. Who do you consider your top 3 competitors?

GREAT GREAT question!!

I can take the answer this way: we see ourselves as differentiating ourselves by providing a product that nobody else in the blockchain space is providing. No competitors here.

Or I can take it this way: Let’s break down our products:

• Emblem Vault: We actually do not believe that there is a close competitor for this product. Each time we come across someone with similar messaging, we find that under the hood, they are just using a service like ShapeShift.
• Emblem Blockchain: All of the blockchains (or blockchain platforms) are competitors. Here we offer a blockchain agnostic platform capable of talking to any/all of the “public blockchains”, and capable of transactions on side chains, and way cheaper than the main bitcoin or ethereum blockchains to perform transactions on.
• CircuitBuilder: In general, low code/no code solutions are not a brand new invention (shit, I myself worked on a low code/no code solution for genetics researchers in the last 1990s and early 2000s). CircuitBuilder has a skewed angle toward orchestrating blockchain-based interfaces, so that is unique to the current landscape.

In general, when we think of competitors, we think of companies like Fluree, Consensys, IBM, and Betty Blocks.

81. Can you decentralize the EV mechanism? If so, how? If not, how will you address concerns from the crypto community that it is not decentralized? (see 63)

See this AMA, q63 above.

82. What’s your favorite whisky, bourbon, tequila, and rum? In order, no substitutes.

(this was definitely my favorite question in all of the AMAs!)

Me: gross, gross, Clase Azul, any (we usually just get Bacardi because rum gets drowned in sweet juices anyway)

Shannon: no, no, Clase Azul, Captain Morgan Spiced Rum

Eric: Yamazaki, Old Forester, Clase Azul, gross

83. When full functional Emblem release ?

Since I’m at the end of the AMA questions and this one has been clearly dominant throughout, let me just offer one final wrap up to this.

We are well aware that people who have been following this project feel disappointed and frustrated that EV has not yet had a production release. And, you can take my word or leave it, our internal struggle has been a very difficult journey, fraught with spinning wheels, negotiation, burnout, disagreements, confusion, disappointment, and actual literal tears. We have had to grow in ways that we thought we were good on, and ask ourselves difficult questions that sometimes made us realize that what we want isn’t always what we need.

We have felt the tightening belt of watching our runway shrink while we still didn’t have an immediate source of revenue from our product. Our personal savings have all but disappeared, and we have had to ask ourselves questions like “Do we sell our car so we can pay our employees a few more paychecks, hoping they will step up and start delivering how we have asked them to?”.

Nobody has been more motivated than Shannon and I, and now Eric, to release EV. Our business depends on it, and our personal lives depend on it.

Also, we have wanted to be damn sure that the system was as robust, stable, and secure as it could possibly be given modern technologies once people started putting value that they care about on it. I’d MUCH RATHER be late in delivering product than scrambling to recoup people’s assets that were lost to a software bug.

84. Would you ever consider rebranding COVAL due to its relatively rocky (and unknown) history?

Coval is already a re-brand. It’s publicly available knowledge that the original token was created by Ribbit.me, which became Loyyal, and that they chose to pivot away from any association with cryptocurrency when they were seeking investment funding.

Is there a reason to re-brand in an attempt to … what? Have a fresh start? Make it harder for potential investors to find the whole (you say rocky, I say strong) history? Possibly get ~eye roll~ slammed on public media for trying to hide our past?

This is one of those times where I could definitely argue for the fresh start and see the benefit of, say, coming out of this pandemic stronger and better with a “new” image. But we really do have to take things into account like doing that requires people’s time, and there are only 3 of us now, so how do we prioritize the time to re-brand over the work to get the product out? Of the two, I think the EV product has to take first dibs.

That’s not a no.

85. When will mbts be on an exchange and traded?

That is not quite the plan for the Fuel (MBTS). They are not a speculation token.

86. Logo Rebrand?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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