Welcome to the CoreDAO AMA about the CoreStarter program.
Let's just give a few more minutes for everyone to join and to set up everything with the partners to speak.
Looks like we have everyone here.
Welcome to the CoreStarter program AMA.
As you know, Core launched the CoreStarter program last week.
And the CoreStarter program is basically an incentive program for builders on Core to drive innovation in the space by providing the developers with some essential resources and give them room to explore all the possibilities.
The program has like over 300,000 worth of tools and incentives.
And the goal is to catalyze this innovation in the Core ecosystem.
So today we will be speaking with some of the partners of the starter program and getting to know a little bit more about themselves and what they are offering on the other program.
So without any specific order, I would say let's start calling out partners.
And I'm going to start with Certik just because it's showing right after the CoreDAO here on the spaces.
Great to be here and glad we got the number one spot.
Thanks to Elon's algorithm.
I am here on behalf of Certik.
So Certik is a blockchain security company.
We've been around since 2018.
Very happy to be partnering with CoreDAO on the starter program and providing our blockchain security services Web3 security auditing platforms and everything to everyone building on Core.
Which is a really exciting ecosystem.
So I'm happy to keep speaking if you want or if you have any specific questions, I'll answer those.
So can you just explain a bit what is the offer by Certik to the starter program to builders on Core?
So as one of one of the core security partners, I mean, we audited Core back in 2022, which anyone can head over to Skynet and check out for themselves.
So, yeah, we've we've been experienced with the ecosystem for a while.
So what we're offering in the starter program, basically two things.
We know that, you know, at times of peak demand, which may be on the horizon, things get very hectic in crypto.
People are all lining up to get audits to launch new platforms to to access basically a finite amount of services.
And anyone in the CoreDAO starter program will basically be at the top of the queue for that.
So priority access as well as certain financial incentives to to get audited.
You know, like auditing and security is so important for building secure functional platforms that stand the test of time.
So that's what we're offering is incentives both both time and financial to ensure that you get to market as quickly as possible and as securely as possible.
With a full with full access to our comprehensive range of security products and platforms and knowledge and experience and everything like that.
I don't think it's necessary to explain why is it important for builders to to claim the software security is definitely and it should be definitely a priority in the space.
So let's go now the other way around.
John Davies from Halborne.
Can you introduce a bit about what Halborne is?
Sure. Well, Jesse is a tough act to follow.
And thank you for that great explanation of how Surtex working with CoreDAO.
Halborne is quite similar.
We are a security partner who offers not just smart contract security assessments, but full stack advisory work.
Everything from front ends through the smart contract code infrastructure, even all the way down to security awareness training for teams to help mitigate one of the most prevalent threat vectors these days, which is the actual human.
Halborne has been working with CoreDAO for a while now as part of our security advisory as a service offering, which allows the project as well as its partners to consume our services on demand that include all those things I just mentioned, as well as plenty more.
yeah, the biggest thing here is just that we want to make sure that everybody is aware that we're here to help.
We understand the importance of security all the way across the stack and
want to make sure that everybody operating this ecosystem is as safe as possible. So
yeah, do you have any other specific questions on how Halborne is involved with this project?
I want to present a bit about the offer that Halborne is doing through the course of the program.
Yeah, we are here to really work as a partner for anybody in the CoreDAO ecosystem building on the platform.
They're able to consume our services either independently or through their engagement with CoreDAO as a partnership.
And we actually have a Security Solutions Center website where anybody, whether they're associated with CoreDAO or not, can log in, create an account, and see exactly what it is that we offer, request work, and get all sorts of helpful updates on the things that we're doing with them.
So that's a big part of what we bring to the table now.
Awesome. Thank you, John, for your words.
So let's switch now the other way around again to TokenSoft.
Alright, thank you for having me.
Can you present a bit what TokenSoft is?
And my name is Mason. I'm the founder of TokenSoft.
TokenSoft has been helping projects launch tokens since 2017.
So we've helped launch over 100 tokens so far, and projects using our platform have raised over a billion dollars in aggregates.
We've launched and supported projects like Avalanche, The Graph, Arbitrum, Tezos, Connext, Ansthetics.
And our goal is just to help people launch quickly.
So we want projects to get to market as soon as possible.
We help, just by the way we do things, we help make sure these sales and distributions or airdrops are, you know, civil resistant.
There's no bots or people taking advantage of these airdrops or sales.
And basically you can use our platform for launching a token sale, doing an airdrop, or people use this for a wide variety of things, even like hackathons or developer grants, things like that.
And our special offer for the core starter program is we're basically doing 10% off registrations.
If you're looking to use TokenSoft to set up your token foundation, we're providing, you know, $5,000 off that.
And if you work with our awareness partners to get in front of, you know, an audience of 3 million people, we're providing $10,000 off one year of that.
And I think, you know, when projects are looking to launch, it's just important to make sure you launch on the right foundation.
We see a lot of things go wrong, and we've been doing this for a long time.
So we sort of pick up on those lessons that we see out there on the market and make sure that, you know, none of those adverse things are happening to our customers.
So we try to get people to market in just sort of a safe and secure manner.
And that's TokenSoft, and we love the Cordao ecosystem.
We had Cordao on our podcast, The Friend Zone. Please check it out.
And we're excited to see all of the projects come launch on Cordao.
Thank you. Yeah, check out the podcast, because I think at least you all will enjoy it.
Let's go to Christoph from Request Finance.
Hi, everyone. I'm Christoph, one of the co-founders of Request Finance.
Request is the financial platform enabling like with three companies to manage their daily financial operations from payment to accounting, both in fiat and in crypto.
So when I say daily financial ops, I'm talking about, of course, collecting like the money.
It's a billing solution to collect your turnover.
You can transact in fiat and in crypto, especially on the blockchain.
And you can manage also all your payables, vendor payments, contractor payments, salaries, grants, bounty disbursement.
Any type of disbursement can be done.
Request is working with Workdao for those community disbursements, all the community payments.
Since we are live, requests exist since 2017, and we are live since 2020, and we processed over $700 million of payments across the industry.
What we have to offer to the core community is like a special offer, premium offer with like two months free trial.
So like every single builder on core is welcome to use requests, test requests and like enjoy it.
And it's really important for like builders to get a hint of what it is because at the end of the day, every one, every project really want to scale and scaling requires a scalable setup.
I mean, we are doing invoicing, we're doing payments, but doing things the right way from the beginning is really important when you are a builder.
And when I say the right way, I mean, documenting everything with proper invoicing and transaction receipt is important, not just transaction ashes, because it enables companies to maintain accounting.
When you maintain an accounting, you can make forecasts and eventually get audited by any financial audit firm.
And if you have a proper audit trail, the due diligence goes much faster the day you aim to raise funds like a Series A, for example.
So doing things the right way is really important from the beginning.
We've accompanied a lot of companies, early builders since early days, like One Inch, Avi, MakerDAO, The Graph, Sandbox, and they are like financial life.
And we really want that core DAO builders to be like the next wave of people we help scaling.
Awesome. Well, I must say that I use Request Finance and it is definitely an awesome platform, easy to use, very intuitive, and it definitely makes life easier.
Thank you, Christophe. Let's go to Alex here.
Hello, guys. Can you listen to me? Yeah, all good. How are you?
Okay, amazing. Doing good. Thank you for having us here. It's amazing to be able to be in a space with so many good partners and you guys.
So yeah, a little bit about us. Well, we've been here about like five, six years already.
We're mostly in the gaming side, so we have a game launcher that's mostly what we've been doing these last like four or five years.
And there's where you guys come into place. We have some chains there that have games, but yeah, we've announced a partnership with you guys a few weeks ago, I think, or a few days ago.
So now people are going to be able to play games on Core.chains, so that's amazing. And also filter all the games through your chain and all of the connections to payments and in-app purchases,
all the off systems so people can just go into the launcher, log into their account and just play games and do by FTS, transact with their tokens on whatever they want to do through our overlay.
So that's going to be awesome. And yeah, also, a couple of days ago, we announced that we're going to build a launchpad that we're going to incubate games and we're going to launch a token that's going to have mostly utility through that launchpad.
And also the launcher, so people that use the token through the launcher are going to have special prices and cash back and all that stuff that you'll be able to check out.
So yeah, very thrilled to be here, very thrilled to have you guys on board as a partner recently, and hopefully a lot of CoreDAO games come to us and users are able to play through us. So yeah, really help from our side.
And any questions you may have, feel free to ask.
Well, we have more starter program partners that are not here today, such as Google Cloud and Questly and Hacken.
And more partners are also joining the starter program pretty soon, so stay tuned for all the news.
For all the builders who want to claim these offers, there's a link here. It's core.org slash initiative slash core starter program, you can go there, explore the offers, and also there's a link to a form, and you can just fill it out.
You can tell us which offers you are interested in, and then someone will get back to you.
So, I will ask everyone here in the spaces, like, when you joined the starter program, it was a few, a few, launched just last week.
What are your, like, what are you seeing being built on core chain? And what do you, and in blockchain in general, like, what trends are you seeing at the moment? And I'm open to anyone here to answer.
I mean, I think the Bitcoin ecosystem in general has seen a lot of activity in recent months, and over the last probably year or so, with ordinals and BRC20 token standards and things like that, which I think is a very welcome, you know, development.
Bitcoin for a long time has done one thing, and one thing very well, which is a store of value and payment mechanism, but it's exciting to see all these new projects being built that leverage the decentralization, security, all the positive attributes of the Bitcoin network to build things that are new, innovative, contribute transaction fees to the network,
really keep the whole Bitcoin ecosystem thriving and alive, really. So, I know core is very, very Bitcoin aligned. So, I think that's something that's been exciting to see recently.
Absolutely. And for the security partners here, are you seeing, like, an uptrending concern about security in blockchain in general, or do you think it's already, like, well-established thing in the space?
Either Jesse or John can go.
Yeah. I mean, I think security, it's always been, like, in people's minds, you know, like, whenever you get into crypto, it's sort of one of the first things you have to think about is, how am I going to, you know, custody my own private key? What, which solution am I going to use?
But then I think that some people can, you know, once they get a little bit familiar with that, then it becomes a, it goes to the back of your mind a little bit. It's, it's not necessarily the number one consideration that people have. They're more interested in, you know, playing around in the ecosystem, building things, all that sort of stuff, which is great, which, you know, you want, you don't want to just be thinking about security all the time.
But it is very important, especially when it comes to, you know, financial products, that platforms and ecosystems that have millions, billions of dollars of value within them.
So I think, you know, last year we saw an uptick in the number of security incidents, but a decline in the value of in the value lost to hacks and scams overall, which is, you know, sort of mixed messages there about whether or not things are getting better.
Or if, if we're just seeing, you know, more projects launched, and then that just comes along with, you know, more security incidents, a lot of those were, you know, exit scams, which are basically malicious to begin with, not necessarily security errors from well-meaning legitimate teams.
So I think that, you know, the legit projects in the space do recognize the value of security, do recognize the importance of security, and take that seriously, and want to build platforms that keep their users safe.
You know, like, if you're trying to build a revolutionary product in the ecosystem, then getting hacked is like the last thing that you want. It's going to wreck your reputation, wreck your users, just wreck everybody.
So it's something you definitely want to avoid. And taking security seriously is like the number one, the number one way that you can do that, that includes, you know, thinking about it from the very beginning of the development process, having security reviews before deployment, monitoring after deployment, working with, you know, advisory, consultation, security services, and all that sort of stuff.
So there are a lot of tools and platforms out there to make security work for you and for your users. It's just, it's about taking advantage of those. And I think that's why we joined the starter program is to bring awareness to our services and make those available to as wide an audience as possible.
And I'll jump in to add on Jesse, that was a great explanation. You really touched on something that I think is crucial here, which is the separation between developers and security professionals.
And to some extent, you don't really want them to be the same people because you want specialists who are good at their respective areas. And when crypto projects are underneath a certain size, it doesn't even make sense for them to have their own dedicated security resources, which is where a third party trusted advisor comes in.
And I think that going forward, one of the biggest things that consumers of security products will need to reckon with is the balance because security is a cost center. You know, you don't make any money off of adding the next layer of sharding or any sort of security feature that you consider adding to protect your key material.
However, you have to do it because like you said, if you don't, then the whole project could go away tomorrow. So I think that that's one of the biggest things that people who are starting a project right now need to think about as close to the beginning as possible for how they're going to plan ahead and make sure that they're keeping themselves as well protected as reasonable based on the TVL and the threat profile of their project itself.
And then it does go into continuous monitoring and making sure that the second you introduce a new function to an audited code base, you are introducing risk. And the longer you keep developing without getting a new audit, you're introducing more and more risk and more opportunities for things to be introduced that are malicious or for people to find something that has been there the whole time that was a zero day nobody knew about.
So that's why models like a security advisory retainer make a ton of sense because you don't have to start a new engagement every single time that you want to get something looked at. You can keep an advisor around full time to help you out whenever you need something.
Yeah, absolutely. I co-signed that.
Awesome. Thank you guys. A question now for Alex here. Which games are you seeing being launched now? What are the trends and what can you tell us?
Yes. So, I mean, there's not that much games being launched right now, but I can't disclose it. But through our launch plan, we're going to be hopping in into the Web 3 ecosystem, some Web 2 games out there that are going to be launched.
We have been working hard to actually convince Web 2 studios to get into the Web 3 ecosystem. I mean, there's certain genres that make sense to actually hop into having a token or maybe some entities or something.
There's other genres that don't make sense and it's not good to actually force it. But yeah, hopefully we're going to be able to disclose a little bit more about that in the near future.
But yeah, right now, I think instead of the ecosystem, top games out there are Big Time and Lubion. There's a few others that are soon to launch, but there's a lot of sound around pixels, I think, that has launched. But I mean, the game has been already out there.
So it's mostly revolved about inside of the Web 3 ecosystem, of course, the token launches and how things are, airdrops and how things are revolving around that. But yeah, really thrilled about what we're going to be launching in the next few months and hopefully people like it.
Awesome. Thank you. Tokensoft, Christoph, anything you want to add?
All good on my side. Thank you, Christoph, speaking here. All good on my side.
I just want to say, if you're thinking about launching a token on Cordao and you're interested in just chatting about what are some things I should be thinking about, feel free to reach out and we'd love to be helpful.
Yep, same here if you have a game studio and you're thinking about launching the token and launching it with Cordao for sure. Check us out, see the tech, see how it would be implemented through us. Love to have you there and have some chats and maybe give you some recommendations out there.
Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah, Christoph, go ahead.
No, no, I'm okay. Thanks.
Oh, okay. Thank you all for joining the AMA and taking the time to answer these questions and also for being among the first of partners of the core starter program.
There are a lot of things coming up, so it will be exciting.
For everyone listening, thank you for tuning in and hope to see you on the next Cordao AMA and check out the link of the core starter program for any builder who wants to claim the offers.
You just click the link, go through a form, select the offers you are interested in and keep an eye out because more offers will be added soon. So we'll be updating constantly either the landing page and the offers and the form as well.
So that's it. Thank you very much and see you on the next one.
Thank you. Thank you for having us.