Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Monthly Community Call
Recorded: Dec. 20, 2023 Duration: 0:19:37Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey, Ganesha.
Hey, Boris.
How are you?
I'm all right.
How are you?
Yeah, I'm good.
And I'm glad we have a community call.
Hakobo and John will be joining us in a minute.
Hey, John.
Hey, John.
Hey, Boris.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, we can.
Yes, we can hear you.
How have you been?
Yeah, not bad.
I've got some building work going on in the house, so I'm taking the community call from
somewhere slightly different today.
So hopefully the audio works nicely.
Yeah, slightly.
It's been a long time I didn't hear your voice.
It's good.
Yeah, we're all good.
Hopefully we'll have a couple in a minute as well.
It's a good thing at least people get to have some time to chat.
Yeah, it's not so bad.
It's interesting because normally, certainly in Europe and in Norway, people spend this week
getting ready for Christmas, getting ready for the end of the year.
Obviously, not so much for us.
We might get a break, but not yet.
So we've been flat out this week.
When is your break?
I finish on Friday.
Okay, that's cool.
Hopefully Kobo gets some time to relax as well.
Kobo is famously not good at taking holidays.
He always ends up chatting off somewhere else.
Speaking of which, can you talk, Kobo?
Yes, I've tried to talk before, but I don't know if you guys heard me.
Hello, can you hear me?
We can now.
We can.
Good, good.
How's everyone?
Good.
Okay, I think.
Our pre-Christmas end of year call.
That is right.
I'm good.
Shall we give it two minutes more?
Because I see that we're only 15 in the call.
No, 20.
Something like that.
Yeah.
That's about the average number that we get.
So, I'm pretty sure.
It's interesting.
We get more people to listen in later on.
So, it's all right.
We just, sometimes we have like 30, 35.
Okay.
Yeah, and Kobo, I think it's very interesting in terms of the number of people that we get
listening to this after the fact.
You know, we've had some comments on the Discord saying, you know, why do you do the community
call at this time?
You know, why aren't we mixing the times up a little bit?
Some people in Europe have jobs and can't listen in.
The irony is, of course, that some of us are based in Europe and this is our job.
So, we do it in working hours.
We could.
We could look at holding community calls at crazy times in the middle of the night.
But I think because we record them and we have a written summary, you know, it's one
of those things.
If we were never on Discord, if people couldn't get in contact with the team, then maybe we
try and mix it up a little bit.
But the fact that we have a call every month and we have, yeah, we try and answer every
question, we're always on Discord.
Hopefully, that's enough.
And it gives people what they need.
Yeah, I mean, it's difficult to please everyone, right?
From the point of view of timing.
The fact that we already work across several time zones already, you know, gives us a bit
of experience in terms of the difficulties of getting a time that is suitable for everyone.
But that's the way it is.
So, should we start, guys?
Or what are we?
Yep.
Let's go.
Okay.
Perfect.
So, we normally start with a bit of a generic update about where we are as a team and what
our priorities are.
So, the number one thing that we've been working on, and basically, we can divide what we do
as a team into two broad halves on the development side.
So, on the one hand, we've got the core NAMI protocol.
So, that's, you know, the actual protocol itself.
It's the Block Explorer.
We lump DevOps in with that as well.
But anything that we add to the NAMI protocol, anything around maintenance, testing, deployment
activities, that all comes into one team.
The biggest thing that we've been doing for the last few weeks or since the last community
call is making sure that the NAMI 3 code that we have is basically release candidate worthy.
So, I think we can say, if it's not today, it'll be tomorrow that we are sticking a pin
in the NAMI 3 core development.
And that is our release candidate.
So, we're looking to code freeze pre-Christmas.
And that sets us up for release.
So, that's the first major update.
The second update alongside of it is the products.
So, it's always a little bit tricky for us to give you an update on the product side.
Because some of the products we're working on, we haven't announced.
And if we go and spend a fair amount of time concentrating on one particular product or two
products that haven't been announced and there'll be a surprise for the community, then it can
look from an external point of view like we are not making progress or not making adequate
progress.
So, it's no surprise that we've mentioned this previously, there is a product that will
be a bit of a surprise when it lands.
That one is pretty much now feature complete.
We have a couple of extra tests to run on.
We have to try it out in a certain configuration.
But basically, that one is good to go.
There are a couple of minor changes that we'd like to make to other products.
Kiwi had a little bit of a bug issue on public testnet.
That's been fixed.
So, people that have mentioned that on Discord, they should hopefully be able to repeat the
tests and it will work.
We've also been, as a couple would say, cleaning the house.
We've been paying back some technical debt.
We've been making sure that things are as well configured as they can be.
And that means things like improving the automated test coverage, for example.
So, we've been playing around with expanding our test coverage with Cypress, which is a front-end
testing tool.
So, we have unit tests.
We have integration tests.
We have automated front-end tests.
A lot of this is the sort of work that you have to do before something actually goes live.
So, it's improving the test side of things.
There will be a small update to Nephi going.
That ties into the work we've done on this product that we've recently finished.
So, Nephi should see an update in the next few weeks.
And that will be, I think, probably the final update to Nephi.
That one's pretty much good to go.
We have also been making use of external partner development teams.
We have two products that they've been building for us that are currently in testing, one of
which will almost certainly be shown on internal testnet.
Sorry, on public testnet.
So, lots to see there.
And that will come after Christmas.
But the TLDR, in terms of the development side of things, is for NAMI and NAMI-related
products, we basically have a release candidate for the core protocol.
And we are now finalizing the products that will launch alongside it.
We are doing other development work.
Obviously, as we've mentioned previously, we are working closely with our friends at Rugs Bank.
And we're now in the next phase of our project work there.
So, that work has commenced, I think, about a month ago.
So, we are reasonably far into the next phase of the work there.
That's always fun.
Working with NAMI, they're smart people.
And we've enjoyed working with them in the past.
And we, obviously, will be working with them for a lot longer into the future.
So, business development work continues.
Gobo's been checking off around the world to smile and shake people's hands, as we like
him to do.
But, thankfully, he's back in Norway for a little while at the moment, so he can see
his family.
But, generally speaking, we've been busy.
We have a few other potential options with regards to major contracts that we are bidding
for.
So, we'll see how those go.
Obviously, there's no guarantees.
But, generally speaking, we're in a position where we can say 2023 nearly being finished.
We actually will probably do a little recap on this call of all the things that have happened
in the last year.
And maybe it'll be in January or December that we put out a year in review post and look
forward to the next quarter.
So, we might do that a little bit later on in the community call.
But, Gobo, as always, have I missed anything off in our introduction?
Well, I guess that we're in the last stages prior to launching to mainnet.
And that is the objective that we're working towards, which is going to happen ASAP.
It's going to happen, hopefully, way before most realize.
So, now we're wrapping up the year and it has been a busy year.
It has been a good year in some aspects, bad year in some other aspects, but that happens
with every company.
We have things to improve.
And, yeah, 2024 is going to be an exciting year.
We have been working very hard in the last 18, 20 months building.
And 2024 is the year where we need to start recouping some of those investments and pushing
products out to the market and get traction again.
So, the fact that the market is warming up or apparently is warming up is good timing for us.
Yeah, I think the improvement in market conditions is only a good thing from where we sit.
And, yeah, we could probably start the call with a quick recap of the last 12 months.
So, this won't take too long.
I'll focus on the main thing.
So, at the start of the year last year, we really wanted to simplify, for example, the Gini staking process.
So, this is where people can stake their Gini tokens and receive a constant flow of NAMI tokens as part of the ongoing NAMI airdrop.
Incidentally, the NAMI airdrop, the NAMI airdrop, I think, is now the longest running airdrop in all of crypto.
We hit our five-year anniversary recently.
That marks the halfway point for Gini airdrops.
So, yeah, we've done 60 months of the Gini airdrop.
So, we used to do that manually.
That's been moved over to a staking model where people stake their Gini tokens and they can claim the NAMI.
Gini staking went live in February.
So, every six weeks, pretty much, is the Gini staking period.
We, as a company, will top up that staking contract and it maintains a constant reward rate.
And that's been going since the start of February.
So, that was a key focus for us.
Probably the biggest change that people saw with NAMI this year came in March.
And that then set us on an interesting path.
So, at the start of March, we launched NAMI 3's public testnet.
And the public testnet has been expanded consistently since then.
Obviously, originally, it was on Gurley.
And it now runs on Sepulia.
So, we added Nephi.
We added Bridges.
We added smart contract deployment.
We let people deploy on our network for the first time without using an allow list system.
And eventually, obviously, we added lottery games and all kinds of things.
And we'll come to those in a moment.
But the headline figures for NAMI 3's public testnet were quite impressive.
So, we ended up, across both Gurley and Sepulia, I think it was three and a half million transactions on Gurley.
And over 100,000 on Sepulia.
Over 100,000 wallets.
I think our NFT games attracted well over a quarter of a million mints on the network.
So, it's been very clear to us from March this year that there is an interest and there is an appetite for what we're building.
So, carrying on, obviously, we allowed people to mint different tokens.
So, USD minting went live at the end of March.
We also sent people to different conferences.
We had Jens Sivar at the Norwegian Fintech Fest, our CTO, in April.
And then we had some fun with the random number generator.
So, this was at the end of April.
This is the lottery NFT game, which was fun and, for some people, slightly frustrating, depending on how lucky they are in equal measure.
So, the VRF, we used code for Chainlink.
And we used that as a way of demonstrating a very, very fast random number generator on our network.
That enabled us to have the lottery NFT game, which is successful.
And the VRF will also be used by a range of our other products.
We see that as central to what we're doing next.
Next up, we had 100,000 of those lottery NFTs minted by mid-May.
And then we continued to expand the testnet.
Kiwi ended up going up live on the 30th of September.
And that kind of brings us towards Q4 and the end of the year.
So, some news came out that we didn't announce.
It was found by our community members around what we were doing with Norgus Bank.
And that's obviously not a secret anymore in terms of our community.
So, that was a major win for us.
And we see our relationship with Norgus Bank as strategic for the future of the company.
It has opened doors.
It's enabled us to have many interesting and productive conversations.
And also, it sent a Kobo off around the world, which he's very grateful for, I'm sure, to meet with other financial institutions.
So, we did have an interesting decision to make as we went into Q4.
There were a couple of what we considered to be killer features for NAMI 3.
And we had to decide whether or not to go ahead with launching NAMI 3 earlier, which would have meant potentially a redeploy of its main smart contracts and almost a migration.
If we did that, to add these new features in or whether we should wait and make sure those features were ready, tested and good to go.
So, it was a difficult decision.
We know the community are very excited about the prospect of playing around with main NAMI 3.
But, in the end, we thought, given the potential pain that comes from redeploys or migrations and the real value that we think these features can bring, we decided to finish them off and hold on to the release date until early next year.
Kobo has already given us a bit of a hint about when NAMI 3 is currently targeted for.
So, this is the first time we can say on one of our community calls that NAMI 3 has a pretty solid internal release date.
So, everything in the company now is geared around finishing things off, getting our release candidates as polished and as robust as we can, testing them, adding automated testing, monitoring, you name it, and making sure that NAMI 3 is ready when we press the big red button.
So, that's our quick year in review recap and thanks to Venetia for pulling the dates together for me ahead of this call.
So, I don't think we have quite as many questions as individual entries on our Discord this time compared to normal.
But, each person seemed to have asked about 12 questions.
So, Boris, I don't know if you want to take us through them.
Go on.
Anything to add?
Sure, but before we go through that, I would just like to ask Jacobo.
You mentioned you were traveling recently to meet institutions.
Where did you go?
Recently, I've been in the UAE.
That's what I've been.
But, this year, I've been, I would say, all over the place.
I've been in Africa, Europe, Asia, Middle East.
I've been traveling quite a bit, yeah, to, I don't know, 10, 12 different countries, I think, at least.
So, it has been a busy year.
A little bit too much traveling for my liking.
But, I think it's going to be productive.
Or, so far, has been, has paid off a little bit.
We still have a lot more to go.
But, yeah.
I know, I'm back to the other question, John.
No, I will not, I will not add anything to it.
Well, actually, yes, I will add one point, which is kind of funny.
This last few weeks, maybe a couple of months, I've been coming across on so-called crypto Twitter.
Quite a bit of comments from so-called, again, influencers or subject matter experts on blockchain.
And, they're talking a lot about paralyzed EVM and modular blockchains.
And, most of them, they kind of fail at really indicating what they mean by that.
Keep in mind, as well, that most of the individuals involved in this side of the industry,
they don't really have much of a good understanding of what paralyzation might mean or modular systems might mean.
But, I just wanted to bring it up as a fun side note.
Because, quite a bit of the work we have been doing on NAMI 3, these last 18 months,
has actually been on those fronts as well.
