What in it how are you doing doing good? How are you? I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for asking and thank you for coming on today Yeah, thank you for having us. It's gonna be here for sure. So we'll get started in probably a minute or so. I don't want to hold up
So, I think that's a good idea.
after people get off work and stuff. They kind of listen to it. That's kind of how the numbers have been going for a lot of my spaces. Yeah, I'll make sure I send a few tweets out about it as well. Perfect.
So, Whitney, if you all are good, we can end up getting started too.
- Nope, sounds good, let's go. - Perfect. - So for everyone that's listening, welcome to a really exciting episode for me. I'm a huge, like, Oracle person smart contracts.
and everything in between. And this is a very up-and-coming project that I think a lot of people need to put on their radar. And it is WITnet. So WITnet, thank you for being here. How are you?
Doing great doing great. Thank you for having us really happy to To join you on this Monday evening. Absolutely. So just to get started for those that are probably alright, we've never heard of Whitney. Can you just tell us a little bit about who you all are and how long you've been around? Yes, it's all
So, Whitney is a layer one multi-chain decentralized Oracle that's powered by our native coin, the weight coin. And that's kind of like the crypto economic incentive and the security of the entire network is similar to a proof of state blockchain. But of course it was custom built for the
a very common, commonly understood problem in the blockchain system. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically just the concept that a closed deterministic system like a blockchain can't actually receive off-chain information in a decentralized way.
So that's the blockchain oracle problem. So Whitney was asked to set out to do this. The white pivot was released in 2017 and the network went officially live in October of 2020. Perfect. Love it. And that's just something that I always like when
I hear you all speak you're not a new project. That's the big thing. Sometimes people might think oh they just came yesterday. No you guys have been building and doing a lot. For a while. Yeah and that's the important thing. The next part I want to dive into you touched on a lot of things. The first one is
the scalability and what you all are doing in terms of being a layer one with the scalability. Just explain that because there's a lot of people out there that just hear the word layer one, layer two. Oh, that sounds cool. But can you break it down especially with the Oracle FASC that you all have?
Yeah, so I think the common understanding is that when you're building on top of a chain like a theorem, you know, for example, you're kind of tied to the fate of a theorem, which isn't necessarily a problem in any case, but it kind of restricts you in what you're able to do as far as your how you can come to a conciliation.
or how you can have specifically the oracle kind of problem that I touched on, how you can have this off-chain information come on chain. So you can't use the consensus mechanism that was built for something else to kind of try to solve a problem that requires its own animal, right? Does that make sense?
You know, being a layer one, we were able to specifically create a set of tools for developers to be able to use that gives them the information they need. And because of that, it allows it basically does its job really well, if that makes sense. And, you know, we kind of
We're not a new project, right? We've been around forever and we focused on progressive decentralization over large announcements or large funding, you know, raise when we were initially starting the project so that we could kind of focus on building and having this resilience
network to common Oracle, Adaption, X-Poites that you see with other oracles. Perfect. And that goes into the next thing because we keep touching on that you are not a new project, but you guys have a lot that you're working on. How big is the team and have you all been impacted with the bear markets and like the ebbs and flows of the cryptocurrency?
Well, you know, I think everybody's been impacted by the flows and especially with a lot of these collapses like FTX and TeraLoan on all this. But, you know, we were our founders, you know, we're kind of true big
corners from the beginning, you know, they understood the importance of cold storage and not leaving your funds on like an exchange like that. So we were pretty able to weather that not really a problem. But the issue kind of comes in with the partnerships, if that makes sense. You know, we have these protocols that are, you know,
kind of a line on those large inflows from like FTX. So that was kind of a problem as far as partnerships go. But the actual team itself, the experience of the team, you know, they've been in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry forever. The most recent project was all we
was actually called Stampery and it was what Whitney Sponoff of and it was basically a way to timestamp information on Bitcoin blockchain so you could kind of pass messages across the actual chain but it was way ahead of its time and you know the founders who
kind of spun off into Whitman and decided that it was necessary to have like a system where you can create immutable information for DeFi protocols, which is kind of where Whitman came from. Love it. And that's what I appreciate. Just hearing about the background and where all of this came about,
So my next thing goes into something that a lot of people like to dive into and that's kind of the tokenomics. Can you explain a little bit about the tokenomics and then the other key part is that lock supply that we all hear about when it comes to Bitcoin, Ethereum and when those things will unlock. So just kind of break that down a little bit for people.
Yeah, yeah, the total total economics. There's a total of 2.5 billion left ever right now in circulation is about 1.1 billion. And when the network launched, there was a 30% allocated allocation to like the pre sale of the foundation and the team with the lock up
At the time was I think, I thought I'm mistaken like three or four years. So that recently actually started unlocking. I believe it was like 2021, but I'm actually I'm not. Totally clear on the specifics, but I'm if I'm not mistaken, there's nothing locked up anymore.
right now the other 70% can only be gotten through mining and each block has a total reward of 250 wit and that has every five years with the first halving happening. I believe sometime in the next year. Perfect. Thank you for that. That's
or two or three years. Yeah, so I appreciate that and people always just like to hear and understand more about tokenomics than how things are. So thank you for end up bringing that part down. The next thing is, of course, you all are within the Oracle space. So of course,
people are part of either chain link or band or various other ones that are kind of out there doing different things. What separates you all from what they're doing compared to like what you all are doing and how you will be able to set yourself apart in a positive direction.
Right. So I would say the simple answer is that we need to layer one. So obviously chain links not a layer one. It is kind of its own protocol on top of like a theorem or you know a chain that they're providing oracle services on. And a lot of these other oracles are the same way where they're you know on these
just kind of hovering on top of these other layer ones or layer twos. So yeah, that's the simple answers. That's WITNET to its own layer one. We have thousands of nodes operating at any given time. But the more complex answer is that you don't actually have to trust node operators of WITNET to provide truth.
truthful information. You just believe that the nodes are rational and that they're economically minded. So they're incentivized with money to provide truthful information because they actually lose collateral or part of the stake that they have posted if they provide false information.
That's not really a system that you see with other oracles. They kind of just have know your customer on nodes or like approve authority or like a white listed set of validators or something. So you're getting a lot of power into those single points of failure that can be corrupted or manipulated.
Perfect. And my next part is the WITNET randomness. Explain what that is for those that may or may not understand.
Yeah, when I randomness is the randomness oracle is what we call it It's a very powerful tool for developers that need to access random numbers, you know In our normal like daily lives traditional fanat we have a lot of products that use random
of numbers, like the lottery or sports spending to an extent, or like Zeno's. And these are big industries that require random numbers. And that's true also on
and blockchains. So you can see that for NFT projects or lotteries or something like pool together is a use case of randomness. So it's a very powerful tool and it's necessary in this kind of industry.
And the most important aspect is its unpredictability. So, Whitney at random, Whitney at randomness essentially works the same as a price feed and it's powered by crowd witnessing. It's basically a random set of nodes commit to a sequence of fights that they actually
together and this generates a hash that is basically the random number. It's so big. So like 10 nodes go out, generate this sequence of bytes and then they can concatenate that into a hash that's fed into a smart contract.
So it's actually really simple. And it's as long as one node is honest, then the number is unpredictable to others. Perfect. And then you have actually brought into my next point, because you meant
and nodes and the WITnet token themselves. So can anyone mind WITnet and then also how does the node process go? I know for each project and team it's kind of different but can you touch on those two things?
Yeah, anyone can mind windnets fully permissionless so you don't have to ask permission from the windnet foundation or you know me or anybody else at the at the project you can just download
load the software that's required. And then you're up and running basically in like five minutes at most. You know, obviously that goes with like with any with running any node, there's a little bit of
resources that you need. It's about two gigabyte of computer processing power RAM and about I think 50 gigabytes of storage to run a full node on WITnet. So once you start running a full node, you can actually buy some WIT and stake it as a collection.
on your node or you can earn that wit and then obviously if you stake some collateral you have more of a chance to mine the next block or fulfill more data requests more often. Love it and then so the next part is once you mine the wit net and the wit
But where can people hold it? There's certain wallets that are compatible or open for you to end up having your wit store. Because I know every single wallet that's out there doesn't allow for every single token in coin.
Yeah, so that kind of goes back into because Whitney has a layer one and it's not an EVM compatible chain. We actually had to create our own tools from scratch, which so we created Shika, which is our native wallet to store Whitcoins.
It's a very secure and private application that connects to a full node on the way that network. And it doesn't require any KYC of course, because we're fully permissionless.
So yeah, that's a simple place to store your waycoins. But my favorite part about it is that you can actually create data requests directly from the app where you just put in the sources that you want nodes to
get data from and compile and deploy that right on the WITNAN network and you'd be running that data request within a few minutes, which is a really cool feature that I think is very undervalued right now.
Yes, I honestly feel the same exact way. So I love that you end up bringing that up and just for you all creating on wallet, that's a big thing in itself. And it's definitely something that you can see a lot of people have more trust when they know that this wallet is going to be secure. We see so many exploits within wallets. So for that to happen is the big
thing and now my next topic that I do want to touch on is the future. So you've touched a lot on the present and then also what you guys have been doing. What are you most looking forward to within 2023 and beyond for Whitney and then also what are some big things that everyone should be looking forward to? Well, we're always looking
to increase our total value-secured metrics. Right now, we're live on 25 EVM compatible chains, and we're securing, I believe last I checked, it was $350 million in value locked. So we're always looking to increase those numbers. I believe we want to get to 30 total chains that we're integrated on.
That would be a huge milestone. And right now we're securing about 1% of all value. We want to get that up to a billion total value secured. So I believe that would be like, I don't know, close to some close to like 10% if I'm not mistaken or at least five. So that those would be huge milestones.
And the more value that's being secured by WITnet is the more value that's truly secured in a decentralized way without single points of failure. So we don't like to be cocky about it, but if your protocol is secured by WITnet, then your users can rest easy knowing that it's safe from common exploits.
on Oracle's. And then another thing I'm super excited for is we're coming out with a decentralized bridge. By like quarter three 2023 that actually allows anybody to run a bridge node that would communicate from an EBM chain to the witness side chain. And
bridge nodes could actually earn a small amount of, I guess, money in the native coin of the chain that the request is coming from in order to fulfill those data request to nodes on the window network. So it's basically, it would be the communication bridge that allows data request to pass through the networks.
Love it. And then if there's people out there that are like you know what this sounds dope I think I want to start to pick up a Lisa small bag where places that people can pick up on the Whitt token if they want to try and test it out or at least hold some Yeah, yeah right now we're live on gate IO and nxc dot com
We have exchanges coming in the future. Of course, we're always looking for more exchanges because it helps add security to the WIDNAN network. It adds value to miners. So we're always looking for exchanges for listings. But yeah, right now it's gate.io and MXC. Of course, there's OTC options.
you can earn it, you can earn new wit by mining it yourself. Love it. So then that brings in to my next thing because of course everyone's within crypto that they believe in the future but where do you foresee cryptocurrency either going in terms of technology or in terms of where Bitcoin will end up taking the whole space?
Um, oh that's a tough one. Obviously I don't
I don't know the right answers to those. I always get those questions and I never know the right answer. But I see that a lot of these, a lot of value really comes in lending protocols. If we can, I would say in five years, we might have had a, found a solution to over or under collateral, collateralized lending. And I think,
That's going to be where we really start to onboard new people is when we can actually create these trustless projects that people can take out loans without having credit checks in KYC in a way that mitigates the trust.
also doesn't allow for corruption, which I mean, that's a really complex topic, which I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. But I think in five years, we might have a solution to that. And that's where things will really start to get interesting. Agreed. I have started to see so many times they talk about
lending being a huge thing. And plus everyone doesn't necessarily, I've seen this even with the NFT conferences and things that nature that people might not have great credit scores, but they have the money for everything. Exactly. And then that kind of becomes an issue of, so you're relying on this credit score, but then they might not have a real technical
something I am excited for. I think about all of it how before COVID like we had QR codes, nobody really used QR codes, but then once COVID came about, QR codes became something that everywhere, everyone has everywhere. And I think about the same with lending protocols and then also cryptocurrency. It's going to take time, but there's going to be like some random event.
That's going to like push it even more forward than what it is right now. Although it's a global currency, which I do love, but then also the technology is something that it's on a blockchain, which I really do appreciate that Oracle's just allow all of this to be streamed faster and like you brought up before either sports betting are various different things. This is what Oracle's going to be used for.
Absolutely, yeah, I think that's very well said. Yeah, so my one of the final things is for people that are like, you know what, everything that I've heard about Whitney is great, but I might end up wanting to dive in deeper, have more questions. Where's the best place for people that end up reaching out to you or continue the conversation?
I would like to tell people about our telegram of course, but if you want like more specific kind of, you know, more specific questions head over to our discord, we take a lot of pride in our discord and we kind of keep it nice and concise. We don't have overwhelmed
channel on our server that some of these other communities do. We just keep it nice and simple for any new user to get the information they need within the within a minute they need it. So I would say Discord for sure, which is discord.gg/witness. Love it. Love it. And just kind of with closing everything up
up. I really want to say thank you to the Wittnet team, especially for coming on here. Selfishly, this is something that I've been looking forward to. And then if you follow some of the bigger names out there, even like WaveJumper, they start to talk about the-- WaveJumper is one of a close friends of mine. We've talked about it for like nine years.
Yeah, so I love what he's doing and just for him to put that on a lot of people's radar is a big thing because you need the deep divers that'll end up explaining information because there's people out there that full-time jobs will never hear about other projects and it's like you have someone like that that can start it off and now you can do your deep dive and then we
we can also present more information because I believe like Wittnet and Oracle's in general people need to understand the word Oracle's and what it fully brings into everything. So I really want to say thank you to the community that's been listening. I want to thank the Wittnet team and Wittnet, do you all have anything else you want to leave with people?
Um, no, I mean just remember that real DeFi is built on Wittnet. And thank you for having us. Absolutely. Thank you. And with that being said, I hope everyone has a great rest of your day wherever you are in the world. And until next time, thank you and catch you later. Catch you later. Thank you for having us. Bye bye. Absolutely.