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Zilliqa’s Vision: 2022 and Beyond
Recorded: April 14, 2022 Duration: 1:08:22Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hi, everyone.
Welcome.
Welcome to this very, very special session that we've planned for taking you through
the vision for Zillica 2022 and beyond.
You know, just since we've posted this session a few days ago, we've had incredible response.
We've had so many signups. I'm seeing all of these amazing comments coming in.
I just want to say I'm so grateful that you all joined us today.
This is the kind of engagement that keeps us motivated to take Zilliqa to greater and greater heights
every single day. So thank you. To quickly introduce myself, my name is Aparna and I've
actually been with the Zilliqa family for three years now, focusing on communications and PR.
And in this time, I've seen Zilliqa go through incredible stages of growth,
so many stages of evolution,
and there's just been so many learnings along the way.
But the one I think I'm most excited about
is the one that's happening right now
and all of the growth that's being planned
that's just around the corner
that I really think will be the most exciting phase for us. We're gonna go through, we're gonna get into
that right away and I think the best person to take you through that will be
none other than the the man at the helm, our CEO, Dr. Ben. Ben, you know, no
further ado, the floor is yours. The community is dying to hear from you.
All right. Thank you so much, Aparna. It's really exciting to be here. It's really taking us a while to get to this stage in terms of pulling things together, in terms of various other exciting things that have happened over the last two, three months that I'll cover as part of this presentation. So I guess the floor is mine for the next 10, maybe 12 minutes, give or take.
And I have some slides for you prepared as well.
So I'll try to focus on a variety of subjects.
I'll tell you about what we've done in the last little while,
over the last 10, 12 months, give or take.
Some of the recent changes that I'm sure you are quite excited to
hear about. And I'll introduce you to some of the people that we'll spend more time interacting with
during the rest of this session as well. And I'll tell you about some of the more specific plans,
both on the business side, as well as the technical side for us for the coming months.
So quite a lot of information to cover.
So we try to see if I can jump into the slides.
So Art, if you could, can we have the slides, please?
Okay, match.
So we haven't used this platform before, but let's hope it all works out.
Let's hope the sound quality is what you expect here as well. But all right, so I guess
it's up to me to try and manage these slides. All right, let's do it. So first, before we go too much
further, I should probably tell you a bit about my background as well, because I think for some of you
this might be the first time you're encountering me here and so let me just give you a broad overview of some
of the things i've done in terms of my career and education things for that sort so my previous job
was also with a startup called brave you probably know about the brave browser at this point you
know going really strong you know 50 maybe 55 million users. I lost count.
Also, crypto-related projects.
I was there as the chief scientist leading the research team,
coming up with interesting ideas and driving them into production
for about four years.
And prior to that, I was inrosoft research for about a decade also coming up
with exciting research ideas publishing papers presenting these papers and then ultimately
taking these ideas into really complex products and sort of things that are ultimately shipped by
microsoft in this case in addition to that I've also taught at a variety of universities.
You can see the University of Washington here, MIT, as well as Imperial College London.
I work in what's called software systems, which includes a variety of subjects all the
way from things like programming languages, compilers, distributed systems, software security,
data privacy, as well as a variety of other topics.
So that's a little bit about me, and I hope that this is helpful,
and I'm really quite excited to be here and meeting Zilliqa to the next stage of its growth.
Now, before we talk about the future, let's talk about some of the recent past.
So we've done really well in terms of growth in the last 10 to 12 months.
And I want to cover some of the numbers that are covered in a lot more detail in a relatively recent ecosystem report that talks about the Zilliqa ecosystem.
You can find the link on the website.
If you go there and dig around, you'll be able to
find this report that gives you all sorts of gory details. And I'll just cover some of these
numbers here. And so these are some of the important metrics as far as we are concerned
at Zilliqa. So quite a lot of growth in terms of Zilliqa addresses have grown to by almost 200% from 2020 to 2021.
So we have over 3 million active wallet addresses at the moment.
And of course, this is one of the things we are aiming to grow further.
And hopefully throughout the rest of this presentation, you'll see some of the ways that we are approaching this.
In terms of the DeFi ecosystem,
this is the number here on the slide,
over 350 million locked into different DeFi applications
and different dApps in the Zilliqa ecosystem.
And obviously we're not stopping at this only,
we are pushing this further.
So one of the ways we are pushing this further is by opening up the Zilliqa ecosystem to other blockchains.
And so there's a significant focus that we've had on bridging, bridging of assets.
And of course, this is only the beginning.
We need to invest further into bridges and bridge with more networks and so on and so forth.
So there's quite a lot of thinking that's happening there at the moment,
both for things like DeFi assets as well as NFTs going further as well.
And so since we've opened these possibilities,
we've had over 60 million worth of these assets brushed onto Zilliqa relatively recently
as well. In terms of getting more people access to the Zilliqa ecosystem, we are pushing quite
significantly in terms of giving users, giving people access to ZRC tokens both for purchasing
as well as staking and we've been working pretty much continuously both for purchasing as well as staking.
And we've been working pretty much continuously
with various exchanges as well as institutional investors,
various funds and things of that sort.
And the list of exchanges keeps growing.
And we are focusing on getting more and more
so that people from different geographies
can get access to Zilica tokens and Zilika assets.
Last but not least, and this is something that we'll talk about
you know in the rest of this presentation, I think in a lot more detail, there is a
renewed focus in the Pekomit community and that applies to just about every aspect of
community interactions and so one of them is just the sheer growth
in terms of the number of people signed up for Twitter,
things of that sort,
and interacting with us on various channels,
including Discord, as well as others.
So the growth has been over 200% in the last year.
And of course, we have a number of initiatives
we are pushing, such as the ambassador program and things of that sort that will push this further still
now let me step back for a couple of minutes and just kind of look at the market as a whole
so by now there's been quite a lot of situation that's happened around blockchain and its
applications and of course it's not just the l1, which is where we are and what we are excited about, but of course, also applications of some of these L1s. And in terms of maturation,
we've seen several really significant and sizable types of applications, types of markets emerging
in the last 12 to 15 months alone. So certainly there is a great deal of interest out there
in terms of games that are interacting with blockchains
or based on blockchains or blockchain-based gaming.
Anyway, you cut it.
And so there are some projections out there.
It's expected, you know, that market alone is expected
to hit something like 300 billion by 2027.
DeFi, of course, remains our focus,
and we are aiming to add more high-quality projects
to our DeFi ecosystem,
some of which might be multi-chain, multi-platform as well.
But the projections here are also staggering.
So basically, you can see some of these numbers here on the slide,
effectively quarter trillion, something of that sort.
And, of course, continued growth is projected as well.
Last but not least, of course, is the metaverse, which is something that's been supremely active and obviously in the news a lot the last year, pretty much nonstop.
And so there are some projections here, I think, from Citibank or some such that give it something like 13 trillion by 2030, which is, of course, far away.
But we'll have to see what happens.
But at the same time, we are super excited about this specific domain.
You might have seen some of our activities here with Metopolis and some of the things we did back in Miami about 10 days ago.
back in Miami about 10 days ago.
So we are extremely excited about this
and also optimistic about this domain
and are engaging there deeply.
So again, sort of stepping back for a second.
I mean, look, what we have is an efficient
and basically energy-friendly, if you will, L1 technology that's ready to power quite a number of applications.
And these applications range from anything that's in the space of DeFi, those kinds of dApps,
all the way to creator economy type of applications that often involves things like NFTs
on Zilliqa. And we've put quite a lot of energy into some of the recent
ZRC standards when it comes to NFTs as well, all the way to sort of various other things that I
think are that we are on the cusp of, such as, you know, enabling interesting gaming scenarios
and things of that sort.
And again, I don't want to steal the thunder
of other people who will speak up to me.
So I'll just leave it at that.
Speaking of some of the other people,
so I'm actually very happy to introduce,
some of them and actually some of them
are shown here on the slide,
but what's happened is that in the last three months,
we've had a lot of very important team growth happening at Zilliqa.
So here are some of the people who have joined us.
This list is not exhaustive.
New people are starting pretty much every week,
but this gives you a sense in terms of the some of the focus areas
and so you'll speak to our new community lead head of community you'll speak to some of the
technical people as well and of course the head of marketing will speak to us in just a few minutes
also we are continuing to grow on the gaming side so we have had several people join in the last months alone,
and we'll keep adding to that because we are very passionate
about some of these gaming-based outcomes.
So here's a subject that's near and dear to my heart.
So we wanted to announce some of the things
that are currently in the works.
And these I'm sure some of you will find quite exciting.
So the first thing here on the list is support for the EVM.
We are working on EVM support at Zilliqa,
and this is something that clearly many people have been asking for for quite a while.
We are well aware of this,
and we are also well aware of the possibilities
because with EVM support,
I think the proverbial floodgates open in that many projects that were sort of on the sidelines before suddenly find a way to migrate to Zilliqa.
Many infrastructure aspects like new wallets, new custody providers, things of that sort suddenly become, you know, open up to Zillica as well. So this is something that, you know, we've known for
quite a while and, you know, it's something that we are focusing on for upcoming months.
We are also putting more muscle behind Scylla, which has been our sort of mainstay, has been
our language at Zillica for quite a while now. But what we're adding to Scylla is support for our LLVM, for an LLVM backend, which will give it rather more speed, effectively faster compilation path.
And this is something that I think really is important.
And, you know, we'll have to wait and see.
I mean, we'll have to do measurements and figure out,
because depending on the application,
some applications might want to use Scylla,
and especially with this faster backend
and others will still gravitate towards the EPM.
And then the last thing on this slide
is our focus on more kind of bridge options, let's say.
So as I mentioned before before we want to have more
people from different chains migrating over and interacting with silica in a variety of exciting
ways and uh this is where bridges come in and so we want to redouble our focus on bridges and kind
of give more possibilities to people and as i mentioned before these are bridges for sort of regular tokens, regular assets, but not only that, also for things like NFTs as we get into the NFT sort of storage NFT domain further.
Just to highlight some of the things that we have on our DeFi roadmaps, support for liquid staking has been there on our roadmap for quite a while.
We are basically continuing to focus on that.
Various other kind of solutions
for cross-chain swapping
as well as potentially routing
across multiple exchanges.
We are aiming to increase our competitiveness
when it comes to decentralized
exchanges or DEXs. And then basically just pushing further on the Zillbridge functionality.
We know what to do there. It's just a matter of time and effort that needs to be put in that
domain, in that direction. I wanted to focus a little bit more on some of our recent activities when it comes to
gaming.
We are really passionate about the potential that gaming on Zilliqa gives us as a fast,
affordable chain.
I think we're really well suited for games being integrated with Zilliqa.
And we've been engaging with a variety of gaming studios and individual game items and we're also
quite passionate about uh building games ourselves and you might have seen that we've released the
recent data of our gaming sdk uh publicly went public just a few days ago and this is just uh
one of the signs of our commitment to pushing this gaming angle a lot further and some of you
are probably paying attention
to what's happening out there,
things like play-to-earn games,
things of that nature.
And so we're quite passionate about these possibilities
as well as interesting community interactions
such as guilds and all this other stuff
that comes as a result of getting further
into the gaming domain.
Last but not least, I also wanted to mention some of our recent partnerships
with a variety of really exciting eSports companies.
So, NuneJuice in Pajamas is in the middle of this slide.
RRQ is also here, as well as Madlines, which is a company out of Spain.
And it's really exciting and important for us to cut partnerships of this kind
because in addition to other things, of course, they have engaged user communities
or fan communities, sports communities that come with these kinds of companies.
And that's exceptionally important for us
as we grow our user base on Zilliqa,
as well as the number of wallets,
as well as things like transaction volume,
and so on and so forth.
Just to talk about, you know,
one of my favorite topics out there,
which is, you know, the gross mindset, so to speak.
There's quite a number of things that are happening on this front, which is we're expanding our geographic footprint.
We are expanding into Europe quite significantly, as can be evidenced by some of our recent hires.
We're expanding in Asia as well.
We're also expanding in the U.S.
We've hired several people there recently, and I think we'll continue to do so.
And then when it comes to community interactions,
we are on the cusp of restarting our ambassador program there,
and Tiago will speak about that in probably just a few minutes.
I don't really want to steal his thunder,
but we are committed to making sure that those interactions are serious and productive at the same time. We're doubling up when it comes to
global visibility for Zilliqa, when it comes to marketing done properly as well event participation.
I sort of mentioned the event we had in Miami that was extremely well attended, much more so
than we ever anticipated.
A great deal of excitement about Metropolis, topics related to that.
So super psyched to see all of that.
And the last bullet point here is increasing accessibility or just access to ZIL as well as associated tokens to a variety of players,
access to ZIL as well as associated tokens to a variety of place individuals as well as businesses
alike as well as future investors and again I mentioned some of the things we are doing
in that domain such as more exchanges as well as bridges.
So super excited to be here I think really we have really quite an event planned for you.
So looking forward to discussions that will happen,
some of the discussions that will happen
in the next 20 to 30 minutes.
You'll see an exciting panel.
So looking forward to all of that and welcome.
Thank you so much, Ben, for that fantastic summary
of everything that we have planned in terms of our growth
pillars for the next year or so.
I think we touched upon tech, DeFi, Web3, gaming.
We've really touched upon all of it.
And I'm sure you agree that the next few months are going to be crucial as we activate all
crucial as we activate all of them, build them out.
of them, build them out.
Which really brings me to the next part of today's event,
which is building up all of our initiatives in the right way.
And this is one that I've been personally dying to announce for a while,
but we've had to keep it under wraps because of all of the other incredible
things in our pipeline, including Metapolis,
early access event we just had.
And so with the slew of sort of Web3 and DeFi activations,
we really needed the right person to help us glow the global visibility of our brand, as Ben was talking about,
expand our global community of Zilliqa's
and really position Zilliqa at the top of the game
that we know it truly is at the top of.
And I think we found the right person for this.
He's as much of a blockchain native as you can get.
He's been marketing for projects for six years
in the blockchain space and over 10 years in tech. And we're thrilled
that he decided to join the Zilliqa family. And so I'm so happy to announce Art Malkov as the
new head of marketing. Hi. Hello. Hey, everyone. Super excited to be here here i'm looking forward to zulika future a lot a lot of exciting
stuff coming out yes and and and and you know those of those of us working with you know that
you've been at it in the background for a while um but finally the community gets to meet you
and um they've been they've been asking for you know the new head of marketing for a while
um and so this is one they're going to really love.
But so, you know, this is something that I was curious about.
So many projects in the crypto space.
Why Zilliqa?
What was it about Zilliqa that you decided that you needed to join us and help us, you
know, make us even bigger?
I saw the potential possibility.
So to me, Zilliqa is, I look for the projects where there is so much,
if you connect certain elements, you can unlock so much potential.
And if you look at my background, that's what have happened as previous projects.
I specifically look out to join the project that I can connect with emotionally,
that I really understand what they
can do and how they can bring it to fruition and from azulek it just jumped out it was like you
know diamond and rough where it's it's already you know it's been around and it has a great technology
but is it showcased properly and so to me it's all about unlocking that showcase of potential it's
like there are we have so many cool things you you know, metaverse, gaming, DeFi,
like, and why not take it to the next level?
So to me, that really spoke as soon as I look at Zilliqa, I went like, oh, this is awesome.
We can do a lot of stuff here.
So yeah, hi everyone.
I'm super thrilled to be with Zilliqa because listen, we're sitting in a gold mine here,
right?
It's in a way to me, it's a technological gold mine, not literal.
So we will be able to, I think there's so many things we can build on top of Zolika. There's so
many different potentials. I've done some Playturn back in a previous project, and I think Zolika
has amazing names that can really leverage that that's what people don't understand that you know when we're talking about rq or nip those are some of the best teams in the world
in gaming we're talking about millions and millions and millions tens of millions of fans
all around and we're able to tap in and if we you know whenever we have a play to our own game we
want to feature those teams those fans will come behind. That means, you know, immediately Zilliqa becomes the gaming platform.
So I think, and that's just one element.
And there is metaverse, there is DeFi, there is, you know, cross-interpreability elements.
So to me, that potential is still locked up.
So I love to unlock that kind of elements.
Yeah, I agree with what you said. All of our partners
have followings of their own. They have communities of their own.
And it just is very exciting to think of how
we can combine communities to achieve
massive impact and bring even more people into crypto. Not just people
who've been Zilicans for so many years and people that we love, but also new people that can find
out, you know, what we can and what the ecosystem can really do for them. But, you know, you've
been already doing a lot of stuff for a few weeks. Do you want to tell the community a little bit
about what you've been working on and what you plan to focus on?
Absolutely.
So for me, I think with Azulica,
there could be a lot of connectivity with real-world projects,
real-world businesses.
And even the projects that we have in the ecosystem,
there are a lot of ways to showcase them.
We have Lunar. It's one of the biggest social, you know, for those who are not familiar, it's kind
of similar to CoinMarketCap in social sentiment.
So they're built in Zilliqa.
Not many people actually know that this is pretty amazing.
They're growing very rapidly.
And so we have a number of projects like that where we can do so much more with them and
then with us.
And to me, it's about attracting also the right type of companies and talent
to build on top of our ecosystem.
We have an incredible ecosystem right now, but it was a little bit, you know,
maybe not focused on.
And so to me, that jumped out immediately.
You know, let's do more with partners.
Our partners have huge reach like gaming partners.
And I mentioned that's a huge reach.
We get we have Metaverse.
So unless again, Metaverse is people say, well, it could be a little hype.
It could be, but also it could be a real world solutions.
And the thing is, lots of big companies putting a lot of resources and money behind it.
So like for us and so far Metopolis have received very strong reception you know that
Zilliqa city is one-of-a-kind platform that no one has done yet to that customizability to
ability to what we can offer potentially products on Zilliqa ecosystem that being built can interact
with Zilliqa city so uh you know bring larger brands can come in and have stores here
so it's a so it's it's really you know possible i love the that it could be uh it could be a
small or could be gigantic and thing is gigantic is very possible because it's not just us you
know facebook you know they they they're going in they change their name to meta that's that's a signal so and
yet we're going more for the business side of it more a metaverse as a service which is
really connected with me because i think there is it's a possibility once again it's not just that
but we have gaming we have defy so zilka really have a great infrastructure and framework to build on top of. And so I think that's what I'm looking to do,
connect it all together.
Yeah, like you said, it could be small,
but it could be gigantic.
That's the key.
But with Metaverse as a service, it's up to everyone else.
They need to imagine it and we build it for them.
And so, I mean, if we scale that up,
that's gonna be amazing.
And that's just one
of the many things planned. And, you know, there's so many people that are going to be
responsible for making this come to life from the community perspective, from the tech perspective,
from the engineering perspective. And I believe we're going to speak to some of them now. So
I will hand it over to you. Absolutely great to be here thank you partner uh we
got an amazing panel and i will be uh kind of leading right into it so we got some some uh
incredible people so i will bring him on stage until head of our product uh we have valeri
head of distributed system engineering our tech person you got a tech question don't go to him
but those questions will come to him at some point
He's playing the future so let's and we have to Tom head of
Gaming and head of community so this is
let's
so I will give a quick intro to
our So I will give a quick intro to our panelists.
So the reality is we have some amazing brains behind this situation.
I'm thrilled to be part of that community.
So first and foremost, let's meet Tom, who joined us from Fortune 500 tech giant IBM.
And they know something about sports entertainment,
and he was their lead. So, you know, that's immediately, we're already in the right direction.
And he's driving, we'll be driving digital transformation. He has done it before,
and he'll do it for us. It's a, he's understanding of Web3 Powered Solutions is incredible,
and he'll be spearheading our gaming strategy.
So this is Tom, maybe you say a few words.
Let's see.
Hey, everyone.
Great to be here.
So, yeah, so really excited to meet you all and be here today.
I had a great role at IBM.
I loved it.
Head of Sports and Entertainment for the UK. It was a dream role that I did for about five years. The last year of that became a bit frustrating. Right. So I spent a lot of time talking to people both internally and our clients about how they needed to embrace Web3.
needed to embrace web3 and ultimately it became clear to me that they either weren't incentivized
correctly or weren't able to do that and really they weren't going to be able to make that leap
quickly enough and so i needed to um that's what led me to zilliqa and why zilliqa well the more
i researched this project the more it became like super clear to me that it's got all of the ingredients to be a really major force, both in terms of gaming and beyond.
So we've touched on some of this already.
If you look at the combination of Metapolis, the eSports partnerships, also the tech stack.
And as Ben alluded to, is actually really well suited to the demands of gaming.
I think that just puts us in a great place to really build out this vertical.
The other things I looked at was a really large, passionate community, many of whom have been supporting this project for a long time.
for a long time. And I think that's a really important foundation to build on.
And I think that's a really important foundation to build on.
And then finally, the thing that was probably really tipped the balance was the team. So
both the existing team that were on board and the really great talent that Ben's putting together
here. A lot of us met each other for the first time in Miami a couple of weeks back around the Metapolis event and it was impossible not to be excited by how much diverse, passionate talent that we've got on board.
So yeah, really great to be here and thanks, Art.
Absolutely, yeah. And we do have a truly global team from everywhere. So that was great to connect
in person. And of course, it was just great to see people from all over the world bring their own expertise and knowledge.
So I think that's what really makes Zilliqa so diverse and powerful that the team.
So in the next stop is Valeri.
So Valeri, I'll give a quick intro to Valeri and then he can give us his vision and why Zilliqa.
And he's our head of distributed system engineering.
And so some of you have heard of Internet Computer, you know, the last year's top five, top 10 leader. Well, DFINITY, well,
guess what? Valeri really did amazing work there and was critical. Well, you know, as you can,
everybody's critical, right? But so will we get his perspective on it to the DFINITY Foundation.
He was also driving large programs in Google
and led the engineering team across multiple AI
and distributed system startups.
So I think he's a truly tech person,
tech lead that Zulika can benefit from.
So Valerio, maybe tell us why you joined and
kind of your perspective. Right, thanks Art. I'm really excited to be here. Okay, why Zilliqa?
Multiple factors. So in fact, when I looked at Zilliqa, I appreciated many, many things. First of all,
all the technology that we build has to be used by the people for a particular purpose.
And I looked at for the amount of code that people have written.
And I looked at the code as well, of course. engagement of the community the amount of belief of the people in the community and how far the
team went with the with the technology that they created uh was quite amazing to me um
and you know i looked at the technology it's very solid and at the same time simple like if you take
bitcoin white paper for example it's very short and very nice and sweet and here
we have kind of the same situation because we have like you you read one white paper you understand
how Zilliqa works you look at the code and it looks fine and like and then on top of that when
I was seeing that Ben is uh expanding on already successful story,
he just wants it to continue in the future.
And there are many more dimensions along which we can expand Zilliqa's technology.
Then that was a no-brainer.
I was thinking that, hey, this project is really underappreciated
and we need to come and make it much like much more successful than it is even
though it was already kind of way ahead of many other projects you look at many other projects
and many many projects in crypto actually they built some technology come together with some
ideas saying okay we have a new consensus protocol, so what?
Or some other ideas, right?
And then they struggled to kind of build this whole system of,
you know, there's technology, there's people around it,
there's ecosystem fans and so on. And this seems to be working already now at Zoico for quite some time.
So this gives us the energy to move further.
That's how I, that's my perception.
Yeah, so it's a proving technology, right?
So they already, it's not like, let's build it in the future, but it's really, it's working.
You know, that's important.
It's very important.
Yeah, and the potential is only the beginning.
So it's like working, but really,
we haven't yet built what we can build.
Yeah, so much more to build.
Absolutely.
And great to have you here, Valery.
It's absolutely needed.
It's always good to have somebody of your caliber
to be in a project leading really our engineering efforts.
And it's, you know, blockchain is about technology.
We can talk about metaverse and gaming, but let's build a tech.
So absolutely.
And so the next person I will introduce is where you haven't spoken to him yet.
He's Anton has a passion for building and launching digital products.
He's our head of DeFi.
He actually co-founded several crypto startups.
So very experienced
um and uh i think it's very important in this type of uh environment to have somebody who know understands defy on a very deep level that's why it's thrilled to have you on time to join us
and show and lead our defy vision so maybe share with us some thoughts on what do you think about it and just why Zilliqa?
Thanks, Lodart, for an intro. I'm Anton. Actually, for me, it's quite a simple question.
I truly believe in a decentralized economy and I believe that crypto is the future of money and the future is now. And also, financial freedom is a basic human right. So for me, Zilliqa
is a great opportunity to contribute to those values and to contribute to building a decentralized
economy.
Absolutely. And that's where we're going, right? Why would we be in blockchain if not
decentralized? Let's remember, everybody, that we're still in the very beginning of the growth.
And it really is, you know, I started in 2016 and I have seen a lot of projects.
I have seen, you know, when the market was still tiny, tiny, I think the total market
cap was around 20 billion when I went back in the day.
And it was, you know, everything we talked about back then as a dream is actually real.
And sometimes some of the elements are actually more real.
Some of the DeFi, I don't think anybody really could understand that back then,
early 17, what could be done.
Yet right now, this is a part of our life.
So it's super thrilling.
So, yeah.
And last but not least, a super important
part, community. And Tiago is really leading the way of our community vision. And he has built
different projects and, you know, communities and different projects. So one important one,
Dash. It helped them grow really rapidly. And that's how Dash, community helped Dash get high,
you know, top five.
And guess what?
Community is also very important to us.
So it's all about the proper connection.
And also you're a part of Cardano Ambassadors
and growing, implementing, designing the Cardano program.
And we know how strong Cardano community is.
So this is something that, I wouldn't say it was a missing link,
but I think we can definitely do more with community.
We can listen better with community.
So I wanted to get, you know, why Zilliqay?
And what's your use on that?
Hi, everyone.
And thank you, Art, for the intro.
So as mentioned, I've been working in the blockchain industry since 2013,
contributing to a few projects, namely Dash and Cardano.
And that really gave me insight, particularly with Dash,
because it went from obscure altcoin all the way to top five market cap.
And it really taught me by trial and fire what it takes to scale up a community to that level
and how important
communities are. So I have been aware of Zilcov since it came out. I've always kept an eye
on its progress. Development is ongoing with many exciting upgrades in the near future,
but by now the Zil chain has matured. It is tried and tested, objectively one of the strongest
chains in terms of security, speed, low transaction cost and very high transaction per second.
It is one of the few chains that is really, really ready to start building the next generation of the Internet.
And we have the tools to do that. So for me, that is very exciting.
is very exciting um now of course defy is very very exciting but as a lifelong gamer and musician
in my spare time of vr and sci-fi aficionado i really wanted to contribute to the metaverse nft
game vibe aspect of this industry which i've never done before and um what i find is that
the zilliqa family is already incredibly positive and engaged. But putting all these ingredients together really creates the recipe for one
to become one of the biggest, strongest, and most dynamic communities
in the history of this industry.
And that is my goal.
So through our partners, namely on the GameFi and the Creator Economy,
the potential to onboard thousands of new members is quite real.
And yeah, as mentioned before, I was privileged to be at the Miami event where I met the team,
and there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I had found my new home. The quality of
the talent pool is just absolutely astonishing, with many new hires still to be announced. So
I feel very honored to be part of the Zilfan. I think we're all excited.
I think the level, it all comes down to the level, right?
If there are right people in right positions,
we can, this is I think what sometimes blockchains
could be missing.
And I think the Zilliqa has the right,
definitely right thinking
and the Zilliqa leadership team
definitely doing the right things.
So I'll take it into kind of main questions for, so everyone is asking, so it's, you know,
what is next? So let's go vertically. What is next? I think, what is our vision for DeFi?
You know, this is important questions. Everyone wants to know. So Zilliqa, great.
By the way, guys, partnerships is really cool, But first, it's all about having the right framework.
So just, you know, we have a lot of partnerships coming out,
but let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
Ultimately, for a team, it's all about building connection.
Right now, we're rebuilding from, you know, on the back end,
a lot of things that can be improved,
especially like, for example, for marketing.
There are a lot of elements that we, I think, maybe could have done better.
And so all those things is done on the back end.
So I assure everybody that there are going to be a lot, a lot of really, really awesome stuff coming up.
But ultimately, it takes, you know, blockchain is not, it doesn't happen in a second.
You've got to have the right foundation.
So we're focusing on the foundation that when we grow, we're growing very rapidly.
We scale very rapidly.
And this is a very important element.
So, you know, for everybody, don't get ahead of yourself.
But let's get ahead of ourselves a little bit.
So with that, I'll have Anton tell us what his vision for Defy and Zuluca.
He just joined recently, but I know he has a very ambitious vision.
So let's please, Anton, tell us your thoughts.
Yeah, basically Defy is evolving in the Commando space and our team will drive the change.
Nowadays, Defy is a competitive environment
with multiple blockchains, teams,
products striving to attract some users,
assets, and people to build on top of them.
And we actually have grand plans
to expand DeFi products within the universe.
So our focus would be infrastructure
and interoperability.
We plan to, as Ben already mentioned, to expand bridges. We plan to expand bridge to
multiple EVM and non-EVM networks for both fungible and non-fungible tokens.
We plan to increase competition between DEXs, to upgrade ZillSwap and introduce new DEXs.
We have a lot of other kind of things to be done, like providing fast and reliable
infrastructure is our kind of top priority now. And we plan to scale up infrastructure,
decrease latency, decrease rejects and introduce on-chain oracles.
So we have some plans to build and actually to expand the DeFi ecosystem
from the point of standing now.
And I think we have the team in place and we have the
capability to deliver so for me it's a great chance as I already said to
contribute to the values of decentralized economy and to contribute
to building decentralized economy with Zilliqa.
Sounds good, yeah. And that's why we're here. It's a decentralized, decentralized,
decentralized. And let's take it more on a fun note. Gaming. What is our
vision for gaming? I know Tom is going to share with us his thoughts and
where we're going. So once again once again this is good think of it for
everybody it's kind of the direction we're going because we have a lot of things we have a lot of
component that can come together so tom please share your thoughts on where you think yeah sure
so i'll start with the immediate and my current priorities and then sort of build towards where I think we can go. So priority number one for me is to get games on Zilliqa, right?
And it's a simple statement, but there's a lot within that.
So there's what can we do with the technology?
There's a lot we can do, actually.
And we started to make some good progress around building out tools
to make it easier for studios to come and build on Zilliqa.
We're hiring experienced people from the gaming industry.
You'd have seen the recent announcements about Valentin,
our head of gaming technology, who's joined recently.
He's going to make a big difference in terms of the capabilities that we've got
of people who are really experienced in this industry.
of people who are really experienced in this industry.
We're actively pursuing partnerships with studios
that are going to encourage the flow of games
onto the Zilliqa blockchain.
That's going to be really important.
And then finally, we're going to be working closely
with the games that are already building.
The community project's really important.
I'm really impressed with the teams
that I've met so far and we're going to be working with these teams to see what we can do to
accelerate their roadmaps and get those games on Zilliqa as quickly as possible so that's kind of
priority number one then if we look beyond that number two is around Metapolis and Zilliqa City. We absolutely need to make sure that that experience is gamified,
that there's a rewards mechanism, that users are incentivized not just to come back to Metapolis,
but that on every visit back to Metapolis, their engagement deepens further
deepens further and they become more and more a part of that metaverse.
and they become more and more a part of that metaverse.
And then thirdly, we need to tell the world about it.
And the parts that I can play in that is predominantly through those esports partnerships
that we've already mentioned.
As you touched on earlier, these brands have millions of engaged users.
And the research we've done suggests that a large proportion of these people
are at least crypto curious or receptive to the concept of crypto.
Maybe they own some Bitcoin, maybe they own Ethereum.
There's absolutely no reason why their next step down that crypto
rabbit hole can't be to play a game on Zilliqa or enter Metapolis or participate in DeFi on Zilliqa.
And all of those priorities, what they're building towards really is a vision of combining our
GameFi initiatives with Metapolis and with our esports partnerships.
And what that's going to mean is that we're going to be able
to create unique experiences that actually merge these worlds,
not just for gamers, but for esports fans, crypto natives,
and just about everybody in between.
We've got loads of exciting ideas about how we can do that,
and I really can't
wait for us to build that out. Absolutely. Yeah. And for those of you who don't know,
Valentin who just joined, he had half a million active users in his previous game,
which is massive. So he knows about retention, how to build out so we gotta i think the the team is keep getting expanding in a you know in a better and better uh strong like we're getting getting better not better
but like strong talent constantly so we're expanding with the right people who know how to
build it i helped in a previous project i have helped with play turn and i know how you know
those elements work so i think we're all are highly capable to taking the zillikas various verticals to the
next level and gaming is definitely one of the to me personally i think is you know you know there
are billions of players uh you know casual or serious but in the planet and we're talking about
hundreds of millions serious players and if you can earn you know play and earn it's way better there is a there is uh
you had to buy before then it was free to play beta played free to play and now it's earned to
play and this is a new paradigm which is super new and so this is uh i think azilica is way ahead of us
of the curve uh and based on the gaming part so that's what me gets me really excited it's a you know people
that you look like everybody you know we're at the very beginning the really axie infinity only
exploded last year it's over like the second you know like summer of last year and then everybody
can get been rushing into it the thing is do they have the right stuff do they have the right support
and zilliqa is zilliqa is big enough that we can do a lot of stuff for the future for gaming.
So that's, you know, I'm so super thrilled to have you on board and volunteer and others.
And that brings us to the tech part.
You know, like Valeri, maybe you can share with us some of them.
Sure.
Where are we going technically?
And once again, everybody, it's blockchain.
It takes a little time to build.
Let's not go like, you see, it's not about the reality is we're here to give you a real information.
It's not about the hype.
It's like we're here.
And Valerio, please share with us your thoughts.
Thanks, Art. So, okay, the real information here is that it's critical that we become more interoperable with other players in the blockchain. So to that end, we are building the EVM support, Ethereum virtual machine support. This is already scored. This is in the works. And what will it bring?
already is code, this is in the works. And what will it bring? Well, first of all, as Anton mentioned,
it's important for DeFi, it's important for many partnerships, institutional investors,
things like that. The code that's already written and is just waiting to be run on Zilliqa.
And then as a Web3 developer, as a DAV developer, you will be at home with the tools you already know from other networks, which is also helpful for the whole ecosystem.
Scylla will still be our tool of choice for many projects.
So we are kind of giving more choice to the developers. And in some cases, one
technology will be preferred, in other cases will be the other technology, right? So that's to the
EVM as Ethereum virtual machine, which is actually compatible not only with Ethereum now, many networks use it, as many
people know. We also have a lot of ideas about actually interacting with Ethereum proper, right?
So, for example, having some interoperability on wallets and so on. And then there are longer term discussions happening in the team about
where do we go in terms of scalability of the network, in terms of benefit to specific use
cases. How do we cater to different verticals, to different trade-offs with better latency, better decentralization, better finality speed, and so on.
So there are many dimensions, and we are going to publish that also in due time.
also in due time. That kind of iteration takes time, but these immediate priorities about
interoperability is not the only thing we are thinking about much more scalable impact of
Zilliqa. Excellent. Yeah, and I do believe that EVM is actually going to be relatively in the near future, right?
Definitely it's going to be this year.
Definitely.
It's mentioned in 2022.
So yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And a lot of things, I think for everybody, we're looking to do a lot this year.
So it's hard to say because once again, it depends.
There's technology, there's different layers of it.
There's partners, how we're working.
And we have ecosystem that need to highlight.
So there's a lot of moving parts.
And that brings us back to ecosystem and community.
And Tiago, please tell us what's your vision for the community
and how it can help Zilliqa position itself for the future.
Sure.
So the vision.
Well, you can't fork code.
You can fork code, but you can't fork a community.
This is something that I've said a million times before.
And I wish I knew who coined this phrase because it's beautiful
and really sums up some of the challenges of building
a community.
It's an asset that takes years to develop and you can't copy paste, you can't steal away from other projects.
So what is the vision? The vision is to build a next generation community where on one part we already have Web3 and crypto natives.
On the other, facilitate and onboard newcomers into the
space in a simple fun and rewarding manner so the zilliqa dApp system is booming and we haven't
even touched the surface as mentioned before evm compatibility is coming and as ben mentioned that
is going to open the floodgates of um of you know the number of dApps that people will be able to interact with.
So in a nutshell, what I will be doing is building the foundations
to scale the Zilliqa family to where it deserves to be,
which is the undisputed market leader trailblazing the way for others to follow.
The Zilliqa community will be the very first layer one community to be able to congregate in the metaverse called Zilliqa City.
And this will have a very strong historical significance in this industry as well.
So in the meantime, in the near future, the community will be witnessing a complete overhaul over our Discord server.
I won't commit to a date because everyone knows how roadmaps go um but yeah in the coming weeks we will have a complete
overhaul of our discord server to make it much more intuitive interactive and fun place to be
with that will help with user retention for sure um we will power up the ambassador program
and really get moving there we already have a pool of
excellent ambassadors ranging from business development to developers who have been here
for many years so they're they're not new to the to the to the ecosystem so that's a really very
high added value we'll have I'll start planning several community activities, regular AMAs, host events with our partners,
activate Zilliqa City as soon as possible, and so on and so forth.
So stay tuned.
It's going to be very exciting.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I totally agree that we're going to be doing a lot more highlights of different projects.
And this is, as you know, community been clamoring for it.
So you'll see more in depth.
We'll work in bit closely on marketing side,
closely with more projects that are,
you know, building on Zilliqa
or trying to build on Zilliqa.
For example, I just spoke to the Zillhive,
which has a number of projects,
you know, in the pipeline.
And they're doing accelerators they're doing different things
to onboard more projects in zilliqa so it's i think uh i think it's really for objective for
all of us is to bring the next uh kind of stage next evolution for zilliqa where you know we're
doing we're we're more encompassing and i do believe we have the right
capabilities and people and you know this year is going to be very busy so just uh for everybody
it's it's it's once again blockchain is not like snap your fingers technology you got to do it
right uh but at the same time we're not talking about you know long long terms talking about this
year there's going to be a lot of stuff happening both on technical side both on community side on marketing side and
gaming side on defi side so just uh and i would say get involved like like you know i love how
everybody is uh arm sharing and the sidelines but why don't you get involved during community
maybe tell them how to get involved how How to get involved with the Zilka community.
With everything, yeah.
Absolutely.
I mean, just come join us and participate.
It is as simple as that.
You can follow our Twitter.
If you are big on Twitter, you can join on Discord
and just participate.
There are no rules.
Some people have all the time in the world.
Other people have nine to five and a big family,
so they can only dispense a couple of minutes or hours per day.
It doesn't matter. It's not about how many hours you have.
It's just about actively participating in the space and start discovering our booming ecosystem.
You will be surprised. Just start by coming in and just say hi, ask questions.
There are never silly questions. Everyone was new to blockchain at one point.
We all learn from each other and when the time comes pay it forward by supporting others with their questions and their doubts and and this is how communities grow download a wallet get a small
amount of zeal to start playing around with it see how it works we have already many quality
nft projects up and running dexes games that are already starting to be released.
And above all, give us your feedback because user experience reports are our goal to us.
Don't be shy.
We really do want to hear from you.
And if you so feel like it, get involved with Zilliqa.
So we welcome everyone from any walk of life.
Contrary to common perception,
you don't need to be a developer to become involved. Just come talk to us. We're excited to hear from you where you come from, you know, what are your skill sets. And for that, we do have
an ambassador program. It's not limited to the ambassador program, but, you know, the ambassador
program really is there to cater to anyone who feels that they would like to contribute.
to cater to anyone who feels that they would like to contribute.
Like I said, with whatever skill sets they may have.
The ambassadorship is open to anyone who wishes to become
a prominent thought leader in the space and mentor for our family.
So yeah, find our Discord, our Twitter, our Reddit.
If we don't have the links after we publish
or around here in pop-ups, just go to our website,
zilliqa.com, scroll down to the bottom
and you'll see our social links and just click Enjoy.
Absolutely. And we'll drop Discord also link.
So yeah, and Discord has different communities.
There is gaming. If you're a developer, absolutely.
Listen, if you want to build in Zilliqa, let's talk.
The reality is we encourage everybody to, you know, not just be in the silence and scream, go up, go up, go up.
But really, let's build a real project. Let's build real blockchain.
Because I've been, you know, in blockchain for a while.
And it's, you know, I would say if you're excited about Zilliqa, get involved.
Like, and there's different ways. I started with Discord.
There's different chats.
There's different conversations going.
And yeah, if you just want to be freshly following us, Twitter is good.
But I would say if you're anybody who is serious, go Discord and dive deeper.
And last but not least question.
Let's do the...
Let's take a grander vision like so
i guess what are we most excited about this zilliqa future not just directly to defy or such but
do you like what excites you maybe we'll start with uh with uh anton maybe or you can take us
into the what excites you just generally blockchain and how zilliqa maybe relates to that
What excites you?
Just generally blockchain and how Zilica maybe relates to that.
That's it.
I truly believe, as I already said, that Defy the future of finances and Zilica would definitely have a decent share in the economy of the future.
We are layer one, so we build infrastructure, we build blocks, we give the capability to the external teams to build what they like.
And my role would be to support the external teams to build great products on Zilliqa.
And I will do whatever it takes to help them to achieve their goals.
I think this is my top priority there.
Yeah, that's great.
That's great.
And so what about you, Tom?
What's your thoughts on that?
Yeah, so I think if you look at blockchain gaming as an industry,
vertical or whatever, it's obviously in the early stages.
But ultimately, I really believe that the amount of money that's pouring
into it, I mean, this is more money that's ever been invested in gaming ever before.
It's going to result in a number of culturally significant blockchain games that are going to
onboard hundreds of millions of non-crypto natives, right? And along the way, provide genuine
play-to-earn opportunities. And that, I think, is the thing that genuine play to earn opportunities.
And that I think is the thing that I'm most excited about.
My job is to maximize the chances of those games being on Zilliqa.
Shorter term, I think I'm really excited about providing our engaged community with some great blockchain gaming experiences.
And we're going to be looking to do that as soon as possible.
Yeah. Yeah. great blockchain gaming experiences and we're going to be looking to do that as soon as possible yeah yeah that's a yeah uh like i said that's what excited me excites me about zilliqa overall
it just there's so much potential in various verticals it's not just one it's not just
metaverse oh everybody metaverse yeah it's cool it's never this can be really big potential but
there's also d5 d5 is incredibly valuable and critical for blockchain projects.
So, you know, that's why it's also important.
Also gaming. Gaming could be, you know, game changing, pun intended.
So it really depends.
Valerio, maybe tell us more of, you know, what do you think of your own worldview and how Zilka fits into it.
I think currently the world is rethinking how computation in general is done and how it's delivered to the customers.
And crypto is a big part of it. So we will be rethinking what kind of models make sense.
what kind of models make sense.
So if I want to run some code somewhere,
on which chain should I run it,
or should I run it off-chain, on-chain, and so on?
So these discussions about on-chain and off-chain
will be ongoing all the time.
And I think that for zilliqa it's important to find that sweet spot where
uh the right technological choices are made and this is what we are trying to do here yeah yeah
absolutely so i'm very i think it's it's exciting for zilliqa and it's uh in a way you know what
I think it's exciting for Zilliqa.
It's in a way, you know, the blockchain growing,
and I think Zilliqa growing very well with where blockchain is going.
And I do feel there is potential for Zilliqa to be an explosive project,
a breakout project based on just what I'm seeing.
So, Tiago, maybe you take us, your thoughts on overall broader blockchain community
and how Zilliqica fits into it.
Sure. This is going to be a bit philosophical, but that is exactly what made me get into the
space in the first place. So not only some points that have been mentioned, financial freedom,
identity freedom, and internet freedom. So I'm excited to not let this next generation of the internet fall in the
hands of the usual suspects and let's make the internet great again. The opportunity to innovate
in community activation through Metapolis which is our metaverse as a service and in particularly
the first metaverse that we call Zilliqa City. That's going to beica city that's going to be tremendous it's going to be a grand experiment
for everyone and i'm extremely excited about that for sure but not only that engage with
with our community and partners to create many events be it online and offline be it in game five
be it in you know created economy nfts and even d5 there's so much that we can do
NFTs and even DeFi, there's so much that we can do.
The possibilities are literally endless.
But ultimately, my main concern is that I'm, you know, to do this under one big umbrella
of providing a safe space for our community to interact, to educate and support individual
activities and ultimately contribute to their success.
Absolutely.
And to your point, Diago,
I think it's very important to have the,
as you said, the metaverse and innovation.
It's the bold to get rewards.
So that's ultimately, we're in blockchain.
This is a space where you have to be bold.
It cannot be just sitting and waiting for something to come. So I do believe that Zilliqa is that blockchain that is being bold,
taking risks and really, you know,
and the risks to pay off the rewards because it's not just, you know,
we're doing one thing, we're doing a lot of different things that are,
and as well as we executed well, I believe Zilliqa will be, you know,
one of the leaders in the very near future.
So I think on this note, it was amazing to have everybody here.
Thank you for the panel, Ben, Parna.
It is our pleasure to be here.
And if anybody want to have a couple of words of goodbye, Valerian, Tom, Tiago.
Feel free.
Yeah, want to say something?
Well, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah, OK.
Just thank you to everyone who tuned up for this livestream.
For sure, we'll be the first of many to come.
And yeah, just feel excited because we are.
And nothing feels better than being excited,
but recognizing that the people that we are contributing for
also feel that excitement and report back to us.
So thank you very much, everyone.
Yeah, we're here to build.
Building, building come first.
The right foundation is super critical.
And, you know, the rewards come.
But I think the vision is truly, truly incredible.
And we're here to help it bring to fruition in reality.
And I believe we're on a very right path.
Zulka is in a better spot than it's been in years.
So, yeah.
It's all right.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you and stay tuned.
We'll see you soon. Bye. Thanks, everyone. Thank you and stay tuned. We'll see you soon. Bye.
Thanks everyone. Ciao.
