The second episode of Stakely's AMA series. We welcome today Bin Zhu, Founder of Stratos, presenting his interesting project, and Joel Jabalera, CEO of Stakely, as moderator.
—Joel: Hello Bin Zhu (@NotBoxBin), welcome to Crypto Engine, and thanks for your time.
—Bin Zhu: Hello Joel, nice to meet you and thanks to have me.
—Joel: What lever of proposal, for business? This is a personal question. How POT (Proof of Traffic) work?
—Bin Zhu:That is a great question, Stratos use the Proof of Traffic incentive model, just like all major Internet companies, traffic is the source of value rather than storage. YouTube, Google, Netflix does not rely on storage to obtain users, but earns revenue through huge traffic advertising. We will measure traffic is a better way to measure the real value than just measure the usage of disk. So, Stratos is the first project in the blockchain industry to use Proof of Traffic consensus.
—Joel: Amazing! Now let’s go with the round of questions.
Q: What is the strong point of Stratos considering that it is a decentralized system and that although it has tried to balance between security and efficiency, it is very difficult to achieve it 100%? What makes it different from other platforms in the point of “the impossible triangle paradox”?
A: Stratos is first decentralized data mesh which is combined by 4 components, blockchain, storage, database and computation. When the data is written to storage and database, the relevant auditing metadata is also be stored in blockchain as well. So if any data in Stratos is hacked, the user will be aware that at the same time.
For efficiency side, the Stratos network infrastructure learned the good design from GFS (Google File System) white paper and HDFS (Hadoop File system), the team redesigned it in decentralized manner based on the rich enterprise IT experience. That’s why Stratos could keep the system decentralization and high efficiency together.
Stratos use 3 different consensus internally for 3 different layers to guarantee the network is tightly bound together like a triangle.
Q: Which minimum requirements will be needed to participate in the resource layer?
A: Stratos welcome both of professional data center and personal hardware to join the network. Stratos mostly focus on the entire server performance instead of any single dimension Performance suck as CPU, GPU or disk size.
The detail specification for the resource node will be announced late.
Q: How will you achieve privacy and anonymity?
A: Like the other project, the user can encrypt personal data before adding to the Stratos network, also user can feel free to create the Stratos account anonymity.
If any user plan to use Stratos services, we don’t need to know who is the customer, the customer just should make sure there are enough STOS in the wallet.
Q: In the crypto world we always talk about decentralization, but we forget that the easiest way to create a node is in the largest and best-known VPS companies where they have all their DCs located in specific areas. In the end, most of the nodes will be found within these DCs, and we will fall back into the same fault as always. Have you thought about implementing any rewards to those who do it in different places?
A: I really like this question. What the question mentioned here is true. In my opinion, the network always need big trunk and small branches (like trees) for the different purpose.
The main trunk provided the high-speed data transportation highway, the server link to branches will offer the edge storage and computation service, maybe those servers are not strong like the servers in highway, but it more close the customer. So, it still brings value due to lower network latency.
Q: How does the team intend to support the DCloud through small data centers or individuals? Is it intended that anyone who has a server can act as a data center? What do they gain in return?
A: Stratos welcome any kind of qualified data center or servers to join the network.
According to the Proof of Traffic incentive model, the miner will get reward that is measured via the traffic the server respond.
Q: Staking has recently become in an important part of Blockchain to attract participants and investors, what is Stratos going to do? Will you take part in any staking/farming/pool platform?
A: Definitely, we will, Stratos blockchain would like to take part in the staking/farming/pool platform.
Q: How are Stratos storage costs versus current alternative solutions?
A: Be honest, this is a hard question to answer. The cost of per GB storage is really dependent on the multiple dimensions of like:
1, the size of Stratos network
2, the total traffic on the network
3, the performance of network
4, etc…
We will publish Stratos token economic paper soon, maybe you can have better understanding via review the paper.
Q: In the section on the future of Stratos, I like what you say about “the internet of value” and I see great potential, I am sure you will achieve it, but I would like to know what is the period of time in which you expect this adoption?
A: Yes, Stratos has blueprinted to be the foundation of value of internet.
But it takes time and need very well strategy plans to reach this goal.
That’s why we start with Storage. When we have a stable and solid storage foundation, we will move on to the next steps.
Q: Can a single node have the roles? Blockchain, meta and resource?
A: Technically, it’s doable for testing purpose. But it’s not recommended in the product inurnment.
Q: What plan does STRATOS have for the future (2 years)?
A: In two years, the Stratos main network will be available, all the component’s blockchain, decentralized storage, decentralized database, decentralized computation are all ready.
At the meantime, Decentralized CDN, NFT, Oracle solution, decentralized Social network and edge computing network product are good to go as well.
Q: Could you describe the Stratos recent goals, and about your next plans in roadmap?
A: You can have the milestones from official website The Stratos. The path to the success is:
- Stratos blockchain testnet.
- Stratos decentralized storage testnet.
- Stratos Network Acceleration (Decentralized CDN).
- Stratos NFT Marketplace.
- Stratos Blockchain mainnet.
- Stratos decentralized storage.
- Stratos decentralized database testnet.
- Stratos decentralized computation testnet.
- Stratos decentralized database maintnet.
- Stratos decentralized computation mainnet.
- Stratos Data Mesh mainnet.
Q: What is the strong point of Stratos that it gives confidence to the consumer for its widespread use of purchasing digital material?
A: The strong team bring us the confidence to archive Stratos’ GOAL, also Stratos has great vision about future of blockchain industry. All of these stuff will help Stratos reach the goal.
Q: Which use cases of Stratos network do you think will attract non crypto-savvy people?
A: For most non-technical people, it will be a little hard to understand what Stratos does.
But we could attract them via offer the products:
- Decentralized YouTube or Decentralized Apple Music (powered by Stratos storage).
- Digital market (or call NFT market) (powered by Stratos storage and blockchain).
- Decentralized Social Network (powered by Stratos database).
Q: How many metanodes will be? What are the requirements to run one?
A: Technicality, we will initialize a couple of meta nodes at the beginning. The number of meta node will be increased when the Stratos network get bigger and bigger.
Q: Until Stratos is a reality (I hope it will be soon) some time will pass and in the first days, months, years there will not be (surely) enough nodes to support the benefits that the white paper talks about. Will the first to create the nodes have higher rewards at first?
A: The Stratos resource node always get reward depend on the traffic it serves. In the early stage, less traffic and fewer nodes in the network, each node will reward more STOS token in the same period as when network get bigger.
It is the same story as you start to mine Bitcoin in 2010 or 2020, for sure you will earn more BTC in 2010.
Q: How does Stratos and its decentralized data mesh make blockchain more secure compared to other competitors? That is, what would make a company choose Stratos among all others?
A: Stratos is a decentralized infrastructure project instead of public chain project. So, our competitor is not those public chain project. Actually, we could be the service provider for those public chain projects.
Q: Could you tell us more about how does Stratos manage different data types? For example, unstructured images and videos follow similar routes? How are they segregated? Is or could be some type of AI used for storage selection?
A: Stratos support structured data and unstructured data storing services.
The structured data will be forward to decentralized database and unstructured data will be forward to decentralized storage. Storage and database are two different components in Stratos, the developer can use different API or SDK to talk to the different component based on their business requirements.
Q: What advantage does STRATOS have over ICP?
A: Storage, database, and computation are 3 majors features of any application.
It hard to work out without any of them, so Stratos provide the end-to-end solution, I think this is the Stratos advantage .
Q: What do you think about the boom of the NFT + DeFi association that is causing so much interest in the world? How does Your project take advantage of and exploit this reality?
A: The current NFT is for most rich people for trading. But I think the real NFT market is for everyone instead the rich one.
Stratos not only support copy right trading operation, also allow the customer to trade the usage instead of copy right.
For example, the musician creates a song and want to sell the copies instead of copy right. We can satisfy their business need.
The Stratos NFT market will be the Next generation “decentralized eBay or Amazon”.
1, Stratos keep at least 3 copies in different nodes, so if one node are compromised, the user’s data won’t be lost.
2, User can encrypt the data before uploading to Stratos and Stratos will separate the file as well, so the hacker still can’t get any useful information even they compromise any single server.
Q: I see clear the benefits of using Tendermint, however I am not clear if it can be used asynchronously. If you do not succeed in doing new research, would you change the platform, or would you also use Tendermint with its advantages and disadvantages?
A: I would like to say, all the consensus process of the blockchain is a forced sync process across multiple desync instances on the different servers. So, there are always had trade off between the performance and something else. As long as the decision is good for our project, we will approach it.
—Joel: Thanks, Bin Zhu for all the answers.
—Bin Zhu: Thank you, Joel, for hosting this great AMA.
—Joel: The next is the 2 winners, with the two selected questions from you.
—Bin Zhu: Reinhard and Kiko.
—Joel: Awesome!
—Bin Zhu: Thanks Kiko for the technical question and Reinhard for the question about NFT vision.
Stratos
The Stratos | Telegram | Twitter | Medium
Where can you find us?
Stakely | Twitter | Youtube | Telegram News | Telegram Chat | LinkedIn