Blockcast.cc: Good to see all of you on Saturday, 6 March 2021, 2pm at Asia Blockchain Community. Asia Blockchain Community (ABC) is a community that is based in Asia and run by volunteers. We know the market very well and is backed by a panel of blockchain & crypto experts and influencers.
- Mission: Our mission is to create value for projects & members & educate the general public about blockchain and crypto through the work in our community.
- Vision: To bring concepts to life and increase blockchain adoption.
- Slogan: Long Crypto and Short the World
The session will start with me asking the questions and followed by 3 live questions and 3 more questions that was sent to us from our Facebook group, https://www.facebook.com/groups/asiablockchain.
We bring in projects that are good at what they are doing. This week, let’s talk about Decentralized Cross Chain Protocol by CZZ. Hi Dr Z, please give a quick introduction of yourself.
Dr Z: Good afternoon everybody, my name is Dr Z, and I’m from New Zealand. I represented New Zealand in the International Mathematics Olympiad, and I hold a PhD degree in mathematics. I joined the crypto space around 2016 as an ETH miner, and I am now working on a community cross chain protocol called Class ZZ, and it’s token is called CZZ.
Blockcast.cc: Thanks, please tell us about your project.
Dr Z: We have a PoW main net that’s been running for more than a year, and we are about to launch our cross chain protocol Te Waka today! It is a decentralized cross chain protocol for native tokens. For example, if you wanted to trade UNI for CAKE on a decentralized exchange, it’s actually very difficult as UNI lives on ETH and CAKE lives on BSC. Under the Te Waka protocol, which we will open source to the entire DeFi space, it will make such a transaction possible.
There are 4 advantages that Te Waka commands over existing cross chain protocols
1) Users never have to deposit any asset. For example, if you wanted to move BTC to ethereum network via WBTC, you basically have to deposit your bitcoin somewhere and you get a WBTC token. With the Te Waka protocol, let’s say you want to covert ethereum to HT (on Heco), you send ETH to a smart contract and you will get HT token on Heco.
2) Users always get native token, allowing them to participate in the entire DeFi ecosystem. For example, you can’t do yield farming on HECO with ERC-20 HT token. You will need HT on HECO, so being able to get native tokens is very important in the DeFi space.
3) Users don’t need to buy gas of the destination blockchain. The user can designate any asset they like on the destination blockchain, and they will get exactly that.
4) The entire transaction route is verifiable on public blockchains.
Blockcast.cc: How did you guys come up with the name Te Waka?
Dr Z: Te Waka is an ocean crossing canoe invented by early settlers of the Polynesian archipelagos. So rather than being stuck on one island, you could travel to pretty much any island you like on Te Waka.
Blockcast.cc: There are other projects such as polkadot that also focus on interoperability, how does CZZ compare to them?
Dr Z: So Polkadot is an amazing project, and they have laid a great foundation for interoperable blockchains under their substrate framework. The biggest shortfall is that projects that’s are not currently under their framework, their interoperability is quite limited.
Right now, there’s really only two ways to send assets across blockchains.
1) Atomic swaps – This is really the ideal method, and it’s been around the longest. However it’s not really widely adopted because of the long process time and low throughput.
2) Wrapping – Doing something like WBTC, renBTC or PolkaBTC. Essentially you create a token on your own blockchain, backed by real bitcoins at a 1:1 ratio. This has shown some good adoption in areas such as moving bitcoin assets to ethereum.
The biggest problem with approach 2) is that if you have to move assets between two different smart contract platforms, such as ETH – BSC / HECO / OKChain, you can’t actually participate in DeFi activities such as mining or lending with wrapped tokens of another blockchain.
Under the Te Waka protocol, users who own assets in ERC 20 tokens will get real tokens on the destination chain. This will allow them to do interesting things like cross chain Dex’s or cross chain arbitrage. The idea of cross chain arbitrage is particularly interesting, because it will provide a price discovery mechanism of the risk premium to operate DeFi on different chain’s.
Blockcast.cc: You also mentioned that Te Waka is decentralized, but that word has now become a cliche. How are you different to other projects in this regard?
Dr Z: We hold decentralization to the highest regard in our community. Centralized cross chain transactions are not that hard to do, we’ve all done it, just go to a centralized exchange! On the other hand, I would agree with you that the word “decentralization” is somewhat over used in the crypto-world today.
So I think it’s time to set an industry standard. You can only call yourself decentralized, when every part of your transaction can be tracked on a permissionless public blockchain. For example, if you wanted to buy MDX.HECO with USDT.ETH (the dot stresses which blockchain these tokens live on). Over the CZZ network, the following steps happen,
Step 1: USDT – ECZZ (ETH smart contract)
Step 2: ECZZ – CZZ – HCZZ (CZZ main net)
Step 3: HCZZ – MDX (HECO smart contract)
You can find all 3 transactions on the blockchain explorer for the corresponding networks. Unless you can achieve this level of transparency, you cannot call yourself decentralized.
Blockcast.cc: So please explain, what are ECZZ and HCZZ? You also mentioned that it goes through CZZ main net, how does that work?
Dr Z: So, CZZ has a proof of work main net, and it has been running for over a year now. It’s already attracted significant amount of hash power from the community, so we know it’s super secure. The native token on this network is CZZ. ECZZ lives on the ethereum network, HCZZ lives on the HECO network, they all have a 1:1 relationship with the main net CZZ token.
What is interesting is the way these tokens are created / governed. On the CZZ main net, we have a list of community addresses, which are addresses that look like
000000000…101 (Eth community address)
000000000…102 (Heco community address)
…etc.
By the NUMS principle (nothing up my sleeves), we can assume that nobody knows the private keys to these addresses, so any tokens that’s sitting in there are considered to be a public good.
The sum of all ECZZ is represented by the amount of CZZ tokens sitting at 0000…101 address The sum of all HCZZ is represented by the amount of CZZ tokens sitting at 0000…102 address etc.
Now, let’s see what happens during the ECZZ – CZZ – HCZZ step.
Step 1: Let’s say 10 ECZZ get burned on ethereum, and the user indicates that he wants HCZZ. Step 2: On the next PoW block, miners give 000…101 a miner reward of -10, and 000…102 +10. Step 3: Upon seeing 000…102 received 10 CZZ tokens, the smart contract on HECO will mint HCZZ.
If the user wanted something other than HCZZ, such as MDX maybe; the smart contract will automatically call a Dex, and give the user MDX token instead. This can all be done without the user having any gas to begin with, as gas fees are automatically deducted in the smart contract.
Blockcast.cc: If someone wanted to convert ERC 20 tokens to BSC, they could just use BSC Bridge right? Where’s is your value add?
Dr Z: BSC bridge is really just a wrapped token. In fact, almost all the bridges out there works this way.
While your assets are fully backed, and you can participate in all of BSC’s DeFi, it’s actually extremely difficult to jump from BSC to Heco right now. Most people I talk to would still cash out to USDT in Binance, deposit to Huobi, and withdraw to HECO. This is very inconvenient and potentially very costly, as crypto markets can move very fast.
If you tried to move something from BSC to HECO using the Te Waka protocol, it could be done with just one tap/click, and your token is moved across almost instantly. Moreover, you’re always getting native tokens, never wrapped tokens. If you’re a dex developer, you could even introduce say the MDX/CAKE trading pair, and the users wouldn’t notice much difference.
Moreover, the user never has to store their valuable tokens in a risky place, and this is really the biggest concern with wrapped tokens. WBTC for example have a long track record of trustworthiness, so you may feel comfortable holding that. But if you had the choice, it’s safer not to leave your token in someone else’s address at all.
So with the Te Waka protocol, you sent your native token to a smart contract on one blockchain, and outcomes your native token of another blockchain. You never have to deposit anything anywhere anytime.
Blockcast.cc: For all this to work, you will need some level of liquidity in the ECZZ/ETH pair right? How will you guys get that?
Dr Z: Liquidity in CZZ really becomes a consequence of all the traffic that will flow through the CZZ protocol. As long as people are moving asset across chains, liquidity will come automatically. As you can imagine, there will be arbitrageurs who may do some lending on AAVE, and send it to a mining pool on BSC, just to profit from the yield difference. So we are expecting a lot of traffic and a lot of liquidity in the future.
But just to get things started, we will be introducing liquidity mining around late March. So please stay tuned.
Blockcast.cc: Can you share some of your plans going forward?
Yes, so Te Waka will go online today as a set of open source cross chain protocol. All projects are welcomed to use it. You can do cross chain dex, cross chain mining, cross chain yield farming, cross chain lending. The possibilities are limitless. By end of March, Te Waka will support Ethereum, BSC, HECO, OkChain, Polkadot, Solana and Tron as well as start liquidity mining on the swaps of the corresponding blockchains
We are also closely collaborating with the major exchanges such as Huobi, Okex and Binance, as our protocol will be beneficial to the DeFi ecosystem they’re developing. You will hear more from us soon.
Blockcast.cc: Thanks, we have selected 5 questions from Facebook. After answering the 5 questions, we will open the floor on Telegram for 3 more live questions. Each question answered will receive 250 CZZ.
The following are the questions from our Facebook group with 13,400 members:
HECO is mentioned many times. Our founders like Jenny Zheng and Anndy Lian are strong supporters of Huobi, but it seems like we do not see much action in Singapore or in SEA. The first question from FB is: Would the Te Waka protocol’s cross chain ability become a selling point for HECO to become as popular or more popular than Binance?
Dr Z: I think what Te Waka will do that in the long run. It will connect islands of ecosystems. Build a bridge, you connect 2 islands, to connect n islands you need O(n^2) bridges… build a Te Waka you immediately connect all n islands.
Huobi being the first would have the early mover, but I would argue their decision is more based on the benefits that we bring to the entire DeFi space. I think if you look up on HECO webpage. They mentioned that they’re looking for a more decentralized way of moving assets cross chain. This fits nicely to our vision.
In the recent months there are quite a number of rugpull on DEX? Will the Te Waka protocol’s cross chain ability help to prevent rugpulls?
Dr Z: I think rugpulls mainly happen when you have a centralization of liquidity. Let’s say 1 or 2 parties control maybe 50% of the liquidity for a particular token. I’m not sure how much a cross chain protocol can help here. I guess if liquidity is that concentrated if they’re going to do it, they’re still going to do it.
HCZZ, CZZ, ECZZ and more ZZ token to come. It may be confusing for beginners. Users want things to be simple, in the near future, can all these tokens be grouped into one? Will it be smart enough to do it? Or is it not practical.
Dr Z: Well, we have talked about whether we should just call all of them CZZ. Maybe CZZ.eth, CZZ.heco, CZZ.bsc. But the general response I got was people found it more confusing. To be honest, I’m quite open to the idea of just calling them all CZZ’s
But I think from an application point of view. Te Waka is an open source protocol that’s meant to be used by other developers. When someone develops like cross chain DEX all users will see is maybe MDX/CAKE and that’s what users would trade MDX – HCZZ – CZZ – BCZZ – CAKE. This route will be quite invisible most of the time, unless the user want to see verification for themselves.
How is CZZ mainnet different from others?
Dr Z: We use mining reward of the mainnet to move CZZ tokens between community addresses, and that’s really the central piece of how Te Waka works.
Is CZZ a Chinese based project? We do not see much publicity in the English speaking markets? We do not want to miss out good projects.
Dr Z: CZZ does not know borders. We do have a big community in China but ultimately it’s a decentralized project. Just have to get the word out really.
Questions from Telegram:
Cross chains protocol bridge safe to anonymous Attack by Hacker’s & your protocol pass any audited report.
Dr Z: Yes, we are being audited right now, and we’ll release the audit report as soon as it becomes available. I absolutely share your concern about blockchain security, particularly with the level of complexity that we are working on today.
Why the czz team is not concentrating on promotional activities. every technology needs some marketing to deliver the product.
A basic law in microeconomics is that never join a perfectly competitive race. Rather, you want your complements to be in perfect competition. Commoditize your complement, that’s what they all say.
From CZZ’s point of view, we are more focused on developing the key tech to empower the market participants, and we believe our product, powered by a PoW main net, also have a significant barrier to entry. So the future that we’re working toward is that all the cross chain DeFi projects would use our protocol.
What makes Te Waka unique from other cross chain projects?
The most unique aspect is that users do not have to deposit ever, it’s entirely native token to native token. This is very different from every cross chain project you see today.
Trust is very important in business. So, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with Your project? And how will you get the trust of many users that have negative thoughts about Blockchain and DeFi?
Dr Z: Trust comes from decentralization. For example, nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but everyone seems to believe bitcoin is trustworthy. Likewise, CZZ is very committed to decentralization. Every part of the cross chain transaction route happens on a permissionless public blockchain, and this is what makes Te Waka secure.
Regarding negative thoughts. I’ve worked with people in traditional finance who hate the word DeFi… but I would just tell them DeFi is just finance on autopilot. It’s really just like the self-driving cars. This perspective sometimes helps a lot.
What are the possible problems for cross chain protocols like czz?
Dr Z: The biggest problem going forward is getting the initial liquidity on the ECZZ, HCZZ, BCZZ trading pairs. We will opt for liquidity mining, and I hope we can just take off from there. However, I will be frank that if these tokens never attract any liquidity from the beginning, then Te Waka’s ability to conduct cross chain token transfer will be quite limited.
Blockcast.cc: Thanks CZZ for the great afternoon at Asia Blockchain Community. For more information on Blockcast.cc, you can reach us at:
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Original Source: https://blockcast.cc/interviews/asia-blockchain-community-speaks-to-dr-z-on-cross-chain-protocol/
