2020 has been a rather uneventful year, specifically how Covid-19 has hit the world so hard and impacted global mobility and businesses. Naturally, ProximaX was affected by the pandemic insofar as its progress was concerned.
The Sirius Chain has clocked over 2.625 million blocks now and has shown to be working smoothly since its launch on 25th September 2019. However, in 2020, we fell short of our target to launch the Storage, Supercontract, and Stream. Although the Storage and Supercontract were launched on the mainnet in the last quarter of 2020, the plan was to launch it much earlier. The reason for the late launch was the reward mechanism that we were trying to work on, as well as some of the limitations in the Supercontract working hand in hand with the Storage. This resulted in us going back to the drawing board often. More improvements are expected in the coming months.
Essentially, we are nine months behind time as we play catchup this year. We shall be tweaking the Storage and Supercontract and also prepare to launch the streaming component. SDKs, APIs, and tools shall be developed further. We will put more effort into working on the Supercontract as we believe this will be a driving factor later for a more holistic ecosystem.
For now, Rust shall be the go-to programming language to develop these Supercontracts with WebAssembly as its compilation target. WebAssembly is an assembly-like language with a compact binary format, which essentially means it is a type of low-level virtual machine bytecode. It is, therefore, closely matched to machine code.
Some people in the community have been harping about the lack of marketing. Marketing is a big word, and it needs a strong strategy before going out to market. It is not about just hype and listing in exchanges. It calls for a better approach than that. Marketing, in my perspective, particularly in the ProximaX mainnet project, broadly encompasses three stages. These stages are:
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Create a working platform.
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Develop viable applications and solutions on top of the platform.
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Market the utility of these applications and solutions.
Each of these stages requires proper execution. There is no point in creating hype and then not delivering on what was hyped about. It defeats the purpose of spending money on that.
We are near the completion of stage one, and we are working on ideas to develop on stage two. One of the areas that we shall focus on in the coming year is to look at the use of our decentralized exchange – DEX – and work on using that to create an exchange for application transactions that will exist on the Sirius platform. It will serve our project a great deal with a DEX. The platform itself has room for many DEX players. However, they will have to be developed using Supercontract, unlike the Sirius DEX native approach which uses a plugin on the blockchain. It not only gives better performance compared with what you see in other smart contract based DEXs, but it also provides better features, such as price quotation depth.
As we progress with more applications, the demand for our utility token, XPX, will increase. This has always been the plan and mainstay of this ecosystem. XPX is finite and not inflationary. In fact, it is slightly deflationary as people lose their holdings over time due to lost keys and lost wallets.
Many projects have their tokenomics centered around mining as a reward. But the limitation of this methodology is that it does not provide any real economy. Our model eventually encompasses both the mining and the need to use our native token to consume services. Consuming services will prove to be the main thrust for the long term. A project cannot just depend on big rewards for mining. Long term, it is unsustainable.
Accordingly, it is essential that we look at the ecosystem’s sustainability. When demand is naturally created as a necessary component of an ecosystem, its propensity to create real demand and survive long term is more probable. Hence, the secret sauce is to create more applications and solutions on it.
Marketing can only do so much as to draw interest. It cannot do more than just interest. It has to involve building applications to create more utility. Therefore, the skew is not just about attracting developers to work on the system, more so, attracting entities that would like to develop applications and solutions as a means to grow their businesses.
Blockchain has evolved substantially. What separates the future and now is that it will evolve into an application and solution-based space. The catalyst for what we see today in the Internet space was the creation of the World Wide Web -WWW- using TCP/IP, technically a decentralized routing protocol. The catalyst for decentralized computing services, also known as cloud services, was the creation of the WWW, maturing almost 15 years after it was conceptualized for commercial deployment in the 1990s. Blockchain technology, the catalyst for value transfer and management, really started evolving circa 2014 when projects using this technology began to take a different route to include other services away from just value transfer and management. Projects today that are still emerging with the same value transfer concept are considered archaic and newer services will continue to evolve. We should see this happening in the next five years when more and competing services come online.
Diving into ProximaX, we see blockchain tech as the hub to the spoke of services where applications and solutions sit at the end of these spokes of services. The blockchain hub provides value transfers and management, event recording, and time-stamping, while services such as Supercontract, storage, and streaming serve as the spokes bridging applications and solutions to the hub. Once we can appreciate all these, then one can see that we are moving away from pure hype and speculation, which today is confined to a very small crowd, sharing the same space with thousands of other projects. We need to move away from this crowd and into the rest of the global population.
Time and again this has been said, not just by me but by many research houses like Gartner. And we hope that people will one day see that this is a precursor to yet another boom in the industry. Already we are beginning to see that the landscape is changing with this emergent technology. We hope to be a front-runner in this segment of the vertical play, and along with it comes the use of XPX as a utility crypto to fuel the economy.
In summary, this year, we hope to complete stage one and at the same time begin work on some stage two application designs. This includes building a chat app with a built-in crypto payment wallet. We are still working on a model on the utility side of the chat app so that it uses more XPX other than just fees from transactions. It is hoped that the chat can add in more services. As mentioned earlier, a DEX will be introduced this year where it is hoped that we could use the DEX to wrap crypto from other chains such as BTC and ETH into our ecosystem and allow it to be freely transacted. Later in the year, we hope to launch some Supercontracts on DeFi to power some interesting applications. More SDKs and APIs shall be developed so that the platform becomes more complete as we progress.
In closing, I remain upbeat on the project and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy New Year!