AMA with VRSC | Transcript

Q: Do you want to introduce your project first?

A: Sure. Verus was launched with no ICO, no pre-mine, no development fee, or other rent-seeking taxes. 100% of rewards from the network goes to miners and stakers. Verus has a unique consensus algorithm called “proof-of-power”. It’s 50% proof-of-stake and 50% proof-of-work. It’s a provable hybrid solution to 51% Hash Attacks. Our algorithm solves the two major theoretical issues of proof-of-stake systems, which are “nothing at stake” and “weak subjectivity”. Our algorithm leverages Verus smart transaction capabilities to remove any incentive to attempt cheating, making the protocol more secure. No specialized mining equipment is necessary to mine VRSC. Use VerusHash, a quantum secure hash algorithm that is near-equally mineable on both CPUs and FPGAs.

Verus mainnet offers recoverable friendly name identities and unique smart transactions to ease the development of applications and services. In addition to these capabilities, which are available today in the Verus Desktop GUI application for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, Verus is testing its upcoming release that supports unlimited tokenization of assets.

Verus Public Blockchains as a Service (PBaaS) and Verus DeFi, available to use on the testnet today, are a truly free, decentralized protocol and rent-free blockchain framework that provides chain interoperability that can scale to the world. It’s not just a protocol but an ecosystem of interconnected blockchains. Once on the mainnet, the Verus DeFi system will be a fractal, market-driven, and completely liquid global network of independently valued currencies and protocol-based currency baskets. It allows Verus holders to perform cross-chain transactions, launch a fractional reserve token, and merge, mine, and stake on up to 22 blockchains at once.

Our next-generation DeFi platform is designed as a scalable, secure, permissionless network with zero-knowledge privacy built-in. Verus offers superior decentralized finance for community-driven liquidity by utilizing simultaneous parallel processing of DeFi transactions. This allows Verus to advance the technology underpinning automated market makers and community liquidity. The result is a series of improvements, including the elimination of front-running, lower costs, and optimization of liquidity.

Q: Let’s go back to the day you decided to create this project. What exactly was the reason for this, where did you get the idea, and what did you lack in the world of cryptocurrency? 

A: It took multiple founders doing a lot of work to prepare for the launch of Verus. My personal inspiration started when having built a machine learning system for a large company analyzing content and emails, I realized that with blockchain, we had the theoretical ability to actually get to the truth of what people sought through a permissionless system where they could all participate with privacy, motivated both financially and through self-sovereign control over their own expression.

Verus is a system that allows everyone to participate and benefit by contributing to the network economically or otherwise, as they build their vision with the tools the system provides. Mainnet tools include VerusID with support for NFTs, multisig, revocation and recovery, self-sovereign social networking profiles (https://verus.io/verusid-lookup/mike@), Verus Vault for secure staking and locking of funds, vesting schedules, inheritance, digital signatures of contracts, files, or content, zero-knowledge, private funds transfer, messaging and communications, or Verus ID and NFT Marketplace with confidential transactions, which enables worldwide peer to peer purchase and sale of VerusIDs and NFTs.

Other tools on the testnet, including Verus DeFi, The Verus Ethereum Bridge, which brings Verus DeFi Anti-MEV protocol to Ethereum, and Verus PBaaS, a multi-blockchain launch platform with built-in cross-chain communication, are being prepared for the release. You can use VerusIDs, Verus Vault, and the NFT marketplace on the mainnet today. The Verus Ethereum Bridge, Verus DeFi, and even Verus PBaaS are all live and available to use on the testnet.

Q: I didn’t understand why someone would choose to launch their projects on your platform but not on Ethereum? You have your own blockchain, right? Tell me how your launching feature works?

A: Verus DeFi and Verus PBaaS, currently on the testnet, make Verus a much more capable, easier, and less expensive launch platform than Ethereum. Besides, with the Verus Ethereum bridge, any currency launched can be sent to and from Ethereum as both are ERC-20.

You could actually use Verus as a launch platform that can make it possible for anyone to launch a liquidity pool currency, use Kickstarter-like crowdfunding capabilities with auto-refund, launch a multicurrency basket, or even your own fully independent crypto built from block 1. Launching a currency on Verus, which can be done with just a command, is easy. We offer an incredible number of options, and you can try it on the testnet today to get your project ready for the mainnet.

Q: One of the features allows earning VRSC through Network Economy. So, can you explain more about how the Network Economy works? How to earn through Network Economy on your platform? What are the advantages of this feature?

A: When people think of blockchain rewards, they think of the blockchain minting block rewards, and the entire industry works this way. This generally results in inflation of the coin supply and small rewards in fees, which can create security problems when miners or even stakers fight over extra high-fee blocks.

In Ethereum, when they saw the fees getting high enough to cause security problems, they chose the EIP-1551 to start burning fees to ensure that there would be no fighting over the chain. This is not what we mean by a network economy, not at all.

In the Verus community, a blockchain network economy is when the cost of services on the chain actually makes sense, and the fees from costs go back into the economy as payment for the miners, stakers, liquidity, and service providers who worked on the platform. With Verus PBaaS, fees are put into an ongoing fee pool, and those fees are added over time to the block rewards, ensuring that all fees go back into the economy to be recycled without inflation and that there are no extra-large blocks for miners and stakers to fight over. Besides, the rewards for miners and stakers grow, as does the value of the network, without contributing to inflation.

Q: You say that “All blockchains, public or private, can easily connect to Verus through advanced bridging technology.” Tell us how this technology can be utilized and if it can be useful for blockchain developers?

A: Verus is a community. I’m not sure who said that, but assuming they are talking about the testnet protocols, it’s true. We have a bridging technology that currently works seamlessly with Ethereum’s Rinkeby testnet, allowing users on Rinkeby to exchange currencies as easily as a local dApp, but by sending the currency to the Verus network through the Verus bridge, which converts the fees from Ethereum to Verus, paying the Verus miners. Currently, it converts currencies between Ethereum, VRSC, and USDC. It allows a user to send the resulting currency to an Ethereum address or a Verus R-address or I-address on the Verus testnet. The Verus DeFi multi-currency support also allows organizations, groups of organizations, or individuals to control bridges between any type of external financial system. Finally, the Verus PBaaS system enables the launch of any number of blockchains, which can automatically communicate with each other through the Verus Intersystem Protocol (VIP).

Q: Verus is an open-source, decentralized blockchain protocol with proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms. Please tell us how these two types of transaction validation can coexist within one blockchain? Why did you choose both when proof-of-stake alone is better for the environment?

A: That’s a great question with a lot of misunderstanding since there are people with a lot of self-interest wanting proof-of-stake to replace proof-of-work. For example, the Ethereum pre-mined coins currently represent 62% of the total supply. When they move to proof-of-stake, pre-mined coins will completely control and earn the majority of all rewards from the Ethereum network.

When you mine, you are hashing to prove that you are the person who has earned the right to make the next block for the network by getting the best hash result.

When you are staking, you are running a form of the hash using your provable Verus holdings to, again, prove that you are the person who has earned the right to make a block for the network because you got a good enough stake hash result.

In both cases, you are making a block, and the Verus network will accept both valid mined and staked blocks. Since either can be accepted, there are twice as many people, some with coins and some with hash power, who can earn the right to make blocks around the world. As a result, security and decentralization improve.

The idea that proof-of-work must be bad for the environment is false, as even in proof-of-stake, there is a trade-off between computing work required to coordinate the network and benefits that can make the process simpler when using partial proof-of-work.

In addition, since Verus PBaaS allows an unlimited number of blockchains on the network that users can mine at once using the same hash power, the environmental cost of both mining and staking together is not directly tied to transactions per second or the number of transactions processed on the network. In fact, when we calculated our overall network cost of transaction processing with large network simulations, our environmental overhead was extremely low and can actually go down as the network gets larger. As a result, based on math, Verus is one of the most environmentally friendly cryptocurrencies.

Q: So, Verus is a permissionless platform. How do you keep scams and bots away from your platform?

A: In the beginning, Bitcoin was an easily understood decentralized project with secure consensus algorithms. With Ethereum, the idea that functions on the blockchain were controlled by consensus became optional. People can write security holes as easily as they can write scripts. Millions of dollars are lost each day due to these issues on EVM style platforms, and the built-in no fee model can prevent these contract actions from enabling scams.

As with Bitcoin, Verus does not operate by smart contracts but by smart transactions, primitives that are smarter than bitcoin scripts, but not general-purpose scripts that can only take money. All functions, whether it’s VerusID, Verus Vault, Verus PBaaS, DeFi, MEV-resistant AMMs, zero-knowledge transactions, or any of the other capability functions just as with Bitcoin, are correct, and the consensus controls all the inputs and outputs of all functions. Fees scale with operations, so the general model to prevent network abuse is similar to Bitcoin’s.

As for scams, Verus DeFi and Verus PBaaS are multicurrency and multichain protocols for everyone to make currencies and blockchains that can communicate. As an open system, we have designed all functions to be transparent. For things like liquidity pools, we didn’t include rug pull capabilities. In our 4-year history, we have never had a hack that compromised transaction security or any form of rug pull.

Q: Let’s talk about goals and achievements. Did you reach all goals you set up for the project in 2021, and what is the one you are most proud of? What plans have you already made for the upcoming year?

A: As a 100% community project, Verus does not do corporate planning of any kind. There are companies working on their plans that leverage the Verus network, and there is the Verus community vision. We work on goals with the community and devs.

Other contributors and I work towards the vision expressed in the Verus Vision Paper (available on verus.io) over 3 years ago. Everyone is welcome to join and contribute to our open network, and if people contribute meaningfully, the Verus Coin Foundation offers bounties that people can earn from.

This year, we have completed all the core technology described in our vision paper, which is now running on the testnet. We’ve done much more than we envisioned when we wrote that paper. Sometimes we have moved one goal out and added other goals at the same time. For example, we have almost completed the Ethereum bridge for the mainnet, which has been running on the testnet since this year. Instead of releasing the Ethereum bridge by the end of this year, we released the first worldwide on-chain fully peer-to-peer marketplace for VerusIDs and NFTs. Generally, we have hit all of our goals in the last 4 years and more. Now, we have moved some of our Ethereum bridging work and PBaaS to target early next year.