Friday's AMA saw Joseph and Chris taking questions from the community on the back of the release of the tokenomics and distribution plans for $XE.
Written By
Bolaji Oyewole
• 1 min read
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Question 1
Will the new Edge token be locked? If so, what is the proportion of locking?
Chris Mair: No. There’s no locking associated with $XE/$Edge. Once it’s opened up it’s open for trading entirely. The exception to this is for device and governance stakes. However, that’s an active participation choice for individuals.
Joseph Denne: It’s important to note that $XE has its own wallet. This is a client-side JavaScript app that interacts directly with the blockchain in the network. Your keys are yours.
Question 2
If I want to buy x USD of Edge services, x USD converts to EDGE and then to XE, right?
Chris Mair: Yes, that’s right. Services purchased in fiat are treasury swapped to Edge and bridged into the network.
Question 3
What are the timelines for token release/withdrawal?
Chris Mair: There are three steps to release:
Distribution (wallet generation and claim request via Console)
$XE distribution (this is an automatic process)
Network bridge opening
Step #1 and #2 we expect to take place within the next few weeks. Step #3 will happen approximately a week after that. Why is there a lag between these steps? Because we want to take a moment to review in-life usage of the transactional layer in the networks chain. The team has spent a lot of time testing, but there’s no substitute for real-world use.
Question 4
What are the DEX and CEX listing timelines and the name of the exchanges?
Chris Mair: We’re opening on Uniswap. The plan is to use this platform for price discovery. From there we’ll evolve the plans that we have relating to additional exchanges accordingly. I can’t be more specific than this at the moment I’m afraid.
Question 5
What are the team’s plans to get the node system running efficiently again, and what do you envisage the APY looking like. (We’re in the height of a bull and it’s not unusual to have 100+% APY so that would be nice.
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Knowledge
Last Updated:
May 2021
Joseph Denne: The node system has been working well throughout the transition period. Obviously, we need to get the staking of new nodes operation again as a priority. After the release of $XE this is the core team’s next priority. We're planning on moving away from Console entirely – dropping the concept of an account for anything related to staking or governance, and instead extended the $XE wallet and running the entire system within the network's blockchain. The timing for this is being worked on and we should have more information to share soon.
In terms of APY, we are expecting an average yield of around 10% for Hosts (more for Gateways and Stargates), however, this will vary from device to device. Individual nodes are in competition with their peer groups to complete jobs within their immediate network area. I wrote about this in some detail in last week’s core team update, which can read here: https://ed.ge/update/2021/04/19
Arthur plans to be expanding on this soon as well. It's a *really * detailed subject and there's a lot to dig into.
Question 6
What's going to be different this time around? DADI launched in a bear market and had an uphill battle, but the team seem seemed to never shake the 'if we build it they will come' philosophy. How does the team intend to grab the attention of speculators, drawing them in to research the project and hopefully buy into the team's vision and ultimately invest/start staking?
Joseph Denne: You're right that with the benefit of hindsight the timing of the initial launch was bad, and there was absolutely an uphill battle with respect to the token value. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, I think that we listed and released the original token too early, which compounded the effect of the bear. I'm not sure that the charge of an attitude of "if we build it they will come" is entirely accurate though. The original plans had a five-year roadmap of development in the context of a booming market. From a technology perspective, we've gone far further than this. But efforts relating to marketing within the crypto space didn't gain much traction, which wasn't for a lack of trying. A lot of energy and cost was expended on that front, which in hindsight would have been better held back or focused exclusively on business development.
We've also had a year+ of a global pandemic to deal with. We all know how challenging that has been. From the company's perspective, it took a lot of committed business off of the table, including some game-changing engagements that had been many months in the making. We’ve rolled with those punches though, and used the opportunity to further enhance the platform. Of course, no one can predict the future, but hopefully, the bear and the pandemic won’t be followed up with a nuclear war or global famine!
New business for the network is strong, and we've reshaped the organization to better address the opportunities around us. It is 100% the case that whilst we have brilliant technological, UX&D and marketing experience in-house, none of the founders are salesmen. We've been addressing this and will continue to do so (through hires and through community engagement, including referral programmes.
With regard to the token ecosystem and network scale, the focus is squarely on community building. Hopefully, this should be very visible to you. We’ve moved forward with community governance, placing the tools and token structures in place to evolve Edge into a community-driven project. And we’re pushing hard on community growth, with content-based campaigns and outreach underway. Growth in the community over the last month has been strong, and we expect this trend to continue.
Chris Mair: To follow up on that, I want to be clear that our vision for the project is one of deep community involvement. The proposal and voting mechanics coming online in the summer are meant to provide a direct platform for participation (beyond just staking). The more you guys pitch in the further we’ll go.
Question 7
How far out is direct staking and node running from the cellphone app? This is a killer feature that could really drive adoption. Onboarding a Linux host is too technical for most.
Joseph Denne: We've had desktop apps running in beta for a while, and the mobile wrappers are mostly complete. We don't currently have firm dates for release yet as there are a number of dependencies that need closing out first, but the team is pushing hard on this front. Mobile specifically needs Object Storage complete first, as this is the main service applicable to the mobile environment with regard to the capacity available for use. There are plans to make running a node easier via other avenues as well, which we hope to be able to talk about in the coming weeks and months.
Chris Mair: The mobile wallet for XE has the potential to have a node baked in. We’re looking at this for a later release.
Question 8
Do stakes that have been requested to be returned qualify for $XE distribution and if so, how do we claim the $XE?
Joseph Denne: No. Stakes will be automatically factored into your distribution amount and moved into the new staking contract for $XE.
Question 9
Do we have the listing price sorted for $XE on Uniswap?
Joseph Denne: Yes, we're pretty settled on this front as part of the launch strategy. We'll be discussing this a little nearer to the release date.
Question 10
What level of liquidity will be available?
Joseph Denne: There are funds set aside for the provision of a pool on the first listing and there is a plan for support. How this grows beyond this point will be down to community participation in the pool itself (LP staking). I should note that we're working with a third party to help us better manage this side of things.
Question 11
Any way to skip the $XE part and get clear EDGE tokens?
Chris Mair: You can just buy $EDGE directly from the market.
Joseph Denne: If you held the original $EDGE token and have been through the swap process to TNC, you will need to claim $XE via Edge Console.
Question 12
How is the 31.34% of the staking contract calculated? Is this based on existing stakes?
Joseph Denne: It's based on a few inputs: 1. existing stakes; 2. backbone infrastructure in the network moving to staking; 3. commitments from individuals and companies to staking; and 4. new nodes in the form of additional Stargates and gateways coming online. The figures are projections and subject to change, but we believe that they are in the ballpark for where they will net out for first distribution.
Question 13
Will it be 50 or 60 million? As 10 million will be for staking rewards so total should be about 60 million market cap.
Joseph Denne: 50 million initial distribution of $XE, with a slowly increasing supply from a reducing pool of locked coins (1 million year #1, 900k year #2 and so on, reducing 10% for the value of the locked pool per annum), with a max cap of 60 million.
Question 14
Why was there a swap in the first place, if we are now getting the $EDGE back as $XE?
Joseph Denne: There's a lot written about this. If you want to get into the details, you check back over the weekly updates from the core team in the #project-updates channel. Here's the tl'dr: it's a partnership with a larger group of projects that was announced on the cusp of the first covid lockdown, designed to provide greater exposure to the project and to help facilitate new business in new markets through what was an extremely difficult macroeconomic environment. There is a group coin, TNC, which is a bonus to the community. The intervening period between then and now has been used to push forward development and to prepare for launching the networks internal token through the exposure of the blockchain at its heart.
Question 15
So, to understand it correctly... if I had 10 Edge, I'll get 4.5 $XE based on the reduced supply and 10% locked in the growth fund?
Joseph Denne: Yes, that's correct. You can use this GSheet to calculate your own holdings: https://ed.ge/xe/calculator
Chris Mair: It’s important to note that the growth fund is under the control of community governance.
Question 16
What distribution does the core team have?
Chris Mair: There’s no change on the 2018 crowd sale. At that time 20% of supply was allocated to the founding team with a five year vesting period. Three years of vested tokens have been released, in February 2018, February 2019 and February 2020. The remaining allocation – 8% – has been swapped to $XE and a new vesting schedule has been put in place. This schedule runs over five years, releasing at 20% per year, meaning that a maximum of 1.6% of supply will be made available to the founding team per year.
Question 17
How will the circulating supply on Coin Market Cap be calculated? If it’s only on the available $EDGE, wouldn’t the CMC market cap ranking be much lower than the actual market cap is?
Chris Mair: Good question! There are a few ways that this can be cut, but the bridge itself has a hot wallet that holds the $EDGE transferred in. This is obviously explorable and can be used for the market cap calculation. CMC and the others are pretty flexible on that front.
Question 18
How much of the original ICO funds are left? At what point will you rely solely on the dev funds?
Joseph Denne: We've been driving new business throughout and adding to the company's runway every month. As a result, there is no expectation of relying solely on distributed dev funds in the near-medium term. Chris and I are working on an approach to enable greater exposure to this side of things, consistent with the outlook of the team and the aims of the project. There are huge commercial sensitives here, so it won’t happen overnight.
Question 19
How is the network revenue split up (percentage-wise)?
Joseph Denne: We're finalizing the details of this, but there will be allocations to the dev fund and the growth fund.
Question 20
What will be the approximate gas costs to bridge between edge and XE and back?
Chris Mair: For the bridge to the Ethereum network the gas costs are tied to the current rates within that network. You will be able to choose your transaction speed, which has a direct impact on the fees. (Slower transactions are cheaper). Today the average gas fees in the Ethernet network are 49 gwei: ~$2.80.
Question 21
Can the network bridge contract work on Ethereum L2 (e.g. with Polygon) as well, to avoid gas costs and enable trading on L2 exchanges such as Quickswap?
Joseph Denne: Yes, this is technically possible, although there are no plans for it at the moment. What we’d like to see is open discussion around where we focus efforts in relation to the bridge, and perhaps some community proposals to enable broad participation in the debate.
Question 22
Is the individual node yield based on its hosting performance?
Joseph Denne: This is a simple question that's pretty complex to answer. It's based on a node score that is generated by the Gateway the Host is connected to on the basis of a moving window of completed jobs. Individual jobs have an individual capacity impact, and the Hosts are in competition with each under a single Gateway. So the answer is really yes and no – more performant nodes will in most scenarios deliver more jobs, leading to a higher node score, but it’s not as simple as that. However, it is absolutely the case that yields are based on the number of jobs a node delivers.
Question 23
In the past years we have seen that Edge was mostly getting some adoption in its home market (UK), are there plans for how this can be scaled to a global level?
Chris Mair: This is definitely the case in terms of business, and is a direct result of the geography of the core team. It’s not really the case for node spread, however, as we have points of presence in 100+ countries. And it’s definitely not the case for the community, who come from 202 countries. How we grow business internationally is a great question though. Our focus right now in terms of direct sales is on our home market. We have plans for how we broaden this out, and a target list of territories to address. There are significant cost implications here as well, which will have to be addressed. So it’s a question of timing.
Question 24:
What’s the team doing to help users with tokens stuck on exchanges?
Chris Mair: Unfortunately, there isn’t much that we can do here as it is impossible to provide absolute proof of holdings from these environments. However, we have reached out to KuCoin and have asked for a list of holders in this situation. If they can provide this, then we can work to resolve the situation through a matched distribution of $XE. We’ve not heard back from them yet. But we’ll continue to press and will let you know as and when there is any movement.
Question 25
When storage & when edge compute sirs?
Joseph Denne: There's a big update to our roadmaps coming! Arthur is leading this with input from across the core team. So stay tuned.
Question 26
What’s the total, max and initial circulating supply for the new EDGE token?
Chris Mair: This will most likely be based on the bridge wallet, which holds $EDGE matched to the max supply of $XE. That would mean 60 million day #1 for the total and initial circulating supply.
Joseph Denne: It’s important to add that the bridge wallet is under the control of the bridge contract. So, while the figure within the contract matches the max supply of $XE, obviously the release schedule of $XE from the network runs over a long period of time.
Question 27
What’s the status on the payments for devices that have continued their support during past year by keeping their nodes up.
Joseph Denne: These are being worked through and will be made up to date soon. I'm expecting this to be closed out by the end of May. Hopefully sooner.
Question 28
Is there a timeline for Storage and have you thought about collaborating with an existing network like Storj (who even does revenue sharing with partners). The engineering challenge seems a bit far off EDGE’s core tech, isn't it?
Joseph Denne: Yes, we have internal timelines and we'll be exposing some of those with the next roadmap update. Collaboration in this space has been considered, however, it's such a core component of the network and our model is so different technologically – focused on edge and embedded devices – that it doesn't really make sense. It would introduce friction into the network, ultimately slowing it down for short-term gain. It would limit what we could achieve with the service as well.
And no, it’s entirely in our wheelhouse. We have an alpha live. And I believe that when you see it you’ll understand the benefits of being core tech rather than a clone or partnership of an existing solution. (All of which are lacking from my perspective).
Question 29
Previously you have said that EDGE financial runway is infinite suggesting EDGE’s operates cashflow positive. Is this still the case and what are the growth targets for coming years in terms of team size? Any ambition to go after a Series A funding round?
Chris Mair: Edge remains cash flow positive, and we’re adding to our runway month in month out. The focus is two-fold: growth and service extension. I can’t really talk about targets here, but we have hired this year and will be hiring again throughout the rest of the year.
Joseph Denne: I’m not sure we’d see a Series A as an ambition, but the question of follow-on funding is open as we grow and look to other markets. There would have to be a very clear case for it, and of course, timing in relation to growth is very important.