AMA Recap: July 20 2018

🔗Question 1

Saw this image “The connected living room” and loved the simple illustration of the concept. My second thought was: How about bandwidth? My Raspberry Pi latency to Google is 20ms whereas 3ms from my VPS. What about home network higher latencies? Isn’t this an issue?

Arthur Mingard:
Latency is considered when rating a host. However, measures have been taken to reduce it in other parts of the network. One example is the routing policy mechanics, which route requests to the nearest gateway, on the same ISP where possible, lowering the number of hops and distance travelled. Your latency to Google may be slightly higher but imagine if Google’s closest point of presence was at the end of your street. With Gateway, that’s possible, and over time, quite likely.

🔗Question 2

Curious about the node ROI projections. They seem decent. Down the road though, as we look at the addressable market and the projections from the white paper, the revenue can be possibly tens of dollars per DADI token per year as far as I can tell. So the host projections kind of hockey stick at some point. I guess the non-staking devices eat into this on exchange for a more robust network. Anyway, how do you guys see this network working at huge scale?

James Lambie:
The architecture as it currently stands is capable of scaling to hundreds of millions of devices. It is envisaged as a single market-driven network, for mixed use software presented through a series of SaaS layers. As it’s a marketplace, supply and demand must be balanced. In the first instance this is being controlled directly (through a phased approach to onboarding and the rollout of the backbone), but it will open up in time. So as the technology scales, the model scales as well: over time we expect the POS requirements to be reduced. Plus, the current network/model configuration intentionally builds in a lot of spare capacity: as we gather data and better understand production performance, this overhead will be reduced, which will in turn increase the earning potential of nodes.

🔗Question 3

How do you envisage people with the household products affecting the network? Do they need to stake? If not, how does this and non-staking nodes affect the value of the network?

James Lambie:
There will always be a stake requirement for earning nodes, but how this is expressed may vary. Imagine purchasing a device that has the stake built into the initial cost. Non-staking nodes already exist in the network, in the form of some backbone components - but these are non-earning. In the future other non-staking devices may be brought on board. Imagine running a DADI app that offsets the carbon footprint of your laptop, for example. Non-earning, but still valuable to the end user, and still contributing to the network.

🔗Question 4

What impedes a node from manipulating the output of their own computations? What happens if the computation is non-deterministic? i.e: time(), rand(), cat /dev/urandom

Arthur Mingard:
The network operates a peer review system at random to cover most output formats. Non-deterministic responses are an interesting one. In a typical cloud environment, it tends to be the case that webservices run with status endpoints to determine whether the application is running as expected. This is usually the only requirement, because of the nature of the owned infrastructure, which comes with an assumed level of trust in relation to the machines in operation. To create a similar environment where trust exists, and when running trusted software on an untrusted host, the network adopts a secure container environment where the VM and containers are running in a secure enclave. This means that the owner of the hardware is unable to tamper with (DMA or other infiltration methods) even though they have full access to the machines.

🔗Question 5

Maybe a strange question: Would it be possible to have a private cloud fork of DADI that big service providers could offer business customers as something like SharePoint?

James Lambie:
Yes, this is a possibility, and something that we have been exploring with a large-scale potential customer since early this year.

🔗Follow up: How does that network set up look?

James Lambie:
As a VPC running in the backbone infrastructure.

🔗Follow up: Do they resell services?

James Lambie:
It depends on the use case - we’re still exploring the options available… it’s really up to the customer how they set it up and run it.

🔗Follow up: As a contributor, will this run through our nodes or private channels?

James Lambie:
It would run through the customer’s nodes.

🔗Follow up: Would the customer operate using DADI tokens?

James Lambie:
Yes

🔗Question 6

Will you take down content if required by repressive governments? Wasn’t this one of the advantages of dadi that it is harder to censor?

James Lambie:
DADI operates within the boundaries of the law in the jurisdictions in which it has active business operations (currently the United Kingdom). We have no plans to set up shop in countries with repressive governments, meaning that we are not bound by the law of such countries. In this respect, yes - DADI is harder to censor. We believe that operating within existing legal frameworks is essential to the success of crypto. Individuals/projects that think they can sidestep the law are naive at best. What business or enterprise is going to use technology that takes such a stance?

🔗Question 7

What will drive demand of DADI tokens over the mid to long term? Masternodes seem to be the only feature that will drive some demand on tokens.

Joseph Denne:
There are three key perspective to talk about in relation to token demand:

• 1. Macro factors (big trends)
• 2. Micro factors (our strategy for scale)
• 3. Marketplace dynamic (demand and supply and fixed token)

Mid-long term, the drivers of demand for tokens will be micro (those largely within our control) and macro factors, but also from the perspective that we have supply and demand side of the DADI network as with any marketplace. Firstly, from a macro point of view there are some big trends: shift to blockchain, IoT, general cloud adoption, web services/SaaS, network attached storage and so on. These macro trends matter because collectively they represent billions of dollars of proven value today and our technology strategy is not just about a share of the future blockchain market, it’s about using blockchain to acquire share of these existing markets.

For example, our web services - which is a multi-billion dollar market alone, can be deployed as dApps in a VPC - as per Jim’s note above - or Public Cloud within the DADI Network. This means we can provide customers with a credible blockchain powered alternative to their current solutions. These markets can impact the value of the DADI token as there is a huge market that exists already in which we will gain market share that can be reflected in the value of DADI tokens now.

From a micro perspective we are building out the DADI network at scale through partners. Both partners as customers of our dApps, but also partners that are providing the backbone to the DADI network in terms of Nodes and network capacity. Whilst we grow the number of Hosts in the DADI network over time we are working to ensure that we establish the largest network in terms of node count in a matter of months. The micro picture is about us delivering customer sales which of course mean tokens being purchased and distributed to Nodes.

Customer sales thus also create the demand for Nodes. In terms of customer sales, we are focused on ensuring adoption of our proven technology through outreach to enterprises directly, agencies, developers and the DADI community. Also, in the mid to long term we will be bringing other third party dApps onto the DADI network, which will grow demand massively.

Short term the big influencer of value is market size and the opportunity from blockchain and the wider macro factors. It’s important to remember that whilst DLT is new and has huge potential, a significant part of the value is going to come from servicing existing markets not new markets.

We’re operating in a huge space with a unique proposition to benefit from both. This really sets us apart. And of course, in the long term the finite supply of tokens will drive up value when demand grows. In this case 1 $DADI must increase in value. I think that just about covers it!

🔗Question 8

Are we going to be able to see any financial reports from Dadi in the future?

James Lambie:
We will issue KPIs which include relevant financials and will be working with our accountants to ensure the appropriate accounting principles and practices can be applied. When the first of these reports will be released is still to be determined.

🔗Question 9

Assuming you meet your projected demand for your services, what percentage of tokens will be locked away into masternodes?

James Lambie:
This is very difficult to project as the POS requirements will fluctuate significantly over time to help balance supply and demand. By way of example, if POS requirements remained static, we would need around 1,250 Empire-sized customers for DADI CDN to drive a network scale that would result in the lockup of 90% of all tokens. To keep it in perspective, that example represents about 0.005% of the total current CDN market. I imagine it will be a balance of token value, service cost and liquidity. From this perspective, anything up to 99% would seem possible.

For reference: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/discontent-and-disruption-in-the-world-of-content-delivery-networks

🔗Question 10

When can we expect to see documentation regarding DADI network’s service limits and pricing?

James Lambie:
Pricing for CDN is available in the Masternodes document we published last month http://dadi.link/ns Pricing for other services will be provided as we move towards their launch in the network.

🔗Question 11

Any update on available community discounts for hosting services via Wirehive and other managed masternode services?

James Lambie:
Not yet, I’m afraid. We’re working with the team at Wirehive to button this down. We’re also looking at the potential of allowing Hosts within our network backbone to be rented out - what this looks like isn’t yet fully defined, but as soon as it is we’ll let you know.

Question 12
When will LBX be listing $DADI?

James Lambie:
Very soon! 🙂

🔗Question 13

We see a lot of different people pop through TG with different takes on what is required to convert a site to DADI and I am not sure how this question can be answered in laymen’s terms but how specific are the requirements to switch a site to DADI? Is it language agnostic, database agnostic, how hard is it on scale of 1 to 10?

James Lambie:
On a scale of 1-10, about a 2 🙂It really depends on the site in question, but for example we migrated and refreshed empireonline.com to DADI in 6 weeks. The previous build took the customer’s team nine months. DADI allows you to spin up and API in less than 30 seconds and run existing templates in DADI Web without any structural changes. A lot of effort has gone into making the platform as simple as possible to use.

🔗Question 14

Would DADI ever open the nodes up to non-DADI applications?

Arthur Mingard:
Yes, and this is already happening. The DADI Marketplace is designed to enable containerised applications outside of our own stack, which we are using in our work with Agorai for example. Opening this up is a long way out, as it’s super complicated to do in a method that won’t undermine overall network performance. But we’re working on it.

🔗Question 15

How many people in the direct sales team and what can you tell us about their efforts?

James Lambie:
We’re building this team out, along with the supporting sales materials. Our focus has been - as is - partnering in the main, with a shift to direct sales for CDN expected in September.

🔗Question 16

If things go really well, will DADI the company ever go public?

James Lambie:
DADI Cloud Limited - the company set up to run the network - is a not for profit, so no. DADI Tech Limited - the company set up to provide supporting services in a commercial context - could do so. But there are no plans for this.

🔗Question 17

How will liquidity will be maintained for the customer if there is not enough supply of tokens in the market?

James Lambie:
We are working with leading liquidity providers to ensure that this is not a problem and have set aside significant funds specifically for this purpose.

🔗Question 18

Other than the DADI microservices, what other 3rd party apps do you see being part of the network, is there any in the roadmap working with you to expand the service offering?

Arthur Mingard:
We have a marketplace build of our containerisation layer that is designed for third party services. However, because the network is so streamlined, just throwing open the doors to other dApps could have a detrimental impact on the network. As such, in the near mid-term we are working with interested parties and partners directly - e.g. Agorai. In time we plan to open this up, but there is no set timing for this.

🔗Question 19

I also have a rather strange question. Are you working on an application that allows P2P streaming using the DADI cloud? If yes - when will it be available for companies/startups? If no - do you need help building it, or will it never be possible?

James Lambie:
Video is on the roadmap for CDN. Live streaming isn’t something we’ve looked at yet, but it would be great! If you’d like to get involved, drop me an email at jl@dadi.co!

🔗Question 20

I’m trying to understand how many requests a typical website generates and how DADI network and CDN are able to handle them. Can you help explaining that with say one of your biggest clients compared to a website like Yahoo.com?

James Lambie:
It’s not one of the largest but using empireonline.com as an example: they do ~150 million requests per month, which boils down to roughly 172 requests a second. Empire is ranked as #18,147 in the world by traffic. Yahoo! is currently #6.

🔗Question 21

Is there any more specific date when the public DADI Host nodes will be launched?

James Lambie:
We’ll be sending out Founding Nodes mid-August and then onboarding in phases from there. Specific dates will be confirmed next week.