[Messari AMA] John Liu, Chief Product Officer and Yona Takac, Head of Ecosystem Growth at Fusion

Messari hosted a public AMA with John Liu, Chief Product Officer and Yona Takac, Head of Ecosystem Growth at Fusion ($FSN) in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.

Messari: Hi all! I’m excited to have John Liu, Chief Product Officer at Fusion and Yona Takac, Head of Ecosystem Growth. Thanks for joining us!

We had a lot of great questions submitted but before we get started could you guys give us a quick rundown of your background and how you got started with Fusion?

John Liu: Hi, Im the Chief Product Office of Fusion and also Head of EMEA, looking after staff and partnerships. I've got 18 years of background in wall street, 9 years trading bonds and derivatives in OTC (over-the-counter) markets, 9 years building enterprise platforms servicing buyside and sellside across data, analytics, content access and more. I got started with Fusion last September as I was looking to blockchain as solution for inefficiencies in the OTC markets.

Yona Takac: Sure thing, quick little summary, I studied Finance and Politics at college, before working at one of Australia’s largest banks ANZ. Quickly left the corporate world and moved into the start-up space as one of the first employees at a online B2B marketplace in the FMCG sector called IRexchange. Entered the crypto scene early 2017 and haven’t looked back! Started with Fusion pre ICO in December 2017.

Messari: Very interesting, makes sense that your backgrounds in finance led you here

"So can you give us an overview on Fusion and talk about the problems it’s looking to solve?"

JL: Briefly, Fusion is building the financial fabric of the digital ecnomy, and we do this through two thinsg: 1) interoperabiliyt of assets and 2) digitization of assets with time value.

Digital assets will only succede in a connected market. Today, blockchain and non-blockchain projects looking to digtal assets are under the gun to "prove themselves" by providing funcitonality, growing assets, etc. And some of these projects are clearly very successful. But, they are successful mostly in their own markets. Fusion is creating channel for assets to interact with each other.

YT: Here is a nice summary we previously wrote that captures Fusion’s value prop and vision:

Fusion is a connected ecosystem for financial transactions. Fusion powers the next wave of financial innovation on the blockchain through decentralized interoperability and asset digitization with time value. The Fusion protocol is the perfect technology environment to build a new forward-thinking application or cost-saving solution for your business. On Fusion, any and all digital assets become interlinked and are able to freely interact, fostering seamless integration with other businesses and technical systems. Blockchain development is easy on Fusion, with a rich set of Finance focused APIs such as Quantum Swap and Time Lock, drastically reducing the requirement to program complex smart contracts. Fusion already has partnerships with over 40+ entities at both private and government level and is looking to bring hundreds of millions in asset-backed loans through its announced partnership with AXP, in addition to the $12.2 billion of committed assets announced last year. With a successful MainNet launch on 2019/06/30 and network powered by 280+ nodes across 4 continents, Fusion is well on its way to realizing the Internet of Values.

Messari: Great! so going off that overview, we've had a few questions surrounding the competitive landscape.

"Who do you view as your main competitors in the 'ecosystem for financial transactions' and what differentiates Fusion?"

JL: I think, Consensys said it best in their article (Avoiding Blockchain Balkanization):

"The vision of a blockchain-powered Internet future the industry so often evokes is nothing without interoperability. Without it, we will find ourselves in a future with a global network nearly identical to the dominant Web2 landscape today. Everyday consumers will still enjoy their smooth and consistent interaction with Web3, but their data will not be secure, their identity will not be whole, and their money will not be theirs."

DCRM is currently in Alpha, but in Q4 we will be moving to beta and as roadmap says, integration into Mainnet. We are already looking for partners to help us vet DCRM's power 3-for-1 system: 1) interoperability 2) decentralized custody / secure hot wallet solution and 3) efficient exchange pools, aka dark pools.

YT: I don’t like the word competitors, it’s too early in the blockchain space. We are keen to work with any and all projects to make Finance on the blockchain are a reality. There are a few great projects working in the same space as Fusion. Wanchain for example is often mentioned as a competitor, they are also looking at Decentralized Finance. We also draw comparison against other interoperability protocols like Cosmos and Polkadot. Whilst we are tackling the same issue of blockchain connectivity, our approaches and solutions are very different.

Messari: "Can you go into some specifics about what makes you different from a financial protocol like Wanchain or interoperabillity focused chain like Cosmos/Polkadot"

JL: simplest is what @YonaTak listed, compatibility standard (e.g. a Cosmos) versus true interoperability that doesn't enforce standards onto other chains.

Our interoperability operates at the asset encryption level, therefore allowing us to also relay on the external blockchain consensus, smart contracts etc.. "as is"

YT: In terms of differences to Wanchain, although we are broadly tackling the same massive industry ‘DeFi’, our chains are completely different. Of course, I also think there is room for numerous players in the DeFi space. Our core competencies revolve around interoperability, time-value extracation of digital assets, peer-to-peer swapping, asset digitization and more.

JL: also, as mentioned above, our interoperability also offers a decentralized custody solution. That is, the blockchain protocol itself, becomes the custody and protector of assets. Not a single entity, foundation, or node. This feature can also be used a secure implementation of hot wallet for 3rd party custody providers. So it's really a 2-in-1 feature.

Messari: That makes sense, and so "the white paper says Fusion introduces authentication for 'on-chain data and off-chain data' -- what does this mean? And what specific kinds of off-chain data do you see being authenticated?"

JL: off-chain data authentication has come a long way (very quickly) since whitepaper was written in industry. But very common issue industry has been working with are sensitive personal information like social security numbers or your credit score. We need those information, for example, to validate a loan on-chain, but that data should only be available to permissioned people.

in our AXP proof of concept ,we put in place simple concept of roles being able to access certain data points, but in just a few short months, we've already explored with 3 different potential partners on better way to control field-level access to information. For example, Photino whom is already a partner, are doing work on identity and ZKproof of sensitive info, such as age must be greater than 18 (without revealing exact age).

Messari: To switch gears a little, for those unfamiliar, "Fusion ran a unique type of ICO can you talk a little about that and the thought process behind structuring it in that way?"

YT: Sure. Fusion’s ICO ran for 10 days between Feb 1 and Feb 10 in 2018. Like many ICO’s, Fusion set a hard cap (51,200 ETH), a token sale duration (10 days) and token exchange rate (1 ETH = 400 FSN). What made the the token sale unique was that it was to last for the full duration of the token sale period regardless of whether the hardcap was achieved prior or not. If the hardcap was raised before the end of the token sale period, say on the 2nd day for example, the crowsdale continued and participants were still able to contribute ETH until the very end of the token sale duration. Of course, this created the possibility of over subscription - where FUSION would receive more ETH than the stated hardcap of 51,200 ETH.

The token sale was successfully completed (and oversubscribed) with 126,874 ETH sent to the token sale address. 75,674 ETH was automatically returned to participants proportionally based on how much they contributed and the rate of over-subscription. The token sale smart contract required only 323 lines of code and FSN tokens were safely distributed to 7,343 addresses.

This token sale mechanism increased fairness, decentralization and ensured that there were no gas wars or breakdowns in the process due to heavy traffic on the ethereum network.

Messari: Wow, 75k ETH returned. Seems like a handful of other projects in the space could've taken notes on how to not become overfunded!

YT: haha yep! We are very proud of the way that our token sale was conducted!

Messari: We have a few questions related to the roadmap

"any updates for fusion DCRM?"

YT: Recently the team successfully made DCRM compatible with EdDSA signature schemes used by projects like Stellar and Libra. The team believes that now DCRM is compatible with the vast 98%+ of existing blockchains.

The roadmap is live on Fusion’s website - https://www.fusion.org/developers/roadmap (https://www.fusion.org/developers/roadmap)

Messari: "What will be the requirement for Supreme node after DCRM is out on the open? 5000 FSN or more? Will the required cpu specs be higher than currently for nodes?"

YT: We don’t want to make any hard committments yet on the exact numbers, it’s still being finalized by the technical team. However, we will find out soon enough! DCRM goes into Beta and then is integrated with MainNet in Q4 this year!

Messari: Sounds good, we'll have to keep tabs on the MainNet to find out!

"Afghanistan is listed as a Fusion partner. What does that mean or how do you work with them?"

JL: We hosted one of their representatives at DAS (unfortunately, the original party of ministers and their entourage could not make it due to visa challenges) and engaged with Afghanistan to explore bond issuance, managing identities, land rights, and health. Working with governments though is always a long process, especially in challenging regions like Afghanistan. We will update when we progress

Messari: "What about planned marketing activities for Fusion brand awareness? Any plans to boost PR in reputable magazines etc.?"

JL: Of course awareness is important to us. For example, arlier this year, we had a heavy push in awareness, including being title sponsorship DAS 2019, a gathering of top instituational clients. Also, I was invited to United Nations to be panelist on blockchain for impact. We've been menitioned in Zages, Kepler, and more. Now, we are prioritizing the right time and deployment of resources for next phase, balancing with a focus on adoption.

Messari: On the dev side - "how does fusion incentivise dapp developers to use the fusion blockchain? are dapps being built already on fusion?"

YT: We currently have a small but powerful developer community, a good metric is to look at the 300+ nodes participating in consensus on the Fusion network. However, it is a major focus over the next period to grown and empower our develop community. Some aspects we are focused on in the short terms is providing better documentation to support developers, increasing and creating new incentives for app development on the Fusion chain, hackethons and other programs.

JL: To add to above, we are also in discussion with a few technolgoy integrators that are interested in promoting the Fuson solution to their enterprise clients. Updates to come later this year as agreements get signed.

And of course, our partners such as AXP and recenlty Realio are working with us to build onto Fusion as well.

Messari: Developer activity seems to be one of the biggest competitive moats a blockchain can have. Its interesting to see how teams can help grow the dev community

JL: Agreed, we take assets on chain and development activity as priority focuses

Messari: Another popular competitive feature is decentralization (although somewhat vague). "How does Fusion think about the term, and are there concerted efforts to become more 'decentralized'"

YT: Decentralization will increase over time in line with adoption and awareness. Already we have 307 nodes participating in consensus and 15,210,000 FSN tokens locked up in staking. Of course we need and expect these numbers to grow over time. The more people that need to run Fusion nodes for develpoment purposes, that want to participate in consensus to increase security and earn block rewards, that require FSN tokens to use an application etc these are the factors that influence decentralization and they are mainly tied to adoption and awareness

Messari: That makes sense. So to wrap up, last questions - "what are you most excited about that’s coming up the pipeline for Fusion?

YT: Awesome question. Between the ICO in Feb 2018 and June 30 this year, MainNet launch was the major technical delivery that had me excited. Today, I am personally incredibly excited about DCRM integration with MainNet. The interest in DCRM from potential partners is really really significant. DCRM is like Fusion’s secret sauce, it is super innovative and is a special achievement. I’m excited to see it in action.

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