#citizencosmos

• Episode link: https://www.citizencosmos.space/idena

• Episode name: Idena, proof of person, AI & democracy

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:01:32] Citizen Cosmos: Good space time you all! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, I have with me today two guests LTraveler and TravCrypto, community members of Idena. It's a Cosmos based project, they will tell us all about it, it's a very interesting project. Hey guys! Whoever wants to introduce themselves first, welcome!

[00:01:58] LTraveler: Community knows me as LTraveler, I'm in the project for about two years. At the beginning why Idena catched me was getting into the crypto world without any penny in your pocket. It was pretty cool when someone asks me if I want to solve some puzzles and then get paid. I got joined into the community then I started to discover and when I went deeply I realized it's not just about to solving tests, it's actually something new that I have never seen before. I have developed this script that helped people to run Idena on Linux server and then I have made my YouTube channel, I'm making some video tutorials that are explaining how Idena works and how it could help people to developed the fair democracy. Then I started to help with the translation of Idena chronicles and other materials from English to Russian and more and I felt like we are building something that can make a revolution in the future.

[00:03:47] TravCrypto: Hey guys! My name is TravCrypto, I've been involved in crypto since 2016 and I started a little bit skeptical of crypto and what all it could really offer, and basically over time after reading the Bitcoin white paper and other white papers like the Ethereum white paper I got really interested in blockchain technology and basically came across Idena because I wanted to participate in validation but other blockchains can be very plutocratic and can require you to have large amount of wealth in order to participate in validation so I wanted to find a layer one blockchain that anyone could participate in no matter how much wealth they had. That's how I came across Idena and I've been actively involved probably at least for the past couple of years and like LTraveler said the ethos is really really cool within the community because it's accessible to anyone and everyone, and that kind of brings us where we are today.

[00:04:57] Citizen Cosmos: I have several questions straight away. Which one of you guys wants to give a brief overview of what exactly it is and what is you guys doing? What is the idea behind Idena?

[00:05:44] TravCrypto: Idena basically is a layer one blockchain but any human can participate in the validation. So the consensus mechanism is proof of person and unlike Bitcoin which is proof of work where you need ever growing amount of machines to participate or unlike what is soon to be Ethereum 2.0 hopefully if it ever happens proof of stake where you need an evergrowing amount of the actual cryptocurrency in order to stake and participate in validation, you just need to be a human being and you need to participate in what's called a validation ceremony which currently happens approximately every three weeks and that validation ceremony is basically puzzles or flips proving that you're human. So you solve these puzzles over relatively short period of time and you prove that you're in fact a human, and once you do that you can participate in validation on the blockchain where you can earn mining rewards for validation. So that's the very basic overview and I think now LTraveler can probably dive into a little bit more of the technicality.

[00:07:05] LTraveler: So as TravCrypto said, we're developing the network that is going to be part of web3 and if we look on the process of participation to the network we can see that as a game. First, when you're just joining to the network, you’re just candidate and to protect our blockchain from bots we have created a system to invite new members only through the invitation codes so you cannot just come a candidate and join into the ceremony without invitation. First of all you are taking the invitation code then the person who invited you, he is getting rewards for the invitation so he's motivated to explain you everything clear and to control that you participate on time you know exactly what to do. So it's like your manager who's going to control you, going to check everything, who's gonna explain you the next step after the first validation. Then you're becoming from candidate to newbie and then you can have some new skills that you can do, so you can start mining if you want but the rewards that you are getting are going to the stake so you cannot just take money, you have to keep going. Then you're going for one more validation, you're getting a newbie 2 level but you still new so the money still goes to your stake and only after third validation you are becoming identified member which gives you opportunity to invest your money into the stake, and why we are making that as I said because we are developing human blockchain like a blockchain for human being so we have to make the system that accepts humans but does not accept an AI or bots. I would like to tell you more about the process that is a part of solving - flips. The flip is a filter for intelligent people which means that when you're solving flips you can solve it because you are a human but the machine cannot solve it because the way how they made it which is a story with four images that has beginning and the end. we have four images in one colum and four images in another column and only one colum could be the order of image so the images are the same but the order only in one column can be represented as the story that had beginning at the top and the end of the bottom. So since you becoming a newbie, then you have one more responsibility. You have to create flips also and this is very important. It's like people are creating flips and people are solving flips and if we are talking about the validation ceremony, there are two parts. First part is a short session, it is one minute and forty five seconds why we have short session because the short session could guarantee that only one identity and one uman can be connected. It's like the period of the time is very short so you cannot pass validation from many identities which very important. Then we have the second stage and the second stage it's qualification session. The purpose of the long session is to check flips that have been created by other people, checking that all of the keywords are connected to the images and also that there are no marks or hints that help you to solve the flips. So we are moderators and also we are the people who are examinated by other identities. So we are like whole ecosystem that are using our brain to support that blockchain, and this is more or less a general explanation.

[00:11:51] Citizen Cosmos: I like that. It's a very decent explanation easy to understand. I have more questions, some of them devil's advocate, of course. So let's play a little bit with some of the things that you said. The first question which comes out to me is obvious: why human-only chain? Why Idena doesn’t recognize bots, machines, AIs as full-on intelligent beings capable of participating in life of the chain in an equal way to human?

[00:12:30] TravCrypto: That's a great question! My understanding is Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism originally was one machine, one one vote or one node, so anyone could basically participate with their computer and they could validate on the proof of work blockchain which is known as Bitcoin and over time that's become more and more inherently difficult. I actually live in Texas, here in the United States and here are Bitcoin mining farms but hey're located all over the world and you can see how difficult that barrier to entry is for validating on this blockchain. To answer your question in terms of Idena being a proof of person chain or one person one vote as far as the consensus mechanism I think the whole idea is to have a more equal and egalitarian system that anyone in the world can participate in, and that's currently in place with Idena which is really cool to see because you can see people participating in the community. They’re participating in validation as well which is somewhat rare in other blockchains. Also to answer your question in regards to why can't AI participate, I think technically speaking they could participate if they were smart enough to complete the validation ceremonies which we haven't seen to be the case so far but I think technically speaking if AIs were as smart as a human being, smart enough to complete these flips as LTraveler was explaining previously, I think they very well in fact could participate butmthere's no AI that's currently at that technical level.

[00:14:27] Citizen Cosmos: So if I could summarize, it's not about disliking robots, you just think that at the current stage of the implementation that's a test for them. If they can solve it they can participate, that means they're smart enough. Is that basically what you're trying to get at? right

[00:14:42] TravCrypto: Right.The goal is to not have AI participate, that’s the ideal. We've been successful so far but obviously we hope that this validation ceremony can prevent AIs from participating in the future which allows humans to have the power in the in the consensus mechanism. There obviously have been a lot of attempts so far but they haven't been successful.

[00:15:09] LTraveler: There is one thing I would like to add is that there is a price for people who're going to develop that kind of system. So the developers going to pay amount of money for someone who's gonna hack the system.The second thing that we're always trying to predict that since the blockchain was released, it was already two or three additional protection have been implemented and we have to mention that first of all we call it antagonistic noise which is kind of noise that every image has and that protects when, for example, Google vision trying to check that kind of images with this antagonistic noise the percentage of correctly recognized images are very low. Also we have a mechanism when we are putting another image or another background with the low level of opacity, it could be noticed but it didn't break the general sense of the image. Also there is one more thing that sometimes the system when you are loading your flips it makes horizontal mirroring of the image just in case so all of that mechanism are making for vision system very hard to ecognize images and to solve plays because actually if that system going to exist then the whole blockchain’s going to be in trouble because it's just destroyed the whole system.

[00:16:55] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a good cat and mouse game to see the improvement. It's like with bank security when the hackers hack the bank security, the bank security improves and so on and so forth. I think it’s beneficial for the whole industry what you guys are trying to do.

[00:17:10] LTraveler: I'm sorry that I'm interrupting but for us that kind of asystem that's going to solve flips automatically, it's like a person who can ray the money and the money are the same as the real money. That's why we are always aware of what's going on.

[00:17:27] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. It's going to be a bit unrelated to that but something I want to make clear. The proof of work and the proof of stake. Can you guys clarify how exactly does it mix everything together? Where do the mining and the validation meet each other? I would love to hear it from you guys and to hear a proper clarification of where I'm wrong and where I'm not wrong.

[00:17:59] LTraveler: First of all, when you are joining to the network, your first validation ceremony is to pass the test. and since you pass the test then you can join to the mining but there is one very important thing of the mining that you don't need a powerful machine. You can use whatever computer or a virtual private server regardless of which operation system it is. We have a node client for Linux system, Windows and Mac OS. So, you can join and since you start to mine very important thing that the mining rewards are the same. There was recently a voting for the new hard fork and after accepting it, the new mechanism is going to connect the rewards for your mining and the amount of coins that you have in the stake. So basically what we are trying to do is not connect the mining process to the power off your machine. The only thing which is important if you're joining to the network, you're helping the network be decentralized as much as possible. But the main part is your brain, that you're a human and that you can solve and create good flips. Maybe TravCrypt wants to add something.

[00:19:32] TravCrypto: That was actually a great summary, I was pretty much going to say all of that same stuff myself. I just wanted to touch on a question that a lot of people typically ask as well and it's all related to this. The question is why wouldn't I just complete the flips on 10 different computers, complete the validation ceremony with 10 different invitations and then I could get 10 times the amount of rewards or mining? Well, the answer to that question is this validation ceremony actually takes place at the same time all around the world so no matter where you live on planet Earth. This validation ceremony takes place all in sync all around the world. So obviously it's impossible to be in two places at once. Each person actually has to complete this validation ceremony on their own personal device. You could do it on a mobile device, you could do it on a laptop but you complete this validation ceremony as LTraveller said in 1 minute and 45 seconds which is a relatively short amount of time, complete 6 different flips which are these puzzles. So it would be difficult to do that at the same time across 10 different machines. So that's how the network prevents people from having multiple identities for the consensus. It really sticks to one person one node.

[00:21:17] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned plutocracy and at the beginning you said that the in Idena it almost doesn't exist and that's really cool to hear because in a lot of the times you come to a community and unfortunately what we see is centralization of stake and using that power to push opinions but a lot of the time it's not even that. It's really cool to see that it's the community members who are coming on to the recording to onto the podcast to talk about the project and to explain it other people rather than actually finding members. So the first question is why? How come it was community members that reacted? Why is it in your opinion like that?

[00:22:30] TravCrypto: Just from my perspective as a community member over the past couple of years first and foremost I think the developers of Idena are just very focused on the development of the blockchain and so they're the ones technically implementing these new bug fixes in these new editions that some other community members wouldn't be able to contribute and I think it's also this ethos of a community driven project. The community is now representing itself which I think is very unique to other blockchain projects. It's really cool to see because there's this ethos not only at the consensus level of one person one vote and participating in these different Idena improvement proposals like the most recent one IIP-5 where we're going to make a hard fork but also at this level right on podcasts. The community really is organized and representing itself which is pretty rare to see in the space.

[00:23:43] Citizen Cosmos: I have been in this industry for a long long time and I've seen projects fail and rise and one of the biggest reason proof projects fail is the lack of the community involvement, the lack of the community remembering that this is a decentralized space where that's what we're supposed to do.

[00:24:19] LTraveler: I think any project going to get success when you are always in touch with the community. The reason I like Idena because the developer is actually listening what the community thinks, they are also in touch with us, they are checking discussions and so on and most of the improvements that we have made it was because of the community feedback. For example we have had a hard time when we have had many really bad flips, we start to tell to the developers we have to do something with that because it's just the garbage and it couldn't be like that, and then there were lots of improvements. For example now we have a qualification part of the flip. It's like if you really like the flip you could put the star and then if that specific flip is going to get the majority. We have a filtration mechanism so you can approve flip, you can decline flip or if you do not have more reports, you can leave the flip as it is without any mark so that means that someone else from the committee where that flip goes to be examinated from other identities, if the flip is bad it's going to be marked as bad flip from someone else and step by step people learning how to make good flips and how to report bad flips. So we're always in touch of course. We do not know each other in face but we're always talking, we're always getting a feedback, there is always brainstorming. For example about IIP-5 there were a lot of discussions and then finally everything was integrated into the perfect wonderful solution. how to make solo miners, how to make them run independent. We have a huge pool and we want to be a network more decentralized so we have created a system how make people around their independent node to start mining by themselves and this is something unique that is happening in our community and I really love that.

[00:27:25] TravCrypto: Just to touch on that real quick, I think in other blockchains the like if you take the total community, the percentage of those community members actually participating in the validation is relatively small whereas Idena it's actually a very large proportion of the community so they have more incentive to participate in these proposals, in these changes and and it's actually affect the rewards that they get so I think that incentivizes a lot of involvement within the community and it creates this environment where these proposals. There's really a lot of activity and it's cool to see all of the community proposals that people make.

[00:28:07] Citizen Cosmos: By the way proposals and IIP-5, it's about quadratic voting right? Does any of you want to explain what exactly it is and why you guys think it will help?

[00:28:39] LTraveler: Let's go back to the IIP-4 where we introducing the quadratic staking. So in the proof of stake systems we always have a problem: if you have a huge stake you're actually getting way more benefits comparing to people who have a small stake. The solution which we integrated in Idena blockchain is to make quadratic coefficient which is going to make the process of getting rewards for the staking in the way that if your stake is small you are getting more rewards the percentage of rewards out of your stake then more your stake than less the percentage out of stake you are getting. So that's how we making new members with a small stake for example earn rewards and also how we are making people with a huge stake also earn but with not a huge gap between people with a small stake. With IIP-5 we are getting a new idea about how to connect the stake and the mining rewards so the more coins you are putting into the stake the more rewards that you are getting from the mining process. Before we have had a huge cake of all rewards for mining and then we just spread all of that pie proportionally to each of the mining member so it was like each of the mining member get the same part of the reward. We have had a connection to the age of the identity so if your identity have had more ages when you are in the blockchain then you're getting more. So the newbies were getting less but it wasn't fair because someone came to the community two years ago and someone just now. So the people with more epochs in the block chain they're going to earn always more than the newbie members. The older the blockchain the more this gap is going to be so we completely changed the rule and now nevermind how old you are, the most important thing how much coins you have in the stake. So you have more coins your rewards are going to be bigger and also it is very good for the economy of the Idena because people are not going to exchange the coin after each validation. So the coin is going to be inside the blockchain.

[00:32:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's quite interesting that you use the same quadratic voting model because I've seen it implemented in airdrops a lot especially where you don't want the wells too big of an airdrop so the idea is the less you have the more you get. I don't think I've seen a blockchain before implement it on staking, I think the first time that I've seen this being implemented was only when I was preparing for the podcasts I saw on one of your Twitter accounts a print screen or a pole about what do you guys think and then I started to research and it was quite interesting, I've never seen this implement in before. Another cool thing I've seen across Idena was DeFi demo. I have noticedsome posts and some explanations on how it can play a big role and make an advertisement decentralized. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about that as well?

[00:33:49] TravCrypto: This is actually if you're referring to the concept of decentralized on-chain ads, this is something I actually was most excited about for Idena a while back. I think the concept of advertising on-chain in a decentralized way is really applying blockchain technology in a way that can can really revolutionize an entire space like the centralized marketing. So how it works is essentially there's this concept of oracles on-chain and you can create an oracle, like an add and when you create this add it goes to the oracles or people to decide whether they're going to approve it. So it needs to be approved by the community first and once it is approved, then it is actually displayed on-chain so after the implementation it will be once year doing the validation ceremony you’ll actually see these adds displayed and the money spent on these adds is burned in the form of Idena’s native crypto currency. That's actually burned on-chain in order to display these adds to people around the world. So i think that concept of decentralized marketing is really really cool and I think it adds a lot of value to the blockchain because obviously there's a lower supply and we all know the concepts of supply and demand over time.

[00:28:39] LTraveler: One more thing that I would like to add is that you can advertise whatever you want. We don't have rules. The only rule that we have is that the community must approve your ad. So you're sending an advertisement to be examined by comity of people that's going to be randomly selected from the whole network and then if you are getting the approval of majority you can run your advertisement company and this is very important because nobody can tell you nothing.So people will take a decision what is good and what is bad. This is the main point of the future because we always know about discrimination, about censorship, and all of that thing but for example why someone is going to choose what is good and what is bad because you have to ask like at least randomly of some members and if it is good why not? And this is the main principle of our advertisement platform and also you can run whatever oracle you want. For example you can ask whatever thing, you can make a poll. Then you can get a feedback from the community. Of course you have to pay for that but the feedback that you're getting from the real people it is very hard to manipulate that vote system and that's how we are implementing our Idena improvement proposals. First, the person who wants to propose that idea has to describe that idea pretty clear and then we have delegates and that delegates we are choosing every three epochs and then if the delegates approve the program then the program goes to the oracle vote part where everyone from the community is supposed to vote. Everyone can propose something even now we have a community wallet community foundation so if you're a developer you want to develop something new you have to prepare the paper, you have to get the majority from the majority of votes from five delegates that we are selecting every three epochs and then you're going to get that majority then that paper going to be put it into the oracle voting and then if people say yes then you're going to get the foundation for your project or for your implementation. Recently we implemented community foundation to translate Idena chronicles into three languages and it was implemented in that new mechanism.

[00:39:18] Citizen Cosmos: what has been the most controversial decision that the community made?

[00:39:31] TravCrypto: I'll touch on two things real quick. One, oracles can be as controversial as you want them to be. In terms of oracles you could ask any question that you possibly want e whether it's politically whether it's opinion. One oracle off the top of my and this doesn't affect the blockchain in any way or the community is should abortion be a legal or illegal? Here you have this democratic system with community members literally all over the world in all different political environments from all backgrounds and they can just vote legal or illegal and there you get a true perspective into what people's true thoughts are on any given matter. So I thought that was really cool, I think that like a concept of true democracy but then another example are these improvement proposals like IIP-5 that was controversial within the community because there are certain people that think these mechanisms should be a certain way and then there's certain people that think they should be a different way but it's the coolest part about this is you always have differing opinions. That’s the basis of human nature to see when these proposals are brought up. It's not always just bi-partisan, it could be three or four different thought paths and everyone breaks down their own explanation of why they think it should be this way or the other way. Once you get those explanations then the community can put in their thoughts and when it's all said and done and you have this very broad overview of this IIP-5, that's when community members can take action and actually participate in voting and depending on the results of the vote that will create a hard fork of the blockchain which you could arguable say doesn't happen in most other blockchain communities.

[00:42:14] LTraveler: I want to add one more thing that because everything is private. You can ask whatever questions you want, nobody going to judge you.

[00:42:29] Citizen Cosmos: I have a wrap up traditional question for you. What keeps you motivated to do what you guys : are doing today? Whether it's for Idena or whether it's for the whole of blockchain industry.

[00:43:07] LTraveler: I would like to start because it reminds me the story of how that community proposals came out about the translation. I was so attracted by the idea and I just wrote to the developers and said I want to translate your chronicle and they even agreed to pay me. Then, I started creating videos and the result was also good. What I feel is that apart from your job where you're just earning money there should be something that you're really happy to do. You do something that people really can use because they really need that. The key point of changing our society is to transform it from what we must do to something what we choose to do. For me me this is the key point and Idena really represented the ideas of fair democracies, it is the representation of that kind of style of society. We are small but at least you can feel that and this is wonderful.

[00:45:11] TravCrypto: For me it’s very similar to LTraveler. In the time that I've been in web3 professionally over the past three years and as a community member over the past six years I've seen a lot of different blockchains, a lot of different projects all promising different things. The thing that makes me most passionate about Idena is this concept of a truly decentralized democracy and what I mean by that is a global democracy where every humans can participate in this system and their vote can be heard which is really spectacular to me. I think it's a novel concept that hasn't been done at scale and I think Idena is the technology that can allow truly decentralized democracy to happen at scale.

[00:46:12] Citizen Cosmos: Guys, this has been a huge pleasure! Thank you very much for your time!

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#citizencosmos

• Episode link: https://www.citizencosmos.space/orbitalapes

• Episode name: CO, NFT, gaming & validating

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to our new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! Today we have with us CO, the Community Overlord from Orbital Apes. Hey! Welcome to the show!

[00:01:42] CO Orbital Apes: Thank you for having me here, excited about it!

[00:01:45] Citizen Cosmos: Glad have you. You guys have probably the current biggest NFT project in the Cosmos ecosystem. I would love to talk all about it. Do you want to introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about Orbital Apes and what you guys do?

[00:01:57] CO Orbital Apes: For sure! So me, I run the social media marketing and part of the business side of the of the collection. So Orbital Apes started as NFT collection, it's relatively simple to just create the art and push an NFT collection so we decided to take it one step further and pack it like with as much utility we could give it. So that's where our idea for the market place started and we decided to create a validator in the Evmos chain and we're currently building a game for Evmos as well, so we're tying all of these different aspects to the NFT collection so as a holder of the main collection you get a piece of everything we’ll build in the future, so all the Orbital Apes NFT holders get 50% of our validator management fees. They get 20% of the marketplace fees and they're going to get a free airdrop for them to maintain the new collection for the PvP game. So with all of this we're trying to tie up the different aspects and everything we develop in the future into the main collection so holder from now we'll get access to everything we build.

[00:03:08] Citizen Cosmos: You just answered one of my next questions but it's good! So you have a lot plans, we'll talk a little bit about them later as well. I'm going to start with obvious questions. Why did you guys decide to go anonymous?

[00:03:24] CO Orbital Apes: For us this is just a matter of privacy, we don’t have any problems with sharing our identity, but if we don’t need it, we want to have apes as the core image of our brand. We’re dogs with the Evmos team because we have to go through full KYC for one of the projects we're running on Evmos, so they've seen our faces, we're in constant communication with them but for the public itself maybe in the future we would have plans of not being anonymous but for now it's just a matter of privacy. People can reach out directly to us on social networks but for now we don't feel identity is the most important thing.

[00:04:08] Citizen Cosmos: i absolutely agree with. It's just interesting that you actually had to go through a full KYC the team and here you still decide to stay anonymous but in my opinion it might be a little bit better for the team to be anonymous because that way you strip down the persona behind the person who creates the project and you concentrate on the project. What do you think about having to go through the full KYC? Were you okay with it?

[00:04:37] CO Orbital Apes: It's just a part of the process with one of the projects we're working on, so not a big issue for us.

[00:04:45] Citizen Cosmos: What's with the nicknames? Share the story! man i love the nicknames community overlord

[00:04:52] CO Orbital Apes: It's just pretty much fun names we came up with as we were looking for our nicknames. I'm using my actual nickname, people called me CO in real life so I went with that.Then, Mr. Sir is something we say a lot,we often refer to each other like that. So that's how that came up. People just chose whatever they felt was cool.

[00:05:36] Citizen Cosmos: Before we go more into Orbital Apes I was going to ask why and i've seen this a lot, 10.000 NFTs? I guess 10.000 is a kind of nice round number which makes sense psychologically I guess. But still, why?

[00:05:52] CO Orbital Apes: So 10.000 has become pretty much a standard in NFT collections. We know it's a big number and in the current market conditions it's been a hard push to reach the full mint but right now we're 8000 minted, so it's already 80% and we plan on pushing even more so I think it's a realistic number for what we're trying to achieve. Also in the scope of our project it was better for us to split, to have a lot more NFTs because this would allow more people to get into the ecosystem because for example the game in the future we're going to want a lot of users so if we have more holders we are already preparing a large user base for for the game. Also for the market place and a validators’ fees that are going to be distributed are significant and are going to continue growing in the future so it we felt it was better to split it between a lot of people instead of going the smaller collection.

[00:06:47] Citizen Cosmos: Makes sense! I do have one more intro question. Why Evmos? We also validate Evmos so we also on the same side but I would love to hear your opinion.

[00:07:10] CO Orbital Apes: We've always been big fans of the Cosmos ecosystem, we think it's amazing how everything is connected, how easy it is to move from one place to another but our experience is in solidity and then EVM, so as soon as we saw Evmos, this massive project coming to IBC we felt like that was the right way for us to go because it combines everything, like all of our experience in the EVM side with the interopperability of Cosmos. So it was perfect match, so everything we've done in the past because our team has experience in solidity could be translated directly into Evmos so it was perfect for us.

[00:07:54] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned twice having experience in solidity. Do you want to expand on that? Did you do any projects already in Ethereum that we can talk about?

[00:08:02] CO Orbital Apes: Sure. So our teams is half devs, half designers and the devs they all worked in Silicon Valley companies like Google and Slack, and part of their coding experience comes from there. The team also worked in worked as freelancers for several EVM based projects, so that's how all of us got acquainted to EVM and all of this but this is the first time this team gets together to a solo project like not working for anybody else but this is actually something we own and we're running ourselves so it's pretty much our debut as a team.

[00:08:38] Citizen Cosmos: It's a big debut you made! A good entrance for sure and now you're saying that you guys have quite a lot of experience in big companies. Why did all those people gather together and decide to make a game? what was the idea? Why not anything else but a game?

[00:08:56] CO Orbital Apes: We've all been into blockchain and cryptocurrency for a long time so we've been looking at the type of projects that are successful, the type of projects we wanted to work in and first of all the NFT collection was like an entry point, it was a way to create a brand, to create community so this is why we chose that as a centerpiece of everything we wanted to build. And then we're all gamers, we’re super passionate about it so it was fun to see how much we could experiment because you can see other games like Infinity, for example, that started in Ethereum but that's not viable, they have their own subchain but with gas feeds it becomes impossible to do. Then we've seen several other games and other chains that as they grow like gas feeds can become expansive or the network becomes clogged so they also slow down and fade away, but we saw Evmos and the way it interacts with IBC and everything like much more solid place to develop. Everything matched perfectly, so what we decided to go for it and games are a super fun way to interact with a community and to grow a brand, so this is our path.

[00:10:08] Citizen Cosmos: I agree about gaming and interacting but let's talk a little bit more about all the things you mentioned in the beginning. You guys have a validator, let's start talking about the validator. So the idea from what you said is that the people who are community members and owners of the NFT get part of the commission that the validator earns. Is that correct?

[00:10:30] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah exactly. Through marketing and through community engagement we managed to get our validator to the top one spot in Evmos which was a massive surprise for us. It also required a lot of effort so we're happy with a result we got. So from that validator there our users stake with us because they trust the brand, they know how we operate and the reward system we've created for them, so all of the holders are getting the 50% of the management fees sent to them daily. So at the current rate I think the Apes are getting around 1.3k Evmos daily split into all of them, so every day the collection is getting some rewards. So right now if you go to mint on Orbital Apes instead you still pay the 60 Evmos mint price but as soon as you mint, you can go claim the rewards that have been staking since release. Right now they hold around three most inside so the real price you're going to pay is 57. So this is a cool system because in the future if enough time goes where Apes are not minted they're going to become free at some point or if people mint now, they're going to recover the full price of their mint. So it's sort of self-balancing system. If people invest early they're going to get their rewards and if it's going to be paid off so they can just continue getting rewards or selling it in the future or when the game releases, so it's pretty cool. Apes are always going to be generating rewards and validator right now is the main source of it but also we run the largest just NFT marketplace in Evmos and the holders are also collecting rewards from that so right now since we launched our collection, the traded volume for the apes is about 90.000 Evmos so it's significant right now and we expected to continue growing as more and if the collections come to the market place. Now have some excellent NFTs approaching Evmos so it's pretty cool, we’re excited to see how much the volume increases in the marketplace and all of this is going to benefit Ape holders in long term as volume increases, their fees increase.

[00:12:49] Citizen Cosmos: So basically what other parts are there to the economics? So you have the marketplace which generates a certain revenue and are there other parts to economics apart from being an NFT collection and being scarse which is I can guess can also be part of the economics. Are there any more things that week can say that's part of that?

[00:13:10] CO Orbital Apes: So for now things with actual monetary value are just these like this is where we're assigning value but we also have like a reward sort of reward points for people who delegate to us. We created this token OAV so people that stake with us get a monthly airdrop of the OAV token which is not something that has value in itself but it's something that people can use in the OAV store that we created. So the whole purpose of this store is to give some incentives for people and rewards for people that delegate to us and that have been loyal to us and we give something back that they can use to further engage with the brand so the OAV store contains some exclusive NFT designs they're all erc 1155 so it's shared ownership but people can use the tokens they got from staking to mint these new Apes. All of these are limited edition Apes so they're going to be there for one month and then they're going to disappear forever so you can use the OAV tokens you've got from staking with us. To mint these Apes you can use it as a profile picture, you can trade in the marketplace, and we're creating a system of scarcity by making them time limited so early stakers who minted one of the current Apes are going to have them but in the future these are going to be impossible to get unless you buy them of secondary. So its this scarcity system we created to reward holders, early holders especially because they're the only ones with access to the early releases of OAV.

[00:14:45] Citizen Cosmos: Could you kind of summarize that the NFTs in this case are a gateway point into the system that you're creating?

[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah, exactly. So if you own an Ape you can be sure that you're going to be part of every single project, and you're going a get rewards from every single project we build.

[00:15:03] Citizen Cosmos: If you don't mind talking about what other projects do you want to talk about? The other plans that you guys have?

[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Right now the game is something where dedicating our full time right now because it's pretty complex task to achieve we've seen games, we've seen how successful they are on bull run especially once the game is new it continues to the tokens associated with the game continue to go up like crazy but this is from history we see that this is not sustainable. Pretty much every play to earn game that has released eventually collapses so this is something we're really trying to avoid. Of course like teams that release a play to earn game can get a lot of capital quick from the increase of the value of the token but then in the end you're still responsible for your community, for what you promise to the people. Having a token falling in price is not something we want to give to our customers, so we're taking our time we're trying to build a more sustainable play to earn tokanomic system so this is why we're going to continue taking our time for the game, make sure to release it once it's perfect and also one of the important things is to release it under a better market condition because even if you have the best game in the world you really do have to wait for for a good market condition for it to be truly successful if not lunching something that's not going to take off immediately is going to make it way harder to push it in the future, so we're trying to wait for every factor to align itself. Everything has done until now for collection so that's when we're going to release that's also going to be part of the reward system for the holders.

[00:16:50] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned two things: market conditions and games failing. Let's talk a little about the games failing. First, why in your opinion, most of the other games fail? We’re talking blockchain games of course.

[00:17:04] CO Orbital Apes: The thing with blockchain is that most games have been pretty much just another way to invest. We've seen idle games where you just click send your players to do some activity but you're not really engaging with the game. So this lack of entertainment in the game is what will determine its lifespan. So as long as the tokenomics inside the game continue increasing and people are making money then it's going to make sense to play but if it's not entertaining and the rewards start decreasing that's where a game fails. Right now the key thing we're focusing on is making a game that someone would play on its own even without a reward system because we believe this is the key. This is the only thing that's going to make any game sustainable because if you purely rely on tokenomics, it's just like releasing a new DeFi protocol, not an actual game. So we're not going to go that route, we're going to make something actually fun for people to play.

[00:18:04] Citizen Cosmos: This is an interesting point. I would love to expand on that. Let's talk psychology a little bit. You say that you want to make a game which will attract people to play without having a monetary reward. I can understand that you probably have a lot of things that you're trying to avoid because of the like the things that you haven't released yet but can you talk a little bit more like in general psychology wise, what in your opinion makes people play a game in the first place if it's not receiving a reward?

[00:18:35] CO Orbital Apes: For anything you're going to need a reward. So in games for example xp systems are a pretty good expand levels are a pretty good incentive so people have leaderboards, you get to level a hundred and you're in the top. So you're competing against other people, people can see your name, people know who you are, and your NFTs are linked to you. So you're online your block chain identity goes with you into the game and you get some recognition if you do well with the game but this is one sort of reward this is purely on an entertainment and recognition level we're also going to do a full tokenomic system but by combining these two and making sure they interact properly with each other we're going to make it sustainable in the long run. Because only when you achieve a true balance in this the game can succeed. So it's going to be both like a social factor, a rewards factor and something that will keep people engaged.

[00:19:29] Citizen Cosmos: What would you say from the outside of the blockchain world, which successful games can be an example to what you're building?

[00:19:40] CO Orbital Apes: I mean we can see probably that the biggest game right now by user base is probably Fortnite or World of Warcraft and all of these games where you create an online persona and your avatar becomes an extension of you. So, for example, in Fortnite you buy some skins, WoW you can buy different cosmetics and all of this is important because you create online persona and you pretty much decorated so you get new items for people to see who you are online, what new thing you have and all this so this is important thing like the social factor combined with cosmetics you can apply. This is what creates a successful game so if a lot of people are playing and then you have the new most exclusive skin then people are going to give you some recognition for that so this is sort of the system we are going to strive towards. We're testing out with the OAV Apes because all of these are limited, they're only going to be there for one month so people are actually rushing to buy the Apes because they know if they buy this now, they're going to be the only one to have it and this is something people actually cherish.

[00:20:52] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned market conditions before a couple of times. Would love to hear your thoughts in general. So are we in a depth of a bear market, in terrible market conditions to relate things? if you can talk more about it, I would love to hear your opinion.

[00:21:08] CO Orbital Apes: So right now everybody can see it's not the full green candles every day as we experienced in past years, but in Evmos I feel like we're in a secluded place because Evmos keeps growing. More people get interested in the coin, they're coming to the ecosystem, they're seeing their reward, all the useful features you can have when you combine EVM with IBC. So right now Evmos is in a pretty good spot, it's getting a lot of attention as the chain keeps growing. It keeps proving people what the possibilities for it are so right now like we're waiting also for the use surveys in Evmos to increase as well because it's getting a lot of attention but it's still very small compared to the potential it could have in the future. I think that after some months we're going to have a lot of people really invested into the entire ecosystem and that's when it makes sense to do something truly big. Even in these market conditions we managed to sell 80% of our collection until now in a couple of weeks from launch and it looks like we're going to fully mint out in a couple of weeks as well. So it's not terrible but if you have a solid product it will do well even in not the optimal conditions.

[00:22:28] Citizen Cosmos: For your team and for you personally, what would be the 1 market event that would trigger you?

[00:22:40] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it's going to be only one event. We have to see continuous growth throughout decent enough period of time because that's the only signal you can have of improving market conditions because big green candle for the month is not an indication of anything. You have to see how people are engaging with Evmos, for example. How many more wallets are created in the chain? How many more DeFi protocols exist? What kind of brands it's attracting? Right now this is not directly related to Cosmos but dYdX is building their own Cosmos chain, so this is something huge for the cosmos ecosystem and this is the sort of thing we like to see when when we're dealing with Evmos that's fully integrated into Cosmos and having these massive protocols migrating into Cosmos seeing the value. That's very good signal of what's to come in the future. So as we see more protocols migrating into Cosmos, and more people discovering the potential of these chains, that's where we can find great signa,l not one specific market event but a series of them for a sustained period of time.

[00:23:48] Citizen Cosmos: So I guess we're talking more fundamentals than technical analysis. I have a couple of questions which I'm going to look at because they were from our various chats from community members and then I also have some more questions but a little bit different. So one question was on Twitter. What are the current difficulties in the cryptoworld and the business in terms of like launching your own project in general, and maybe both the market conditions being not in the best situation?

[00:24:53] CO Orbital Apes: We've been in in crypto for a long time so we have seen projects become successful and fail and we determined what makes a project be successful. So I remember there was a point in time where any NFT collection you just had to release it and the floor price went crazy and everybody made money on that. So it was a period where people just continue to buy mint every collection and the demand for them was crazy. But right now I think the market is more mature so people know where to find value, how to determine a successful project from one that's going to fail, so right now it's not enough to just release a profile picture collection but you actually have to give the user something that they will recognize value in. Now every user is marked, people know how to do their research, they know what works and what doesn't so if you just try to launch very simple project, it's not likely to be successful so that's why the Orbital Apes a are full ecosystem. So we have different aspects that hedge the performance of the NFT collection so the validator as long as we remain in a good position is going to continue generating for our our project. The NFT marketplace we’re fully into this industry so if the NFT industry within Evmos continues to do well as our NFT then we're going to continue getting benefits from that by combining this having multiple sources of rewards and incentives. It's much more complete package for collection so I would say right now if you’re going to launch a project, make sure something unique and that has true value in itself regardless of market conditions. Something that can endure a bear market, something that can help you push through that and then of course in a bull market it's going to be amazing but you really need something that can withstand any conditions. So that's how we built the Apes, and that's why they made such a loud noise right now even with the current conditions.

[00:26:59] Citizen Cosmos: What was the most difficult thing though for your team to overcome and apart from the market conditions obviously? What was the one thing may be drawing the Apes thinking of the collection or maybe launching the validator?

[00:27:23] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it was just one thing. We had multiple roadblocks like the validator, for example. We started it as soon as the chain restarted so for that we had to make a pretty expensive investment into Evmos when the price was 6 to get into the active set and that was of course a completely different price than right now. So right the start our cost was massive, and then we saw all of that investment go down quickly because we wanted to be there from the start, then we had to run the valley data for OAV, a month without any rewards active because inflation was not active in Evmos so that was also an additional cost, and all of the costs of development like the artists, software engineers, and all of these. It was a long period of time where nobody was collecting any profits from anywhere, so it was all our effort waiting for the time to release, and we also ran the NFT marketplace at 0 profit for a long time because we wanted to have everything enabled for the chain to grow, and then for releasing we had to adjust to the timeline of Evmos, not necessarily our own because Evmos was still in the middle of doing upgrades for the Keplr claim issues, so there were multiple factors that had to come through for us to be able to launch. So one of the main things that was preventing us from announcing minting date or a price was the fact the IBC transactions were not enabled to pretty much the largest part of the ecosystem which is Cosmos. It was hard for them to access Evmos directly, so we had to wait for all of these, endure the cost and all the time we spent, just being patient until all the factors aligned and then we could release and it was the right choice to wait even though it was hard and even though we hit many roadblocks, it was the right choice.

[00:29:21] Citizen Cosmos: So huddling works, right? I have one more question here which was sent privately. Why did you only self-bond 0.008% of the stake? Is this okay for network security?

[00:29:40] CO Orbital Apes: That was the initial self-bond that we had to buy when Evmos was at 6 and after that instead of self-bonding more we just staked 10% of the Orbital Apes mint into the validator so this s a bit more secure for us, gives us more flexibility. Pretty much every validator keeps a really low self-bonded amount because of this. It gives you more security, flexibility but it it's just like that. We want to keep the fund safe so from anything in this way by just staking to the validator, we can do that and all of our wallets are public so people can see that we're not only staking 10% of the main funds to our valudator as we promised but right now we have around 300.000 Evmos stake to smaller validators in this page so people can go to the addresses that are connected to the validator there and they can see how it spreads. I think we're currently staking to 15 other validators, maybe the list has grown but this is pretty much our way to support the ecosystem because we did realize our validator grew to a pretty large size. So initially our plan was to stake with Evmos to continue growing but right now we don't feel like that's the most responsible thing to do, so everything we earn from all the rewards are staked with other people. We choose to stake with validators that are providing something to the Evmoschain, to the Cosmos ecosystem. So for example, a big part of our stake is with ecostate that created the restake tool that a lot of people use, then we deliver it to several other validators. This is something pretty cool for us because we get to engage with a lot of teams so whenever they've come to us sometimes people need a little bit of help to remain in the active set so we discussed the project, and then we know what they're going to be adding to the Evmos chain and it's amazing to be in this position where we can help others and we know what they're doing to help the chain so it's perfect. We love supporting other people because we really get to see inside of everything that's being built for Evmos.

[00:32:12] Citizen Cosmos: I love the answer, thank you! I think you guys are doing a very cool job to decentralize the stake. I have a couple of questions, it's going to be harder to ask you since your team is anonymous but I'm still going to try. You did mention that your team has worked with Google and Slack, but how did you resonally get into crypto?

[00:32:47] CO Orbital Apes: I think all of us got into crypto in a different period. Me personally, I started in 2018. I started with Bitcoin, that was my first purchase and then as soon as you're invested into something that you keep track of it and you keep looking for more about it so I think that was my entry and then I started looking into other protocols like getting a load to DeFi into NFTs. So by investing in them you get to engage in a much deeper level than people just read the news because you have something and you have a stake so it's important to you and this is pretty much how all of the team got involved. Some have been in crypto from like 2015 so they're much more experienced. We're all pretty confident in the crypto space, we know what's going to be the key success factor so it's pretty cool to also have a full team of people that you can talk to about different strategies, about different events because everybody has experience. Combining all of this experience into one project has been massively useful for us.

[00:34:06] Citizen Cosmos: What's your personal worst buy so far since 2018?

[00:34:10] CO Orbital Apes: I'm not sure what was the worst buy. Right now everything is pretty toughbut I don't think there's been one complete fail. You can always pull out. We had some UST, luckily we were able to to sell it quickly as soon as it broke back. We were also actually huge fans of Luna before but luckily we didn't hold it at the time of the crash.

[00:34:54] Citizen Cosmos: I guess UST was one of the worst hits for everybody. Personally, it was a big hit for our project, we had five years worth of money in UST and then it was a big hit, so I totally understand. What was the internal motivation behind creating Orbital Apes?

[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: So a lot of the team worked as freelancers for other people and we saw how their projects were becoming super successful and they grew into actual companies in the cryptospace and all of this, so we wanted to be able to work on what we really wanted. So the Orbital Apes is a company like every other business where we're using our skills what we have to provide value to people and we’re running a company around this. We're going to continue pushing our skills to anything we can do, maybe we get into the maybe we get into DeFi, maybe validating other chains. I wouldn't say it's something novel, something that will change the lives of people but at least right now we're doing our responsibility of keeping the network, secure in helping decentralized although we do take a big chunk of the chain, we’re doing efforts to decentralize, we're supporting other teams and just yesterday on the upgrade it was completely smooth, the V6 of Evmos happened and our validator there was up and running perfectly on time, we didn't miss a single block in there so it's perfect. It makes us feel better to see that we can prove to people that their funds are in a safe place, that we're going to have one of the best up times in the network and that's part of what we're doing for the people. This is a business, this is our baby and we're going to continue running it as a business and growing it as much as we can.

[00:37:45] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a very great and fair answer! I'm going to ask one last question to you. What keeps you personally motivated?

[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: I would say running an NFT collection is pretty tough. At some point you have to be constantly engaged with community, constantly developing new things, you’re pretty much in the hands of how the market is behaving, how market psychology works so it's tough but once you have success in a collection that's more than enough to keep you going because if you know you were successful in this than you know what else to do in the future. And it's also pretty fun. I run the community so getting to interact with a lot of people in Discord is super fun. I know a lot of the people that are in the day score and there's some that are pretty much there 24/7 so talking to them, getting their feedback about the project, listening to suggestions is also super helpful because even though we are a big team it's super useful to hear the the ideas of the people that are actually using our product and are invested on it because first of all, they give us a lot of different ideas of what to do in the future. We've taken a lot of their suggestions and we actually implemented them for the whole ecosystem and you also see when when people react positively towards a new update that you did to the market place or towards a new Ape design that you're released in the OAV store. All of this is super rewarding and fun, it's super fun to see the reactions of people when you release a new snique peek or something like that. Working in crypto you have all the freedom and flexibility you want.

[00:40:37] Citizen Cosmos: To be honest with you I don't get many guests who are so business driven and I love that because it's a motivation in itself to succeed. I think success is a very good motivation. Thanks for the conversation, it’s been a huge pleasure!

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