This is a review of the regular Vite Community AMA, which is held by the head team every 3-4 weeks.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Hi all!
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Welcome to the AMA
MD : Kawsar Chowdhury
Question : what's the Vite best achievement success story in 2020 year ?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Based on community feedback and internal review, our main focus will be on ViteX. So this will include listing VX on exchanges and listing coins on ViteX
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
We will have a new coin listing on ViteX within a week or so
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
In terms of listing VX on exchanges, we are in talks with many big names (perhaps all the big ones you can think of outside the US) - it comes down to a matter of listing fees negotiation. I know this is the same update as before, but unfortunately these price discussions take a while
Question from the forum:
when the chainlink implementation will be done?
when futures?
will we see anytime soon an investment in a real marketing campaing done y real marketing professionals to attract more traders?
the website is still old version, what happened?
which of the ideas from community are going to be implemented?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Most of these questions are answered by our CEO's latest letter: https://medium.com/vitelabs/vite-roadmap-review-and-adjustments-e14592c15ae4
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
But let me give some quick bullet points here:
Futures - this is not part of 2020 plan now, but afterwards. This involves serious design and liquidity ramp-up, which we are not prepared to handle at the moment.
Real marketing - this comes back to coin listing, which frankly was slow on ViteX earlier this year. We are picking up the pace.
Also - we are releasing the community coin-listing competition campaign within 24 hours
We have created a small group of coin scouts within our team. They've been contributing excellent ideas for listing new coins
According to our plan, the new website will be released within 30 days
In terms of ideas to implement from the community - see the roadmap letter above. Many new additions to the roadmap are DEX-centric
**Responce on the recent suggestions **
Hi Richard, recently "Ultrapower - use 1801183244" offered us some ideas, I think they are worthy of your attention. Please review them carefully. Also to some of ideas I added my comments.
-The current situation needs a correction, VX needs to be used for something else to attract people to buy it, if we simply list it on binance it will just pump and dump if not worse, we need to attract people to do something with it that is not only staking, something that attracts people to trade on ViteX
The exchange like binance, kucoin, crypto.com and others are continuosly hammering the crypto scene with contests, new services, lending, futures and why? because their trading fees are less and less because of competition maybe or less people trading in general? i don’t know the truth but i know that when some business is marketing so much i smell fish, it means it is not going as foreseen, we have an exceptional product on vitex, you can do whatever you want with no KYC, move funds at the speed of light with no fees, we need applications, we need developers loving the lattice smart contract platform that Vite is and developing useful and good Dapps.
DEFI is amazing, on ETH platform is expensive to make smart contracts transactions, we would suck a large slice of the market with our feeles, ligh-fast lattice system.The funds on DEFI on ethereum, where a 14 years old can steal everything in 5 minutes, reached almost 2 billions.
I think the best idea to would be this: double or triple the daily dividends and then market it immediately to create a hype effect, we can even do it for a limited amount of time like: who has 1000 VX gets double dividends for a month or something like this.
And added to that who has 10000 VX for example staked, get’s a card to use everywhere with a % cashback for every tx on shops, we could even do a partnership with some product brand or supermarket and give away vite or vx with some kind of products on the shelf, like, you buy coca-cola you get 10 vite with a code, you buy a computer you get 1000 vite
Can we make ref codes free again ?
Why don’t we create a program with points to get prizes like iphones, macbooks et cetera? when you trade a volume of 10.000.000$ you get a iphone. but what you people should try to understand, is the shininess of it, if you promise a ledger you attract a certain kind of people, if you promise a car you get serious traders, market movers
You buy bids to do on very expensive items like macbooks iphones et cetera and for every bid the price goes up but with VITE super action auctions, the price goes down, the person buying get’s the iphone and some money and all the rest of people paid for it buying bids, it’s like a lottery
Everyday extraction lottery for VX holders, more VX staked better the prize
Hiring a real graphic designer and rebrand VITE in a way it does look not a project like the others.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Unfortunately the answer to the point about "using VX" is still to bootstrap liquidity. Coin listing and co-marketing activities as part of that are still the strategy.
Admittedly we've been a bit slow in listing new coins at the earlier part of the year, but we're rectifying that now.
A new listing is happening within a week or so, and the community coin listing competition will launch within 24 hours.
Re: getting devs to make dapps, we will have grants available for dev proposals, as outlined in Charles' letter on roadmap adjustments. But I personally think there's more to do on the DEX side than non-speculation Dapps. The most successful and perhaps the only really useful dapps right now belong to the speculation category. So it's better to focus more on continuing to develop the ecosystem around our DEX. Now that is not to say we won't encourage 3rd party development of other dapps.
We discussed DeFi in the latest ViFi survey response article.
Regarding increasing VX rewards, I am not convinced this will increase true liquidity. But maybe we will look into increasing incentives for market-making as mining. Also, I think listing of new coins and co-marketing around that is the ultimate crwod-attracting campaign.
Plastic cards involve significant logistics. This is more of a longer term project.
About referral codes, we had plans to launch another round of activities to temporarily reimburse the fees for creating codes. Let me check how that campaign is going.
Tangible prizes like iPhones is a good idea. We will consider this. To make shipping easier, maybe Apple discount card?
Bitcoinman
Why there is no effort at promoting Binance trading campaign? No marketing effort from Binance and Vite. No results or Volume increase from that campaign.
Richard Yan (Vite COO
Some of these questions are answered in the roadmap update letter Charles sent.
More ViteX campaigns is a good idea. Co-marketing for coin listings should have similar effect.
In terms of marketing - note we are having panel discussion with Binance and AMA with Chainlink, both happening within 1-2 weeks.
In terms of getting a credit card - there are many logistical steps to sort out.
We are talking to some vendors about fiat on-ramp though.
So i got the following questions:
Question from the forum
Community members offered some good ideas in which replies were "passed to the team". Do the team really consider those suggestions ? Personally, i didn't saw any suggestion to be included in any release.
We need more coins, more operators, more volume otherwise VITEX will have an unwanted faith - that of being closed because costs of keeping it up will be more than it will be afforded.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Of course some community suggestions have been incorporated. One example is the stablecoin zero fee conversion feature. This should be out in a few weeks (this requires making sure enough SBPs hard fork - hence a longer process - nature of developing decentralized systems).
Another example is interface change to the wallet (using memo instead of comment to make sending to Binance easier, for instance).
Yet another example is display of VX mining statistics to vitex.net dashboard.
And someone suggested adding a ViteX listing google form, which we will add early next week.
Not every suggestion can be incorporated, or incorporated in time. @Daniel_Leedan made many great suggestions (including some about making our github more friendly to developers) - I have asked our team to look into them. But there's also an internal priority of things to be done.
Behind the scenes, we recently did significant refactoring of code to tackle tech debt, and also dealt with upgrading security of our gateway and web services.
Unfortunately such efforts aren't as visible to the community.
Question from the forum
How to get ETH developers to come to Vite.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
There are many public blockchains trying to do the same thing. I think a smarter strategy is to focus attention on DEX now, which has natural usage and indeed drawn significant interest. I made some other points about how to grow our DEX earlier
Marl
how many devs are working on the team currently ?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
We have about 10 full-timers. On top of that, we have testers, designers, product managers. And in addition to these, we have interns and part-timers.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
The coronovirus pandemic was a bit of a turning point. During that time, productivity took a hit, and we evaluated the team output accordingly. Then we made a decision to conserve capital by retaining the most effective developers.
Marl
and what's the total number of employees ?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
The total number came down a bit because of the changes I mentioned earlier. But that said, we added many part timers and consultants not currently on our page. Some part timers have day jobs elsewhere and do not wish to appear in public. One example is our business development manager Morgan Jones in New York City. He has been instrumental in introducing Vite to the New York state assemblymember Ron Kim. He's interested in making a "Libra" for the City of New York and we've been talking maybe once a month.
Other examples are service reps for ViteX who also do bizdev and coin scouting for the DEX.
Daniel
Hi Richard, I have 2 questions:
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At AMA about a month ago, you mentioned that 5 staff members are working on marketing.What kind marketing actions have been taken in the last 3 months? Can you give some examples without the usual tasks (Twitter, blog posts, etc.)?
-
I did some research on Vite's activity on GitHub: on Vite team page there are 23 tech staff but only 5 of them are still active on GitHub, some of them stop their activity at the end of last year and some a few months ago. How many team members are currently working on the technical side of the project?
My research:
https://github.com/Daniel-Leedan/Vite
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Note that the five-person team have marketing responsibilities, but they also deal with operations & community (managing Vite gateway, managing community managers, etc). I didn't say that team was fully dedicated to marketing. Sorry if there was miscommunication.
That said, off the top of my head, here are some marketing activities:
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Binance trading contest
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Partnership with a variety of projects (the most prominent one being Chainlink)
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Arrangement for upcoming Binance roundtable discussion (it takes time to get on the guest list)
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Preparation for coin listing campaign (to be released in 24 hours)
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Various AMAs with coins listed on ViteX and with other friendly projects
I answered #2 earlier. To supplement, there are private repos that we are working on that outsiders won't see. A few examples:
In Q4 roadmap, you will see that we're adding integration with trading strategy projects. This will allow others to deploy common trading strategies more easily on ViteX. The person working on this has a private repo.
Also, I'm surprised you say there are only five active. Could you share a screenshot? I talk to our developer team regularly, and my job would be a lot simpler if there were only five active!
Bitcoinman
Why there is no effort at promoting Binance trading campaign? No marketing effort from Binance and Vite. No results or Volume increase from that campaign.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
To be honest, the original understanding with Binance was that they would promote. But later that decision got reversed somehow. We think it's because the amount of rewards we committed was not high. We want to maintain a good relationship with the exchange, and didn't put pressure on this.
The good news is that we're getting onto a Binance panel discussion, with more notorious personalities like Justin Sun present. So that would be both fun and good for business.
Nick
you are catching lots of attention from your podcast but the last time you tweeted about Vite was the Binance voting,more than 8 months. do you have any strategy to build Vite image as a founder with Twitter and your podcast?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
You are right. Charles is the main tweeter when it comes to Vite content, and he has a bigger audience than mine. My twitter account hasn't even tweeted crypto content for some time. It's a place for personal and broad intellectual discourse.
On the other hand, I try to promote via other means, such as AMAs, panel discussions, presentations at virtual events, etc. The biweekly report chronicles these items.
Bitcoinman
The in-house marketing is not effective, are you going to hire a seasoned PR to work at Vite?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
We are making some personnel changes. So you should expect to see more active social media presence from our main accounts. We are supporting some great grassroot social media accounts (blogvite, vite&news) to market content for us.
I'm trying to get a video AMA going, with projects listed on ViteX, for example. But we want to do something a bit different. For instance, maybe a female host to add a different perspective. In early stage of exploration, I have my mind set on someone, but still early. if you guys have good suggestions for candidate hosts, I'm all ears.
Also, I still think coin listing is the marketing with the best ROI, which we will pick up pace for.
Looperstar
Is there any plan for non fungible tokens and trading them within vitex
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
I dont think we support NFT now
Tôi mơ mộng
I see now there are many vite-like ecosystems. Know they are late to us. but I see them go very fast. We need a new, effective, and quick initiative to implement it. If there were no new things, I thought it would be bad. Although I travel with vite, I feel that we are inefficiently slow
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Frequency of ViteX coin listings. This will be a main metric with which to measure our future success.
Bitcoinman
- What is your plan to get more dApp developers to Vite blockchain? Vite is feeless and the first Smart contract on DAG, you have advantages.
- TomoDex is new but they received many supports, have you checked this competitors? I don’t use their dex but I heard about because they do marketing viral, they have lending borrowing and sharing liquidity in the same protocol.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Dapp dev - we will have grants. But frankly I think this is not a main area of focus. The most popular dapps are speculation related - gambling, trading etc. We might as well focus on DEX, which has a natural use base.
Not sure if TomoDEX has more activity than us, thanks for flagging it. A CM suggested doing an AMA with them soon.
Tôi mơ mộng
Why don't you make every piece have its place. Not necessarily stuffed into a wallet
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
One stop shop is better imo
Daniel
Github activity charts display private repositories as private, my research includes screenshot. There is no activity, even not private.
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
When I log into github, I see very different activities from the same dev than when I do not log into github
Bitcoinman
Why some github private some public? What’s the private project about takes 8 months private? Is it Vite products?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Trading strategy project integrations, for instance. I suppose we could make them public. But we normally don't go public until the code is past a certain stage of development
said lee
Me too bro they surprise me i since year i wait defi but unfortunately they don't care about that i already started lost trust in this project
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
Yes, with unlimited resource we would have been able to tackle this. In addition to the explanations in the ViFi article, here are a few more to consider:
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Security concerns. Every two weeks or so, a DeFi project gets attacked. bzx, dforce. It's dangerous waters. We can overcome such challenges, but when we see that the usage is not there per community survey, we pulled back.
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Lots of competition and difficulty to differentiate. Of course, one could say the same thing about DEX. But we're already in the DEX business, so why not focus on this bread and butter?
I understand your disappointment. I would be lying to say I'm happy about this. With the Vite 2.0 decentralized gateway, we should be able to do decentralized cross-chain transfer of ETH. At that point, we will have a bridge to Ethereum and it may be better to tackle DeFi then, given the vast amount of assets we will be able to access. But I can't promise anything on that right now.
Nguyên Bá
Ankr partnership is great, when do you have the real partnership to do real thing like that again?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
ViteX coin listings are truly useful partnerships between ViteX and those coins. Separately, we have coin-listing partnerships with other projects as well, where they get reimbursed for finding useful coins to list.
MD : Kawsar Chowdhury
What Problems Has ViteX Encountered In Providing Service Security To Its Massive Users? And How Did They Solve That?
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
The VIte Labs Gateway was audited by a reputable security firm. We have reconciliation daemons that regularly check for potential withdrawal problems in our gateways.
Daniel
Sorry for being late, it took me a while to prepare the table with the dates. You mentioned that some of the team are no longer part of the project, why are they still on Vite website? Is it a coincidence that by the end of last year most of the team had switched to "private" mode? (added pic is here https://t.me/vite_en/264022)
Richard Yan (Vite COO)
The website is due for a renewal. Our goal is to have the new website out in a month or so. In an earlier answer, I did allude to some attrition. But there are also some non-dev additions that aren't reflected on the website.
Thanks a lot for your support. I do hear your concerns, and I appreciate your spending the time to express them here
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. I hope our projects will be able to collaborate even more closely in the future and achieve new successes. Cheers!
️ Any questions regarding PegNet will be sure to answered at
we’re excited to be a part of ViteX
️
