Heard about an advanced WASM-based smart contract platform that can quickly deploy dApps (less than 5 minutes) on DOTSAMA? Yesterday (November 15), PolkaWarriors had an interesting community AMA session with Nikolay Volf - CEO of Gear Technologies, and lots of information has been shared by Nikolay.
If you missed it, don’t worry, we have prepared the recap for you.
“Gear is a smart contract platform which will become a parachain on the Polkadot and Kusama network. It's the most advanced WASM smart contract platform that can compete with Solana/Near/etc while still being part of a greater project (Polkadot).
On Gear's platform, all smart contracts are just WebAssembly programs that are compiled from different programming languages — no limits to the code. This also lowers the barrier to entry for developers that are not so familiar with blockchain development because they can build dApps in programming languages that they are more familiar with.”
Twitter Question
1. Why did you choose the Polkadot network? What are the benefits to your project? Are you planning to launch your mainet or switch to other blockchains in the future?
Nikolay:
Well-organized work, extensive infrastructure, easy interaction, scalability, customized flexibility – that's why we choose Polkadot for the Gear network.
As we know Ethereum has faced the problem of scalability recently when we saw slow transaction processing and high fees. Polkadot works with multiple blockchains so the load can be distributed across separate networks.
Each parachain included in the Polkadot ecosystem can host its own logic with flexible settings. At the same time, projects can easily interact with each other, despite the structure of their blockchain.
Reliability, security and easy interaction between blockchains - it`s all provided by Polkadot so our platform will only benefit while connected to its ecosystem.
and we are not going to other blockchains any time soon!
2. Community is a key element for any project if you want to be successful, how can you ensure that the community is shared in governance? Do we need to place bets to get votes or do we need to run nodes?
Nikolay:
Gear is a completely open-source project, so naturally you can easily check all our development on our GitHub (http://github.com/gear-tech/).
Once fully deployed, Gear will be fully governed by token owners
The vast majority of the tokens will be held by the community and incentivized team.
Gear will have a staking mechanism, so naturally, running a node will also be incentivized. This means that by owning tokens and staking, the community will have complete rules!
3. Can you list 1-3 killer features of this project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your project has that you feel most confident about?
Nikolay:
Easy one
- WebAssembly VM for user code (near-native code execution speed)
- Actor model for inter-program (cros--contract) communications - secure, effective, clear, parallelizable and shardable
- Fast smart-contract development speed with advanced features in general-purpose, well-established languages. Continuations (Async-await) are one of them!
4. As I know, strong backing and partnerships in the crypto market might bring huge benefits to new projects. During this point, can you tell us about the investors and partners of your project ? What benefits to the "GearTech' ecosystem do you expect from them?
Nikolay:
We are backed by top VCs and angels that are heavily involved in the industry and eager to help us grow.
Our investors mainly invest in infrastructure projects and typically hold their investment in a horizont of 3 and more years.
They will share their experience and best practices as they supported and guided the leading projects in the blockchain ecosystem.
5. People are always worried about the transaction speed because they worry about their transaction going to fail. How fast and secure is "Gear Technologies' platform? If the number of users spikes, will transactions on "Gear Technologies' get congested?
Nikolay:
Gear architecture aims for high throughput — as I mentioned, it uses WASM VM under the hood which means near-native code execution speed, and thus fast and low-cost transactions.
The ability of Gear to group transactions in processing threads and run in parallel is also multiples the performance (and thus lowers costs by a factor)
WASM VM itself is a highly secure sandbox environment, securly running untrusted code in every device on the planet (now in any browser).
6. If the community is considered the backbone, security is also an extremely important factor. So is your project currently audited or not? How to convince that your security system is safe enough for investors as well as the community against hacker attacks?
Nikolay:
At the current stage, we are still making our protocol feature-complete!
After that we will undergo a security and economic audit.
Our stable test network (stand-alone) will be launched right after this audit.
Bug-bounty program is also one of our priorities -- it will be permanent.
7. Can you tell us some of the latest achievements made by Gear Technologies. Can you describe in detail the current development efforts, such as market expansion plans, expected applications & new upcoming program of events?
Nikolay:
Over the last few months we have launched a testnet and we have plans to launch a stable test network after an extensive audit as mentioned in the previous answer
We are also developing everything in an public, open source way, you can easily check it in our Github (link is above somewhere)
Last week we opened an office in Silicon Valley, hired a team in Asia and we are starting a development of our community there.
In October we started a series of workshops collaborating with leading tech universities in the USA and Russia. This educational project just started and it is getting bigger.
8. As I know this project is relatively new, you're just getting started. Can you tell us about the progress you have made so far? What has been the most important update of the moment and what are you currently focused on?
Nikolay:
Yep, so this is a very interesting question, a lot of things have already happened, but I will try to point out the most important ones.
During recent months we crystalized our vision and built a solid team to launch our project and get it public on GitHub somewhere in August.
From the technical side, after that we deployed our test net and built main components of our protocol, which allows a secure (and thus economically sound) way of running any user code.
On other hand, we closed an investment round with funds and people that are heavily involved in the industry. We will make it public soon.
We did a lot of workshops in the universities already but much more will come.
We are growing fast and we are always looking for motivated and self driven people to join our company and support our community. So if you have any ideas on how we can improve, you are always welcome to shoot us an email.
In the live questions section, Nikolay did answer several short questions from the PolkaWarriors community.
1. Can you share some Details about Recent Major Achievements done by your project? Also, what are the Future Roadmap & Targets of your project?
Nikolay:
This is probably going public on GitHub. Open-source development is very demanding. Everybody see what you are doing
As for the Future roadmap, we plan to do a stable test network somewhere beginning next yeah!
2. You have a plan for almost everything related to a good crypto project, but I'm curious where that great confidence comes from? Why should investors trust Gear?
Nikolay:
Because we care about technology and technically perfect solutions. These are our values and these always win in the long-term.
3. What is your plan for global expansion? At present, which market are you focusing on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users and partners?
Nikolay:
We are going to developers. To developer communities, universities and everybody who has passion for code. They are our customers, users and partners :)
4. What is the vision and mission of Your Project ? What problems are you trying to solve? Do these problems remain unsolved with the existing public blockchains?
Nikolay:
The problem we are trying to solve is the lack of easy entrance in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem. To become a parachain, you need a lot of resources - both financial and development. With Gear, you can be there in minutes with close to zero investments.
5. How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates?
Nikolay:
https://twitter.com/gear_techs
https://discord.com/invite/7BQznC9uD9
6. Ambassadors play a very important role in every project. Do you have an ambassador program? If yes, how can I be one?
Nikolay:
Yeah, this is what we are going to do as well. Feel free to contact me directly or @PavelSalas !
7. While you build your project, do you take into account community feedback and demands?While you build your project, do you take into account community feedback and demands?
Nikolay:
Yes, totally. In our discord we listen to every person. All feedback from universities and workshops is carefully gathered and taken into account! Many thanks to those who get involved there.
8. NFTs are hot trending now. Do you have a play to have NFTs on your platform? If so, can you tell us the plans of your project in NFTs?
Nikolay:
NFT is technically a trivial thing, you can have it on any smart-contract platform. And Gear is no exception
