DEFINFTsApes & SYSCOIN: AMA Recap.

24 min readFeb 2, 2021

On Sunday 31st January 2021, we welcomed @sidhujag from Syscoin.org into @DEFINFTsApesChat telegram chat. @sidhujag is one of the core team member of syscoin, he has been in the space since 2012/2013 right around the time Mt Gox went popular. He was trading equities/forex and developing software full-time before he was made aware of bitcoin and then developed in crypto for a while before joining syscoin.

Syscoin is the blockchain platform for real money, assets, and blazing-fast token payments that scale. Syscoin Platform provides trustless interoperability with Ethereum ERC-20, token & asset microtransactions, and Bitcoin-core-compliant merge-mined security. Syscoin is currently creating an NFT platform!!!!!

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Q1. Hello, Apes! We are glad to meet here @sidhujag of Syscoin, and he will start by introducing himself, giving us a short pitch of Syscoin and his role in the project!

A. Hi @ApeDegenNerd and community.. I’m happy to be here chatting with you guys. I have been in the space since around 2012/2013 right around the time Mt Gox went popular. I was trading equities/forex and developing software fulltime I was made aware of Bitcoin and was always looking for a light at the end of the tunnel not only for speculative reasons but also philosophically knowing the writing is on the wallet with our existing financial regime being replaced as legacy to something new, when I read about Bitcoin I came to the obvious questions about deflation and monetary policy resulting with something like that but also understood the tradeoffs versus central rate targetting policy which put us in the big problem we are in today. So I developed in crypto for a while and came across Syscoin when it launched, it was a great chance at innovating something new and using blockchain for real utility instead of just P&D scheme’s which still plague our industry today.

SYS is very unique, it is a rabbit hole the more you will understand it the more you will want to learn more. It is a rabbit hole just like when you first learn about Bitcoin. A birds eye view is that it is a cross between Bitcoin and Ethereum, it offers the best of both and doing so in a secure, decentralized and trustless way. There is no unvalidated cryptographic assumptions or beliefs that are held by the Syscoin protocol and there is no tradeoffs for decentralization happening on Syscoin. We understand the trilemma to achieve scale but also understand the big picture of why we are all here in crypto, so we are set out to achieve security, scalability and decentralization all together and I believe we are close to being able to achieve all 3 which was once thought impossible even in the crypto space.

Q2. What inspired the idea of Syscoin?

A. Business using blockchain, SYS = System was original idea. We started out with identity,escrow, decentralized marketplace (amazon of blockchain) but realized scale assumptions we were making would hinder us from adoption so over the years we have finalized our design and hardened our core offering to be based on asset tokenization using the UTXO model which is unique. Other things that are really exciting are being worked on to give more general computation capabilities in ways that even Ethereum won’t be able to provide so we believe we are in a really good position. The base of syscoin however as a mainchain is that it should be secure (we are merge mined with Bitcoin) we follow the continous integration processes of the most valuable and most developed crypto in the world that is Bitcoin. Our code is shared and hardened with Bitcoin so we can leverage the thousands of researchers and developers making the core protocol secure and decentralized. The assets themselves represent the MVP of all value that needs to be stored on a blockchain and use it as a base layer to do many things on top, payments/contracts whatever you need or whatever any blockchain is doing, it all starts at a solid fundamental base that does not make assumptions or tradeoffs away from beign completely decentralized and secure like Bitcoin.

Q3. Going back to the features of Syscoin blockchain can you speak more on its concensus algorithm, commenting on its speed. Shed more light on the Syscoin blockchain and masternodes, seems like an old tech there.

A. UTXO execution model is always more efficient than Account based execution model that is Ethereum. It offers parallel execution capabilities and makes things like NFT’s really simple as the model of NFT is already very similar to using a UTXO execution model. The consensus algorithm is meant to be secure and not fast, it is meant to avoid sybil/finney/race/51% attacks to keep users store of value secure and quantum resistant. The transaction model on Sys with assets (SPT’s — Syscoin Platform Tokens) offers something called ZDAG which enables real-time payment capabilities kind of like an on-chain Lightning Networks. However the goal for payments using UTXO involves doing offchain payments BACKED by onchain ZDAG if there are any resiliancy issues offchain (which there always are) so it is a complete payment solution like no other out there one which does not increase traffic on the mainchain with the amount of payments offchain so offers great scaling attributes but backed by onchain robustness and security (as a court system should).

Q4. Do you consider Syscoin a web3.0 blockchain? If yes will solidity contracts be easily migrated to Syscoin blockchain, if no, what language will smart-contracts be built in?

A. We are looking at zkSNARK/zkSTARK general purpose computational model which will be game changing, it is inevitable we are going in this direction as an industry and Syscoin is in unique position to offer this to the world with the secure backing of Bitcoin merge mined chain securing the environment. Think of it as a chain-of-chain type of ecosystem that becomes possible. Solidity tools to convert between the ZKP based langauge and itself will be made possible and this work is shared in the industry with some large companies that have incentive to make these tools, so its not something we are making it unique for our needs but using tools to suit a solution that is unique to the world. its not only privacy tech but incredible scaling tech, think smart cities, IoT and DeFi all put into one. Its proof of computation, you don’t need consensus on the actual event ordering and dbl-spend protection its all protected by math but syscoin mainchain is backed by PoW (sha256) and merged with Bitcoin. masternodes are interesting for a few reasons… we don’t believe in the philosophy on where Dash is taking masternodes. To me they are incentivized full nodes. Any bitcoin core developer will tell you the main scale problem in the space is the size of the state and access to that state (UTXO db) and full nodes end up centralized the bigger this gets (communication complexity and computational complexity are linearly increasing with the number of users) this does not bode well for a system that is supposed to serve as backbone for our next gen finance. We are using masternodes as a way to make our network robust, paid full nodes. They are paid with seniority so longer you run more you get paid but they are not taking part in too many consensus decisions because then you get into security assumptions that remove the core proposition that Satoshi brought to us. So they help with the health of the network in affect of large scale and well funded attacks against the networking and peers and perhaps mining side of things. We are applying “some” useful things like chainlocks that help with selfish mining (which is the biggest attack vector on Bitcoin’s miners today).

like a side or parrallel chain ish i guess?

yea kind of like side, but all running in parallel and gauranteed to be correct with no censorship resistance concerns.

Q5. How long have you and the Syscoin team been working on the project, any achievements, and milestones you can share. Any roadmap?

A. Rough roadmap here: https://syscoin.org/roadmap we have history of delivering btw so we don’t usually just put stuff onthere that we aren’t going t odeliver on however sometimes it happens. Alot of this is cutting edge (some new mathematic assumptions) on the new features which require diligence. Sometimes they don’t work out, but since we have been in the space so long I feel like we have a leg up on the rest of the world which is stil generations behind on analyzing an optimal blockchain design.

Q6. Any funding achievement and milestones you can share? Does the project have a platform token, and has Syscoin offered some for sale? Do you think there will be a token offering event for the platform token soon?

A. We had an initial crowd sale back in 2014 I believe, most of the money was stolen by the escrow agent, we worked pretty much based on passion ever since (did not want to abandon existing investors just because escrow agent took off). The coins are well distributed but price is fairly low so and below the crowd sale price today so they are at discount compared to satoshi rates when we first did the sale.

wow sad, funding might have been pretty difficult.

Bitcoin did not require a seed sale, so we work in same vein. We are a bunch of solution providers that don’t know the meaning of no or cannot.

Q7. What exchanges is Syscoin listed? How do I spend Syscoin? What wallets?

A. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/syscoin/markets/ some new wallets are coming, with 4.2 we are moving to UTXO asset model and I have made a javascript SDK with blockbook backend which wallets are integrating to today, look for some new wallet announcements coming up but I consider it air, food, and water to give these to investors so we are incrementally getting there to provide base layer functionality across the industry for syscoin community. We have an enterprise corporation on top called Blockchain Foundry which is publically traded on CSE (BCFN) and our goal is to spread adoption and awareness of Syscoin and make profits for work on top. We work on wallets for clients using Syscoin and also Syscoin community wallets. I am also the CTO of this business. Most of our clients are enterprise type organizations and alot of our research is a result of what businesses say they need. Basically althought we are one of the oldest projects, new users are still considered “grass roots”.

Plus you mean I can mine SYS coin, how do you manage to keep the miners on? Or its something the SYS coin team does?

It is merged with bitcoin so bitcoin miners keep syscoin secure.

Q8. How do you plan on getting Syscoin blockchain more adopted and not fade to the background? @sidhujag

A. We are in cutting edge research for generalized computation we are also cutting edge on the payments side. Those I feel will not intersect in the future. Imagine having every IoT device stream payments we are talking about say millions of transactions per second happening using crypto tokens which have to happen in real-time. This sort of scale needs to happen offchain between peers and not using a chain or consensus. Imagine smart cities which say input money and I will park your car on this conveyor and at some time in the future you can come back and claim it, but also earn rewards from us while you are parked, this is more of a smart contract which requires less scale but also needs to be efficient. We have plans to solve both at scale and have people understand that both require tradeoffs, you don’t necessarily want to use a generalized computational platform like eth to do fast payments and you don’t want to use a fast payment solution to do autonomous organized finance. Businesses are what is driving adoption and so as businesses adopt and see that these are the efficient paths for disrupting existing fintech and bringing on new value propisitions like smart cities Ai+IoT they will push adoption and make the rest of the world conform to the new standards and ways of managing value, time, money and attention. Through BCFN we have connection to business world, driving value back into SYS and through SYS we have connection to degens and crypto community which push envelop back to soverign ownership, decentralization and security. We marry those concepts together to create utility world cannot ignore.

Q9. Now to what really concerns us 🦍 Tell us more about your NFT platform like no other? What problem are you looking to solve with it? Does it work with Syscoin blockchain and Ethereum, give us some hints on features, platform interface e.t.c.

A. Remember I was saying we were working towards a base layer that will serve as infrastructure. Well we have learned that there are two types of tokens required at the base. FT and NFT. We also know that SYS is UTXO based assets so its inherently NFT to begin with. However we were using our asset ID to represent tokens as a deterministic number derived when you first create your asset from the transaction ID to avoid people copying your asset within the mempool and claiming it before you. What we did was add 4 more bytes to the asset ID, so now it is 8 bytes instead of 4. The top 4 bytes are definable. Thus we have a 1–4 byte extra information for NFT ID’s and now we get NFT’s that play within our infrastructure without any massive differences between FT and NFT’s. This will drive adoption for NFT’s because its efficient (only 1–4 bytes) its UTXO based (parallel execution, storage, spending and compliance of Bitcoin model) and it will serve as a base for other enhancements like instant payments/transfers using ZDAG/Payment channels as well as being able to move in and out of generalized computation environments. We needed to come up with an abstract concept for tokens that encapsulates erc20/erc721 in a really efficient way. I guess you can consider it almost like erc1155 but more efficient. Its a generalized token standard that will feed into other innovations easily meaning wallet support comes almost free with one integration (FT) then NFT comes for free. On eth its hard to find integrations for NFT’s in wallets because the standards between the token types are so different.

Q10. Explain what you mean with divisible ownerships of NFTs with Syscoin NFT platform like no other?

Well because these coins are UTXO based, they carry an asset identifier for each set of coins aswell as value. Typically on Eth an NFT is considered to not be able to be broken up (value being just 1 unit) however because of the flexibility of our model, these NFT’s can have more than 1 base value. Think real estate where you issue a custom ID for an asset (NFT) but assign 1 million shares of it for a building. Each of the shares will be coloured with the NFT ID so you will know its unique from other tokens and one asset as a parent can control the issuances of these NFT’s. They are common to one asset, but with individual NFT issuances (with or without shares) created by the asset issuer. Also consider for example a DRM replacement for content creators like music. An artist issues 10 million shares for her new album and it has a market of its own. To listen to the music you either transfer 1 share back to some service or just prove you own that share through signing a message. It replaces DRM which has issues with liveness and DDOS attacks by making it democratic and decentralized. With standard NFT’s you cannot really serve these usecases as you would be issuing 10 million seperate NFT’s. Using token standards like 1155 you can try to do similar things but end up costing alot more because in the smart contracts you will need to create mappings and such to denote value.. its a nightmare to do on eth but you get for free on Sys and costs will be much cheaper.

Q11. lastly. what other NFTs sector do you find Syscoin NFT platform useful?

Where our NFT’s will catch on is where there is missing value from eth today. Where NFT’s are usable and valuable through added utility through ownership distribution of real world assets that must maintain uniqueness. Today NFT’s are mostly used as collectibles and art, which is nice and all but not where majority of the usecases and value lie for this technology. When this NFT bubble gets going, it will mean businesses are using it for real value and using it for real value with real assets means alot of time assigning shares, or sometimes using for example our notary service which allows the service providers which issue the asset to control spending or dbl-spend detection of these NFT’s.. think of it like a permissioning layer on top of permissionless and decentralized settlement. So now ingame assets can be provably sent to the game and value extracted right within the game without the game producer worrying about dbl-spending and insurance on the transfer of that ingame asset.

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers! @sidhujag

To find out more about Syscoin, please see:

Website — https://syscoin.org/
Blog — https://syscoin.org/news
Twitter — https://twitter.com/syscoin
Discord — https://discord.gg/RkK2AXD
Telegram — https://t.me/Syscoin_Official
Youtube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTx546WgFKfKQg0_814FfMA
Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/SysCoin/

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