AMA Recap: OMNIA Protocol & Safelaunch

8 min read

Last week, on 18 of March 2022, we organized an AMA session with the Safelaunchers.

Here is the AMA transcript:

Isaaac Essuman

Hey Safelaunchers 🚀🚀, Hope y’all doing great today? Today’s AMA is going to be very informative and also if you want to learn more about Omnia Protocol and grab a share in the giveaway later on, don’t miss out and stay until the end of today’s AMA!

We’re honored to have Christian, the CEO & Co-founder and Alexandru, the CTO & Co- founder of Omnia Protocol as our AMA guest. We would like to convey our warmest welcome and best wishes on behalf of all members and management. Thank you for making the effort to join us today

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

Hey everyone👋
It’s a pleasure being here 😁

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

hello everyone👋 nice to be here in SafeLaunch community 😁

Isaac Essuman

Without wasting much time, we will get straight into the questions

Hope you are ready?

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

yes 🚀

Isaac Essuman

So first, let’s get to know you and a bit about your project, can you tell us how you got into crypto and where the idea came from for Omnia Protocol and tell us about your core team members and their background?

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

Sure.
First thing, OMNIA in latin means “Everything” and implies the concept of “Omniscience & Omnipotency”.

Using OMNIA for every DApp or wallet means surrounding everything and bringing privacy & decentralization to every user.

Omnia Protocol is a decentralized infrastructure protocol that provides untraceable access to the blockchain.

We stumbled upon the idea more than a year ago when we realized some gaps in the blockchain ecosystem, which is the decentralization of accesing points. Right after researching about the pain of users we realized another major gap in the privacy space.

This is how OMNIA was born 🙂

Now OMNIA is more that 1 year old from the genesis 🎂

Regarding the team, my role at OMNIA Protocol is CEO, I have a PhD in the field of privacy enhancing technologies.

I am mastering the cryptography for more that 7 years with a wide experience in different verticals.

Alexandru, our CTO, and my twin brother, he also has a strong technical background in programming, IT security and cryptography. His academic research activity includes cloud security modules, smart card architectures and DLT based authentication frameworks.

Also, Alex has a pending patent on systems and methods for secure creation, exchange and management of user identity data using blockchain where privacy-preserving methods were key aspects in the architecture design.

And we also recently onboarded more key team members, Liza joined as head of marketing. She is a great communicator with skills in both investor relations and technical business development.

Catalin and Alex on our technical team, both with great experience in cryptography and cybersecurity.

More on that, people can research us thorugh our LinkedIn profile right from our website (omniatech.io) 😁

Isaac Essuman

Wow, that’s great.
Could you please tell us the strategy to attract new users, motivation and benefits for traders & investors to hold $OMNIA token for long-term? We’d love to hear more about the utility of the $OMNIA token.

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

Our primary focus into attracting new users is to go after the developer communities.Because they are the one implementing the dapps and needing secure access to the blockchain.

In the same time we introduce incentives for anyone willing to spin up a node.
We also make it easier for non-technical people to spin up nodes in the cloud with just a few clicks from our dashboard (coming soon)

When it comes to investors & traders there are a lot of things that are designed to create value in the long term.
First we have the staking mechanism that is going to reduce the token supply in circulation.This staking mechanism is also required to ensure the security of the protocol.
Beyond that, the token is deflationary — we will burn a third of the collected fees in order to further reduce the circulating supply.

So, to summarize the token utility:

– Staking to join the network — Node providers and privacy relayers will stake OMNIA tokens in order to join the network.

– Tier-based fee reduction for token holders

– Rewards — A ⅓ of the subscription fees is distributed to both nodes & privacy relayers as rewards.

– Obtaining subscriptions for access, generating dAPP gateways using OMNIA token

– DEX liquidity and farm pools — Contributing the tokens to the DEX liquidity pools will ensure that OMNIA tokens can be traded when needed.

We want to reward our community and users who help solve the liquidity challenge on the DEXes, that’s why we share half of our liquidity mining rewards to farm pools.

And of course there will be a holders loyalty program — some features that will be limited only to those holding OMNIA tokens. For example, token holders may be able to generate and use much more endpoints, or their request rate will be higher.

Isaac Essuman

The main focus of Omnia has to do with privacy. So what tailored solutions do you have for off-chain privacy concerns when it comes to accessing the blockchain?

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

For off-chain privacy we leverage the mixnets technology, which is similar to what the The Onion Router (Tor) project is doing, but way better.

Tor has almost 25% of their nodes compromised, and people can still be de-anonymised if they use it

Therefore, we use mixnets which add on top of the Tor’s technology some obfuscation methods that makes correlations impossible, thus the entire solution more secure & private.

It’s important to understand here the segment which we are serving.

There are privacy coins such as Monero/Zcash or solutions such as Tornado Cash — but these are only covering the on-chain privacy => they hide the amounts & recipients

This is not enough, because one can still map IP addresses to on-chain activity and exploit user’s personal & behavioural data.

And this is where OMNIA comes to cover the gap with off-chain privacy, ensuring a secure connection at the network level

Isaac Essuman

Since the roles of blockchain nodes and privacy relayers are not mutually exclusive, how do you preserve privacy at the infrastructure layer?

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

That a nice point to touch.

You are right, they are not mutually exclusive but the protocol it’s designed such that the operations are done sequentially.

Let me expand that one, so when a user submits a transaction or makes a read request through the OMNIA endpoints, the flow is going to touch first the gateway of mixnets

In this way, before the request reaches the node infrastructure layer, that one will be already anonymous from a network/behavior level.

But, in the same time one could disable the mixnets and only rely on the proxy wall that we have to achieve a reasonable privacy level before hiting any node provider.

We give the choice to every user to choose their own model of use, based on their needs 🙂

I hope this covers your question.

Isaac Essuman

You mentioned in your whitepaper that Omnia provides competitive incentives that have compounding effects to the entire ecosystem. Can you tell us what some of those incentives are?

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

Sure.

If we look at the blockchain ecosystem right now there is a big issue.

There are too many light nodes and too few full nodes to service them.

Therefore, there is a desperate need to create incentives for people/organization to run full nodes and sustain the network.

What OMNIA does is to create the right incentive for anyone to spin up a node at home (or even in cloud with just a few clicks).Whoever is running a node and coupling it to OMNIA will receive rewards because they help maintaing the blockchain decentralized

OMNIA orchestrates this resource pool to serve RPC requests from wallets/dApps and will return a third of the collected fees (paid for each subscription) back to the node owners

The compounding effect is that the more rewards people receive, the more staking they are able to do, therefore earning more rewards

Also, when the usage of the protocol ramps up — there will be a deflationary effect on the token, therefore people that have an active stake get more value without even selling their tokens.

Isaac Essuman

Privacy is key but Security is also important. So what security measure does Omnia have to ensure that that node owners do not act maliciously or against the user’s interest?

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

The staking mechanism is the basis of ensuring the security within the protocol.

In order to join with a node, people need to stake a specific amount of OMNIA token — this acts a guarantee that it will behave according to the protocol.
Now, in order to detect malicious behavior there is a node integrity protocol that ensures that node act how they are intended to work, in the interest of the protocol.

If the integrity protocol detects that a node is returning bad data to the wallets/dapps, then its stake will be slashed.
This way, any attack will be economically infeasible since the lost stake will be higher than the potential outcome of the attack

The staking mechanism also ensure a good performance of the system.
When node owners register their nodes, they stake to a specific perfomance threshold and if they underperform consistently they rewards will be reduced, and after a few warnings their stake is also slashed.

Isaac Essuman

Can you shed some light on your Growth Model with respect to the four main pillars of your user acquisition path?

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

Yes, you are reffering to the these ones i assume : Affiliate Programs, Influencer Marketing, Community Angels, and Alternative Reward Systems.

Influencer Marketing is already up & running, we have a network of 150+ influencers accross the world. They help us with the awareness about the project and educate the community about what we are building.
This includes local communities that can help in translating the content, adapting to each culture, etc.

Community Angeles will be part of the brand ambassador program that will kickstart in the upcoming months

Affiliate programs it’s dedicated after we become revenue positive, so we have the right tools and metrics to have that accomplished.

Alternative Reward Systems it’s an open system that we are actively improving, such the live discord channel for the community content brainstorming and contests. We plan to incentivise the people that spread the word about OMNIA and the vision we have.

Let me know if you wish to expand more on the growth model 🙂
But i think this covers most of the topics.

Isaac Essuman

Sure, for the purpose of time saving, this will be enough

Can you enlighten us on some of the risks you encounter and the mitigations you have in place for them?

Cristian | OMNIA Protocol

Of course, there are always risks that a startup should be aware of.

Mitigating them it’s also part of the plan 😉

So we have some risks that we identified:

– First one is to process malicious funds which came from suspicious sources or even hacks/scams

To mitigate that we partenered with 3rd party solutions that do check in real time the source of funds, in a private way, and in the same time we construct badlists with addressed which are involved in hacks/scams.

More on that here : https://twitter.com/omnia_protocol/status/1485160426115633153

– Next risk we identified is the risk of technology and how it’s going to be implemented.

In this regard we have a plan to test multiple solutions, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, i can mention here the Hopr and Nym mixnets.

– Also there is the risk of a bad/bearish market — we mitgate that by focusing in the product first and delivering the value out in the space before launching any token. On top of that, staking ensures that the circulating token supply is reduced and also the selling presure it’s reduced to minimum while we ensure the best liquidity provisions from our treasury.

Also, the fundraise that we just closed of 3.5 mil $ gives us an enough runway to ship all the features and in the same time to start chasing the next partners which will be part of the next round.

Isaac Essuman

Can you tell us a little bit about your tokenomics and also in the next 5 years, where do you envision Omnia Protocol?

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

The Tokenomics infographic can be accessed from our website omniatech.io
To summarize it:

Hard cap: $3,495,000
Seed — Strategic: $450,000
Private — Strategic: $600,000
Early VCs Round: $645,000
Partners round: $1,570,000
Public Round: $230,000

As Cristian has mentioned, we finished the $3.5M fundraising recently. And now we prepare for the IDO, dates will be announced soon.

More information about the tokenomics and token utility here — https://medium.com/omniaprotocol/omnia-tokenomics-and-token-utility-c77037386753

We are confident that in a not so distant future, OMNIA will be the natural choice for accessing any blockchain in a trustworthy and failproof manner, regardless of the network.

In 5 years, we will have already replaced Infura/Alchemy or at least make them a minor contributor with node resources in the OMNIA Protocol.

We want to be an inspiration to the blockchain ecosystem, by pushing the envelope beyond its existing limitations so that others can innovate beside us.

Isaac Essuman

Is there any bullish information that hasn’t yet been made public that you can share with our community for ‘exclusive’ news before we wrap up and offer the floor to the audience?

Alex | OMNIA Protocol

Well…I think I can disclose here with you guys that we partnered with Scaleway which is a cloud infrastructure provider — we are part of their start-up program.

This is one of the institutional partnerships that fuels the growth for the node infrastructure.
An official announcement is coming soon.

Isaac Essuman

Thank you for the wonderful answers.