AMA Recap: OMNIA Protocol
Today’s AMA consisted of 3 parts:
✨ Introductory Session — five general questions
✨ Twitter Session — questions from this tweet
✨ Telegram Live Session — questions asked live on TG
Q1 — How and when you have started? How did you get involved in the crypto? What’s your role in OMNIA Protocol ?
Cristian:
First soft contact was back in 2013, but I got more on the technical and theoretical aspects of the crypto somewhere arround 2015 when I studied the cryptographic primitives of the privacy enhancing technologies, such as homomorphic encryption.
Before the crypto winter I started investing and going deeper on the roots of how token economics works in fully distrubuted approaches. Later on, in the spring of 2020 I got into the DeFi space by having contact with a cool project which planned to make a decentralized financial market anchored in Bitcoin.
My role at OMNIA Protocol is CEO, but as any founder of a startup you do all the activities that come up, in order to have the desired growth.
Alexandru:
I’ve started with crypto around 2013, back then I was more focused on the mining activities
From 2015 I discovered the actual value behind Ethereum and its smart contracts and started to dig deeper. In the same time I was also working on security solutions and cryptographic systems, so having a good understanding of how cryptography works definitely gave me an advantage.
In 2017 I started a blockchain consultancy company in Estonia, and later on in 2018 took an opportunity to lead the design and development of a self-sovereign identity solution. This is also where I submitted my first patent on privacy and identity using blockchain, which is currently pending.
With OMNIA Protocol I started this summer, when
presented me some findings on the off-chain privacy gap. I realised that despite the fact that on-chain privacy is widely addressed, the off-chain privacy is missing, especially when it comes to blockchain related applications.
My current role at OMNIA is Chief Technology Officer, but as in every startup you have to do all kind of activities in the beginning — from marketing, HR, fundraising and business development.
Q2 — Give us some important information about OMNIA project, what is the meaning of its name and what was your goal to create this project ? how far this project will go in future ?
Cristian:
Omnia in latins means “Everything” and implies the concept of “Omniscience & Omnipotency”. In other words, we think that nodes shall be the God into the Machines. We assume that our solution will be everywhere in the blockchain ecosystem, it expresses our ambitions in the crypto space.
Using OMNIA for every DApp or wallet means surrounding everything and bringing privacy & decentralization to each crypto user
I think this sums up the meaning of OMNIA 😁
back to our goal at OMNIA, I can give a brief description of what we are doing
Omnia Protocol is a decentralized infrastructure protocol that provides untraceable access to the blockchain.
Reading and writing to blockchain shouldn’t be centralised or managed, but rather performed in a decentralized manner, in which every node (mining non-mining) should be incentivized to help with the access to blockchain, in a trusted and decentralized way.
Omnia allows anyone to earn rewards by hosting and maintaining a node on a specific blockchain.
If we look at the market right now, there are arround 73 bilions daily requests sent daily to blockchain nodes — either to read data from it or to send transactions. In Ethereum for example, more than 60% of nodes run centralized in the cloud, mostly on Amazon Web Services, orchestrated by companies such as Infura or Alchemy
The entire blockchain ecoysystem is decentralized, except the access to it which is currently concetranted in the hands of a few corporations — this has to change, and OMNIA does exactly that.
Alexandru:
I can add that we created a prototype for our community to get a preview of how will look a part of our solution — getting secure endpoints for accessing the blockchain:
See the above link 🔗🔗🔗
Q3 — Tell me about the blockchain networks that OMNIA will support and what is most important feature in this project that is not present in other projects and what will be the benefit to us in this ?
Cristian:
In the first phase we will add support for Ethereum, Bitcoin and Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Then we’ll expand support to other networks such as Avalanche, Solana, Algorand, etc. for which we already see a huge interest
It really depends on the feedback we receive from the market, and, the networks that are more preferred by our community will be added first.
In regards with our differentiator from other projects, we strongly believe that the privacy we bring is going to change the ecosystem
While there are also other projects that want to decentralize the node access, we take this oportunity to also create an off-chain privacy layer in the blockchain ecosystem — a missing piece from our point of view.
The main benefit for users is that anyone can generate a secure endpoint from OMNIA and use it in their wallet or blockchain applications.
Q4 — Tell me some information about OMNIA token, and also give us some information about OMNIA subscriptions, how they can be acquired, customized etc.
Cristian:
Well, there are some good use cases that bring utility of the token, some of them are:
Staking to join the network — node providers and privacy relayers will stake OMNIA tokens in order to join the network.
They will commit to some specific perfomance metrics and their reward is decresead if conditions are not consistently met.Tier-based fee reduction for token holders — from 10 to 25% percent
Rewards — a third of the subscription fee is distributed back to nodes and privacy relayers
Obtaining a subscription to have access — using OMNIA token
Deflationary burn — a third of the fees collected for the subscription will be burned
DEX liquidity and farm pools
Holders loyalty
More info on the token utility you can find on our medium article.
Alexandru:
One thing that we noticed is that there are some edge cases that developers are facing, for example one may want to have a large number of daily requests while another wants to make less requests but with a higher request per second quota
OMNIA provides this kind of flexibility, so that users can customize their subscription based on their needs
There are 3 parameters that we defined so far:
1. How many daily requests can you make
2. For how many days you want the subscription to be available
3. What is the speed throughput you want to use — i.e. how many requests per second are you making in the most demanding scenario
Q5 — What are your aims in next year according to your roadmap? What if I ask you what is the ultimate goal of OMNIA Protocol ?
Cristian:
Next year we are planning to have the alpha release, which will include among the others: the node verification protocol which ensures that every joining node is acting as expected, the staking and the rewards for the node providers & privacy relayers and the possilibity to acquire a subscription with OMNIA tokens
Alexandru:
Also, in next year we will bring support to other chains for which we already see a great growth
In the same time we’ll add more features that will improve the overall performance, such as batching requests, clustering nodes based on location for low-latency throughput, etc.
Cristian:
well, the ultimate goal is that, in a not so distant future, OMNIA will be the natural choice for accessing any blockhain in a trustworthy and failproof manner, regardless of the network
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.
Q6 — What is the tokenomics distribution? How many tokens will be minted ? How many tokens are locked by the team?
Cristian:
There will be 100 millions of tokens minted at the TGE, which is also the max supply. In time this supply will decrease, as a result of the deflationary action of burning a third of tokens paid as subscriptions.
The team has 16.5% of the total supply with a vesting cliff of 1 year, meaning that for the first year there will be 0 unlocks for the team.
You can check all the full token metrics on our website
Q7 — Do you have plans of burning and buyback of your token? how do you want to maintain its price and supply uniformly?
Cristian:
yes, as previously mentioned, we plan to burn a third of the tokens paid for subscription — this is applicable for the first stage when the subscription can be obtained with OMNIA tokens
But we also have plans to add other payment methods, in order to facilitate the ease-of-use and orchestrate the utility by using the treasury to buy back tokens from the market, and then burn them.
As the ecosystem grows, along with all the aligned incentives, the total value locked in tokens will also increase. This is why we strongly believe that a deflationary token approach brings benefits to all the ecosystem actors without having them to dump on the market, thus promoting a long term strategy for exponential gains
Q8 — How can we buy the token ?
Cristian:
We recently closed the private rounds, but there public round will be announced soon
Keep an eye on the announcement channel
Q9 — Why do you think privacy it’s important for blockchains?
Cristian:
Well, there are 2 kind of privacy : on-chain and off-chain privacy, and i think they are crucial to be fulfilled in pair
I think that the blockchain transparency and openness are a benefit rather than a weakness, but it also comes with some drawbacks if we look closely
For example, if you are trading on DEXes, use DeFi, NFTs, play to earn or other means of use on the blockchain, you can be easily tracked, and others can take actions based on what you’re doing
This could lead to disruptive actions not only for you but to the ecosystem as a whole
As i said, this requires not only a on-chain privacy approach but also the off-chain privacy, because central node providers or even the block explorers can map you IP adresses with chain address
This is an great example of why on-chain solutions aren’t enough
but limiting only to the privacy related aspects
Blockchains should stay open where it has its benefits, but there are also many areas where it doesn’t benefit the system and becomes an issue.
After all, privacy it’s a given and should be enabled by default within any blockchain technology you may want to use.
Q10 — How can we help you?
Cristian:
spread the word about OMNIA and use our endpoints in accesing the blockchain
and soon we can join OMNIA network to earn extra revenues
with mining and non-mining nodes 🙂
the MVP will be ready by the end of the year and you will be available to generate endpoints
for example to use them directly in your wallet (e.g. Metamask, Ledger, Blank, etc. )
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