Metanyx – IOST Servi Node Interview

Please introduce yourself so our audience can learn more about you and your team

The Metanyx team consists of a mixture of Software Engineers and System Architects with background in financial, security and digital signage. Our team is very technical consisting of a PhD, MBA, Master in Artificial Intelligence and an RHCA.

We have collectively built and deployed financial platforms that have current annual transactions that exceed £10 billion pounds Sterling used by thousands of merchants to take payments online across the UK.

Our team has also been involved in designing one of the leading anti fraud systems used by Mastercard as well as more recently building a peer to peer lending platform. In addition to our core background of financial platforms we have also engineered a leading Digital Signage platform used around the world.

 

Please tell us more about your digital sign business and how you plan to integrate IOST in the future?

Our core team is involved in many businesses either directly as owners or indirectly as consultants, one of the businesses we are directly involved in is a Digital Signage platform that has over 10 thousand screens deployed around the world. Networks of screens are deployed in shops, bars, buses, taxi, airports and shopping malls.

Metanyx would like to see tokens utilized to facilitate the purchasing and selling of advertising space on digital signage networks. In a very similar fashion to the way Google Adsense works for embedded website advertising we will focus on utilizing tokens to facilitate payments between advertiser and publisher on the digital signage network.

 

Do you have any previous experience with running a node? And are you planning on running nodes for other blockchains?

The Metanyx team have run Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes over the years but not actively due to the power/cost overhead, we also believe the industry is moving to 3rd generation platforms such as IOST.

Outside of the blockchain ecosystem the Metanyx team currently run a number high availability platforms that process millions of transactions and have vast experience in 24/7/365 operations of critical systems.

 

What makes IOST stand out for you from other blockchain projects from a technical standpoint?

IOST is the first PoS based blockchain in the world to implement a consensus algorithm that does not have a high barrier to entrance which can quickly create defacto pecking order that is rarely changed as we have seen in Tron and EOS. IOST’s design of PoB is actually quite similar to DPoS in that both limit the amount of nodes in a round to achieve higher throughput.

The main difference between PoB and DPoS is the fact that PoB ensures a rotation of block producers on a 10 minute basis. The Servi node balance is used to determine which 17 will be in the next round, a candidates Servi balance increases every round based on their votes, after completing a round their balance are deducted by 10% of the average medium balance of the current block producers.

Assuming you had 17 block producers in the current round with a medium average of 10 million service balance each producer would have their Servi node balance deducted by 1 million.

If you consider the likeliness a bad actor with ⅔ control of Tron SR(18/27) or EOS BP(14/21) getting together who rarely change due to the voting system vs IOST (12/17) which are changed every 10 minutes out of a pool of possibly hundreds the ability for bad actor(s) is greatly reduced with the more nodes on the network being eligible to produce blocks.

To be elected as a candidate in IOST only requires 2.1 million votes, to become a producer on Tron requires over 100 million votes that are based on a token price that is currently 3x of the IOST token price. In both Tron and EOS networks the change between the top producing spots rarely happens meaning ⅔ could easily get together to control the network.

 

 

IOST is the first blockchain to implement Smart Contracts entirely within Javascript instead of basing it on EVM(Solidity) or WASM(C/C++/Rust). Many other blockchains have simply imported or even copied/forked EVM 1.0 from Ethereum, Tron were really the first to actually make DApps work on EVM that could scale but ultimately it was a shortcut to bring to market.

EOS has gone another route to use WASM which is more sensible then EVM 1.0 but is still more restrictive as not as many younger developers know how to develop in C/C++. IOST took the bold step to use Chrome V8 engine to implement IVM (IOST Virtual Machine) which will attract a lot of developers as many developers know Javascript.

We expect to see many new DApps being developed on IOST once the community is aware of how significant this really is. In addition to the smart contract language IOST have also designed a very intelligent Gas/Ram system that will benefit developers.

The future of IOST blockchain incorporates the design of Efficient Distributed Sharding, the implementation of sharding can not rely on a root chain to facilitate transactions between shards.

IOST plans to implement atomic transactions across shards allowing for enormous scalability as each shard can currently scale up to 8000 TPS, assuming cross shard transactions can occur without a centralized ledger the scalability will more then meet the demands necessary in the market.

 

Do you have any development plans for IOST such as for DAPPs?

Metanyx are going to focus on practical uses of IOST rather then on DAPPS specifically. Metanyx want to pursue integration with payment systems to utilize IOST or other tokens that exist on IOST as a method of payment either via Internet transactions or via Point of Sale terminal.

Once a POC of payments is implemented we would like to explore integration with Digital Signage.

 

You are the first issuer of a token on IOST. Please briefly explain your thinking behind issuing this token?

Metanyx are one of the most active community nodes in the ecosystem, we believe in supporting our fellow partner candidates, developers and our voters. The reward contribution has changed many times in recent months and we believe it is fair to share in our success with our supporters.

We designed METX to do exactly this, as a voter of Metanyx you will receive METX on weekly basis once the network supports this which we expect to occur in Q2 of 2019.

Metanyx based the design on METX from other networks block producer reward mechanism with a couple of novel twists such decreasing distribution, burning of METX once exchanged and vesting of the initial token. We believe that METX will serve our voters by giving them a stake of the Servi only rewards in the form of our own token.

 

How does Metanyx plan to become a top contributor to the IOST ecosystem?

As many will know the rewards system in IOST have changed many times in the run up to the mainnet. The reason for the changes were to avoid the issues that plagued other networks where large investments can ultimately secure a place as a producer indefinitely drowning out the little guys.

The IOST foundation has done a great job to make the bold decisions to change the model to ensure grassroot participation is rewarded by providing a quarterly contribution reward that is 25% of the annual 840 million rewards.

Metanyx have led by example from the beginning supporting the IOST ecosystem ensuring other node operators had information they needed, assisting developers configure environments, providing recommendations to IOST team and contributing to the online documentation.

Metanyx did all of this without knowing their ever was going to be any contribution reward and we will continue leading by example in the community where ever we can. We expect in the future that our voters will be rewarded for supporting us from both our Contribution rewards as well as our METX token.

 

Anything else you would like to add to this interview?

Metanyx are looking forward to seeing how the IOST ecosystem evolves over the next few years, we are excited to see the progress the IOST foundation are making in evolving the technology and hope to see see more community contribution across the spectrum.

With the right integrations we believe IOST could get more mainstream adoption as it begins to solve the scalability trilemma (scalability, security, decentralization). We believe IOST will become a top 10 coin in the next 3 years based on its technological invention and community support.

 

Many Thanks to Stuart from Metanyx for taking time out to do this great interview and all they do for the IOST ecosystem.

You can Vote for Metanyx here and Vote for IOST News here in the ongoing IOST Election.