The WORBLI deep dive with Costa Rica Crypto!
August 1, 2018 — This week, we had the privilege of being hosted by Matt from Costa Rica Crypto. He sat down with WORBLI’s founder and CEO Domenic Thomas and spent the best part of an hour taking an in-depth look at the WORBLI project, its vision for the future, and how it is tackling issues in the broader EOS community.
See transcript below!
[The following transcript is composed of edited and abridged highlights of the interview]
MATT: So, WORBLI is going to be a fork of the EOS that bridges the gap between the banking and fintech industry and blockchain. Forks are a kind of contentious subject, so I want to know, why are you doing a fork?
DOMENIC: We are EOS people at the core, we are all token holders on the team. We would have loved to have just built on Mainnet, but it comes down to compliance.
At the end of the day, we have a lot of people who have decades of experience in banking and we’ve done tons of research.We need compliance on a core level so, all the way down to our block producers on our chain. They are going to be signing agreements, going through AML/KYC, they are going to have to be audited for their financials and they are going to transparent. We’re also going to hold ourselves to the same standard as the foundation that runs the chain. Compliance is the key.
We didn’t see a way in which we could impose this on the Mainnet, nor do we think that would be great for the Mainnet because the vast majority of things that are probably going to launch won’t need things like AML/KYC, as it costs money for every verification.
MATT: What’s the problem that WORBLI ultimately solving? What was the goal behind the creation of WORBLI, and what are some of the innovations behind it?
DOMENIC: We’re doing it because right now, for the average user — especially the non-technical users — getting involved in blockchain is too complicated. There’s too much friction. They have to open an account with someone like Coinbase, they have to wire up money, they have to buy Bitcoin.
“We want to see billions of users around the world. We know what this technology can do beyond the transformation of digital money and finances. The possibilities are infinite. This is a giant leap in technology for humanity”
But if you then want to buy tokens and interact with dApps, you have to download a wallet and you have to run a wallet you have to transfer the coins. There’s a risk along the way that you can make a mistake or lose your private keys. I don’t know about you but you know when I have conversations with people who don’t understand blockchain I get glazed over looks pretty quickly. If I want to get them involved I kind of have to sit there manually with them and walk them through it, and that’s not going to scale.
We want to see billions of users around the world. We know what this technology can do beyond the transformation of digital money and finances. The possibilities are infinite. This is a giant leap in technology for humanity.
MATT: Can you explain to me how you are creating ways for the under-banked to have access to both crypto and banking services?
DOMENIC: One of the core values for us is not just about making blockchain technology more accessible to the average user, but that seeing that blockchain technology leveraged to make financial services, in general, more accessible to people.
We may take it for granted in developed economies, but there are many places where there are challenges. In places like Africa, South American, or parts of Southeast Asia, people don’t have access to bank accounts, or if they do its very expensive for them. It’s like a disproportionate tax on the poor.
As a society, we expect people to build businesses right. You are expected to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But it’s not a fair game for everyone involved. How are you going to build a business in sub-Saharan Africa if you can’t even accept payment? Or you don’t have a stable currency to work with? These are fundamentals for building a business, so a lot of people have been walled off from the internet economy.
We know that the blockchain has the ability to drive down costs, reduce risks and increase security to a level where we could potentially offer accounts to just about anybody the world. We think that’s that’s a really exciting part of this and it’s a big part of our mission.
MATT: One of the dApp you are going to be launching is Gamma Bank, can you tell me a bit about that, and how that might work?
DOMENIC: The WORBLI network will provide the infrastructure on which we will build these dApps and one of the first we are producing is Gamma bank.
It’s going to be a kind of dashboard of dApps. We figured out that if we do it that way, we don’t need to get a class A banking license. If you want full banking privileges — accepting deposits, custodianship of funds, issuing debit cards, loans, savings and checking — you need a class a banking licence. They are very difficult to get, and expensive. Even if you have the money, the connections and the resources it can still take up to two years. That’s not going to scale.
By working with our team of compliance experts we have found that if we launch individual dApps, we can provide all of the functions of a bank but through separate entities. We can be a bank without being a bank and that’s the beauty of it. We’ll be developing the dApps that we think are best suited and have the partners who are going to be building them.
Over time, we expect Gamma Bank will be the Bank of the WORBLI chain, and the best-in-class dApps will be included in that dashboard.
“You will be able to build your own bank. It’s almost like an iTunes store, where the user can pull in the dApps they want, and they’ll all be integrated together so you are not constantly logging in and out of everything”
MATT: Will there also be a way for people to access cryptos?
DOMENIC: It’s an integrated cryptocurrency bank. It’s going to be tied to numerous exchange platforms and you will be able to connect with whatever trading accounts you are already a part of. We’re going to be working on relationships and we already have been with all the major exchanges. The idea is that there is integration.
You will be able to build your own bank. It’s almost like an iTunes store, where the user can pull in the dApps they want, and they’ll all be integrated together so you are not constantly logging in and out of everything.
We are also going to have digital asset insurance across your accounts. If you do want to leave your funds in there, you can. You will always have a manual option to hold your private keys, or download everything to wallets if you choose, but we don’t think the average user is going to do that at the end of the day. We wish they would, but we just don’t think non-technical people are going to deal with wallets. We are trying to offer a safe, transparent and honest option for people like that to store their assets.
MATT: Can you talk a bit about developers, the opportunity and why WORBLI is a good place to develop?
DOMENIC: Say, you’re a software developer and you’ve got a great idea for a fintech dApp. You understand the tech, you understand the use case but you may not be a compliance expert. You don’t want to go out there in the early stages, bring on experts, dilute your equity, or deal with the hassle of it. It’s a lot of work.
With WORBLI, the compliance will be in place for you. The network will be in place and the governance will be taken care of. We are going to have very predictable costs on our chain. Because of the way will are handling RAM and network resources, you’ll know how much it will cost. We are going to AML/KYC our users, which is the process for verification in the financial world. At the user-account level, the user will own that and you will have a token that you can send out to dApps when you want to interact with them.
Your financial data will be stored and encrypted within your WORBLI account with us, and you only have to do it once. That’s a cost that developers don’t have to absorb, the compliance is taken care of for them, so they can just build. We have plans for educational tools, developer SDKs, and we have the WORBLI Network Fund which will provide funding.
Insurance will be there for you, and a bank account, which sounds simple but it is not easy to get. As this vision gets built over the next two years, developers will only have to worry about software development. That’s our goal.
MATT: Let’s talk about block producers, do you have block producers lined up? Are you talking to block producers. When do you anticipate bringing up a test net?
We have 14 block producers supporting our chain, which is certainly more than enough for us to get launched. We do want to get to 21, and we will. The test-net will launch within a week. The network launch will be on September 14, when there will also be the airdrop. We are building a portal for the airdrop that will go through our website, WORBLI.io.
With block producers we didn’t want to make it wide open just yet. We’re still in the early stages of getting everything launched, but we actually just may end up having upwards of 100 block producers.
From a technical and security level, we are more in line with Block.one’s original vision of around 121 block producers. We’d like to have a hundred block producers as we as we scale over time. I feel pretty confident with what we have now, but once we get the chain launched on September 14, will be ready to start adding more block producers.
MATT: You have been really supportive of the EOS community and you have been part of it for a long time. Could you just summarize some of the changes in governance and what your intentions are with regards to inflation and RAM.
DOMENIC: Our block research payment is very similar to Mainnet. It’s going to be around 1 percent, but we’re doing it a little bit differently. One of the main differences is that our inflation is based on what we’re calling our usage algorithm. We spent a lot of time on everything from our token economics to the financial incentives of the chain.
We wanted stakeholder alignment across the board so we have come up witha usage algorithm that, as more and more dApps deploy, and more and more transactions are happening on the network, the rewards get higher. As more users sign up, more tokens are staked on our chain, more tokens are going to get unlocked. As more dApps deploy, more tokens are going to be unlocked.
For example, a dApp comes on to the chain and it needs to stake a million tokens based on the size of the dApp and the expected number of users for an existing business. We can make a fairly decent estimate of what their network resources will be. We want to incentivize them to stay there, and we don’t think they should be penalized for staying staked.
MATT: What do you need to do differently with the governance of WORBLI in order to accommodate some of those fintech applications?
Because we need to control certain things at the beginning, to make sure the compliance is in place, it definitely starts centralized. We’re actually not ashamed of that and we’re not trying to hide that. People keep asking: “Are you a centralized chain?” Well, to start, yes.
“We think if block producers are going to maintain the compliance standards that we want them to then they should at least have a steady income. They shouldn’t be spending all these excessive resources on marketing and getting votes”
Our block producers are not elected, we don’t think that’s good for stable business. They are going to be on contracts with us. The initial contracts are for six months, after that we’re going to be doing annual contracts. We think if block producers are going to maintain the compliance standards that we want them to then they should at least have a steady income. They shouldn’t be spending all these excessive resources on marketing and getting votes. Also, we will pretty much eliminate any collusion, there’s no reason for it and it’s not going to help them.
What people really want, more so than the ability to elect(because, as we are seeing, we are only getting about 12 percent of voters on mainnet engaging), is to eliminate bad actors. If somebody is getting out of line, we’re definitely going to have processes where the community can vote.
We set this up so the WORBLI Foundation is in charge of the network and managing their relationships with block producers, business development and general marketing. The executive team of the WORBLI Foundation is going to answer to a board of directors and that board directors is going to renew the contracts and oversee the WORBLI Foundation team to make sure they’re carrying out that mission.
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