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Three core members of the Wanchain team hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) in Wanchain’s global Telegram community on June 23rd, 2021. Over the course of just over an hour, Jack Lu (Wanchain’s Founder & CEO), Weijia Zhang (Wanchain’s VP of Engineering) and Li Ni (Wanchain’s VP of Business Development and Operations) answered questions about a wide variety of topics including the recent Litecoin integration, enterprise partners, future wanToken use cases and more!
Below is a (slightly edited) transcript of the questions and answers from Wanchain’s three-headed AMA!
Q: How does the team plan on getting more adoption across the Wanchain cross-chain ecosystem?
Jack Lu: From a technical point of view, we will continue to innovate to ensure that our cross-chain mechanism remains the best in the industry. This means you can expect constant improvements in terms of performance, security, and user experience. Simultaneously, we will continue to integrate more and more heterogeneous public chains.
As you all know, we just integrated Litecoin and will soon add support for Polkadot. We are also developing a greater suite of developer tools to make it easier for developers to develop cross-chain DAPPs on Wanchain.
From a business development perspective, we have been targeting public chains that we think would benefit from being added to Wanchain’s cross-chain ecosystem and are already in talks with several prominent projects. We’re also reaching out to DAPPs and projects on chains we’ve already bridged (like Ethereum) to try to get more use cases for our cross-chain assets like XRP@Ethereum and BTC@Ethereum.
We will also do more cross-community building. We will do more promotions in different communities to demo our use cases and provide incentives to attract new users.
Q: What are you doing to bring more developers to Wanchain to create more applications and protocols?
Weijia Zhang: There is no doubt that a vibrant developer community is needed to ensure the ultimate success of a project. Therefore, my team and I are focusing on the following:
- We need to improve our developer tools. This means friendly and convenient cross-chain developer tools, well-organised development documents, and standardised Github sample code. All are being worked on.
- We are relaunching our long-term developer incentive plan. Now that Wanchain’s core infrastructure is built, it is suitable to rely more on community developers to polish Wanchain’s underlying mechanism and develop rich cross-chain DAPPs. Rewards will be given to different projects and community developers. I have no doubt that some of you will develop something important!
- We are going to set up a better channel to encourage open communication between developers. Innovative ideas require a good idea exchange platform. Building a stronger and more engaged developer community is an important next step for Wanchain.
- We will continue to cooperate with world-renowned organisations to attract developers from outside the industry. As some of you may know, Wanchain has close ties with the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA). We are working closely on research to advance the field cross-chain mechanisms. By leveraging the EEA platform, we can reach out to many different companies in a variety of traditional industries. We have several of these non-traditional projects in the pipeline — but you will need to wait a bit longer to hear about them in detail.
Q: When can we expect more use cases for wanTokens on Ethereum and BSC?
Li Ni: The adoption of Wanchain’s cross-chain assets is going to be important for the future of Wanchain. In the past couple months, we were focused on building processes on how to add more tokens more quickly. This part is in pretty good shape. We’re now able to add new decentralised cross-chain bridges at a pretty good rate and our partners at WanLabs can also quickly add new tokens with Instant Cross.
Recently, we’ve also been talking to our industry connections and reaching out to specific projects regarding our cross-chain assets (wanTokens). What we’ve discovered is that the trend is for these applications on Ethereum and BSC to rely on their DAOs to determine what tokens to support.
So, while Wanchain will continue trying to reach mutually beneficial deals with the projects (I think our cross-chain XRP and LTC are quite valuable), I also encourage all of you to submit proposals to the DAOs and projects that you want to support Wanchain’s cross-chain assets!
The bulk of these projects will support tokens that have an existing demand, so we all need to work together to make sure we are heard! Let’s do this together!
Q: Is Wanchain currently working on listing on more exchanges?
Jack Lu: I knew this one was coming!
Recently, some smaller exchanges have started listing WAN on their own. I view this as a good sign that more and more people are taking notice of the good work we are doing. But I know this question is really asking about large, major exchanges.
At Wanchain, we tend to focus on problems and coming up with solutions. One current issue, that we are all aware of, is that it can be difficult for some users — particularly those in the US — to get WAN tokens from a CEX. While we are keeping an open attitude towards listing on more, major, exchanges, we are more focused on finding a solution to this problem.
Part of this solution is reaching out to large exchanges. This is something we have done. But listing on major exchanges is a long process without any guarantees. In the meantime, we’ve started approaching DEXs on other chains to list WAN and wanTokens like BTC, XRP and LTC. We’ve also expanded our cross-chain faucet so that anyone who sends assets cross-chain will receive a bit of free WAN and can easily get more on WanSwap.
This will be an ongoing issue, but it’s something we are always working on.
Q: Is Wanchain exploring options for a stable coin — either algorithmic or backed by crypto/fiat?
Li Ni: There are already a couple stable coins like USDT and USDC on Wanchain, not to mention the huge number of minted USD tokens on other chains. Wanchain also supports GUSD and TUSD contracts on Ethereum and Wanchain, as you can see our token list.
As Wanchain ‘bridges’ more and more chains, all these USDx tokens will be naturally imported & exported to-and-from Wanchain’s cross-chain infrastructure. As such, we are not actively working on building a native stable coin on Wanchain.
However, there’s nothing stopping an independent developer from doing so, of course, but it is not currently a priority for Wanchain (But I would love to see someone create a USDJ [Jack] on Wanchain soon!).
Q: Has Wanchain considered developing any DeFi insurance products?
Weijia Zhang: Though Wanchain’s primary focus remains on building fully decentralised bridges that connect siloed blockchain networks, Wanchain does have a need to have insurance type products to better protect cross-chain and staking assets. That being said, while we have discussed it, we are not actively developing insurance products.
Rather, we will work on building a more engaged developer community so that it is more realistic to expect that other development teams create these kinds of products. An insurance DAPP to secure cross-chain assets would be a unique product for cross-chain operations. We will, of course, support any developers who want to build it.
Q: Is rebranding the website currently a priority?
Jack Lu: Certainly, we all agree that the current website needs some work. We’re currently working on a full facelift for not just our website but also our app UIs. It shouldn’t be too much longer before you start to see some of this work roll out.
Q: Are there any plans to build out Wanchain’s BD team/efforts?
Li Ni: Yep. Now that Wanchain’s infrastructure is basically built, the focus is shifting to business development. Our BD and marketing teams have several meetings with other projects every single week — some big, some small.
Not only are we deep in discussions with several projects to build bridges and use cases for wanTokens, but I can also share with you that other projects/partners/chains are really in dire need of a ‘true’ decentralised cross-chain solution/bridge. Thus, Wanchain definitely has opportunities.
We’ve also been working hard with our enterprise partners on some longer-term projects.
Q: Given that State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) was one of the entities appointed to execute the banning of BTC mining in China, will this affect SGCC’s partnership with Wanchain?
Li Ni: China’s recent ban on BTC mining has nothing to do with the enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. It will not have any impact on our ongoing blockchain-based enterprise projects.
Q: Could Wanchain share its views on crypto’s role in China going forward?
Li Ni: Today, Alibaba just launched its own NFT and it is available for the public to purchase — of course with CNY only, for now. State Grid, Alibaba, Tencent and all these big enterprises consider blockchain technology to be of great importance. The Chinese government also shared this attitude towards blockchain.
That being said, banning BTC mining fits China’s ‘no waste on energy’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ policies.
Q: Will Wanchain reach out to people (influencers) in the Greater China region?
Li Ni: For the Greater China region, we have our Taiwan CM Kelly who manages Wanchain’s Taiwan & HK communities on WeChat.
Jack Lu: We are also working with multiple media outlets including ChainNews — which is the biggest crypto news outlet in China. We have been and continue to work hard in both Greater China and Asia as well.
Q: Which project do you see as Wanchain’s biggest competitor?
Jack Lu: Currently we must fight against fake and centralised bridges. It takes more time to develop decentralised bridges. Wanchain was one of the most famous projects in the world. Now, there are so many new people coming to the industry that are crazy about new projects. Wanchain has started doing a lot more marketing and will win back peoples’ hearts, sooner or later.
Q: Any updates about State Grid? What other enterprise clients are you working with?
Li Ni: Things are going well, and more projects might come. Stay tuned! We will release more project and client information when we can.
Q: How much does the Chinese government’s bans affect Wanchain?
Li Ni: Not at all. Chinese authorities only banned BTC mining. That’s all. Blockchain technology, which Wanchain is dedicated to, is not negatively impacted at all.
Q: How do holders of the WAN token benefit in the ecosystem & what power within the governance model do individuals hold?
Li Ni: There are obviously many benefits to holding WAN tokens. For example, you can use your WAN to stake in the Wanchain PoS and Storeman nodes to gain daily rewards. WAN can also be used for liquidity mining on WanSwap. Additionally, on WanLend, you can borrow or lend WAN and earn interest!
Q: What do you think about the evolution of NFTs in the crypto space and the real world?
Weijia Zhang: About Wanchain NFT support, I agree that NFT is the next big thing. Wanchain already has Zookeeper as a NFT DAPP. We also have a project proposal and POC going on by an external team who are exploring NFT-based degree diplomas.
Q: Also, how many developers are working in house right now?
Weijia Zhang: About 30 around the world.
About Wanchain
True DeFi is interoperable — Wanchain is the world’s premiere decentralised blockchain interoperability solution. Our mission is to drive blockchain adoption through interoperability by building fully decentralised bridges that connect the world’s many siloed blockchain networks. This cross-chain infrastructure empowers developers to build truly decentralised cross-chain applications to power the future of DeFi.
