Velas Africa AMA With Blockchain Nigeria User Group Recap

[This is a Press Release]

The Velas Blockchain AMA World Tour Train arrived in Africa yesterday (19-6-2020 by 8:00PM GMT+1) as Blockchain Nigeria User Group hosted Velas Africa.

The AMA lived up to the previous AMA in the series (Indonesia, Vietnam & Korean AMA) with Velas CEO (Alex Alexandrov) and the team doing justice to most of the questions from developers, Cryptocurrency enthustiast, blockchain users and more.

Incase you missed it the enthralling session, not to worry, we have taken time to collate the AMA conversation in this thrilling recap below. Enjoy!

Adebayo BNUG Moderator:

Good evening everyone, thanks for gracing this 15th AMA session with BNUG and we are privileged to have VELAS to facilitate today’s session in colloboration with BNUG. Kindly adhere to the rules which include no spamming,no repeating of questions.

Adebayo BNUG Moderator:

So, before we kick off with the AMA proper. Some people know you from coinpayments. However, Could you please tell us basic information about yourself? Also, your former work background, your venturing into crypto space plus your journey through the blockchain industry?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

I started in Crypto space in mid 2011 was mining cpu, gpu , in 2012 started coincable supply store for mining supplies and followed with coinpayments in 2013

I used to trade forex so when i found bitcoin it was a concept which made a lot of sense to me from the start.

Adebayo BNUG Moderator:

Why did you switch from coinpayments which is reputed to be about the #1 crypto payment solution globally? Was coinpayments sold? And what inspiration led you to develop Velas blockchain?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

I am still majority shareholder of coinpayments and im spending time with development team on backend and front end v3 of the platform. I just find it less interesting to run the regulated payments company then i do working on technology and with innovative people

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

its what i enjoy and thus im better dedicating my time towards such tasks. Jason is the CEO i appointed to take over as I took a role of innovations officer and chairman of the board and focus 70% of my time now on velas

Adebayo BNUG Moderator:

@cyclo1d (Velas CEO) can we now open the floor for questions to come in? And in just 45 seconds the group would be muted for you to answer the questions.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

ok sure 🙂

LOL Crypto (@Idee01):

Q. What are VLX team plans to educate and raise awareness and promote adoption among:

1. The community

2. Non – Crypto users to make more people understand the technology behind VLX ? it works?

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

We put our bi-weekly tech reports and monthly ecosystem reports. They are presented in both written and video form to keep the community up to date with all the latest development progress and news

Also, in the past three months, we have opened up nine new international telegram groups to cater to a global audience. 

We have seen significant growth across all socials with over 20,000 new followers between telegram and twitter. So things are heating up!

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

We are taking the time to build educational content, weekly and monthly updates along with many explainer videos. We also contracted hypercubes studio to produce mini series of 5 episodes on each set of features of velas as we get closer to launching each. This will help new people better understand main ideas and get on board. Also we are doing fun thins like working influencers, doing conferences ama’s and entertaining videos in hope of catching viral attention on social media and youtube.

Also, I feel like any industry at its start needs people to push it in directions it must grow and others who in times even surpass you get idea for direction from those who attempt it first. I do believe AI is here to stay and can do task people shouldnt, as its far better at those and does not eat sleep or goes afk too often. This will be road ahead to win over confidence of the blockchain fundamentalists but i think common sense will win in the end.

For the users they can see lower or no transaction fees, plus if they want to take on tasks in the system AI will help them automate them as well

AFFUL (@AFFUL1) :

OK so why the name velas, were you inspired by something that lead to the name?

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

Velas stands for: 

– Virtual – expanding – learning – autonomous – system. So the name actually stems from our core functionality which is an AI enhanced blockchain.

Deleke Nice (@Dayo4ky):

From the time VLX project was conceptualised to current date, Have  you faced unexpected challenges wheather be an organization or environmental? If yes, what are the steps taken to deal with the situation?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

Many , any business or project relies on people and in some ways as iv become more known more people keep showing up with amazing ideas and no way to deliver or in other terms trying to scam me or us. This has been the most annoying part. In blockchain space latley funding is not the issue its finding right talented people to help you build

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

this is the biggest struggle right now in this space we are very lucky to have the team we do but we changed dev team twice to date.

Aluta (@Boylut):

Could you briefly describe VELAS current and Future community growth strategies as we all know that community is an integral part of any successful project?

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

As marketing director, my main focus is to position velas with a loud voice in a space where many are cookie-cutter and frankly boring! You can see from our messaging to our creative content that we believe in standing out from the crowd and blazing our path. We are also proud of our content output. You won’t find a project in the market that does more consistently.

Tahira Siddiqui (@th_198):

What’re the Algorithms which are used by Velas for fast and scalable transactions?

Andrey Stehno (Velas CTO):

We use regular blockchain and building AI on top of it to find safe cases to accelerate/optimize it when possible. Also we have dynamic consensus powered by smart contracts

Aluta (@Boylut):

Q1. Why does Velas need Blockchain? What benefits does it offer you?

Q2. What solutions is VELAS bringing into the crypto space that would make it a better place?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

blockchain is needed for records keeping on the network and to create transparency and trust. Benefits are mainly optimization, security and scalability without sacrificing decentralization. This is a bit of a holy grail balancing act in the industry as you tend to have to give up some element to accelerate the other.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

Ai can help achieve far greater results without such sacrifice

Enajite (@EnajiteNg): 

How Velas wallet is different from other wallets , what are the competetive advantages of Velas wallet ?

Do you have any plan to make its own visa card master card?

Andrey Stehno (Velas CTO):

We are working on including of decentralized vtube, voogle into downloadable wallet connected to decentralized nodes so noone is able to shutdown the service.

Tahira Siddiqui (@th_198):

What’re the Algorithms which are used by Velas for fast and scalable transactions?

Andrey Stehno (Velas CTO):

AI powered DPOS. AI is learning how to replace gossip safely to speedup transactions (p2p improvement). Propose  the consensus change to adapt the current situation. When it is safe it is trying to speedup the protocol, during attack slow down and improve the security. (All these features under construction)

Limits~Arya Executioner (@armahes):

Can you give a bit more explanation on your new cryptocurrency? Specifically:

1. Why and how are you implementing AI to delegated proof of stake?

2. Why is the source not available for review? How can you expect people to participate in a closed source network?

3. Why was there a token swap with coinpayments coin (whatever that was) in addition to a premine?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

Good questions.

1) AI is designed to help with monitoring and scoring of the potential validators before they join epoch, along with optimizing best communication routes between them in order to optimize gossip protocol.

2) We are building on top of open Ethereum (rust) while adding dynamic consensus model and aiDPOS, vm is still solidity as we made a decision early on it made sense not to reinvent the wheels but improve the parts we want to prove out. We requested the right to remain closed source until beta as this gives us ability to prove out concepts and not have them all stolen before we even had a chance to build community by projects who have far greater position or funding. Now i see the devs point of view and generally prefer open source but they were proven right as we have to change team twice in first year and this allowed us to have smoother transitions. We are however one release from beta or open source so if this is a requirement for you please keep us on radar until that time.

3) token swap was done due to fact syscoin ended support for POS on assets, removed blockmarket and left us in interesting situation where all we set out to do became impossible as asset on their chain. I was working on velas at the time and decided to sake of community to pivot them in to vlx, although vlx has nothing to do with original cps coin it extended new opportunity to community that was forming and it was just a fair thing to do 🙂

Premine is foundational coins and unsold tokens as Velas never held and ICO

We decided it was 2018 ico’s were dead and people were tired of projects not delivering so we primarily self funded and had a few private investors but we realized long term project will need funding so it was decided to keep the coins originally dedicated to ICO in long reserve and sell otc as needed to refill projects runway in funding, this way we are dependent on project success to see any funding to keep going and its a fair model in my opinion vs getting 200million and sitting out our arses.

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

In a time when you see a lot of the ICO projects from 2017 vanish, we are growing and getting stronger every day.

Make sure to follow us on:

https://twitter.com/VelasBlockchain? For the latest updates!

Aluta (@Boylut):

Who are your closest rival or competitors and in what ways are you better than them

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

I think EOS would be competitor we can use for this question. We still use ETH base so its easy for developers to migrate using solidity VM which we optimize, we decided to take a solid base and improve it instead of creating countless new directions and new languages to learn for developers. This was direction we first started with just like EOS but then we saw it will require far more documentation and funding to build community long term. Also we use gossip between nodes where eos is not and there is an argument there which i will not get in to now why its s bad idea to drop it from public blockchain point of view. We believe its better to optimize it using ai vs dropping it but without ai it makes sense why they are doing it they way they chose to.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

truth in crypto at this stage i dont see anyone as competitor we are all running sets of decentralized experiments in order to create true enterprise level solution which will last and support all tasks users and companies will through at it

i believe what we do will be adopted by many just like we will borrow from anything that saves us time

Each project contributes their developments in code libraries and fixes or improves libraries for those who came before them, you have to realize this industry is young, very young.

When you select who to follow watch for activity and track record of people in it, not just titles like PHD on MB but what do they do not schools they went to but what did they build.

Ashish Tripathi (@T_ashish08):

Most investors focus only on the token price in the short term, not on the real value of the project. Can you talk about the benefits for long-term investors?

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

Long term holders are always the ones that come out on top in the crypto space. We are not slowing down anytime soon. In my opinion, the smart move is to follow the project, stay informed, and support the progress. We are not new to this and we have a wealth of experience. We’re just getting started.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

i saw at least 50 white paper with harvard and stenford phds and all the titles and credentials you can think of who raised 10-100million in 2016-2018 and none to be found now lol then Satoshi no one even knows build the most successful to date project + dont get me started on this lol

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

we are building a 3 way eco system, velas coin as fuel nodes and delegates system which supports servers for validators of blocks and economy then velasphere were you can share resources such as HDD CPU and GPU and earn , then Vortex where u can uplaode video , images files talk to friends and even build decentralized websites.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

long term as you start now i suggest becoming a delegate, it is only 10k vlx and you can start your reputation career as AI is going to be trained on data sets already being placed now, this will open doors for users long term for more opportunities to be used as trust point and thus earn by Ai.

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

It’s a great entry point and you can do it from within our multi-coin wallet. Super simple to become a delegate: 

Gabriel (@gabriel878):

What is your growth plan? How do you attract users and developers?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

We plan to continue development and stick to release schedule this year in order to roll out mobile app, Velasphere, Vortex and get on all leading exchanges along with fight for dominance in payment space with merchants.

Akachukwu (@Akachukwu_A):

The CORONA and MARKET CRASH impacted way too much within MILLIONS of companies, LAYING off many many Employees. 

How is VELAS dealing with this problem? With the market crash and corona?

Did you lay off any workers and did the market crash impact badly on VELAS?

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

We are very fortunate to have a tight-knit team with great leadership. The only real thing that has slowed us down is the inability to travel because of various regional travel bans. We have grown a lot since corona and pivoted to doing more virtual conferences and online activities like this ama world tour .

Divya …. (@awesomedivya):

The Crypto world is too familiar with the fact that projects require real use cases to develop. Does  VELAS have a product and partnership where we can see technology function?

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

Great question. This has been a big focus for us. I am leveraging my position with coinpayments in order to have velas integrated to V3 coinpayments platform for merchants, due to release this summer. It will give greater benefits for affiliates and cashback options, discounts on swaps and so on using vlx. We will also run promotions in order to have more merchants accept vlx as we want this to get on the level of etherum with payments.

Andrey Stehno (Velas CTO):

Also, Understanding of issues of existent blockchains and ideas how to fix them will enable bring in more use cases using Velas.

(Alex Alexandrov – Velas CEO):

I am sorry guys i have to end it here but its time to jump on friday dev meeting call 🙂 this was fun and its always interesting to see questions from community please follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/velasfounder Thanks everyone! 🙂

Adebayo BNUG Moderator:

Questions not answered would be collated sent to the velas team for due justice

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

If you are new to Velas make sure you check out our most recent Ecosystem report: 

https://medium.com/@VelasBlockchain/velas-monthly-ecosystem-report-004-ecbb8773661e

Kalani Moe (Velas Marketing USA):

Make sure to join and follow us in our communities.

List of Velas Official Community Groups:

Velas Global Telegram

Velas Africa TG

Velas Website

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This article is a paid press release. Readers are encouraged to do their own research.

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