On 15 June, we hosted our latest Telegram AMA, where Aventus Founder & Chairman Alan Vey answered the community’s questions around upcoming partnerships, our ambition to become a parachain on Polkadot, and his opinion on the current crypto winter.
For those that missed it, you can find the transcript of the AMA below.
Q1. Some blockchain companies have been waiting for certain milestones to be reached, or for better market conditions before ramping up their marketing efforts and advertising spending. Does Aventus fall into this category? If so, what are the milestones that need to be reached or market conditions that need to be present for Aventus to focus more on marketing, or even advertising if applicable.
Alan Vey: We have been quite different to many others in this respect. We never ramped up our marketing spend massively, but rather focused on spending out money on building out the fundamentals, the product and usage of our network. We have slowly been ramping up the marketing and will keep it constant at the level it is at now until the winter passes. As you can see from the AVT market over the last week, we are getting noticed now that a lot of the noise within the wider market is calming down.
Q2. What are some of the ways that Aventus will further spread the word about their technology?
Alan Vey: We are launching a big campaign around our plans for parachain launch. This will include working with key influencers and the relevant entities in the ecosystem. High profile partnerships and clients are a big part of this strategy to demonstrate our strong fundamentals.
Q3. In previous AMAs there was mention of upcoming high-profile clients / partners with big names. Are these upcoming partnerships expected to be a major driver of growth and awareness for Aventus?
Alan Vey: Yes. Please hold me to this comment. We will be launching a campaign with one of the very best inventory rights holders in NFTs in the entertainment world very soon. I cannot announce it here, since, as you know, it is important to give journalists exclusive stories that are not yet in the public domain in order to get the best media coverage and maximise impact, but this is going to be a game-changer for the NFT line of our ecosystem.
Q4. Is one of the high profile clients that have not been mentioned involved in the banking sector? Also is this client utilising Aventus Network or their own permissioned fork of Aventus where fees paid in AVT still?
Alan Vey:
None of the high profile clients we currently have in the pipeline are in the banking sector. They are using the main Aventus Network. Permissioned forks will only be allowed if they use AVT in the fork, with validator deposits and transaction fees set to be at least as high as the Aventus Network.
Q5. From what I understand, Aventus Network is feeless to post transactions if users run their own validator node to post transactions (electricity, internet and maintenance costs only). If one of Aventus partners who post a lot of transactions, (fruitlab for example) were to run their own validator node to post their own transactions, does it mean stakers would stop earning rewards from fruitlab, which they would have been earning before fruitlab were to run their own validator node?
Alan Vey: To your first point, the assumption is not correct. Every transaction has a cost on the Aventus Network when it is sent, on top of the maintenance costs. To your subsequent question, this is not how it would work. All fruitlab transactions generate fees for validators.
Q6. How can someone view the total number of unique addresses on the AVN? Will there be an analytics section on the explorer where this information could be displayed under, in the form of a graph? Is this something Aventus Network is planning on adding to your explorer for users to see in addition to other analytical information?
Alan Vey: We are hoping to add this functionality to the explorer soon: see explorer.aventus.io. At this point in time, we have to run a manual search since it is not part of the product yet, and we know the number is over 8 million active wallets. Yes, this is on the roadmap to extend in the future.
Q7. How does Aventus plan in helping new developers with early stage projects?
Alan Vey: We are about to launch the Aventus Grant Program on the website – keep your eye on our blog for the announcement and more details. Otherwise, we provide detailed developer resources for advice on how to build and support from the team.
Q8. What is your projection of a number of monthly transactions by the end of this year?
What is an expected average fee per transaction in USD (including discounts, etc.) until the end of this year? What percentage of transaction fees are transferred into rewards?
Alan Vey: By the end of the year we hope to be doing 50-100 million transactions a month, with an average of $0.01-0.02 per transaction. 100% of transaction fees are paid out to validators.
Q9. How much is Aventus currently averaging in daily fees?
Alan Vey: I do not have that number to hand but this can be calculated from the data at explorer.aventus.io.
Q10. Would you consider forking Aventus – so there will be two versions: an Ethereum exclusive version, so L2BEAT criteria is achieved, and the multichain version. And then airdrop the Ethereum version to all current AVT holders?
Alan Vey: The current AvN is an Ethereum exclusive version and, as you state, this is likely how things will play out. The AvN parachain version will not be the same (since security moves to being derived from Polkadot, not Ethereum) and we would turn the “old AvN” into a test network. We are looking at launching a TAVT (test AVT) for test network purposes which would have a value and distribution to existing holders.
Q11. You were asked in November 2021 if you applied for a Coinbase listing. You said no and that you are focusing on mid-tier exchanges. But now it appears you are listed on Coinbase. Please can you confirm if you applied to them or not.
Alan Vey: As far as I am aware we did not apply. Coinbase saw our activity on UniSwap and I received an email from their compliance team, unsolicited, informing me that AVT is being listed on the exchange and requesting I fill out their compliance forms – which I did.
Q12. A greater percentage of new crypto investors value a token based on its price. What methods are you taking to fortify your community and investors so they do not value Aventus based on the token price?
Alan Vey: We only talk about our fundamentals, and do not engage in price discussion. We focus on driving deals and have a strong narrative of fundamentals first across all press. We also do not do any OTC deals from treasury and only focus on driving transactions and our product suites.
Q13. Since the transition to a layer 2, Aventus has focused on forming partnerships via direct communication with potential clients. I do like this approach but also realise that opening it up to any developer could result in significantly more widespread use/adoption. With new project onboarding being dependent on governance votes, do you think this will in any way discourage developers from choosing the Aventus platform? I recognise the benefits of this setup (preventing over-saturation of AVN with copycat projects and scams, and also preventing the network being overloaded with transactions).
Alan Vey: This has historically been our approach, but with the launch of the Gateway API we are now allowing anyone to use the Aventus Network (as long as they agree to the terms of the IaaS Agreement and SLAs). This way, we can ensure a high degree of quality but also try to tap into the developer market you refer to.
Q14. This may have already been asked but I remember reading about there being separate and private instances of the AVN network being used for specific clients. Would transactions on these instances be applied to those staking on the public version of AVN?
Alan Vey: There are not yet (only test networks – we have about five instances of the AvN total) but we will be rolling some into production soon for clients. Clients would have to make their validators’ stake at minimum the same as in the Aventus Network and they would have to have transaction fees paid at the market rates set by the AvN minimum. Our primary focus is always delivering more utility to AVT.
Q15. How much of an influence did scytale ventures investment have in your decision to focus on Polkadot network ?
Alan Vey: We sought out the partnership with Scytale to be able to pull closer to the Polkadot network because we believe in the vision of interoperability and that they have some of the best tech (hence why we built on substrate years ago), not the other way around.
Q16: What did Scytale get in return for their investment into Aventus? What’s their vesting period?
Alan Vey: The terms of the Scytale deal are confidential, so I cannot comment on this.
Q17. How well do you think the current layer 1s will perform in the next bull cycle? What do you think is the probability of them being overtaken by new layer 1 projects?
Alan Vey: It depends on what you are referring to as current vs new. If you mean those that have already launched in production as current, I think there will be very few (but some) new layer 1s that gain massive adoption. I expect layer 1s to boom significantly – the reason we are moving to a layer 1 on Polkadot rather than staying a layer 2 on Ethereum is because we think the days of the layer 2 are coming to an end. With layer 1s showing high transaction throughputs and security, the necessity for layer 2s is diminishing. Also, true adoption will come from making this easy for people to use. Like the Internet, we do not want individual siloed blockchains with vulnerable bridges, we need connected up interoperably blockchains where wallets etc are all easy to use. This is the future.
*Just to address the layer 2 comments. There will always be a place for layer 2s, especially for individual very high throughput use cases, but the days of various new ones popping up and the layer 2 space dominating the new traffic on networks are coming to an end in my view. They inherently need the layer 1 they rely on for security, and various bridges have been hacked or compromised recently, as you can see.
Also, with Ethereum moving to v2, scalability is massively increasing so many use cases won’t need layer 2s. Look at newer entrants like Solana that have solved scalability concerns (but then are not enterprise grade, so keep halting the network).
The biggest challenge preventing widespread blockchain adoption is user experience. When your average person does a Google search, they don’t care how the packets are routed in the Internet or what database is being used – they just want their results fast. Once we can solve this by connecting up all blockchains and solve security concerns, we can get this mass adoption. It’s just like the Internet rollout – right now we have siloed pockets of value (like intranets) which all need to be connected up (like the internet).
Q18. If the majority of transactions during the next bull cycle are predominantly on Ethereum, is Aventus in a position to take advantage of this? And how do you propose to capture as much of that as possible?
Alan Vey: Yes, we will maintain our connection to Ethereum, even once we are a parachain, to allow assets to flow both ways. Ultimately, we will be building the enterprise side of public blockchain. We want to make it easy to use for businesses and mitigate their risk with enterprise grade infrastructure, SLAs etc. We hope to attract that sort of business on this basis.
What next?
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