October AMA with GRAFT Devs

Community Manager: Welcome everybody for the first GRAFT developer AMA! We’ve been collecting questions across our various social media channels, which lead developers, Slava and Dan will be responding to. This channel will be reserved strictly for questions and answers. We will give the community a few moments to respond in the Discord #graft-lounge and Telegram, and determine if there are any follow-up questions we have time to address. I will be working to keep things moving so that we can get through as many questions as we can in the short amount of time that we have. Please note that if your question doesn’t get answered, it will remain in the pool for follow-on AMAs.

With that, let’s begin with our first question…

Question: Could you talk a little about the software development process that Graft uses? What development methodology does Graft use? Is it an industry-standard model (such as agile, incremental, or waterfall) or something custom designed? Perhaps you could walk us through how the process works, for example how a concept goes from initial idea to implementation to testing to competition?

Dan: We use an agile methodology with two-week sprints. The system is quite complex with many components that we have to time together into planned releases. We started with formal testing but are quickly migrating towards community supported rollouts. You can see how various pieces stitch together looking at our development roadmap.

Question: I currently scan various blockchain projects. I’ve noticed several unresponded pull requests that seem to be ignored. In understanding C++ for a number of years. They seem to be solutions for a drastic fix. I cannot involve myself in a blockchain that the dev doesn’t fix issues in a timely manner. How can i invest with any courage the dev and the project is community oriented if they do not listen to pull requests!

Is there any particular reason why PR are being ignored and is the super node RTA going to launch without any review from all pull requests?

Slava: We pay attention to all pull requests. Pull requests however are not “just push an approve” button activity — they have to be vetted, tested, incorporated into the release schedule, and timed for the appropriate network update (fork) — all these things take time and are gated by the development and release schedule.

Question: It is appreciated that the Graft Team have said many times that people who buy GRFT aren’t investors. But if GRFT is truly a ‘community’ coin then it would help if someone is available to give one consistent message from the Graft team to the people that form the community. There is often misinformation and confusion in the telegram and elsewhere because there isn’t someone from the core team that is managing communication with the community. Will you be hiring an individual or team to manage communication with the community?

Dan: We are sometimes constrained as to what we can share due to incomplete conceptual framework (we start out with broad brush strokes and then fill in the details as we move closer to implementation), private info from 3rd parties that we’re not at liberty to share (such is often the case with exchanges or other partners), or simply are working on something that may or may not pan out and we try to avoid situations where we overpromise and underdeliver. As engineers, we tend to communicate once something is done and no uncertainties remain — we’re learning however to communicate more, bear with us.

Question: In the current alpha implementation, the RTA SuperNode requires a hot wallet with full spend keys on the VPS running the SuperNode. This seems dangerous: if we imagine graft at $1, that means a T4 is holding a hot wallet worth a quarter of a million USD, which makes it a tempting target for hacks — someone who gains access to the VPS could steal the entire stake plus any transaction fees. Why did Graft decide to go with a hot wallet approach as opposed to the cold-stake approach (of submitting stakes as time-locked transactions on the blockchain) commonly used by other Masternode systems?

Slava: First, it’s important to take into account the specifics of the Cryptonote protocol — proof of balance in a CryptoNote wallet is not as easy as doing the same in “”regular”” non-private blockchains. Second, we are aware of this issue and already have it in the backlog, so it will be resolved in the future RTA release.

Question: The recently announced stimulus plan for supernodes was unveiled without any details at all as to how it will work. This has led the community taking wild guesses as to how it might work (e.g. with the unofficial calculator floating around) and what the payoffs might be. Proper planning for potential supernode operators requires the actual details.

When do you plan to formalize the stimulus payoff details so that people can start deciding whether or not they want to run supernodes?

Dan: The stimulus plan will take a bit of flushing out. We have defined the general direction and the targets for the incentives and will be filling in the details as we get to the roll out stage. The goal is to make the network perform at roughly 100k tx monthly volume.

Question: There has been quite some discussion recently on the GRAFT blockchain telegram channel about the upcoming Monero CNv2 fork and the impact it may have on the GRAFT blockchain. Some are convinced that the fork will lead to a substantial migration of ASIC/FPGA hashrate to GRAFT (being the most profitable CNv1) from XMR. This in turn could lead to centralization of the network, a potential drop in value (as the farms are less like to hold their GRAFT) and even outright attacks. It would be great to get more information from you on this topic, if you plan to fork to CNv2 or any of the CNv1 derivates in the coming months?

Slava: The GRAFT dev team is working on the patch. We will announce the date of the hard fork shortly.

Question: Where are we with Verifone and Ingenico exactly? What will be procedure for merchant to turn on GRAFT as currency on their POS machines, and will it require manual update?

Dan: Regarding Verifone software — it is done and ready for the rest of the network — of course there are iterations and updates happening on that as we go as all these things are interconnected. Using GRAFT on Verifone terminals only requires Engage-compatibility. Engage is their app platform — they are rolling it out to various models starting with the newest / most capable ones. To enable GRAFT, the merchant has to go to Verifone marketplace, add the app to their merchant account, configure the wallet and few other payment gateway options. As simple as that. Regarding Ingenico — we are waiting for the platform upgrade from their side and opening API’s — tentatively Q1 2019, so for now our primary goal is to get the Verifone terminal to work flawlessly.

Question: Could you briefly share the Graft Team marketing plan and road marks that you are following to implement the plan?

Dan: Here’s an example of what we’re thinking and driving towards. https://www.graft.network/merchant-service-provider/ . Please keep in mind however, that this is a decentralized, community project, so core team’s involvement in marketing and distribution is focused on working on core software and integrations.

Question: Many people have attempted to send coins from the mobile wallet to Cryptopia. The transaction fails because the mobile wallet does not support non-integrated payment ID’s. The users then contact Cryptopia about the lost coins and then Cryptopia asks for a payment ID. There are a few problems with this all too common scenario, but the biggest problem in my opinion is that the mobile wallet does not provide access to transaction ID’s. Will the mobile wallet soon be able to display transaction ID’s?

Slava: 1) Cryptopia is the only exchange that does not support integrated addresses. We’ve contacted their devs several times and asked to implement this support. They promised to do it but never provided any ETA. By the way, they do not support integrated address for Monero or other CryptoNote coins, not just GRAFT. Here is the latest response from Cryptopia devs: “We’ve escalated this issue and hope to have an ETA for you in the near future. We haven’t forgotten about it.” 2) In the next releases of the wallets we plan to add both detached payment id & full transaction history (including Tx ID).

Question: When will the results of the RTA alpha testing (bug reports/fixes/etc.) be made public? Or if they won’t be, when will you start accepting public bug reports for RTA supernodes?

Slava: As you may have noticed, we have started communicating the development status on a weekly basis providing lots of details to the community. The results of the testing feed back into the development with the end result of a public alpha and then beta state of the product.

Question: Do you plan to conduct any external security audit of the platform (RTA/Exchange brokers/etc.) before the final production release?

Slava: One-time security audits are largely ineffective (subpar, expensive, and short lived) as the code changes literally every day. The code is open to the community to examine and find bugs. We’re also looking into implementing a bug bounty program. (Note that both GRAFT co-founders are CISSP certification holders and have serious infosec background.)

Question: What is the long-term plan for continuing Graft’s management? Some other coins have defined organization structures that are designed to continue without the present Dev teams. Has the Graft team thought about how Graft will be managed on an ongoing basis once the project reaches maturity?

Dan: Good question. We recognize that there is a natural evolution in a decentralized project governance as the project matures. We are considering a DAO path potentially, taking notes from other leading projects, and looking to incorporate some of the innovative models (like quadratic voting) that provide equalized participation.

Question: Multiple sites out there already support payments with cryptocurrency. How’s GRAFT different?

Dan: The primary purpose of the GRAFT project is to build a DECENTRALIZED payment network — the fact that it can process crypto payments is one of the important by-products, not the be all and end all. The devil is in the details — centralized payment brokers go against the principles of decentralization and they don’t scale. GRAFT’s goal is a decentralized payment network with no borders, no single party controls, no (or marginalized) banks, agnostic to the currency you pay with.

Question: I’ve heard that early supernode holders will be incentivized to participate in the graft network and I applaud that. Doesn’t it make sense to incentivize merchants to encourage graft usage by offering a transaction fee holiday for some time period up front? You could still pay the network supernode participants out of the coins set aside for incentives (or not). I think that incentivizing the vendor will go MUCH further towards promoting crypto adoption.

Dan: Yes, we’re thinking about incentivizing other eco-system participants and have thought about waving the transaction fees for the merchants for period of time. It’s not clear whether it’s strong enough of an incentive for them to adopt a new payment network if they didn’t have an interest in it before. We are thinking that the focus with merchants should be on creating awareness in the industries that are notoriously hard to get merchant services in, as well as making it super easy for them to integrate GRAFT into their existing systems and processes.

Question: Service Brokers are going to be One of the most critical part of the Graft Ecosystem. Considering an example where Bitcoin payment is made by a buyer and Merchant’s payout choice is in Fiat USD. This is the most obvious use case I could think of. And the kind of liquidity needed for converting BTC to USD is going to be huge (to make settlement seemless). I fear individuals (SN owners) could provide this liquidity. Unless a major exchange could be a service broker I personally feel this will be difficult. Hard fact being we are facing difficulties in listing Graft on a bigger exchange, so what’s the plan on getting a high liquidity exchange?

Dan: You’re right — payout brokers are one of the keys to the functional network. We anticipate the liquidity to come from both smaller and larger brokers. The plan is that once the project gains recognition and adoption in the marketplace, the exchanges will open up as it’s a very lucrative market for them. At this time we have a number of smaller payout brokers who have registered their intent to provide these services to the network.

Question: One problem with almost every cryptocurrency is the boundless growth of the blockchain data. One of the numbers that got pulled from the reward post was 100k transactions per day. Graft transactions average about 12kB, so put those together and you get the blockchain growing by 1.2GB/day. It’ll hit nearly 100 gigs after 2 months, nearly 500 gigs after a year.Does Graft have any long-term plan to reduce that storage requirement at the node and/or supernode level?

Slava: This is common problem for all blockchains, not just a specific problem to GRAFT. The current short-term solution is merging recent Monero code which introduced a new method of proofs for confidential transactions — Bulletproof — which is supposed to reduce the blockchain size by 80%.

https://web.stanford.edu/~buenz/pubs/bulletproofs.pdf https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/6781/what-are-bulletproofs

Question: We appreciate your efforts to involve the community in the project, how would you like to improve this relationship over the next few months?

Dan: Thanks for this question. As a decentralized project, we have to really pull back on implementing roll-out and adoption plans for the network and rely on the community to take over and form their own geographic and industry clusters with their own promotion and business plans for the network. We will know that the network is thriving if there are initiatives, ideas, local governance, and business models that go well beyond what was envisioned by the founding team.

Question: How does GRAFT handle void transaction? Is that similar to void transaction of Credit cards?

Slava: Void transactions are typically handled by the point of sale, before it even comes to the settlement. If payment is processed, some payment processors allow voiding such transaction. On blockchain it is impossible to reverse (void) a transaction after it is added to the transaction pool (even before it’s added to the block), so RTA “void” should be replaced by refund (return) transaction.

Community Manager: Excellent. Well that concludes today’s AMA. I want to thank Dan and Slava for taking the time out to answer questions. We are happy to get through so many, and look forward to future sessions. Thank you all!