ArcBlock Community Technical Q&A 5/16/2018

On May 16th, ArcBlock held the first Community Technical Q&A event. The excepts from conversation between CEO Robert Mao and ArcBlock’s community members are as follows.

Recent Development of the Project

I plan to give a brief intro to the community what we have done in the past few months, then I'll answer questions.In the past months, we mostly focus on team building, product planning & development, community development planning.In today's competitive blockchain world, hiring is a big challenge, luckily we have one of the best engineering leader, Tyr Chen, joined us as VP Engineering.

We will organize a FAQs and publish on our new website from every community Q&A session.That will also include create questions that was not picked to answer during live QA.Question get picked in our FAQs, the asker will get a small amount of ABT as a bonus.We will try the Telegram Q&A first, and later we might try to host video status report in Zoom video conference.We try to be transparent, let our community know what’s going on, we'll also need to stay focus on our plan.It's a balance.What we can announce more in detail is how we design our OCAP (Open Chain Access Protocol)

We adopted GraphQL in OCAP implementation, that's to say, you can use GraphQL for any blockchain we support in OCAP, and take advantage of the whole GraphQL community.http://graphql.org

Q: Is there any specific time for the first consumer class application to land?

We plan to have our first beta app ready to try on Jun. It's more a developer facing app, since ArcBlock's targeting users are developers. However anyone should be able to play it, even without developer background.

Q: What do you think the biggest advantage of ArcBolck is？

There are lots of advantages, maybe the biggest is, we are very few product in the market facing the "ease of use" problem for blockchain applications. To make blockchain apps consumer friendly, to make blockchain development developer friendly is our mission. We are in a very unique position.

Q: Admins, could we get an update on the roadmap anytime soon?

We will soon replace our website, which will include a updated roadmap. Stay tuned.

Q: Hi Robert, is the project on track to meet its 2018 Q4 milestones?

Yes, we are on track, but we do have some adjustments and changes.

Q: What sort of adjustments and changes are we talking about here?

There are small adjustments: e.g. 1. we might release OCAP earlier than what we planned before. 2. we might delay our support for Hyperledger but support Cybermiles earlier. Those decisions most made by talking to potential clients and partners.

We originally thought Hyperledger is very important to support, however after we talk to numbers of industry partners and found most of those Hyperledger projects are in early proof of concept stage, and it seemed that even we support them there will be very little users.

Q: Is ArcBlock planning to support EVM (ethereum virtual machine)?

ArcBlock will not implement EVM or similar VM in our main net. We have different approach compare to Ethereum.

Q: When ArcBlock will hold developers group and Hackathon?

We will first have something for developer to hack (hopefully next month) then start hosting Hackathon and events.

Q: Do you have any plan to attract more developer to build up the same great community as Ethereum?

Yes. To attract developers is our important strategy, to do so, our first plan is "make developing experiences great again". :) We will adopt concepts like "playground", "playbook", to support rapid development make the entry barrier really low for developers. Of course we will also have community plan as some other projects do.

Q: Can you explain about how can other DApps cross chain in you main net (like ETH DApp which want to move their platform to ABT network or use for 2 network)？

Our main net (ABT chain) is designed for BOSS (Billing & Operating Support System), it's not a general computing platform like ETH. The advantage is, it's optimized for token and token service.

Q: Will you provide an API connectors for the most popular languages?

We do have plan to use ArcBlock itself to develop a better community app, however we are short of resource at this phase.

Q: How will ArcBlock link different public blockchains together?

ArcBlock is not a cross-chain protocol/solution. ArcBlock's OCAP allow developers to communicate with different chains in a uniformed way. However, it doesn't help different chains to "link/communicate/connect" with each other. It's different than Cosmos or Pokadot.

Q: Hi Robert. Here is my question: Microsoft, Google and Apple are super companies with enormous resources. If they are interested in building a platform functioning like ArcBlock, I believe it is pretty easy for them to make their platforms popular. So why don't they do something like this and do you think the ArcBlock have something very unique to make ArcBlock still attractive to developers even among the platforms built by big companies.

Microsoft recently announced Coco-Framework, it was actually a joint project from Microsoft Research in Cambridge UK. (I almost worked there, but eventually worked in MSR in Redmond). For us, the 1st priority is always do the things we ought to do, focus on user experience and security, iterate fast and learn fast. It is a blue sea with vast opportunities, we shall keep our page without worrying others.

ArcBlock's vision is to build a platform that eventually run by the community, not just ArcBlock itself. AWS, Azure will only own and run by its owner along. Ofcourse we welcome AWS or Azure to run ArcBlock nodes as miners for sure.