ArcBlock Community Technical Q&A 11/21/2018

On November 21st, the fifteenth ArcBlock Community Technical Q&A took place in the Telegram group. The conversation between CEO Robert Mao and ArcBlock’s community members is as follows:

Q1: Hi, Robert. Are there any new partnerships for ArcBlock to announce?

Yes! We’re currently announcing new partners at the rate of almost one per week, with many weeks of announcements left to go. On the marketing and operations side, we have launched a new campaign called “2019: A Blockchain Odyssey.” We started with three technical talks in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. The session in Beijing was co-hosted by MSRA (Microsoft Research Asian), and about one hundred people were in attendance. All the talks were very well received. We also participated in the 2018 TechCrunch Shenzhen Hackathon as a sponsor. The first place team created a project “ArcPay,” a crypto payment gateway built on ArcBlock.

Q2: Can we use ArcPay?

Unfortunately, it’s a hackathon project, and most of those are just proof of concepts. However, we do have an “ArcBlock Payment SDK” in our product roadmap.

Q3: When will OCAP support Bitcoin transfer?

We just added send transaction support on OCAP, it now allows users to send raw transactions (so you can transfer cryptocurrency). However, it requires developers to do the signatures themselves. We will include help in the SDK to make developers’ lives easier.

Q4: Is Forge's design mature enough?

Forge’s framework is now in private beta, and we are able to build a very interesting content-oriented blockchain with it. By the time it is publically released, it will be mature enough.

Q5: Where did Forge’s design start?

We designed Forge when we started our own ABT chain design. Now Forge will be the foundation of our ABT chain, which is used for the ABT network’s BOSS (Billing and Operating Support System).

Q6: Many people are concerned about the release time of the mainnet. Will the mainnet released as scheduled?

A lot of people asking about ArcBlock’s mainnet launch don’t actually know what a mainnet is. The “mainnet” concept was coined in the early days: when building a blockchain, you needed a “testnet” for testing and a “mainnet” for production. ArcBlock is a blockchain development platform, containing several components; blockchain is only a small piece of it. For some components, there is no mainnet at all, because it doesn’t need them. For some components, it connects to different blockchains, so it could connect to a mainnet or a testnet but the components don’t need a mainnet themselves, e.g. OCAP and related services. OCAP currently works with Ethereum’s mainnet and Bitcoin’s mainnet. So OCAP is already running on these mainnets, but our developers badly a testnet, so they can develop without spending real money. For the ABT chain itself, it will have a testnet and a mainnet, but at this moment, we don’t need it.

Q7: Which piece of the mainnet is coming first?

ArcBlock is on a mainnet already, but we are working to launch a testnet. Also, our enterprise and government solutions won’t have mainnet or testnet concepts at all, though they can be run in different modes such as production/staging/test. Given the crypto market changes, which coincide with us getting more government and enterprise clients, we might adjust accordingly in the future.

Q8: When can developers build their own applications on ArcBlock’s platform?

This is already happening. Throughout our numerous hackathons, developers have built several cool demo projects.

Q9: Maybe the use of other mainnets means the introduction of ABT’s blockchain?

ABT’s chain is a billing and support chain, it will come later. We may adjust the release date based on the market changes. In our roadmap, we avoid the term “mainnet launch”; instead, for accuracy we use “ready for business.”

Q10: How is OCAP run, and where?

OCAP is officially run on Amazon Web Service. Soon, you will be able to quickly launch it with AWS Marketplace. And soon you will potentially be able to do the same on Windows Azure.

Q11: Are there currently talks with any businesses or corporations interested in using ABT?

We have three American federal departments and two enterprise customers in our pipeline. When we launched ArcBlock a year ago, we designed the platform to support both public chain customers and enterprise customers. Recently, in the past three months, we’ve seen more interest from enterprise customers than consumers.

Q12: I don’t doubt the tech, I’m just worried about adoption.

Thanks. It takes time, but we are on it. In the next few weeks, we will have some important announcements: we just became members of two important government-related organizations.