ICYMI – AMA with Chromia

June 24, 2020

We had an amazing power-packed AMA with Chromia Team on June 10th, 7 PM IST. Our Growth lead, Minal Thukral hosted the AMA. Henrik Hjelte, Co-Founder of Chromia, Serge Lubkin, Advisor Chromia and the Chromia community team were present for the AMA. The team answered and explained different parts of the Chromia projects in a really fun and engaging way.

Tl;dr – This blog is a record of a fun AMA with the Chromia team. The blog has detailed explanations of different concepts of the Chromia project.

Minal:

Hey Guys,
Minal here from CoinDCX, I lead Growth efforts for CoinDCX. I am really excited to host this AMA for you. So let the fun begin.

There are thousands of blockchain projects out there, but only a few of them are able to leave a mark and change the way the industries will function in the future. One of those projects is Chromia which actually makes sense for both traditional and blockchain industries together.

With this said I would love to invite Serge, Henrik and Chromia team members to the CoinDCX family.

Serge:

Hey guys! Nice to be here!

Henrik Hjelte:

Yes, nice to be here!

Minal:

Welcome guys! Can you quickly introduce yourselves to our community?

Henrik Hjelte:

Hello. My name is Henrik Hjelte. I am Co-Founder and CEO of Chromia. I have more than 30 years of experience in programming and a degree in Economics from Uppsala University. After being introduced to the blockchain by the leader of the colored-coins project Alex Mizrahi in 2013, we started ChromaWay with Or Perelman to explore if the world was interested in something more than currency aspects of blockchain. it was called “bitcoin 2.0”, and became “blockchain.” After a series of innovations and essential use-cases in both private and public blockchains, this year is focused on Chromia, a new public platform for mainstream decentralized applications using relational blockchain technology.

Serge:

Hey, I’m Serge Lubkin and I’m gonna assist Henrik today. I work in marketing and business development fields at Chromia, as well as on the token economics of the project. I’ve been in crypto since 2014 and my background is in marketing and economics.

Few words about our project:

Chromia is a new public blockchain based on the idea of integrating traditional databases, Relational databases with blockchain security. Chromia is a general purpose blockchain with full smart contract capabilities, just that it is a lot easier to code, even complex applications. You code with an easy to learn new programming language that combines the power of SQL and normal languages but makes it secure in a blockchain context. Up to 1/10 the code-lines vs other blockchains.

The aim of Chromia is to combine relational databases, which exist in every kind of organisation, with blockchains. We want to provide a platform for our users to develop totally decentralised apps securely. Our goal is for Chromia to be seen as the number one infrastructure for decentralised applications.

Anastasia:

Hello and welcome, everyone! My name is Anastasia and I am responsible for ChromaWay & Chromia’s social media presence. I will assist Henrik and Serge today during the AMA.

Have fun everyone! 😉

Minal:

Fantastic! That was quite an introduction. Thank you all!

Can you guys also highlight some pointers on the problems you guys are trying to solve?

Henrik Hjelte:

In short, blockchain is about managing data. And the worlds best way to manage data is….. a database!!!

But blockchain, we try to do it in a different way. as a linked list.

we see several problems with this primitive architecture:

* People have great ideas about blockchain potential but we don’t see successful deliveries. No mainstream applications, nothing used in normal people’s daily lives.

This is to a large degree an outcome of a difficult to use technology both for users and for developers

For developers: They need a proper database really. Same tech that built Amazon etc web 1.0. Web 2.0 (Facebook was done with PhP and A RELATIONAL DATABASE). WordPress, the dominant web platform

Over to enterprise: SAP. CRM Systems. Core banking.

ALL DONE WITH A RELATIONAL DATABASE.

you need these features to make successful applications with ease

For users: we need better UX. We also try to fix that with Chromia: free to use apps, free to play games. SIngle Sign On

maybe enough on one core problem: Blockchain is about managing data, and it is not now using the best way to manage data

Minal:

Amazing guys! As it is said, we can not solve the problems with the same level of thinking that created them. And crypto was made to deal with modern problems in innovative ways. Chromia surely looks like a fitting solution and on the way to enable Crypto adoption! 👍

Can you also help our community understand how are Chromaway and Chromia related?

Henrik Hjelte:

Chromia is a brainchild of ChromaWay. ChromaWay has a long record of delivering pioneering projects around the world. We started with public blockchains, tokens in 2012, the world’s first stable coin with a bank 2015 (LHV). When coding that solution, peer to peer payments of Euro-tokens, we discovered we need performance reasons to store all data in a database. We needed to quickly know the “balance” of a user, and can’t loop through a blockchain. And slowly the idea grew that we can make the database INTO a blockchain, integrate completely with the transaction mechanism of a database. So we did it as a private blockchain first (Postchain), used it for some projects, then came up with the idea to make a Public Blockchain based on it.

The motivation is that we felt we needed a better programming model for blockchains. Our CTO Alex has always been thinking of optimal solutions for blockchain technology and has lots of experiences thinking about it.

Also: make real-world useful things. For example, we support free-to-play models since users do not need to own “our” token to USE apps, the application itself (often the developer) pays for hosting.

And of course, great performance. Also: more knowledge of who runs nodes and risk level. So it is more suitable for enterprises.

In Chromia the application (at the start the developer) decides Who should be allowed to run its own blockchain (every dapp has its own blockchain).

You can also say on a higher level that we want to provide technology to create “Public applications”, a tool that enables us to create a more fair world.

Minal:

That’s brilliant!

Being part of the gamer community I would like to know what you would think about collaborating with a MOBA, RPG, or Arcade game or similar kind of a project?

Henrik Hjelte:

We are already collaborating with some smaller studios. For bigger fish, we want to show them what is completely unique and visionary with Chromia, and we think we need various examples. So the first Action-Adventure game Mines of Dalarnia (https://www.minesofdalarnia.com), is one example, it is not the full potential or anything but a start.

In this summer, krystopia 2 a puzzle game from Antler Interactive will be released (https://krystopiagame.com).

What is even cooler is the “demo project” we do together with them, where we will show how a multiplayer game with real blockchain features will work.

I saw it not long ago and was blown away 🙂

Oh, and there is another studio releasing something very very cool on Chromia platform. Full logic on chain strategy game. Chain of Alliance. It is already on Public Testnet, so you can try it out here https://www.chainofalliance.com.

FULL LOGIC ON CHAIN….

I’ll end with that scream

Minal:

That’s very exciting! I guess gamers in our community will be really happy with these developments. This also makes me think which all sectors can Chromia be applied in?

Henrik Hjelte:

Chromia can benefit in a vast number sectors, ranging from gaming to finance. In the past year, Chromia has been used for dapps in sectors such as medical, social networks, legal, private institutions and many more.

Chromia allows any kind of dapp to be created on the platform, due to its high scalability and performance.

Any idea can be converted into reality by building on Rell. Remember we are close to the tech that built core banking, facebook, wordpress etc……

maybe enough now on this, we can talk about it later

Minal:

Amazing! Moving on to my last question before we move to our next section of the AMA. What does Chromia’s slogan “Power to the Public” stand for? And what makes Chromia different?

Henrik Hjelte:

Those are two questions. As you see, we have attention to details…

i’ll take the first one, first.

“Power to the public” means we want to support creating public applications, decentralized applications that are “public goods” such as decentralized social networks
public sector applications that are probably fair and corruption-resistant games with logic on chain probably fair and where users have a say.

Serge:

I’ll take the Second 😉

Henrik Hjelte:

Here is a blog post by our visionary CTO on this: https://blog.chromia.com/towards-publicly-hosted-applications/

Let me also add:

How can we do that? I think the reason we don’t see these applications yet is that they are really difficult to do with today’s blockchains. Chromia has another programming model, inherited from relational databases, the same technology used by 99% of all non-trivial applications. Enterprise applications such as SAP, Social networks like Facebook. All were done on a relational database (SQL).

And now I’ve repeated myself enough, over to Serge on second one

“Q: what makes Chromia different?”

Serge:

What makes Chromia different ?

The main advantage is easiness thanks to the relational database aspects. Relational databases are run by 100% of the enterprises, (85% of the database market) at the moment, way above any key value store or noSQL at the backend. It makes it easier for enterprises to integrate our tech stack to their systems without the need to redo them like in most cases where blockchain pilots have failed. That’s why we had success with customers who live in the Chromia network. It’s very easy for developers to deploy dapps because they already know SQL-style programming. Keep in notice that we worked with customers and developers to build our tech stack while solving problems for them. We didn’t build something unneeded, we had proof of validation from the market.

We chose Ethereum for our token because it’s the goto option for all pre-mainnet tokens because of infrastructure and relatively long history.

Our native Mainnet will support tokens in the next release so we will transfer the majority of ERC20 tokens to our network.

It’s in a very short form, of course we have a lot of other distinguishing features, but we will talk about them later

Minal:

Great @sergelubkin! Since we have announced our AMA on twitter there were a lot of questions surrounding the Chromia project. We have curated 3 top questions from the lot. With your permission, I would love to ask those questions before we open the group for community questions.

Serge:

Sure!

Let’s go

Minal:

Twitter questions:

1. Regarding Chromia’s blockchain game (Minesofdalarnia), I’m quite sure that the vast majority of game lovers would be anticipating its release, could you please share with us the likely date it will be released?

2. What makes your platform unique? Why should developers choose to develop Dapps on your platform?

3. What special about the business transparency project (GAW)? Why is Green Assets Wallet considered as the flagship App for the Chromia Project?

Over to you @sergelubkin @henrik_hjelte

Henrik Hjelte:

I can take 3

anastasia maybe 1?

serge 2?

Serge:

I thought all three! 😅

Ok! I’ll help @anastasiazudina with 1st one

Henrik Hjelte:

This is why I’m not a core developers, I cause bugs

GAW 1: Green Assets Wallet was one of our recent partnerships.. A co-creation of leading capital market actors, green finance experts and technology innovators, the GAW uses Chromia’s blockchain to build a platform for trusted and transparent information about green investment opportunities. It directs capital towards investment opportunities that deliver green impact by i) reducing issuance and reporting costs for issuers, and ii) providing a means for investors to discover and monitor green investments.

Ok I continue… the Green Assets Wallet is a collaboration of sustainable fintech innovation hub Stockholm Green Digital Finance, the climate research institute CICERO, the Nordic financial services group SEB, the asset manager Öhman, world’s largest asset manager Blackrock, real estate developer Vasakronan, asset owner Mistra, geographic data provider GIB, China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group (CECEP) as well as the Emerging Markets Sustainability Dialogues (EMSD) programme of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, commissioned and financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

How about that lineup? 😊

The Chromia mainnet makes an app like the GAW possible, by supporting truly decentralised performance at scale.

We have worked hard to make Chromia ready for truly usable decentralized applications, it marks the culmination of almost six years pioneering blockchain technology. We are proud to host the GAW, and look forward to more world-changing applications made possible by the platform.

Even more on GAW (Green Assets Wallet): The blockchain is where the project’s critical innovation lies. The trust-by-design architecture of the platform offers investors real-time and direct access to issuer information and impact reports. The ground-breaking platform equips the green debt market with the technology to step up investments needed to deliver on the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the recently unveiled European Green Deal.

And I’ll end on GAW by pointing out a cool thing:

THis is a public blockchain application, but used by serious financial institutions. A very very rare occurrence

Serge:

1. Mines of Dalarnia was released on Public Chromia Testnet in May. Thanks for your interest, we always welcome new players to try the game. A little bit about the game: In Mines of Dalarnia (https://www.minesofdalarnia.com), players get to explore the vast expanses of interplanetary treasure mines.

With an innovative Dalarnia Token system, players can purchase virtual mining plots, and put them up for rent into the community−allowing for real-estate tycoons to earn more Tokens.

Mining plots can also undergo their upgrades, making them more lucrative to explore and a hot property for a rental by miners.

The game takes advantage of these NFT-based tokens to securely track exchanges, and provide a sense of ownership and wealth to players as they grow their mining and resource empire.

Watch our trailer! https://youtu.be/bDXKOp1Asqw. You can already start playing by using this link: https://testnet.minesofdalarnia.com. And if you want to join the conversations on the game, here is the link https://testnet.chromunity.com/c/MoD

Now 2nd question…

Henrik Hjelte:

Ok I take it?

Repeat on that one question:

Q. What make Chromia unique.
(a good relevant question).
why should developers choose to develop Dapps on your platform ?

Minal:

Yes! That’s right.

Henrik Hjelte:

Our main feature is the ability to put full DApp logic on the chain so it’s based on blockchain technology. Why do DApps need blockchain? Good question! We believe decentralization puts power back into users’ hands and creates more fairness, because users are in control of their assets, their personal information, and of applications.

Also blockchain is perfectly suitable for referral programs, and other marketing applications when transparency is the key.

We believe the DApp market now it’s in its early days and more people will come, especially with better UI/UX that DApps on Chromia can provide.

We have some professional IT companies building stuff on Rell and Postchain now, even when it is in Alpha. And we get a really good response from individual developers even though we only had a Preview of Rell out. So I’m quite happy.

Also, it is always the case that people will say, “How will your little language compete with the big one that everyone is using”?

I’m sure we’ll get that question again…

so here is first answer:
A few years ago we had PHP. The big language that everyone was using. And then a small little toy “ruby on rails” captured momentum, after that node.js plus javascript etc.
Developers want productive tools and are not afraid to learn better new languages.
When you see that you can do your project a lot faster and better with Chromia, you will try it.
faster and better? Try 1/10 less lines of code….

https://blog.chromia.com/reasons-for-rell-compactness/

Henrik Hjelte:

I may not have time to answer all questions, sorry for that

Minal:

Woah! You can see the love for Chromia in our community!

Henrik Hjelte:

Also sorry sometimes I’ll be supershort, and sometimes lengthy….

Minal:

Some good number of questions your way @henrik_hjelte @sergelubkin, can you quickly pick 5 questions from the lot?

User:

The primary problem of ETHEREUM is Scalability, How can Chromia assure that this will never happen in the long term as thousands of Dapp developers move to Chromia?

Serge:

Henrik, I’ll take this one, ok?:)

So, to answer this we need to understand what’s the major bottleneck of Ethereum

First of all, if you run a dapp on Ethereum you run it on all nodes at the same time, you also compete for the gas with all other users.
Moreover, Ethereum network itself wasn’t planned to handle so many transactions by design
So we have network wide competition for scarce resources + architectural limitations = nasty bottleneck, everyone’s struggling

In Chromia each dapp has its own blockchain
So even if a dapp has unexpected big volume it doesn’t influence the network at all
Plus the code is super optimized for high load. So to overload the dapp you need to put a lot of efforts
We also make it possible for a dapp to scale more easily, with the same experience as with Amazon Web Services- a dapp dev just need to add more nodes, or parallelize processes with more blockchains, that’s it!

User:

Does Chromia allow powerful transactions?

Henrik Hjelte:
Yes. I’m serious. Our transactions are more powerful than other blockchains. It sounds like a joke, but this is how I’m thinking:

First: it is vague what is a “transaction” really? Something that changes the state of blockchain? Moving some tokens between A and B?

IN our world: a transaction is a transaction in a relational database system. That is a very powerful unique technology. You have heard that they are Atomic, Isolated, Durable and something on C… ACID.

The thing is that a SERIES OF OPERATIONS happen, the database is either changed completely, or not changed.
A series of operations, this can be complex stuff. For example:

1. Move all 20.000 troops in the game one position.

2. Resolve battle to gain new terrains.

3. Update scores.

Or for an enterprise app: payout dividends to all shareholders
This is complex stuff, involving thousands of operations in a single transaction.
So when you say “blockchain A has gazillion of transactions”. Ask yourself “what is a transaction”?
and then “do they make tradeoffs in decentralization”?
So: our transactions are like 11 instead of 10 on the amp. (see “Spinal Tap” movie).

User:

Do you have plans to extend to other markets? Like South America?

Henrik:

Absolutely. We do a project now together with InterAmerican Development Bank to look at land-registration processes in 3 countries, and we have more projects coming

User:

What are the limitations applied to protect determinism and consensus? More precisely, how are these limitations determined in the chain system?

How does Rell and Postchain play a role in managing these limitations?

I’m not sure I completely get it but:

Determinism: we needed to make a new language Rell to ensure that compared to the normal database language SQL. Non Deterministic operations.

Also: behind the scenes, we also have a “low level” blockchain with chained together sequential operations stored in the database. But application developers only need to look at state in the database, that is the trick. So Chromia is a full blockchain, AND a full database.

Consensus: protection? We have a system based on proven research and experience, for many many years (PBFT-like), then add layers even ending in anchoring in PoW and PoS. See whitepaper for more details.

User:

For creating DApps, Why should any developer choose CHR instead of any other Blockchain? What are the additional benefits are provided by CHR than other Blockchains?

Henrik:

1/10 of the codelines. Same tech that built Amazon and Facebook and made Larry Ellision buy a private island.

Fewer lines of code = fewer bugs. Faster development (cheaper). Faster time to market. More fun…

https://blog.chromia.com/reasons-for-rell-compactness/

User:

Chromia Vault Single Sign On (SSO) reduces the times que need to enter our password to log in, but how does it preserve security?

Henrik:

Authenticator descriptors allow you to attach multiple keypairs to one account. Believe it or not, you don’t have to remember it. In fact you should not save it and just forget it. The authenticator descriptor is explicitly permitted to send transactions only in the module (smart contract) specified at the moment of delegation. And you can also prevent it from sending money.

Furthermore, thanks to Chromia architecture (one chain per dapp), in case the keypair of the authenticator descriptor is compromised, it can only steal the tokens that have been assigned to that dapp.

Now, let’s say that you create a disposable authorization descriptor, how can you prevent it from draining your assets in case it gets compromised? Well, you can attach rules to it at the moment of creation.

So the authenticator descriptor is only valid for a session, it can perform a limited number of operations, be limited in time or blocktime. Or all the conditions together.

Lastly the real juice. How can I have different keypair in each dapp by only remembering one passphrase?

As we saw it is possible to delegate authenticator descriptors across dapps. This means that if we elect a master account (we do that in Vault chain), and we make sure that the passphrase / keypair we have in there is well protected. We can automatically login to any dapp with a seamless user experience.

It is in many ways easier than any other existing unified login system, centralized or not. Once the user has an account in the vault, it only requires 2 clicks to be registered and logged in on any chromia dapp. Just like signing in with Google, or Facebook, only this way the user stays in control.

more on that here https://blog.chromia.com/chromia-sso-the-whys-and-the-whats/

User:

Almost every dApp or blockchain built for dApps has failed to get substantial users, what do you view as the roadblocks for current dApps to gather users and why do you believe Chromia will be able to change this?

two reasons:

Bad UX for developers. It has been easy to do naive prototypes, but when you want a REAL commercial application experience tells us that a Relational Database is a good serious backend. ANd that tech has not existed in blockchain.

So apps are not that good…

Bad UX for users: Need to OWN tokens to USE an app is a blocker. Also, we need to improve ease of onboarding etc.

My son, 12 years old and his school friends could easily start to play Mines of Dalarnia for example. No stopping of commercial possibilities

Another example: Financial serious companies like BlackRock and SEB can USE the green assets wallet on Chromia

User:

I am a gamer and a builder, how can I enjoy MINES OF DALARNIA and also launch my games on CHROMIA RELL

To launch it on rell, please read the code 😉 https://rell.chromia.com/en/master/

User:

Dapp users are exposed to security risk, how will Chromia SSO fix this ?

Smash ball. Read here: https://blog.chromia.com/chromia-sso-the-whys-and-the-whats/

User:

Is @Chromia the only blockchain with a relational database?

Yes as far as I know. You can always “add” a database for storing data to a blockchain. but then you have two sources of truth and you are not using the databases full capabilities for ensuring correct data. Again: banks trust this technology to keep core data…

Minal:

Amazing! Loved the questions and answers. The community never fails to surprise us.

Before we say goodbye to @henrik_hjelte, @sergelubkin, and the Chromia team, I would love to know what’s next for India on the Chromia roadmap? How can the community get involved with Chromia directly? Lastly, what are the prerequisites for developers to start developing on Chromia?

Over to you @henrik_hjelte @sergelubkin

Serge:

First of all please join our Indian community

https://t.me/ChromiaIndia

All updates regarding India will be there, so stay tuned;)

Serge:

First of all please join our Indian community

https://t.me/ChromiaIndia

All updates regarding India will be there, so stay tuned;)

Serge:

ICYMI – AMA with Chromia

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