AMA Recap GreatDrop with PARALINK NETWORK
Hello GreatDrop community,
On 4th of March 2021, at 12:00 PM UTC (19:00 WIB). we just successfully hosted our 26th AMA with PARALINK NETWORK. With our guest from PARALINK NETWORK team:
- Jan Knežević, CEO of PARALINK NETWORK
Many of you might have participated or many of not, So here we are up with the AMA transcript for those who missed the AMA session.
Introduction Questions Asked By GreatDrop Team
Would you like to share with everyone a quick introduction about yourself as well as a quick overview of Paralink Network?
I am Jan Knezevic and I'm the CEO of Paralink Network. My background is in business and economics- more specifically i worked as an auditor for KPMG, i was an actuary in a life insurance company and later on, I transitioned into consulting blockchain projects with accounting and business development as well as conducting internal audits. Last year i was part of a team that acted as a data vendor for blockchain data, we collected pricing, on-chain, and sentiment data and created qualitative indicators for traders. I was also an active day and swing trader on the stock market trading stocks and stock options and later on transitioned into trading cryptocurrencies.
Paralink is a multi-chain oracle platform and we decided to build it on Polkadot.
First of all, the real-world data ingress is done by Paralink Nodes through our own Paralink Query Langauge-PQL. This allows one to query SQL databases, access web APIs, scrape websites as well as access state from other blockchains. It's a robust solution that is easily extendible to support custom data sources (actually right there is an issue with the existing solutions since the technical barrier to creating a custom data source is high and takes forever). Besides the data, we have support for post-processing in a permissionless way via on-chain relayer quorums as well as reliable channeling of the computation results via PQL callbacks.
The next aspect of the project is the Paralink node and its query language. With it, you will be able to query APIs. databases but also parse JSON, XML, and HTML, support multiple data sources, apply math functions, do typecast, aggregations, and much more.
The last point which is extremely important to us is the On-chain security as well as the integrity of this data. This is a huge challenge and we think that so far it hasn’t been solved properly. So in Paralink, we have something called Relayer quorums which are self-organizing data repositories with reward token mechanics (as well as slashing of course) that aggregate and validate real-world information. Our infrastructure is built with Substrate which means we get high throughput and economically feasible computing costs. Due to this technology stack, we can also relay computation results from Polkadot to other chains as well, but also monitor reliability via public reputation systems.
Q1. What is Paralink? And how is the story behind the Paralink creation?
We decided to build it in Q2 of 2020 after looking at other oracle solutions and seeing that the technology stack they are built on isn’t sufficient for providing a stable and resilient service. That is why we decided to build on Polkadot to achieve higher throughput and add sufficiently expressive ETL systems and an advanced querying language which we felt were lacking in the current solutions. A more detailed summary is already given in the previous answer.
Q2. What is so exciting about Paralink, which might make Paralink different from all other projects out there?
I’d like to show you a comparison table so you can have a clear picture of the advantages that we have over the current competitors. One of the biggest additions is the advanced queries and ETLs. We believe this will change the way people build Dapps and think about data ingress into smart contracts.
Also, having cross-chain capabilities while maintaining on-chain validation and aggregation gives us the flexibility to do the kind of processing never possible before.
Q3. Please tell us more about $PARA token! What utilities does the token have, and what benefits will tokens holders get?
First of all, it's used to pay the transaction costs of the callbacks as well as for services provided by the relayer quorums.
Besides this, it also serves an important role for incentives -so it can be staked into the relayer quorums — and those get rewarded for providing useful work — also the other way around — slashed for misbehavior.
It's also a governance token, so you can vote for collators on the parachain as well as calibrating other parameters through the ecosystem.
And lastly, you can use it to provide liquidity in PARA AMMs and earn more of them.
Questions asked on Twitter for PARALINK NETWORK team
Q1 from Twitter username @Prettyboy071
Is Paralink a safe and reliable platform for investors? What value does Paralink bring to investors as well as the blockchain community?
To satisfy all kinds of applications, Paralink offers 3 security models with different costs, convenience, and security characteristics.
The Simple oracle is the most convenient and accessible. This is meant for use inside corporations for services that are not connected with financial instruments (logistics chains, Production chains, etc.)
The trusted oracle solution is similar to Chainlink and other trusted oracle solutions as it is dependant on the source of the trusted information to be perfect at all times. This has shown itself as a big liability especially with the recent coinbase API outage which unfairly liquidated DeFi assets holders.
The on-chain consensus solution is unique to Paralink and is the most secure solution out there.
For more information about the pros and cons of each solution check here.
Q2 from Twitter username @Rosanela08
The oracle of Paralink is on Polkadot’s blockchain, how can the platform allow the oracle to be functional with Dapps without corrupting their native decentralized approach?
Paralink as said earlier will have multiple solutions to the oracle problem and one of them is the on-chain consensus with relayer quorums. The relayer quorums will allow multiple sources of information to be relayed to blockchains which will make it the most decentralized solution out there.
Questions asked by our GreatDrop community members during live Session to PARALINK NETWORK team
Q1 from Telegram username @topind7
I am very much interested in everything about Paralink Network project, do you have any channels or communities where I can learn more about your project and also get the latest news and updates so as not to miss out?
You can check our social media and blog for regular announcements.
Q2 from Telegram username @Jonas99999
Tell us a little bit about security? Have you done an audit of the platform? Are the smart contracts error-free? What are the test results?
We have performed a security audit at Halborn.
Q3 from Telegram username @lakikopal
Could you give me 2 or 3 key points to convince me and other angel investors to invest in the project for the long-term?
Most generalized oracle solution-suitable for the widest array of applications
Most functional querying
Most secure oracle solution — On-chain consensus
Q4 from Telegram username @bimasurya88
Paralink is built on the ethereum blockchain, which we know at the moment, the cost and speed of gas are quite expensive, what solutions can you provide money with these conditions? will your platform switch to another block chain?
Paralink is built on a substrate and will use Darwinias polkadot to ethereum bridge for relaying results to ethereum projects.
Q5 from Telegram username @WUTTORP
Your project has great features. There must be an experienced team behind. Can you tell some about your team and their experiences in the market?
Our developers have worked and contributed in multiple ecosystems including Steem and EOS, while we have people who have been in operational roles at Parity, Consensys, Tendermint, and Bitfury. We are mostly based in Europe, but we have a marketing division in the US as well as Asia.
Q6 from Telegram username @bobi07
I’m reading it sounds like paralink is trying to solve the oracle problem using PQL. What are the advantages of using PQL??
how fast are the speeds of the throughput compared to chainlink, band, API3, and Umbrella Network??
And is the project still decentralized if you need developers to continually add data??
PQL definitions represent ETL (extract, transform, load) pipelines for sourcing, aggregating, and validating information. They are the basis of oracle requests (jobs). While this may sound daunting, PQL definitions are just a small subset of what you as a developer are already familiar with: JSON and SQL.
PQL currently supports HTTP. get, SQL.Postgres, ethereum.function, ethereum.balance methods. It can parse JSON and SQL responses. For Ethereum it also automatically finds and initiates the appropriate APIs.
Information from multiple data sources can be aggregated using mean, median, or mode. It also supports basic math operations such as +, -, *, /, %.
The information can be validated off-chain using validation functions such as min_participation, mode_consensus, and variance_threshold.
And lastly, the results can be type-casted into common data types as expected by virtual machines running the smart contracts.
Q7 from Telegram username [Deleted Account]
Although ETH 2.0 is delayed to next year, but it will solve all exist problem of ETH and become the best choice for Dapps in future, so do you think this is a threat for your project and how could you overcome this barrier?
Paralink is a chain agnostic project and we have picked Polkadot as it is the best technology stack available for the oracle problem. If that changes in the future we will adapt and start developing on Ethereum 2.0 as well. We have great solidity devs in our team so that shouldn’t be an issue. We are closely following all the available solutions and still firmly believe that Polkadot is the right choice at this time.
Here are some important links of PARALINK NETWORK
WEBSITE: https://paralink.network/
TELEGRAM GROUP: https://t.me/paralink_network
TELEGRAM CHANNEL: http://t.me/paralinkannouncements
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/ParalinkNetwork
BLOG: https://blog.paralink.network/
GITHUB: https://github.com/paralink-network
WHITEPAPER: https://docs.paralink.network/whitepaper/summary.html
