Mr.But
Dear community, Today VIC Group will hold an AMA with ORCHID protocol
Today’s AMA will consist of 3 parts
👉 Part 1: Basic introduction to the ORCHID protocol with Dr. Steven Waterhouse-CEO of the ORCHID protocol
👉Part 2: Dr. Steven Waterhouse-CEO of the ORCHID protocol will answer questions from the community from to twitter
👉 Part 3: All members can ask directly anything about the ORCHID protocol
Hello @orchid7 glad you were here today to join the AMA with VIC group.
We’ll start with the first part of the AMA . Are you ready?
Mr.7
yes Im ready!
Mr.But
👉 Part 1 : Basic Introduction of ORCHID protocol with Dr Steven Waterhouse-CEO of ORCHID protocol
Please invite guests to briefly introduce the project and themselves @orchid7
Mr.7
Hi. Im Dr Steven Waterhouse (aka “7”). Im the CEO and co founder of Orchid Labs.
Ive been working in “blockchain” since 2013. I co founded Pantera Capital and was CTO and Head of Venture Investments till 2016. We invested in many early companies including Zcash, Bitstamp, Circle, Xapo, Polychain and more In 2017 my co founders and I started Orchid Labs. Our team includes Jay Freeman (CTO) who built the Cydia app store for jailbroken iPhones — the first “app” store for iphones.
And Brian Fox, who was the first employee of the Free Software foundation, author of bash and maintainer of GNU emacs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Freeman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox_(computer_programmer)
Orchid takes a new approach to digital privacy with the first peer-to-peer, incentivized privacy network. On the Orchid Network, anyone can buy and sell bandwidth using the Orchid DApp coin (OXT). Users can browse privately and access content without being limited by their geography. With its decentralized design, multi-hop architecture, and Open Source ethos, Orchid offers users unprecedented digital privacy in a trustless context.
Orchid is a decentralized marketplace for digital privacy. It brings together the services of the world’s top VPN providers within a unique blockchain-based architecture.
Orchid lets users combine the services of multiple VPN providers with multiple “hops” for greater anonymity. Orchid’s dynamic marketplace ensures there is always ample bandwidth supply.
Finally, Orchid is easy to use, requiring only an ordinary credit card to set up an account on the app.
With surveillance on the rise globally and privacy at the center of the conversation this year, VPN use is up. There are several important benefits to a decentralized VPN like Orchid’s, including that it is permissionless and cannot be shut down. The Orchid VPN in particular is designed as a two-sided open marketplace for bandwidth, which means users can access multiple bandwidth providers, and many smaller providers, curated in a whitelist. Users can configure multiple hops with the Orchid VPN, for additional privacy protection. All of this is powered by the Orchid digital asset OXT, thanks to the layer-2 scaling solution on Ethereum that Orchid built in-house, probabilistic nanopayments, that facilitates marketplace incentives.
Mr.But
Thanks to the introduction we will have a few questions before continuing with Part II, you might be happy to answer
How much does Orchid cost to use? Is there a monthly subscription? @orchid7
Mr.7
There is no monthly subscription for Orchid users — the service is pay-as-you-go. While there is no set price for Orchid in dollar terms, in general the service is comparable to standard VPN providers, and offers the benefit of not locking users into “take it or leave it” subscriptions.
You can pay for service using OXT or using in app payments on your iPhone
Mr.But
So Orchid is only available for MacOS and iOS? @orchid7
Mr.7
Nope! Orchid is available on Android, iOS, macOS, Linux and most recently Windows!
Our goal is to enhance the digital privacy of people everywhere and we are proud to be available across all major platforms.
And all our code is open source and available here: https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies/orchid
Mr.But
Can someone use Orchid anywhere in the world?
Mr.7
Orchid is designed to let people explore the Internet freely, no matter where in the world they are. Earlier this year, some of our users in regions as diverse as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America shared their experiences using Orchid in their daily lives.
https://blog.orchid.com/how-people-are-reclaiming-internet-freedom-from-dubai-to-ukraine-to-venezuela/
And over the past year, Orchid has been listed on most of the leading exchanges around the world, with particular growth in Asia. Ultimately, Orchid’s mission is to offer online privacy to everyone around the world. And we are now very excited to be part of the Huobi family!!!
Mr.But
Thanks for the wonderful response from the guests, we will continue with Part II of AMA
These are questions gathered from Twitter coming from people interested in the project
The first question: Which area does #orchidprotocol focus on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake, Dapps ..) and your goals in next year? @orchid7
Mr.7
All the work Orchid does is via our open source community. Our community goals for the app are to improve speed and payment efficiency. As usage grows there will be opportunities for new providers to become part of the network. To explain “staking” please follow along here:
Orchid uses the Ethereum blockchain in a number of ways:
- Orchid Curators (curated lists of nodes) are registered to the blockchain. For example, the default Curator has its own .eth domain and you can see it when you check your Orchid hop settings.
— Creating an Orchid account and funding it both happen on-chain. You “lift” your OXT from the Orchid nanopayment smart contract during the process, and everything is secured and validated via Ethereum.
— And of course Orchid’s account management dApp requires a Web3 enabled browser, or an extension, to work. MetaMask works nicely.
OXT, Orchid’s digital asset, facilitates the operation of Orchid’s bandwidth marketplace. Bandwidth providers advertise by staking OXT on the network, and users ultimately pay for service in OXT.
So in other words, as a provider you “stake” OXT to advertise your services. As traffic grows, more OXT would be used by a provider to increase the relevance of their service.
Mr.But
Thanks for the answer we will continue with the second question: Who are the Orchid end users and what will they use the token for? @orchid7
Mr.7
Privacy is Orchid’s mission. Increasingly, constant surveillance is a fact of life online. Orchid’s founders come from deep backgrounds of focusing on questions of privacy, and saw an opportunity to use a decentralized, open-source platform to help advance this important cause.
So we believe Orchid will be used by people who want a new kind of VPN service — one which does not log your data, or sell it, and offers you the experience you expected in terms of privacy
Orchid does not collect any personal data whatsoever. Not your name, email address, home address, credit card number, etc.
The Orchid client app shows you a traffic monitor of what’s happening on your device, but that data is not sent to Orchid or anyone else.
Orchid’s server side software does not collect logs, and therefore neither the bandwidth provider or Orchid has access to that. To be frank, Orchid does not want your data!
In all honesty, it makes building and marketing Orchid much harder, but it’s a principle we cannot compromise on and we feel it’s worth the extra effort to provide a truly private service. Even Orchid’s website, at orchid.com, doesn’t have any cookies, and all the JavaScript was recently removed.
Mr.But
Thanks to the answers from the guests, according to this information, we are confident there will be no data collected from OXT.
We will continue to the third question: Comparing to traditional VPN, Orchid has many advantages about technologies, privacy and innovation. However, with high gas fee on ETH, users need to pay 5–6 $ fee to purchase Oxt to pay for service, it wont be good for long term bussiness Sustainability. Any solutions for this? @orchid7
Mr.7
Yes our community is working on solutions for this issue. Just to explain how payments work first Orchid’s nanopayments solution is essentially our own layer 2 chain, but a little bit different. When you’re connected to the service, your payments are streamed to the providers on a byte-by-byte basis. So you could be sending as little as 0.000000000000000001 OXT each second based on the traffic you’re sending across the service. The smallest unit of OXT is called a keiki. Every once in a while, to catch up with nanopayments, an on-chain lottery ticket is issued. You need enough OXT in your account to generate this ticket, and a provider must claim it. This helps secure the network on Ethereum’s layer 1 blockchain.
You can read more about it on our blog. https://blog.orchid.com/introducing-nanopayments/
So OXT is used for both staking by providers and also by users for payments.
In order to set up an Orchid nanopayment account however, some contract code needs to be run on Ethereum. Because of high gas fees recently, the amount of OXT that is required to stake on the user side and to run the code is very high — much higher than we would like for wide spread adoption. So our community is focused on other ideas here and we expect some new approach to come out of this work shortly
Mr.But
Thanks for the reply from the guest, we will continue with question 4 : Are you planning to make products on your chain? (some projects I know are doing to generate project / company revenue). In the crypto sector it is difficult to generate revenue, so Do you have a plan to generate revenue in the world of crypto? @orchid7
Mr.7
We are excited about the new work the community is doing related to opening up the Orchid node provider software to enable new kinds of applications to be run on Orchid.
For example, if you are a VPN user and have an issue with a firewall, maybe someone could write a new plug in for Orchid network and enable that firewall to be overcome again. IF that required a full upgrade of the network and release of new software for everyone that would be a bad thing. So Orchid was designed to enable plug in modules which enable new code to be run easily Moving beyond the VPN used case, if new code can be run, then perhaps new kinds of applications can be written which take advantage of the Orchid network. For example streaming, distributed computation etc.
Also, there seems to be potential for the Orchid nanopayments service to be used by other kinds of systems — its the fastest and most scalable layer 2 payments network and there could be many kinds of things that could benefit from this.
Mr.But
Thanks for the answer, we will continue with the last question before moving on to part III of AMA: The biggest #OXT of any project is its Community, No Project Can grow Without Community Support. How are you going to Build a #OXT Community? How will you gain Community trust? @orchid7
Mr.7
Well with all your help! We hope to grow with our new Vietnamese community here and beyond. We are now live on all major global exchanges and translated into many orlobal languages and plan to release many more.
We have active communities across the globe and would welcome support from anyone in Vietnam who would like to get involved and grow our community there
Mr.But
It seems that the opportunity to develop a community in Vietnam is possible for everyone here , right @orchid7
Mr.7
Yes
Mr.But
Everyone prepare questions so that we can continue with Part III
We will unmuted the group within 2 minutes for everyone to ask questions and concerns around the #orchidprotocol project
Let’s GO !!!!!!!! Question!!!!!!!! - Question : Can you explain how is your Tokenomics Distribution? How many tokens Will be minted ? And How many tokens Will be locked by the team?
Mr.7
https://www.orchid.com/oxt/ has the full release schedule. As of right now the majority of all SAFT releases and other release are complete.
Question: Q:I want to support your project, Tell us more about the Ambassador Program and in what ways can we participate ?
Mr.7
Please join our official Orchid community and send me a DM
https://t.me/OrchidOfficial - Question: Although ETH 2.0 is delayed to next year, but it will solve all exist problem of ETH and become the best choise for dApps in future, so do you think this is a threat for your project and how could you overcome this barrier?
Mr.7
ETH 2.0 doesnt solve all problems, and will not be live for at least a year. It doenst pose a threat either. All dapps will probably migrate over, and there will be new opportunities for privacy such as more efficient ZK proofs etc. We are excited for this future.
Question: Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and many project developed here so with your project what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have any plan to develop here?
Mr.7
yes! We are in Indonesia on IndoDax and translated into Indonesian, and look forward to new translations for Vietnamese — if you want to be part of that effort please get involved and DM us.
Question : How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates??
Mr.7
How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates?? - Question : Tell me its 3 unique features that your competitor doesn’t have? How will people attract toward Your project?
Mr.7
Mulithop security, WebRTC based wireline protocol, efficient payments, fully decentralzied design, in app payments, privacy designed in from the beginning. Available on Apple platforms unlike any other decentralized VPN, OXT available on all gloabl exchanges. I’d also like to point out 2 articles that just went live
https://www.cnet.com/news/orchid-vpn-review-it-uses-the-tech-behind-bitcoin-to-improve-privacy/
https://www.cnet.com/news/cnets-2020-innovation-award-winners-made-things-better-during-a-rugged-year/
“4. Orchid VPN
With people doing a lot more online in 2020 — from shopping to learning to socializing to organizing — the internet privacy and security problems we’ve been sweeping under the rug for over 20 years are starting to show. Phishing scams, malware, identity theft and other forms of attacks are getting more clever and artful. That’s bad for people in the US, UK or Australia, but it’s even worse if you’re living under a repressive regime and you find yourself on the wrong side of an argument about the future.
What can average citizens use to protect themselves? VPNs, which CNET writes a lot about. But even the best VPNs have their weaknesses. In 2020, a new decentralized Blockchain-powered VPN called Orchid is changing the balance of power to give the little people some more control. (Blockchain is the technology and the secret sauce behind the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin.) Orchid’s not ready for the masses to use yet, but it could pave the way for better consumer protection. Read Rae Hodge’s breakdown of why Orchid represents a clear leap forward for VPN, privacy and security.
Question : Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like yours?
Mr.7
I was personally very concerned about online privacy and security after leaving Pantera. I experience a personal hacking moment : https://medium.com/@sevenactual/notes-on-recovering-from-a-hack-3cd438e10fe0 which motivated me to find solutions in general in this area.
Talking to my co founders and people like Naval Ravikant and Olaf from Polychain I realized there was no solution in the decentralized VPN space and began researching ideas in this space
Question : What are some of the major achievements that Your Project has achieved and what milestones are planned ahead in the next 6 months, 1 year and 5 years?
Mr.7
In 2020, Orchid’s engineering team contributed strongly to the Orchid open source community, shipping new features and releases, adding support for additional operating systems, improved speed and enhanced user experience. Thanks to their work, Orchid’s speed increased nearly tenfold. Orchid launched in the Apple App Store, in addition to the Google Play store where it originally launched, with an in-app purchases feature that masks the blockchain for a seamless credit card payment experience. Orchid became available on MacOS, and on desktop with Linux and Windows.
New partnerships drove Orchid forward this year. Those included bringing top VPNs into our network as bandwidth providers, including PIA, Boleh, VPNSecure, and LiquidVPN. We also announced support for Wireguard®️ and launched a project with Chainlink: building decentralized price oracles to help users better understand bandwidth pricing. Finally, this year OXT began to trade on the top digital asset exchanges worldwide, including Gemini, Kraken, Bittrex, OKEx, Coinlist, Binance, and CoinDCX and HUOBI! , in addition to Coinbase where it first launched. OXT is also supported by nearly all major wallets.
AMA END thanks everyone for today joining the AMA and guests @orchid7 ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️