Meter x Satoshi Club AMA Recap from 24th of February

Hello, Satoshi clubbers Another AMA took place in Satoshi Club and we would like to introduce to you the AMA session with our friends from Meter and our guest was Jay Lee — @zzangbi13 and Jady Mashao — @Jady_mashao. The AMA took place on 24 February.

The AMA session was divided into 3 parts with a total crypto reward pool of 500$

In this AMA Recap, we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.

Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&WebSite

D. | Satoshi Club:
Hello Satoshi Club! today we have an AMA session with Meter! and we are welcoming our guest — @xiaohanzhu! Welcome to Satoshi Club!

Mary | Satoshi Club:
@zzangbi13 @Jady_mashao welcome to Satoshi Club

Guys, we are really happy to have you here today and want to know about Meter as much as possible

So, please introduce yourself and tell us more about what is Meter?

Jay Lee:
To introduce our CEO @xiaohanzhu, He has a mixed engineering and finance background. The first 15 years of his career were in R&D and engineering. Afterwards he got his MBA from Wharton and started doing strategy and investments. Back in 2016 he formed a VC fund called ZMT Capital. In 2017 many of our portfolio started launching tokens include Brave (BAT) and Aion. He started investing in cryptos as well. In 2018 I finished the first fund and decided that he enjoyed BUIDL more. That is when he started working on Meter.

Meter is a highly decentralized Ethereum scaling solution with a built-in low volatility gas currency. It connects to Ethereum and other public chains as a Layer 2 protocol.

Meter has a unique hybrid consensus protocol that separates currency creation from record keeping. It uses Proof of Work to create the $MTR low volatility coin and HotStuff based PoS consensus with $MTRG governance coin to manage the ledger.

Meter launched its foundation-maintained mainnet in July 2020 after 9 months of testnet. Today we just relaunched the final round of the incentivized testnet before delivering the full-featured mainnet. We expect everything will be on the mainnet after 3 weeks.

Meter will become the most decentralized yet highest performance layer 2 solutions for Ethereum by then. t solves the performance and high gas price problems you mentioned just now. trying to provide a stable gas price with smooth and fast experience in a permissionless fashion.

Jady Mashao:
Meter is DeFi infrastructure based on the sha256 and hot stuff consensus, are goal is to achieve a global stable store of value that is decentralized and open.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
To compare with other platforms which tps will you have?

Jay Lee:
Currently, Meter supports 1500 tps on a single chain. It is limited by the speed of EVM rather than the consensus protocol. We could scale it horizontally with multiple shards and chains.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Thank you, guys for your intro! Do you have to add something or we can go to the questions from our community?

Jady Mashao:
Let me quickly introduce myself.
Hi all, I’m Jady Mashao meter ambassador based in South Africa, it a pleasure meeting you all, and hope we will have a great discussion today.

In brief, I’m an entrepreneur but come from an events management background. I have hosted a lot of social events around my city. I got introduced to crypto during the 2017 bull run. But have been an advocate ever since.

Jay Lee:
We have two tokens $MTRG is the main governance token, it is the ownership of the network. You have to stake $MTRG to validate and maintain the ledger in the system. $MTR is the low volatility coin created by 10kwh of electricity in PoW. It is used as the currency and unit of account in the system for paying gas and transaction fees. Since Meter has its own chain, we also created a Ethereum wrapped version of MTRG called $EMTRG for DEX trading on Uniswap and balancer. You could use our bridge to convert back and forth between $MTRG and $EMTRG.

We raised a seed round in 2018 and did an IEO on gate.io last July. All together raised a little over 2M in the past. The majority of the funding has been used for development instead of making noises. That is why we completed the entire solution already and a bit quiet in the space.

Also our doc site has a lot of information on the tokens and its use cases, so if you want to learn more about Meter, you could visit the doc site.

https://docs.meter.io/useful-information

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q1 from Telegram user @meml97
I read that Meter will have two tokens; $MRT and $MRTG. What are the differences between these two tokens, are they supposed to be use separated or together and why did you decide to create both at the same time? Why didn’t you just create one that could make fulfill all the needs you are trying to cover?

Jay Lee:
$MTRG is used for staking on the mainnet. $MTR is used for paying gas and transaction fees. The way we distribute newly emitted $MTRG is through on-chain auction with $MTR. Think $MTRG as the Bitcoin, $MTR is the mining credit to compete for newly emitted Bitcoin. The $MTR proceeds collected from the auction will partly distributed to the validators/stakers as block rewards, partly retained in the system that allows $MTRG holders to borrow against in the future.

Jady Mashao:
Our consensus is dual in nature, which means we have two consensus PoW for issuance and PoS for record-keeping hence the two token model.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
So, if I will have $MRTG on your mainnet chain to send it somewhere I will need some $MTR?

Jady Mashao:
Yes. It acts as the gas MTRG is only needed for governance.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Will it be possible to earn $MTR simply holding $MRTG on your wallet, as we have with neo/gas for example?

Jady Mashao:
Yes, you can stake your MTRG and receive rewards.

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q2 from Telegram user @JesusFre1tes
We are in the presence of the “BOOM” of layer 2 platforms in the DeFi and blockchain world. What are the features that make Meter stand out in this tide of layer 2 platforms and applications? What are the strategic advantages that this type of technology provides to the protocols you have developed within your project?

Jay Lee:
There are multiple layer 2 solutions currently on the market including Optimistic Rollup, zk Rollups, state channel and side chains. Zk based techniques are incompatible with existing smart contracts. Optimistic Rollup is promising but it is definitely over hyped. All the rollups solutions today require a centralized sequencer to put transactions in order. It essentially is “the house” for all the transactions on the rollup. Not only it has the power to censor and front-run transactions, but it also easily triggers regulatory issues. Think about a BitMex running on the rollup. It is very obvious who the regulators should go after. stat channels are already out of favor due to the tech limitation.

Meter takes a side chain type of approach, similar to xDai, BSC, Matic, Skale. They are either Proof of Authority based (meaning you will have to trust all the validators in the network) or modified on top of Tendermint (Cosmos). Meter uses the most advanced deterministic consensus protocol called HotStuff. Facebook’s Libra is a variant of this consensus protocol. It is several times more performant and doesn’t require the entire network to be highly synchronized (which allows a highly decentralized network) compared to Tendermint. In Meter’s implementation, with the same amount of network traffic as the current 100 nodes Cosmos network, Meter could support 10k nodes. This consensus protocol is comparable in sophistication if not more to ETH2.0.

Jady Mashao:
All chains are interoperable and scalable but lack stability. Meter functions to in increase adoption via a stable unit of account.

D. | Satoshi Club:
Can we already use your layer2 solution, or it will be implemented soon in the future?

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Incredible characteristics! On the other hand, everyone always praises their project and that’s fine. But can you honestly say what you are missing? Are there any shortcomings that you would like to correct?

Jady Mashao:
Yes its up and functional, try it out.
More functionality is still being being built but you can try our ethereum bridge.

Jay Lee:
We should build more Dapps on our platform. We have already launched MeterSwap https://swap.meter.io on the Meter mainnet for swap between MTR and MTRG tokens. We just helped Avalanche team launching the AVAX to ETH bridge which was extremely successful. We will soon launch a seamless integration with ETH in March so regular users won’t even need to be aware of the existence of Layer 2. More applications like lending borrowing, synthetic assets and derivatives trading are all coming in Q2 time frame.

Jady Mashao:
True, we are not selling the world riches, just solutions to problems the majority of people in the world face. Hece we do not position ourselves as any blockchain killer. So therfore our marketing has been a bit relaxed but 2021 will see a change in that.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Are partners with Avalanche?

Jady Mashao:
Yes we are, we are working working with them to intergrate as a re-layer.

D. | Satoshi Club:
I saw on your medium you have a lot of cool partnerships with Razor, AVAX, Harmony etc

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q3 from Telegram user @NSZR1
Bearing in mind that MTR could be used to make everyday payments such as food or clothing, how do you plan to introduce this token to the commercial world so that it is adopted by as many businesses as possible? Taking into account that the concept of cryptocurrencies is often confusing for most everyday businesses.

Jady Mashao:
True, things are brewing in the meter lab.

Jay Lee:
Our focus is to build applications that attracts users/customers right now. Also, we are planning to develop mobile wallet so it could be used on commercial world.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
As I understand when you will go live you already will have your applications, I think you prepared well, right?

Jady Mashao:
Our approach is to introduce this currency were it is most needed. The majority of tokens act more as trading instruments then currency. Our approach is for people to protect themselves against rising inflation and still be able to conduct business with stability in mind.

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Which apps are you mostly focused on?

Jady Mashao:
We are focused on building the meter stack, wallets, explorers and are working with third-party developers to integrate their apps on or chain.

Jay Lee:
Yes, but we will try much harder for broader adoption.

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q4 from Telegram user @cengizhantekin
You provide an open platform for developers to build their own decentralized applications. What kind of apps can be built, please provide some solid samples? What will the advantages for the developers be for using your platform? What is required to start working on Meter platform?

Jady Mashao:
Any sort (exchange, social sites, games) of DeFi app can be built with speed and security upfront. The added advantage is that our protocol offers stability meaning transaction fees for games could remain low cost unlike others

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Which incentives you will have for developers?

Jay Lee:
Also, we have allocated 15M MTRG tokens for collaterals for future synthetic products and ecosystem development.

Jady Mashao:
Here is a link for all developers to follow
https://docs.meter.io/developer-documentation/introduction

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q5 from Telegram user @sirdefi
I am very interested in $MTR, a metastable token that is created by proof of work. What is the difference between this “metastable” token and the famous stable tokens ($USDT, $USDC, $DAI)? Every day new stable tokens are released, why do you think this one can make a difference? What fantastic things can be done with $MTR?

Jay Lee:
Fiat-backed stablecoins like USDT and USDC are centralized and thus are subject to regulatory restrictions.

Crypto-backed stablecoins like DAI first have capacity issues. The cryptocurrency used as collaterals could only be a small percentage of the its circulation to avoid avalanche crashes during the liquidation scenarios. They also have to rely on oracles which are typically centralized (there are only limited sources of high-quality data). If the oracle provides wrong data (could be as simple as a software/hardware glitch), the entire financial system may fail. This maybe too much of systematic risk for the most fundamental building blocks of a financial system.

Meter’s full decentralization and permissionless nature is designed to avoid such systematic risks. It gives up strong pegging to USD, but maintains a long term purchasing power stable value and eliminates counter-party, regulatory, and oracle risks typically found with crypto- and fiat-backed stablecoins.

D. | Satoshi Club:
So you don’t use any oracles in your project?

Jady Mashao:
Most of the tokens are pegged to other currencies, crypto currencies or based on algorithms. Meter converts energy (electricity) to digital value. Electricity is a global asset and does not bbelong to any institute; therefore meter does not face the risks other coins face such as regulatory, oracle, decentralization and over colletrallization.

Jay Lee:
MTR doesn’t need an oracle at all.

Jady Mashao:
Our base layer does not need oracles but we have partnered with some to put tools in the hands of developers

D. | Satoshi Club:
Q6 from Telegram user @Wormz28
About the latest Meter Roadmap update, I’ve read that 2020 was a huge year for Meter with the launch of your mainnet, token sales, the release of the first Dapp built on your network, and more. I can see and tell that METER already accomplished a lot from the very launch and in 2020, but there is much more to come in 2021 and beyond right? So what’s up for 2021? May we know your short & midterm plans, like a small overview of the development of your DeFi infrastructure, the adoption of MTR, and the growth of your community?

Jay Lee:
In 2021, we will focus on launching more mainnet functionality, continuing to increase cross-chain compatibility, and building Dapps on Meter’s infrastructure. Also, we will continue to partner with other public chains to launch MTR on their networks.

You can check the detailed 2021 roadmap here:
https://www.meter.io/the-meter-roadmap-2021/

Also, we have recently updated our tokenomics for MTRG token: https://www.meter.io/update-on-mtrg-tokenomics-2021/

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Can you give us some hints about your nearest partnerships?

Jady Mashao:
As for adoption we will continue to push boundaries were people need our token vs just trading as it guarantees market effectiveness. We will also host campaigns during the year for out reach and launch educational tools like the meter academy to educate new comers in crypto.

Jay Lee:
We have recently partnered with Spaceswap / Avalanche / Harmony etc, and for future partnership you can join our channel and check our announcement

Mary | Satoshi Club:
Guys, our community is waiting for chat to be open to ask you live questions

Jay Lee:
Let’s go!

Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community

Q1 from Telegram user @ Ariana

Miners and validators are an important part of the consensus mechanisms of your two tokens MTR and MTRG, It says in your papers that they collaborate to make the Meter system stable, secure, and scalable, are this actors rewarded on your economic model? How do you incentivize this people to keep apportioning positive to your ecosystem?

Jady Mashao:
Miners create and are awarded with MTR. Validators also receive rewards for record keeping in the system.

Q2 from Telegram user @ Jolaine #FM Team

What do you think are the most outstanding advantages that Meter has over its competitors in the race to be the most important second layer of Ethereum?

Jady Mashao:
Our key feature versus other chains is stability; other tokens could be pegged to meter.

Q3 from Telegram user @ Crypto Jiren

What is HotStuff consensus, can you explain them to us, how does this make Meter much more secure than other blockchain?

Jay Lee:
HotStuff consensus is a variant of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol proposed and mathematically proved by Ted Yin during his internship at VMware Research in 2018. Hotstuff consensus has 3 benefits which are simple and elegant leader change (censorship and network failure resistance), higher performance than pBFT and less communication and data storage requirement.

Q4 from Telegram user @ Cengizhan Tekin

What is the objective of On-Chain Auctions?

Jay Lee:
One of the most important uses of the MTR token is to obtain MTRG to participate in safeguarding, governance, and growth of the Meter system.
This is done via on-chain auctions that are automatically generated by the Meter system every 24 epochs.

Q5 from Telegram user @ Mr.Lonely

I want to buy $MTR, Where could I buy? Is it available in uniswap?
@zzangbi13 @Jady_mashao

Jay Lee:
Currently the most liquid CEX for MTRG and MTR is gate.io, mxc.com and bilaxy.com. For eMTRG, you could find on Uniswap and Balancer.

Q6 from Telegram user @ Nick

You updated $MTR tokenomics recently, can you tell us what changes where made from the older tokenomics?

Jay Lee:
We made a couple of important changes:
1) A chunk of total tokens were removed from future releases until new synthetic and derivatives products are launched.
2) The general emission of MTRG was set to 5% per year to strike a balance between rewarding validators and helping MTRG maintain its token value.

Q7 from Telegram user @ Egor Dubinin

Hоw did METER chаnge the economic game of PоW mining? How did you manage to mаke MTR much greener thаn BTC?

Jady Mashao:
The same energy will always mine the same number of tokens, unlike btc were you need more and more energy to mmine the same number of coins.

Q8 from Telegram user @ Andrew

Is MTR Stabecoin? If yes, what is the difference between MTR and other stabecoins: DAI,…?
@zzangbi13

Jay Lee:
MTR is not trying to peg to $1, it aims to complete Satoshi’s original vision, a sound money independent of the fiat system.

Q9 from Telegram user @ CRYPTONECO

What Marketing and business development plans do you have for METER? Will you add new participants to the METER ecosystem?

Jay Lee:
We are working hard on building out our developer ecosystem right now, with a formal developer program slated to launch in a couple of months. In the meantime, more cross-chain partnerships like the one with Avalanche, Harmony, and others to grow the Meter ecosystem and general marketing to increase awareness are in the works.

Q10 from Telegram user @ Frank Lampard Ziệt Nem

Do you agree that Satoshi Club will lead your project to global development? What services do you provide to the community What are your strategies for building a strong community?

Jady Mashao:
We are still assigning the markets and developing strategies for community growth. platforms like Satoshi club are good for teaching the mass about crypto we look forward to working with you more.

Part 3 — Quiz Results

As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about the crypto project. A link to a Quiz form was sent into the chat.

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Telegram Community — https://t.me/Meter_IO
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WebSite — https://www.meter.io
Testnet — https://scan-warringstakes.meter.io