The Ask Me Anything with Liquidity Network concluded on April 4th, 2019. The AMA session was held live with Guillaume Felley, COO of Liquidity Network, and Asia Blockchain Review, a leading blockchain media company in Southeast Asia. We would like to thank our blockchain community for joining in the event and contributing to its success. The following is a recap of the conversation, with minimal editing for clarity.

• How did you get involved with blockchain and Liquidity Network?

Felley: I got involved in the blockchain space back in university around 2015; this was a nascent field of computer science, and it offered plenty of exciting challenges to tackle. I later met the co-founders of Liquidity Network at ETH Zurich and Imperial College London to tackle blockchain scalability. Liquidity Network initiated 1.5 years ago, and I started to work with the core team 1 year ago on the first version of the mobile wallet.

• What could we do with the LQD token? What is the requirement to run a hub?

F: LQD is used for SLA (service-level agreement) with Liquidity Network. You get unlimited transaction throughput If you buy a monthly subscription of 1 LQD per month. Currently, Liquidity Network runs payment hubs. Later, we will open it to strategic partners and further open source it for anybody to run a hub.

• Liquidity Network would like to eliminate network congestion and slash the cost of transactions. How will you achieve your vision?

F: The solutions that we are developing can have a major impact on the user experience of Dapps and the blockchain ecosystem in general. Blockchain transaction speed will finally match the speed of transactions with your credit card or WeChat Pay, while being non-custodian and trustless.

• There are many other companies also doing layer 2 or off-chain solutions. Any timeline to see the application of the off-chain solution?

F: First, at Liquidity Network, we develop scaling solutions called Layer 2. We build on top of an existing blockchain without requiring any hard-fork or complex changes on the base blockchain. This works by designing a secure protocol for off-chain transactions.

In Layer 2 scaling, there are 2 major types of solutions. Payment-channel (Lightning Network, Raiden, Connext, L4, etc.) and commit-chains such as Plasma and NOCUST (the solution that we are developing). The major difference is that payment-channel relies on isolated interaction between 2 parties, while with commit-chains, there is a central (but not trusted) operator facilitating transactions.

• You have expertise in off-chain and cybersecurity as well; do you think off-chain plays an important role? How and why? How can it provide a secure connection between smart contracts and the external world?

F: Off-chains play an important role because it allows scaling transaction throughput without limitation on the base blockchain. With practical off-chain solutions, we can imagine a world where the money would flow like information on the internet in streams of small packets, continuously.

• How do you see Asia compared to Europe in the global blockchain landscape so far?

F: I believe Asian people are much more digital natives and are, therefore, much more willing to adopt new technologies. Plus, it is a huge market. In Europe, things move slower.

• The business so far is neglecting other-than-tech aspects: marketing, exchange listings, market makers. How do you plan to address these points?

F: Due to various legal reasons, I sadly can’t comment on exchange listing and market-making. However, on the marketing side, we will be presenting our project in major conferences of this industry (EDCON, Crypto Valley Conference, and more to come). We are also preparing some surprises for the community.

• It can be challenging growing the user-base and adoption in the blockchain industry. What is your strategy to expand your community and user adoptions?

F: We provide a “full-stack” of solutions. We develop a mobile wallet supporting scalable and fast transactions, with a strong focus on UX meant for the mainstream. Moreover, we provide a developer SDK and tools, such as the NOCUST client library, to allow any builder to integrate our scaling solutions in their distributed applications to the benefit of major UX improvements. Beside that, we are working on very cool stuff for the community, such as competitions and games.

• Could we relate LQD with Goeureka’s blockchain initiatives, such as cutting down the commission earn by agoda.com and booking.com?

F: At the moment, we are removing intermediaries in payments and exchanges. Furthermore, we will be able to do more advanced off-chain computation. Not relying on custodian solutions can cut the cost down in terms of security and legal work.

• Liquidity Network is doing great on the technical front. However, in the blockchain ecosystem, very few users mention LQD on Twitter, Telegram or YouTube. Do you have a plan to give access for code reviews by experts?

F: We plan to open source very soon parts of our code base, such as our smart-contracts. We will be very happy to listen to feedback from experts and the community. We will be presenting our project at the major conferences. EDCON in Sydney next week, The Crypto Valley Conferences this summer, and more to come.

• All this is expressed in a total market cap of US$3 million, which is orders of magnitude lower than that of competitors, despite being a superior product approach in various aspects. Why?

F: First, thank you for acknowledging that our product approach is superior to those of our competitors. We invite anyone to read our papers NOCUST and TEX, as well as our upcoming open-source code. Unfortunately, we cannot comment further on the price speculation.

TEX: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/265.pdf

NOCUST: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/642.pdf

• Can you share with us, what would be your business model in the case of advanced off-chain computation? Any plan to add NFC payment, so we can start paying in store with the app?

F: The same SLA subscription model could still apply. We believe that subscriptions are better than a complex fee structure, such as Gas on Ethereum. Nowadays, people pay subscriptions for Netflix, Spotify etc. User experience ends up being much better.

NFC specifically is not on our roadmap at the moment. However, we are looking into how merchants can leverage our technology to accept crypto and stablecoin payments.

Once again, ABR thanks Guillaume Felley and our community members for participating in our AMA. If you’d like to ask questions at the next live session, please join our Telegram channel.

About Liquidity Network

Liquidity Network is a 2nd layer solution built upon the NOCUST protocol as a scalable, secure commit-chain. A commit-chain is similar to a side-chain, but does not require an additional consensus mechanism and solely relies on the security of its parent-chain.

• Website: https://liquidity.network/
• Telegram (English): https://t.me/liquiditynetwork
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/liquiditynet
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liquiditynet/

About Asia Blockchain Review

Asia Blockchain Review is the largest initiative for media and community building in Asia for blockchain technology. It aims to connect all blockchain enthusiasts on a regional scale and facilitate the technological foundation of blockchain through a range of group discussions, technical workshops, conferences, and consulting programs.

Our goal is to cultivate and encourage a collaborative community for our members to gather, share their experiences and endeavors in the blockchain space, and brainstorm the potential uses of blockchain technology.

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