On November 22nd 2022, The Amulet team sat down with the AmuNation (our community) to answer their questions. Over 80+ community members attended and were rewarded with our first set of digital POAPs.
In this edition, we discussed:
- FTX situation and current crisis
- Solana and the future
- Multi-chain strategy
- Ambassador Program
- End of Early Contributor role
- Community Events and future plans
Catch up on the audio and transcript within this blog.
Audio:
Transcript:
Rob – Amulet
Okay. Awesome. So we can start if you to both ready? Yeah. Shin is here as well. I can see. Yeah, I have just invited Shin. Awesome. So, yeah, Welcome everyone to today’s AMA. It’s our bi weekly one. So we do this every two weeks. So last time was a bit of a weird one because we were reacting to the FTX response. It was mainly Martin and Rupert, because I was unwell. But I’m here today, we’ll just do just so you know who’s with us today, just in case there’s anyone new even I see a lot of the similar faces. And I’ll just introduce everyone and then we can go through the questions that we’ve got. If that sounds good, we have all of you on the stage. Take that as a yes. Okay, because there was so I’m Rob I’m the marketing manager here at Amulet. My background has basically been in marketing for the last half a decade before that I was in sales. And I’ve been working on web2 and web3 things been Amulet for a year now. So it’s basically since the start and yeah, it’s been it’s been really exciting. Been a crazy year and excited for the crazy year ahead as well. We’ve got on the stage we’ve got Rupert who’s the project lead Martin, who’s a community manager and a Shin I don’t know whether you want to introduce yourselves to give a bit more detail there. If Rupert’s eating maybe we can get to you first Martin?
Rupert – Amulet
Oh, no, I finished I was prepared dont worry, I just very brief background. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve been building businesses for a very, very long time. Most recently, I exited out of fintech. And last year before joining in with the team on on Amulet, towards the end of last year. Yeah, that’s a very, very brief one. Martin for for a couple of words.
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
Yeah, as you probably see me guys quite often on the Discord. I’m Community Manager on Solana, I would say in the first week when they went they lunch and helping, helping in the multiple projects since since those months or years now I think on Solana, I’m on the crypto last last four or five months and as a background working in a few quite large companies, just to make sure and then I will bring the experience to the to the blockchain industry.
Shin – Amulet
Shin here I’m the tech lead for a minute. I previously worked in TradFi as well as DeFi world. Yeah. So here I am. Glad to see all you guys here.
Rob – Amulet
Awesome. Thanks. Thanks, everyone for doing that. So what I’ll do is I’ll jump straight into the questions that we have. And yeah, we’ll, we’ll go through it through that and see how it basically goes. I’ll do it in order. Big because we didn’t have as many as last time. So it’s easier to do in order this week. Well, I’ll start with one that I think we might have. I will start. It’s not it’s a bit of a difficult one. So I will start with what I what kind of answers if and then I’ll lead on to Martin it’s to do with Will we have partner programmes quests like crew three didn’t have the time. So that was the first question from Pixel, which I think was from the last AMA. I think that one of the things to know about partnerships, as you will notice, there’s a few things that we’re doing. So Hakon who you’ve all met a couple of weeks ago, part of his role is to talk to future partners from a business sense partners that will have to be ready for our project their project. And of course, you guys the community. We also do some you will have noticed who I work with, I can never say his name because it’s in Russian, but we also have a collaboration role at the moment. So you might have noticed things like Project Angelic, which Nikolay helped to set up and we did a whitelist giveaway with Blast Royale last week, we have we are trialling some new things, whether that be partnerships from a business level or from a business from a marketing level, like the ones that you will have seen over the last couple of weeks. And with what I was gonna go for Martin live, I’ll go a little bit later because I think this might also refer to a question that quite a few people have, which has to do with the ambassador programme. So I’ll move on to that a little bit later. And I’ll just go on to the next question for now, which is a difficult one to answer but it’ll go straight to you Ru, is when there’s the next funding round?
Rupert – Amulet
very good question. The insurer we had actually opened one up and we were doing a very, very large funding round in order to increase our capacity of TVL on the platform because we had a huge amount of of large sales lined up. We had a huge amount of interest about that particular A round and we were, you know, proceeding forward with it and then FTX happened. So we’ve put things on pause for now we’re just working on a slightly different strategy for that, as a company, we we actually don’t need to raise capital for us to operate right now we were really well capitalised, he would have seen that we did around. Earlier on this year, we raised about $6 billion. And we’ve still got plenty of runway to run as the as a team as we are in marketing activities we’re already doing. That being said, in order to sell insurance on our protocol, we need state assets. And we’re working on a plan that will enable us to expand on the types of assets that we can take and the types of things we can insure. So we’ve paused about the funding round for now, only to work on our strategy a little bit further forward. But like if you’re interested in investing into us, and you know, being part of the journey, obviously, you’re missing out to me, Rollerball, or Mackie openplotter, even and they can be in contact with the with right people. But failing that, what’s your space, and we will announce when we start to rate.
Rob – Amulet
As I say one thing that might be good here is particularly for tomorrow’s recap blog and SEO purposes is can we give a bit of a brief overview of obviously the FTX situation happened? Just you mentioned that we had the runway do Can we just update people as to where how we weren’t. We had that zero exposure to FTX. Just so people know where we were?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, yeah. Well, as Robert already said, Yeah, we have zero, we had zero exposure to objects going down. We’re very lucky, we had some funds on there, but we removed them all off to the Friday before the exchange went down on the Tuesday. And to just reiterate anybody here, he’s listening, he’s hurting right now. I’m really, really sorry, I’m sorry, that this guy has come in and defrauded a whole bunch of people, including myself. To be honest, I was a big believer in FTX. And I really thought that what they were doing was right, as it turns out, I was just as misled as everybody else. So very, very sorry for that scenario. But you know, as business, you know, we had zero exposure on that, obviously, were exposed on the slanted side. And as you can see on the Destiny token price line, it is having some struggles, you know, there is a lot of sell side pressure at the moment. And so as a blockchain and as a business, we’re still extremely bullish on Solana, we’re extremely, you know, focused on that technology. And you know, what it means for us what it means for the industry as a whole, but you cannot ignore Fud with inside the industry. And there, there comes a point when that Fud becomes too large. That being said, it is a it is fighting, the way Solana is organising, the DeFi community is organised in particular, is extremely impressive. And I’m of the firm belief that we will work our way out of this. And throughout 2023, Solana as an ecosystem will grow. As a business, though we are a multi chain solution, we’ve always been mulch installation, you’ve read any document that we put out there, we’ve always been very focused about that. And that’s because of our core belief is that we believe that there will be more than one chain that exists in the future, much like sort of how cloud infrastructure works. Now, there is somebody who was a clear winner. But there are many others that that exist in that space and operate very well and handsomely.
Rob – Amulet
Cool. What I’ll do, because I’ve just obviously, I’ve been able to read through the questions ahead of time, and then do it. And we’ve got three questions about this specific situation. One I don’t really understand, but maybe you might understand, but I think they’ve all kind of irrelevant if I group them all together. So we’ve Mason’s question is have you calculated at what price per the price of Sol that means there’s no profitability within the project? I cannot say I guess when that means there’s what happens to us if if sold goes to zero. The next question which kind of links into it is has a decision being made to replace the network? And are we able to find out which one will be next? And the one I don’t really get is will the release be postponed due to the brand Solana drum dump? So I guess this is all obviously what we’ve mentioned there about being multi chain. I guess what people kind of want to know is, have we made the decision what to replace Solana? Obviously we’re not replacing Solana with a multi chain solution as he just covered, but have you made the decision as to what the next one would be? And I guess we can have with regards to the release being prepared we’ve already released onto the main net, I guess with pricing Solana, there’s no profitability that kind of doesn’t work as well with the multi channel. So I don’t know whether you wanted to kind of answer that.
Rupert – Amulet
Let me let me go through step by step. So have we calculated the price of Solana there is no profitability for the project. So for us it is that those two are separated out. We are profitable based on the volume of assets that we take in. So if the price of Solana goes down, because all of our assets within the current setup are tied to the price of Solana, it doesn’t, you know, one soul equals one soul, right? You’re still getting the same amount of Solana for but if somebody believes that that soul is no longer worth 10 bucks, 30 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever the figure is, and they need it to be profitable for them, then that does that cam proven issue? These are all short term effects. So whilst it’s a have we calculated in the project, what price we can get the salon we can get down to in terms of it becomes unviable for us? No, we haven’t. And the reason for that is because of our multi chain focus. So we’re already building out on those alternative chains at the moment. And when I say building out the reason why I can’t give a definitive as to like what’s coming next is because there are a few different options. And so the part of the building out process is research. And that research is really led by Shin and and his team. Shin Are we able to give an indication of some of the chains that we’ve been looking at.
Shin – Amulet
So, yeah, so as what has mentioned, so we are more focused on research. First of all, I mean, changing infrastructure, so definitely, they will be the first one to look on, we also looking at the business, as far as the interest interest or insurance products we are going to take on. So on chain wise, I mean, our major focus will be the chain, which is proof of stake, of course. So that will be I mean, fairly tightly coupled with Amulet structure. So that and the second will be on the market sentiment, I guess where you guys will have the answer, which are the most hot proof of stake chains on the market right now. And on top of that, we are also looking at new ways of making profits, not just on the proof of steak arm on the traditional underwriting arm on the on top of that we are trying to build new products to cover more risk in so yeah, these are the two directions we are going right now. And there will be more you should be I mean, just keep monitoring us and we will be sharing more for the following maybe weeks. Yeah.
Rupert – Amulet
It’s actually an interesting question. Just in terms of the heat in the market, we would really like to know, from your perspective, what was really exciting for you, is it three years it Aptos is it Polkadot It ETH? Is it BSC you know, what is the what is the most popular in your kind of circle of friends? Maybe we put a poll together.
Rob – Amulet
I’ve prepared questions last week. So we will there will be a community survey coming out very soon with regard to that
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
Then we ran that conversation with our our community team, community champions and moderators just to make sure that they can contribute as well. We run some conversation on our general channels, which we continue to do. But as Rupert and Rob mentioned, we’re also planning to make sure that everyone from our community will have the option to cast the vote or even maybe share why they want to do it. Before we launch our our poll link. As I said everyday, we have those conversation on the general channels then you can guys also raise that conversation and suggest maybe some of the network with we haven’t even spoke yet.
Rupert – Amulet
And just to round off these other questions and make sure I answer them directly has a decision to be made to replace the network. Yes, the decision is we are not replacing the network. We will be adding to if if anything at all. And we will let you guys know which change we’ll be adding in the future as soon as we’re set. We’ll will be released be postponed due to the Brine Solona sign is obviously a typo here. I’m not certain what Brian was supposed to be but I’m assuming Yeah, you’re referring back to the price of soy has a release of are taken, been postponed because of that. No, it we’ve postponed a way before what happened to sort of Solana dip because market conditions, there’s no point in releasing our own internal AMT token until my conditions get better. And you know that that works all round, we don’t want to release something that just goes straight to the floor. And then by the time the market picks up, nobody is looking at it, because it’s already on the floor. And they, they look at this, this gradual decline and nothing happens. You’ve got to release when a market is on a is on the upswing. So we have to wait for that. I don’t know when that’s going to exactly be if I did, I would be a billionaire already. So the we focus on looking at the market and then considering timing around that. But I should suspect it won’t happen till around 2024. But yeah, we’ll see if there’s opportunity to do it next year. We’ll do it next year.
Rob – Amulet
Absolutely. And you’ve just answered the question I was gonna then cover which means we now get to we get to hear from Martin with the question I think a lot of people here want to know about? First, I’m gonna cover Martin, if it’s okay for you. The best way to handle it is the first lot of questions about the change that I don’t know whether I know we initiated it was going to be for the 16th of November, but it was the change of going from early contributor to contributor. So people want to know where that’s at. And if what, where you are with regards to the planning of that particular?
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
Yes, I actually writing announcement as we as we speak, we did close us previous previously stated, The Adley contributors role, I still have a few people on my list to review, then a few people might still get it. But we now switching to the contributor role, which gave also loads of benefits, which we stated little bit later. But yeah, we are now switching to the contributor role.
Rob – Amulet
Okay. And you mentioned there that is there isn’t any significant difference? Or do we need to wait until that announcement?
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
I would, I would say, to wait on the announcement because this is this is very tied to, to our sticking platform. And and our our, our plan of the reward calculation as well.
Rob – Amulet
Cool. So two things I will cover before getting back to you. So someone’s asked how many golden NFT’s have been received so far. We’ve not distributed the gold NFT’s yet. But I did release some fun I am on Sunday, I think it was which had some updated statistics that will tell you how many has been won. There’s still plenty to win. So the best advice I could give that is to continue on the ammunition app, because there’s still plenty to be won. Obviously, some have been some you’ll see in your account, and you’ll see that tweet but I can’t quite remember on the top of my head I think I can’t remember. I said on it, but I will reach out and get it for you later. Another question before I move on to the ambassador lovers one oh, people keep asking when is the bounty going to end? So I’m going to answer this question because it’s not necessarily that it’s definitely it’s going to end the bounty as the bounty that you see it today will change. So what we see is it becoming more like a loyalty programme. So the ammunition that will continue with amulet being on it being specific, bountiful. What people want to know more here, rather than when will the campaign and is when will things be distributed and when will the NFT’s result and when will you know the utility, that’s all coming? Everything’s got to be done in a release. As you know, we did the first set of release a couple of weeks ago before savant joining Solana breakpoint, we’re going to distribute more. And then there’s going to be an updated version of the ammunition apps, there’s going to be major changes that are all exciting, but it’s all going to encourage you to continue working basically hard for the Amunation. And you will see the release of your NFT’s if you haven’t received them yet. That will be coming soon. We just can’t give you an exact date because we’re still working with the dev side. And if anyone to add them at all, Martin.
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
No, no, no. Are you actually covered? And this is a very good start for me to cover the second question about the ambassador then do you want to read that question or?
Rob – Amulet
I was I was gonna go on to you. If so. When is the ambassador programme planned? And I think people just want to know they say who can get it? What will be the requirements and how many seats will there be severely? The The question here is what is what details can you give away already before we’ve got that announcement? I know in today this week’s bi weekly report. I said it would be about 4/3/4 weeks Until recently launched an ambassador programme. But Martin, if you can give some details there.
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
Yes, we don’t have a concrete number as we believe that should be built based on on community activity and community community engagement, then we don’t want to say, on the let’s say, 100, people will get that position, and how we’ll choose that we’ll choose that based on on people activity on people roles as well. And support in the community. And the reason why we can’t give you a little bit more details at the minute because it will be also built partly in our, in our new platform, which Rob mentioned, because what is the key part of Ambassador programme, it’s, it’s your reward, we want to make sure that if you guys are a help us to develop amulet, as you’ll be part of, of amulet, it will be essential for us to be able to track everything and to to offer you reward for it as well, then until that will be put from, from the technical solution, then full traceability and full visibility as well. We can’t give you the exact exact date than the key for us, it’s just to finish this bit of development. And then we’ll share with you guys are more details how we will take the first part of the ambassador programme, and who will be eligible for it. As I said, we don’t want to specify any roles at the minute as we want to make sure that everyone from the community will be able to to participate or at least volunteer to participate. And after that we’ll specify more details when the platform for for ambassadors and staking will be will be available.
Rob – Amulet
One thing I’ll also add hair as patience is always key. One of the reasons these take a bit longer, and we don’t just rush through it is to make sure the quality is there. And it’s all it’s a right programme for you guys. And it’s going to encourage you guys to keep promoting, um, you look the way that you do. So Ambassador programmes, yeah, you might want it to be rushed through, but we’d rather not rush it through, we’d rather make sure it was right for you. Quality over pushing it through there. So that’s why it we’re not rushing it. But we were working on it. We’re working on it solidly to make you to entice you and to keep you to keep you all happy. And some of the things I’ll mention here is are there any other partnerships by now? I don’t know. Because we’ve, as you will have known because of the FTX situation we did pause, cover sales at the moment, they will resume at some point and that we will be listing new new apps there. But I guess we just have to see what’s going to happen over the next couple of weeks before I can confirm that the new role is planned. I guess we’ve covered that with the ambassador programme. And we’ve mentioned the community ones. And so we went, When can we see the use of the Fed will matter bears, I will produce more content before the end of the year. But in the next couple of weeks with regard to that, we still need to work out the fundamentals. And we haven’t got a question here about the test net. Well, we’re on the main net now. So we won’t be rewarding for test net participants because the test net was a month thing between August and September until September 29 before we moved, and people are asking when binance. So I think that mean that we’ve managed to cover those particular questions that were sent through. I don’t know if anyone in the audience wants to come up and ask any questions on stage. Whenever you’re heavy, but they never have the they never have the balls to
Rupert – Amulet
Nobody was ever wants to ask me a question. It’s a great opportunity.
Rob – Amulet
I think langauge levels come into it as well. We were very lucky the other day when it was just the other week. And it was me and Martin because we think we had to two people come up on stage to ask questions. But ya know, it seems they’re not. So I don’t know if anyone here has anything that they’d like to add before we finish off and let people get back to their meetings and stuff.
Rupert – Amulet
They want quick, quick questions. We cover off When Binance?
Rob – Amulet
Now, I didn’t say when violence because I thought that was kind of covered with the tokenomics. Do you want to add anything there? Wen Binance?
Rupert – Amulet
Next week. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Next week, no.
Rob – Amulet
I was thinking Friday.
Rupert – Amulet
Please, please take that that is genuinely a joke. I’m not intentionally. We are not intentionally going on Binance next week. We would like to be on Binance at some stage. And it’s a key part of our kind of strategy when we do want to list our our token and do the TG event because Binance up until FTX ran about 50% of all the crypto in the industry and I suspect now is much higher than that. And so you really do have to be on Binance if you want To the crypto industry,
Rob – Amulet
this events just made them stronger.
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, I mean, I, I’m a big fan of Binance and its infrastructure. But I am also massively concerned about its dominance. And, you know, from a personal standpoint, I think CZ does have a bit of an element to play in this whole fallout of FTX not least, is that he was an early investor of FTX. And I think he probably should have played a stronger role in governance of his own portfolio companies. I mean, certainly when I invest in companies, I want to be very involved and make sure that they’re taking the right sort of directions. But it’s, you know, it’s great grander than that, I think it’s easy as a as a bigger role to play. And he’s, he took the opportunity to take him out here, which I think as, as all well, we’ve seen the results of what’s what’s happening. And then whilst it wasn’t exactly CZs, total actions, he definitely had a big, big part to play in it. So I liked Binance, but I have a little bit of concern about the monopoly that they’ve got in the industry. And I think somebody else needs to grow to take on that monopoly.
Rob – Amulet
KinGeri has confirmed it was a joke about binance.
Martin/Pinto – Amulet
Especially when it’s when the market will be up new height.
Rupert – Amulet
I just on a note, just to reiterate to everybody, not your keys, not your crypto guys. So I mean, if you have got funds on any centralised exchange, please do look after it, make sure you’re only using funds on there to trade with and anything you’re storing for the longer term. Take them off centralised exchanges soon as possible. And, and make sure you diversify them as well. So even if they’re in USDT, that’s not 100% certain that that will exist in the next few months. So you want to make sure it’s diversified into other stable coin assets, understand how these stable coins are collateralized. And look after yourselves out there. It is a fragile marketplace right now. And yeah, we want to make sure that we provide as much security as possible, but I can only do so much with our with our with our system that we have right now.
Rob – Amulet
Awesome. So what I’ll do is ended off with just a couple of community stuff just to keep everyone updated. Keep sending in your world cup MetaBears absolutely loved USERNAME yesterday, well two days ago now. For the England Iran match, I love the the two kits in one, keep sending them in, because the winners will get rewards. And one thing that’s quite exciting in the general chat after this to share that you attended I never now to say if if it’s POAP or POAP, but I’m going to drop 24 POAPs that you can mint and add to your wallet after share that you attended today as a memory. And there was another community thing I was gonna mention. Oh, and just to say that the recap blog will be available tomorrow, which has everything that we’ve talked about today. So yeah, thank you, If anyone wants to add anything other than thank you at the end
Rupert – Amulet
Nothing more for me thank you very much for attending 80 people in attendance was great. I’m sorry, all 80 didn’t get to see the whole lot of it
Rob – Amulet
I’m sorry they won’t get all their POAPs as well but at least it gives incentive for the first 24 to claim that as we’ll keep doing this and hopefully they will increase the amount of allowed to mint so at least it gives people memories of everything that they’ve been doing. I did one for the for a little quiz just to test it a couple of weeks ago and you will talk up on it so I was really made me feel good that the work there also coasters something. Because I went to an event when we went to DevConnect when we announced Amulet, I went to an event for the power app and they said, Everyone take your POAP and I’ve looked and the only people that did it was me and the two people that worked for the company that hosted the event. So it’s good to know that amulet virtually already beat there’s that they gave in person two people. But yeah, no, thank you very much for everyone joining and I hope you enjoy the rest of your days. And we’ll we’ll speak to you. We’ll be online and we’ll speak to you soon. Thank you
Rupert – Amulet Cheers guys. Bye. Thank you