AMA Recap: Dillon Chen & Youan Zang (Crust Network)

Following the announcement of our exciting partnership with Crust Network, both communities tuned in for an exciting AMA session with Commonwealth Labs’ CEO Dillon Chen, and Crust Network’s Global Branding Head, Youan Zang.

This much anticipated AMA session was focused on the recent partnership between both communities – the start of a series of partnerships dedicated to expanding the Common Protocol ecosystem.

The partnership between both communities is summarized as follows: "Common Protocol will enrich the function of Crust community government," said Steve from Crust Networks, "while Crust will provide storage solutions for the Off-Chain data storage feature."

Here's how it all went down on the 21st of June, hosted on the Crust Network Telegram group with over 45k members. The AMA session started with an introduction from the CEO of Commonwealth Labs, Dillon Chen.

Dillon: "I’m Dillon, founder of Commonwealth. I got into crypto in 2013, when I got my first Bitcoin. From there, Commonwealth started in 2018, where our projects have raised $20m. Our main focus now is that we’re building an integrated multi chain-governance, discussions, and crowdfunding protocol called https://commonwealth.im. I’ve been a trader, investor, and dorm room miner in crypto, really great to watch the whole industry grow.

Would you like to share a bit more about Common Protocol and the partnership with Crust Network?

Dillon: Yea! So we’re really excited to be integrating this great Crust Community into the Commonwealth Interface, as one of the premier Substrate Projects. Basically the Crust community will be able to have an integrated place to chat long form, vote on governance, and fund treasury proposals. You can see the latest at https://commonwealth.im/crust , upon completion,  expect it to look like this: https://commonwealth.im/hydradx

Youan, can you briefly introduce Crust on your end? When were you established and what stage have you developed to now?

Youan: Crust Network is a decentralized storage application developed based on the Polkadot Substrate framework, we provide an incentive layer for IPFS storage nodes. Compared with many other blockchain applications, our functions are easier for everyone to understand. Everyone should have used various cloud products. Crust and these cloud products provide similar services. Users can use Crust to store their own files and communicate with others. Crust transfer files, our users can be individuals, companies, organizations.

So how are we different from traditional cloud vendors? Traditional cloud vendors have their own large centralized computer center to store data centrally for users. Crust is more like a form of "sharing economy". We do not provide storage space. The storage space is provided by Crust nodes. The Crust public chain builds a bridge between nodes and users, and is responsible for scheduling users' storage orders to nodes. Then pay salaries to the nodes. As a result, users' files are "distributed" and stored on nodes all over the world, rather than being controlled centrally. In addition to security, distributed storage can also bring users a lower price.

Our team was established in 2018. After two years of development and testing, the first phase of the test network was officially deployed on November 30 last year. On February 4 this year, we launched the Maxwell preview network, which integrates almost all functions of the future main network, including node mining and guarantor pledge. So far, the total capacity of Maxwell's entire network has reached 638PB. A work progress that we are very proud of is that on February 28, Crust officially opened the storage function, which means that all users can now use Maxwell network storage and transfer their files.

Our mainnet is expected to go live after the Polkadot slot is captured.

Besides as a governance platform, how else would the Common Protocol be useful for Crust?

Dillon: So, in general, as long as we've been in crypto, we’ve found it really hard for people to get involved in governance. This came up for multiple reasons:

1) the conversation was fragmented across chat apps and more

2) voting was a pain (and still is)

3) information across all these protocols are spread across a few different applications

We bring everything together into one place, similar to a “crypto-Reddit” for every single token community that you’re a part of. Even before projects get started, they can create a project, and then they can crowdfund directly thru the interface

Beyond the features named above, there’s some easy-to-use things in the pipeline.

1) on-chain and in app notification

2) mobile app to stay updated with all notifications

3) and the last plans for the Common Protocol to decentralize and allow people to run the platform.

Tldr we want to make the product itself into something people want to use every day, similar to Telegram or Twitter: if you want to hop in https://t.me/HiCommonwealth (just started) you can give us any product recommendation for https://commonwealth.im.

What are some practical examples of Crust storage? How do you plan to promote the implementation of the application?

Youan: I guess some audience may wonder, is Crust really as easy to use as I said? Is it really one of the few storage and useable applications on the storage track? We borrowed from Filecoin to provide incentives for IPFS storage nodes, but chose a more efficient TEE proof method. At the same time, we also borrowed from Polkadot's NPOS economic model and added the role of guarantor. I won’t repeat the specific details here. If you are interested, please follow us on Twitter or join our community.

So what are the examples of Crust actually being utilized? Now, well-known projects such as Uniswap, Sushiswap, Compound, and MakerDAO that you frequently visit have begun to use Crust to deploy their own Dapp applications; the NFT assets you purchase may also be stored on the Crust network; you can use Decoo (a file transfer application based on Crust netwok) to easily upload and share your files; you can also browse your favorite videos on Socbay (a video site based on Crust network).

We have also established Crust Grants to encourage developers to develop more friendly and convenient To C applications based on the Crust storage layer. We will give developers a reward of up to $30,000.

In fact, Crust has only opened storage functions for three months, but many ecological applications have already landed. Of course, we still need a lot of polishing, and we have been working hard toward evangelizing decentralized storage.

Final question - can you give us a sneak peek of what events are coming up in Common Protocol that we should be keeping an eye on?

Dillon: So we’re gonna be launching 3 major product releases over the next few months.

1): self serve creation for forums

2): full crowdfunding protocol

3): and some cool swag ($ALLS, our equivalent of $SOCKS)

Youan: Our "Profit Data" campaign will be officially launched on June 22. Users only need to use Crust to store files, and the system will generate data computing power for the files. You can get CRU rewards by staking CSM on the data computing power. Each TB of data computing power can pledge up to 10,000 CSM. In this event, we will issue a total of 54,000 CRUs to users, and the event will last for 180 days.

Similar to the GPOS economic model of the Maxwell network, the CSM is pledged for data computing power. Users can pledge for themselves or help others to share rewards.

To participate in this event, you first need to register a Crust Maxwell account to create a storage order. In addition, you also need to prepare about 0.1 CRU for the cost of placing an order. We provide a certain amount of free storage space, you only need to have a Github account registered for more than half a year, and then apply through the official website.

Thank you all for joining this AMA - make sure to join @hicommonwealth on Telegram here: https://t.me/HiCommonwealth  and follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hicommonwealth  to stay up to date on everything we’re working on, including a future token launch. :-)