KuCoin AMA Series - ARCS - Full Transcript
(UTC+8) 16:00:00, December 5, 2019, KuCoin hosted the AMA(Ask-Me-Anything) session with ARCS in all of our official tellegram groups.
The AMA session was composed of 2 sections: 1. Q&A from KuCoin 2. Q&A from audiences. During the last section, we randomly selected 400 participants to enjoy a share of ARCS (ARX) incentives equivalent to 2000 USD.
The rewards will be distributed to winners who got full 5 points within 7-14 days.
*Winners must have filled in KuCoin accounts.
Introduction to ARCS:
The project takes its root in a vision of bringing well-being to individuals around the world. Well-being is essential for a better life, physically, mentally and socially. ARCS aim to empower individuals with ownership of their own data and identity so they can harvest the value it holds, instead of giving it away for free. The project was initiated in Tokyo, Japan in 2017 by a group of entrepreneurs, technologists, and philanthropists who believe that blockchain technology can contribute to a better world. Individual ownership of data and identity along with a network of data banks will enable multiple business scenarios and solve some of the world’s toughest problems e.g. personal data exchange, data monetization, financial inclusion, lending/funding, scoring and reputation, and privacy.
Alre provides functionality for management and storage of various data structures in “data banks”, which are essentially a business to monetize data. Network participants can access and build on AIre via custom-built applications, or directly through proprietary APIs. This provides a flexible framework that makes it easy for companies to build their business scenarios and applications with powerful insights from data analytics. Individuals who provide information to data banks will be protected, offering a high level of privacy and the opportunity to receive rewards based on the input data and it’s usage. Buying and selling data is increasingly becoming a major part of our lives, and so the ability of AIre’s ecosystem to integrate it more effectively whilst ensuring privacy and fair distribution of data is very attractive.
ARCS (token symbol: ARX) is the native token on the ARCS blockchain and it plays an important role in building an ecosystem for various users. More specifically, ARCS will govern the underlying blockchain infrastructure and enable users to transact in the network.
Official Website: https://www.arcs-chain.com
Whitepaper: https://www.arcs-chain.com/whitepaper_en.pdf
*For ease of reading, some text has been deleted
Q&A from KuCoin
1. What is AIre? And What’s AIre’s main function?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：AIre is an ecosystem centered around data banks and their users. AIre comprises of three main functionalities: information input, information storage, and information utilization.
Information input: Users can input basic personal information such as gender and address, answers from questionnaires, text from blogs, and links to social media accounts. In turn, based on the information inputs and frequency of utilization, they will receive tokens as incentives.
Information storage:Information is stored in the data bank system. To preserve the integrity of data, the system will automatically calculate hash values for the data and store it in on a blockchain.
Information utilization:Proprietary AIre APIs allow companies to integrate their businesses and applications with data banks or even offer their own data bank services.
2. How do you combine your product with blockchain technology?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：Blockchain is an essential part of the underlying trust mechanisms in the AIre ecosystem. We have many participants in the ecosystem, ranging from individuals to corporations, and for these to transact with each other in a trusted manner we need blockchain.
Another way to put this, is that we are building a network where trust is guaranteed by the blockchain and its consensus governance. Some concrete examples of usage is e.g. data integrity guaranteed by data hashes on the blockchain, ARCS native token to transact (ARX), and smart contracts for business logic.
AIre uses blockchain as a second data store. To store data on a blockchain, it requires the consent from majority of the nodes, or enterprises, constituting the blockchain network.
For this reason, it is possible to prevent a small number of nodes from illegally editing the stored data. Once data is stored on the blockchain, it can never be changed or deleted in secret, since all change histories are stored onto the blockchain.Therefore, with blockchain it is possible to prevent data from being falsified.
3. Why did you establish the AIre project? What problems will AIre solve?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：In recent years, personal data has become increasingly distributed across different services and is often stored in data banks without the user's consent.
This is why we start to develop the project, and AIre solves the problem of inefficient use of data. AIre manages user data in a unified manner. User data can only be used with the consent of the user, while protecting data rights.
4. What’s your plan to build strong communities?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：We aim to build a high quality community where people are engaged. It’s not important “how many”, but rather how meaningful the discussions and engagements are. We have a team in place to engage with communities in different languages so that all voices will be heard!
The AIre ecosystem goes way beyond a token and a blockchain, and this is the part we need the community to help us build. The initial development and operations will be carried out by the AIre core team, however as the tokens, and therefore the governance, gets taken over by the community, there will be a natural redistribution of the workload. We hope that the community will start building their business scenarios in the AIre ecosystem.
We will continuously show the community how we work with major industry players and develop meaningful products e.g. data bank 1.0. Also, we plan a series of meet-ups where we can meet the communities in person.
5. How do you manage the liquidity control?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：The market” is a power beyond our control and token offerings are often affected by the market forces. We have done our best to ensure liquidity and all the information investors will need to make qualified decisions. Whether or not the token price becomes subject to extreme price volatility, I’m confident that ARCS will deliver value in the long-term. The initial circulating token supply will be thin because the private investors have long lock-up periods.
6. How many tokens will you issue? And how will you distribute the token?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：We have minted 20 billion tokens. 2 million tokens will be sold at KuCoin, 12.5% has Already been sold to private investors.
The 20 billion ARCS tokens are planned to be distributed as follows：
10,000,000,000 (50%) will be for third-party organizations.
2,500,000,000 (12.5%) will be distributed to AIre startup supporters
500,000,000（2.5%) will be given to core team members as Incentives.
500,000,000 (2.5%) will be given to partners as Incentives.
4,000,000,000 (20%) will be used for development and operations
2,500,000,000 (12.5%) is for future reserve.
7. Is ARCS an ERC-20 token? What is your future plan?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：Initially we have minted the tokens on Ethereum with ERC-20. We are still designing ARCS blockchain infrastructure. Currently, we are looking into consensus algorithms which will meet our requirements and one of these is privacy and decentralization. We believe the network must be decentralized enough for individuals and corporations to trust the consensus governance.
8. Can you introduce your team to us?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：Our team is made up of more than 20 full-time employees and we are rapidly expanding our engineering team. We expect to grow to as many as 60 employees by year end 2020 to ensure that every corner of the ecosystem will be taken care of.
The project was initiated in Tokyo, Japan 2017 by a group of entrepreneurs, technologists, and philanthropists who believes that blockchain technology can contribute to a better world.
Individual ownership of data and identity, along with a network of data banks, will enable multiple business scenarios and the solving of some of the toughest problems in the world e.g. personal data exchange, data monetization, financial inclusion, lending/funding, scoring and reputation, and lastly privacy.
We are finalizing our first partnerships, which will be announced soon! We are very excited about this since we have been talking to major industry players. Our partnerships will mainly be with corporations who have data for the data bank or want to acquire data. We will also build strong partnerships with technology leaders to form a strong development team that can build and maintain the infrastructure.
9. What is in the Roadmap?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：Our roadmap illustrate how we will build the blockchain infrastructure and ecosystem. For the ecosystem, we will release our first data bank product in Q2 2020. Going ahead we will release more products, incubation and much more
10. What is the token economy model of ARCS?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：ARCS is the native token in Aire. ARCS is mainly used in two main purposes. The one is incentives for users. Many internet users feel insecure when providing personal data to services due to recent focus on big corporations’ misuse of personal data. AIre stimulate the user for the information they provide, which is expected to lower resistance of making personal data storing.
The second is rights to use Aire services. Companies which have ARCS have a right to acquire and utilize data from Aire. Once data is purchased, users will be rewarded by ARCS for the data. Also the companies can utilize the data in their services and offer it to AIre users in return of ARCS.
11. Do you AIready have any products?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：The product is under development and will be released in Q2 2020.
Using this product, individuals will be able to register as users, create accounts, do KYC, and make data entries to the data bank - all in return for rewards.
On the other side, companies will be able to acquire data and reward users with tokens. Integrity of the data bank is preserved by the blockchain. The privacy is secured by advanced cryptographic techniques.
12. Can you introduce some application scenarios of the AIre ecosystem to us?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：AIre will develop a wallet specifically for ARCS, payment tokens, and associated services. This product will enable users to transact with tokens in the ecosystem and use tokens for meaningful purposes instead of holding them purely for speculation.
AIre believes we can also build a new credit criterion. In addition to objective data of the individual, their future potential can be evaluated by also taking into account subjective data such as feelings, enthusiasm, and other emotions. As a result, it is possible to reach out to users who have not been able to benefit from financial services until now.
AIre aims to visualize the value of individuals through tokens. As assets are tokenized, different asset types can be exchanged in real-time. We believe that by tokenizing various forms of assets, the assets can be used as a form of “money”, and economic activities can be further encouraged.
13. Why do you choose KuCoin as the first exchange to get listed on? What are the advantages of KuCoin?
Kunihiro Katsuragi：We and our community have confidence in AIre to become one of the most popular projects in Japan. We contacted with some exchanges, and KuCoin left us an deep impression for their great achievement of protecting user data and asset security.
Then we invited our fans to complete an online survey to decide which exchange should AIre get listed on. We are happy that it came to a win-win situation for our community users to support KuCoin as well. After careful consideration and assessment, we decided to choose KuCoin which is professional and globalized.
The globalization process of KuCoin is successfully. Today, it has gained 5 million + registered users in more than 100 countries. The platform has more than 200 kinds of digital assets, and the daily maximum transaction volume can reach 480 million. The international strategic layout is exactly what we need.