KuCoin AMA With Bware Labs (INFRA) — An All-encompassing Web3 Infrastructure and Developer Tooling Platform

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: May 31, 2023, 13:00 - 14:09 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the CTO of Bware Labs, Alexandru Minulescu, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Official Website: https://bwarelabs.com

Whitepaper: Click to view

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Alexandru Minulescu — Bware Labs CTO

He has more than 13 years of experience in Software Engineering and has been in the Crypto space since early 2020. Alex's main responsibilities revolve around ensuring the infrastructure behind Bware Labs products works flawlessly, as he is the warden of both Blast and Bware Labs' reliability. With a current focus on Bware Labs' validator business, Alex played a central and essential role in all the development achievements around Blast and the other products under the Bware Labs umbrella!

Q: Can you give us a brief introduction to Bware Labs and its mission?

Alexandru: We see Bware Labs as an all-encompassing infrastructure and developer tooling platform, a one-stop shop for boosting blockchain ecosystem adoption. We are trying to bring reliability and high performance to the Web3 space and support developers throughout their development lifecycle, from development to production release.

One of our most important goals is to decentralize blockchain access without losing any performance compared to centralized providers, and right now, we are succeeding; we are one of the fastest.

Q: What's the inception story behind Bware Labs, and what problems does it aim to solve within the blockchain ecosystem?

Alexandru: Bware Labs was founded in 2021 to contribute to the rise of a truly decentralized web3 ecosystem. The company was born out of frustration with the current state of the market, which relies heavily on centralized platforms controlled by a handful of centralized institutions, creating a single point of failure, thus compromising the security and privacy of users.

The founders of Bware Labs recognized that this was different from the picture of web3 they had in mind and decided to take action. We saw an opportunity to provide an alternative infrastructure that prioritizes decentralization, security, and accessibility, and we set out to build a decentralized platform that could serve as a backbone for the next generation of dApss, without relying on a centralized authority.

Q: Please tell us about the product suite of Bware Labs.

Alexandru: Definitely, happy to! Our first and flagship product is Blast, a decentralized blockchain API platform with the twist of being the fastest API platform on the market, even counting for centralized providers. Blast Mainnet went live in February, and it was a big achievement for us because we needed to maintain performance even after the decentralization.

Aside from Blast, Bware Labs has two other business directions, a validator business where we currently manage close to half a billion in TVL and a dev tools and ecosystem enhancements business which includes one side building tools for different blockchains, such as faucets, snapshot services, explorers, custom indexing. In contrast, on the other side, we do ecosystem improvements at the protocol level. The latest achievement in that area is building the delegated staking functionality for the Aptos blockchain.

Q: Blast looks like a very interesting product. So what makes Blast unique as a blockchain API platform, and how does its decentralized approach set it apart from competitors?

Alexandru: Blast is a multichain, subscription-based API platform featuring lightning-fast and reliable blockchain access to some of the most relevant networks in the space. Using Blast, infrastructure expenses and outage risks are reduced for blockchain developers by avoiding all the challenges associated with managing their infrastructure.

Now, calling Blast lightning-fast is an overstatement. After all, how can you have cutting-edge performance without making any tradeoffs? However, we at Bware Labs believe we have found a way to bring together decentralized infrastructure and fast API performance into a concept we call Proof of Quality.

By Proof of Quality, we mean allowing node owners to join the Blast Protocol as Node Providers. This would be done permissionless, provided the registered nodes match the platform's performance and data integrity requirements.

All nodes serving user requests are rewarded with our native INFRA token under the condition they can sustain the level of quality required and enforced by our Integrity Protocol. We aim to bring the development experience to a new standard, and the 30 projects that already run on Blast API nodes or the more than 50 enterprise customers stand as proof that our work is successful.

Q: What were the key results from the Stress Testing period and Testnets, and how do these results translate into the expected performance of Blast's mainnet launch?

Alexandru: Well, the main objective of the stress testing was to ensure that the platform's performance would not change after decentralization.

Some key results we were tracking during the stress test were that our integrity protocol identifies any misbehavior correctly even under high load, which means no false positives, catching any data integrity violation, verifying sync status or latency breach, and so on.

Then we were closely monitoring the participants and were able to make a fair selection of the ones that would receive the testnet incentives at the end of the program.

And last, by not least, we want to see how the entire system behaves under production conditions and discover any potential bugs and issues.

Q: Tell us a bit more about the $INFRA token and its utility.

Alexandru: For Blast to be decentralized, it needs a mechanism of incentivization for operators who join the protocol with their blockchain nodes so that they can sustain their infrastructure costs. The INFRA token solves this issue!

Also, to keep or even improve its current level of performance, it needs a way to reward the best performances on the part of the operators while automatically taking measures against the misbehaving ones. This is done through the INFRA token because Blast's Integrity Protocol and Scoring Algorithm do just that, increase the APY of best-performing nodes and jail the ones that don't respect the platform's quality and integrity requirements.

For Blast to scale and expand, its Staking Protocol was designed to encourage the creation of new Staking Pools, but to make it appealing for operators to join the platform, token holders are needed to stake with Blast Operators, thus improving the platform performance while earning between 8% and 12% APY. Furthermore, the more INFRA staked, the more new operators can join, making the platform more reliable, faster, and secure.

Q: Discuss Bware Labs' partnerships with industry leaders such as Polygon, Avalanche, MultiversX, and Aptos and how these partnerships support the company's mission.

Alexandru: As a BUIDLer-centric company, we must be as involved as possible in the blockchain. Leveraging our technical know-how in developing tools for other ecosystems is something we're best at, and that shows through our collaborations with Web3 giants!

Let me name some of our biggest achievements. For example, Bware Labs was selected as one of the initial four wardens of the Avalanche Bridge, which was an amazing journey allowing us to work with some of the most skilled engineers in the industry while doing our part to secure all transfers in and out of the Avalanche ecosystem. From that, our collaboration took to new heights as both projects developed, and we're very happy to say that we chose the Avalanche chain for bridging our freshly-released INFRA token.

Moreover, there are cases like the Aptos Delegated Staking, a mechanism co-designed by us and the team at Aptos Labs. With a substantial involvement in the Aptos ecosystem, which ranges from validator services to decentralized API support and a free-to-use Snapshot service, Bware Labs recognized the need to provide the Aptos community with a delegation mechanism that would lower barriers for new validators joining the network and allow token holders to participate in the protocol by staking their assets and earning rewards.

Overall, mechanics will always be up for work and building and developing - and we're not different in any way! Devs keep blockchain spinning, so naturally, our work returns to the devs, regardless of their preferred building ecosystem. So we're happy and proud that our capabilities are being acknowledged and put to good use in the Web3 space.

Q: Do you want to share any tips with the upcoming builders in the space?

Alexandru: I could share what I consider to be the most important three (3) tips for any upcoming builder:

1. Always know your toolkit. DYOR, once you find the best tools that fit your building style, ensure everything runs smoothly in terms of performance and/or UX. A dApp isn't a dApp without the proper infrastructure, so ensuring the proper "materials" from the beginning is a great way to start your Web3 journey!
2. Technologies are constantly evolving. That's why you should always keep an eye out for what the trend is and how you may hop on it. There's talk of trending L2s and L3s and even harnessing the power of zk-Rollups - keeping up with the space ensures that all potential for the building is usable at its maximum!
3. Start Building! That's the hardest part. It was getting to do it. Trusting the process and tools might initially feel overwhelming, even a bit scary. The road is set!

Q: Does Bware Labs plan to partner with any big project this year strategically, and why is the name Bware?

Alexandru: Bware is the abbreviation for Blockchain Software. We are constantly partnering up with important projects in the space and pushing the partnerships to the max. We are always searching for improvements; take, for example, our work for the Aptos ecosystem.

Q: When will your tokens be listed on the exchange, and which exchanges do you plan to list on in the future?

Alexandru: Our INFRA token has been launched on 4 CEXes - KuCoin, Mexc, Bitmart, Gate.io, and 3 DEXs: TraderJoe, Uniswap, and xExchange. We aim to launch more by EOY. So please keep your eyes on us.

Q: Which market are you focused on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users, and partners?

Alexandru: We are a global project focused on gaining traction worldwide, and our node providers and infrastructure support are well-distributed geographically.

Q: Do you guys feel satisfied by seeing your progress and achievements till now, when you look back to the day you started the Bware Labs’ project?

Alexandru: Yes, we are! Looking back, we are glad to see that blockchain technology is evolving and that we can keep doing what we love: building blockchain infrastructure for many innovative and disruptive projects.

Q: Can you share your social media links so we can keep ourselves updated?

Alexandru: Kindly visit our humbled community.

Q: Many projects need help with UI / UX which turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and users outside the crypto space?

Alexandru: Have you seen our UX/UI? It is one of the most simple and intuitive interfaces in Web3. Check it out!

🎁 Participate in the Bware Labs AMA quiz now for a chance to win $10 in INFRA!

The form will remain open for five days from publishing this AMA recap.

KuCoin and Bware Labs have prepared a total of $2,000 in INFRA to give away to AMA participants.

1. Pre-AMA activity: $1,000 in INFRA

2. Free-ask section: $50 in INFRA

3. Flash mini-game: $400 in INFRA

4. Post-AMA quiz: $550 in INFRA

. . .

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