CoinMetro AMA: 10 Best Questions 🔥 

For those who missed the excellent AMA with Qredo's Josh Goodbody and CoinMetro CEO Kevin Murcko on December 9th, here's a link to the interview and our pick of the 10 best questions.

(NOTE - For ease of reading, we've made a few, non-material edits to the Q&A transcript below).

Q1. Do you plan to connect with other chains and if so which ones would potentially be first? [Note: shortly after this AMA, Qredo announced the integration of Algorand]

We have a few things planned. We have Solana, BSC, Polkadot, Cardano, Algorand, Terra and Avalanche that are all being built right now. In what order those are coming, we won’t disclose but they are in production in some cases, in testing in others.

It's so important for us to be bringing these out because it increases the overall usability of the network. You can hold these assets; you can also settle these assets across a Layer 2 network and you can interact with the default ecosystem for all these assets.

So it's almost like we bring a whole community to the Qredo network every time we integrate with these Layer 1s. So for us, it is top priority.

👉 You can see all Qredo's supported assets here.

Q2. Is there a metric when looking at protocols you are planning to add to the network?

We do want to support the majority of the Layer 1s that are out there, but we will always prioritize the ones that are making the most headway…  that in turn supports the overall growth of crypto and makes it much more usable and much more innovative.

We look at all of the various community metrics to help guide our thinking.

The amount of active engagement that people have across various social media channels is important because that shows how many people are using it.

The second thing that we look at is innovation and what people are building on their layer ones. We want to see innovation, and we want to see an active community of builders and supporters and that's how we prioritize them.

Q3. There have been a lot of questions about the tokenomics around the overall inflation within the Qredo tokenomics model. Is it inflationary, deflationary?

A lot of the confusion that exists right now relates to the ecosystem fund that Qredo has, which is 11% of the token supply. This is a really large amount of the overall token supply and it vests slowly over the course of 2022. But these are ecosystem tokens; they’re not entering into circulating supply. They’re going to be used very selectively and very sparingly to incentivize the growth of the ecosystem and to reward those building really cool products and functionalities on Qredo.

The next token release is on the 14th January 2022, so on this date, there is an increase of 4.46 to 4.7% in the circulating supply — so a very small amount. Tokens vest on a weekly basis throughout the course of 2022, so by the end of 2022, the circulating supply is going to be around 305,000,000 Qredo tokens. So that's an absolute increase of 26.1%, which feels like a lot but — in the reality of things — if you look at all these other layer one projects that are out there and even some layer two projects, as an inflationary measure, that's actually quite low.

And we combat that inflation in quite significant ways. We're very conscious to make sure that, as the token circulating supply increases, we're bringing new ways to make the token even more usable, and more widely distributed in the space.

We're doing that in key concrete ways. For example, next year we will be implementing a token buyback scheme. This is where all of the income that the validators generate on the network actually initiates wholesale buyback of Qredo tokens on the secondary market.

We've got a lot planned, and this is very much the beginning of our journey. So don't listen to the FUD, listen to the facts.

👉 Learn more about Qredo tokenomics in our tokenomics paper.

Q4. Can you give more information on the huge amount of investor and team tokens that will be unlocked next year?

Contrary to most projects in the space, we built the product before releasing the token. Most projects you see have a team bucket. We also have a team bucket and an investor bucket and, together, they're not abnormally large compared to other projects**.**

From a team perspective, we're not an anonymous bunch of builders — we are a seasoned team with a great deal of experience and we aren’t walking away from this anytime soon. We're building for the long-term and part of that is why we've built this economics model over 50 years.

People look at the investor and team token numbers and think this seems like a large percentage. There's a reason behind all of this, we've built this company over three years and we've invested a significant amount into this, and we're going to continue doing so. The unlock that you're seeing will happen slowly and steadily and we have built an arsenal of deflationary and demand-led economics strategies that will help dampen any kind of concerns that the community has.

Q5. How easily do you think the “not your keys, not your crypto” mantra will die off? 

For the first time in recent history, you can actually control a financial asset that you have. This asset that's worth something, you can control and own — and you don't have to rely on a bank.

So, I don't think this mantra is going to die off because it resonates with our innate sense of what's right: something that is mine, I have control over.

That isn’t going anywhere, but it might evolve as holding your own keys becomes easier. And we hope we're doing our bit in that — i.e making the “not your keys, not your crypto” piece usable. So, by all the magic of cryptography and multi-party computation, you can actually own your private keys but have them protected with MPC.

But, equally, it's a choice — some people want to put it on a hardware device and bury that in their garden. If that’s your thing, that’s your thing. There's going to be choice for everyone.

So I don't think the mantra will die off, but I think it'll evolve over time.

Q6. How will KYC work with Qredo? Will users have to manually do KYC for every exchange Qredo supports or are they in some way able to create or streamline it?

We plan to release something called the KYC Hub — which isn't a mandatory step or process within the network but it will enable you to establish an identity within the Qredo Network.

One of the things that is coming in the pipeline is the establishment of the Web 3 economy for identity standards. They're called the W3C standards. And what that means is if you want to interact with other platform services that have adopted those standards, like Meta and some of the other large social media giants in the space, you've got to be able to have some kind of identity certification that you can take with you when you go to different places.

We want to give people the choice to have some kind of identity on the Qredo Network, and give people the choice to sign up for the certification or the solution that they think works best for them. There's going to be a lot of choice.

Q7. Do you have anything in the works to address the high transfer fees? I've been wanting to stake my Qredo for a while, and these fees prevent me from doing so

People want to move their $QRDO onto the Qredo Network from whatever exchange they’re on to benefit from the auto staking program, which is where you just keep your Qredo tokens on the network in a Qredo wallet and let it accrue staking income.

But some of the exchanges charge quite high fees, and it's difficult because exchanges don't want to have to constantly change their fees depending on Ethereum gas costs. So many exchanges just implement this flat fee, which covers them regardless of what's happening in the Ethereum gas space.

Right now this is a reality for many tokens in the crypto space – we totally hear that.

We think that in the future we will have direct bridges into many of these exchanges, so you will no longer have to be exposed to the Layer 1 fee. We want to be able to reward you when you move your asset onto the Qredo Network – part of that is the auto-staking program we have, with additional things coming in 2022 that involve what’s called custodial mining.

👉 Open a Qredo wallet and start staking today.

Q8. Regarding Coinbase's recent acquisition of BRD, how does Qredo potentially differ from BREAD?

The BRD team has a great pedigree in building very easy-to-use retail crypto wallets. And by Coinbase bringing BRD in, they bring a team that is really the bread and butter of UI and UX, making super easy-to-use retail products.

We're different in that we're not trying to build point solutions. We're not trying to build a crypto wallet per se; we are building an infrastructure layer that can underpin and power all these different crypto wallets.

We’ve given the first example of what can be built on Qredo by launching the web-based app that people are using to access the Qredo Network. Qredo is building infrastructure, so many more BRDs can be made in the future on the back of it.

Q9. Is Qredo aware of Parsiq and the potential synergies of adopting their tech into Qredo’s services?

Coinmetro kind of pioneered their distribution and was actually heavily involved in pushing them to create a token. I remember keenly watching that launch, and it's been such a great journey for the Parsiq team. We've known some of the team for a while, and are very impressed with what they've been building.

I think the approach that Qredo takes is completely agnostic from a solutions perspective. If there's value in it, we're going to integrate with it. Whether that is a ZK roll-up, a centralized custodial solution, a centralized exchange, or a project like Parsiq, there is enormous value in us, both contributing to and working together.

We've gone from an organization of about 20 people to 100 people, so we have a few more hands-on deck to be able to do more things. And one of the things that we're really working on is building this coalition of the brave. Whether those are Layer 1s, Layer 2s, or existing token projects, we're going to be working with a coalition of them to do some pretty cool stuff together.

Q.10 What skillset is hardest to recruit for in the crypto space? 

This space is attracting the brightest minds in the industry, and they're coming from every sector. We've been interviewing people from big pharma, investment banking, and even the aerospace industry. We've also been speaking to people that have spent their life building enterprise open source software, but they're all gravitating towards crypto because it's different, new, and presents all kinds of opportunities.

So at the moment, if you try and pick a skill set that is hardest to recruit for, I would say it's engineering and development because they're so in demand right now. If you have some kind of experience in this field and you have touched crypto at some point, you're as good as gold.

👉 Want to work with us? We're currently hiring for these roles.

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