Why The Open Application Network (OAN) changed its go-to-market strategy & more
Messari hosted a public AMA with Matthew Spoke, CEO and co-Founder of The Open Application Network ($AION) in the Messari community group. Below is a transcript of the conversation.
You can find all of Messari's historical AMA's here
Messari: Alright let's get started. I'd like to thank @matthewspoke, CEO and founder of The OAN. Matthew, can you start by giving us a brief introduction and how you first got involved in crypto?
Matthew Spoke: Happy to be here. I got involved in crypto as a full time career focus in 2014, when I started Deloittes' first research team on Bitcoin. I led that team for 2 years, during which time I first discovered Ethereum. Being from Toronto, I had the pleasure of getting to know a good number of the original team from Ethereum, including having spent a lot of time with Vitalik in the early days.
I left Deloitte in early 2016 to start my first company which morphed its way into what we're doing now with Aion and the Open Application Network.
Messari: That's an amazing journey! Could you also talk about how The OAN got started? What were some of its initial goals and the problems it's looking to solve?
Matthew Spoke: Good question. We spent the past 3 years building a layer 1 blockchain protocol that we're extremely proud of. We've accomplished some incredible milestones including our upcoming hard fork to become the first hybrid consensus based system that blends PoW and PoS.
And although we've had some incredible success building our protocol, we started realizing that we weren't necessarily helping move the narrative of the industry forward. As in "why and how will the world start using this new technology"
The OAN is the result of the research we started 6-7 months ago to better understand the economics of platform economies, where they're falling short, and why a global open system like ours could be well positioned to solve these problems. From our perspective, the crypto industry, and particularly those operating under the banner of web 3.0 have failed to make a compelling argument for why we need to exist.
The launch of the Open Application Network is not as much a rebrand, as it is a new go-to-market strategy. Aion continues to be the name of the digital asset of this system, but we started focusing our adoption efforts towards companies operating in the “platform economy”. Companies like Shopify, Uber, Youtube, and their respective stakeholder groups.
Our main emphasis is to develop a narrative that addresses a real economic problem growing today among platform companies, and then show the world how we can use an open system like ours to build new solutions for these 21st century problems
The reactions we’ve received so far have been extremely positive, both from our existing Aion community, as well as from key people in our new target audience. I think people are eager to hear real world applicability coming out of our industry.
Messari: Completely agree. While a lot of these projects have a cool factor, what they really need to answer is how can customers use this platform or product and how can it benefit them.
Matthew Spoke: I think there's a need for people pushing forward on the "Decentralized Internet" narrative, but it is not directly relevant to most people's day to day lives in the short term
Messari: This is a great point. Many of these initiatives are long-term plays.
Matthew Spoke: Ya agreed. We're by no means trying to belittle those efforts. I think the Ethereum community is very well suited to solve these issues. I do think there are too many copy cats trying to mimic them. We're building towards a different audience
Messari: I think we can start jumping into some community questions. This one is related to the above asking about adoption efforts: What sectors are seeing the most adopting on THE OAN? What are the most popular applications using THE OAN?
Matthew Spoke: Good question. Rather than looking at sectors, the common characteristic we're looking for in the companies building with us is whether they operate or participate in multi-sided online marketplaces
This is true of companies in many consumer verticals. Companies most people would be very familiar with. Our earliest examples happen to be built in transportation / ridesharing, and online video streaming / ad marketplaces. That said, there are projects building in other verticals as well. Our target user either operates one of these online market places (e.g. Airbnb) or is a company that relies on these online markets (e.g. Smile.io - a plug in to Shopify).
Messari: We also have some more specific question about ecosystem partners: What have the teams in Shanghai and Barbados been up to lately? What will they be working on moving forward under The OAN? To what extent will Verity Group and Kesho Labs be utilizing Open Kits as part of their startup work?
Matthew Spoke: Good questions. Our Shanghai and Barbados teams are extremely integrated in our development efforts. Other than geographical differences, we all collaborate on core milestones. Specifically, the Shanghai team build and maintains our Rust kernel, alongside our Java team. They also played a huge role in rolling out the staking interface earlier this week at https://staking.theoan.com/dashboard
Same is true in Barbados. They are key members of our global team and have played roles in our Java kernel and tools like our dashboard and other key pieces
Verity and Kesho Labs are two examples of companies we're working with globally to deliver Open Apps in different geographies. Kesho Labs is building some exciting products in gaming and payments, as well as working with other African companies on their future strategies
Verity is an extremely strategic partner for us in Latin America, having deep experience working with online consumer apps and large enterprises. The platform problems we experience in NA are equally relevant in Latin America. They are helping define requirements on certain Open Kits as part of their work.
Messari: This global effort is great to see. With the team in Shanghai and the recent news coming out of China, we have a question on OAN's plan for China: What strategies will Aion make to grow use cases in China?
Matthew Spoke: We operate a solid team in China, and are constantly staying on top of market conditions changing there. We are open to working on Open App concepts in that market, but keeping in mind that the dynamics and economics of their equivalents are quite different than their western peers.
There's a lot of interest in our OAN strategy, and I intend to be spending more time in China to better understand opportunities, and to engage with the crypto community across key cities. I'm hoping to be back in China for a significant trip in Q1
Messari: Excellent. I think we're all interested to hear more about your feedback from that trip! Speaking of your team: How do you rate your tech team? How does the experience of your tech team stand out?
Matthew Spoke: I love this question. My favorite part of my job is talking about the incredible ppl I get to work with every day.
Our tech team is world-class. We’ve been developing this team for the past 3-4 years in this industry, and have incredible success in attracting talent from some very notable companies, including Google, Twitter, IBM, and Amazon. Overall, our team now sits at about 55 people between our 3 offices, with a new focus on product management skills and developer relations, to complement the incredible engineering and research talent we have.
Most importantly, moving forward with our roadmap, you’ll notice a prioritization of features and improvements dictated heavily by user feedback. We don’t want to be playing the “my blockchain is better than your blockchain” game anymore. It’s disconnected from reality, and suffers from a complete lack of real world feedback that addresses real problems.
Long story short, I would put my team against any other in this space with a huge amount of confidence
Messari: That is really great to hear. And we have some questions on some of the technical developments within OAN: Scalability, security, and data privacy are three important things: How does Aion plan to overcome these issues?
Matthew Spoke: All important topics
On scalability, as part of our Open Kit infrastructure we're currently working on efficiency improvements for applications calling on the network. In terms of base layer scalability, we follow this field of research closely but don't see this as the most imminent requirement for adoption
On security, our biggest step forward is happening next week with the launch of Unity, our upgrade to a hybrid PoW and PoS system. This will see the overall security threshold of the network increase by several orders of magnitude. Coinholders are starting to actively stake to participate in this new upgrade. We've already seen more than 30m Aion staked in the past 4 days alone. The hard fork is scheduled for Nov 19
On privacy, stay tuned. We expect to be announcing our privacy efforts in the next week or two. This is a hugely important topic that we are making significant strides against
Messari: Big news! Are there any resources available or crucial information that would be good for node operators and token holders to know going into the hard fork?
Matthew Spoke: Yes for sure. The interface for staking went live on Monday at https://staking.theoan.com/dashboard
People can learn more about Unity and the economics here. The economics paper is referenced in that post
we also announced a huge slate of supporting staking services. We expect there will be 18-20 high quality stakers services registered before the hard fork. You can see who's announced their intent to support us here.
Messari: Thank you for sharing these. And congrats on the upgrade! We have a couple of questions that go a little deeper into the technical weeds.
Matthew Spoke: Let’s do it
Messari: What advantages does Aion JAVA AVM have compared to Ethereum Solidity EVM?
Matthew Spoke: Rather than type out a long response on the AVM, here are a couple of useful links to help describe why we developed the AVM: (1) Why Java and the JVM, (2) Why not WASM, (3) AVM Hybrid Storage
Messari: How's progress with the Java standards for NFTs and FTs? What's left in the AIP process before they're implemented? Metatransactions seem to break down some substantial barriers to adoption. Any ETA on implementation? Will these be integrated into Open Kits, as well?
Matthew Spoke: The NFT and FT standard are both complete and going through final audits. For future users though, we expect the interaction with these standards to be done through the SDKs we're building into our Open Kits
Most of our users will likely not work directly on contract development, but rather plug features into their products by integrating the relevant Open Kits
Meta transactions (or third party transaction fees as we call it) is part of the upcoming hard fork on Nov 19. This feature will make a huge difference to user and developer experience. Effectively not requiring a user to have a balance of Aion in their account to interact with an application and pay for NRG (gas)
In this new design, a developer can pre-fund the required NRG costs for their users to interact with a particular application. This required some substantial changes to how the AVM recognizes fees when executing a transaction. We're excited by this improvement.
Messari: These sounds like some positive movements in terms of UX. I'm excited to see these first hand.
Matthew Spoke: Lots of development hours went into these pieces
Messari: We also love to applaud transparency, so we have a few questions on the latest financial disclosures: The latest financial disclosures are really reassuring. There's been references to loans and investments - who are those going to? How is that determined? How much revenue is that going to bring over the next year or two? What other revenue sources are the Foundation looking into or implementing?
- What type of asset allocation can we expect going forward in financials? Will the team consider increasing their BTC position even if it’s a modest $1-2M?
Matthew Spoke: For those who want to better understand our financial disclosures, you can check them out here.
The loans and investments you'd see on our last report have to do with the Foundation supporting a few key members of our ecosystem to build out critical infrastructure in tooling and UX. These are alternative to funding we issued through our grants program
When possible, we'll look for opportunities for the Foundation to monetize some of these contributions for future cashflow into the Foundation
As of now, we have no immediate plans for monetization. As an open source project, our long term goals are best aligned to the Aion we own on our balance sheet. At some point in the future, we'll strategically use that treasury to bring in new strategic investors into our ecosystem and to add more cash to our runway
Given where we currently stand, this will likely be an area I spend more time planning for in the second half of next year. We're fortunate to not have an imminent cash constraint in the Foundation.
On the second question, we have no current intention to grow our BTC position. Our market confidence lies behind Aion, and if anything we’d increase our position in that asset, while balancing demands coming from new institutional investors wanting to take part in our new narrative. We're getting a lot of renewed interest from larger investors and funds.
It’s also worth noting that we were in the first batch of Messari disclosure projects, and we intend to continue working with Messari on leading the industry in transparency.
Messari: Thanks for the update. I think that's all we have for time. Thank you again @matthewspoke for joining us. And thank you to the community for all of your questions. Before signing off, can you tell everyone where they can find out more about OAN and stay in contact with the team?
Matthew Spoke: Follow us on twitter at @OpenAppNetwork and @Aion_OAN or follow me at @mattspoke.
Also, one more shameless plug, check out my latest piece in Forbes today