AMA: Circuits of Value and Emblem Vault’s Founder Shannon Code — February 2021
A big thank you to the Zero to Hero Crypto (Chat) for providing the platform for this Ask Me Anything session. Please visit them on Telegram or Twitter.
STOP! Before proceeding with this (very) in-depth Ask Me Anything, please use the following additional sources of information. First and foremost, visit the $COVAL Telegram Channel to meet Shannon and have your questions answered:
On a red Tuesday…
It’s an interesting day in crypto land, that’s for sure. But I feel pretty great, excited to inform people about this wonderful product we’ve built.
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you build Circuits of Value?
My name is Shannon Code; I’ve been a software developer since I was little. Writing my first program at 8 years old. I used to work in an industry called RMT (Real money trading) where we farmed in game currency in mmorpg games and sold it. Later I applied and was hired by Mastercoin to head their security efforts. Throughout the years I was intrigued by the idea of creating a wallet that could be sent to someone without me knowing the keys, so I could gift crypto currency without any risk.
Circuits of value, began life as a token called Ribbit Rewards, the team who created it was pivoting and going to abandon the token, so I took it over and rebranded it to $Coval. $Coval was then utilized as the payment token for creating Emblem Vaults, which I will speak more about here.
Q2. Can you briefly describe what is COVAL?
$Coval (Circuits of Value) was designed to be a transient token. Meaning it would be able to “Jump” between different blockchains. It has evolved over the years, but is still serving this function. By being able to move from blockchain to blockchain Coval can be utilized as the payment mechanism for making NFT’s on any blockchain. We strongly believe that the blockchain space is similar to the early days of the internet, many different services, many different types of networks. But blockchains need to function cohesively. Circuits of Value was designed to help solve this interoperability issue, we want the internet of money to be a single network of networks, rather than a bunch of competing blockchains, fighting.
Q3. What is the use-case of the Coval?
So, Coval has a singular purpose at the moment. The ability to mint a very special kind of NFT called an Emblem Vault. Every time a vault is minted, the amount of Coval used is burnt forever, making Coval a deflationary token.
Now Emblem Vault, the NFT I spoke of is where things get interesting. An Emblem Vault is an NFT that can exist on many blockchains (currently ethereum and matic, soon bsc) which itself contains a wallet inside.
An Emblem Vault allows anyone to create this portable wallet that can contain any number of different token types, from ethereum to bitcoin. It can contain counterparty asseets, and assets that exist on Matic, and soon every other blockchain (as we add the support). An Emblem Vault allows anyone to create this portable wallet that can contain any number of different token types, from ethereum to bitcoin. It can contain counterparty asseets, and assets that exist on Matic, and soon every other blockchain (as we add the support)
******Imagine with me for a second ******
Ethereum gas fee’s are ourtageous. One collector has hundreds of art NFT’s they purchased on ethereum Opensea (say crypto punks)
Another user has counterparty NFT’s that they have collected (say rare pepe’s). Both users can create vaults on Matic sidechain for very low cost, They can then send their native NFT’s into the vaults they created. Those users can now go to a marketplace on Matic and sell their NFT’s also inexpensively, or… they could utilize the swap feature and trade one vault for another. Essentially trading NFT art across blockchains as simply as trading 2 NFT’s.
A vault is similar conceptually to wrapped tokens, except that they work more as a container. The assets are locked inside the NFT and are traded, no need for costly wrapping operations.
Q1. What are COVAL’s most important next priorities until the end of 2021? Are the fundamental tools sufficient to achieve these goals?
Our high priorities for 2021 are going live on BSC, enhancing our infrastructure to make everything even more decentralized, and building out the NFT 2 NFT trading contract.
We have two strong beliefs:
1: Layer 2 chains are going to gain massive popularity as ethereum gas fees continue to increase while at the same time ERC based tokens and NFT’s also gain major traction
2: People want to be able to trade their art pieces with each other, similarly to how people trade baseball cards, or comic books.
With things like IPFS/filecoin and Layer 2 blockchains becoming widely used, then I’d say “yes”. The tools are in place for us to build out everything we need
Q2. The digital artwork supported by Emblem Vault is based on ERC 721 NFT. How do you solve the high gas problem? Sometimes the GAS fee for sending some NFTs even exceeds the value of the NFT itself.
First, Emblem Vaults can be minted on blockchains other than Ethereum mainnet, and these vaults can hold Ethereum NFT’s . Now, often times the highest cost on Ethereum is the minting operation, and secondly sites like opensea have internal smart contracts to facilitate trades and sales, these operations are often very expensive.
To load a vault with assets is a simple transfer function, the transfer functions are some of the most inexpensive operations across every blockchain.
By minting a Vault on something like Matic/Polygon and loading it up with Mainnet Eth, or Bitcoin enables anyone to transfer these higher level assets, quickly and inexpensively across the layer 2 networks.
In an early experiment, we created a vault on Ethereum Testnet, filled it with 1 ETH and transferred that vault to another address on Testnet. As far as I know we were the first project to ever transfer real mainnet ethereum across the ethereum testnet.
Q3 What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create Circuits of Value?
Like I described earlier, I’ve been in software for years, even changing my last name to Code. The idea for this project started as a bug in a wallet I was building.
The web wallet I was building had support for a few different assets.
A bug surfaced that turned my bitcoin address into a litecoin address. This got me thinking that we could use the same “Wallet Seed” to generate multuple different types of blockchain addresses.
This thinking lead us to create a universal wallet, similar to trustwallet, or Genesis, but placed inside an NFT, encrypted.
Q4. What is the vision and mission of your coin? What problems are you trying to solve? Do these problems remain unsolved with the existing public blockchains?
Our vision includes a unique way to make assets agnostic to which blockchain they were created on. When you pay for something at a store with a credit card, the store doesn’t ask if it’s in euro, or usd, it just accepts the payment. We strive to make blockchain operate similarly, and Coval / emblem vault is the rails by which we can make these interopoerable crypto assets.
We are seeing lots of projects attempt to solve the problems in different ways, Tether for instance lives on a handful of blockchains, and wrapped bitcoin on ethereum has a massive amount of value locked. We believe that the current solutions are too complex and still result in a fractured network. We will continue to expand upon this idea of interoperability until it really doesn’t matter which blockchain you use, you can interact with any other asset, regardless of their blockchains.
Q5. There are three core issues in encryption and blockchain technology, namely security, interoperability and scalability. How does $COVAL overcome these problems?
By making a universal container (think envelope) one can transfer any asset, any way they like. Similar to a letter or package, the envelope or box doesn’t care what’s inside it, but the postal system can still ship it around to it’s destination.
Encryption is a tricky problem, and with Emblem Vault we strive to simplify this. The keys within a vault are encrypted and can’t be lost. The holder of the vault can claim the contents and import into their wallet, or transfer the entire vault to someone else. No need to worry about complexity of encryption or key management.
Thank everyone for your time, I hope you have found this AMA helpful and our project intriguing. We are ramping up awareness quite actively and welcome anyone to join our community and participate in our project https://t.me/Coval_Chat.
Impromptu Community Questions
Q: I’m a developer, and I’m interested in contributing to your project alongsides earning, Do you have any Bug Bounty to check for vulnerabilities ?
Get in contact with me directly and we can discuss bug bounty.
What about a partnership?
We have partnerships with Dark, Prism, Deflect, Secret Network along with others being worked on. We anticipate lots of projects will find Emblem Vault useful
Kindly explain more about your Tokenomics, Release Schedule and utility, is it inflationary or deflationary?
Coval is deflationary, every vault minted burns coval. We have a working product that’s live today. Play with it. Have fun, people are coming up with clever uses every day.
What are the key benefits of COVAL Tokens for users and traders of conventional cryptocurrencies? Do you think decentralized finance is better than traditional finance? If so, why?
Decentralized finance brings the power commonly held by banks and large corporations into the hands of everyone. Someone with as little as 1$ can participate in lending, earning yield, and more.
DeFi is the new frontier and already buzzing in 2021, what roles do you play in innovativeness of DeFi and what’s your approach to DeFi and ultimate DeFi solutions?
Emblem vault stores the wallet address on chain, this opens up the capability of staking your vaults, and getting credit for all assets contained within.
Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like your?
You can hear all about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLGB9CUnvs&ab_channel=Blockchain%26Business
Which projects are your closest competitors? For example, do you accept Uniswap, Curve or Balancer as your competitors? How will you take to the next level?Which projects are your closest competitors? For example, do you accept Uniswap, Curve or Balancer as your competitors? How will you take to the next level?
Since an emblem vault can contain any assets, that includes LP tokens, so a vault can actually earn yield, and that yield earning asset can be staked or sold or transferred.
We strive to build with “co-opetition.”
Truly it is convenient to use apps and platforms on our mobile devices, for Circuits of Value , will it launch a mobile app in the future?
Rather than a mobile app, we build a Dapp, that’s compatible with many mobile dapp browsers like Metamask mobile.
Could you give me 2 or 3 key points to convince me and other angel investors invest in project for the long-term?
We have a very public team, a transparent community and 2 live products. We are only going to grow. We essentially predicted this NFT boom and are positioned to fully enhance and take advantage of the NFT popularity. Adding utility to anyone and everyone in crypto. We have an active German and Asian community, and welcome ambasador’s in other countries to help manage and grow our community internationally.
Association support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?
We are planning AMA’s like this one at least once a month, and are currently discussing showcasing our project on youtube as well as other social media networks. I also have plans to interact heavily in Clubhouse.
How many rewards campaigns could Circuits of Value run in the near future? Do you want to attract more users to your ecosystem?
And with that, giveaways, gifting of vaults, and fundraisers are quite easy to develop with Coval/Emblem Vault today.
How Can I Be Engage In Providing Liquidity And To Claim The COVAL token?
We are live on Uniswap(eth) and Quickswap(matic)
“Thanks everyone, and for all the questions unanswered, please join our telegram chats, and ask any unanswered questions there.”
Shannon Code
