AMA: Circuits of Value’s Founder Shannon Code — March 2021
Before reading further, we need to give a huge shout out to the good people at Professionals Review. Prior to the Ask Me Anything session, they wrote a great investigative piece on $COVAL and Emblem Vault that can be found here. Please visit their website, join the Telegram Channel, and follow Celty Crypto on Twitter.
STOP! Before proceeding with another (very) in-depth Ask Me Anything session, please use the following resources of information. Visit the $COVAL Telegram Channel to meet Shannon and have your questions answered directly:
Questions and Answers
Questions are asked by Celty Crypto, and they are answered by Shannon Code (COVAL / Emblem DEV). Follow up comments by the host are denoted with brackets [].
Prologue: Hi @shannoncode , you are very welcome and thank you for joining us to what I think will be a very interesting session. And welcome to all of our fantastic community old and new as well, we do this for you folks, and I know a lot of you are very interested in COVAL since our review a while back…. Without further adieu.
Q1: Firstly, I want to know a little bit about you. Can you briefly tell us about your personal journey to get here today?
Lets rewind all the way back…. I have been working with computers since I was a youngster. Fast forward to my 20’s when I discover crypto while doing security research work for a local company (Pen testing / hacking) The company I was working for became acquired and my position was moved. I loved security and wanted to investigate this crypt stuff so started looking for a position that covered both. I interviewed with the company Mastercoin, and was hired as their Chief security Officer. That was it, I was hooked. Before crypto, I developed software that would play world of warcraft, auto leveling characters and then farming in game currency. Yes, bots…. but it was better than paying sweat shops in china for the in game gold.
[Oh nice! With Lua (programming language for non techies)?]
Well Lua was part of it, but mostly I used c# .net
[Love it! A passion hobby turned career 😍]
That’s how I roll, if I love it, or want to know more about a technology, I look for a job doing just that.
Q2: So how did you dream up COVAL?
It started as a thought experiment… Can I make a wallet without knowing the private keys… Once I started experimenting with this concept, Coval and Emblem Vault was born.
Q3: Did you pull a team together straight away or were you solo for a while first?
I had one partner when I started, back then there was a large crypto community on skype of all places. We hung out in the counterparty group along with other crypto themed groups. We did lots of musing at that time, describing what would eventually turn into the NFT space we find ourselves in.
I didn’t form a team for a few years, after I felt secure that how I wanted to build was a viable approach. (I asked quite a few hacker/security types for their thoughts).
Q4: Ok, so let’s skip forward a little bit to now then….What size is your team and do you follow an agile or waterfall development process?
Our team size has fluctuated over the years, we are currently a team of 3. My wife and I and Our business development head.
As for the agile question, that’s a great one. My wife, Dawn Code: is internet famous as a leader in agile coaching. So we practice agile where we can.
Fun side story, My wife and I changed our last names to Code when we married, because of our love for software and puzzles.
[Thank you for that. I’m a big agile fan personally, and it’s always refreshing to see agile teams in crypto which tends to be quite a black box development world. It’s always so interesting to hear about a project’s journey and how the team is managed and constructed.]
But let’s talk about COVAL now…
Q5: What is the Circuits of Value platform in one sentence? Give me the elevator pitch :)
Circuits of Value is the utility token that enables blockchain interoperability.
Q6: Ok, so let’s break that down a little bit. How does it achieve this — what’s the enabler?
The name Circuits of Value is meant to help users envision a path through a complex network of blockchains (circuit) much like the internet.
[Right, so COVAL is the platform enabler, Emblem Vault is the use case/product]
Q7: Can you explain what exactly an Emblem Vault is at a high level?
My vision of the future of blockchains is one similar to the internet or credit cards. When we pay for something using a credit card, the business receives the payment, and the purchaser just swipes the card, there isn’t a complicated transfer and conversion of funds into different currency types. Blockchain will become as ubiquitous as this. And Coval / Emblem Vault is one step closer to that future.
At a high level an Emblem Vault is simply a crypto container. Much like an envelope, or a shipping box. Emblem Vault is specifically an NFT, with a wallet inside. This NFT can contain many different assets, from many blockchains. The entire contents can then be “mailed” (transferred) trustlessly and as simply as any other cryptocurrency token.
Since we can containerize a wallet now, we can do lots of fun tricks.
[As I read about Emblem Vaults, I could think of more and more use cases for them — they have the potential to have entire platforms built on top of them. I came across 3 main use cases however — Trading, Privacy and Storage.]
Q8: Let’s talk about trading first. What problems do Emblem Vaults solve in the trading space and what unique utility do they enable?
I remember watching a bitcoin documentry with my wife, I paused it when they described transfering bitcoin. I handed her my wallet and said, there’s cash, and credit cards, and the password to my safe in that wallet. “This is an Emblem Vault” That was her lightbulb moment.
EXAMPLES:
One of the early realizations we had was the ability to do atomic cross chain swaps unlike any other system before. For example:
User1 has bitcoin but wants Eth
User2 has Eth but wants bitcoin
User1 places some bitcoin in a vault
User2 places eth in a vault
Both users then “swap” their vaults, claim them and extract the contents. The users have performed a swap between eth and bitcoin.
[Yes, this “wrapping” concept has a lot of power.]
There are other interesting potentials as well… A vault stores it’s addresses on chain.
A system can be built using smart contracts that can peer inside a vault and determine a value, this enables things like staking, Users can stake their vaults and earn rewards based specifically on the contents of their vault. This will enable staking of every type of token imaginable.
Another fun type of vault was created recently. the NFT lived on Polygon blockchain I think. But the contents were matic-$coval, xdai-$coval, bsc…, eth… and fantom$Coval making a very unique “Multi dimensional token”
[The privacy use case caught my eye immediately]
Q9: Can we go a little bit deeper into privacy tokens. They are a huge market themselves. What unique use cases do Emblem Vaults bring to the privacy market?
When we designed Emblem Vault, we decided that some use cases would NOT want the contents of the vault public, so we were sure to allow the hiding of the addresses contained within a vault. This means that now someone can load a vault with their tokens, mark it private and transfer the vault to another party. The password is provided to the other party will let them see the actual contents of the vault, but no one else (unless they know the password)… This alone offers a layer of privacy.
[So essentially, any token can become a privacy token if you wrap it in a vault?]
Another privacy aspect is like this: — Story Time-
Lets imagine Satoshi had transferred his early bitcoins into a Vault, as far as the bitcoin blockchain is concerned, the coins landed at a wallet address.
But Satoshi could have sold this vault, and others selling it and on and on. Since the coins within the vault don’t actually change addresses, the blockchain doesn’t reflect any movement.
[No transaction = no record. Simple, yet incredibly effective.]
Expert companies like Chainalisys could link together all the blockchains and get some of the transaction history, but if the vault was password protected it would be even more difficult.
We are really blurring the lines now between blockchain networks.
Q10: Integrations and partnerships sound like very important enablers for the platform (as touched on above). I see the platform being as much a B2B (business to business) product as a B2C (business to customer). What partnerships do you have, and are you planning any integrations in the future that you can tell us about?
Example: Place an original Rare-Pepe into a vault and now it can be sold on opensea… all this without opensea needing to support counterparty / bitcoin NFT’s.
We are speaking with a few companies who want to make a bunch of vaults. One company for instance wants to be able to pay users for certain behaviors… they want to be able to pay the users even if the users haven’t created blockchain wallets yet. With Emblem Vault, they can create a vault that’s able to be claimed by each user, paying into that vault as needed. The users can then at some future time claim the vault.
Another company we are speaking with wants to sell packages of NFT’s …. think foil wrapped sports cards. Buy a vault, open it up and see what you got…. OOOH you got a rare one.
Here’s another fun one. DeFi starter kits.
Imagine an airdrop that were vaults. Inside the vault are tokens required to yield farm, a few LP tokens. The vault is already earning yield, and once claimed the user has the pieces necessary to participate in the DeFi space, all without trying to figure out how to get started.
[Gamification :)]
Q11: I know there is a dual token economy, but first can we just talk about COVAL? What roles does it play in the platform? Will it have utility, or will holders be able to stake it for example?
We are activaly developing a new token code named $Fuel… This token will be able to be earned by staking or exchanging their coval.
Until that time Coval will continue to be a first class citizen within all of our products. Buy vaults with coval, NFT 2 NFT Swap using coval to pay the fee, etc…
Q12: When will $FUEL be released? I assume Fuel will be on-platform only, and COVAL will remain the outward facing token?
Unknown. We have some unique features planned but need to keep gas costs down. Lots of testing is needed. We are ~40% complete I would say. That’s the current thinking.
Q13: I see you are very actively developing, you just recently finished the contract code for trading one NFT for another NFT on any ethereum based network for example. Can you tell us about your next dev priority?
Well I want to get out a simple UI for the NFT 2 NFT swapping application. This will out of the box work with every ERC721 and ERC1155 token across every ethereum based network. After that the high priority is the integration with the Enigma/Secret network. This will further decentralize the wallet generation, storage and retrieval.
I really enjoyed this and appreciate the opportunity to describe these exciting developments.
Q14: How does your Circuit Jump technology work? How do you transfer assets over blockchains?
Currently we have 2 methods in our contract that lives on all the chains. On one chain we do a DepositTo… this burns your specified tokens and ads an entry into the contract about where the coins are going…. On the same contract on the receiving chain, the WithdrawFrom method is called, which mints the amount of tokens that were previously deposited on the other chain.
Q15: With wrapping it is clear to me. But what if you want to unwrapping tokens from a container?
Unwrapping is as simple as a transaction on our DApp… This special transaction burns the NFT and returns the decryption key needed to decrypt the private keys contained within the vault. These keys can then be imported into wallet(s) of your choice
Q16: Tell us how do your transferable liquidity pools work? How do transfers work?
When you add liquidity to an AMM like uniswap, you receive LP tokens that represent your deposit… these LP tokens can be transferrd into a vault and traded, gifted or sold.
An NFT that earns LP yield is such a fun concept.
Q17: How popular is emblem.finance app with users now? How do you plan to develop the NFT direction?
We have had over 2000 vaults created across the blockchains. More interest every day. In this ecosystem we are focusing heavily on NFT’s since a vault offers some unique features to artists not seen before. Such as Embeds. Our NFT’s allow embed url’s so an NFT can be created of a tweet, or a 3d rendering, or a spotify playlist… the options are endless.
Q18: Your platform allows you to make “tradable portfolios” by combining different assets into one. But where do I trade this? Where can I get liquidity for such portfolio tokens?
Stay tuned for the NFT 2 NFT program to launch. This will allow trading of vaults, along with just trading of any NFT simiularly to how kids would trade Magic the gathering cards, or baseball cards.
Q19: When will marketing be increased? The project needs more exposure! Is there a plan to relist Coval on bittrex or any other exchanges?
We are working on new exchanges :)
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