Crypto Ninjas AMA - Kathy QB (Moonbeam Network)
Ninja- Ladies and gentlemen, Crypto Ninjas AMA session guest is the Head of community at Moonbeam Network, Mrs. Kathy QB.
Kathy- Hi everyone! Happy to be here =) thank you so much for the invite!
Ninja- Its our pleasure! Can you tell us a little about yourself and your role in Moonbeam?
Kathy- Sure! I work in the marketing team as the Head of Community & Events. The majority of my time goes to work with international communities (we have over 19 communities that are language-based), plan monthly strategies for the ambassador community and evaluate/executing events around the world. I’ve been in Moonbeam for over a year and it has been fantastic!
My past life/background has always been in marketing and in the tech space. I used to work in IBM Peru for over 5 years =)
Ninja- Hmm.. IBM is cool. For those who don’t know, what is Moonbeam? What does it promise? Could you briefly give some information about Moonbeam?
Kathy- Sure! Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible parachain in Polkadot. Moonbeam tackles cross-chain interoperability challenges by providing a simpler way to deploy apps to Polkadot. This is why over 100 projects have been able to access the Polkadot ecosystem in an easy and quick way.
Our team is developing the Moonbeam smart contract platform that mainly targets developers that want to build dapps. Our easy to-use infrastructure and tooling have supported Moonbeam in becoming a top destination for building dApps.
What amazes me about Moonbeam is that only after 2 months of being fully live has over 3M transactions, 200k wallets, and 106M GLMR tokens locked with collators.
Ninja- Congrats! Its brillant project. Sufficient and solid promises. So, can you tell us about Moonbeam’s team members? Who is who and what is their role in Moonbeam?
Kathy- Sure! PureStake is the company that is running the core development of Moonbeam, led by CEO Derek Yoo. Derek and his team have extensive experience building technology companies in the web2 space and have leveraged this to excel at providing secure, reliable services to our customers.
Our team has been growing fast in the past year. The project has got too much attention that we needed more support. When I started, the team had around 20 people. Now, we are a 40-people team! We’re all brought together by our vision to make Moonbeam the best platform for developers and projects to build on Polkadot.
Find more info about the Moonbeam team here:
Ninja- Qualified team members and teamwork are very important for a project. Greetings to all of Moonbeam team members. 👋💪
Well, there’s also the Moonriver Network. Can you explain to us the relevance between Moonbeam and Moonriver?
Kathy- Sure! Moonbeam is our deployment to Polkadot, and Moonriver lives in Kusama. Their relation is very similar to Polkadot<>Kusama, they both are related but independent networks.
Moonriver is a MainNet that serves as a canary net for Moonbeam. Moonbeam’s code is tested first on Moonriver under real conditions, and it’s later deployed to the Moonbeam network. This means that Moonriver will always have the latest tech features! A great way of exemplifying this is the cross-chain capabilities that Moonriver has using XCM. In Moonriver, users can now make cross-asset transfers with some of the parachains like Karura and Kintsugi.
Moonbeam’s success is a reflection of Moonriver’s activity and performance. After the code and new tech features are tested on Moonriver, they are deployed to Moonbeam. Moonriver is currently the most active parachain in Kusama, and has been fundamental to test integration deployments, technology runtimes, and other activities that have brought great knowledge and experience to the Moonbeam team. It’s been a little over 6 months since Moonriver completed its launch process to Kusama. The network has passed 15M transactions, 500k wallets, and 2k ERC-20 created.
Moonbeam and Moonriver’s success depends on each other, it’s exciting to see how the networks are developing independent ecosystems and communities.
Ninja- Will they compete with each other?
Kathy- I don’t see it as competitors, all the opposite. Moonriver serves as Moonbeam’s canary net, where all the code, tech updates and new functionalities are tested under real condition. Once tested, they are deployed to Moonbeam.
Ninja- It must be difficult to carry out two projects together.. What’s on Moonbeam roadmap this year?
Kathy- It is challenging and it keep us busy haha.
Good question. Our roadmap focuses on mainly three pillars:
Technology: Since Moonbeam is a parachain in Polkadot, it benefits from the shared security coming from the Polkadot Relay Chain, and interoperability capabilities. This year our team is continue to develop capabilities that allow cross-chain communication between parachains in Polkadot. This is now being added only in Kusama and Moonriver, in the near future, this capabilities will also de deployed to Polkadot & Moonbeam.
Ecosystem: Our ecosystem of integrations is currently the biggest one in Polkadot and Kusama, with over 100 projects building on our networks. We want to continue bringing prominent projects that will add new tools and bring new use cases for our ecosystem. Our main goal is to always provide the best user experience for dapp developers. One of the main things we focus to achieve this tool is to make sure that we have a robust set of tools.
Community: This year focus is also in our community. We have over 19 communities around the world, and we want to continue making this communities grow by hosting more local events, creating content in multiple languages, hosting workshops to target developers. I think many members of this community come from Turkey, so I wanted to leave here the link to our Moonbeam Turkish community: https://t.me/MoonbeamTR
Ninja- Staying connected to the road map and completing the goals is satisfying for the team and trust for the investors. Well, can you tell us about Moonbeam’s advisors, investors and customers?
Kathy- Sure, Moonbeam is backed by CoinFund, Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures. These are just some of the names I remember now. In terms of clients, there are around over 100 projects building on us. Our ecosystem includes prominent projects like Curve Finance, Chainlink, Gnosis Safe, Sushi, Covalent, Etherscan, The Graph, and many more.
Here’s a link to Moonbeam’s ecosystem site. You can see some of the projects building on us here:
https://moonbeam.network/community/projects/
I say some because there might be more projects that are live since Moonbeam & Moonriver are both open source. But the ones listed on our website are projects teams that we know.
Sure, Moonbeam is backed by CoinFund, Binance Labs, ParaFi, Coinbase Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, IOSG Ventures. These are just some of the names I remember now. In terms of clients, there are around over 100 projects building on us. Our ecosystem includes prominent projects like Curve Finance, Chainlink, Gnosis Safe, Sushi, Covalent, Etherscan, The Graph, and many more.
Here’s a link to Moonbeam’s ecosystem site. You can see some of the projects building on us here:
https://moonbeam.network/community/projects/
I say some because there might be more projects that are live since Moonbeam & Moonriver are both open source. But the ones listed on our website are projects teams that we know.
Ninja- Sounds good.. AMA session with Moonbeam Network is end.
Thank you to Mrs. Kathy QB and for take your time today.
Thanks to everyone who joined the AMA session.
Thank you!
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Relevant Links
Moonbeam Website:
https://moonbeam.network/
Moonbeam Telegram:
https://t.me/Moonbeam_Official
Moonbeam Twitter:
https://twitter.com/moonbeamnetwork
Kathy- Thank you so much for inviting me. It was great to participate!
Ninja- Group chat is on. Moonbeam Network will be happy to answer your questions.
Angela- Hi Kathy, What are your superior points over the projects of your competitors?
Kathy- Hey, I would say that what makes Moonbeam different in comparisson to other L1 projects, is its interoperable capabilities (that allows cross-communication between parachains), its ecosystem of tools & integrations (100+ integrations), the user-friendly experience for devs, and the shared security that comes from Polkadot.
Here are some of the points that make Moonbeam unique:
Minimal Codebase Changes for Ethereum projects that want to expand to Polkadot: if you have an existing contract, it will work right away with no need to rewrite or reconfigure
Language Support: write smart contracts in Solidity or anything that compiles to EVM bytecode
Use Existing Tools and dApp Front-Ends: connect popular tools like MetaMask, Remix, and Truffle via a complete set of Web3 RPC endpoints. Use well known Javascript libraries such as Web3.Js or Ethers.Js.
Core Developer Integrations: integrations with the most-requested developer tools and services like APIs (The Graph, Biconomy, Covalent, OnFinality), assets (Ocean Protocol), bridges (ChainSafe, Interlay, and an NFT bridge in the works), DeFi protocols (SushiSwap, IDEX), oracles (Chainlink, Band Protocol) and many more.
Unified Accounts, Addresses, and Signatures: use your existing Ethereum H160 accounts & ECDSA signatures to interact with Moonbeam.
Clarasaktii- Why did you decide to build your project on Kusama/Polkadot?and not on Cosmos, Avax, Solana or any other blockchain network? and what is the positive impact of Moonriver on the Kusama ecosystem?
Kathy- The Moonbeam team decided to build on Polkadot mainly because of the technology and developer activity.
Outside of Ethereum, Polkadot is the most active ecosystem in terms of developers. Given that we are building a developer-oriented platform, we need to go to where the developers and builders are. And Polkadot offers more of a greenfield opportunity vs Ethereum, where there is a more mature and established ecosystem.
The Substrate and Polkadot technology stack was another important factor. Substrate is a Rust-based blockchain development framework that helped us build Moonbeam much faster than if we had built it from scratch. We were drawn to Polkadot based on its vision of cross chain integration. We believe the design of Polkadot will lend itself to new kinds of natively cross chain applications in the future.
Turk- Currently, there are many smart contract projects in the crypto ecosystem. Why should I choose Moonbeam?
Kathy- It’s the easies entry point to access Polkadot. If you have a project in Ethereum and want to go multi-chain and expand to Polkadot, you will need to rewrite your code using a different language, utilize Polkadot’s tools, and also have two different set of accounts (Polkadot & Ethereum-style). With Moonbeam, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can easily port your Ethereum-based cose to Polkadot with minimal changes, and in this way, you can access a new community of users and use cases right away!
C A- What advantages do you have for token holders?
Kathy- MOVR & GLMR token holders can stake and lock tokens with collators to earn rewards, try and use integrations in our ecosystem, and participate in governance.
Here are a couple guides:
Ninja- Thanks for your time and effort. Wishing you success in your project.. Kathy!
Los invitamos a unirse a la Comunidad de Moonbeam Network en Español: t.me/moonbeam_es / twitter.com/moonbeames
