So, Ben, our first question from our community would be, where do you see Dag or Constellation Network in the next five years?
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. So, where we see the business going over the next five years, is really growing out the community. We totally believe that we’re just starting crypto, and the emergence of everybody understanding basics of crypto, which will be a part of everybody’s life. As such, we really think that if you look at the entire gross national product – the 88 trillion dollars of money that’s made every year from goods and services – can actually be tokenized, meaning that we can tokenize a piece of that revenue and add cryptocurrency as cash flow to every business in the world.
So, we’re very ambitious in doing this, and as such we need to really build out our community even larger, because this is really kind of the core of what makes this a success. It’s not just keeping crypto within crypto speculation, but actually bringing it to, you know, our families, our mothers, parents, getting them to understand it, getting them to understand how this plays a vital role in every business, and can really unlock new potential – that really paves the way for the fourth industrial revolution.
So, you think that Constellation will hit the streets in the future, in the near future, yeah?
Oh yeah. I mean, there’s going to be so many opportunities for everybody to play into the Constellation ecosystem. Right now, people can stake 250,000 DAG to be a part of our network. We’re going to be opening that up even more – giving people other opportunities to get involved in our ecosystem. We’re constantly building things for people to participate in our ecosystem. You know, Lattice exchange is our decentralized finance play, there’s a huge potential that we’re still like, we’re still just becoming known around what we’re doing on the Lattice exchange and cross chain swapping – being agnostic to any other ecosystem. We’re bringing other projects into our ecosystem to build on top of us, that are really quality projects. Like, if you think of Constellation as reinventing the internet, well what does the internet have, centralized – or the existing internet predominantly has advertising as one of the main components.
Well, as we’re reinventing the internet, we have Alkimi exchange, that’s bringing the community to the forefront of digital advertising – opening this opportunity for everybody that’s exposed to digital advertising to participate in the value exchange, that’s been largely between publishers and advertisers. We’re working on building out alternative social media platforms – like Geojam. We’re looking at ways to bring data onto a blockchain and empower people. We bought a company called Dor technologies, which I think is going to play a huge role in the next year, and will be where a lot of our focus is.
So, another question we get asked a lot Ben, would be, how do you see Dag’s scalability in the future, once all these projects get on board, all the data starts collecting – where do you see Dag’s scalability? Does it have a limit, because you talk about Dag being limitless in scalability.
Well, I mean you can be infinitely scalable, but if nobody uses your network then what’s the point. So, one of the big things that we’re starting to see, is how many people are coming into the community to help us scale – evangelize our messaging, bring on new people to take our message around, you know, tokenizing the GNP. But then when you look at the technology, actually you know just one of the aspects of building out your own protocol, you look at the technology, and the technology was built to be infinitely scalable. We’re working with the United States Air Force, one of the largest data producers in the world, that will have scalability needs every day.
So, on the technology we chose to go with a framework called a directed acyclic graph, which is really just an architectural framework on how the network is deployed, but then our consensus mechanism sits on top of that. The consensus mechanism is one of the most essential technology pieces to making sure this is scalable, how do you organize all of the nodes that come online, all the people that are participating and upholding the network. You have to organize it in a way that can process information extremely, extremely fast, and that is something that we’ve been focusing on the last four years, is, we actually run two concurrent consensus mechanisms in parallel, and this allows us to achieve scalability by being faster. The other component, the third component that I would really highlight – is the economic side. You might have the technology side, you might have the community side, the people, the socioeconomic movement – but if you don’t have the economic movement, meaning it’s not affordable to use, then you’re going to limit yourself.
We’re seeing that with second generation blockchains, where gas fees are variable – you can’t put a business on a blockchain like that. No business can create – yeah, it’s not feasible, you can’t create predictable revenue. So, when we thought about this from the ground up, which is much harder to convince people of what your model is as a protocol, to say hey there’s no transaction fees, that was, it’s really hard for people to understand – but that’s an essential piece, to making sure this is scalable.
Cool and on that note, talking about the technology, what other advantages do you see with using Dag versus traditional blockchain?
Yeah. I think one of the major highlights is, that we have zero transaction fees – right. This, and they’re not variable, as well. You also have, on the technological scalability, meaning it’s going to be faster and it can grow infinitely – that’s another competitive advantage. But the third, I would also say, is our community. Our community is so powerful to making sure that this vision flourishes, so that new ideas can come on to our network.
I think one thing that other people don’t have, is the team that we’ve built. We’ve built a team. We’ve built a community with a culture. It’s a brand, that brand is what we – what we live by. We live by fashion, brands, art, music, like that’s what makes our culture. Well in our ecosystem, we believe in putting culture to the forefront, because that’s why people will come to our ecosystem, because they want to have fun, they want to learn, they want to be educated, they want to get involved – and they want to make sure that their vision and their mission can evolve with us.
So, after you’ve seen the amazing growth we’ve had within Spain, what are your thoughts, what are your next steps here?
It’s been absolutely amazing seeing the Spanish community come online and be excited about what we’re doing. We had no idea, and you know we’ve seen the power of people coming, the passion – there’s so much passion in the Spanish community, and so we’re really taking this, and we’re kind of hearing what everybody’s saying. We’ve got large plans to go into Latin America, go into South America, really get every Spanish-speaking community on board with Constellation, and so that, I think that’s going to also give us a real big competitive advantage, because of the passion and power of Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.
So, we’ve seen that the ecosystem is growing quite fast already, we’ve got Alkimi, Geojam, and all these projects coming on board. What can you tell us about these in a quick way, and also if there’s any more projects coming – if you can say anything?
Yeah. We’ve only really highlighted a few of the projects that are coming on, there’s so many that we’re talking to on a daily basis. We launched our first cohort of our accelerator program, where 35 companies went through a 16-week training program on what Constellation is, how to build a cryptocurrency company, how do you articulate our technology through the lens of another business. And I’ve been blown away by the quality of potential projects, potential companies – that are all coming into our network. People are taking our vision and they really understand what they can do.
So, as such, next year we’ll be launching two more cohorts. So, two more accelerator programs that kick off throughout the year, inviting many more companies to come through. We’ve already started to receive applications; hundreds of applications are coming in every month – it’s really exciting. So, the course of the next year, you know, when we start looking at some of these companies that we put our backing behind – our stamp of approval – we’re really looking for ground-breaking visions. Amazing teams, that that can grow and handle the stress of building a cryptocurrency company, but also the technological aspects that make it so different and important.
So, there’s going to be a lot more companies that are coming down the road. We’ve got projects in healthcare that are coming on, we have ambitions for other crypto related projects that are coming on, that I just think really bring out a new aspect of crypto and really evolve the business of Defi – and merges concepts of Defi with real world companies.
So yeah, another question we get quite often is, how do you think the nodes are going to work out – once we’re on mainnet? How’s it all going to work?
Yeah. So, all these nodes will play – well one the nodes play a role in upholding the entire network. This is what validates our cryptocurrency Dag, it will validate Lattice exchange, it will validate the data on Lattice exchange, from cross chain swapping. But, one of our major visions that you’ll see with nodes coming on, is that businesses that start to build on nodes, will be able to petition or reach out to node operators to provide liquidity for the throughput needed to run that business. So, you’ll actually have businesses reach out to node operators, and almost like propose what they’re building to node operators, to support the growth of that business on the network.
And so, I think this is going to be a very – this will be a really incredible time, where node operators and new businesses that come on, come together to really highlight the better projects. And so, you put the onus on the network, meaning the businesses and applications building on it, the node operators, to decide which are the valuable projects, and a lot of that can come through by understanding the liquidity or the throughput needs that are addressed on the network.
Being who you are, the CEO of Constellation Network, we understand that you undergo a lot of stress on a daily basis, and we wanted to know – this is a more personal question – but how do you confront this, and not just that, what do you value in life?
Yeah. I value – something that we talk about at our company is the beginner’s mind, and the beginner’s mind is a concept from Lao Tzu, who wrote the Tao Te Ching, which is one of the oldest pieces of literature that was really about, about life. Like, The Tao translates to something about life, like the meaning of life, right. And so, one of the passages in the Tao Te Ching is about a beginner’s mindset, meaning you approach everything with a new clear mind, you let go of ego, and you embrace the opportunity to learn and educate at any given moment. And this allows us to look at new perspectives, it allows us to be creative without judgment, it allows us to take chances and know that failure and success are both two very viable outcomes. And so, when you have this type of mindset, it allows your team to grow in different ways and feel supported, but this is also kind of how I go through life – right. Like, it’s how we kind of got on the path of Constellation, when we saw Constellation, a lot of this didn’t even make sense in the beginning, you’re like – this could be crazy. But, when you take this approach, that you know, maybe if you look at it from a different perspective or what can we learn from this that’s not always obvious, right, when we talk about Constellation we always talk about technology, but Constellation is not just technology, it’s people, it’s a community – that’s what makes this up.
There’s a lot of competing good technologies out there, what makes us different is that there’s a vision, there’s a passion, there’s something that can break that, that perspective that we normally have. And so, every time we see people come into our community, it’s because there’s something inside of them that wants to break that perspective. They want an opportunity to see the world through a different lens, and that’s what makes life so interesting.
I think this is a really exciting time to be a part of the Constellation community. We’re growing exponentially. We’re seeing more businesses understand our message – what we’re trying to do. We’re getting ready to do so much more with the Lattice exchange, our road map is really becoming more powerful than it ever has been. We have a foundation right now, this was our foundation, this was the year of building a foundation. Next year is the year for accelerated growth, getting people beyond anything we can imagine to come onto the network, build, participate, express ideas, and really allow this thing to flourish into something that’s impactful to our daily lives, as well as our work lives, and so I’m getting really bullish for 2021, and what’s to come for the future.
Well Ben, that’s all, thank you very much for your time.
Thanks to CEO Ben Jorgensen and community admin Marcos for this interview. You can view the full interview here https://youtu.be/M1OabD9WpRE
