In our second installment of the Phoenix Oracle Network Beta community question and answer, the team provides some additional answers on use cases & users of the Oracle and lead up to mainnet — including testnet and marketing. In case you missed our Oracle articles, check them out here and here, and see the oracle Beta in action here. Part 1 of the Q&A can be found here.
Note: Questions may not be presented verbatim and may be consolidated with other similarly relevant submissions.
Q1. What are the primary use cases the team has targeted for the Oracle in the next couple of months? Seeing things like temperature and COVID-19 is interesting, and opens up for a wide variety of other data.
The data shown in the Phoenix Oracle dashboard is mainly used to show the capabilities and range of data we are able to connect to — however in terms of actual adoption and growth of enterprise users we plan to have a much more focused strategy. It is known that most of the current usage of mainstream oracles are focused on DeFi — that’s understandable as DeFi has been a prominent force in the space in the past year as well as served as a driver of real adoption to many of the Layer 1 blockchains. Additionally, DeFi is a simple and scalable use case as well, as the data connected is mainly price feeds of various crypto and traditional assets.
However we believe that much of the other use cases that are set to explode for L1’s have been underestimated, overlooked, as well as underserved. These include data sharing/exchange, IoT & edge computing, decentralized AI, logistics, and privacy-related applications. These would require drastically different sources, types, and format of data necessary to be verified on-chain. Portion of these use cases may also require seamless interoperability with private and alliance chain setups. We believe that Phoenix Chain in combination with Phoenix Oracle Network is well poised for this new wave of adoption.
Q2. Are there any other partnerships with other projects, or organizations to leverage the Oracle?
Yes, the initial strategy will be to provide an easy end-to-end solution for the end user from data sourcing to verification. As the main target use case would be non-DeFi related applications, we can expect initial data sources required to be potentially uncommon, unconventional, and/or custom. This would be unlike typical DeFi data sources that would be verifying API data from often public and commonly used data sources.
Phoenix Oracle Network will work with end users to support data sources other than web APIs including data connections via RPC, middleware platforms, IoT, database queries, data warehouses/data lakes, and even more primitive formats such as MQTT. This approach will also be able to facilitate data cooperation with 3rd party data providers such as China Telecom, China Unicom, Unionpay, Alibaba, and Tencent. Additionally, based on the needs of the initial target users, we will be able to facilitate long-term relationships and data connections with a variety of different platforms, vendors, and systems, hence in terms of oracle ecosystem would be formed via a combination of demand and supply side sources.
Q3. Was the redenomination requested by Binance due to low volume? If so: While increased the volume is still low, so what potential risk does this carry for PHB on Binance?
The redom suggested by Binance team was not due to low volume but due to ease of trading and size of spread.
Q4. Any news about FLC launch? Its been postponed for more than 2 months.
At this current point in time, the regulators, which originally have signaled high probability of approval, have blocked approval for FLC as a non-profit organization, hence the delay. The exact reason being an actual physical office location in Hong Kong is required, as well an approved management team for FLC physically present in Hong Kong. Our original plan of more of a decentralized organization working mostly remotely wouldn’t work in this case anymore. However, the team is in the process of executing plan B, which is setting up a Consortium Entity in the same jurisdiction, albeit it means that FLC will likely no longer be a non-profit organization.
Q5. How far are we from having our mainnet deployed and when will the node structure be set up and tested?
We are aiming for mainnet launch in Q2 of this year (ideally mid Q2). The new consensus will be an optimized DPOS/BTFT Hybrid based on Tendermint. After the new optimized consensus is completed, we will relaunch a new Testnet, in which community and ecosystem partners are welcome to test the nodes.
Q6. Will the PHB mainnet still be semi-public? In the past it was mentioned that the pilots from CPX times wanted a private chain, is this still the case?
There will be a full mainnet — enterprise pilots and future users whether they want to deploy on public mainnet is their choice. However, users who utilize the Phoenix Oracle Network will have to connect to and use the mainnet one or way or other.
Q7. Is APEX Tech still a partner/funding PHB? What role does Apex Tech now how with Phoenix?
There is both an independent Phoenix Global development team as well as developers from the APEX Tech side. APEX Tech is still very much involved in product, tech, system architecture, testing, and solutions development. APEX Tech will be very much involved in helping acquire users and drive adoption,
Q8. Jimmy stated bull-run will probably end in Q1, then why is mainnet scheduled for Q2?
No one really knows when the bull-run starts and ends, but from the looks of the current situation the “bull-run ending in Q1” thesis doesn’t seem likely.
Q9. Can you share a marketing plan? We need some regular updates — pilots, tech updates, marketing updates, please dedicate one person from Shanghai team like Denis for Horizon.
Yes, this brings up a very good point that Phoenix core development would like to address — we are currently in the process of revamping the structure of the Phoenix Global team into two separate teams 1) Core development, tech and product 2) ecosystem development, community relations, marketing & PR. The purpose of this is to place more emphasis on front-facing activities and acquire new team members and talent for these functions, in other words, building out a front-facing team/organization to ready for our next step of development.
During COVID times it’s been quite difficult to hire talent locally (like Denis), therefore we have expanded our front-facing team hiring scope to a global pool of talent. We plan to pace this team expansion along with speed of mainnet launch, and will expect to have a team ready to manage community engagement and marketing campaigns by then.
That concludes our second installment of our Q&A! Thank-you once again to all who submitted questions, and we are looking forward to providing the next batch.
