ORE Network — Telegram AMA — May 10
On Tuesday, May 10, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Marc Blinder
We asked him questions about the development of the ORE Network.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Introduction
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Please introduce yourself. Is ORE your first crypto venture? It would be nice to know about your exploits so far and how you ended up in crypto.
A — Marc from ORE Network: Yeah actually ORE is my first crypto project. We’ve been working on it since 2017, so it feels like a whole lifetime. Prior to working on ORE, I’ve been involved with 5 different startups, so I’ve seen the good the bad, and the ugly of silicon valley
I’ve had one break even, one $50M exit, one $400M exit, and one total failure
Here’s my official bio:
I’m the co-founder and CEO at AIKON and a core contributor to the ORE Blockchain. AIKON makes it easier for companies to launch products on public blockchains and ORE is best known for its identity service called ORE ID that connects non-technical people to blockchain apps using Web 2.0 identities and ORE Vault which helps teams manage token treasuries.
I ran my first company at 28 years old, a social network called Mobileplay (which he sold to Good Technology), and became Creative Director at Context Optional which was sold to Efficient Frontier for $50M. At Efficient Frontier, I set up the social business in EMEA before the company was acquired by Adobe for $400M. And after that, I founded Emmerge, which unfortunately was my first failed startup! (They say you learn more from failures than successes and I totally agree!) Since then,
I spent the last four years working on Blockchain technology with AIKON and ORE. My friend and co-founder Stefan Roever originally introduced me to crypto, he was a total crypto-anarchist.
His first company was called Brokat technology and they sold online encryption software for banks when the US wouldn’t allow Americans to offer SSL overseas, He rebuilt SSL in Germany and ended up with a $6B market cap at its peak on NASDAQ
and he was always a huge believer in the principles of “code is law” and “equal opportunity for everyone” we spent about a year brainstorming around blockchain before founding AIKON and ORE
AIKON is the for-profit software company that built ORE ID ORE is the blockchain — decentralized, non-profit.
About ORE Network
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Tell us more about the ORE project. It must be very special to keep you working on it for over 5 years in this space where people are easily distracted by new trends.
A — Marc from ORE Network: That’s so true — it’s pretty simple, but I think it’s really needed Basically we’re creating an easy to use cross-chain identity, we want to make blockchain accessible for the masses, and since we believe that Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, etc. will ALL matter 10 years from now
We think normal people will need a single sign-on solution that connects to social logins they’re used to Google, Facebook, Apple ID, email, those sorts of things
And we store the top-level account that owns all the wallets on a decentralized Network called ORE.
Because we don’t want any one company (even us) to own the future of identity on the blockchain — it needs to be decentralized so people can own their own accounts, even though we’ve been building for a long time, it still feels like early days since it’s pretty complex to make this all possible our CTO Tray always says it takes the most work to make something seem simple.
Q — Telegram user Life🌹🌹 Style 🌹🌹: In a simple sentence, what is your project goal in the crypto-verse?
A — Marc from ORE Network: Make blockchain easy enough for my parents to use it!
Q — Telegram user Ninja: Read on your RoadMap that ORE will launch ORE Vault — Built on top of the ORE Blockchain. Can you explain your ORE Vault? How does it work? What benefits does ORE Vault provide and why do people lock their tokens in ORE Vault?
A — Marc from ORE Network: the Vault is designed for teams
ORE Vault gives teams a DocuSign-like experience for managing their token treasuries so users get emails when they need to sign a transaction and everyone can see who’s doing what with the money in the accounts!
The ORE Vault is designed for the security of any crypto asset — ALGO, ETH, whatever, not just for ORE tokens
Q — Twitter user @Kriptosedo: I read that ORE Network wants to achieve TrustWallet verification. But, what are the strategies you will use to achieve this milestone and what results do you expect to get with this listing? What are the attributes that make ORE special for TrustWallet?
A — Marc from ORE Network: I was super impressed that someone noticed this, we need 5,000 holders on Ethereum to get verified on Trust Wallet the vast majority of our users are on ORE
not ETH but we have ~1000 users each on ETH, Matic, and BSC
So we’re expecting to be able to run some marketing campaigns this year to get some of the user base to hold ORE on other chains
The reason we care about Trust Wallet is it’s used by a lot of DEXs to help users know when tokens are safe
We want to be on the safe list for casual users to know they can use ORE and there are some fake ORE tokens out there
The real list is here
Q — Telegram user Steffi Reguera🎀: We have seen copycat NFTs emerge that have the potential to attenuate the value of native NFTs by reducing perceived rarity. What is the ORE Network solution to allow NFT to be assigned as sole owner across multiple chains and guarantee sovereignty?
A — Marc from ORE Network: That’s such a great question! I haven’t thought about adding that feature before, but we would be a good fit for that. Since we can map wallets across chains we could probably help people judge real NFTs from fake ones if we put some effort into it. Cool idea! If you’re working on an NFT project let me know.
Token
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Let’s talk about the ORE token. What role does the token play in the ORE ecosystem?
A — Marc from ORE Network: ORE is a classic utility token
If you want to create ORE accounts or store NFTs on the ORE Network you need ORE Tokens. Projects that grow in users need more tokens based on the number of users they’re adding
Right now we’re at roughly 160,000 users, but we’re expecting a lot more this year we’re also adding more governance opportunities for the ORE Token holders to control the future of the ORE Network, but right now it’s just a very straightforward utility use case.
Security
Q — Telegram user Atharv: While Account creation on a platform where are the Keys stored? What Safety Measures ORE has taken for Account Creation?
A — Marc from ORE Network: First of all, we only store public keys in the on-chain registry. No personal data is ever stored on-chain. Each public key has a private key that goes with it. These keys are stored off-chain in an encrypted database. In order to sign a transaction on another blockchain, the ORE ID service asks the user for their password and then sends the encrypted key and the hashed password to a server called the
“Trustless signing service” this service runs on Google confidential computing — which has machine-level encryption, so we can’t see the private keys even in memory. That code is open source if anyone wants to review it here
Beyond that, we’re HUGE believers in open standards. we used eosio code for the blockchain — battle-tested with billions of $$ in transactions Network built the ORE bridge — battle-tested with billions in transactions and hundreds of millions locked.
Funding
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: In terms of funding, how has the crypto community been brought into the concept of the ORE Network? Have you raised funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? And are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Marc from ORE Network: Yeah — that’s a great question
So we have funding from silicon valley VCs for AIKON (the software company), The ORE Foundation also did a token sale and listed the ORE token
In total, we raised $6.6M in Venture funding (so far), and spent it mostly on R & D. Nearly half of the pre-sale went to utility users of the ORE Network
The whole thing is set up to build for the long run we honestly probably don’t do enough marketing and hype. We focus on building and growth(We lived through the crypto winter), so we really want to make sure we’re focused on the things that matter when the market goes up or down.
Competitive Advantage
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: I was going to ask you what sets ORE Network apart from the competition, but I haven’t come across any project that’s doing this
A — Marc from ORE Network: Yeah — I don’t think anyone else is doing this in a decentralized way that’s truly self-sovereign, it takes a lot longer to do it right, but we think it’s true to the spirit of blockchain. And that’s worth it
Q — Telegram user Divine Emperor: Numerous projects are trying to catch the new trend called Metaverse and you know what that means, market share becomes intensely competitive and the strongest and fittest project will definitely survive, so what makes your project(ore tokens) the best among the best one in the space?
A — Marc from ORE Network: Honestly, I think Metaverse is going to be important in the long run, but it’s slightly overhyped right now. I think DeFi, NFT, and DAOs are the most important trends on the blockchain right now and we’re focused on those topics
Our DAO tools will come out at the end of this year.
Business Development
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: How far along are you with your roadmap and what should we expect in the coming weeks and months?
A — Marc from ORE Network: We’re pretty far along, but it’s never fast enough as a founder, The next big thing is definitely Polygon and Avalanche support we’re also rolling out an integrated fiat onramp in June and we’re improving our multisig product — ORE Vault
which brings the same easy to use approach to multisig for teams
I’m also speaking at NFT NYC and we’re sharing the stage with another second NFT game using our platform the first one is called Kogs:Slam — it’s a play to earn game by Red Fox Labs — available in the Google Play store if anyone wants to try it out.
We have another huge announcement that I’ve been working on for months!!! but I can’t say yet — but we should be announcing in roughly early June. We’re also going to do our second CEX listing in June too.
Q — Twitter user @Godpelpa: It took the ORE Network two years to accumulate its first 37,000 users, doubling that number from October 2021 to January 2022, bringing the ORE Network to more than 160,000 accounts. But can you tell us what is your forecast for the rest of the year?
A — Marc from ORE Network: Thanks for the question — I was super excited to see that one on Twitter, because ultimately the value of the chain is based on the people actually using it we’re hoping to hit 1M users by the end of this year, and that’s what the team is focused on as our goal for the end of Q3 is 500,000
Q — Ayeley from GAINS: Will you work with only EVM-compatible blockchains? Or does ‘etc’ allow the inclusion of blockchain solutions like Solana and Cosmos in the future?
A — Marc from ORE Network: Great question! We currently support Ethereum, EOS, WAX, Telos, and Algorand. The next chains will be Polygon, BSC, and Avalanche. We will support Solana and Cosmos too for sure but we need time to roll it all out.
Marc, we could have gone on for hours, but we are thankful for giving us your time today. And thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. It was a long wait but it was worth it. Do you have any final words for us?
Where can we follow you to stay updated? — Ayeley from GAINS
Thank you all for checking out ORE, Let’s build the future together!
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