Interview with POA Network team

How would you describe the main pillars of the project?

For POA Network, the main pillars are:

Interoperability = Allows tokens to be moved from one network to another WITHOUT increasing the total supply of the token. There are a lot of stand alone blockchains that exist today but they can’t interact with one another. POA Bridge has been live for several months now and it allows tokens to move seamlessly between the Ethereum and POA Networks. A total of 23 million tokens have already been transferred back and forth.

Identity at Stake consensus (No mining) = The Identity at Stake model within POA Network adds a layer of accountability in the overall consensus. All validators that are validating blocks on the POA Network must be US public notaries. Whereas Proof of Stake (POS) consensus requires validators to put up capital in return for rewards, Identity at Stake requires validators to risk their identity and reputation in order to validate blocks. Transparency creates personal accountability as validators know their actions and participation are written to the public ledger and available for anyone to view.

Governance = On-chain governance is a group of individuals (separate from the developers/founders) coming together to make decisions on behalf of a blockchain. POA Network improves the governance process by making it more secure, efficient and most importantly transparent. Validators make all governance decisions through exclusive Distributed Applications (DApps) and all decisions are recorded on the POA blockchain. This process creates an effective self-governed system where changes can be made quickly and efficiently to better serve the POA Network.

About the team and supporters, what are your strengths?

POA Network is proud to have such a strong technical team. We have a team of about 50 people, consisting mostly of developers who work on various projects for POA. The tech lead of POA is Igor Barinov. Igor holds more than 16 blockchain and computer programming accolades and has won blockchain hackathons at Consensus, Texas Bitcoin Conference, BitHack, and Distributed Trade. He also holds 12 professional certifications in programming and data science as well as experience in the design of memory networks, implementation of generative models, training segmentation systems design, and neural translation systems design from the University of San Francisco. We also have a superstar team of Elixir developers working on Mana — the Ethereum Client and our open source Ethereum explorer.

Thinking about the future, do you have any roadmap with relevant upgrades or partnerships?

We have roadmaps for individual projects that we are in the process of publishing, these can be viewed on our Github. We’re also working on an overarching POA roadmap to include all of our stand alone projects. With respect to these projects, the first version of our Ethereum open source explorer will be available in the next couple of weeks. The explorer has won the ETHPrize and we are very excited to share it with our community.

We are creating upgrades for our POA Bridge which will allow two-way transfer of ERC-20-to-ERC-20 tokens between the Ethereum and POA Network. This will enable the movement of existing tokens into the POA Network to take advantage of sidechain and POA Network benefits. We are also working on an ERC-721 bridge which will allow ERC-721 to live on both the Ethereum and POA Network. This is in line with our approach to include more games and ERC-721 tokens on the POA Network.

As for partnerships, we have announced multiple big partnerships over the last month. The first one involves the integration of the Bancor Protocol with POA Network. As part of this partnership, Bancor DApp will be deployed on POA Network with new currencies that will be used as part of a humanitarian initiative in Kenya using community currencies!

We have also announced a partnership with Infura for enhanced blockchain infrastructure support! This is a big step for the whole ecosystem as this is the first time Infura has provided nodes for a sidechain.

Our partnership with Sentinel Chain involves a joint development of an ERC20 < →ERC20 Bridge which will show how EVM based blockchains like POA Network can work with an otherwise closed market.

Our most recent partnership with LegalThings One is all about making blockchains more General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant.

What’s the added value of POA Network in comparison with other competitors?

While some of our competitors are still working on releasing their testnets, we recently celebrated our six month anniversary of launching the POA mainnet. Since then, our on-chain governance model has been used to vote on important decisions including the addition of new validators. Our aim is to increase decentralization on our network by consistently onboarding validators.

From a technical standpoint of view, we have a block generation time of 5 seconds, with 60 txns per second.

What are the use cases you are looking to cover?

POA Network was developed with the aim of addressing issues that the Ethereum ecosystem is currently facing such as scalability and governance. Ethereum DApp developers can create their applications as they would normally and deploy to POA network, taking advantage of all the benefits the network has to offer. This is huge as we’re already seeing DApps deploying on the POA Network like Bancor mentioned above. More recently, DopeRaider, a gaming project decided to move their ERC-721 tokens completely to POA Network. The game ran so smoothly on POA that they are recalibrating the speed and timing of animations initially created for Ethereum to now run on the POA Network.

How are you aiming to provide scalability to your service?

POA’s aim is to enable horizontal scalability by connecting different Ethereum-based networks. Also, there is potential to clone the core POA Network into any number of networks, which would in turn be connected by interoperability bridges. POA Network is the bedrock foundation for solving the scaling problem by allowing POA blockchain clones to serve targeted industry, market and regional interests, and leverage the POA bridges to handle liquidity events between chains when required.

Thanks for your time

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