Bware Labs AMA - Key Takeaways

“Our end-goal has been full and real decentralization even before finding the Bware name.” says Flavian Manea, Co-Founder and CEO of Bware Labs in our latest AMA. Find out what more he had to say about the project’s future and going live on Mainnet in the AMA recap below. 

Before the session, we asked Coin.fyi, community followers to pre-submit their questions via Twitter. During the one hour AMA, Flavian answered 10 pre-selected questions from both the community and Coin.fyi. At the end of the session we asked live participants to submit their questions, of which Flavian chose 2 to answer.

Below are the key takeaways from the AMA and the questions that were asked. 

 Coin.fyi: Welcome, Flavian, it’s great to have you here!  Bware Labs has been pretty busy lately, we saw that your (Houston) Testnet is soon coming to an end.

Flavian: It's a pleasure to be here, I'm very grateful for the invitation to your colorful community!

Q1: To start our AMA, please tell us more about your product Blast. What it aims for and how it differs from other infrastructure providers?

Blast (https://blastapi.io) is the mothership of Web3 exploration. It is a multichain, subscription-based, API platform, featuring lightning-fast and reliable blockchain access to some of the most relevant networks in the space. Using Blast, infrastructure expenses and outage risks are reduced for blockchain developers by avoiding all the challenges associated with managing their own infrastructure.

Now, you might be thinking that calling Blast lightning-fast is an overstatement. But think about this: by the time you’ve read this sentence, Blast answered 6000 API calls. By the time you go and check that on blastapi.io, it answered another 6000 calls to one of the 34 supported networks.

We aim to bring the development experience to a new standard, and the 18 projects that already run on Blast API nodes or the more than 40 enterprise customers stand as proof that our work in that sense is coming to fruition.

Q2: How would you judge the entire program as of today? As the CEO of your company, what were the milestones, aspects and conclusions that stuck with you now that you are days away from the mainnet release?

Testnet was intriguing, to begin with. Funnily enough, just like the participants, we did not know 100% how it will evolve what to expect when we started the Houston Incentivized Testnet Program. We knew how we’d run it, yes, but we couldn’t have expected the involvement and excitement of the members we onboarded on our mission.

We had over 190 participants during Testnet, out of which what stuck with me was that 75 of these were institutional participants, among which projects such as Stakin, Dokia Capital, P2P, P-ops  and Nodes Guru. Having such an impressive number of institutions and projects syncing their efforts with our goal of securing and readying Blast for launch is a sign of appreciation and demonstration that decentralization is possible, achievable and, dare we say, scalable.

As far as performance goes, the numbers don’t lie! By the end of the Stress Testing period we subjected Blast to, the results can be deemed as admirable, with the Average Throughput hitting 41900 RPS, 815 ms as the Average Response Time and an Average Pass Rate of 86%.

Q3: Speaking of the Mainnet, any hopes and/or fears for when it all comes live? Is there life after Mainnet? What would your next steps be?

Of course there’s life after mainnet! And the life after mainnet comes as it usually does: with work to be done and innovation to be pushed. We’ve got exciting stuff coming up, growing Blast with new network integrations, new features and functionalities are in the making (or, better said, in development) and many more.

What’s also exciting, now that Mainnet is almost here, is that the community will have the chance to get even more involved in improving and securing the platform through delegations and staking. Wondering how that’s going to work? Once Mainnet is on, there won’t be long and our much-awaited protocol token will be listed, which will allow for the true decentralization of the platform and also for the pool of users to expand to more non-technical individuals as well.

Q4: $BWR will be the project token. What are the use-cases for $BWR? What will be the main token utility?

Truth be told, it’s not 100% certain that there’s going to be a $BWR ticker, we have some internal voting on a more meaningful ticker for the project, but to keep it simple, let’s keep it BWR for now.

The three main pillars of the $BWR token are Staking, Delegating and Governance Participation.

Node Providers must stake tokens in order to participate in our upcoming Decentralized API Marketplace, other users can delegate to a Node Provider from Blast in order to earn a percentage of their profits and, last but not least, the governance mechanism for future development initiatives and improvements of Blast and its Decentralized Infrastructure Protocol will rely on $BWR token holders.

Also, a small secret, but users can also use $BWR as a payment when using Blast and, thus, benefit from discounted prices!

Q5: We saw that the tokenomics are not yet released. Can you provide the audience some Alpha regarding your token metrics?

$BWR’s tokenomics are designed with security and sustainability in mind, two elements essential when it comes to creating a product meant to onboard users on a still-in-its-infancy technology.

We can share that at our TGE, the private investors and advisors will have 1 years of cliff with another 1.5 years of vesting of their tokens.  Except the staking rewards, there won’t be any other token unlocks for a year and a half, so that the market can drive the token value naturally, without as much interference from major force incidents or investment moves.

Other than that, we will release the tokenomics closer to the mainnet launch.

Q6: There are many discussions in 2023 regarding  the end of tokens which have  no-utility. What about your token? How will $BWR subscribe to the ongoing changes in the utility and tokenomics landscapes?

Well, building the tokenomics and the in-platform functionalities of $BWR already showcases its hop on the “trend” of tokens that have actual utility. Allowing token-holders the voice they deserve in terms of the technical and governing developments ahead is our response and thanks to a community that has not only supported our platform and endeavors so far, but also has had valuable input, feedback and integrations that made Blast what it is now.

Q7: On the same note as the previous question, there’s a clear tendency of users that focus more on the token and its long-term value while paying little to no attention to the utility and functionality of said token. How does Bware, via $BWR, plan on balancing technology development and token value?

Our end-goal has been full and real decentralization even before finding the Bware name. $BWR is our key towards achieving that, as releasing the token and allowing node providers and consumers to integrate their activity on Blast within the use-cases mentioned above will decentralize the platform and its modus operandi.

Q8: Fully decentralized - everybody aims for this. What were the biggest challenges Bware and Blast faced on the road to full decentralization?

The biggest challenge is being true to your word when it comes to what you want to bring to the table. Maintaining industry-level standards in terms of quality while running the platform in a fully decentralized manner is no easy feat.

In order to tackle that we had to find our own routes and methods, that could ensure that the nodes on Blast present the required performance and that would not prohibit the scalability potential of Blast.

Now, after continuous and sustained efforts, decentralization is in sight and the way is set.

Q9: What would be the repercussions if a malicious node provider were to incorporate their nodes into your infrastructure? Besides incentives, what other measures are implemented to guarantee proper conduct from various node providers?

Funny this question should come right now, as it describes how we managed to overcome the challenges in the previous question. We have found a way to bring together decentralized infrastructure and fast API performance into a concept we call Proof of Quality.

By Proof of Quality, we mean allowing node owners to join the Blast Protocol as Node Providers. This would be done in a permissionless way, provided their nodes are able to match the platform’s performance and data integrity requirements.

All nodes serving user requests are rewarded with our native BWR token under the condition they can sustain the level of quality required and enforced by our Integrity Protocol.

The process is simple. All Node Providers have to do is register their node endpoints in one of the available slots within our platform for each of the supported networks. If they pass the quality checks, they become active participants and are allowed to create Staking Pools, where they will be required to stake BWR tokens and start receiving rewards in the form of an APY. They can even accept delegations in order to increase their profitability.

After registration, all nodes are continuously verified against the preset performance indicators. If they fail any of the quality checks, the specific nodes will be jailed. Continuous failure to pass the verifications ultimately leads to node deactivation and the loss of the occupied slot within the platform.

Q10: Can you comment on the recent $60M investment round in QuickNode with a valuation of $800M? Is their technology so advanced or is Bware Labs underestimated?

Flavian: We always had a problem of under evaluating ourselves in terms of valuation, because we always had developed more with less funding, and it was challenging and we loved it.

Almost without exception innovation comes from start-ups rather than from big companies. With a lot less funding and a significantly smaller valuation, Bware and Blast are the best example of doing more with less! Two years in the making, Blast is already pretty impressive in terms of performance and reliability, and our efforts towards continuous innovation are paying off.

To answer your question, if QuickNode has 15 times more valuation, it doesn’t mean that they have 15 times better technology, it’s just a matter of the potential we have with our product in the marketscape.

Last but not least, our platform will soon be decentralized. Lightning-speed and a state-of-the-art platform on the market is already important, one of fastest platforms and fully decentralized? That's history in the making.

Live Telegram Questions

Q11 (Evan Mair): Could you please explain how the Bware token tokenomics will be structured? Will new tokens be minted? Or will it be fixed supply? Any burn system? 

We can share with confidence that will have a fixed supply of 100M tokens, with no new tokens to be minted.

The rewards for the staking functionality for delegators and node providers are thought for a 5 year period from a fixed pool, and afterwards, the protocol should be self sustainable.

Q12 (Alice $BWR): PLs tell me a little bit about the projects that are supporting Bware Labs. And where can we find information about recent partnerships? You can share

We've been focusing a lot lately in the Aptos and Sui ecosystem, with Blast API integration and other tooling related to Snapshot Services / Faucets and Validators.

One really exciting news is the delegation smartcontract functionality that we've been working on in the last 4 months, enabling the Aptos Community to be able to delegate their tokens: https://github.com/aptos-foundation/AIPs/blob/main/aips/aip-6.md

We've also released a new version of our website, that has more information regarding all of our partnerships and products: https://bwarelabs.com/

Thank you Flavian, the Bware Labs Team, and all community members who joined!

Hosting another live AMA with Flavian was a pleasure. Also, a big thank you to the 280 community members who participated and pre-submitted questions. During the live session, we also received 120 questions within 30  seconds, which shows great enthusiasm and engagement. We are looking forward to our next AMA session; watch out for the announcement soon.