On the 30th of June, 2021 at 14:00 UTC, Decentralized Club had the honor of hosting Nagu Thogiti, CTO from Folder Labs for an Ask-Me-Anything session on their Telegram page with a community of over 30,000 people. It was hosted by DC Admin, May.
The session was divided into four segments. Introductions were made in Segment 1, questions from the Twitter and website community were answered in Segment 2 and 3 respectively, and live questions from the community members in attendance were answered in Segment 4.
If you missed this event and would like to know what Folder Labs is all about, you can find a recap of the interview here. Note that slight edits have been made for clarity.
Segment 1 - Introduction
[BILLY]
Hi Nagu, how are you?
[Nagu]
Hi Billy. I am good, thanks. How are you? Thank you for having me today in your community to talk about Folderlabs, decentralized storage.
BILLY:
Welcome! Glad to have you!
Let me hand it over to @MsMayMay who will host you today!!
[Nagu]
Ok, thanks, Billy.
[May]
Hello Nagu
[Nagu]
Hi May. Thank you for hosting me today in your community.
[May]
Grateful for the privilege 🙂
Hello, नमस्ते, 大家好, Selamat!
My name is May and I'll be hosting the AMA with FolderLabs.
[Nagu]
Great, let's start.
[May]
Could you please tell us more about yourself and your job description at FolderLabs?
[Nagu]
Sure.
My name is Nagu Thogiti, CTO of Folderlabs. AT Folder, I lead all the technical aspects of the blockchain. Before joining Folderlabs, I had designed and developed blockchain protocols and dApps with a heavy focus on the protocols security engineering and IPFS ecosystem. I have a long experience in creating enterprise-scale platforms and applications in the fields of AI, big data, FinTech, and blockchain with more than 20 years of experience and professional accreditations from MIT. From education-wise, I am a mathematician and computer scientist with cryptography and AI as specialties. I have been doing a lot of privacy-preserving AI projects in the non-blockchain professional world helping healthcare and fintech companies do data-intensive privacy-preserving computational projects.
[May]
Again, you're welcome to the Decentralized Club. 😀
An honor to have you here!
You have a lot of experience under your belt. It's amazing!
Shall we head to the introductory questions?
[Nagu]
Thank you, you are very kind. Yes, please.
[May]
Great!
Q1. Can you tell us briefly about Folder Labs' objectives and when your team started working on the project?
[Nagu]
The Folder Protocol is designed to be a layer-2 solution for all decentralized storage protocols such as (Storj, Sia, Filecoin, IPFS, Ethereum, and other blockchains). It is especially useful for decentralizing data, building and running distributed applications, and implementing data-heavy smart contracts at enterprise scale and performance (very low latency and heavy data usage).
We started the project in the second half of 2020.
[May]
Awesome! I love the project already.
Q2. How does Folder Protocol benefit its clients and miners in trading storage spaces?
[Nagu]
A very important question.
In Folder Network design, miners earn two different types of rewards by contributing to the network. They are storage fees and block rewards.
Storage fees are fees paid periodically by clients to store data that has been negotiated.
As fees continue to be collected over time, they are automatically transferred to a miner's withdrawal wallet.
The block reward is a large sum that is distributed to the miner who successfully completes a new block in the Folder blockchain. The reward is not paid by clients but rather is issued by the Folder Network to both help with the inflationary aspects and incentivize miners who advance the Folder blockchain. As long as there is space to contribute to the Folder network, everyone will have a chance to receive a block reward.
We designed various levels of rewards for participating in the Folder network and providing support. Mining rewards for offering storage services as described above, validator-related rewards for participating in the Folder validator pools, staking rewards for staking into the network, and providing liquidity into the DeFi based services in the decentralized storage marketplaces, staking pool rewards in the Folder NFT platform. For detailed timelines and when these reward programs go live and how you can engage with them, please watch out for our website and telegram community.
[May]
A minute for the community to digest 😀
Q3. What is the file retrieving, media streaming speed, and performance like in Folder Protocol?
[Nagu]
It is difficult to give highly trustworthy benchmarks for Folder network performance at the moment due to the network's infancy and consequent volatility, as well as the fact that Folder is a distributed system. However, after you begin engaging with Folder Network, you can utilize these heuristics to gain a better understanding of the Folder network's overall performance and how it relates to your use case.
[May]
I understand.
Q4. Can you shed some light on the utility of the $FOL token and how its price will be positively affected in the long term?
[Nagu]
I stay away from any price speculation. But I will give you how Folderlabs creates value and what we are doing to grow this value for our community.
Apart from the mining rewards from storage services and staking rewards for staking FOL tokens, here are some more FOL token utilities that we are designing for:
• Token Burn/ Revenue Share
• Discount on trading fees on the Folder Products/Services Platform
• Collateral
• Socialized Gains
• Leveraged Token Listing Fees
• White Label Solutions
• Future Expansion
• Increased referral rates on the Folder products/Services Platform
• Bonus votes
• Increased airdrop rewards
• Waived blockchain fees
[May]
Wow. So much latent value.
Awesome.
[Nagu]
Thank you, May.
[May]
You're welcome 😁
Q5. At the end of 2021, where do you see Folder Labs at?
[Nagu]
We have an aggressive roadmap in terms of R&D, engineering, operations, and business development. In 2021, we are making great progress in multiple dimensions with several new strategic partnerships from the business sustainability side, a brand new and first in the market with NFT+DeFi platform with decentralized NFT data and metadata, design, architecture, and implementation of the core Folder protocol and algorithms, etc. We will be seeing great progress in several of these milestones and pushing an inch by inch towards the greater economic utility of the Folder Network.
[May]
Impressive!
Where can we buy $FOL?
[Nagu]
Currently, FOL is listed on Bittrex, Uniswap, and Flybit. We have more exchanges in the pipeline. Please keep watching our telegram community and website for upcoming announcements on new exchanges.
[May]
Awesome!
Let's take some Twitter questions.
Segment 2 - Twitter Questions
[Nagu]
Ok, thanks.
[May]
Q1. I want to know more about the Folder project. Can you give a brief overview of tokenomics and token supply? Will there be burning and repurchasing of any kind? What do you want to achieve for you and does that include any form of scarcity paths such as a stake, save, or burn?
Twitter Username: @luckyjem02
[Nagu]
For token economics, I answered above many ways you can benefit from FOL token utility.
The total amount of issuance is 200 million. Among 200m, 70% (140 million), which is reserved for mining rewards; but mining is not started yet. The current token circulating supply is approx. 6 million. More information on important activities and issues will be disclosed to the public, so please keep an eye on our communities.
As we have mentioned before, our Defi X NFT marketplace will be online very soon. And we are pleased to announce that our FOL-FIL staking structure will be introduced when the NFT+DeFi platform is ready.
[May]
NFTs? We love NFTs 😁
[Nagu]
Great. You will derive great value from the upcoming Folder's NFT+DeFi platform.
[May]
Q2. The Folder Protocol (FOL) aims to securely store and send large data sets more adequately. So how do you ensure this security?
Twitter Username: @waybesuricata
Question Two 😁
[Nagu]
Our software design philosophy is a security-first mindset. I myself have done a lot of work in blockchain security engineering, auditing protocols, and implementing proper mechanisms to reduce the attacks. As we are developing the core Folder protocol, we are building the tools and solutions with various security engineering principles as part of the design and not in a reactive approach. We are also planning detailed security audits at various stages of the code released by multiple parties.
Applications built on Blockchain are susceptible to bugs, social engineering, malware, and more—all the same, exploit concerns as other software you build, buy, or deploy.
Our Blockchain security assessments help you understand:
• Is it possible for an unauthorized party to gain administrative access to my smart contracts?
• Are tokens within the contract managed and stored correctly?
• Can participants manipulate bonding and transcoding protocols to gain an advantage?
• Are backdoors present? Does the code contain common errors?
For example, every software assurance project includes:
• A list of discovered issues with detailed explanations.
• Attack and exploit scenarios that illustrate real-world impact.
• Clear short- and long-term recommendations for remediation.
• Tools customized to your codebase for lasting improvements.
• Supporting reference material.
[May]
Q3. The team has previous experiences in AI projects from Google, Adobe, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. However, these platforms have gone through numerous controversies due to the use of their users' data with third parties. How can FOL offer security against this?
Twitter Username: @Aykutbarnabas
[Nagu]
This is a great question. Thank you very much for asking. Your community is one of the smartest communities I’ve seen. They know how to ask important and valuable questions.
Platforms like Google, Adobe, Amazon, and Facebook are centralized systems of trust. They offer free services on their platforms in exchange for your data and attention. This is what drives their attention to economy-driven business models. But the cost is you centralize the trust in one single entity and lose control of your personal data. You, the user, become a product in their portfolio and they sell you [product] to the highest bidder.
Decentralized Storage solutions like Folder Network, are an open network that decentralizes the trust and keeps you, the owner of the data at the center. You retain the full ownership of your data and the network, and the platform provides different ways to create revenue streams for your data using cryptographically secure data marketplaces without scarifying privacy or security of your personal data. When you join the Folder network, you will be using a set of Cryptographic security keys (public and private) to interact with the network. Your data is hashed (signed) with your security keys and only you can decrypt them using your private keys. On top of that, the blockchain ledger will provide additional guarantees of open governance, transparency, immutability, and a trustless ecosystem.
[May]
Thank you for the compliment! We are proud of our community members 😊
Great and detailed answers so far!
For this next segment, we'll be taking questions from our Website Community
Segment 3 - Website Questions
[May]
Q1. Who is the main target of Folderlabs? Are you primarily focused on individual users or enterprises? Who benefits the most from the services offered by Folderlabs?
Telegram Username: @KathDM
[Nagu]
ok, thanks.
Folderlabs is primarily focusing on the businesses and developers who are creating solutions with decentralized storage as a backbone. We are primarily solving issues related to latency, and data-intensive applications on blockchain in this decentralized storage category through our densely connected virtualized gateway networks for low latency and performance.
We are mainly focusing on the B2B challenges facing decentralized storage communities and data-intensive use cases in the development phases 1-3. In 2021 we will be working very hard to develop and test the core algorithm of the second layer solution to IPFS, Ethereum, Filecoin, Binance, etc., and launching our own Folder network to facilitate faster and highly scalable decentralized storage integrating these blockchain protocols. We have an aggressive development roadmap internally and plan to hire many engineers and R&D analysts to create this innovation.
We are working on some specific implementations around IPFS virtualized Gateway networks. These are special IPFS gateway networks that have some special mathematical properties like highly and densely connected graph networks. These densely connected storage nodes architecture in the Folder Network have benefits like very low latency and high performance for decentralized storage. Our whitepaper was updated to describe some high-level overview of the protocol and its specifications.
[May]
Q2. I did read that you designed various levels of rewards/benefits for participating in the Folder network and providing support. What are those levels? How can we participate as a community?
Telegram Username: @emidm28
[Nagu]
We designed various levels of rewards for participating in the Folder network and providing support.
Mining rewards for offering storage services as described above, validator-related rewards for participating in the Folder validator pools, staking rewards for staking into the network, and providing liquidity into the DeFi based services in the decentralized storage marketplaces, staking pool rewards in the Folder NFT platform. For detailed timelines and when these reward programs go live and how you can engage with them, please watch out for our website and telegram community.
[May]
Q3. What is the main difference between the Current IPFS network and the Folder Protocol? Why should we choose Folder Protocol and what advantages does Folder Protocol have?
Telegram Username: @guddu201912
[Nagu]
The main difference is that we are a second layer solution to all decentralized storage facilitating access to large datasets and enterprise-level scalability & performance. If you are a developer or a business working with large amounts of data or struggling with scalability and performance issues of your decentralized applications, a Folder network will solve these issues.
Currently, IPFS is the main choice for many developers for decentralized storage. But the current IPFS has several issues when you want to move large data or need enterprise-scale performance. IPFS as it exists is an "OK" service for an individual use case or very small business use case. But as soon as you want low latency, speed, enterprise-level performance, support for data-intensive applications, IPFS fails at being a real storage infrastructure. Also, data permanence is a huge issue with the current IPFS ecosystem. FOL solves these issues with its densely connected virtualized gateway networks and Folder protocol.
[May]
I must commend this project!
I'm sold by this interview alone.
I can only imagine the wonders I will find when I do my personal research!
Thank you so much Nagu. Your answers are so great!
[Nagu]
Thank you very much.
[May]
We've come to the final segment where we take our live community questions.
[Nagu]
Ok, thanks.
[May]
I will open the group for a bit and we'll take four great questions.
Please pick original questions and skip the copy-paste questions. 😅
---Chat was then opened for the live community to send in their questions---
Segment 4 - Live Questions
[Nairobi]
How Will Your Project convince people who has little knowledge about cryptocurrency to partake in the project ?$FOL
[Nagu]
Digital storage is something all individuals and companies deal with. You are storing your pictures, videos, important documents, etc. Or, if you are a company, you are developing applications, platforms, or other IP and need to save all that data. Current options for the data storage are heavily centralized and it has many issues resulting from centralizing the trust on one or two players.
Decentralized storage solutions like Folderlabs and others are a good alternative when privacy, security, decentralizing the trust are important factors in your storage decision.
We believe there are room for all, crypto-focused and non-crypto-focused individuals and companies with visionary projects like Folderlabs.
[J Mags]
There is already a lot of decentralized storage out there like the famous $STORJ and $FIL. When it comes to Folder Protocol, what are the advantages and upper hands your project has?
[Nagu]
I answered a similar question above.
[Natasha 000.1]
The goal of DeFi is to create a new financial system that eliminates subjectivity, bias, and inefficiency by relying on programmable terms. Does the Folder Labs project support this vision and how does it participate in the DEFI space?
[Nagu]
DeFi is at the core of the data and storage market places in decentralized storage. Apart from this, as I described above, we have many DeFi based incentives to participate in the Folder Network and support the project.
With our upcoming NFT+DeFi platform, you will be able to combine NFTs and DeFi in one single platform with decentralized storage for all your NFT data and metadata.
[May]
Two more questions 😎
[Aston Rowi]
Folder Protocol (FOL) is constructed to function as a second layer for decentralization such as Filecoin’s mainnet network. But is FOL really able to safely store, send, and use larger batches of data with the same level of efficiency as Amazon/Google?
[Nagu]
Decentralized storage solutions like Folderlabs and others are a good alternative when privacy, security, decentralizing the trust are important factors in your storage decision when compared to fully centralized solutions like amazon/google. Efficiency is not the only factor when you are designing data systems and platforms for various business use cases. Increasingly, security, privacy, data ownership, and decentralized trust are very important factors for the sustainability and fairness of the system. In these cases, sacrificing a small fraction of efficiency for achieving other important factors is worth fighting for.
[May]
One more 😁
[Nagu]
Enterprise-level scalability, performance, and very low latency on the decentralized storage for all blockchains and data-intensive applications.
[May]
Awesome!
Thank you so much for your detailed answers!
[Nagu]
Thank you May and Billy for hosting today. This was fun. Thank you community.
[May]
I had a great time interviewing you for DC today.
Your project is super impressive and I wish you and the team all the best.
Thank you for honoring our invitation.
[Nagu]
Thank you again. Have a great day and night.
[May]
Have a great day too.
The group will be open now.
Dear community, please check the pinned post and follow Folder Labs.