AMA Recap - Chromia x Game of Bitcoins

By Game of Bitcoins | crypto_amas | 8 Jun 2020

Thanks a lot for actively participating in the Chromia AMA held on 8th June 2020 at the Game of Bitcoins Channel. We really appreciate all your support. This post is a recap of the entire session held with Chromia

We have with us

Henrik

Hello. My name is Henrik Hjelte. I am Co-Founder and CEO of Chromia. I have more than 30 years of experience in programming and a degree in Economics from Uppsala University. After being introduced to the blockchain by the leader of the colored-coins project Alex Mizrahi in 2013, we started ChromaWay with Or Perelman to explore if the world was interested in something more than currency aspects of blockchain. it was called "bitcoin 2.0", and became "blockchain"

Serge

Quick intro:) I’m Serge Lubkin and I’m gonna assist Henrik today. I work in marketing and business development fields at Chromia, as well as on the token economics of the project. I've been in crypto since 2014 and my background is in marketing and economics.

Anastasia

Hello and welcome, everyone! 👋 My name is Anastasia. I am responsible for ChromaWay & Chromia’s social media presence and will assist my team today during the AMA. 😊

Q1. Is Chromia actually the only blockchain with relational database? Other blockchains must have some kind of workarounds? How do you think Chromia can compete with other Blockchains such as Ethereum? What’s the idea behind Chromia?

First a little info on Chromia:

Chromia is a new public blockchain based on the idea of integrating traditional databases, Relational databases with blockchain security. Chromia is a general purpose blockchain with full smart contract capabilities, just that it is a lot easier to code, even complex applications. You code with an easy to learn new programming language that combines the power of SQL and normal languages but makes it secure in a blockchain context. Up to 1/10 the code-lines vs other blockchains.

The aim of Chromia is to combine relational databases, which exist in every kind of organisation, with blockchains. We want to provide a platform for our users to develop totally decentralised apps securely. Our goal is for Chromia to be seen as the number one infrastructure for decentralised applications.

Ok, and now for twitter question, It kind of continues on this.

I will start with the roots of the relational database. Members of our team have been working on blockchain tech since 2011, and over years we noticed that there are many problems caused by primitive data models. It makes programming hard, leads to duplication, some things are outright impossible.

So we decided to integrate relational database technology (i.e. SQL) with blockchain to use the best-known data modeling technology to model blockchain state data. This makes it a lot easier to make applications that can make use of a database… Which is pretty much all of them.

We learned this by the way when we did the world's first stable coin issued by a bank, LHV Bank in Estonia 2014-2015.

We needed proper indexed database performance...

Back to the reasons: Look at the world outside of crypto. They are not using ledgers, they are using databases. 85% of the databases are SQL/relational databases. 100% of all enterprises use them. Also the web, from Amazon to Facebook and wordpress. And banks, core banking, SAP. CRM systems. Why is that technology so successful for the last 30 years? Because it works. It is easy yet powerful and flexible. And Chromia is the only blockchain that is also a relational database.

Why can Chromia compete with another blockchain that has been already for long on the market? Easy – the relational database aspect. Relational databases are run by 85% of the enterprise market at the moment, way above any key value store. No SQL at the backend etc, which makes it easier for enterprises to integrate our tech stack to their legacy systems without the need to redo them like in most cases where blockchain pilots have failed. It’s very easy for developers to deploy dApps because they already know relational database programming. Keep in mind that we worked with customers and developers to build our tech stack while solving problems for them.We didn’t build something unneeded, we had proof of validation from the market.

Can we switch perspective maybe: How can blockchains, such as Ethereum, compete with the technology that built the web (1.0), the social web2.0, core banking, SAP and more. And have 30+ years of trackrecord. Whose biggest company Oracle has a larger market cap than bitcoin.... and implementations done by thousands of developers over decades, and is known by millions of developers..

By being a blockchain... yes but also it needs to be good at managing data....

Again on background: the Idea behind Chromia (https://chromia.com): We started with public blockchains, tokens in 2012, the world's first stable coin with a bank 2015 (LHV). When coding that solution, peer to peer payments of Euro-tokens, we discovered we need performance reasons to store all data in a database. We needed to quickly know the "balance" of a user, and can't loop through a blockchain. And slowly the idea grew that we can make the database INTO a blockchain, integrate completely with the transaction mechanism of a database. So we did it as a private blockchain first (Postchain), used it for some projects, then came up with the idea to make a Public Blockchain based on it.

The motivation is that we felt we needed a better programming model for blockchains. Our CTO Alex has always been thinking of optimal solutions for blockchain technology and has lots of experiences thinking about it.

It wasn’t hard to start, but we had a lot of challenges during our long history.

Ok, really enough on this question.

Workarounds if you don't have a relational database? You have a blockchain and ALSO a database. Now you have two sources of truth.

Or workaround 2: You never deliver your fantastic DAPP, you just talk about it....

Q2. Many developers don't know RELL, just Solidity and SQL. Is this a barrier or threat to Chromia? Why is RELL better?

Oh Rell is soo much better! Where to start?:)

I feel for this one too... one of my favourite subjects...

First, what do developers actually know? Let's be scientific. In the Stackoverflow programmer questionaire 2019 we find some facts.

It went out to 90.000 developers.

Fact: Solidity is not on top 20 list. No special blockchain languages are on the top 20 list (that is where the summary ends).

Fact 2: SQL is on the list. it is nr 3, after HTML/CSS (as one) and Javascript (2).

You can also see this in other sources, do search on github projects/langauges etc.

This means that RELL, which is an improved way to do SQL with static typing etc has access to a developer base of millions of developers. Not thousands.

And, if you know SQL, you might feel tempted to for once try an improvement. SQL has looked basically the same for decades, and is showing signs of age. Now comes a nice syntax, static typing, and a hipster flavour. Oh: also blockchain built in....

What is RELL really?

Chromia Dapps are written in RELL. It is a new general purpose language similar to SQL and closely connected to the relational database, but improved with static type checks and a more concise syntax. Rell can be learned well in less than a week. The large advantages with all this is that you can write complex decentralized applications much easier and faster, and do things that are really hard to do with other blockchains. https://rell.chromia.com/en/master/ .

It is deeply integrated with the relational model and supports complex operations. This model increases programmer productivity and ensures application consistency with ability to update code over time. It’s very important to catch programming errors at the compilation stage to prevent financial losses. Rell is much more type-safe than SQL, and it will make sure that types returned by queries match types used in procedural code.

Oh, a link to my Facts: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-popular-technologies

Also fact from this survey: database market is dominated by SQL databases..

Also Rell has:

• Normal programming constructs: variables, loops, functions, collections, etc.

• Constructs which specifically target application backends and, in particular, blockchain-style programming including request routing, authorization, etc.

Rell aims to make programming as convenient and simple as possible. It minimizes boilerplate and repetition. At the same time, as a static type system it can detect and prevent many kinds of defects prior to run-time.

Safety-optimized. Arithmetic operations are safe right out of the box, programmers do not need to worry about overflows. Authorization checks are explicitly required.

Concise, expressive and convenient. Many developers dislike SQL because it is highly verbose. Rell doesn’t bother developers with details which can be derived automatically.

As a data definition language, Rell is up to 7x more compact than SQL.

Allows meta-programming. We do not want application developers to implement the basics from scratch for every dapp. Rell will allow functionality to be bundled as

Templates. Programmers can use relational programming idioms they are already familiar with. However, they don’t have to go out of their way to express everything through relational algebra: Rell can seamlessly merge relational constructs with procedural programming.

The language is deliberately similar to modern programming languages like JavaScript and Kotlin. A familiar language is easier to adapt to, and our internal tests show that programmers can become proficient in Rell in a matter of days.

You can read more about our programming language Rell in this blog: https://blog.chromia.com/the-case-for-rell-a-new-blockchain-language/ 😉

Q3. What is the Postchain and how it different from old type blockchain technology? Which factors add in this which makes it more useful and profitable and why did you use this in Chromia?

Postchain: is a product of ChromaWay (https://chromaway.com) for enterprise clients and it’s the core technology on which Chromia is built.

Postchain is a replicated blockchain and database that offers highly resilient distributed database management with distributed control. Postchain is the only product on the market that combines the immutable consensus of a blockchain and the full properties of a database management system. Postchain allows you to share information between companies and/or individuals in a secure and transparent way.

Basically, with Postchain we allowed direct SQL programming. But for Chromia we needed to make a more secure language RELL.

Q4. Can Chromia Vault be disabled if the DAPP infrastructure is damaged by cyber attacks? Can users' personal keys be compromised with this risk?

It is not possible to disable the dapp. Anybody will still be able to run the code. That's the whole point why we built it completely decentralized. It's a feature. Unfortunately this is not true on many decentralized applications. We believe that dapps should be unstoppable (i.e. censorship resistant).

Even saying that it would be possible. The whole security lies on the blockchain. Therefore an attack would keep on going on the chromia chain as well as on any other decentralized chain.

It would be a problem if some vulnerability is found on the client side (e.g. private key is exposed). We could fix/stop distributing the Vault, but since it is an open source project, other entities who are distributing the software might do otherwise.

This problem is shared by any open source software. In case we would keep the code secret, we could even not admit the vulnerability and overlook many security best practices. We strongly believe that open source and open collaboration is the best long term solution.

Q5. You've already released "Mines of Dalarnia", its really great. What are your plans regarding making more games on Chromia platform?
Can you talk about the future of GAMING on Chromia platform?

We already have more than one game that was released on our platform. Mines of Dalarnia (https://www.minesofdalarnia.com) is a free-to-play blockchain action-adventure platform-mining game,

and the other game what was released on our platform by two external developers Dennis and Simon (huge credit to them), Chain of Alliance (https://www.chainofalliance.com), is an auto battler game.

"Chain of Alliance" has full logic on blockchain. Impressive feat you seldom see on other blockchain games.

We had the game called Planetary, where you can trade your planet as an NFT asset. We have more games to come, for example Antler Interactive (https://www.antlerinteractive.com) will be working with merching their games with Chromia blockchain. And so on.

Antler will release Kystopia 2 this summer with Chromia elements. Already getting good reviews.

Also we do a "secret project" together with Antler Interactive on more futuristic blockchain game, pushing limits a bit.

Gaming is quite a challenging target because good UX is expected, it needs to be fast, responsive, etc. If we can do that, then we can also do all sorts of other stuff. Also it lets us experiment with things without a lot of hassle, it’s easier to get users, and so on. It’s also a growing niche within blockchain.

Q6. What's the unique thing in Chromia that no other blockchain has, that makes Chromia the better option?

Blockchain is about managing data, and Chromia is the only proper relational database combined with a blockchain. "Manage data" is what you use a database for....

Q7. SQL is a fairly common database programming language in the Blockchain space , so why did Chromia choose to create RELL and not use the SQL ?

Security. SQL is not designed to be used in a shared context like blockchain, run by multiple parties. It is not secure enough for this use case. Needs to be deterministic etc

Q8. Why do you still decide to born Chromia while the number competitors are very huge in your field such as ETH, NEO, EOS, Lisk, GenEOS...? are there any motivations or interesting points behind?

Mr Trump. Why did you decide to go for president when there were millions of other americans that could have done it? I guess it is because you are THE BEST president, and is ALWAYS RIGHT. Same for us.

Chromia is best, because it has full-blown database included. The same tech that is dominating the enterprise market for decades. None of the competitors, many of them are nice, but they still do not have the decades behind it, the complete dominance, the mathematical logic roots that we do. We inherit so much power from relational databases...

Q9. Did you notice that your project symbol (CHR) is the same as Fantom project one? Does that bother you, or is it insignificant?

No I didnt know about Fantom and CHR. That is unfortunate. I'll check it later.

Q10. What's the relationship between Swedish Land Registry (Lantmäteriet) and Chromia?

As you know, Chromia is a brainchild of ChromaWay, Swedish company that provides solutions for enterprise clients. Swedish Land Registry on blockchain is one of many projects developed by ChromaWay and based on Postchain. Chromia is also based on Postchain, so potentially all projects built on top of Postchain can migrate one day on Chromia infrastructure. More about this project you can read here:

http://ica-it.org/pdf/Blockchain_Landregistry_Report.pdf

https://stockholm.bc.events/en/news/how-does-swedish-land-registry-work-on-blockchain-answer-from-j-rgen-modin-chief-solutions-architect-at-chromaway-92127

https://blockchan.ge/blockchange-land-registry.pdf

Q11. Most of users are still not aware with Blockchain & its related projects ! So, How $CHR platform create awareness about their project with NON-CRYPTO users too?

This is our goal, non-crypto users (and developers). First: we have amazingly easy to use UX. One examples is that we do not require users to hold any tokens to USE (d)apps. Check yourself with mines of dalarnia how easy it is. Also for enterprise applications, we have financial institutions use Green Assets Wallet, it is that "normal" and simple.

non-crypto developers: scroll up, we have a large potential with everyone of those millions of developers that know databases.

Q12. How did you choose/end up with a name "Chromia"? Where did the idea of the name came from for the coin and why that logo, any particular significance?

Our CTO started with "colored-coins", the first tech for users to be able to create their own tokens on a blockchain. It started our industry you can say. Greek word for color is Chrom(a/e) etc. The project was first called Chromapolis. But our branding agency said that word sucks, can you do something else. I fought hard for another name, but we picked Chromia as the name.

Q13. What is the meaning of Chromia? Where the name Chromia came from ? Chromia = Chrome 🤔. What we can expect from Chromia in term of development in 2020?

Google did not invent the greek word for color though..

Q14. I see often Chromia & ChromaWay being used interchangeably.. So, Could you Explain what's the difference between ChromaWay & Chromia Projects? Is Both are same Projects or Different?

ChromaWay projects are based on Postchain, Chromia was developed by the team behind Postchain, and based on it. So all Postchain projects have the potential to be on Chromia infrastructure even if they are private/consortia types. For example one project that was developed on Postchain - Green Assets Wallet already successfully migrated to Chromia Bootstrap Net (first phase of Mainnet)

https://greenassetswallet.org/

Q15. How do you plan to show the world that your product is not just useless blockchain solution to a non-existing problem?

Well, we have financial institutions using the Green Assets Wallet now, such as BlackRock and several banks. I'd say it is manly up to indivdual dapp developers to sell their applications.

But: given the state of the web, the debate on power of monopolies etc. A tech that can prove they can make a user-controlled social network such as https://chromunity.org, I think it is very very useful. I do not approve of a situation where citizens of another company approve MY apps.

And: for the trends in enterprise database with "cloud databases": here comes the perfect decentralized cloud... useful stuff...

Henrik meant Decentralized Social Network Chromunity https://testnet.chromunity.com what was built on Chromia platform

Q16. Gaming industry is widely used and with much rush. It will be always trending! But what is the actual role of blockchain in gaming industry?

So we see great potential of blockchain in gaming.

First of all - decentralized games are more robust and can be governed by community, for example if developers are for some reason tired of the project or want to change it in a bad way, community always has a say, people can vote or they can fork the dapp and create their own better version

Secondly- transparent games have a great potential in those game related niches that demand transparency. For example referral programs or gambling

Also blockchain games can have different monetization models - crowdfunding, bonding curves backed tokens, community support by voting and many many more cases

Last but not least, privacy and censorship are a very tough problems for games that can be solved with decentralization

Q17. What is the best suited Dapp that can thrive on Chromia?

Personally I love applications which can give "Power to the Public", meaning "the public" as in the general population, users, us etc. Chromia has the potential to change how applications are controlled. From media to public sector, it can be a tool to make a more fair world.

This is our CTO Alexs wonderful explainer: https://blog.chromia.com/towards-publicly-hosted-applications/

Q18. Hi @henrik_hjelte

I'm very amazed to know that Chromia started it company before ETH existed. During this period, there was no money in blockchain.

May I know What inspired you to start, knowing fully well that there was zero money in it? or

Did you envisioned that the blockchain industry will be profitable later in the future, perhaps the reason why you didn't quit ?

Yes, I quit my dayjob to explore "bitcoin 2.0", before ETH. At the time, I liked my dayjob... The reason I think was that I like to explore new things and ventures. And I fell in love with the technology. I had no idea it would become an industry. I honestly never thought that Ethereum would be released, and I had no idea that IBM would go into the business etc. If I had known, we should have moved faster....

Thank you guys!

Please also join our Indian community

https://t.me/ChromiaIndia

Thank you to everyone who participated in the AMA, @henrik_hjelte, @sergelubkin for your answers, and @gameofbitcoins, @game_admin for having us!

If you wish to learn more about Chromia, our public relational blockchain platform powered by Rell, please do not hesitate to contact us or visit:

Website: https://www.chromia.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/chromia

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/teamchromia

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chromia

Telegram: https://t.me/hellochromia

Indian Telegram Group: https://t.me/ChromiaIndia

Our blog: https://blog.chromia.com