Hey Community, Jaguar will answer 3-5 community questions about ProximaX and/or his involvement. If you have one to ask, put it in the comment section below. Deadline for submitting questions is 11:59 pm CST on November 20. I propose the top questions (up to 5) that are most liked by the community get answered.
Thanks!
Alex
Is ProximaX really a complementary solution to work with Catapult or is that the perception that ProximaX wants to put out, as in reality it may be a competing chain to NEM. What value does it add to the Public NEM Blockchain?
Should projects that use ProximaX receive NEM funding ?
Hi Alex and Jag!!! Q is:
If ProximaX release public net on their «NXT POS concept» does it mean they are never be use NEM chain?
Thanx!
âŠand who should be responsible for costsâŠ
On ProximaX website youâre listed as an advisor.
what percent of your time is spent on NEM vs ProximaX, and is it a purely advisory role or also actual technical development?
What about NEM Foundation members/ developers who worked on NEM tools and switched to working on ProximaX during Lonâs Presidency.
Is it acceptable by you that a ExCo is launching private ICO and source its developers and other staff from NEM talent pool? Should this platform be endorsed and promoted by NEM Foundation? Same question about the Leader of this ICO, who constantly puts NEM in a bad light. Do you think NEM Foundation should maintain good relations with project like that?
What is your vision in working cohesively with ProximaX (as a NEM partner) and working with NEM.io Foundation?
What would say would be a succesful 2019 in your view for NEM?
Hi Alex, Hi Jag,
Thanks for opening this up for a Q&A with your valuable time.
My question would be: âHow exactly do you view ProximaX in relation to NEM public Catapult (help/hindersnce),and moreover, what do you and the other two core devs need to complete Catapult for the public chain?â
Thanks again,
Laura
Jaguar, I have two questions.
On-chain logic is more and more of a necessity for businesses. The recent Catapult update, Bison, makes inroads to this with the introduction of state Merkling. It may not be in the plans, of course, but how would you introduce more on-chain logic in NEM from an engineering standpoint?
I join in with the rest of the choir with regards to Lon Wongâs clear abusive use of NEM resources to build up his ProximaX project, and troubling evidence linking ProximaX to existing council members Stephen Chia and Nelson Valero to suggest conflicts of interest. Do you support the continued licensing of Catapult intellectual property that you and your team have created to ProximaX, when it is clear that ProximaX may not have the best interest of the greater NEM ecosystem in mind? It is clear that they are a fork and, in kindest, most forgiving terms, at the very least a direct future competitor.
ProximaX and NEM have different goals and can coexist. Proximax is more designed as an application platform and is more centrally managed.
ProximaX is based on a private chain of NEM with some modifications. How they deploy it is up to them, but theyâre no different than any other company using a private catapult chain (e.g. LuxTag, Blockstart, He3, etc). The difference is that the ProximaX team is the only team currently contributing back to the ecosystem. They have written a Go-SDK for catapult .
Additionally, the have made changes to a fork of catapult-server, which I have reviewed. Some of their changes are not applicable to the main trunk, but some could be valuable and find their way into the main catapult-server trunk eventually.
Even if one views ProximaX as a âcompetitorâ, itâs not uncommon for competitors to work together on open source projects. For example, two of the largest contributors to Hadoop are Hortonworks and Cloudera who are in direct competition.
Due to the shared codebase, atomic swaps should be possible between ProximaX and catapult chains.
Catapult supports a plugin model, which makes it easy to add custom functionality to private chains. Generally, we support people sandboxing new features on private chains first. If there is demand for the feature and it works on private chains, they we can consider adding it to the main (public) chain. This also allows better customization of private chains since there are some things a (trusted) private chain will want that doesnât make sense for a (trustless) public chain.
I think Lon should not have launched ProximaX while he was NEM Foundation President because it lent itself to really poor optics. This was the primary reason he stepped down. I am not sure of what clear abusive use of NEM resources youâre referring to specifically. There was certainly some intermingling of resources because the foundation doesnât have any conflict of interest guidelines, but Lon is not the only one to have blurred these lines.
I donât think Stephen or Nelson are employed by ProximaX (although Stephenâs brother is an employee) but they probably both hold XPX. The election will decide whether or not this is a sufficient conflict of interest.
As long as ProximaX abides by the software license (LGPL) , they can do what they want with the code. This is the whole premise of open source.
Iâm not sure why youâre singling out ProximaX? Maybe you missed the NEM pavilion at Consensus 2018. There were at least 11 companies that the NEM foundation sponsored; only one of which had a catapult-based demo.
If ProximaX and NEM are sharing costs, I donât see too much of a problem.
I am unaware of any developers that switched to working on ProximaX. However, since Lon stepped down, ProximaX has been much more successful in hiring quality developers than the foundation. That is true.
I agree that Lon should not have launched ProximaX while he was NEM Foundation President because it lent itself to really poor optics. If he had waited until the end of his term, there wouldnât have been any issue.
I would prefer the foundation focus on marketing and selling catapult-based chains. Considering the code contributions being made by the ProximaX team, I donât see any reason to cut off them and Lon.
Hmm, interesting⊠Meanwhile while he was at NEM there was lack hiring of developers and lack of Catapult roadmap approval. His 2 lackeys currently still within NEM are ensuring this continues.
Sorry to put a negative spin on this, but theyâre both close to Lon and have vested interests in ProximaX doing well, and NEM not doing well.
In hindsight they catch cry of a lot of the council and reps in 2017 was âNDAâsââŠsounded great at the time.
Also I canât see Nem and Proximax working together, I call bullshit on that front.
The current/present toxicity between the two communityâs would have to change to a more realistic positive approach for that to happen successfully.
Dan
This is important, Open source works so well because of the nacent ability for 3rd parties to contribute, if the NEM Foundation has basically stalled at hiring new talent then how else is Catapult going to be getting new features if not through 3rd party contributions?
I really hope that ProximaX does launch on catapult, but at the moment it just feels like we are falling further and further behind in development, at some point that is going to become a problem for re-integration.
Not sure if open source for Nem has had much momentum in 2018, unless I have been looking at the wrong repo.
Dan
