ProximaX & Jaguar Q+A

#12

Hi Alex, Hi Jag,
Thanks for opening this up for a Q&A with your valuable time.
My question would be: ‘How 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?’
Thanks again,
Laura

5 Likes
#13

Jaguar, I have two questions.

  1. 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?

  2. I join in with the rest of the choir with regards to Lon Wong’s 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.

13 Likes
#14

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 they’re 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 “competitor”, it’s 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.

10 Likes
Misha Granin for Vice President (at least for a day, so we all can create NEM Foundation 2.0)
#15

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 doesn’t 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 you’re referring to specifically. There was certainly some intermingling of resources because the foundation doesn’t have any conflict of interest guidelines, but Lon is not the only one to have blurred these lines.

I don’t think Stephen or Nelson are employed by ProximaX (although Stephen’s 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.

5 Likes
#16

I’m not sure why you’re 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 don’t see too much of a problem.

6 Likes
#17

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 wouldn’t 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 don’t see any reason to cut off them and Lon.

10 Likes
#18

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 they’re both close to Lon and have vested interests in ProximaX doing well, and NEM not doing well.

2 Likes
#19

In hindsight they catch cry of a lot of the council and reps in 2017 was “NDA’s”…sounded great at the time.
Also I can’t see Nem and Proximax working together, I call bullshit on that front.
The current/present toxicity between the two community’s would have to change to a more realistic positive approach for that to happen successfully.
Dan

2 Likes
#20

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.

3 Likes
#21

Not sure if open source for Nem has had much momentum in 2018, unless I have been looking at the wrong repo.
Dan

#22

Again another important point I have brought up with a few candidates, the NEM ecosystem is spread amongst several privately owned repo’s - this all needs to be consolidated under a single NEM branded Organisation Repo for it to be effective, Open source collaboration needs to improve drastically.

1 Like
#23

:disappointed_relieved:

To be honest, I’m a bit upset that you declare that only ProximaX contributes back to the NEM ecosystem.
Rene

18 Likes
#24

Well @r3n3 that is because it doesn’t.
Startlingly all the Proximax folk seem to be oblivious to the fact that it is actually Nem.
They all bag Nem, while in the same time it is built on Nem.
Some guy today was telling me how “Byzantine” nanowallet was…lol, yeah well it’s actually head and shoulders above any Proximax wallet that appears to only accept XPX transfers.

Omg…
Dan

#25

Question for Jaguar or anyone :

From ProximaX website :

Yes, each transaction on ProximaX generates a transaction on the NEM blockchain. And each transaction on the NEM blockchain needs XEM (fees).

ProximaX released their testnet. Is there link to NEM testnet ?
Easy to see if they are true. If they are , all ProximaX testnet transaction will be on NEM testnet.
If not, ProximaX is FORK .

More from ProximaX website :

ProximaX (pronounced as Proxima X) is a blockchain-based decentralized storage and content delivery network developed by some of the people behind the NEM blockchain platform.

Which people ?

EDIT :

Where is even link to ProximaX testnet ?
I see hype but product hard to find :roll_eyes:

1 Like
#26

Eventually, from what I gather Proximax will one day move to its own blockchain.
The funny thing is that Nem is actually built with the feature to launch your own cryptocurrencey.
I am now starting to understand that for Nem it is not necessarily a ‘‘hard fork’’, but the natural progression of Nem’s structure.
I feel many have known this for a long time, yet have been reluctant to market it to XEM buyers.
I am not sure how this works as compared to Ethereum as all Ethereum projects utilise the ERC20 token, hence stimulate ETH volume (correct me if I am wrong).
Yet with Nem (nem:xem), I do not think prx:xpx has the same effect as it is two different tokens(this may be quite incorrect, someone can correct it if they like).
And really no one mosaic is obligated to stay on the Nem blockchain.

In reality Proximax and others like Loyalcoin are really complimentary to the Nem “ecosystem”,
as they are successful ventures spawned from within Nem.

I see this as not a move against Nem but an addition to the future possibility’s.

If somone can clarify what I am trying to say, it would be helpful.
Also if an admin feels this post is in the wrong thread feel free to move it.
cheers
Dan

#28

I was getting PMs asking about ProximaX and no feedback from Council on this so I asked Jag to clarify. He’s busy and said he’d answer 3-5 questions. So there you go. Not regulating… just consolidating. :woman_shrugging:t3:

3 Likes
#29

No Alex the photo represents the last 12 months.
It is nothing personal on you, it merely a photo that I made up in representation of all I have read here on the forum in the last week.
I found it humorous, maybe some have no sense of humor but do not let it get you down, the future is bright.

Indeed one must laugh at times, its good for the soul.

I took the pic down anyway, its probably not fitting here in this thead.

cheers

Dan

1 Like
#30

Hello. I’ll try to answer your inquiries about ProximaX and I hope it’ll help.

There are 2 versions of ProximaX, the first version was built using NIS1 and it’s basically an IPFS + NEM (NIS1) Integration. In this setting, all uploads to ProximaX storage node costs a certain fee + XEM as transaction fees. We’ve halted the support for this version cause this isn’t really the complete vision we have in mind. Our entire vision of a new ecosystem of integrated decentralized technologies just won’t work with NIS1, hence we have version 2 which uses Catapult.

Yes, proximax is a HARD FORK but the great thing about Catapult is that even though we have different consensus algorithm and more plugins / contracts, its architecture and framework allows any fork to swap (cross chain transaction) between other forks. In fact, we have a project now that utilizes this feature. We set up 2 private chains and made cross chain transactions in each. It’s awesome to see it actually works. :slight_smile:

In laymans, if

  • Company 1 forked Catapult (Cat1)
  • Company 2 forked Catapult (Cat2).

Cat1 can still do cross chain transactions with Cat2 UNLESS one of them remove this feature on their code base.

You said it’s all hype, but you fail to understand that we just started mid this year. We’ve been trying our best to be transparent to the public with our monthly tech update (https://blog.proximax.io) and been tweeting some teasers of our progress. ProximaX is a platform and catapult is just one of the components under that platform. Given the timeframe, I’d say we’re actually early to release TESTNET but we did it anyway and here’s why…

The intention of the TESTNET release is so that we can prepare our engagement with community. We have weekly release and updates on the TESTNET environments and we will soon open up our tools for developers to try it out. I believe that engaging the broader community will create a battle tested solution in the long run and the platform will be better prepared for main network. We’re not creating hype at all, we just need the community to know cause we will be needing their help on this.

Here are the testnet links:
http://bctestnet1.xpxsirius.io:3000/block/1
http://bctestnet2.xpxsirius.io:3000/block/1

Most of our source (about 90%) is private but here is our github repo:

Our blog if you want to get the latest updates.

I am not as active as Lon on forums and chat groups because I need to keep our engine room running (keep #buidling), but if you have questions you can always ping me via Telegram. I’ll do my best to answer.

3 Likes
#31

In hindsight, “only” was probably a poor word choice. It would be more appropriate to say:

The ProximaX team is making significant contributions back to the ecosystem and is the only team I’m aware of that has attempted to modify the catapult-server code.

1 Like
#32

Thanks for the response @Jaguar0625 :hugs: