Ambisafe CEO: Mining Industry May Sink Into Oblivion After the PoS Switch

18.09.2016

Andrey Zamovsky, Ambisafe CEO and InChain team member, will be moderating the development section of the Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Kiev 2016, a major event to be held September 23.

ForkLog contacted Andrey to find out more about the forthcoming conference and his work on the new project.

Andrey Zamovsky, Ambisafe CEO

FL: You are going to moderate blockchain development section at the Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference Kyiv. Which speaker will you personally be interested to hear most ?

Andrey Zamovsky: I’m looking forward to Johann Barbie’s speech on diversity of PoS algorithms. Consensus algorithm is the most crucial element of any cryptocurrency; it determines its speed and reliability. Recent works in this area promise a quantum leap in the short run. Mass transition to PoS will be one of the most important events in the industry, and eventually it could even change the market structure. I’m looking forward to the Ethereum’s switch to PoS.

FL: When is it going to happen, and why do you think it’s important?

Andrey Zamovsky: The funny thing is that even Vitalik Buterin himself can’t answer this question. The switch is important as it may prove PoS’s operability in such a big network as Ethereum. This will make the mining industry to sink into oblivion.

FL: Why do you think so?

Andrey Zamovsky: With the PoW algorithm employed in Bitcoin and in the majority of other cryptocurrency networks, your chances of finding a block and being rewarded are in direct relation to your computational capacity. For that reason, if we talk about Bitcoin mining, the one who owns more hardware earns the most. With the PoS algorithms (and there are plenty of them), there’s no need to run through multiple random values, and your chances of finding a block do not increase with the number of ASIC’s in your data center.

You use variations on prediction markets instead, where the winners are the ones who vote for the most beneficial outcome. Therefore, as soon as PoS is more popular than PoW, all those mining farms, the hardware and its manufacturers will be no longer needed. They all realize this and already start looking for new business models and new areas of applicability for their chips.

FL: Recently we spoke to Sergei Primachik from InChain, a crypto assets insurance platform. According to him, you are involved in the project as a software architect. Will you tell us more about this project?

Andrey Zamovsky: You’ve probably already heard that financial markets is one of the biggest industries to be transformed by blockchain and smart contracts. The nature of this transformation is that contracts previously written in legal terms are now drafted in programming languages, while their execution is enforced by consensus algorithm rather than some social order system. This significantly accelerates all operations, and ultimately brings nearer the moment our civilization jumps into hyperspace.

Insurance is a big niche within financial markets, where numerous contracts are traded between numerous players. We plan to issue several types of contracts: user insurance, investor insurance bonds, and a corporate charter known as DAO.

The first minimal version will enable users to insure their wallets against loss of funds. After that we want to add insurance against losses from catastrophic events and natural disasters and to continue developing the product set. Each insurance product will have its own smart contract complete with numerous innovative solutions. Thus, the project is a great example of how Ethereum may eventually replace traditional jurisdictions for businesses.

FL: What key problems did you have to solve while working on this?

Andrey Zamovsky: The project’s key problem is to connect blockchain to the real-world data sources with the help of so-called oracles. We have several options as to how to do this, as described in my earlier article.

FL: What are your thoughts on the project’s perspectives?

Andrey Zamovsky: I believe it is capable of raising as much investment as The DAO, and I am confident we won’t make the same mistakes.

FL: What about your other project, Ambisafe? Any big news there?

Andrey Zamovsky: Yes, we are putting the finishing touches on the protocol for crypto tokens (eToken) and already have miscellaneous new projects running on it. Recently, Ukrainian exchange Kuna used our protocol to issue its shares, and more projects will be announced soon. A reasonably comprehensive list of tokens working on our platform is available here.

It has to be said that creation of a new cryptocurrency still requires a lot of manual work, and we are busy preparing a service that will automate this process. We plan to announce it at the Kyiv conference on September 23.

Interviewed by Tanya Otter

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Tags: Ambisafe, Ethereum, InChain, insurance, PoS, smart contracts