Recap of gala AMA
「Crypto Gala」, a well-known AMA community in the industry, invited Epik to the community on the evening of April 8, and Have a profound dialogue，The following is the main content of the interview。
1. Introduce yourself Eg your background, experience
Hello everyone! I am Eric, graduated from the School of Information Technology of Tsinghua University. Since I am studying the domain of data storage and big data computing, I entered the blockchain industry and came into contact with Bitcoin relatively early. Since 2013, I have successively invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Dogecoin, EOS, etc., have experienced every ups and downs and bull-bear transitions in the market. I have always been an early technology investor and industry observer in the industry. Decentralized storage is also my focus. I have been closely following the development of IPFS and Filecoin projects since 2017.
At the beginning of this year, some of Tsinghua’s friends in the industry approached me. They also paid attention to the low quality of FIL data, high rate of wasted resources and its lack of commercial value. Some of our ideas coincided with each other: how to make it better? The idea of EpiK was born by refining the data storage model to ensure the value of data on chain and to improve the commercial value of the entire project.
2. Could you give us a brief introduction of EpiK Protocol?
With the help of block-chain technology, EpiK Protocol is dedicated to build a decentralized and collaborative platform of secure and trusted knowledge graph, which is built and benefited by everyone. By means of four core capabilities: trusted storage, trusted incentive, trusted governance and trusted finance, to organize global knowledge community users to cooperate with each other at low management cost, to transform knowledge into knowledge graph for permanent preservation, and to expand the cognition of AI, thus promoting the era of cognitive intelligence.
3. Could you please give a brief introduction to knowledge graph? Why use blockchain for distributed storage of knowledge graph? What problems are addressed by EpiK’s four core capacities?
Knowledge graph is the underlying foundation needed for AI to understand human knowledge. It can be seemed as a biomimetic system of human neuronal system. As the connections of nodes in knowledge graph, the connections of neurons are more intelligent when they are denser. While it is not easy to transform the knowledge inherited by human beings in various forms into a super-large-scale high-quality knowledge graph, which faces many challenges. First of all, human knowledge involves a wide range of professional fields, far beyond the reach of one organization, one company or even one country. Secondly, in the process of knowledge graph construction, it includes acquisition, extraction, disambiguation and fusion, it needs human to participate, which means that the cost of knowledge graph construction in each professional field is not low. The last and the most difficult problem is, since knowledge graph are so expensive to build that most people can’t build them on their own, which means that many AI need to use third-party knowledge graph to build cognitive capabilities.
If these dependent third-party knowledge graph data is maliciously misrepresented, it will directly lead to many AI cognitive disorders, and then out of control.
Therefore, in the course of the evolution of artificial intelligence from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence, a knowledge graph database which is not centrally controlled and can motivate all parties to participate in co-construction, data security, credibility and tamper-proof is essential.
4. Could you give us a brief introduction to each of EpiK’s four core competencies?
Filecoin: It solves the problem of excitation by designing storage proofs, and by combining zero-knowledge proofs with PoRe and PoST to solve the problem of cheating.
Token Economy: Through the token economy model and the smart contract, we can solve the record and reward problem of micro-contribution in the knowledge graph collaborative scenario with very low trust cost without manual intervention.
DAO: Decentralized governance solves the decision-making problem of dividing the voting right to achieve the maximum benefit of the group under the premise that everyone’s interests in the ecological group are different.
DEFI: Decentralized lending services allows users with mainstream currencies such as BTC/ETH to participate smoothly in collaboration with the de-centralization of the knowledge graph ecosystem.
5. what is the relationship between Epik and Filecoin
The data on the EpiK Protocol is the log data of adding, deleting, checking and modifying in different fields. When using it, users can specify which fields of data they want, download these log data to the local database, replay them and provide API data interface. Such a process can decouple the work of professional experts and ensure that the data is updatable but not tampered with. However, with the growth of the running time of Epik protocol network, the number of domain log files increases, and it will become time-consuming to replay these log files locally. At this time, our best choice is to periodically transfer the snapshot of domain data to Filecoin. When you want to use some data, you only need to download the latest snapshot data from Filecoin, and then download the latest update log from EpiK Protocol, and you can quickly recover the local database. Filecoin is suitable for the cold storage of large files, and EpiK is suitable for the hot storage of small files. By cooperating with each other, we can make full use of the idle hardware resources in the market to better serve the knowledge graph collaboration network and the decentralized storage ecosystem.
6. What is EpiK’s general economic model? How to ensure that prices can have a relatively stable development?
Let’s start with a brief look at EpiK’s economic model, the five roles in DAO ecosystem allocate the EPK generated every day after the mainnetgoes online. Miners own 75 percent of EPK, professional experts own 9 percent of EPK, and voting users share 1 percent of EPK. Another 15 percent of EPK will fluctuate according to the network’s daily access traffic, and those 15 percent are the result of a game between miners and professional experts.
The criterion of network activity is the proportion of EPK (1EPK=10Mb/day) that the whole network has pledged in order to obtain the daily traffic. The higher the ratio is, the higher the data demand is, which requires the miners to improve the bandwidth quality. If the demand for data is reduced, this requires that professional experts provide higher-quality data. It’s like having more visitors in a library, and you need more seats, which means paying the miners to increase bandwidth. With fewer visitors, more money is needed to buy better quality books to attract visitors, making bounty hunters and professional experts generate more quality knowledge graph data. Unlike the game between the official team and the big miners in the Filecoin ecosystem, the game between the producer of data and the store of data is the most important game in the ecosystem.
When the EpiK economic model was released, it received unanimous praise from the community, which is reflected in the rise of token price. Among them, the game relationship is based on the real cooperative relationship, which can withstand deliberation, the design is also very exquisite. It is also recommended that you to find the document link directly in the official website epik-protocol.io to read in detail.
At present, the miners’ ecosystem is very active. After each miner goes online in the main network, it needs at least 1,000 pledge token to access mining. In the early days, the circulation is very limited. In order to participate in the first mine, many miners are now preparing the pledge token they need to start up.
7. Recently, EpiK also disclosed the fundraising of the strategic round. Which stage has EpiK’s project reached now? What will be the big moves in the near future?
At present, the product’s in the first stage, such as the mainnet v1.0, the mainnet wallet, the mainnet explorer, knowledge Mainland App, have been developed and entered the beta test. The first batch of domain experts are also actively recruiting. After the reviews, we will be on line and start the second phase of ecosystem construction. The core products include integrated EVM mainnet 2.0 and the open platform for knowledge crowdsourcing, as well as a series of small applications for domain knowledge graph. All these products will meet you all in the next stage.
8. EpiK will launch the knowledge mainland gamification annotation platform in the near future, how can users participate in?
We will open the first phase beta test of the Knowledge Mainland. In the beta stage, we provide you with a threshold-free voice data collection database, and we will continue to work with the first batch of experts to launch more question database. The friends who participate in the beta test will also have the opportunity to share the ERC20-EPK rewards we prepared for you every day.
9. Could you please tell us about how does EpiK relate to web3.0 and NFT?
If we look at EpiK from a technical point of view, its underlying infrastructure is actually a de-centralization data lake solution. After each professional expert is selected by the community, it has the data write permission of a field on the data lake platform, which is equivalent to managing a public database of unlimited scale. The data in these databases has the characteristics of user-defined format, updatable, non-malleable and readable to everyone. Such underlying infrastructure means that we have NFT data domain experts as well as those with knowledge graph. If we are going to create an NFT, we must pay to store images on an IPFS provider (such as Pinata Cloud) that can provide Pin Service. This solution not only requires money, but also does not guarantee permanent storage of data without relying on third parties. While if we do so through a NFT domain expert to EpiK, it is not only free but also the domain experts will get EPK income, and data in the EpiK network will be backed up at least 100 times, it’s never necessary worry about the loss of data. We are communicating with some service providers such as Pinata Cloud, to provide such services. In addition to NFT domian experts, the role of domain experts on EpiK can guarantee the ordering of data in various areas. There will be more storage scenarios worthy of imagination in the future.
