KuCoin AMA With Meter — Scale and Connect the Financial Internet

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: November 26, 2021, 10:00-11:02 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Xiaohan Zhu, Founder and CEO of Meter, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Meter is DeFi infrastructure with a built-in, crypto-native, metastable currency, MTR. It uses HotStuff-based PoS consensus with MTRG (Meter Governance Token) to manage the blockchain ledger. Meter functions as a highly-decentralized, high-performance side chain for Ethereum and other public chains.

They are working to achieve three things with Meter’s DeFi infrastructure:

1. Complete Bitcoin’s original vision and create a metastable sound money independent of the fiat system.

2. Address performance issues that current chains are facing with their Hybrid PoW/PoS + HotStuff consensus that is backward compatible with Ethereum.

3. Interconnect with other public chains like ETH and run as a side chain to enable scaling and value interaction.

Official Website: https://www.meter.io

White Paper: https://docsend.com/view/6gebiph

Follow Meter on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

Xiaohan Zhu — Founder and CEO of Meter

Xiaohan was the managing partner at ZMT Capital and managing director of JD Capital, one of the largest private equity firms in China. He is a seasoned investor in fintech, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, with executive experience in marketing, product management, strategy, and engineering at Huawei, Microsoft, Sony, and Motorola. A Palmer Scholar, he received his M.B.A. from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. He also has an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Q: What is your background and why did you decide to create Meter.io?

Xiaohan: My name is Xiaohan Zhu, CEO of Meter.io. I have a mixed engineering and finance background. My first 15 years were in R&D in various high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. After getting my MBA from Wharton, I started working on strategy, marketing, and investment. In 2016, I started a VC fund to invest in fintech and gradually got into crypto investment. I was a builder at heart. Since I believe crypto was a megatrend, I would rather build things and directly contribute to the ecosystem than manage others’ money. That was why after I deployed the first fund in 2018, I decided to start Meter.io with my co-founders and have been focused on building on the project since then. Meter's Telegram channel is https://t.me/Meter_IO. I love to invite everyone to join our community.

Q: What exactly is Meter.io and what are you looking to achieve?

Xiaohan: Meter is DeFi infrastructure with a built-in, crypto-native, metastable currency, MTR. It uses HotStuff-based PoS consensus with MTRG (Meter Governance Token) to manage the blockchain ledger. Meter aims to achieve three things with Meter’s DeFi infrastructure:

1. Meter contains an Ethereum scaling framework called Meter SDK. It uses HotStuff consensus (similar to Facebook Libra), which is the most efficient and resilient consensus protocol for chain style data structure required for the Ethereum virtual machines (EVM). Currently, we have 130 consensus nodes and are scalable to a few thousand. It is one of the most decentralized and fastest EVM compatible chains. In addition, it is the only EVM chain that is front-running resistant. Our partner STPT network recently announced Verse network, a Meter SDK-powered parallel chain designed for DAOs. There are more than 20 projects lined up launching on Verse.

2. Meter provides a shared infrastructure for cross-chain asset transfer and communications. We are the official cross-chain partner for Ampleforth, Moonriver, Theta and many other projects. Passport enables cross-chain interoperability for both Meter SDK-powered parallel chains and other heterogeneous smart contract chains.

3. Meter tries to complete Satoshi’s original vision. The gas token MTR in the Meter ecosystem is a PoW created sound money that is long-term stable in purchasing power.

Q: $MTRG is the investment token, but what is $MTR and how is it a metastable coin?

Xiaohan: The BSC version of $MTRG is currently listed on KuCoin. We are working with KuCoin closely to support Meter mainnet early next year. $MTR is the gas and transaction payment token on the Meter mainnet. It is pegged to 10kwh of electricity used by SHA256 miners. Miners profit chasing behaviors will stabilize MTR to an economic equilibrium linked to the global competitive price of electricity, which is more stable in purchasing power than any fiat currencies in the world in the last 70 years based on historical data.

Q: What makes Meter Passport unique compared to other bridges?

Xiaohan: As a cross-chain bridge, Meter Passport has several unique design goals:

1. Support both asset transfers and smart contract calls across blockchains. We believe the evolution of blockchain technology mimics the evolution of the Internet. 1st generation blockchain like Ethereum and Solana are like an Ethernet or local area network. In this model, no matter what kind of trade-off developers make for decentralization and performance, all applications are fighting for a shared common resource. The scalability is limited. The Internet, however, scales very differently. Routers and TCP/IP protocols connect all different networks together. The program can communicate with another program on a different network. We will see smart contracts doing the same thing. For example, $AMPL is already using Meter Passport to do rebasing on different networks. We believe the blockchain internet is coming faster than everyone had imagined.

2. Truly decentralized. Currently, the Meter Passport is secured by 5 reputable relayers, including Protofire, HashQuark, InfinityStones, Wetez and Meter. With our v2 in 2022, it will support an unlimited number of relayers and a much lower bridge cost.

Q: Why did you use Hotstuff and what are the advantages for developers building on Meter?

Xiaohan: HotStuff consensus was invented in 2018. Similar time frame to the Avalanche consensus. Other consensus like the one used by Cosmos, Polygon, Solana and ETH2.0 are all based on technologies developed in the 1970s. The main advantage of HotStuff is its efficiency, performance, failure resistance and instant finality. For example, Meter's enhanced HotStuff implementation, with the same amount of network traffic as the current 100 nodes Cosmos network, Meter could support 10k nodes. Avalanche was best for DAG data structure and tens of thousands consensus nodes. It is actually not the best suit for chain data structure like EVM and smart contract platforms. Meter’s enhanced HotStuff consensus is more efficient than Avalanche till a few thousand consensus nodes, making it perfect for layer 2 financial applications. Main advantages of building on Meter are:

1. Ethereum compatible without the typical Ethereum problems, for example, stable transaction fee cost, communications with other blockchains and instant finality.

2. Meter is front-running resistant, perfect for building transaction-related dApps.

3. We are a young chain with a strong community. Early dApps have a good opportunity to build a strong presence. Finally, we have a developer grant waiting for developers.

Q: What is VoltSwap and what makes it unique to other DEXs?

Xiaohan: VoltSwap is the first major DEX in the Meter ecosystem. It is a completely community-driven project to showcase the capabilities of the Meter blockchain. The swap has several key features that are specifically designed for retail traders and investors:

1. With the unique infrastructure support on Meter, Voltswap not only is fast and low cost but also front-running resistant. You will have bots sandwich attack your transaction on Meter.

2. Maximize liquidity mining without the risk of losing funds. VoltSwap creates an ERC721 NFT contract-based smart wallet for each user. Only the user has access to the wallet. The user could subscribe to as many liquidity mining programs as he wants and the tokens never have to leave the wallet. This smart wallet design will become the standard for liquidity mining on the Meter network.

3. Cross-chain arbitrages. Since Meter Passport connects to multiple chains, VoltSwap provides the swap capability for swapping assets from different chains to facilitate cross-chain arbitrage.

Q: Who are Meter's competitors and how do you compare?

Xiaohan: There are multiple layer 2 solutions currently on the market, including Optimistic Rollup, zk Rollups, state channel and side chains. Zk-based techniques are incompatible with existing smart contracts. Optimistic Rollup is promising but it is definitely overhyped. All the rollups solutions today require a centralized sequencer to put transactions in order. It essentially is “the house” for all the transactions on the rollup. Not only it has the power to censor and front-run transactions, it also easily triggers regulatory issues. Think about a BitMex running on the rollup. It is very obvious who the regulators should go after. Meter takes a side-chain type of approach, similar to xDai, BSC, Matic, Skale. They are either Proof of Authority based (meaning you will have to trust all the validators in the network) or modified on top of Tendermint (Cosmos). Meter uses the most advanced deterministic consensus protocol called HotStuff. Facebook’s Libra is a variant of this consensus protocol. It is several times more performant and doesn’t require the entire network to be highly synchronized (which allows a highly decentralized network) compared to Tendermint. In Meter’s implementation, with the same amount of network traffic as the current 100 nodes Cosmos network, Meter could support 10k nodes. This consensus protocol is comparable in sophistication, if not more, to ETH2.0.

Q: What are you most proud of in your accomplishments with Meter so far and what is the roadmap ahead?

Xiaohan: I am most proud of our development team and the community. We only raised $1.3M funding in 2018; however, we have delivered a much more complete and stable layer or layer 2 blockchain than many projects that raised hundreds of millions. Our community provided strong support during the most difficult times. Our marketing and operation teams are all from the community. Since we have completed the blockchain development for Meter, the next phase is to focus on the ecosystem development. We are going to complete the Meter SDK for the Verse network by Q1 2022. Release Meter Passport V2 with an unlimited number of relayers and lower gas cost in Q2 2022. We are also going to release a multichain synthetic asset platform in Q1 2022. Many interesting ecosystem projects are also in the pipeline.

Q: Can you briefly describe your partnership so far and upcoming partnerships?

Xiaohan: Our Meter Passport infrastructure is the official cross-chain solution for Theta, Moonbeam/Moonriver, Ampleforth and many other projects. We are also partners with Chainlink, Avalanche, Elrond, Polygon and many other projects.

Q: Could you please describe how your project plans to support NFT development and do you have any project plans for combining NFT with DeFi?

Xiaohan: Since Meter is Ethereum compatible, it is very easy to develop NFT on Meter. In addition, Meter Passport supports NFT cross-chains as well. We are looking forward to working with our partners like Theta to provide better NFT support for the crypto community.

Q: Do you have any coin burn/buyback systems or any token burn plans to increase the value of the token and attract Investors to invest?

Xiaohan: We are doing a network upgrade in the next 2 weeks. After the upgrade, all the transaction fee/gas income on the Meter mainnet will be used to repurchase MTRG and burn. In the long run, such a burn will make MTRG deflationary.

Q: Can you list 1-3 killer features of this project that make it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your project has that you feel most confident about?

Xiaohan: Meter is the only Ethereum chain that is front-running resistant, making it perfect for DEXes. Meter SDK is also the only Ethereum scaling framework for building your own decentralized and high-performance Ethereum side chain with cross-chain support.

Q: What is "front-running resistance"? How does it work and what are the benefits of this feature for the investors?

Xiaohan: On many DEXes like Uniswap and Pancake, when you put in a big buy order, you will notice bots will insert a big buy order right in front of your order and then sell right after your order. Such sandwich attack is typical on Ethereum compatible chains due to Ethereum's gas design. It will make retail traders enter a position with loss immediately. On Meter, such an attack is no longer possible.

Q: Can HotStuff consensus process two or three blocks at once? What is the processing time of blocks in HotStuff's sync?

You use it with an innovative Proof of Value (PoV) consensus mechanism for the Meter network, which is a mix of Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). How is PoV different from Pos and PoW?

Xiaohan: Yes, HotStuff allows processing multiple blocks at once. However, because of the nature of EVM, all transactions have to be processed sequentially. Therefore, there is no advantage of processing multiple blocks in the EVM compatible mode. Proof of Value in Meter is the separation of economic consensus (PoW) to create metastable coin MTR with record-keeping through PoS-based HotStuff consensus with MTRG, enjoying the benefit of both PoW and PoS and avoiding the problems in each.

Q: Can you please tell the difference of the metastable coin $MTR with the other popular stablecoins such as $USDT, $DAI, $UDSC? Why should investors prefer to hold $MTR instead of the other popular stablecoins?

Xiaohan: The biggest difference is MTR is fully decentralized, not relying on oracles and not even pegged to USD. It aims to complete Satoshi's original vision to create a sound money (not an investment tool) independent of the fiat system.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Xiaohan: Yes. Next week Voltswap will launch on Theta. It will be the first DEX running on the Theta network. It is a joint development between us and the Theta team in the past few months. Please follow us on https://twitter.com/Meter_IO and join our Telegram channel: https://t.me/Meter_IO to learn more.

KuCoin and Meter have prepared a total of 210 MTRG to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 10 MTRG

2. AMA activity: 200 MTRG

Activity 1 — Quiz: 150 MTRG

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 30 MTRG

Participation Rewards: 20 MTRG

. . .

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