Brief Information

The Aventus Network is a 2nd-layer blockchain protocol that lets any organisation build on the Ethereum network without the typical limitations of speed, scalability, and price.

Introduction AMA

Pat: Hey @alanvey! WELCOME to The AMA Room! 🔥 Glad you can join us today.

Alan: Hey thanks for having me. 😊

Pat: Our pleasure! How are you?

Alan: Can’t complain, busy times for us! Great to see the market booming again.

Pat: Yes! Everyone has to keep up with the speed of this bull run! where are you logging in?

Alan: You mean geographically? I am in London at the moment, but we are still quite locked down.

Pat: Same for us! To start, please introduce yourself, your background and how you got into crypto.

Alan: Ok so, I’m Alan Vey, CEO & Co-founder of Aventus Network Services. Aventus is a blockchain company that helps other organisations build on the Ethereum blockchain without the network’s well-known limitations of scale, speed, and high costs.
As for how I got into things: I conceived the idea for the technology underpinning the Aventus network (AvN) when studying for a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence with industry leaders at Imperial College London.

In 2016 my co-founder Annika Monari and I, closed a small seed round with Daniel Masters (Coinshares Chairman) and in 2017 we raised serious funding to fulfill the mission as outlined in our original whitepaper. However, three factors combined to create a change in the company’s direction.

The first factor was that what began as a live entertainment ticketing protocol to reduce ticket fraud quickly expanded to something much larger as we realized the technology had multiple additional use cases.

The second factor was that Aventus Classic relied upon the Ethereum network solving their infamous issues of scale, speed, and cost. However, in the intervening years, transaction costs on the network have skyrocket one-hundred-fold with no improvement in transactional speed or throughput.

The third factor was that COVID restrictions meant there have been no live events.

For those reasons, the team pivoted to create the Aventus Network that has a much broader set of use cases which launched in February 2021 and has been rapidly gaining traction since.

Pat: Thanks for the background! Nice experiences that led to what Aventus Network is today. When did Aventus go live?

Alan: So you can see the Aventus Network main net that launched in production in February 2021 and all associated data (like Etherscan for Ethereuem) here: https://explorer.aventus.io

Pat: Nice! So I think you’ve mentioned a lot of problems with Ethereum above. Considering that, how much faster and cheaper is it for companies to scale with Aventus?

Alan: There are many attempting to solve Ethereum’s scalability problems, including Ethereum itself.

However, Aventus is an enterprise-grade solution focused on specific use cases that we don’t believe our competitors can match.

– AvN is 133X faster than Ethereum, scaling up to 2,000 transactions per second compared to Ethereum’s 15,
– The average transaction cost for organizations using AvN is $0.01 – less than 1% of the average Ethereum transaction fee,
– Token transfers are processed in 0.13 seconds by AvN – more than 100 times faster than Ethereum,
– As a layer-2 blockchain solution, Aventus combines the best of Ethereum’s highly secure distributed ledger with interoperability with future or existing blockchains.

AvN can also implement bespoke business logic and is not restricted to just token transfers or other limited use cases. Finally if you look at the number of users and transactions we have and some of the big names using Aventus, we are among the leaders in layer 2 scaling.

Pat: Can you name the DApps utilizing Aventus right now?

Alan: So we have use cases across the following sectors:

– Live Entertainment: the headline client here is Live Nation (SAS France) the biggest promoter in the world: https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2021-04-13/live-nation-sas-france-turns-to-fandragon-s-aventus-network-powered-blockchain-technology-to-launch-a-new-fan-engagement

– Video games: these partnerships are not public yet but will be very soon. It is a use case of in game currencies

– Supply chains: we have over 18 clients from metals to soft commodities on our ecosystem partner https://artos.io

– Loyalty: our biggest client here is https://vowcurrency.com which is a cashback operator

More secors are coming but have not been announced yet. We have processed millions of transactions and have millions of users across these applications

Pat: Interesting! Where are you on your Roadmap right now?

Alan: Given we built the AvN using substrate, we are following the same launch plan: https://polkadot.network/launch-roadmap/. We have launched phase 1 of the rollout of the network, where we have 10 validators on the network live and processing transactions. Next step is phase 2 where we move to a nominated PoS model for validators and finally phase 3 where anyone can become a validator and join the network.

Pat: Awesome! Now let’s talk about $AVT! What can it do in your ecosystem?

Alan: The Aventus Token (AVT) is an ERC-20 token with 18 decimal place accuracy.
There is a total supply of 10,000,000 AVT, a good portion of which is locked up in staking.
As the network grows, so will the number of nodes, and the total quantity of AVT staked.

Broadly, the token has 3 specific utility use cases within the network.
– AVT helps ensure network security, aka Validator deposits, via a proof of stake protocol.
– Validators — AVT holders who stake AVT to AvN nodes, receives rewards for processing transaction fees paid by users to Validators. To date we have paid around 55,000 AVT to stakers in the past 2 months.
– Governance. AVT holders have a right to vote on the future of the AvN.

AVT is available on Uniswap, Mercatox, and HitBTC and we are actively pursuing new listings which should be finalised this quarter.

Pat: What are your current staking programs available? and how much can we possibly earn?

Alan: The 10 validators that are live now are processing transactions and each have a stake since we are a Proof of Stake system. Most are full but some availability still exists at https://staking.aventus.io. For the first 2 months about 55,000 AVT has been earned. Each node has 250,000 AVT stake (any once can contribute to a proportion of that) so it is about 5,500 AVT per node in fees in just 2 months.

Pat: WOOOW! 🔥 And I see you’ve processed 1.5M txns! Is that in the last 30 days?

Alan:

Exactly from https://explorer.aventus.io
And a new major partnership we have just done will double that number starting in about 2 months, but that is one to announce in the future. 🙂

Pat: Awesome! Can you share who that is? Or it’s still a secret? 😉

Alan: Maybe next time. 🙂

Pat: How big is the team at the moment?

Alan: The core management team consists of myself as CEO, Anna Frankowska as CCO, Andrey Brozhko as Chief Product Officer, and Andrew Shackleton as CSO, with Daniel Master of Coinshares and William Knottenbelt of Imperial College as board members and advisors. Some background on each below:

Before moving into Blockchain, I worked at Deloitte in the Entrepreneurial Business Department and at the macro hedge fund, Brevan Howard. I completed a Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London. My master’s thesis investigated film rights distribution using blockchain in partnership with BAFTA.

Anna Frankowska is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Technology award winning entrepreneur, Economist by education with a diploma from University College London, and Investment Banker (RBS) by training with CFA Level 1 and FCA & PRA certifications. Anna specialises in commercial strategy, partnerships and scaling products having successfully led companies in fintech, blockchain and entertainment industries. She is also a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and sits on the advisory Board of The Oxford Guild Society.

Andrey Brozhko has over 20 years of experience leading product and software engineering efforts, primarily in distributed systems and security applications, spanning large multinational companies and startups in Fintech, Blockchain and Cloud industries. Ex-R3 and ex-Oracle, he is a graduate of Warwick University and holds an MBA and MSc software engineering degrees.

Danny Masters is a Bitcoin Pioneer, Executive Chairman of CoinShares, a company that has accumulated over $3B in assets in XBT Provider listed products while having attracted over 40,000 clients. Entrepreneur, visionary founder and industry leader in the domain space’s first two NASDAQ-listed bitcoin and ethereum tracking certificates. Director of the world’s largest, first fully regulated Bitcoin Fund (which is now retired). Co-founded Global Advisors in 1999, after serving as Global Head of Energy and Trading Business at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (“MGT”) in New York (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.).

Prof. William Knottenbelt is Professor of Applied Quantitative Analysis in the Department of Computing and Director of the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE). He is an expert of the World Economic Forum on blockchain and is technical advisor to a number of blockchain start-ups including Aventus, Gradbase and Alice.si.
In terms of the number of people, the core team is around 20 at the moment, but there are lots of outsourced providers for less mission critical development, marketing, sales etc.

Pat: Impressive team right there!! thanks for the thorough intro of them 🙂 so Aventus has been around for quite some time in the space. What’s new this year for you guys?

Alan: Yes, but we have recently pivoted as explained so the Layer 2 approach has really only been live since Feb 2021. This year we are focused on Marketing and driving more users. We are quite unknown but you can see from our statistics we are up there with the biggest in the layer 2 space. We need to increase our presence, help people get involved more easily through exchange listings and drive more adoption of the platform.

Pat: Gotcha! And yes, results are very clear that this is something that will definitely grab the attention of a lot of use cases. 🙂 We shall now proceed to our community questions.

Alan: Great, sounds good.

Pat: You may start answering after 5 minutes. 🙂

Community AMA

Q: Can you tell us more about the number of transactions per month that you expect in 3, 6 and 12 months?

Alan: Ok so within:
– 3 months I expect us to have processed about 15m transactions
– 6 months we are on track to be at 1m new transactions a month sustainably
– 12 months is just too far in the future, our capacity is 5bn transactions a month, I hope to at very period of maximal load to get close to 2,000 transactions per second

Q: What was the biggest milestone your project has? What is plan in the future ? Please can you share about your partnerships for success? How can your project be successful so quickly?

Alan: The biggest milestone so far is having launched the network in production after all the private testing and this network having been stable so we are now onboarding our clients without problems. The future plan for this year is marketing so people can see how solid our tech is and the huge numbers we are already processing compared to any competitors in layer 2, and to get more exchange listings to make the purchase of AVT easier for our partners sending transactions and paying fees to the validators. We have some big transition clients (like Live Nation) and some more DeFI ones (like vowcurrency.com). We can implement any business logic so we are not getting sales teams set to hit our already established sectors (live entertainment, loyalty, supply chains and video games) and I am working on fleshing out new use cases.

Q: How do we participate in $AVT mining? What’re the requirements?

Alan: You got to aventus.io/products and sign up to the validator scheme. That will allow you to stake at https://staking.aventus.io. All you need to do is buy AVT and stake (and of course agree to the T&Cs).

Q: With AvN, applications can work easily with any other promising blockchain tech, cross-chain ,, Does the Aventus Network plan to integrate with other well-known blockchain, such as BSC, Tron, Heco, Corda etc. ?

Alan: We have this capability, both in terms of lifting (so from base chain into the AvN) and lowering (from AvN onto the base chain). This will be use case and client driven. Today we are finding the most traction within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Q: What are the ways that Aventus core foundation generates profits/revenue to maintain your project and what is its revenue model? How can it make benefit win-win to both investor and your project ?

Alan: The core team does not have much of a revenue model, we are all about delivering value to the Aventus community and receive grants from the Aventus Foundation to do this. We do partnerships with other profit driven companies and get them to build on the Aventus Network so that they can drive long term sustainable transaction on the network in perpetuity.

Q: Do you think #Aventus Network (AvN) would be a good choice for us who are planning to build new project by using your chain?

Alan: Yes, we are actively encouraging people to get involved if they have a great use case and can drive transactions, please get in touch with info@aventus.io if you fall in this category or know anyone who does.

Q: Aventus uses FanDragon Technologies in mobile ticketing, which will deliver hundreds of tickets per year to Live Nation (France) by wallets. Why the combination of FT and NFT tokens for transactions on AvN, what are the use cases of each of them on Aventus?

Alan: The AvN can implement any business logic. FT and NFT transfers are just limited examples. This is key to our differentiation we are not limited in the applicability of the platform to use cases.

To your specific question: in live entertainment you have seated and general admission tickets. General admission where everyone is standing is fungible in nature, seated (given one person per seat) are non-fungible.

Q: How do holders of the $AVT token benefited in the ecosystem? what power within the governance model do individuals hold? why is it so attractive and what are the basic requirements to participate?

Alan: AVT holders are essential to the governance and getting involved in validating transactions. Like Ethereum 2.0 which is proof of stake, Aventus is the same. Anyone can buy AVT and stake it which allows them to earn fees from any transactions the validator they stake earns. If you want to get involved you can do so today at https://staking.aventus.io

Q: I don’t quite understand the validator program, the AVT holders the more they bet and make transactions would be participating in a round and are rewarded by the $0.01 transaction rate? How many nodes do each validator have?
Can you explain more details about this?

Alan: There are a total of 10 validators each with an equal probability of selection. So far each validator (or node) has earned about 5,500 AVT. Each node needs 250,000 AVT stake. Anyone can contribute a proportion of that and ear that proportion of the fees, there is no minimum. We have a guaranteed 8.5m transactions paying $0.01 in AVT each but many more historical and live transactions on the network too.

Q: Can you please explain the tokenomics of AVT,,? How much is the total supply?How much is allocated for distribution,for the team and for the community?

Alan: Tokenomics are similar to any PoS system. Validators stake (constricting circulating supply, reducing the velocity of token supply) and user buy and pay for fees to use the platform (which the validators own). Each of these scale with adoption. Total supply is 10m tokens all have been issued. The foundation still owns about 1.5m AVT to facilitate market liquidity and incentivize others to adopt the platform.

Q: What is the current focus of Aventus – to expand, to gain the trust of users or to grow its community much more?

Alan: We are focused on marketing so people can see that we have traction and are growing the same if not more than the biggest in layer 2 space. We are also getting more excahnge listings to support our clients in buying tokens to pay for their fees and we are getting more adoption of the platform.

Q: To have achieved scalability, reduced cost and speed to Ethereum transactions, you must have encountered some challenges. Do you mind telling us some of the challenges encountered in very concise terms? Also, is this the first project your team is working on?

Alan: There are challenges on many fronts: attracting the right talent for such specialised skill sets, driving adoption in traditional industries and the education needed, technical issues around delivering high degrees of security at scale and many more. You can see our team below and the extent of experience:

The core management team consists of myself as CEO, Anna Frankowska as CCO, Andrey Brozhko as Chief Product Officer, and Andrew Shackleton as CSO, with Daniel Masters of Coinshares and William Knottenbelt of Imperial College as board members and advisors.

Before moving into Blockchain, I worked at Deloitte in the Entrepreneurial Business Department and at the macro hedge fund, Brevan Howard. I completed a Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London. My master’s thesis investigated film rights distribution using blockchain in partnership with BAFTA.

Anna Frankowska is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Technology award winning entrepreneur, Economist by education with a diploma from University College London, and Investment Banker (RBS) by training with CFA Level 1 and FCA & PRA certifications. Anna specialises in commercial strategy, partnerships and scaling products having successfully led companies in fintech, blockchain and entertainment industries. She is also a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and sits on the advisory Board of The Oxford Guild Society.

Andrey Brozhko has over 20 years of experience leading product and software engineering efforts, primarily in distributed systems and security applications, spanning large multinational companies and startups in Fintech, Blockchain and Cloud industries. Ex-R3 and ex-Oracle, he is a graduate of Warwick University and holds an MBA and MSc software engineering degrees.

Danny Masters is a Bitcoin Pioneer, Executive Chairman of CoinShares, a company that has accumulated over $3B in assets in XBT Provider listed products while having attracted over 40,000 clients. Entrepreneur, visionary founder and industry leader in the domain space’s first two NASDAQ-listed bitcoin and ethereum tracking certificates. Director of the world’s largest, first fully regulated Bitcoin Fund (which is now retired). Co-founded Global Advisors in 1999, after serving as Global Head of Energy and Trading Business at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company (“MGT”) in New York (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.).

Prof. William Knottenbelt is Professor of Applied Quantitative Analysis in the Department of Computing and Director of the Imperial College Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE). He is an expert of the World Economic Forum on blockchain and is technical advisor to a number of blockchain start-ups including Aventus, Gradbase and Alice.si.

Closing Remarks

Alan: Think we are done? Thank you everyone for participating and the great questions!

Pat: Yes, that’s perfect! thank for such generous and detailed answers. Please invite the community on where they can join and follow you. 🙂

Alan: Please find our socials below:

Telegram: https://t.me/Aventus_Official
Mailing list: https://aventus.io
Twitter: @AventusNetwork
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aventusnetwork
Blog: https://blog.aventus.io
Staking: https://staking@aventus.io
EtherScan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d88ed6e74bbfd96b831231638b66c05571e824f

Pat: Got this! Thank you so much @alanvey for being here! enjoyed our chat. All the best. 🥂

Alan: Thanks for the chat, hopefully see many of you in our community!