AMA session conducted over Telegram and Wechat, August 14, 2019

Host ： Hello, and welcome to this Stegos community AMA event. Our AMA is about to begin! Please don’t post messages during the AMA. We will begin by answering the questions we collected in advance, followed by a 15-minute quickfire question session to conclude the AMA.

Host ：Please welcome Stegos CEO Joel Reymont!

Host ：Hi Joel, welcome to the community and this AMA!

To start, Joel will outline Stegos’ current status and future development vision, and share his experience of starting Stegos.

Joel ：Good day everyone and welcome! This is your chance to ask me all those questions that you may have been holding back. Ask me anything!

Stegos is a native blockchain (not ERC20 token) that’s been designed to protect you from mass surveillance and let you send absolutely untraceable and anonymous payments and messages.

It’s been a long road to mainnet, but I’m happy to announce that we’re near the end! We’re in the final stages of testing before the launch of our mainnet and desktop app. We plan to hold our IEO very soon after that. We will announce each event in advance, so please stay tuned!

Towards the end of the year we plan to release a mobile application that will integrate our wallet with payments and group messaging. We will follow this up with on-chain trading and atomic swaps with BTC, ETH and other coins, making Stegos a perfectly private and secure gateway to the wider world of crypto.

I apologize for taking so long to deliver our product, but we have learned enough in the past few months to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. In the coming few months I expect us to hit our milestones on time and to keep the community up to date throughout the process.

Reject surveillance — embrace your freedom!

Host ： Now, let’s begin our AMA Q&A session. We will post the questions we collected from the community one by one and Joel will answer them accordingly.

1. When will you distribute tokens? Will you lock the tokens, and what proportion of funds will you use to manage the market value?

We’ll be distributing tokens within a few weeks. Tokens will be locked for a much shorter time than previously planned. Tokens will also be unlocked to give later rounds an advantage: so the last round of the private sale will unlock first, then the first round of the private sale and then the seed round.

2. Will Stegos perform the same as Sero after being listing on exchanges?

Our legal advisors do not allow me to make price predictions, but I’m fully confident that Stegos is much better than Sero as a product. We carefully built our blockchain for privacy and speed, from the ground up.

3. Why has token distribution taken so long?

We could not distribute the tokens before finalizing our IEO and exchange listing plans. We are a native blockchain and do not have the ERC20 token, so we had to wait until the mainnet is ready.

4. Is Stegos a truly anonymous coin?

You cannot get any more anonymous and untraceable than Stegos is at the moment! We have collected and implemented the best academic research in blockchain, encryption and security.

5. Will Stegos be inflationary in future?

Stegos starts with a 14% annual reward to our validators and this number halves every 4 years.

6. What exchange will you be listing on?

We apologize for the long wait and will make an announcement in the next two weeks.

7. Which investors will receive the double token award? Which period did these investors have to invest in? How can we apply to receive double tokens?

There is no need for investors to do anything at the moment. We have halved the price of our private sales rounds, from 10 cents to 5 cents and from 7 to 3.5 cents. This halves our market value, but also means that all direct private sale investors, rounds 1 and 2, will be getting twice as many tokens.

8. How many tokens will it take to run a node?

We are in the process of writing the Stegos Guide and will publish the staking requirements together with the information on how to set up and run a Stegos node. We expect somewhere in the order of 20,000 to 50,000 tokens or $1,000 to $5,000 at the last STG private sale price of $0.05.

9. What is the total supply of STG? Will it change in future?

The total supply of STG has not changed since we first published our whitepaper. It’s still 1 billion tokens. No changes are planned in the future, but see the answer about annual inflation.

10. How many people are currently participating in your test net? How much RAM does it need?

We are about to publish our desktop app and will start doing large-scale testing immediately after. We need CPU performance for all the heavy encryption that we are doing. A lot of our users want to use AWS instances to run their nodes in the cloud. For example, AWS micro instances have capped CPU performance, so we can’t use them. We need computing-optimized instances and the minimally suitable one is AWS c5.large with 2CPU cores and 4GB RAM.

11. When will you develop cross-chain anonymous transaction?

This is a technically complicated topic, but we plan to do this soon. Please understand that cross-chain transactions can only be anonymous when performed between two privacy blockchains. You will not be able to make the BTC side anonymous, for example, but the STG side will be 100% anonymous. The atomic swap will also be completely trustless. You will be instantly anonymous and untraceable once you convert your BTC to STG and will continue to have complete privacy as long as you are using STG.

12. Why does Stegos use the PoS (Proof-of-Stake) protocol rather than PoW (Proof-of-Work)?

We believe that PoW is too slow for the kind of Stegos use that we envision. We want to be as fast as possible and to run on the smartphone in your pocket. This requires PoS. We also want to deliver payments, chat messages and other data within seconds, something that’s not possible with PoW.

13. Can you describe the Stegos ecosystem?

Stegos acts as a message bus, passing around absolutely untraceable and anonymous messages from sender to recipient. Any data you can embed in such a message will be delivered with total privacy. This enables you to build all kinds of applications that exchange messages, e.g., robots talking to one another or autonomous vehicles. Chat and text messaging are the most immediate applications, though. We will deliver a software development kit (SDK) to enable our users to be creative and build great applications on top of the Stegos Privacy Platform.

14. When will you release the Stegos mobile app?

We have already started on the design of our mobile application and plan to release it towards the end of the year.

15. When will you release the Stegos mainnet?

In the next 2-3 weeks. Note that we will not be distributing tokens until the IEO or exchange listing event. We will announce the listing separately, in the next couple of weeks.

16. How many sales rounds does Stegos have? Can people still invest now? Are you going to distribute tokens until all tokens have been sold?

Stegos had three rounds of investment: seed, private sale #1 and private sale #2. You can still invest in private sale #2 at $0.05. This is the adjusted price after the double token announcement. Note that there’s a minimum of $100k in ETH required. All private sales will close when we get to the IEO or direct exchange listing. We will deliver the tokens that we owe to seed and private sale investors. A small portion of the tokens will be sold at the IEO if we have it instead of the direct exchange listing.

17. When did the second round of investment begin? What were the dates for the first and second investment rounds?

The first round of our private sale ran from February to April of 2018 and the second round was in May and June of 2018.

18. Are you going to develop Mac and Windows clients?

We will be releasing a cross-platform desktop app this month. Testing should start next week. You will be able to run it on Mac, Linux and Windows.

19. What kind of coin is STG? Is it a staking coin or just a token?

Stegos is a proper PoS coin used to pay for services on the Stegos blockchain. The same coin is used by validators to post a security bond (stake). Unlike other coins, you cannot earn STG just by holding it in your wallet — you actually need to run a node, be a validator and help support the network!

Unlike other PoS coins, our variant lets you win big by running a node and supporting our network. A portion of each block reward goes into a prize pool that is awarded to a random validator every week or so. This award does not depend on the size of your stake, so all you need is a minimum stake and a node that’s always online and validating.

Host ：Due to time constraints, we will now move to the quickfire question session. Any community members who have any questions should post to the chat. Joel will then answer two or three questions.

Q20: What are the main differences between Stegos and other privacy coins like MITH? What are Stegos’ advantages?

A: There is a comparison with other privacy in our white paper, You can find it on page 42 in the Chinese white paper and Page 49 in the English white paper .

Q21: Do users need to pay STG for each message delivered by stegos?

A: Yes, you need to pay for every transaction (and thus message). We will try to do something about this, e.g., with a single monthly payment.

Q22: How many people are in your team currently?

A: 11 people, plus external collaborators.

Q23: Do you have full time developers? And do you have a physical office?

A: We have a physical office in Zug, Switzerland; however, only our VP of Engineering and I are based there. All 11 people mentioned are full-time, although external collaborators may be part-time.

Q24: Will the rewards be the same for a node with 10,000 tokens and one with a million tokens?

A: The payoff for each node depends on the size of the stake. The larger the stake, the higher the payoff. This is how PoS works. Our PoS comes with a twist, though, where you can win big regardless of the size of your stake, as long as you keep your node online and supporting our network. This is in addition to standard staking.

Q25: How many transactions per second (tps) can Stegos deliver right now in its current iteration? Is it scalable as the number of participants grow, or will node centralization issues emerge as the number of participants scales?

A: We are decentralized and highly scalable. Sharding is on our roadmap. We’ll publish the benchmarks after releasing the mainnet.

*Host*：Thank you Joel for taking time to talk to the community. This is the end of our AMA today. Any further questions from the community will be answered later. Thanks again!