We recently connected with Justin Giudici, Head of Product at the Telos Foundation, which supports the development of Telos (TLOS), a high-performance blockchain that has evolved into one of the most promising crypto-focused platforms in the digital assets space.
Guidici talked about what makes Telos unique and arguably better than some of the more prominent blockchains such as Ethereum (ETH), Binance Smart Chain (BSC), among others. He also discussed emerging DeFi and NFT trends and why the crypto and DLT sector will become a major part of the global economy in the foreseeable future. Our discussion is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: You’re offering a fast, scalable decentralized finance (DeFi) solution with Telos.
But it seems that there are now many blockchains providing faster and more scalable alternatives to major blockchains like Ethereum. Please tell us about your project’s unique value proposition.
Justin Giudici: Yes, there are now a few blockchains that improve on the limited scalability of Ethereum. However none have released solutions matching Telos’ half-second block times, 1c transactions or 10,000 transaction per second capacity, nor remove the ability to be front-run.
Blockchain Block times
Telos – 500 ms / 2 txs per second
Ethereum -12-15 seconds (plus mempool and miner pick up delay of several minutes)
Binance Smart Chain – 3.0-5.0 seconds
Polygon – 2.2 seconds
To put this in context with the most popular Ethereum alternative BSC, waiting 5 seconds for a transaction to process or paying 20-25c for a transaction might still seem okay vs the $5-$200 fees you see on Ethereum. Or, the $25-$50 fees you can see doing a stock trade or sending an international wire.
But in a digital technology sense that’s the difference between using a fax machine vs using instant messaging or email. The slower more costly technologies eventually die out like the FAX machine has.
There is also the huge problem of front running on Ethereum and other Ethereum alternatives like BSC (we call it the DeFi tax!). These blockchains have a flaw in their design that allows savvy traders to pay more gas fees to slip in front of other trades. In certain situations $1000s of dollars can be extracted from unknowing buyers and sellers in DeFi. Front running typically utilizes trading bots which are common these days but this particular use of them creates a poor user experience and lifts fees for everyone. It effectively causes buyers and sellers to overpay 1000s of dollars more than they intended
We could also compare transaction capacity between these blockchains. Even BSC is seeing huge congestion. Telos’ own launch on Pancakeswap was delayed over half an hour due to congestion issues on BSC. Ironic perhaps in that Telos could have handled over 10 times the transactions that were happening that day on BSC.
Crowdfund Insider: You have one of the fastest blockchains in the industry.
But it seems that executing quick transactions is not the only metric that should be considered when evaluating the effectiveness of a DLT platform.
Justin Giudici: A valid point indeed, although quick transactions are important for user experience there are many other factors at play.
Number of transactions per second – Ethereum does 14 transactions a second, this is barely enough for one platform let alone thousands.
Node Reliability – do transactions process every time or do they often fail. Failed transactions create a horrible user experience, we have experienced these in launching our token on Ethereum and BSC based Dex’s.
Zero Front Running -Do transactions process in the order they are created. This is important for record keeping and creating a fair playing field for DeFi
Crowdfund Insider: What are some of the other technical design features that Telos offers which can help it provide better services than its competitors?
Justin Giudici: EOSIO C++ and Ethereum Virtual Machine (Solidity) compatibility – the two leading smart contract standards available on a single network.
Telos Decide – an on-chain governance engine exclusively for the Telos Blockchain Network that offers an extensive suite of voting services and DAC/DAO tools for both users and developers. It can be used for government, corporate governance and decision making, running entire organizations and so on.
First Authorizer Pays – A technical feature that allows developers, wallet/signers to cover user transaction fees. Needing to get a cryptocurrency before interacting with an application is a huge pain point and a stretch for users coming from web 2.0.
Crowdfund Insider: What are your plans for Telos this year? And in 2022 and beyond?
Justin Giudici: Telos Web Wallet and Signer – Continued development on https://wallet.telos.net including the addition of google login option. We are really pushing to make this the easiest crypto experience to date.
Telos EVM– The fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine on the market is almost ready to launch bringing full ethereum compatibility to the Telos Network.
Telos DStor – The most advanced and performant decentralized storage solution available today. It’s being tested by a number of corporate clients already.
Telos Privacy – Private transaction layer for the Telos network enabling people to send crypto on Telos without revealing to the world.
We will continue to build out the Telos economy to be expansive. We are constantly adding new use cases for the Telos token and bringing in new projects.
Crowdfund Insider: What are some of the main DeFi use cases that you think will become a part of the financial system of the future and why?
Justin Giudici: Real World Assets as NFTs – I believe that the ownership of houses, vehicles, items will be digitised as proof of ownership NFT’s. This will prevent theft and reduce middle men in sales. It will also make it easier to crowdfund new buildings or have instant settlement even of major asset sales.
Trustless Crypto Loans – Being able to utilize your asset ownership in the form of both fungible and non-fungible tokens to secure loans. As things like your vehicle, house and all currencies are digitized as NFT’s and tokens, locking them in a smart contract to borrow other assets becomes quick, seamless and trustless compared to current centralized loan systems.
Ticketing as NFTs – I believe an early DeFi use case will be handling ticketing in the form of NFT’s, not only does this stop fraudulent tickets being sold, it allows entertainers to take a cut from the resale of their tickets. This will be a no brainer for sports teams, in fact Mark Cuban is already looking to do this at the Mavericks.
Crowdfund Insider: Where do you see the larger crypto and blockchain space in 5-10 years from now?
Will it co-exist with the traditional financial system or will it replace it completely?
Justin Giudici: Impossible to predict but in around 5 years time (or hopefully sooner) we are going to see a major social media platform with a crypto economy explode into mainstream consciousness as we have seen Tik Tok do but probably much bigger as it will be fueled by greater incentives.
I believe this is the type of event that will get the majority of people onboard with crypto in their day to day lives. Although I see smaller governments will start to adopt Bitcoin as El Salvador has just announced. I believe we will probably see delays for larger economies to adopt central bank crypto currencies.
I believe it will be difficult for these countries to decide what level of control and transparency they are going to give up. If they do release, I think most transactions will still occur off chain (for privacy) and the old system will work side by side with the new.
Perhaps in around 8 years time we will finally see a country utilizing a 100% crypto based central bank digital currency. I’m hopeful government real estate registries will at least adopt NFT’s for ownership and transfer of land and property.
Crowdfund Insider: Please tell us about your DEX and what are the benefits of using it compared to other trading platforms.
Please also tell us about other products you aim to offer and why they’re beneficial.
Justin Giudici: The most exciting DEX on Telos right now is probably tswaps.com – it offers users free, instant swaps and is suitable for microtransactions. The beauty of this platform is that you don’t need to purchase a token like BNB, ETH or even TLOS to start using it, you can start swapping tokens like PEER (peeranha.io) or GEMS (https://gemslab.io/) which you earn from those relevant platforms for answering questions or playing games. This is a much more organic experience for new traders.
Tswaps has recently added a sister product called tstarter.io which is an IDO platform. In future, I hear the Tstarter may provide features that lock up tokens from sales into Tstarter which would provide some peace of mind for investors.
We are very excited by the opportunities these two platforms provide together to make it easy to raise money and launch tradeable projects.