AMA Recap: Band Protocol x Burnt XION
Band Protocol has recently hosted an AMA session featuring Burnt Banksy from Burnt (XION). Covering topics ranging from Band Protocol's integration with Burnt XION to the XION ABSTRACTATHON Hackathon, this session offered participants the opportunity to engage with and build on XION.
Band Protocol has recently hosted an AMA session featuring Burnt Banksy from Burnt (XION). Covering topics ranging from Band Protocol's integration with Burnt XION to the XION ABSTRACTATHON Hackathon, this session offered participants the opportunity to engage with and build on XION. It is our pleasure to host this AMA in collaboration with Burnt XION, one of the most promising new chains, and gain insightful information about XION directly from Burnt Banksy, the core contributor and the founder of Burnt. Let’s take a dive into the insights and highlights of the Burnt XION x Band Protocol AMA Session!
💡 For a more comprehensive understanding of this AMA session, you may refer to the original recorded video: Link
XION X Band Protocol: AMA Session #11
*** Some parts of the following transcript have been edited for clarity while ensuring the original meaning is preserved.***
Q1
Leon: Banksy, welcome mate! Also, everyone tuning in, happy to have you here. Before we do a deep dive into Xion, could you briefly introduce yourself to everyone?
Burnt Banksy: Absolutely! My name is Burnt Banksy, I am the core contributor and founder of Burnt, where we’re building XION. You kind of gave it a great introduction. I go by the name Burnt Banksy, the reason I go by that name is; that about 3 years ago I bought a Banksy art piece, a pretty famous artist, and sold it as an NFT. For all of 2021, we had the highest average-priced sale on OpenSea. We’re still on Wikipedia for the word NFT on this day. I’d say even till that day we’re still stuck on the goal of bringing crypto to retail. We’re very excited to be working with the guys here at Band as it allows us to, especially with some interesting applications such as VRF, cross-chain, and data oracles. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly which I’m most excited about because of all the cool applications in our last hackathon. If anyone hasn’t gotten a chance yet, we released our testnet about 4 weeks ago. We’ve gone over a million meta accounts and 10 million transactions in addition to just wrapping up our first hackathon, which was extremely successful with 300 projects.
Q2
Leon: Would you mind elaborating a bit more in-depth on my explanation of what XION is, what is the long-term goal here? In my personal opinion, I think XION fits perfectly in the current primitives, after all the overall industry has yet to demonstrate a meaningful Web3 use case that is beyond gambling, really!
Burnt Banksy: Thank you, I appreciate that a lot. It’s hard to say exactly what we are, it’s easier to describe it with the vision. For us, we want to create a place where products can finally exist in the ecosystem and I believe that crypto has not been conducive for a product. You had immense friction onboarding, the BD team of the localized wallet, etc. With that being said, the acquisition cost of a customer is so high. We use words like UX chain, consumer chain, or generalized abstraction layer. But, these are just kind of the means to an end. I’d say that our success comes from not knowing who we are. Very similar to AWS, I don’t know where X is being hosted right now, could be AWS. But, the thing is, it doesn’t matter. Right? Because we are using this product, and it’s being backed by AWS. And I think that’s the exact vision for XION. In the future where people are going to be able to use the products on the ecosystem and not have to buy the native token or worry about gas fees or worry about downloading a wallet. It’s going to be completely replicative of a Web 2 experience. Which is you know what we’re building. We get there by utilizing our generalized abstraction layer, we get there by utilizing our parameterized free layer. But at the end of the day at a high level, we want to compete with Web 2, and we want to show the values of crypto without people having to know every single thing or click the wrong links and get rugged.
Q3
Leon: Let’s move a bit deeper into Account Abstraction on that thought. In general blockchains have two types of accounts, externally owned accounts & smart contract accounts. How is XION’s framework into account creation here?
Burnt Banksy: Yeah definitely. Kind of into that point where we kind of start to differentiate in terms of when you look at the actual protocol level. You know we looked at ERC 4337 and some of these other solutions out there. But, the issue is we needed a way to separate identity from authentication. Let me just tell you what I mean by that; right now, you have a wallet which proves both, hey I’m the person who owns this wallet, and I’m signing this transaction to authenticate. If we can break that apart into two things, we don’t need to follow these kinds of same legacy poor decisions that we’ve been making in my mind.
Let me give you an example; if anyone here is familiar with signal. We like to think the way the flow of XION works is very similar to that of the signal. On signal, you log in and validate the session, whether that be signing on with a JSON web token, which is like an email/passkey or a phone number. Effectively, in that scenario, that is how you authenticate that it’s you. You have access to that phone number or email. Everything is encrypted from that point on. Whenever you send a message on signal you don’t have to sign a transaction every time. It’s not the same as with XION, but it’s a very good comparison.
Following a very similar premise, that’s exactly how the flow on our chain works which for us is exactly mimicking Web 2. Rather than something like a 4337 which is a social or a smart contract consensus layer. With that being said, what you get with that is like a Pandora's box with different opportunities, right? To take this kind of more down that rabbit hole. You have legacy decisions like private public keys, previously since everything was an externally owned account or MetaMask that people are used to. You needed a place to store a private key, and this is where wallets came into the example. You couldn't just store a private key on a browser, that’s not safe. So, you needed a certain extension to effectively allow a safe place to store a private key. Now, when you want to start getting onto different devices, this gets tricky. We are completely device agnostic, and we have complete signatures agnostic. If anyone has used our testnet, we had this trending hashtag going around called #XionEverywhere. A bunch of people taking photos of their testnet from interesting places.
Q4
Leon: I noticed you had a hackathon going recently. How did that go, any cool submissions thus far?
Burnt Banksy: Yeah yeah, we’re still looking at all of them. There are a couple of really cool ones. I believe there was a team working on abstracted interoperability, which allows a way to use Injective applications through XION. It’s the first time that’s been able to happen with another chain. Composability to a pure level of an ability to interact through XION and through everything that we’ve made to another chain. For me, it’s very exciting because it’s the first proof of concept where you can go genuinely interchain. That was probably one that I was most excited about. There were so many great projects. In the little time, I had been able to go through them, and that one stuck out the most to me. There are a lot of cool ones out there, loyalty programs, social platforms, and music platforms. What we’re looking for is consumer applications, right? For us, we try to find the most creative solutions possible, we say that in the hackathon as well.
Q5
Leon: When diving into your whitepaper I noticed some unique design choices, I love to hear some of your reasoning on those. Parameterized fee layer to pick one, I love to hear some deep dives on that topic.
Burnt Banksy: Yeah absolutely, I think I touched on this not too long ago, but it’s really interesting to me. Before we made any hard decisions, this was the main decision that we made. Effectively, again, it’s hard to describe things in their pure form of like; the direct thing is X, Y, and Z, right? The parameterized fee layer comes about because we wanted to say okay; a user should never ever see a gas fee, no matter what chain they’re in. This on a base level says hey; we can take a free from any token. Not necessarily the XION token. You could use Solana, you could use Ethereum, and you could pay with any token you want. It will still settle to XION.
We did a pretty big partnership back in November with Circle where we announced Circle to be our denomination of choice. This allows us to do even more things, right? There is no price volatility. When I was selling NFTs on Solana, it would be 5 dollars one day and 10 dollars the next day. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to sell something like a ticket to have that underlying volatility. Something else that makes it interesting is that we could also very easily use credit cards to buy assets directly on-chain. Since it’s USDC, you could have a pool of USDC do this interesting auto-swap feature as you don’t have much inventory risk because USDC is stable and pegged to the dollar. It also kinda relates to the other aspect of it which kind of siphons these two definitions of gas fees. The first is like a service fee which would take a percentage of a transaction, very similar to an eBay or something like that. Web2 users are very experienced in knowing that flow. The other one is for free transactions, which is like claiming a free asset or sending something to someone. In that kind of capacity, it’s pure gas sponsoring. The main goal at the end of the day is to bring the parameterized fee layer together. We don’t want people to see gas fees. That’s kind of the short of it.
Q6
Leon: What opportunity is there for people to build on the XION ecosystem, how are the resources? Would love to hear from you on that. Your overall ecosystem is quite insane already from what I can tell.
Burnt Banksy: Yeah! Please check out the documentation; docs.burnt.com For anyone to get involved, we have an awesome ambassador program. We’re starting a global initiative right now and could use all the help we can get. I recommend checking out the white paper and following us on Twitter and Discord. During office hours we're in discord. I’d say our engineers end up being your engineers at the end of the day!
Q7
Leon: With Band being the core oracle solution for XION, keen to tell everyone tuning in how XION uses Band oracles and how the overall implementation process went between both parties?
Burnt Banksy: Yeah absolutely! I would say it comes in the creativity of the projects building on us. It’s less for us but more for the multitude of projects that rely on you guys. I am a big fan of VRF, and I think that there are a lot of freaking cool applications as it kind of relates to that. So, for me, that’s personally the most exciting. Whether it be live data feeds or price feeds. Trusted Oracle solutions I think, you guys are probably the most requested, hey where can I get this or where can I get this? This is something that we’ve seen in the Hackathon. Band Protocol is so crucial to our process and everything that we do.
Q8
Leon: What's your strategy to stay ahead of your competition? Obviously, it isn’t a zero-sum game by nature. But curious about your take on this matter.
Burnt Banksy: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think a lot of it comes in the products that are building on us. We don’t want DeFi products, I guess for some people. But, I think there is a lot of innovation out there for DeFi, and, I think, there is a lot of competition out there, people fighting for the best DEX or perp markets. That’s just not a market that we’re interested in. We’re a very small nimble team, and our focus is on consumer applications. Our focus is on bringing the promise of Web 2 to the grandmothers of the world. Grandmothers don’t care about perpetual markets or automated market makers, there are other values to be found. And, I believe that we’re trying to find it. Trying to be collaborative with everyone, not necessarily turning away from the traditional Web 3 users but still embracing them. But, being able to onboard Web 2 at the same time. I don’t think we’re ever trying to say no to anybody or single anyone out. But, we’re trying to make a space that’s collaborative for everyone at the end of the day.
In Conclusion
As we conclude this AMA session with Burnt Banksy, it's clear that the strategic alliance between Band Protocol and Burnt XION is poised to drive significant advancements in blockchain technology and its applications. The insights shared today underscore the potential of XION to bridge the gap between traditional web experiences and the innovative possibilities of blockchain, offering a seamless integration that prioritizes user experience without sacrificing the security and decentralization that define crypto technologies.
We look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of Burnt XION, as well as the impact of its collaboration with Band Protocol on the broader ecosystem. Thank you to everyone who joined us, and stay tuned for more updates and discussions that will undoubtedly shape the future of blockchain and decentralized applications.
💡 Find out more about Band Protocol’s integration with the XION here: Link
Band Protocol Marketing
ABOUT XION
XION is the first layer-one blockchain purpose-built for mass consumer adoption, with its primitive chain-level Generalized Abstraction enabling seamless experiences for everyday users. XION allows the development of next-generation mass-market projects through protocol-level implementations related to abstracted accounts, signatures, fees, interoperability, and more. The project has raised over $11M from top-tier investors including Animoca, Circle, Multicoin, Spartan, HashKey, and others.
More about XION: Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram
About Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform with the aspiration to build high-quality suites of web3 development products. The flagship Oracle solution aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts, enabling smart contract applications such as DeFi, prediction markets, and games to be built on-chain without relying on the single point of failure of a centralized oracle.
More about Band Protocol: Linktree
