Cypherium CEO Blames ‘Lack of Regulatory Clarity’ for Postponing Their ICO

This is an excerpt. To hear the full interview, click the Soundcloud or Youtube links. 

Cypherium, a new blockchain network that has branded itself as “a highly scalable & permission-less hybrid platform based on proof-of-work and Byzantine fault tolerance consensus,” was chosen as an investment by Pantera Capital in mid-February.

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Pantera, an investment firm and hedge fund with a focus on blockchain technology, has chosen a series of successful blockchain initiatives in the past.

Recently, Finance Magnates spoke with Cypherium Co-Founder and CEO Sky Guo and Sicong Zhuang, Researcher at Cypherium.

Why did Pantera choose Cypherium? “Pantera has always been looking for potential projects that can disrupt blockchain technology,” Guo said. “They saw the quality of our project, and our team, and our advisors, and that’s why they believed in us.” Cypherium’s team of advisors include Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner and Emin Gün Sirer, Associate Professor at Cornell University and bloXroute Labs Chief Scientist.

“We hope that Cypherium could be a universal blockchain that supports application adoption, similar to Ethereum and NEO. We also hope that Cypherium can be used by enterprises as a trusted ledger for business transactions, and other data that they want to put on the blockchain.”

Cypherium’s Plans for the Future: Multi-Level Governance for Greater Stability, Scalability for Enterprise Use and Everyday Purchases

“Cypherium is a next-generation public infrastructure that improves transaction speed and introduces a more effective governance model” than the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, explained Sky Guo. “[Visa’s network] can process over 2000 per second, making blockchain really expensive and ineffective for practical use.”

“Cypherium aims to provide an infrastructure that supports at least 100,000 transactions per second that will be viable for enterprise applications and users’ daily purchases,” he said.

The network also introduces a “multi-level governance mechanism, which means that it separates the governance from the protocol and the governance of the application.”

“So, [as for] protocol governance,” Guo explained, “the miners are able to decide the parameters: the amount of transaction fees they want to charge and block size for the transactions.”

“As for application governance, [the developers and users have] complete control. [For example], they can decide their security policies, and who can access their data.” Sky explained that by keeping these two layers separate, “we create a more stable blockchain infrastructure.”

A quick look at Cypherium’s chain data structure: https://t.co/MEIyAt5L5X We will release our consensus layer implementation soon.

— Cypherium Blockchain (@CypheriumChain) February 28, 2018

While user interfaces and APIs for the Cypherium network are currently under construction, future developers will be able to “build their applications using a standard programming language,” explained Zhuang.

Interoperability on Cypherium

“The first case of interoperability that we’re focusing on is the migration of legacy systems to blockchain-oriented systems. So, we’ve adopted the Java programming language as our smart contract language because Java is the most widely-used enterprise programming language,” Guo said. He explained that this would make it easier for enterprise application developers to switch to Cypherium.

Cypherium also aims “to be interoperable with other blockchains through side chains,” Guo said. “We are currently working with IC3, the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts, led by Cornell Tech. They created the Tchain, an atomic side chain solution.” Cypherium plans to adopt the Tchain and use it to create inter-blockchain transactions.

The Cypherium Token Sale

The Cypherium pre-sale concluded earlier this year. Guo said that a lack of regulatory clarity surrounding ICOs in recent months has caused Cypherium to wait to launch its own ICO in the second quarter of this year. “We will always keep up with the latest regulations” to the best of the firm’s ability,” explained Sky.

He also explained that “Cypherium is a utility token,” and does not represent any kind of security. “The tokens are solely intended for executing smart contracts.”

The tokens that can be bought during Cypherium’s public token sale later this year will be available for immediate use on the network, a feature that Guo believes also supports the Cypherium token’s status as a utility. “Since our public sale will happen after we deliver the network, [the token that will be sold] during the ICO is the actual token of the network,” he said.

Guo added that “definitely, there will be some kind of KYC check, and we want to make sure that the sale is in full compliance of [sic] regulations. We might also set up some caps for individuals, so they could only purchase a certain amount, and no more than that.”

At the time of the interview, Guo explained that Cypherium is currently in conversation with cryptocurrency exchanges about token adoption post-ICO.