After more than three years, Forbole returned to Taiwan in 2023, this time bringing Desmos to introduce Forbole and Desmos to the Taiwanese blockchain community, investors, and institutions. The response was enthusiastic, with many questions asked, and those that were not able to be answered at the time will be addressed in this article. This is the first part of the article about Forbole.
Q: What problems can Forbole's services or products solve?
As a team, Forbole offers several services or products that address the following issues:
Forbole Staking. Most blockchain networks, including Ethereum transitioning to proof-of-stake, require validators to operate and secure their networks. Token holders can participate in staking by delegating their tokens to reputable validators like Forbole to secure the network and receive staking rewards. Forbole is one of the pioneers to offer staking services and has established a solid reputation in the industry. It now serves as a validator for over 60 blockchains and helps delegators earn staking rewards reliably.
Big Dipper. Big Dipper is a complete set of open-source software related to block explorers. It currently supports ecosystems such as Cosmos, Flow, Solana, MultiverseX (formerly known as Elrond), and Celo. Developers can easily launch their own block explorer using the Big Dipper's code to monitor transactions, nodes, and other blockchain information, which is essential for blockchain development and deployment. Big Dipper and its related source code have been forked over 400 times on GitHub, indicating its excellent developer experience.
Desmos. I would say Desmos is a web3 social initiative which consists of a few components. Desmos Network is an L1 blockchain designed natively for web3 social applications, with its independent sovereignty, on-chain governance, and token economics. Desmos Core is a development kit with eight corresponding modules, making it easy for developers to build their own web3 social applications. Examples of these modules include "Profiles," a cross-chain decentralized identity, and "Subspace," an exclusive space for individual social applications to define their own rules.
Q: Have seen that you've invested in quite some blockchain projects. Will you be providing services for integrating different projects?
Since the beginning of our venture into the web3 space, we've always had a cross-chain philosophy in mind. Apart from investing in other projects, we also serve as validators on over 60 different blockchains. Big Dipper, as an open-source project in the Cosmos ecosystem, has been involved in several other ecosystems, including Cosmos, Flow, Celo, Elrond, and Solana. Our investment portfolio also includes many NFT projects like CloneX and Memeland. Desmos was designed with cross-chain properties, and we plan to integrate all of our works across various aspects of web3 into Desmos. This is our primary focus for 2023.
Q: As a staking service provider, how do you judge and explore potential blockchain projects?
Although we serve as a staking service provider, we hold the mentality of early investors. With our industry experience and reputation, we provide staking services for different blockchain networks, which is a kind of investment based on our operating costs and sweat equity. Therefore, we assess different blockchain projects from the perspective of an early investor. As there are so many projects in the market, we prioritize projects from warm referrals. Furthermore, because we have established good connections within the industry, we exchange information with peers, which is helpful for us to conduct due diligence.
My (Terence's) shortcut is to first look at the Twitter followers of the project and see if they overlap with my Twitter circle. This is because I know the quality of the accounts I follow (many of which are people I know personally and we respect their credentials). This method allows me to filter out 90% of the projects quickly.
(Follow me and Forbole on Twitter, so you can know what projects and teams we are paying attention to, and perhaps discover potential projects.)
We also study the activity and quality of their development on GitHub. This is also our unique advantage because our engineering team (including Co-founder Kwun Yeung) is a comprehensive web3 technology team, proficient in everything from network protocols, network security, DevSecOps, to front-end development and user experience design.
Q: How do you evaluate whether a blockchain or project can succeed, or whether it is worth investing in and has future potential?
In fact, even Bitcoin has not yet successfully achieved wide adoption. Honestly, I don't really know how to evaluate projects from an retail investment perspective, because I am an entrepreneur who is willing and capable of taking calculated risks. I think there are too many possibilities in the future, and I would look at the team first rather than the project, because a good team, even if they do a bad project, will learn from mistakes and come back stronger. But if the team is bad, they will ruin a good project and what worse, rug pull. Web3 and cryptos are still in a very early stage, and what we need to invest in is people, not projects. Good people can create good projects.
Q: Is there any risk in becoming a validator? Have you encountered any major difficulties?
Validator is a professional field that requires in-depth understanding of underlying protocols, network security, and token economics, as well as financial resources to enhance network infrastructure. Currently, there are many validators who are amateur in nature. They may be able to participate in a few chains, but they may not be able to scale their operations efficiently, which increases the chance of down time or even other fatal mistakes such as double-sign and causes losses to their delegators. Of course, we need more validators to participate to web3, because this is the way to make web3 sufficiently decentralized. We expect that there will be millions of blockchains in the future, connected in a decentralized way to become a new internet which is more decentralized and censorship-resistant. Imagine every website becoming a DApp, and larger websites becoming a chain. This is a giant ecosystem that can accommodate many validators.
As early mover in this industry, we have established a strong brand, built an excellent team, system, and workflow, and have been operating steadily and reliably. The biggest difficulty we have encountered is undoubtedly the bear market in 2022, which led to a significant drop in our revenue measured in USD. However, we adhere to a conservative financial plan, always strive to compress operating expenses and reject the venture capital's "growth at all cost" mentality. As a result, we were able to weather the storm and seek opportunities during the bear market.
Q: Do you consider immigrating to Taiwan? Are Hong Kong and China relatively unfriendly towards blockchain?
Personally, I like to travel to Taiwan, but since most of my life is spent working, I still believe that Hong Kong is the best place for me to work because of its convenience in business and life, as well as its simple tax system, which still has great appeal to me. Judging from the recent news, I think the Hong Kong government is determined to promote web3. The Financial Secretary, the Monetary Authority, and the Securities and Futures Commission have all recently issued policy directions favorable to the web3 industry. We can keep an eye on the upcoming Web3 Festival, which will be held in Hong Kong in April, organized by the well-known blockchain company Wanxiang Blockchain, and Forbole is the Gold Sponsor of the event and will have exhibition booths and speak on stage.
Q: What do you think of the Op Stack? Will it have an impact on the Cosmos ecosystem?
Although Forbole has received funding from SSV, a distributed validator technology for Ethereum, to develop products for Ethereum staking, I must admit that I am not familiar with Ethereum and its L2 ecosystem. However, I think that because Ethereum has a dominating market value in the crypto market (I have always viewed Bitcoin as separate from the crypto market), other sovereign blockchain ecosystems, including Cosmos, will naturally become Ethereum's sidechains. In terms of popularization, projects are driven by humans, and humans ultimately want to become independent and not be constrained by the limitation and legacy problems of other projects. Therefore, more and more projects will become independent chains with their own sovereignty.
Q: May I ask if the logo is a seahorse or a horse? Is there any meaning behind it?
It's a horse! A"qian li ma"! (In Chinese literature, "qian li ma" literally means a horse that can gallop for over thousand miles within a day. It is a metaphor used to describe a person or thing with exceptional talent or potential, often used to refer to a talented individual who has not yet been recognized by society.)
Q: Do you need to raise funds?
In terms of our financial position, we "do not need" to raise funds because we are a post-revenue company which has sufficient reserves. In fact, we have not taken any VC funding in the past. Forbole and Desmos investors are individuals, mostly our family and friends. However, in consideration of our long-term expansion plan, we are actively seeking our first institutional investor, hoping that this institutional investor can our fundraising and capital partner in the future. (If you are interested in us, please email me directly at [email protected])
Where to find Forbole: Telegram | Twitter | Website | GitHub