Wednesday, Nov 17th, 2021 marks the third AMA(Ask Me Anything) event of eCash, hosted by StealthEX, once again project lead and benevolent dictator Amaury Séchet himself attended the live Q&A session, answering questions from the eCash investors. Below is the recap of the Q&A session:

Q1: I am writing this on November 10th and there are five days left before the network update. You are already reading this in the future, I hope everything went smoothly and as you intended. The next major update is worth waiting for on May 15. This date is still far away, but can you share some superficial details about what you are currently working on and what we can expect from spring?

‍

A1: Well, we are after Nov, 15th, and the network upgrade went perfectly. Right now, the main focus of development is avalanche, and wallet/API.

Q2: After avalanche post consensus, how long do you think it will be before staking rewards are live? Does enabling staking rewards require a lot of work or will it be relatively easy once post consensus is working?

A2: The main question about the reward is not so much technical, but what are the specific incentives we want to put in place, make sure the community is happy with them and that they don't encourage perverse behaviour. The best way to move this along is for the community to have a discussion about this and try to come to an agreement.

Q3: According to the roadmap, eCash's goal is to become a sound currency available to everyone in the world, so can eCash be used as a payment method for Metaverse or NFTs in the future?

A3: Actually, there is one NFT project that launched a few days ago, but I haven't had the time to look at it personally yet. ecash supports token, and therefore NFT too (NFT are just tokens with a supply of 1). It's really good to see people building on ecash.

As for payment, I use it as such, but few services supports it as a payment option yet. The community can help on this front to indicate to service providers such as bitpay that there is interest in using their services. The more people do, the more they will notice and the more likely they are to do it.

One design choice we've made with ecash is to be compatible with BTC and BCH, so any company that supports either can add support for ecash very easily.

Q4: I think Most people only evaluate projects based on their token value, not the technology the project has. How can @eCashOfficial  Founders and team add educational value to their investors so that more people understand the value of your project than the price?

A4: Well, tokens which do not have a serious technology behind them come and go. When they have good meme attached, they can go pretty high, but then they fall back down.

Real success is built over time. Bitcoin took more than 10 years to be where it is now. Ultimately, trading meme token for me is like trying to catch falling knives. If your timing fails, you can end up pretty badly hurt.

The ecash team is really focused on the mission and is focused on delivering things that helps move the mission forward, ignoring the noise. They'll be there during the bear market as much as during the bull market.

Q5: What is your best estimate as to when eCash will be able to reach its goal of 5M txs/sec?

A5: It depends on the market more than the tech. When usage grows, resources grow too, and we have a solid plan to make it work.

So when will people do this many transactions? It depends on so many factors that it is difficult to say. I think we are seeing major economic events profiling themselves. The government has damaged the supply chain and created inflation by printing a ton of money in 2020 and 2021, this kind of event is what gets people to look for alternatives.

Q6: I know you are getting some fire from people about marketing. Please elaborate on this topic, so they can be satisfied knowing that you are actually doing different marketing projects. Would be nice to read/hear more about this.

A6: Yes, but it is difficult to predict when exactly. People - including myself - tend to overestimate what will happen short term, and underestimate what is possible long term.

Anyways, on the marketing front, we are focused on doing something steady more than flashy. Flashy may attract a ton of attention in the moment, but it loses it just as fast, and that's not where we are at. People who expect this to be a 100% marketing project such as SHIBA may be disappointed, but in the end, SHIBA will be long dead that we'll still be there.

Q7: Following the roadmap I’ve read, is an EVM Subchain will having an advanced feature for eToken like IDE to allow developing, deploying and administering smart contracts? What is the future of eToken?

A7: Yes, these campaigns attract a lot of people and build a lot of expectations, but ultimately, it all turns into resentment. We prefer being upfront about what we have and what we are building, making realistic promises.

So there are two things in your next question. First, eToken already exists using the SLP technology. There is work done on making them easier to work within wallets such as cashtab and electrum ABC, but this is a technology that exists today.

We indeed plan to create an EVM subchain, which would bring full EVM capabilities to ecash, but we must first deploy avalanche for this to be possible.

Q8: What real advantage does eCash have while sticking with the Nakamoto consensus and incorporating into it the Avalanche consensus as compared to a new cryptocurrency made fully in the Avalanche ecosystem that could also have a denomination like that of eCash?

A8: Avalanche in itself cannot be 100% trustless because there is no way to verify history. For instance, when you start an AVAX node, it connects to trusted servers and downloads a set of trusted peers from there. This means that a powerful actor, such as a state actor, could shut down AVAX. Nakamoto consensus is still required to build a trustless system.

Another benefit is that the chain remains 100% compatible with BTC and BCH, which makes it much easier to adopt by anyone who already supports these (which is almost everybody in the space).