On November 29, 2022, SimpleSwap had an ask-me-anything session with the community lead of the Orbs platform, Shawn O’Donaghue on Twitter Spaces. Shawn answered lots of users’ questions, and we have a recap of the meeting right here.

Questions & Answers

SimpleSwap: To begin with, could you give some general information about yourself, the team, and the Orbs project?

Shawn O’Donaghue: I'll start with myself, then I'll move on to how the Orbs project came about and the team. I've been in crypto for 4 or 5 years now, I got started as an intern at Blockonomics, a payment processor for e-commerce websites. Then I worked on a bunch of different projects as a typical mod and worked my way up into an in-house Community management role at Taraxa, and the rest is history.

I've been at Orbs for about 5 months now. My role is supposed to be a community lead, but I wear a lot of different hats. Orbs is a really exciting place from an employee perspective.

In terms of how Orbs came to be, it all started 3 years ago. They raised money from non-US investors with a focus on institutions. They were going for institutional mass adoption but then they realized that it is pretty far away. Originally they thought it would take about 5 years until massive players come to space; now we think it's more like 10-15 years before we see Amazon, for example, using a blockchain for logistics. We still think that it is going to happen but just further down the line.

In the meantime, we've switched over to being more retail- and DeFi-focused. Orbs's main pitch is Layer3, which means that Orbs sits on top in between the blockchain stack and enhances smart contracts. For example, you could potentially use Orbs to execute commands in a decentralized way thus enhancing the yield reward of the earn.

In terms of the people I work with, they are really awesome. A lot of them are very seasoned individuals. They have been developers for 20-30 years, they are really sophisticated and talented and it's something that we're really proud of at Orbs. The management team has plenty of experience in big public companies, and has now switched to startup life to have actual interactions with people.

SimpleSwap: Who is the main audience of your project? Is there a focus on non-crypto users?

Shawn O’Donaghue: We're focusing on TWAP (Time-Weighted Average Price) right now. These have two components. Firstly, we have to get companies on board with the idea of integrating Orbs into their exchange or their DEX. Secondly, we have to do the integration work, and then educate people on why TWAP is important, what advantages there are, and what issues could occur.

In terms of people that aren't familiar with crypto, we always try to make educating material. We make an announcement and then we educate our audience on important aspects and why they need to use Orbs or alternatively something else.

SimpleSwap: We at SimpleSwap are glad to announce that we have a partnership with the Orbs network. Now anyone can swap ORBS on our website instantly and without KYC verification.

What other partnerships and collaborations does Orbs take part in?

Shawn O’Donaghue: We announced a few weeks ago that we're integrating the TWAP feature into SpiritSwap stacks which has been an exciting process because we had to go through their governance and get approval from their community. We have other DEXs which haven't been announced yet, this is the biggest direction that we're moving in currently.

SimpleSwap: What benefits do long-term holders of Orbs enjoy?

Shawn O’Donaghue: We have staking as an option. Users go to our staking portal on our website, delegate their tokens to node operators (guardians, as we call them) and receive a yield on their tokens. I think right now it's 6.6% annual return, which is not a crazy amount, but a good option for the people to invest long term.

SimpleSwap: What competitive advantages does Orbs have?

Shawn O’Donaghue: What we’ve dubbed as Layer3 essentially sits on top of Layer1 and Layer2 and enhances them. For example, in the case of SpiritSwap, we're enhancing them by enabling TWAP on their platform. This means that the transaction is executed over a period of time instead of being swapped all at once, and it is executed directly by the Orbs guardians.

In terms of other chains, we have a Polygon bridge but that's about it. We are on other networks, and we are blockchain agnostic. But predominantly we're on Ethereum.

SimpleSwap: Do you face any problems and barriers with legal issues with investors from different countries or legal regulations?

Shawn O’Donaghue: That's a big roadblock we're running into because we want to expand to other geographic areas and we want an English-speaking community. Currently, we have really strong communities in Korea and Japan, and educating people on the other side of the world has been one of my challenges but it's exciting.

The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and we haven't had any issues with the regulators.

SimpleSwap: What is Orbs focusing on right now?

Shawn O’Donaghue: Our big short-term goal is getting more DEXs integrated because we're really excited about Orbs guardians directly touching TVL and interacting with real users’ funds. I think it's going to really battle-test Orbs as a protocol.

Another thing is that we're really active on the Ton network. That is the open network launched by Telegram which now has an open foundation. We just released Minter which is essentially a way to deploy Jettons, the equivalent of ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. Orbs was named the official deployer of Jettons on Ton which is a really exciting time for us.

SimpleSwap: Could you tell us about the technical side of your work? How do you mitigate such risks as hackers attacks?

Shawn O’Donaghue: All of our major contracts are audited, both the token contract as well as the staking contract; you can see those on GitHub. The token contract had 3 audits, the staking contract had 2. Hopefully, I won't eat my own words here, but they seem to be battle-tested because they've been around for so long.

Security is something that we take very seriously at Orbs. I know that the developers look at exploits that have happened on other chains and other protocols at the end of every week. They sit with a CTO and they go line by line of the code and they see what happened, how it was executed and how we can prevent the same type of disaster. I know that the TWAP, our newest contract, got audited before it was integrated.

SimpleSwap: What are the predictable fees in the Orbs Network? How does it work?

Shawn O’Donaghue: Currently, a lot of our things, TWAP, for example, don't have any additional fees. We might work that in later to the protocol, but our main goal now is adoption and then monetization later. So when you use TWAP you're just paying the gas fees, a small portion of which goes to the Orbs guardians.

SimpleSwap: What are your plans for 2023?

Shawn O’Donaghue: In 2023, we want to have a major DEX integrated. I think, one of the top-10 with a pretty significant volume. We also really want the Layer3 narrative to be more widespread so that people knew what an L3 is, that you can use Orbs or other projects to execute commands in a decentralized way. In this case, we will be operating as software where projects want to integrate with us. Ultimately developers won't even need to contact us because everything is laid out in our documentation.

SimpleSwap: Do you have any plans for NFT integration on your platform?

Shawn O’Donaghue: We have a project called mynft.io and it verifies that this person owns an NFT. They are interesting, even though in a bear market NFTs are slowing down. Hopefully, that will change soon.

Thank you very much for your attention! If you want to listen to the full session, you can do so on Twitter or our YouTube channel.

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