AMA Recap of Dude’s Army x Pinknode

On Thursday, April 22nd, Dude’s Army community had the great opportunity to host an AMA with Pinknode’s team, very instructive and educational. We will share with you a little bit of what this experience was like.

The Dude👨‍💼:

Let’s start the AMA by hearing a bit about yourself and how you started Pinknode.

EP Pinknode:

My name is Eric, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Pinknode.

I started my career in banking, left after to pursue entrepreneurial interests, namely in digital marketing, e-commerce startup and corporate finance, contributing through roles in sales, marketing and business development. I care deeply about service and product quality, and I am sure these will shine through Pinknode.

After DeFi summer last year, I chanced upon an article about blockchain infrastructure service provider Infura and it’s vital role in the blockchain space. I was immediately drawn to its value and investability but was disappointed to find out that it was owned and operated by a private company.

Within the same period, I also learned that the Polkadot network was gaining a lot of traction in terms of media coverage and developer growth. I went down the rabbit hole into Polkadot’s unique architecture and realized how impactful an infrastructure project can be on this merging multichain ‘meta protocol’.

I reached out to my crypto buddy and current CTO Benjamin to discuss the technical complexities around execution of this idea and also to Lennard from Astronaut Capital to understand market dynamics and feasibility.

And then, Pinknode was born.

And here we are, ready to rock and roll!🦾🦾

The Dude👨‍💼:

Amazing intro! Glad to hear the full history behind it.

So explain now our community what Pinknode is building and why the market needs it?

EP Pinknode:

Pinknode is a Polkadot focused infrastructure-as-a-service project with the mission of supporting and accelerating the growth of the most promising Web 3.0 protocol. We fill a missing piece and solve a need that is required for the growth of any networks.

Due to Polkadot’s unique architecture as a meta protocol (Layer 0), there will be a need for specialized infrastructure support to enable fast and reliable communication between relay chain and parachains.

By empowering developers by providing node (infra) solutions, we are removing an entire layer of inefficiencies and complexities, and accelerating the project’s product life cycle. Projects will no longer need to commit engineering resources into setting up and maintaining nodes, so they can focus on buildin their product. 🦾

The Dude👨‍💼:

And you will provide that infrastructure through Pinknode as a service. Got it! Token will be used to acquire that service and few more features correct? Can you comment a bit more on the toke side?

EP Pinknode:

Sure, my team has put a great deal of thought into designing the use cases for our tokens. So there are two main pillars

The Dude👨‍💼:

Can you comment a bit more on how you will remove this entire layer?

EP Pinknode:

The various developer/project use cases of $PNODE include:

PAYMENT via staking and burning of $PNODE — there will be packages for different rate limits and services

STAKING $PNODE tokens for API access, securing of network, optimisation of relays

For community use cases:

STAKING $PNODE — community campaigns, running independent nodes, voting and fractional node ownership

GOVERNANCE of Pinknode, for onboarding of new parachains, role of nodes etc.

We are also considering a burn model to further enhance the value of $PNODE. 😉

Basically, all a project/developer has to do is create an account on Pinknode, select a plan and with a single click generate a custom API endpoint which can be plugged into their codebase to start interacting with the Polkadot network.

The Dude👨‍💼:

Wow! Tokenomics look really great. Lots of utilities for the token specially on the developer side.

Will the product be accessible without PNODE or only PNODE?

EP Pinknode:

If we didn’t exist, they would have to set up the node, fully synced it, and then eventually maintain the health of this node over the course of operations, which is really not necessary.

So far the team has only planned for PNODE based payment plans. We might consider taking fiat payments only if absolutely necessary.

The Dude👨‍💼:

What about the infrastructure itself? Is it ready or still in development?

EP Pinknode:

Our MVP is ready, and we’re in our beta release phase.

So we have been talking to many potential highly strategic partners..

WE will be announcing them soon. Stay tuned

The Dude👨‍💼:

That’s great to hear but to start getting adoption Parachains should be out first correct?

EP Pinknode:

That opens up a new avenue of business for us, but even so, currently projects can connect to our API endpoints on Polkadot and Kusama already

We are LIVE ☀️

Community Questions

Q1 from Lalepop:

What are the criteria to use Pinknode infrastructure? Is it hard to integrate on an existing infrastructure?

EP Pinknode:

No it is not, we made sure of simple and easy to use interface for easy onboarding. It is literally a single line of code for developers to deploy their dapps.

Q2 from Sofía Isla:

On your website you announce that the IDO presale will be in mid-April-June, but do you already have a specific date for this event? Or is it still unconsolidated? How could people who want to participate? Do you present any series of requirements for people to meet and thus be able to be selected? And tell me, where would it take place?

EP Pinknode:

We are finalizing our talks with a very prestigious launchpad and we will be announcing it very soon. ;)

I’d suggest for you to join us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/official_pnode), Community Channel (http://t.me/pinknode) and Announcement Channel (http://t.me/pinknodeann) to stay up to date.

We will be running campaigns and contests for the community to get their hands on some $PNODE gems. And we’re planning to be generous with it! Early supporters get priority :)

Q3 from Rubel Hasan:

Can $PNODE holder choose on which project they wanted to stake their token? And how the rewards distributed daily or weekly or monthly basis?

EP Pinknode:

This is in our community use case plans, once we have our governance functions set up, the community will be able to stake to vote on which parachains to onboard, and subsequently earn collator rewards in native tokens. However, Polkadot team is leaving the rewards system up to parachain owners, so we dont have a firm answer on that.

Q4 from Tahani SG:

Have you already presented the project to potential customers? What do they think about your proposal? Are they convinced to leave the administration of their nodes to Pinknode?

EP Pinknode:

Tahani great question, yes we have presented our solutions to multiple reputable projects out there and they are highly interested. Of course we will run through a beta testing period where we get everything in order before fully onboarding them.

We have also invested significant resources into ensuring that our network architecture is of the Gold Standard, in terms of scaling, security and speed. :)

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Q5 from ⋅ ℝ𝕒𝕚𝕤𝕓𝕖𝕝𝕪𝕤 𓃗 ⋅:

Pinknode is focused on providing niche infrastructure support for the impending exponential growth of the Polkadot ecosystem. My question is, how do you plan to provide this globally so that more and more people can integrate into Pinknode? Is the Polkadot ecosystem growing? What are the different strategies they apply to grow?

EP Pinknode:

We are global, the nodes we run are distributed globally through the multiple clouds.

Polkadot is all the hype nowadays even since their mainnet launch last year. Their developer conference had 7000 registrations, Polkadot has the SECOND most number of projects developing on the protocol (last checked number is 400) and their developer growth in first 3 years almost doubles that of their 2 closest competitors.

We have full faith that Polkadot is bringing us to a very open and welcoming multichain future.

We will have an active BD force, strategic partners to on ramp projects directly and of course, our very well connected investors (http://medium.com/pinknode) :))

About Pinknode

Pinknode is aiming to bring to life a reliable network infrastructure and create exceptional tools for developers, empowering teams to create on the most promising Web 3.0 blockchain protocol, Polkadot. Pinknode will begin as a node-as-a-service solution by running nodes on Polkadot and its parachains, and deploying an API suite to provide access over HTTPS and WebSockets for developers

More information about Pinknode:

Website: https://pinknode.io

Telegram: http://t.me/PinkNode

Twitter:https://twitter.com/Official_PNODE