Community AMA, July 2023

DIA is hosting a monthly Telegram AMA session with the core team. The aim of this monthly event is to improve direct communication between DIA and it’s community, by collecting community concerns and suggestions and having the DIA core team answer them.

Below is a recap of the July 2023 Community AMA that took place on July 4th, 2023. In this Community AMA, we had with us Carl Bruns, Co-Founder and CMO, and Mikel Garcia, Content Lead at DIA. Lets take a look at what was discussed:

What are the plans for the development of DIA in Q3 2023? Are there any new products coming or bigger tech updates?

Well, we have some exciting plans for Q3 2023! First up, we aim to introduce what we call test spaces. These will create a safe environment for our development contributors. Test spaces allow them to independentl test code submissions, for instance scrapers that they build. This makes the development process safer and more efficient for all parties involved, contributors and core team. Contributors can independently test if the code they submit works as intended. In the future this will be built out to support more areas of development and drive DIA towards more autonomous contribution architecture

Then, we’re also planning on deploying a solution to ease up the process of oracle deployments. Our goal here is to create a self-service oracle deployment hub that can cater to any project or dapp. They will be able to set up price oracles with varying degrees of customization, all without needing to communicate directly with the DIA team. This self-service hub is going to make the whole process of oracle deployments even easier and faster, and open to everyone!

Beyond monitoring oracles, as part of our risk mitigation strategy, we’re developing products that monitor and showcase the risks associated with price feeds. These include factors like liquidity depth, trading volume and frequency, and irregularities within liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges. As you can imagine, this will fulfil a crucial role for dapps to operate their oracles.

As a third notable initiative, and I know that we have been speaking about this for some time now, we are working towards further decentralizing our infrastructure to enable third party contributions beyond shipping code, but actually in the operation of our architecture. This is a long haul project and requires plenty testing. We’re still ironing out the details, but we’re thrilled to share more once we have more information on that front later this year.

What are the plans for DIA in Q3 in terms of marketing?

We have a comprehensive marketing strategy for Q3! This includes a variety of digital events with key industry players, as well as in-person events like ETH CC and other conferences.

We’re also focusing on revamping the content and technical set-up of our docs and website, with a major emphasis on SEO optimizations and improving the user journey.

We believe in the power of strong communities, and we are looking forward to cooperating with relevant ones. We’ll continue to be active on social media, creating engaging content that resonates with our audience. So keep your eyes peeled for exciting content!

What is the purpose of the Oracle Gasdrop campaign and is there any traction already from projects?

So first off, we were super excited about the trust extended by the Arbitrum team for our early move into the ecosystem. We decided to use those funds to support ecosystem growth on Arbitrum, thereby giving back to the community.

The Oracle Gasdrop campaign has a threefold purpose. Firstly, it’s designed to help accelerate DIA’s growth on Arbitrum. Secondly, it aids the overall growth of the Arbitrum ecosystem. Lastly, it aligns directly with DIA’s core mission to partner with more and more dapps.

In terms of traction, we’ve seen some positive outcomes already! Two projects have applied and received the grant (Silo & Y2K Finance), and we are eagerly waiting for more to apply.

For more details, you can check out the Oracle Gasdrop campaign here: https://www.diadata.org/oracle-gasdrop-arbitrum-grant/

I noticed DIA was a part of the Polkadot Decoded event in Copenhagen, but also organised a view party in New York City…Can you share a bit more about the reason for attending and how both events turned out?

Absolutely! As part of our commitment to the Polkadot ecosystem, where we provide oracles for many dapps, we feel it’s vital to nurture our relationships within this community. Attending the Polkadot Decoded event in Copenhagen gave us a fantastic opportunity to meet with partners and potential partners, and the experience was amazing!

As for the New York City viewing party, it was thanks to our Business Development manager Dillon who set up the event with help from friends at Downtown Moonbeam, Polkahaus, and the wonderful venue, Station3.

The party was a great success, the event quickly sold out! There was an interesting panel with teams from Manta Network, Wormhole, and Phala, and it was a fantastic opportunity to engage with the Polkadot community. We are planning to further support the Polkadot ecosystem wherever and whenever we can.

Is DIA planning to visit ETH CC and are there going to be any side events organized?

Our biggest presence this year will be at ETH CC in Paris this July. ETH CC is arguably the most relevant European conference for the Ethereum community and beyond, offering a great opportunity to interact with builders, communities, and founders.

Alongside the main event, we will participate in numerous side events to broaden our network, foster new relationships, and strengthen existing ones. One of them will be a panel about liquid staking at the Parosdotcomm side conference, which is hosted by the polkadot ecosystem.

Furthermore, we’re co-hosting a prominent side event, Infra Gardens, in collaboration with the teams from Protocol Labs, Fractal ID, Fabric Ventures, and Phala Network. This event aims to bring together key builders from the Web3 infrastructure sector for focused discussions on the present and future of Web3. It’s an invite-only event, but we will maintain a waitlist for potential openings. If you are a builder and will be in Paris during this time, make sure to apply!

Here is the link to the lu.ma page: https://lu.ma/Infra-Gardens

Could you give us a brief overview of the main achievements from Q2 2023?

Sure! We’ve had a fantastic Q2 in all perspectives.

We’ve established partnerships with numerous organizations including FactorDAO, Silo Finance, Kyoko Finance, Clout Finance, Relative Finance, Lokr, and DAM Finance. These partnerships mainly included custom oracle solutions pushing price feeds on-chain.

We’ve also integrated with several chains such as zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM, Base, and Vara Network.

We’ve participated in a range of events, both in real life like NFT NYC, Consensus 2023, Connecting the Paraverse, and Polkadot Decoded, and digital ones like 4 episodes of our Liquid Dialogues series and various AMAs with partners and external projects, including our recent AMA with Arbitrum.

We launched the DIA randomness oracle for wasm (web assembly) and introduced new sources including Bitstamp, Camelot, and Opensea among others.

We launched the Oracle Gasdrop and held community collaborations with Stader Labs, Stride, and Relative Finance.

Are there any plans about the usage of the remaining $ARB tokens from the Airdrop?

At present, the core team doesn’t have any specific plans for the remaining $ARB tokens. However, the community can propose usage methods via the DIA forum. All proposals should be in line with DIA’s vision and aim towards a positive impact for the wider DIA community and DIA as a company.

If you have an idea of how the $ARB tokens could be utilised to further drive growth and development of DIA there, please head over to the DIA forum and make a proposal.

Are there any plans on deploying DIA token to other chains, such as Polygon, Optimism, Cosmos, etc.?

We currently don’t have plans to deploy DIA tokens on additional chains in the near future.

Deploying on various chains can create additional risks for holders and pressure for liquidity allocation, with potential vulnerabilities in bridges and scattered liquidity across different chains, making transactions more difficult. As the DIA token is primarily used for voting, there wouldn’t be any additional benefit of deploying on more chains. At this time, we believe the risks outweigh the benefits.

Following recent regulatory concerns from the US and EU, how is DIA addressing these topics and is there any risk of DIA being deemed a security?

DIA has since the beginning implemented a philosophy of embracing regulations, making a specific choice for Switzerland, their clear regulatory framework and ability to communicate with clear directions from and with Swiss Market Authority.

In 2020, we achieved an official legal clarification of our DIA token as a utility token, and are in regular updates in relation to our DOA framing tools, as well as our recent and upcoming product launches. With the regulatory feedback embedded in our product/DAO/legal tooling, we operate with the highest certainty that DIA is not deemed a security token under EU/US/CH law.

While we will continue to pursue regulatory compliance in Switzerland, we have reacted to recent actions by various US regulators, and stopped our first planned US endeavors, in particular Wyoming’s legal DAO company set-up where we aimed to test a legal MvP. We will maintain a minimum US exposure until more regulatory clarity is given in the US.

In relation to the EU, in particular the upcoming EU Digital Market Act, we are happy to have positioned ourselves as an attractive go-to Oracle partner for EU companies, being able to passport and sell our solutions to EU partners, in compliance with rigid EU data protection laws, while maintaining regulatory compliance under Swiss laws.

Our focus on regulatory compliance from the beginning, explicit Swiss regulations we operate under, and constant mapping of upcoming regulatory risks are therefore a crucial element in our company — with opportunities to use this as a feature and factor to attract customers.

Have questions for the DIA core team? Submit the questions here and get featured in the next AMA in August 2023: https://forms.gle/cUDRwuEDm6UUHPWe6