Summary of Polymath Developer AMA’s 2021 on Reddit

On August 20, 2021, we concluded another Reddit AMA, the second one we’ve completed on Reddit this year. AMA’s give our community the chance to pose developer and product questions to the Polymath team for a period of three days.

Here we summarize the top questions and answers from the two latest AMA’s for community reference.

Is polymesh Mainnet still on track for Q3 of this year as the roadmap indicates? (u/Weaksweakk)

Hey — yep — we are still on track to launch the mainnet before the end of Q3 — realistically it will be right at the end of Q3 though.

We have a comprehensive marketing/engineering/product plan in the weeks before the launch, so expect to hear more as we approach the end of the quarter!

Which asset classes do you expect to be early adopters of security tokens? (u/WOTEugene)

Here’s the quick answer: real estate and debt instruments.

Real estate has proven to be a powerful use case (See: Redswan Case Study) as it has historically been a illiquid investment with certain properties only available to HNW or institutional investors. Security tokens allow issuers to easily fractionalize their real estate assets, creating liquidity for a wider pool of investors.

Another interesting path for security tokens is debt instruments. From our discussions at an institutional level, there’s plenty of interest in using security tokens for debt due to the ability to pre-schedule and automate payments, potentially reduce the need for intermediaries (in some jurisdictions), and provide instant settlement for the investor.

What will be the main areas of focus, from a product maturation / continual improvement/marketing standpoint, once the Polymesh mainnet is released in Q3? Can Polymath update the Roadmap to highlight the plan for life after the mainnet release? (u/Conscious-Cellist-56)

Hey — yep — we are putting together an updated roadmap blog post to shine some light on the post-mainnet plans.

We are also getting lots of feedback on features from market participants that we’re working with on integrations, which is also helpful in informing our focus post-mainnet launch.

It has been nearly 5 months since the testnet launched yet on the face of it there have been minimal changes to the various testnet dashboards. Despite feedback from the community. Is there a dashboard update pending that we have not yet seen? Can you outline some of the main changes and improvements that have been implemented during the testnet phase? I’m interested to hear about the activities that are not in public repositories on github. What is your ticket backlog like in terms of feature requests and is there a list of items you plan to implement? Most of the time when I have made feature requests I have not received feedback on whether they were accepted or rejected or parked. (u/fran426ft)

In regards to feature updates and backlog, we’ve been focused on the current capabilities and that we have a deep backlog of tickets of UX improvements that we will implement post mainnet.

What efforts are being made to attract financial institutes and developers to build tools around Polymesh or contribute to the chain development? I’m aware of https://developers.polymesh.live/ and the Polymesh discord server however when I have seen people ask questions on discord they are largely unanswered by the Polymath team. I understand the team is busy with the upcoming launch of mainnet but the whole team ignoring questions does not give a good impression. And hopefully, there will be a lot of questions as people try to get up to speed on Polymesh to build around it and expand the use of Polymesh. Will Polymath offer a turnkey custom interface for financial institutes to expand on the functionality available in the current dashboards or will Polymath limit itself to providing an SDK/API for Polymesh? (u/fran426ft)

Regarding Discord — this is a very fair criticism. From this week we’re putting in place an internal process to ensure any questions are reviewed on a timely basis led by u/aman_polymath.

We are working closely with a number of market participants to enable their integrations with Polymesh. As part of this we’re building out our tooling around the chain to allow easier data reporting and interaction with the chain via a RESTful API — these repos are currently private as they are early stage, but our partners are actively using them.

Other than the mainnet launch, these integrations, and building a comprehensive set of tools around Polymesh to ease integration, is our top priority in engineering.

Is there anything in the pipeline (or any intention) currently with the aim of enabling interoperability between security tokens on polymesh and other blockchain networks? Thanks :) (u/sgoooders)

There are several possible routes that we are in an early exploratory phase regarding interactions with other chains. These include:

• the possibility of joining Polkadot as a parachain, and allowing tokens (e.g. tokenised assets on Polymesh, stable coins on other parachains) to be used across parachains.
• having oracle or bridge services between Polymesh and other chains to allow the movement of stable coins or tokenised assets between chains.

These are in an early stage of discussion though — a lot will depend on the success of the Polkadot parachain infrastructure, as well as where we see relevant and useful activity with respect to tokenised securities on other chains. One aspect that becomes very tough if you allow a tokenised asset to be split across chains is maintaining compliance on that asset, as no single chain has a full picture of the asset (e.g. its cap table).

Did you have a particular use case in mind?

Hey! For mainnet launch, are you planning to add a controller key option in the staking dashboard interface? Maybe in advanced mode? If no, will it be possible to use app.polymesh.live to set controller key without conflicting with the staking dashboard interface? Is there a way to optimize the processing time of “loading” and “read information” in Dashboard UI? If I create a dashboard, how can I reduce the wait time to read Polymesh blockchain information? A big issue reported by FOB, for example when transferring tokens without meeting a token holder percentage limit rule, was a transfer failure on polymesh when the UI indicated that the transfer was successful, causing a lot of confusion for the user as the transfer had not been completed. One possible cause was that the settlement was made on the next block. Have you addressed this point? (u/pressorus)

Hey — we have quite a long list of improvements we’d like to make to the staking UI but for the next few weeks need to remain focused on the mainnet launch, so I don’t think we’ll get to this ahead of the launch. You will be able to continue to use app.polymesh.live in the meantime to stake as well if you want/need the features available there.

Settlement happening on the next block is something that makes the UI complex — we do have tickets to improve these flows, but again it is likely to come after the mainnet launch.

Want more? Check out this AMA from June as well as the recent AMA from August for the full list of questions and answers.

We plan to do more AMA’s in the future, so keep an eye out on Polymath’s socials so you don’t miss the chance to participate. We’ll see you there!