Vlady Limes — Hello everyone! It’s been a while since Zeitgeist secured a parachain slot on Kusama. There are a lot of questions from the community and today we are having special guest James Preston Head of Content at Zeitgeist. We hope this AMA session will shine a light on many uncovered aspects we’ll know more about the upcoming launch. At the end of the session we will open the mic for the audience to ask any questions.

Alright, let’s meet our guest James Preston. Hello James, how are you doing?

James Preston — Hey everyone! It’s great to be here, I’m very good.

Vlady Limes — Great, thank you for joining us today! Before we dive deep into the community questions, could you tell us a little bit about what’s going on in the project? What are you doing these days? What are the latest updates?

James Preston — Yeah, all systems go in terms of parachain deployment. Obviously, Kusama began onboarding as a parachain. We are finalizing the code to make sure we are fully operational while parachain is producing blocks. There are a couple of tricks that the dev team needs to work on and finalize it. So, it’s probably going to happen in the middle of February. However, you never can be 100% sure, we gotta make sure that runtime is operating well. We hope it’s gonna happen soon. Once that happens, we will start looking at TEE and that’s where the community started to get excited.

While the actual decentralization of protocol is being built on Kusama parachain, we are also working and making sure that the Zeitgeist app is working well. The development of the actual prediction market application is happening at the same time as parachain runtime development. There are lots of things going on, a lot of moving parts. It’s parachain connection and the prediction market app which of course itself requires a lot of code and engineering. We hope that February is going to be the month when all happens, we can’t guarantee but I can assure you that we are working as hard as we can.

Vlady Limes — That’s great news to hear for all of us! What’s your opinion about current crowdloans on Kusama? Maybe something surprises you or everything is happening like it should be?

James Preston — I think what a lot of the community did not see coming was the Council voting for ongoing the parachain auctions so quickly. The slot auctions were so successful last year in 2021 that the Council voted at the end of 2021 for parachains going on a weekly basis. Now, we are seeing a lot of parachains are being onboarded on Kusama. I think that’s quite exciting and what we will start seeing is that more of these projects will be canary chains of other projects for the Polkadot parachain.

Zeitgeist is only connected to Kusama. We really like the ecosystem, we really like the governance model. We are happy to stay on Kusama. Our parachain is not a canary chain for Polkadot. We are staying on Kusama and I think that we will see that the upcoming parachains will be canary chains for Polkadot deployment.

Anything else that surprises me, at the moment the current crowdloan is quite interesting. The current crowdloan is so close, Litmus and Soramitsu are neck a neck. I didn’t see this auction being so close. That’s a big surprise.

Vlady Limes — Thank you! Ok, let’s start with the community questions. What parachain integrations are planned after the mainnet launch? And the second question, Is the team satisfied with testnet results? Is everything going as planned?

James Preston — Yes, very good question. We are very happy with testnet. There were few bugs but that is what you expect with the testnet. Our biggest problem was loading time. We want to focus on loading time so big integration for us is SubSquid. We partnered with SubSquid to really increase our load time directly from the chain. We are excited about that integration.

In terms of current expectations, we are very happy. Everything is going according to our plan. Upcoming partnerships, I can let you in on a little peek at what’s coming very soon.

There will be a partnership with Karura, we are very excited about that integration. Also, I mentioned SubSquid integration and there will be others but unfortunately I can’t disclose too much. The biggest integration in the near future is the Karura protocol which we are particularly excited about.

Vlady Limes — Thank you, James. The next question is also about the testnet and this is very popular one. Will there be any rewards for testnet participants?

James Preston — That is a good question. To my knowledge in discussion with the team there weren’t any additional plans. The only thing I can say is hold on to your Tarot NFT which obviously gives you access to the testnet but unfortunately there are no immediate rewards for that participation.

There were a couple of rewards in particular for the most predictions made. In fact, there is an opportunity for users who participated in Zeitgeist testnet. If you go to https://balance.zeitgeist.pm/ and enter your Substrate address that you used to participate in the testnet campaign you will be able to see what ZTG you will be rewarded.

It depends on how many predictions you made etc. Everyone can check the link and see how many rewards they will get for participation in the testnet.

Vlady Limes — Great, thank you! This year has just started. Obviously you have some plans. Could you tell us what the expectations are for this year? What would be a successful year for you? December 2022, what should be accomplished?

James Preston — This is also a good question. For us, obviously the big one is having a number of successful users come to our prediction market app. Once our prediction app is running, we can successfully keep users and users come back. That way we grow our user base, that would be the main success. That is the biggest one, we are successfully keeping users.

Bigger than that is that our prediction markets to be used in corporate environments and even political environments. Perhaps, some companies open prediction markets on our app to determine whether they should make a certain decision or even political parties may come and say “Let’s make a prediction — who will be the best candidate to represent our party?”.

For us that would be a very key success to know that our app has been used by the corporate world and we are actively pursuing corporate partners. Even if we have 2–3 partnerships by the end of the year those things would be key markers that our app is successful.

Vlady Limes — Thank you, James! Also, one of the popular questions. At the very beginning, James, you mentioned that Zeitgeist is going to be deployed only on Kusama. Could you please tell us more about it? Why only Kusama but not Polkadot? Why did you decide to stay on the Kusama network?

James Preston — Yeah. I think we have a strong dev team and they feel confident in the code and they feel that Kusama will be good enough. We prefer to build quickly, we prefer to change quickly. And Polkadot does require a few more steps of governance whether Kusama can move quite quickly.

We decided Kusama is good enough and we are happy to stay on Kusama. That’s the primary reason we don’t necessarily feel the need for a canary chain. We ran a testnet, we ran two testnet markets and we have a beta app which acts as a testnet. That’s where we can find what’s wrong and we fixed that and we are happy to deploy parachain on Kusama.

Vlady Limes — Thank you, James! The next question is about another project from the ecosystem. Recently, we’ve received a lot of news from RMRK. What do you think about any collaborations with RMRK NFTs?

James Preston — Yes, absolutely. Many of the users that participated in our beta net and beta app would have known the only way to enter the early stage of the campaign was with Zeitgeist Tarot NFT.

Those tarots minted using RMRK protocol. We have a very good partnership with the RMRK protocol and RMRK team. We definitely want to integrate NFT functionality using our protocol.

Going forward that could mean smaller markets where particular markets could be accessed if you have RMRK NFT. It could be creating prices for other markets or if you win a specific market you win a specific NFT. There are many options that we are exploring and we definitely will be partnering again with RMRK in the future I can assure you.

Vlady Limes — That’s great to hear, thank you! James, would you mind if we open the mic for the audience? I see somebody is raising the hand, let’s

James Preston — Yes, no problem. Any questions from the audience.

Vlady Limes — Great, I see somebody is raising the hand.

Community Question — Hello James! My question is about Tokensoft sale. When should we expect distribution of the tokens and possible listings? Maybe Q2-Q3?

James Preston — Sure. I’m not allowed to share which exchanges or markets unfortunately, for legal reasons. I can say late Q1 or early Q2 we should see some exciting movement.

In terms of token distribution, for those who contributed via Tokensoft, we thank you! Thank you for your contribution. Well done if you got in because it was sold out in 10 minutes. It was really surprising for us. Distribution of this sale will happen in Q1. We are working very hard to make sure that happens.

Please, keep an eye on our Twitter when we finally distribute all of those Tokensoft contributions.

Vlady Limes — Excellent, thank you James! I would like to ask more about corporate partnerships. As it is known, sports markets are one of the main markets for the predictions market. What plans do you have in terms of any sports partnerships?

James Preston — Well, in terms of sport markets. Obviously, we are protocol for prediction markets. We would create markets predicting something about the future. For example, “Who will win FIFA this year? things like that.

There will be some basic prediction market setup initially but our goal is for the users and for the community to create their own prediction market. That’s what we want to see.

Vlady Limes — Thank you, James. I would like to ask you the last question. What’s the team vision regarding metaverse projects? What are the potential use-cases? Have you discussed any partnerships with metaverse projects like Bit.Country?

James Preston — Yeah, absolutely. We have indeed been talking with Bit.Country. Another one, we’ve already done some work with PolkaWorld. As for metaverse area for us we find intriguing is that our governance model and which is called futarchy.

Futarchy is a new form of governance based on prediction markets. Instead of voting nearly with a consensus model, futarchy used predictions. The idea with the most predictions would be a decision has been made. We want to partner with some metaverse with certain decisions inside of the metaverse being made via the prediction market. In essence, that metaverse is governed by futarchy.

Vitalik Buterin [has written about futarchy](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/ but we based our model on Robin Hanson, the economist from the USA and we used his material. Futarchy is very new but it’s very promising. That’s our biggest excitement for metaverse integration. We do have some plans and ideas. Perhaps, eGaming and eSports and prediction markets based on that inside the metaverse but it’s still a very early stage for us and those talks still need to grow. It’s still quite immature for us.

Vlady Limes — Thank you James so much that you joined us today. It was a big pleasure for us. I hope we’ll see you again.

James Preston — Thank you so much Vlady. I really enjoy questions, very deep and provocative. Hope to see you around at Zeitgeist Twitter. Bye guys!

About Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is an evolving blockchain for prediction markets and futarchy, the future of governance. Zeitgeist is built for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem and envisions itself as a hub and ecosystem for prediction markets on Web3. At the core of Zeitgeist is an open platform that is built with Polkadot’s blockchain framework, Substrate.

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