Answering questions about future Pontem development:

1. What will be the use case of your mainnet given the change of direction from Meta and Diem?

• For those that are not aware, the Diem Association made up of a consortium of companies including Meta (Facebook) recently sold their assets to Silvergate bank. Silvergate has committed to continue the development of the project. CEO Alan Lane said Silvergate is “committed to continuing to foster the open-source community that supports the technology, and we believe that existing contributors will be excited about our vision going forward.” According to Coindesk, Silvergate is aiming to launch a regulated stablecoin with Diem tech by the end of this year.

After working with the Move technology behind Diem for several years, we are confident of the promise it holds for being a safer and more efficient smart contract language that works across multiple L1s. Due to the strong value proposition of Move and the talented teams building the ecosystem, we believe it will be a prominent ecosystem in the future.

We are evaluating how we can best fit within this ecosystem given our strengths and experience as well as what technology is being built by others so we can best add value and grow Move usage. It is also entirely possible that we pivot away from Move and find alternative ways to add value to the crypto ecosystem by solving problems that exist today.

In the next few weeks we are aiming to release our plan and positioning for Pontem, so please stay tuned.

2. When will you finish the testnet and when will you launch a mainnet?

• We will continue to support our incentivized testnet program until we launch a mainnet to continue stress testing our Substrate based chain. We already have over 700 people that are eligible to receive rewards after soft launching the KYC portal. After making updates to the UI, we will release.
  
  For our mainnet, we will announce a roadmap for launching once we’ve established a clear path for our value proposition.
  
  

3. After losing Meta, we lost the thousand millions of potential users of Diem, what is the new sell point of Pontem in the new strategy?

• Meta will likely continue to adopt cryptocurrency outside of Diem. Although we have built up an expertise on Move / Diem technology, if there is a market opportunity to support other infrastructure for applications looking to get exposure to Meta’s ecosystem, this is something we could potentially pivot to. For now it is unclear how Meta will adopt cryptocurrency but we will follow their development closely.

4. What is the best advantage of Pontem?

• For now our key differentiator is being able to integrate a Move runtime on existing L1s. We have proved this concept by building a parachain ready to be deployed on Kusama and Polkadot. We have also developed expertise in Move which can be deployed to build key applications like swaps and money markets with Move as the ecosystem develops. If the Move ecosystem is going to continue to grow due to investment of resources and its inherent value proposition, Pontem is well positioned to be a first mover in this ecosystem to add value.

5. Can Pontem be an independent and strong player in the market? Are your technologies in demand separately from other companies? Maybe now is the best time to come together and become stronger than you could be.

• No man is an island. Although we have a strong team that can build great technology, we should be collaborating with the entire Move ecosystem to build out this nascent community. We are aiming to find ways to collaborate with the existing ecosystem to add value in a unique way that will aim to grow the ecosystem in a way that grows the overall pie. In this way we are confident that we can find a niche that will capture value if our collective thesis of Move becoming the lingua franca of blockchain becomes a reality.