Recap of the Meter.io AMA with founder Xiaohan Zhu

PowerPools Gems
5 min readApr 7, 2021

On Friday, April 2nd, we had the pleasure to welcome founder of Meter.io Xiaohan Zhu to our Telegram Chat.

Overview

Meter’s vision is to create a fully decentralized ecosystem combining staking tokens and a metastable gas token. CEO Xiaohan Zhu described the project in the AMA as follows: “Meter is the only heterogeneous blockchain network in crypto. It not only scales ETH, but also connects heterogeneous blockchains together and allows value and information transfer across chains. You will soon start seeing Meter connecting to multiple chains in the coming months.”

This and the built in crypto native metastable currency, fulfilling Satoshi’s original Vision of a good currency, are the biggest differentiator from other solutions according to the industry veteran.

Competition

While competitors have already amassed multi-billion dollar marketcaps, Meter is sitting at an evaluation of around $16M. Not only having more features than rivaling projects, Meter also already has a working product.

When comparing Meter to other projects within the same field, Zhu sees a lot of potential for growth in the future and notes that, “if you compare Meter with other projects that are valued at hundreds of millions or even billions, the current market cap of $16M doesn’t make sense.”

Meter deployed its Full-Featured Mainnet in July of 2020 and since then had multiple feature updates and improvements in November 2020, as well as March 2021.

The Project

The Team is working hard and there seems to be more great things to come in the future for the relatively new project. In the AMA, CEO Xiaohan Zhu acknowledged the great work his team is doing by saying “I think one of the biggest achievements was we were able to deliver a much higher quality full featured mainnet earlier than many projects that raised tens of millions.

In comparison, we only raised $2M from Pantera, DHVC, DTC, AU21 and LD Capital. We are probably the most efficient and productive team in the industry.”

But not only is his Team hard at work, the founder himself also works on all fronts, “At Meter, I am doing everything from product, marketing, customer service, to devops.” The nature of Cryptocurrency being decentralization, Xiahoan describes the fundamental design of Meter to be fully decentralized. For example, the metastable gas tokens MTR were all created by permissionless PoW mining. However the project offered team and investor shares for the governance token MTRG (cf. Zhu). Xiaohan clarifies, the goal for the future is to allow a more decentralized DAO for the project.

Metastable Gas-Token

The commitment to decentralization becomes clear when looking at the metastable token “MTR” which is actually pegged to 10 kwh of electricity used in PoW mining on mainstream BTC miners.

Asked about why the project chose such a unique method, the CEO states that “We did not pick the dollar as the peg as based on finance theory only USD backed stablecoins could maintain pegging to USD at scale. Unfortunately they will have to be centralized solutions and subject to all the regulatory restrictions […] Crypto-backed stablecoins like DAI first have capacity issues as it could only use a very small portion of the backing assets as collaterals to avoid causing liquidity problems of the backing assets”.

Pegging the token to electricity cost guarantees a long term stable value, highlighted in this diagram. The blue line representing the adjustment after inflation.

Protocol

Maintaining the highest technial standard in every aspect, Meter uses the most advanced deterministic consensus protocoll called HotStuff. The well established protocol, also used by Facebook’s Libra, is several times more performant and according to Zhu, allowing for a highly decentralized network. Implemented into Meter’s ecosystem, the network could support up to 10.000 nodes, which rivals ETH 2.0 in sophisticated performance. (cf. Zhu).

Summary

The team of Meter has been hard at work by creating a state of the art ecosystem that not only holds a high technical standard, but also continuing the efforts to make networks more decentralized.

Looking at the roadmap of the project, the progress seems to be steady and promising. Attracting more developers and users, such as cross-chain partnerships are just the tip of the iceberg. The Mainnet upgrade with an Ethereum bridge, allowing any ERC-20 token to cross-chains and support third-party, multi-node, multi-signature transactions.

More DeFi Apps such as a liquidity prgram for Meterswap, synthetic assets and a developer program are set to be built in the following months. Meter has achieved a lot and will continue to do so in 2021.

You can follow them on Telegram and Twitter to keep up to date with all things relating to Meter.

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