On Thursday, August 22nd, Blockchain Cuties and ZelCore participated in NEO Global Development’s (NGD) fifth (English-based) NEO LIVE event. NEO LIVE is an Ask Me Anything (AMA) style community event that takes place on the official NEO Telegram channel. In addition to the English event, NGD also hosts weekly NEO LIVE events in Chinese via WeChat.

To date, NEO LIVE has welcomed Travala, Guardian Circle, Switcheo, and Cobo as guests. ZelCore’s founder and CEO, Miles Manley, and CSO Daniel Keller participated in the AMA, discussing the multi-asset wallet, security features of the ZelCore Wallet, potential NEO-based dApp integration, and more.

Following ZelCore, Blockchain Cuties CEO Vladimir Tomko participated in the second half of the NEO LIVE. He discussed reasons Blockchain Cuties chose to build on NEO, integration with the O3 wallet, the team’s art design process, and more.

The full transcript can be found below:

Denis Suslov (ecosystem growth manager of NGD): Hi, everyone. Welcome to the [fifth] NEO LIVE on Telegram. This is Denis Suslov, Manager at Ecosystem Growth of NGD. Very happy to have you guys here. I will be your host tonight.

Before the session starts, I would like to repeat the background of the NEO LIVE initiative in case you are new to the group.

NEO LIVE is a marketing Initiative from NEO Global Development, to bring the latest blockchain knowledge and NEO news to the community. It’s one hour live chatting every Thursday night 8pm (UTC+8) in NEO official telegram group (https://t.me/NEO_EN). NGD core teams/NEO Eco Project leaders/NEO dev community leaders/pioneering blockchain leaders will be invited to share the latest technological development, industry insights with the community members.

For the first time, we have two projects at one AMA! And both projects are awesome.

ZelCore will start first and Blockchain Cuties will be after this.

Our guest today is Miles Manley, Founder of ZelCore Wallet.

Hi, Miles, can you introduce yourself and ZelCore to NEO Community?

Miles Manley (ZelCore founder and CEO): Hello everyone. I’m Miles, Founder and CEO of Zel – Technologies. I’m looking forward to answering some questions about the recent integration of NEO into ZelCore, what we can look forward to in the future and more.

Thanks for having me on, Denis.

Denis: Could you introduce why and how ZelCore Wallet supports the NEO Ecosystem? I mean what kind of integration, how users can use it?

Miles: Sure, ZelCore our multi-asset wallet platform which is available on all operating systems both mobile and desktop. For now, the current integration means NEO, GAS, and the NEP-5 token standard are supported as assets in ZelCore. Which means you can hodl, trade and utilize NEO and the ecosystem of tokens — all within ZelCore. This means you can access your NEO anywhere, on any device.

This is an overview of the current integration, I look forward to the future integration of NEO dApps and games into ZelCore, so users will be able to browse through the various dApps and utilize them within one sandboxed application

Denis: That’s great! Thanks a lot for the sharing. Appreciate ZelCore’s engagement to the community.

Everybody, it’s time for Questions now!

To make it easy for the team to trace the question, please kindly number your questions, starting from 1. eg. A raises question starting with Q1, then B raises questions starting with Q2. Please keep the questions about NEO and ZelCore, we will retain the right to select the questions. Also, the team won’t make comments on the token price.

Q1: How do you store passwords? Why did you choose this method?

Miles: So good question. We don’t store usernames passwords anywhere remotely or locally (until in use). The username + salted and hashed password is stored locally on a users device. Then when a user logs in, their private keys are generated using a hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet schema. We chose this method as it’s human-readable and allows someone to quite literally remember their private key. As one master private key is used to derive the rest of the key pairs.

Q2:  I wonder why should I store my NEO in ZelCore and why not elsewhere? What are your advantages?

Miles: We pair this with Zel IDs d2fa and quite completely login system that allows users to login on multiple devices without any main centralized login server/service. We look forward to our next iteration of Zel ID which extends d2fa – to allow it to be part of the account system integrated in such a way as it is used to derive the private key and not just a second factor of physical authentication.

A great resource to learn more about the Zel ID account system is the following medium article:
https://medium.com/@ZelOfficial/zel-id-security-features-of-the-zelcore-multi-asset-wallet-9c2959dbb6bc

In short security and ease of use.

Denis: Could you expand on this?

Miles: Simply, you own your keys. As I’m sure most would agree it should be in crypto. But you don’t give up the ease of use of being able to “login” to your account on multiple devices, allowing you to access your NEO on multiple devices. Desktop and mobile, without having to move around private keys or 12-18 word seed phrases. As well as extra features in ZelCore+ that allow you to trade NEO on both quickswap exchanges – but also full exchange interfaces such as Binance and Bittrex.

Q3: Are there any NEO dApps ZelCore is looking to integrate in the future?

Miles: Sure there are quite a few NEO dApps out there as NEO has established itself as a leader in the dApps space. We look forward to offering multiple NEO dApps in the future, within ZelCore.

To name a few – NeoAuth would be a cool addition,  along with others like QLC Chain and Jarvis+ and I’m sure there are many that I am missing off and I’m sure many will be created in the future. But we plan to establish a dApp store of sorts to allow users to choose which dApps they’d like to install.

Denis: And, don’t forget about games! And, we have some cool DeFi projects coming up.

Q4: Given that your solution derives the private key from username+password, users that use username+passwords with low entropy can easily be hacked. Therefore, the passwords used must be really complex, to the point where they have as much entropy as a private key itself. At this point why not ask the user to just remember the private key and enter it on every login?

Daniel Keller (ZelCore CSO and Business Development): Most people would not be able to do so, and this is a process we all use normally user name and password combo. We wanted to make it easy, but also secure to reduce the barrier of entry for those new to crypto.

Miles: This is something we’ve heard mentioned before. It’s a question of balance. If a user uses a strong combination of username and password – with high entropy – it does not necessarily mean they have to remember a somewhat random alphanumerical string of 64 characters.

We look forward to our next iteration of Zel ID which extends d2fa – to allow it to be part of the account system integrated in such a way as it is used to derive the private key and not just a second factor of physical authentication.

As well as the user of a base “backup phrase” which can be used to restore an account in the event of all signed-in devices being lost, destroyed etc. Bringing a very high level of entropy with something like an 18-word seed phrase.

Q4.1: But most users will use low entropy passwords, as it has been proven over and over, therefore making them hackable, how do you prevent that?

Miles: By enforcing eight-character passwords – this means that an attacker would require two salts + username + password to derive someones private key – this you’d imagine would start to bring entropy up quite a bit by default.

Q5: Will ZelCore wallet ever create its own token? And, how it can be used?

Dan: Zel has its own blockchain, Zel more information about the privacy-based coin can be found here:
https://zel.network

We are on several exchanges, including Hotbit. The Zel coin has utility in the ZelCore platform including micropayments, payments for ZelCore+ and ZelNodes

Miles: We don’t plan on creating a NEP-5 token in the near future.

Denis: Ok thanks guys from ZelCore, Miles and Dan.

I’m sure our readers will check out your wallet.

If anyone has any more questions, please send private messages to Miles or Dan!

Now it is time for our next project, a game – Blockchain Cuties! Please welcome the Founder and CEO, Vladimir Tomko.

Miles: Thanks for having us!

Dan: Thank you!!

Denis: Vlad, can you introduce yourself and BC to the NEO community?

Vladimir Tomko (Blockchain Cuties CEO): Hello everyone, thank you for having me here!

My name is Vladimir Tomko, I’m the CEO of Blockchain Cuties Universe (BCU) – one of the pioneering crypto-games on the market that just recently launched on NEO platform. Blockchain Cuties Universe is a collectible game with seven species to choose from, complex combat mechanics, hundreds of items, dozens of item sets, Cutie- and item- markets and many other different mechanics.

We propagate community-driven development and update our game at least two times a month.

If you want to take a look, please do here:
https://blockchaincuties.com

Denis: I’ll start with the first question, How BC is using Neo blockchain and why has joined NEO ecosystem?

Vladimir: Lets’ start with the “why.” There are many reasons for that actually. NEO is one of the oldest blockchains that has smart contracts built-in and it’s aimed at creating smart, programmable economies. We look the same way.

Then, NEO, as a product and as a system, is also community-driven. What’s important, its community wasn’t just put together during the hype year of ICOs (2017) – it’s a real society that was building up since 2014, a society that wants its product to prosper and bring real utility, not just speculative value. We as a team share the same values.

Thirdly, NEO international community have big hubs in China and Brazil, countries where we want BCU to prosper. We try desperately to build up a presence in these markets and NEO, as a partner can help us to achieve this goal.

Now back to “How”. NEO blockchains is integrated into the BCU and we use both NEO and GAS as a means of payments for our users. We also use NEP-11 token standard to store value – Cuties themselves (non-fungible tokens).

So the game basically runs many different mechanics on NEO chain – breeding, trading, offering siring service, item auctions, participating in the lotteries and so on.

Q1: How did you come up with the idea of Blockchain Cuties?

Vladimir: It was December 2017, when the market was being born. It’s was a risky space, pumped by thousands of ICOs. We understood that the majority of people here are not your regular players, they are mostly traders that are okay to try out new gaming experiences. And only two working products on the market were CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties. So we realized that crypto-collectibles are of interest to such audience, but we didn’t have any additional information to risk.

So we gathered a team and discussed, what can we do if we start as a crypto-collectible in three to five years. This is how Blockchain Cuties Universe idea was born. We decided to go with a more complex product with battles, items and some serious math behind everything and planned our way to create an MMO strategy game from a crypto-collectible. And it is exactly what we’re doing right now.

Q2: Is it true that players can make some money playing your game?

Vladimir: Yes, of course. BCU is an open market game and we try our best to bring in more users every day relentlessly. If you’re an active player (play one to two hours a day) it is possible to easily earn around €200 a month. If you’re a top player, that number goes a lot higher.

Q3: How long I can play for free? What can I do for free in the game?

Vladimir: We have a Tutorial Cutie, and he’s totally FREE, he can show you the game, all around; go to adventures, fight other Cuties, put on different gear, but you can’t sell him. You can easily play a one to three days for free and then decide whether you like the game or not. Plus, we have a wonderful community at https://t.me/blockchaincuties_en where players can gift you some Cuties for free. They usually do that.

Q4: Tell us a bit about your artist/illustrator. Why do the Cuties look so good? Da Hongfei, Erik, Fabio and Dean all look like the real them!

Vladimir: Thank you! We have a team of five wonderful artists in-house, each is very good at specific tasks – some draw Cuties for the game, others create gorgeous paintings. In terms of Cutie style, it took us 14 iterations before we decided that Cuties are gonna look like that.

From day one, we’ve created Blockchain Cuties’ art style to be attractive for Asian markets, that’s why we try to make them super cute.

Q5: What was the price of the most expensive cutie sold within the game (not on presale)?

Vladimir: If you convert to EUR, I believe it was around €2,450.

One player bought an Alien Cutie from another one.

Q6: Can fiat be used? I see many different cryptos can be used to buy, but I’m wondering can someone say use a credit card?

Vladimir: Yes, fiat can be used and we’re improving this system every week. Right now you can almost completely play the game using only your credit card. We’ve developed a nifty system which allows us to do that.

Q7: What platforms is it currently, and are you planning on expanding?

Vladimir: Right now we’re the only game in the world that’s available on four platforms – ETH, EOS, TRON and, of course, NEO.

Right now we’re concentrated on game mechanics. Because these four blockchains will serve as factions in the upcoming Wars of Cutieland update. And NEO will be a separate country there, that players can pledge their alliance to.

Denis: Wars of Cutieland sounds like a big plan, will you be the first in the Crypto Game to do this? What the game will be like? Can you compare to some existing PC/Mobile games?

Vladimir: It’s hard to tell because it’s a big update and some games develop their products without announcements, but hopefully – yes.

If you played different mobile, PC and browser games before, I think the best combo to describe the Wars of Cutieland would be a mix of these games:

  • Crusader Kings
  • Forge of Empires
  • 1,100 AD/Rise of Kingdoms

It’s going to be a complex product, always evolving, with blockchain voting systems that’ll be used to vote for kings that would influence the short-term strategical directions of the country.

So at some point, some of your Cuties might become Kings of NEO inside the BCU.

Q8:  What Neo wallet can I use to play your game on Neo?

Vladimir: Right now we support 2 wallets:

  • O3 wallet – recommended, great UX, nice team, frequent updates.
  • Our own integrated wallet – for people that trust the game and like to play on mobile Safari or other default browsers.

There’s no need to install anything here.

Denis: Great to know that your game can also be played on mobile.

Vladimir: Yes, from day one!  We always try to improve the UX on mobile. It’s 100% playable. We even have players that solely play on mobile devices.

Denis: Anyone with more questions add Vlad on Telegram and check out the presale page – some good deals over there for 9 days more!

We’ve approached the end of our AMA today, thanks to the community and our projects: ZelCore Wallet and Blockchain Cuties game. Bye-bye.

Vladimir: Please do, guys! Thank you.

Note: Some edits have been made for formatting and readability. The full conversation can be found at https://t.me/NEO_EN.

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