AMA session with the FIO Protocol team

FIO Protocol (FIO) is a decentralized, open-source usability solution that enables easier cryptocurrency transactions on all blockchains by replacing complex wallet addresses with a single, customizable, and human-readable Web3 Handle in the format of username@domain. FIO Handles can be used to send, receive, and request any type of cryptocurrency transaction as easily as sending an email.

In an exclusive AMA session with LetsExchange, Micah from the FIO Protocol team provided valuable insights into the benefits and value of the FIO Crypto Handles. He elaborated on how this solution can greatly facilitate the interaction with all blockchains. Here you are the takeaways of this interesting conversation.

John from LetsExchange: Micah, can you explain in terms of practicality, what is the difference between having a crypto handle and owning a domain name?

Micah: Yeah, sure. Technically, they're both actually NFTs, one's a nested NFT of the other. So, with the domain, we'll take Nadine as an example at LetsExchange. You could get a handle that says Nadine@LetsExchange. So, it's really good for our partners because we don't use extensions, we just use that ‘@branding.’ It's kind of an email without the ‘dot.com,’ and there's only letters. It's hard to spoof and then, if you want that domain, those are going to be taken up. So it kind of has that speculator aspect to the market as well.

But the first part is always going to be essentially like, say, I want to bring people onto my @Dominguez domain; just my family members. I can have mom-, dad-, sister-, brother- @Dominguez; and I can have that either be private, or I can have it be public. So, mine's private because it's a personal domain; but if I would say ‘LetsExchange,’ I would open that up to be public, and then anybody could join and register their handle on that domain.

John from LetsExchange: And it's free for users, as far as I understand. Can you just join FIO on app.fio.net and then just claim your username?

Micah: Yeah, we have free handles on certain domains. Typically, our handles have around a two dollar value. So, if we have partners that we partnered up with-like, I have a handle, @Edge wallet, which is a wallet I love a lot, that I actually use on LetsExchange all the time when I'm exchanging crypto through Edge Wallet. I have a handle on there, that's Micah@Edge. So, there are certain wallet partners that if you want to onboard through their platform they have some free handles. Then, we also have free handles. I think there are three domains on the fio.net website: @Moon, @HotHole, and I think there might be one more. You can also purchase your domain, your customized domain, if you want. Those are 40 dollars, and that's a flat fee. So compared to a lot of other domain naming services out there, it's extremely cheap. We also don't charge, at least right now, for shorter character domains. So, if you want a three-character domain, it's going to be the same price as a 20 or a 10.

John from LetsExchange: And it's for life until the end of time?

Micah: Yeah. We do have a renewal in place that you have to do every year. But we're kind of looking at the business model of that and seeing if that's how we want to go forward. But, right now, it's still pretty cheap to get into that. Essentially, once you have that domain, it's yours to manage and yours to renew. And you can also wrap them as well on Polygon, and then sell those on OpenSea or the open market if you want.

John from LetsExchange: So, let's get to the questions from our users. And this one goes to Micah. The price of FIO coins has increased by 43% this year. How does it impact your business model or is it vice versa?

Micah: So, our coin is a utility token, it pays for transactions on-chain. And what I mean by that is if you were to buy a handle now, say, for two dollars, or if you were to get a free one, you get a hundred bundled transactions for that two dollar value. Meaning that you could map a hundred addresses, a hundred different blockchains, which is a lot.

We also have a feature called NFT signatures, where you can sign an NFT with that crypto handle to prove its authenticity, and to preserve all that metadata on our layer one chain. As you know, a lot of NFTs aren't stored on the blockchain. So, this provides you a tool to prove that asset is yours for all the time. If that NFT were to go down, you could always prove that “hey this asset's mine!” And with some of our partners that have integrated that feature, you can see that FIO handles right on that NFT. So it kind of prevents fraud, it prevents fake NFTs. And those require two transactions, so you could essentially map 50 of those NFTs with the hundred transactions.

There's a request feature so you can make a request like you do on Venmo or PayPal. Like, say, I want a hundred dollars from Nadine; I can send that to her at Nadine@LetsExchange. Then, that would show up in her wallet as ‘Approve’ or ‘Deny.’ She doesn't have to do anything. She can just see that request pop up and hit the button and that payment will be sent. I think requests cost one transaction; so, basically once a hundred of those are spent up, then the user would have to pay the equivalent. I think it just depends on the token price of the market to reload those hundred transactions.

Our foundation also holds tokens and the price fluctuations definitely matter to the foundation. A lot of our token holders are our community. I hold quite a bit, I'm in it for the long haul. So, I love to see that price fluctuation go up. You know, it definitely increases my net worth significantly when it does.

John from LetsExchange: So, let's get to a question. Again, come back to Micah. We actually talked a bit about it, about your interoperability with other blockchain ecosystems. Can you tell us about the strategy behind it? Do you want to work with any blockchain ecosystem? How does it work?

Micah: We're actually an open-source protocol. So, anybody can actually integrate FIO on their own, they don't have to come to us. They can grab our SDK off of our dev hub at fio.net, and they can start integrating. Of course, we're here to support any project that wants to integrate FIO. That's why we chose not to build our own wallet from the jump necessarily. We wanted to kind of be open to integrating into all products across the ecosystem because we felt if everyone had a FIO handle and all their products, that's how everyone's lives could be easier. We didn't want to force them into any kind of ecosystem. We wanted them to build their own and then utilize FIO within that ecosystem.

So, if anyone wants to talk about it, hit me up. We give great support. We have over 90 integration partners now, from wallets to exchanges to payment processors. We're also getting into blockchain gaming as well, with that human readable handle. It's perfect for a gamer handle like Gamer@Game. We're partnering up with different kinds of wallets that offer onboarding for that gamer experience. So we're trying to really expand the use case of FIO protocol across all new aspects and projects that are emerging.

Like, ‘I would love to see your protocol be mapped to get into the deck screener for contract addresses.’ So, instead of everyone getting scammed with fake CAs, have that contract address mapped to that human readable handle. So you only have one contract address to that one human readable handle, and they're like ‘okay cool that's the CA.’ It's going to be with Solana. So I'm trying to get that in the works. I think that could help save a lot of people a lot of headaches and a lot of money. Especially, with all these meme coins on Solana that are flying off the shelves every minute of the day. I think that could be a really cool use case. We're always working on new use cases. We're always working on new partnerships here at FIO. So, yeah, hit me up, because we're here to be interoperable into all platforms and all ecosystems as much as we can. That's our main mission.

John from LetsExchange: So, basically, on Let's Exchange.io, FIO coin is available. Can you tell how it helps users to unlock liquidity? And can you share a bit about your partnership experience with us?

Micah: I know that certain users like FIO. I would love to see it on more U.S. exchanges. I would love to see more availability for U.S. customers. We registered with the SEC that we are not a security. But that being said, it's always tough in the U.S. So, LetsExchange is a great partner that we rely on heavily to exchange FIO in the U.S. We're really happy about this partnership. It provides our users and our DAO with the ability to exchange FIO tokens and provide for their livelihood. So, we really rely on this partnership. We love you guys there. It's been a great experience for me. I would love to explore more that we can do together because it's been a great partnership so far.