468,270,545 ERC Saito have been moved from the Seed and Private Round Vault for distribution to Investors. We are glad to get these tokens to our supporters and thank them for their continued contribution to Saito.

Not all funds will be vested immediately. We would kindly remind anyone who has been sent and has yet to respond to a conversion request or confirmation emails that our Terms and Conditions require active response and that distribution may be delayed. We plan to process late responses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prevent late submissions from creating an unnecessary processing burden on our admin.

No SAITO have been distributed for other reasons since our previous update.

Vesting disbursements resulted in an 28% increase in resulting supply.
This represents the last substantive distribution of ERC20 tokens under the vesting program.

We hope to provide a ‘year in review’ update on finances and tokenomics in the coming weeks via our blog.

Treasury Safes:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault

Saito Foundation Token Vault

Saito Contributor Token Vault

Saito Holding Token Vault

This week’s release brings the total number of games on the Saito Arcade to nine, with an additional seven in various stages of development behind the scenes. If you’re a gamer / developer / designer /artist and want to help expand the number of games that are available please get in touch. All of these games are available in our official Github repository, and will periodically show up on our staging and test servers as well.

The first thing many people notice about the new games is their improved look-and-feel — things like textured board and tiles. Beyond these more cosmetic improvements, our team and community have been hard at work revamping parts of the underlying game engine and its set of standard components. We have recently completely re-written the Game HUD, a component which lists cards and provides a way for players to select from a limited set of options. The draggable box that displays player information in games like Wordblocks and Blackjack has also been upgraded.

Less visible improvements include better support for games with hexagonal tiles, simultaneous card selection, and web3 crypto integration (coming soon!). Those who look closely can also find some more experimental features: support for capturing in-game screenshots as well as the ability for players to save and load multiplayer games. This last feature is particularly useful in games like Red Imperium where it is coming in useful for debugging advanced technologies and late-game weapons.

As always, much of the work that is happening around the Arcade is community driven. If there is a particular game you would like to see developed or you have programming or artistic skills and are looking for a way to help out, please get in touch. If you let us know what you think you can tackle we can direct you to a project that needs help.

In the meantime, check out this animation from our new ELI5 video to get a sense of what is coming. This snippet is from a video introduction that will be displayed on our splash-page. We’ve worked on these animations scene-by-scene and are pleased with the work everyone is doing to get things right.

These kinds of glossy “show off” graphics are matched by simple animations that help deliver the Saito message. This is one of the animations that explains the difference between the network economics in “Saito” and “Non-Saito” networks: you can click on the button to switch animation modes:

Should we push up the website drop date? We thought about this and decided it is better to wait. Some content like our history of blog posts are still being ported and tagged and we don’t want it to drop them offline. More importantly, mobile users will notice little things like animations not being mobile-optimised. Our stats show a majority of the people who hit our website now are visiting on mobile devices especially when we push news and updates, so this is important.

We’re expecting to be able to generate a new wave of inbound traffic and interest in Saito once we have our new site up, so don’t want to waste the opportunity to make a good impression. As we wait for this to be finished, hopefully this post makes our communications strategy clearer. Our aim is a visually slick front-end + blog supported by a text-heavy and community-editable wiki/repository. We shrink from having the 3-4 major sites to a more manageable two that are easier to maintain and update.

So that’s what’s happening behind the scenes. We will keep everyone updated on the site as we move forward. In the meantime, we’re working on some extra polish to our latest game — which is getting pushed to production this week. We look forward to getting this stuff released and have thanks as always for everyone who is helping contribute by sharing word and educating in the crypto space.

We are pleased to share news that three developers have joined our team over the last three months. This brings our development team to five staffers, not including Richard and David. It takes a few months for developers to get familiar enough with Saito to be highly productive, but the community should have already noticed an increase in the pace of activity.

Dev

The most significant technical update in the last quarter was our production network switching to the upgraded version of Saito Consensus that allows both Rust and Javascript clients to co-exist on the network. This was a major software release with significant improvements to core scalability.

Our team is back to refactoring and reiterating our Rust architecture as scheduled. Our goal with the Rust code at this point is improving its networking code and re-architecting its overall design to add support for WASM. The long-term goal with WASM is the ability to compile a optimized version of the Rust binary and embed it directly in user browsers, ultimately allowing us to replace much of our javascript stack and permit the development of applications in non-javascript programming languages.

Outreach

Our next major “public release” will be the unveiling of a new website that will replace our current splash page. While we don’t want to tease unnecessarily, we’re happy to share that the new site has a more stylish appearance that reflects the elegance of what we are accomplishing in code.

Importantly, the new site includes a number of custom-produced videos and animations that we believe will help newcomers more quickly understand why Saito matters and how it works. As of this afternoon the site is basically finished in terms of structure. Our animators are still working on some of the custom animations for the new introductory video. Our target for launching the new site is April 12.

Games and Applications

Once the new site is live we will be moving forward with the redesign of our interior application suites including the Saito Arcade. In the meantime, we will be releasing an exciting new game with a new level of polish and gameplay onto production servers later this week.

Within a month we expect to publicly launch our pilot web3 crypto-integration. We are likely to be “turning this on” on our testing and staging servers (note: we now have testing and staging servers) before shifting to production. Part of the work that is needed here is security reviews and handle UI/UX flows so that the process of joining Saito and funding the network is simple.

Saito Wiki

Our upcoming website will be accompanied by a new Saito Wiki that will combine educational materials, information on how people can contribute to the network and its various projects, information on community channels and materials, and supporting documentation for developers like an API Guide and application-building tutorials. The new Saito Wiki is expected to eventually replace our current backend site as the text-heavy partner to our new front-end webpage.

Our product lead Karl is the contact-point for suggestions around community and Arcade. He is still ironing out details about how exactly the edit-and-review process should work, as we will need to review suggested updates for security reasons, but the site is up and feedback is very welcome. Members of the community are already contributing to a community section and we are moving forward with community-development projects.

Moving Forward

All the above should bring us roughly to the April 2022 vesting, which opens our final quarter of formal vesting. Once that is over, depending on any laggard issuances, that will help bring the network into the period of token stability and zero-inflation needed to move forward with the general roadmap.

As announced in our November Roadmap, in the months following this vesting as the market settles towards a stable token supply, the community can expect continued work on the Rust suite, with most progress visible in the online application suite and gaming network.

We have discussed our plans for this in previous roadmaps, so will just point the interested back there.

Thanks for reading, see you all on the Arcade!

Fortunately, there are alternatives for US based SAITO holders. As always non-custodial options, where users hold their own keys, are preferred:’

Non-custodial Options

1. Trustwallet 
   Fully supports SAITO ERC20 Tokens. The Android version also supports interactions with DEXs and other features.

2. Metamask
   Metamask also supports SAITO ERC20 tokens and can be used on desktop or phone. It can also be paired with hardware wallets such as a ledger.

3. Coinbase Wallet
   Coinbase wallet supports SAITO ERC20 and has customer service in the US.

Custodial Options

Bigone, Decoin, LBank, BKEX and Hotbit Exchanges all offer SAITO Markets.

The Saito team understands the importance of major centralized exchanges in providing liquidity and on-ramps to new and existing holders. We are in discussions with major exchanges to ensure the best experience and options are available to the Saito community in all jurisdictions.

The Saito team

These developments will extend protection for Saito Consensus outside of the United States in the global markets that matter for network adoption. Coverage starts with the use of cryptographic signatures to track fee circulation, and extends from there to critical techniques for building blockchains and running web3 applications.

Our team remains committed to building an open network. We are delighted at the recognition being shown to the importance of Saito Consensus, and the strong prior art these approvals will create to protect web3 developers building on Saito as well as other distributed PKI networks.

Despite this, we are delighted to announce that we have removed the last project provided liquidity from the BUSD/SAITO pair on Pancakeswap.

This means all revenue from liquidity provision on Pancakeswap is going directly to community members. We are grateful to everyone in the community who has stepped-up and supported SAITO this way and think the occasion is worth celebrating.

Many cryptocurrency projects create artificial rewards by dumping tokens into pools and handing them to “stakers”. At Saito we believe this lessens the value of tokens by inflating the token supply and makes it harder for the market to properly value an open network.

As outlined in our PancakeSwap Liquidity Program, we are committed to re-adding liquidity should the amount provided by our community fall. In the meantime in answer to the Telegram group favourite: “wen staking:” we are happy to note that the APY for liquidity providers on the Pancakeswap pair is currently 200%.

387,240,275 ERC Saito have been moved from the Seed and Private Round Vault for distribution to Investors. We are glad to get these tokens to our supporters and thank them for their continued contribution to Saito.

Not all funds will be vested immediately. We would kindly remind anyone who has been sent and has yet to respond to a conversion request or confirmation emails that our Terms and Conditions require active response and that distribution may be delayed. We plan to process late responses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to prevent late submissions from creating an unnecessary processing burden on our admin.

No SAITO have been distributed for other reasons since our previous update.

Circulating Supply

Vesting disbursements resulted in an 28% increase in resulting supply.

These tokens will be held in the Saito Holding Token Vault and are included in the Circulating Supply calculations.

An update will be provided on token distribution at the next substantive change.

Treasury Safes:

Saito Private Sale Token Vault

Saito Foundation Token Vault

Saito Contributor Token Vault

Saito Holding Token Vault

Yoast SEO

Highlights begin here.

1. Who are your competitors in crypto and what’s the strategy to outperform them?

We still have a unique approach – Saito consensus is not implemented anywhere else, so in that sense we don’t have direct competitors.

There are quite a few competitors in the ‘ideas space’ around scale. Polkadot, for instance, solves scaling issues for the relay chain, but passes on all other issues to parachains, while groups like Solana and before them EOS juiced up speeds by centralizing validation.

Other sharding solutions split up the problem to push it further down the road, but lose fundamental properties like ‘universal broadcast’ – being able to send a message to anyone on the network without any help or dependence on anyone else.

2. How important is the community for Saito team and what steps will be taken by team to keep interest of community & investors intact?

Our community is everything. Saito is like bitcoin or ethereum, and is nothing without a community.

The community is amazing – you just have to look at how the saito ‘red card army’ on twitter supports everything we do/announce.

More than that – the community is doing a _lot_ creating docs, making NFTs, promoting Saito… This is maybe the most amazing achievement of the project and something we will keep supporting as best we can.

3. As Saito is a layer One Blockchain, what is the Problems with other Blockchains? Why do You think users will need another Blockchain?

As mentioned above – Proof of Work and Proof of Stake pay _only_ for the security mechanism. To avoid web 3 collapsing back into being just like web 2 we need to pay for everything the network needs from consensus. If it is not, it is subject to ‘capture’ by anyone with power or an advantage in the system.

By rethinking what consensus pays for, and making that robust, Saito can provide infrastructure, pay devs and service users at scale – without closing off access or becoming corporate owned.

4. With many Blockchains, we have seen the issue of 51 % Attack, how do you plan to solve that? Can You give us an overview?

We love this question, obviously.  51% attacks feel like they might be inevitable in blockchain, like maybe natural something like democracy.

There are actually two reasons that PoW and PoS suffer 51% attacks. First, all the work/stake that does not ‘get used’ each block, just vanishes for the next block. The second is that the block creator gets paid for creating the block, and so can use this reward to ‘go again’ with their attack on the next block.

In Saito nodes need to collect user fees attached to transactions to make a block. When a block is made, the fees attached to other transactions, not put in the block, these are still valid ‘work’. AND, when a block is produced, one of the nodes that contributed to putting transactions into the block gets paid. Not the block creator. 

Together this means, that when a node creates a block, other nodes are already have some transactions and fees for the next block so the attacker is behind the honest nodes, and, most importantly we didn’t just pay the attacker to keep attacking the network.

This is maybe in the weeds, happy to talk more about this separately for anyone interested.

5. Please tell me some significant advantages of your platform over PoS and PoW, and how it can strengthen the security for users? What improvements or acknowledgements have you gained so far?

Along with all of the above – the biggest advantage is that Saito can actually be very simple, as it’s solution is not smart contracts, sharding, zk snarks or other ‘heavy tech’. 

Very early on – we got a javascript version pushing two 300mb blocks per minute across the pacific and staying in sync. 

Since then Saito networks have supported millions of transactions, and we have created exciting software on top of the network that gets people coming back.

6. One of the common misconceptions about Saito I see is that newcomers think it’s a “Polkadot project” or “Polkadot token.” Can you explain what kind of role or roles that Saito would like to play in the Polkadot ecosystem?

This is a common misconception because we have worked closely with the web 3 foundation and have many partnerships and friends in the polkadot ecosystem.

We have received and completed a web 3 foundation grant, for example. 

In the end, Saito can be a massive part of the polkadot ecosystem, providing infrastructure to great projects that don’t have infrua to support them for free.

7. I Read in your Website that currently you are working on a Rust Implementation of Saito Consensus that will form the backbone of our next testnet(s). Will you Please tell me More about Saito Rust Implementation ?

The Rust client and Rust consensus are steps to making Saito ‘data center ready’. As the network grows and throughput increases, we would need to move to things like binary blocks (rather than json). 

At the same time – we have been refining and improving how we implement Saito Consensus in code with each update and refactoring of the code.

The Rust client represents our most efficient and robust implementation of Saito Consensus yet.

Changes like moving to binary for all network communications, and the extra strictness of Rust cause some issues for the rest of the stack, like games. We are working through those now, as well as settling our more detailed tech roadmap for the year.

8. What’s your vision ultimately? What is the project trying to achieve in the longer term? 

To deliver the promise of Web 3.

People talk a lot about decentralization and often assume that a decentralized network will be open and user owned. This is, sadly, not true. There are many decentralized networks that are not open at all, and where users are mere customers – or worse they are the product.

Users are freer and have more power if they use keys they control to access systems and interact. Similarly tokenisation allows for users to share value autonomously and without permission.

But this is not Web 3 by itself. If we look at the best examples we have currently they are subsidised by volunteers and companies. For example, Uniswap simply does not work without support from Infura and their servers.

Volunteers don’t scale. At some point they will not support paying for a large scale network. Which leaves companies. With scale, costs will increase, and over time we will see Web 2 business models creeping in. 

If we want a Web 3 that stays open at scale, we must solve issues of paying for the underlying network from consensus. This is what Saito does.

9. How do you deal with pump and dump investors who just buy and sell regardless of the technology behind it? In other words: how do you plan to gain the trust of all kinds of investors?

The answer to this is to get on with building a community and a track record. 

We have an amazing community that understands and supports Saito, our goals, and objectives. This buffers and protects the projects against the ups and downs of industry trends and markets.

When that is tied to a track record of building real code, and being honest and open about what we are doing – it becomes clear that there are much better ways to be involved with the project than making small profits day trading a token.

10. What’s your next move to expand your project & where did you see yourself at the end of year 2022 ?

We have recently published a detailed roadmap covering 2022 and beyond. 

Technically we are working on our rust ‘data center ready’ client, working on tools to let developers easily integrate third party cryptocurrencies into Saito and Developers tools to make it easy to build apps for Saito.

In terms of growth, that is driven by two main things – community and collaborations. The Saito community is amazing and is spreading the word about Saito globally. It is growing in size but also commitment and passion, which makes us super happy. We are brining on community management 

Integrating other cryptos into Saito – in a way similar to the way polkadot tokens are already integrated into Saito applications will allow us to engage on a deep level with projects throughout the industry and simply demonstrate the power and value of what Saito brings to them.

On top of this we will continue to communicate as much as we can about what we are doing. We are really pumped about 2022.

For more updates, please do follow Saito’s official social media pages:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaitoOfficial
Telegram: https://t.me/SaitoIOann
Blog: https://org.saito.tech/blog
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/HjTFh9Tfec
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaitoIO/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRUhZVAUH4JyWUFmxm5P6dQ

On the off-chance you haven’t heard of Friedrich Hayek, he was one of the mid-20th century economists who witnessed the ascent of the Soviet economic model and fought a rear-guard action in defense of capitalism. Whereas his fellow Austrian emigre Joseph Schumpeter saw free markets as superior because of their ability to drive innovation (“creative destruction”), Hayek argued they were necessary to set prices at levels which are “not given to anyone in [their] totality” and thus cannot be optimized by central planners.

Hayek’s seminal essay The Use of Knowledge in Society outlines this most succinctly, asking how state planners can ever know how to allocate resources? What Hayek saw that many others missed is that prices do more than incentivize people to produce things: they value all goods and services in relation to each other at rates Hayek called their “marginal rates of substitution.” Letting these rates self-adjust in response to the floating preferences of consumers and producers is how free markets allocate resources efficiently, incentivizing more of X and less of Y if doing so provides greater social value.

The subtlety of Hayek’s emphasis on relative-prices is usually missed by crypto-libertarians, who see tokens incentivizing arbitrary forms of work and imagine they have a free market at work. Ask exactly how the market is pricing work and most will get confused: isn’t the free market providing hashpower to Bitcoin? Aren’t users paying fees? Yet the problem has never been creating incentive structures or charging fees: state planners do both of those very well.

To see the actual problem, try inverting Bitcoin. Imagine we paid nodes in the P2P network and asked volunteers to hash for free. Would we get an optimal amount of security? What about an optimal number of P2P nodes? If more hashing would encourage more P2P nodes and greater network usage, would volunteers be incentivized to spend more money on hashing?

The intellectual error most people make here is forgetting that when a consensus algorithm pays nothing for something, it is assigning a price (of zero) and manually defining the “marginal rates of substitution” between that and other necessary inputs. The fact that the consensus mechanism is a machine does not stop it from acting as a de facto central planner. Robots can fix prices too!

Were Hayek still alive, he would be the first to point out this abuse of free market economics. He would also never accept the what-me-worry reassurances of technocratic dilettantes that perhaps things will work out. As Hayek would point out, the fact that we have an external market controlling the flow of funds into an internal market means that our two layers are never independent, and can never be subject to a rationalizing outside force.

In this environment, the only way the free market can price inputs efficiently is by putting the cross-market allocation of resources within the firm, so that internal profit-maximization strategies minimize wasteful spending. Like this approach or not, the result will clearly look much less like a permissionless network and much more like Google or Amazon. Replacing volunteers with firms doesn’t suddenly make firms behave like volunteers.

This news is depressing for those who have eyes to see it, in part because so few people seem aware of it, and in part from the irony of watching Silicon Valley’s libertarian class repeat the same price-fixing errors their Marxist counterparts did a century ago. The machines may change, but the technocratic hubris remains the same.

So while we can get to Saito Consensus by reading public choice theory, even the Chicago School can teach us something most libertarian crypto-bros fail to see: the rise of dominant network-layer service providers like Infura and TAAL is far from a swan song of “centralization” before technical maturity delivers a golden age of radical decentralization — it is the direction the free market itself is steering POW and POS networks out of their need to induce provision of the infrastructure their consensus mechanisms cannot price and pay for, but on which they are dependent for continued survival.