CEO of Ninety Eight: 'In the end, Viction will bring utility to the C98 token.'

Thanh Le, the founder of Ninety Eight, believes that the opportunity to surpass MetaMask lies in an unfair advantage: a Layer 1 blockchain.

Ninety Eight is building that unfair advantage with Viction.

Buying time with Viction

In addition to having a good product, what factor has helped MetaMask maintain its almost dominant position in the wallet market for so many years? The answer is that the co-founders of ConsenSys (the parent company of MetaMask) also laid the foundation for Ethereum - the predominant blockchain of the industry. This means that when it comes to integrating the latest features, wallet projects built on Ethereum must follow MetaMask.

"For that reason, people might use wallets with better UI/UX once or twice, but in the end, they will return to MetaMask. Going to someone else's home and claiming that you can develop something stronger than them is almost impossible," said Thanh Le.

According to Mr. Thanh, the founder of Ninety Eight, the wallet game is very different from the exchange game. Creating an exchange with Futures features is an easy way to attract users and generate profits immediately, but with a wallet, that can extend to 5-10 years.

"Big wallets, either backed by strong chains or strong exchanges, will survive and make a lot of money: MetaMask with Ethereum, Binance's Trust, Coinbase's Linear. Meanwhile, small wallets below those will either die or be acquired," Mr. Thanh explained.

How can the Coin98 Super Wallet avoid the fate of the others? Thanh Le's answer: "The wallet must follow the chain; a strong chain makes a strong wallet. Ninety Eight's unfair advantage must be owning its own chain."

The wallet must follow the chain; a strong chain makes a strong wallet. Ninety Eight's unfair advantage must be owning its own chain.

With that mindset, Ninety Eight was quietly building a Layer 1 blockchain, expected to launch in Q2 2024. However, earlier this year, a deal knocked on Ninety Eight's door - the knock came from a veteran in the Vietnamese blockchain community: TomoChain.

The entire team faced a new challenge: continue building the chain as planned or invest in TomoChain and use it as a development platform.

"If we build a new chain, we can control 100% of everything from the beginning: technology, tokenomics, etc. With TomoChain, almost all tokens have been released to the market, and neither the Ninety Eight team nor the Tomo Foundation holds much of the token," said The-Vinh Nguyen, CEO of Ninety Eight.

That is the immediate loss, but according to Mr. The-Vinh, for a new project to develop well, the liquidity of the underlying token is crucial.

"The process of listing C98 on many exchanges cost a lot of money, time, and effort. And it happened during a bull market with very few chains at that time, so everything was easier.

Now exchanges and users are overloaded with the number of Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains out there. If we build a new chain, it's feasible in terms of technology, but can we be sure that the token will be listed on major exchanges for large liquidity?" questioned Ninety Eight's CEO.

Meanwhile, according to Mr. The-Vinh, TomoChain has TOMO listed on Binance with a good community, stable technology of five years experience, and a relatively decentralized structure with 550 master nodes – even its project mainnet was launched earlier than Polygon.

Moreover, according to the projections of Ninety Eight's leaders, the time for the launch of the new blockchain may correspond with a market explosion.

"If any problems occur, we will have very little time to develop and expand the ecosystem. Strategic investment in TomoChain will shorten the launch period to about three quarters. It's worth considering," said Mr. The-Vinh.

Thanh Le added, "There are things I think the TomoChain team has done very well, such as the TRC21 token standard. This is a solid foundation for Ninety Eight to leverage and build upon. We decided to buy time because time is tough to buy with money.”

After weighing the pros and cons, Ninety Eight decided to “choose” TomoChain, rename it Viction, and change its ticker symbol from TOMO to VIC.

Read more: Ninety Eight Ecosystem: Unlock the gate to the Web3 world

Viction: A piece completing Ninety Eight’s big picture

Viction appears as a piece to complete the big picture of the Ninety Eight ecosystem, allowing the team to realize ideas about OneID, logging into the wallet through social accounts with Ramper, zero gas, etc.

Recently, Mr. Thanh launched a small campaign on Facebook: the first 1,000 people to share his post about the Coin98 Super Wallet and comment with their email addresses received 98 C98 in their wallets. This is a clear illustration that with Ramper built on Viction, Ninety Eight is addressing one of the difficulties new users face: the burden of storing and securing private keys when operating in Web3.

Another point that traditional users are not familiar with when using a crypto wallet is transaction fees. For example, to send C98 on the Ethereum network, users need ETH, and similarly, to send C98 on the BNB Chain, they need BNB to pay a fee.

"Viction has a fee sponsorship mechanism, through which users can send C98 on Viction without owning VIC in their wallets," Mr. Thanh said.

But this is just the beginning; in the future, users will also be able to send stablecoins, such as USDT, on Viction without worrying about gas fees of 0.01 or 0.001 VIC.

"It's like people using Venmo to transfer money; they don't need to know what the fees are. And if they need to deduct money, it's deducted directly in the transaction," said Mr. Thanh.

Other projects have considered the idea of zero gas in the past but failed.

"Gas on Ethereum is very expensive and cannot be sponsored. This is Viction's advantage: the gas fee on the current chain is cheap. We just need to change the financial mechanism; instead of users paying gas, that function is transferred to the projects or the Viction Foundation. And this creates a completely different experience for users," The-Vinh Nguyen explained.

In 2019, the Dharma wallet, invested in by Coinbase, had the idea of ​​helping users pay gas fees on Ethereum. In the summer of the DeFi boom, when gas fees reached $100 per transaction, the project poured millions of dollars in fundraising into gas fees and ultimately failed.

To protect the network from spam and prevent gas funding from running out like in the case of Dharma, the Ninety Eight team has a solution.

"We don't commit 100% zero gas for every interaction with the product; we only provide a gas sponsorship solution that projects can choose to register for or not. Interactions that generate revenue, such as swaps and redemptions, can be sponsored by gas, while transactions that do not add value are just a loophole for spam. In addition, there is a firewall underneath to protect the Viction and Ninety Eight systems, acting as a barrier before interacting with on-chain contracts," Mr. The-Vinh said.

VIC ⇔ C98: Temperature rises ⇔ Pressure increases

The overall development of the Viction ecosystem will ultimately bring utility to the C98 token. For example, users will use C98 to earn money, participate in projects, buy OneID, and so on. And Ninety Eight will promote deals with partners for them to exclusively use C98 or use C98 alongside the project's token. The goal is for C98 to spread to every corner of Viction.

"The relationship between VIC and C98 is a symbiotic relationship, like temperature and pressure. The higher the pressure, the higher the temperature, and vice versa, the higher the temperature, the higher the pressure," Mr. The-Vinh said.

The relationship between VIC and C98 is a symbiotic relationship, like temperature and pressure. The higher the pressure, the higher the temperature, and vice versa, the higher the temperature, the higher the pressure.

Specifically, the more users and projects participate, the better Viction develops, and the better Viction develops, the more utilities C98 gets. When C98 rises, Ninety Eight investors and holders benefit.

Explaining why C98 is not used as the infrastructure token, Thanh Le said: "Turning C98 into a gas token has risks in a multi-chain strategy. I see that most chains and foundations have a highly political nature, so the best way to cooperate with them is by not turning C98 into the token of any chain."

Moreover, according to the founder of Ninety Eight, a chain cannot exist forever because technology will continue to evolve.

"When there is a new chain, faster and upgraded, C98 must be able to expand to those chains and ride the wave of their development. As C98 is already on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and now on Viction, turning it into a gas token would hamper its development speed," Thanh Le concluded.

For the Viction ecosystem to develop, the participation of quality projects is needed, and Ninety Eight provides many advantages to attract developers. These include an 8 million user base, a $25 million ecosystem development fund, and the experience of those who have been in the crypto market for many years.

"Moreover, Viction should be seen as a new land for projects to come and dig and test ideas. If you build on Solana or other major chains, the competition is extremely high," said Tris Vuong, Head of Brand at Ninety Eight.

Furthermore, according to Ms. Tris, Viction's most outstanding feature is its infrastructure pieces and the projects built around it: fundraising with Starship, the NFT marketplace with Dagora, listing on exchanges with Baryon, and a gaming platform coming soon.

Viction (Victory + Vision), like its name, conveys a vision of victory for the entire Ninety Eight ecosystem with the participation of the community and partner projects.