Justin Tabb, CEO of Substratum:

SubstratumNode, we announced, will reach its first production version before the end of 2018. So that’s very exciting guys. You know we don’t make predictions if they’re not true.

From the whitepaper — “Substratum will become a fully Open Sourced project upon our launch of version 1 at the end of 2017.”

Today is September 1, 2018 and the latest release is v0.4.0.

Last week, we announced the addition of our third product, Amplify, which will be a decentralized basically cryptocurrency exchange and will enable through SubstratumNode trading anywhere throughout the world. So basically what we want to do is be able to bring the freedom that we’ve brought into the Internet by merging open web requests and decentralized web requests into one Internet uhh through SubstratumNode, and we want to be able to bring that to the traders, right? Because even in the last thirty days, China has blocked an additional 180 cryptocurrency exchanges, so we want to be able to bring that freedom to the cryptocurrency trading world, to ensure that cryptocurrency trading goes forward, to ensure that people everywhere has access to the same ability to grow their financial future through cryptocurrency, which we believe is the currency of the future.

SubstratumNode by itself will bring freedom to the cryptocurrency trading world if it fulfills the vision stated in the whitepaper. Instead of burning money trying to compete with world-class DEX development teams, why not burn money on marketing to create a large userbase for your core product? The network will be worthless without users.

In order to deliver this in its own way, what we’ve done is basically come at the decentralized exchange from a different angle. In order to do that we need our own blockchain which will operate with a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, and basically in order to do that we need our blockchain with our own coin, right?

You already have your own token. It’s called SUB, and more info about it can be found on CoinMarketCap here. At the moment, AMPX (the proposed new coin) and SUB are technically equivalent — they are both ERC-20 tokens. If the AMPX ERC-20 token can be migrated to a native blockchain, so can the SUB ERC-20 token via a 1:1 token swap off the Ethereum protocol. EOS, TRON, and ICON have all performed token swaps to their respective mainnets, so what makes SUB special in this respect?

The answer is “nothing”. There is no technical reason why SUB cannot be the native token on Substratum’s decentralized exchange, and the only reason for AMPX’s existence is to serve as a convenient fundraising vehicle for a second ICO before the original products promised in the whitepaper have even been finished.

…and will always continue to use the SUB token for Substratum network requests, anything that’s run through SubstratumNode, anything that’s run through SubstratumHost, and anything that’s run through CryptoPay will continue use the Substratum token.

Stated earlier in the video… “Amplify, which will be a decentralized basically cryptocurrency exchange and will enable through SubstratumNode trading anywhere throughout the world.”

What we’re introducing is a NEW product, and for that it requires a NEW token, right? And so as part of that it will bring greater earning opportunities to people who run Substratum nodes in two ways. Number one, it’s going to greatly increase the traffic that runs over SubstratumNode because that’s the way the decentralized exchange is going to communicate. Number two, if Substratum nodes want to, they can basically authenticate transactions on the Amplify blockchain, on the Amplify BridgeChain is what we’re calling it because it’s bridging a decentralized and distributed exchange, and so they can do that through a Substratum node, so it brings greater earning potential.

You’re asking us if it requires a new token? I understand the incentivization model proposed here, but what I don’t understand is why a secondary token needs to be created out of thin air. The only reason AMPX has a forced and technically non-exclusive use case on the DEX is that its existence only came about due to the need for a second ICO fundraiser. How’s that for intrinsic value? Ha.

We’re not going to take our 60 million Substratum tokens that we own and devote that to growing the Substratum network. We’re not spending those, we’re not selling those. Those are going back in and basically being given away so that people can come on to use the Substratum network for free in the beginning.

Get your story straight. You’re the CEO. In the first sentence, you claim Substratum will not be using any tokens to grow the Substratum network. Seconds later, you claim those tokens are being given away for people to come on the network, which by definition means “growing the network”.

Before December 31, 2018, SubstratumNode Production Version 1 will be available. Quote me on it.

Yes, sounds good.

Just like how the whitepaper quoted a V1 release for EOY 2017.