Chris: Hi! Can you tell us more about yourself and the role you're playing in that blooming project?
Sumitomo: Hello everyone, I’m Sumitomo, the founder and lead architect of the Dynex project. Together with our team, we have been working on launching our platform for more than two years, everything is self-funded. We have different backgrounds, from building successful startups over working in research and software development to blockchain projects. What unites us is the believe that new computing paradigms, especially neuromorphic computing, have the potential to significantly impact the world as it is today.
Chris: Hello there! Thanks for doing this interview. On your website it is said that you are "The World’s First Decentralised Neuromorphic Supercomputing Platform" — can you simplify this for our readers? What do you guys do?
Sumitomo: Think about it: the need for faster computing power is eminent. Yet, Moore’s law is coming to an end. Transistors cannot be made much smaller any more, CPU speed is not doubling every two years any more. Quantum computing is still experimental and in early stages. So how do we address this issue? We produce exponentially more data every day, and we still have no machines to solve really complex mathematical problems.
We believe neuromorphic computing is the answer.
Our mission is to connect as many people together to form the world’s first decentralised neuromorphic supercomputing platform. This means, every single computation of every mining step will be turned into neuromorphic computations. These are being used to run tasks in the network. For example, a university can use the combined power to solve a complex formulation to develop a new medicine. Or a corporation needs to calculate solutions to an optimisation problem to optimise their supply chain or logistics. The applications are practically only limited by our imagination.
Chris: How are you able to perform computations at unprecedented speed and efficiency?
Sumitomo: Over the last two years we have created a proprietary neuromorphic chip design. To simply explain what it does: On today’s traditional computers, we have CPU and memory separated, and they have to communicate with each other. This leads to a bottleneck (the “Van-Neumann bottleneck”) - one than can only really be overcome through significant changes to computer or processor architectures.
And this is exactly what our chip design does: it performs computation in a combined, parallel way (“memcomputing”). This allows the chip to compute thousands and millions of operations in parallel, making it orders of magnitude faster than traditional computers. What’s interesting is, that we can simulate these chips on regular hardware efficiently. This is done by solving “equations of motion”, similar to, for example what NASA does when they are simulating the movement of a meteor travelling through space.
The striking thing is, it turns out that even the simulation alone shows almost all of the benefits of such a neuromorphic chip! We have been able to solve constraint satisfaction problems with this technology faster than any other technology currently available. In fact, traditional systems would never even finish finding the solution as it would take them longer than the universe exists. Our Dynex chips found a solution within a few seconds.
Chris: Cool! Tell us about Dynex Wallet now. What are its main features?
Sumitomo: The Dynex coin “DNX” is the utility coin used to get paid for computing power provided. Customers, who want to use the network to perform calculations, need to pay in DNX. We have multiple wallets, the easiest probably the Dynex Mobile Web Wallet. There’s no installation or download required, everyone can open a Dynex wallet in just a few clicks. Dynex wallets are being used to store, send and receive DNX. It also offers the functionality to transfer DNX between two users by simply scanning a QR-Code.
Chris: Is there a story behind the creation of the project? Can you share it please?
Sumitomo: I guess behind every great project is always a story :) We actually never intended to build a blockchain or to launch a coin. Our main research interest was to create the Dynex chip, a neuromorphic chip to solve the issue of Moore’s law ending. We tried so many different approaches, looked everywhere to see what research in this area is out there currently. Slowly we narrowed down the most feasible approaches to neuromorphic computing. Our first chip design could solve problems with up to eight variables and was implemented on breadboards with a number of Raspberry Pis connected. It was huge and very unpractical, but it did what it was supposed to do: Perform memprocessing and thus doing things for real in parallel. Building instantons and long-range order, similar to what we usually see in quantum machines.
With this being a great motivator for us, we implemented the chip’s functionality on FPGAs and put together around 1,500 FPGAs to form a cluster of our Dynex chips. The tests confirmed the functionality, but we soon realised that we cannot scale this cluster ourselves so easily. The market for FPGAs was very dried out at that moment, so we had to think out of the box.
That was the time when an article caught our attention, addressing the issue of energy used for crypto-mining. We realised that a lot of computing power is being wasted every single minute on just calculating hashes. Why not utilise this energy to do something meaningful? That’s when we decided that we have to a decentralised approach. Together with a blockchain and a coin. Dynex was born…
Chris: What are your main goals in the next 3-6 months?
Sumitomo: We launched the Dynex main-net on September 16th, 2022 with the possibility to have the miners choose how they want to contribute: by traditional mining or by running Dynex chips (or a combination). Even without any advertising, quickly a community emerged and a lot of people joined.
Just four weeks after launch we already had four mining pools, a first listing on txbit.io and a community of hundreds of people supporting us. Dynex chip operations ramped up rapidly to almost 5,000,000,000 computing steps, we know now that the Dynex chip can operate also on large scale very successfully.
As a next step, we will merge the chip’s functionality directly into our mining algorithm (“DynexSolve”). This will be rolled out after successful testing (which starts on November 1st, 2022). In parallel we are currently selecting large formulations and computations which will be run on our network, leading to building up a customer base for usage of computation power as well. We are also considering listing on an additional exchange.
In short: plenty of work for the next few months, but creating a meaningful project with impact on our world is absolutely worth it.
Chris: Can you tell us about your Discord community? How big of a role does it play in your business?
Sumitomo: Discord has been an incredibly useful tool to interact with our community. It helps us being in touch with our users, to chat about what they like (and dislike). Without that, many things would be handled much slower, let it be bug reports or polls we have been doing regularly with the community.
Chris: To finish up: tell us where can we follow your updates? Thanks!
Sumitomo: Please join our Discord channel as well as our Twitter account, that’s the two places where we share all updates.
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