DFinance AMA with Stas Oskin and Sebastian Stupurac
Introduction AMA
Eric: @bdevelle @syrenity welcome!
Sebastian: Good to be here, thank you for having us
Eric: So @bdevelle @syrenity Can you introduce yourselves to the AMA room community. WE would like to know your background and your journey to starting Dfinance
Sebastian: sure
hi everyone. My name is Sebastian Stupurac. Full time “cryptoholic” since 2013.
Stas Oskin: Amazing to be here indeed 🙂
Sebastian: The first project I (together with the other Dfinance co-founders, Stas, Arman, and Boris) was involved with was named Crypti, back in 2013–2015 (later forked into Lisk and Ark)
Eric: Wow. you guys are OGs
Stas Oskin: I’m in crypto since 2011, been through it all including MTGox 😅
before Crypti I’ve worked with Spondoolies, helping them to launch their B2C line of ASIC BTC miners
Sebastian: After Crypti we started working on WINGS DAO (again, all 4 together) — WINGS DAO had a very good run as a forecast market and price discovery and exposure platform for ICOs. Unfortunately, ICOs died during 2018 and so did WINGS DAOs product-market fit.
We started working on a pivot for WINGS DAO in 2018 (main research at the time). The result of that research (and several other pivot attempts) is Dfinance
Eric: So what is Dfinance?
Sebastian: I personally view Dfinance as lego-blocks for people with financial experience.
Dfinance allows them to construct instruments without the need to know how to code and also (just as important) without the need for prior blockchain experience.
Dfinance aims to completely hide the complexities and technicalities involved in the development and blockchain deployment of instruments — to make it as easy and friendly as possible and in hopes to attract the best financial minds in the industry to try Dfinance out and create instruments.
Stas Oskin: we are also big believes in privacy and helped to launch a protocol named Beam MimbleWimble
Eric: 🔥🔥🔥
What has been created using Dfinance no-code method so far? what is possible here?
Sebastian: we just launched our Incentivized testnet so tools have yet to be created.
at the launch (estimated next month) — it will be possible to create CDP contracts and also — a new instrument called DRO
DRO — is a Debt Risk Option, provides the option holder with the right, but not the obligation, to perform some predefined action — such as buy or selling an underlying asset at a preset liquidation price.
Eric: was about to ask that. also, what are CDP contracts?
Stas Oskin: it’s important to note that these are just the initial basic examples we are making to show the power of Dfinance High-Level Language (HLL)
Sebastian: so if you take a CDP loan and you calculate your default chances to be low — you could create a DRO and sell that for a premium to someone.
If you don’t default — you gained some extra cash
if you do default — the person that purchased the option can acquire your collateral at a discount
Stas Oskin: in practice, we expect to have quite more creative use cases popping up on the platform following the mainnet launch
such as sneakers markets, yield farming optimizations, and structured products and notes
Eric: When would the mainnet launch happen?
Stas Oskin: we aim for the 2nd half of November
Eric: that’s quite near already
Sebastian: A CDP, or “collateral debt position”, is a smart-contact, where you can put up one cryptocurrency as collateral to get a loan in the form of a different one.
this way you get access to funding without having to liquidate your crypto
Stas Oskin: indeed, and we all are working hard to make it happen! 💪
Eric: so what is the role of the token in all of these?
Stas Oskin: we have an amazing team to who we as founders are indebted to, which pulls extra time including weekends to deliver on time
contrary to many projects in this space, we don’t believe in the overpromise and underdeliver approach
this why we started ramping up marketing and community work only once we arrived closer to the launch
Sebastian: XFI is used for
security (running validators or delegating to validators)
liquidity provision (staking Uniswap LP tokens)
gas (similar to ETH for Ethereum, all network and virtual machine operations require XFI)
instrument utilities (e.g someone can create an instrument that uses XFI to some level)
we’re also exploring using XFI to create an intra-network stable-coin, however, we haven’t decided about this yet.
Stas Oskin: we really like the work performed by Lien in creating a new innovative form of stable coin, yet the recent events there had us pause the work in that direction
Eric: How about the fundraise, how’s that going? any public sale details you wanna share?
Stas Oskin: so we want to evaluate first the real-life performance, before deciding whether to continue to move in that direction
Sebastian: There’s an upcoming community-fueled Uniswap sale
it’s “community fueled” because the initial liquidity is provided by community members. and it’s a sale because they’re theoretically selling their XFI (if people wish to buy it that is)
Eric: Any VC who invested in the project? and who are your advisors?
Sebastian: our private fundraiser is being managed entirely by Collider Ventures.
We don’t yet have the names of all sale participants, but once we will (and they agree to make that information public) — we will do so.
for the sake of transparency — we are raising $ 2M in the private sale.
50% — to be used for marketing
50% — to be used for liquidity provision
Eric: ok. I will now open the questions to the community. @bdevelle @syrenity Please allow 2–3 minutes for questions to be posted. after that has passed. please reply with at least 10 questions that you like.
Community AMA
Q: Staking is the new trend. What staking options and guidelines are available for $XFI token? Are there any incentives for staking with Dfinance? What other ways can I earn XFI token?
A: You can stake XFI by:
1. running a validator on the network
2. delegating to a trusted validator
3. providing liquidity in Uniswap and staking the LP tokens
All staking is rewarded through the Dfinance inflation mechanism.
Q: I am an investor, so besides trusting in the DFINANCE project, I also want to make a profit so what is the marketing strategy of DFINANCE to attract investors and expand the market?
A: we believe that money doesn’t pop out of thin air. What we need to attract are users — and there’s a chicken and egg problem
users will come if there are instruments
instrument creators will come if there are users
Therefore we will focus our initial efforts on attracting and populating the network with useful, value-adding instruments, then switch to promoting these instruments to attract users.
Q: When the website says “with natural language tools”, does it mean that no experts and even anyone can program their own instrument?
A: it’s exactly what it means.
while Dfinance provides a wide variety of developer tools and documentation, we focus on attracting financial experts which lack coding knowledge.
the high-level language (or HLL) — allows typing in ideas (suggestive input) and the result is a fully functioning, blockchain deployed financial instrument.
Q: Finding investors is hard, keeping investors is harder, so what strategy does DFINANCE have enough to make investors trust, and with DFINANCE project go a long way?
A: Integrity
Transparency
Hard work
we’ve been in the industry for years. we have history to show for it.
will the project succeed? I hope so, but it’s impossible to say for sure
will we do our very best to try to make it succeed? absolutely.
Q: One of the problems with PoS is that it is inflationary and the price always falls. Can you explain a little bit about the incentives surrounding this DFinance protocol?
A: Dfinance uses a dynamic inflation model.
It is also a sort of hybrid between cosmos dynamic inflation and SNX
generally — inflation goes DOWN the more people stake. Validators also have the OPTION to select to lock inflation rewards for 12 months (in SNX it’s mandatory) — by doing so — they significantly increase their rewards
In order to mitigate inflation and to possibly achieve a deflation status — 50% of network fees are burned by validators.
Q: One of the problems with defi is that of cross-chain Interoperability.
Dfinance network is bridged with Ethereum. Any plans to build a cross-chain bridge to Polkadot and Cosmos?
A: yes, and not only. We’re also looking at Elrond, Solana, and others.
Q: Would you agree with me that adoption and utility are key factors to the project’s survival and success? What’s being done to drive global adoption of amidst crypto regulations, legislation, and competition?
A: Absolutely —
For adoption to happen you need to first create value. This attracts interest. Add to this good security, UX/UI, and scalability and you are on the first step to adoption.
this is our plan as well —
1st — make sure value is created and people actually NEED the instruments created.
2nd — make it as easy (and secure) as possible to interact with the system
3rd — establish a market position and rinse and repeat.
Q: What are the competitive advantages of the Dfinance project? What would be Dfinance most similar contender in the market today in terms of scalability, security, features, and adaptability?in there a competitor?
A: When we started working on Dfinance, we had early identified a big need on the market — allowing non-developers to create DeFi products. The crypto market had traditionally catered to developers, and we wanted to change this status quo. We believe that Dfinance provides one of the first answers to this need, by basically being the “Wix” for DeFi — allowing to “type” one’s ideas into reality.
As per similar projects, I would point at Vega that shares the space, yet they are also more focused on developers, perhaps Kava who are running on Cosmos like us.
Q: I am very impressed with what DFINANCE project wants to do, so I want to ask DFINANCE has a plan to develop the market in Asia? Let me have a chance to join DFINANCE’s house!
A: we’re currently exploring a partnership that will help us gain exposure in Asia. More on this once there’s something concrete :)
Q: What is the advantage of using DFinance platform rather than a bank? How will you recommend your platform to some of the bank investors? Thank you.
A: I don’t think the instruments you will find on Dfinance are something that you will ever find in a traditional bank.
even very basic instruments such as crypto-based CDP — I don’t know of any bank that offers this today.
But even if they did — banks limit their best products to VIPs and High-Net-Value individuals only.
Q: What is the advantage and usefulness of PegZone? For what use cases is it intended?
A: Pegzones are cross-blockchain bridges.
they allow the transfer of value from 1 blockchain to another; through this, we are significantly expanding the playfield — imagine using BTC as collateral for a loan that is made of 30% BUSD from the Binance blockchain and 30% usdt and 60% DAI (because this would result in the lowest interest)
Q: DFinance has just integrated Chainlink but this is not the only decentralized oracle. Is it possible that DFinance can integrate other oracles like BAND or UTU for example? #dfinanceama
A: absolutely.
we provide building blocks. we want to integrate as many options as possible to make sure instrument creators can choose what they want to work with.
Q: What do you think if Ethereum starts to choke, DeFi will move to a new platform? And what is DFINANCE’s strategy if that happens?
A: we’re already seeing a lot of new projects looking at Cosmos (and Polkadot)
Since Dfinance is a tendermint-based (up to 10k txps) standalone blockchain which also integrates Move Virtual Machine it could accommodate a very large number of instruments and projects.
this is of course not our focus, but theoretically possible
Q: Do you plan to build partnerships with local cryptocurrency developers and local project in each country to make the use of DFINANCE more global
A: yes, we plan to do this through our ambassador program.
Q: Dfinance announced that it has integrated Chainlink Oracles. How will this integration benefit Dfinance and what is Oracle’s role in providing financial solutions?
A: put simply — almost all instruments require data.
be it the price of a specific coin, or the price of gold or stock, or weather data, or football results, or something else.
Integrating oracles allows instruments to access that required data.
Q: How was the Dfinance Virtual Machine (DVM) built and how will it mediate the development of financial solutions? How will the Dnode support planned in the next development phase benefit?
A: When we started designing Dfinance, we knew from day 1 we need a solid cross-blockchain protocol, as we aimed to become a Layer2 solution for the established systems. Thus we picked on Cosmos as the most stable and developed solution, having said that there was quite a serious limitation there, the lack of a Virtual Machine to be more exact. This meant that there will be significant limitations for creativity, as every new product would require a soft fork of the network, which is not scalable. Thus a decision to integrate a 3rd party VM was taken.
We did extensive research on the available VM’s, and while the Ethereum’s VM (EVM) was de facto standard, we became fascinated with Libra’s Move, especially because it solved many shortcomings we knew from years of working with EVM.
There is a good article which explains how for example a common attack is not possible on MoveVM:
https://dfinance.co/blog/how-dfinance-protect-against-reentrancy-attack/
By becoming one of the first projects both in Cosmos and in the entire crypto ecosystem to pioneer the open-source use of Move, we both gained the recognition in eyes of the Libra project (and Facebook by extension), yet what is more important, we think we have launched a feature-rich ecosystem, that enables us to quickly port over new features from Libra, thus making them available for Dfinance creators use while ideating, designing and launching new DeFi financial instruments.
Q: Non-fungible tokens are recently quite a phenomenon in the crypto space, does Dfinance have any plans on NFT?
A: yes we are absolutely interested and fascinated by NFTs and are exploring how to integrate NFTs as part of Dfinance.
Q: What roles does your project play in the innovativeness and future of DeFi and how does it spearhead the adoption of DeFi using blockchain solutions?
A: well, I think that by removing the technical barrier and allowing more people to create financial instruments — we are doing just that.
a good portion of financial instruments that we use today (in the blockchain industry as well but mainly in the traditional markets) — is the brainchild of non-technical people who have good financial markets understanding.
We aim to completely remove the need to have any technical understanding requirements in order to deploy new and exciting instruments.
Q: As You know, Many people judge a Project By the Token price, What do you have to say to investors? What’s the plan to increase the Token Demand?
A: The only way to really increase token demand (and this applies to all projects) — is to create real value and increase the token utility in that value creation process.
Closing Remarks
Eric: I think that’s a wrap! @bdevelle and @syrenity please invite all to official tg and Twitter?
Sebastian: certainly. you are all invited to join the Dfinance telegram channel
and to follow us on Twitter
https://twitter.com/dfinance_co
thank you everyone for the questions and the discussion. it was very fun and very engaging
