Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our Sifchain AMA. We really appreciate all your support. There were really good and thoughtful questions that were asked. For those who missed our AMA, this blog post is for you.
Introduction!
CryptoNationIN Admin – We are joined by @Omni_Skyfather from Sifchain.finance team. 🥳
Hi Odin! We’re glad to Invite you for the AMA 😃
Can you please introduce yourself and give our community a bit of an understanding of what kind of business background you come from and how you have applied it to your roles within Sifchain.finance?
Odin – We try to keep it focused on the team as opposed to individual members, but it’s no secret that a lot of our credibility lies with the fact that we have so many members from the Thorchain team, including its early architect. This gives us a lot of credibility and experience with cross-chain software and AMM token design.
Jazear did not just early architecture on Thorchain but helped with development on Cosmos’s official Ethereum <> Cosmos bridge for the Interchain Foundation and the Polkadot <> Ethereum bridge for Web 3 so we really know cross-chain.
Beyond that, our team has a lot of experience with other crypto projects including a YC backed crypto startup and multiple crypto exchanges.
Purely on the dev side, we have over a dozen engineers, most of whom have prior blockchain dev experience.
And strong business development or marketing experience from many major projects for our operations team.
CryptoNationIN Admin – Great! Thanks for the introduction
Twitter Questions
Q1. How do you see the next evolution and development direction of the DeFi track, and which sectors of the DeFi track are you optimistic about?
Odin – We see DeFi generalizing substantially. As we discuss in a Money Dance talk, a lot of the crypto currency projects we see have slightly different AMM fee structures that don’t really need to be separate products. https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1316066082919116800\
We’re building Sifchain to get closest to what SBF called “smart AMMs” where LPs can manage their investments while influencing the LP fee formula through governance that dynamically changes as the market conditions change https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1319361777616838659?s=21.
We think this, paired with Omni-chain liquidity is really the key to the future of DeFi growth. We see billions of dollars of liquidity lying in chains like XLM, XRP, XTZ, and BCH that are not yet participating in DeFi but should be.
If we can get people to think of cross chain liquidity as an essential feature, like block explorers or wallets, we can make so much more liquidity available for swappers and improve people’s gains.
The only other thing will comment on publicly here is that we also really like gaming and automated forms of money management. We will announce more on that later.
Q2. What is the business model of Sifchain? How Sifchain generates revenue for development? Why should everyone use Sifchain?
Odin – The model is pretty simple. Rowan is a settlement token, like Rune or Bancor. Every liquidity pool on Sifchain is equally weighted with Rowan and an external currency like MKR or COMP. The total amount of value of Rowan on Sifchain is always 3x the value of external assets on Sifchain if market participants are economically rational.
This is because all external assets must be paired with an equal amount of Rowan on the opposite side of a liquidity pool. So if there are $10M of external assets, there must be another $10M of Rowan in the pools with them. Then the validators have to stake a combine $20M to secure that, or more.
Through some back of the envelope math, you can see that the TVL of Sifchain drives the price of Rowan directly. We had the Gauntlet team validate the model for Thorchain and Sifchain is quite similar https://gauntlet.network/reports/thorchain.
Rowan LPs can earn swap fees and Rowan stalkers can earn block rewards. During the first 12 weeks after launch, both (as well as swappers) can earn liquidity minding rewards too!
As for development, the token sale and Rowan in treasury will cover those, we will also make some of the Rowan available for the Dao to do development independently of the core team. People should use safe chain because it’s the fastest, cheapest way to swap Ethereum tokens. And will be for every other chain as well as we start adding bridges.
Q3. Only getting users, holders etc is not everything. In my opinion, a project needs to deal with solving a real world issue or problem. What is the problem that your project primarily focuses on?
Odin – We’re focused on being the most efficient way for people to swap or trade crypto tokens. We have 100x faster TPS for EVERY ERC-20 token and ETH. In a world here high fees and slow transactions are clogging Ethereum, institutional traders and serious portfolio managers cannot commit serious capital to DeFi platforms. We open up that market and expand the user base of DeFi to increase the amount of on-chain volume possible.
We will solve this problem at launch for Ethereum, which is in Q4 2020. After that, we will solve the same problem for other chains all on the same network so people can trade their tokens against each other.
Q4. Safety and security are always the most important issues. How will the team resolve if there is an unfortunate security problem on the Sifchain? Has the team thought of a workaround for this problem?
Odin – We take security very seriously. We’ve invested in having a separate test engineering team which few if any projects have. This lets us have people just focused on writing test coverage and testing out corner cases.
We have a continuous audit going from our audit team and will also have programs for security firms and individual researchers to help us with big bounties and red team attacks.
Q5. COMMUNITIES gives a project a strong base, what are your plans on ” Global expansion and adoption ” with Sifchain? Will $Rowan holders be allowed to partake in the governance of this project ?
Odin – We are kicking off a strong global marketing campaign here on Crypto Nation 🙂
We are exploring liquidity sharing partnerships with strong exchanges in multiple key regions to drive user adoption and support to Sifchain in viable jurisdictions.
Rowan holders will definitely partake in on-chain governance. Eventually, all responsibilities for Sifchain’s development will be decided through on-chain governance via SifDao including software development, testing and quality assurance, product management, design, dev ops / IT, economic design, research, marketing, business development, legal, hiring, human resources, finance, partnerships, and public relations.
Of course, we need to launch first.
Q6. Farming is very popular nowadays but do you plan to add more features in your platform like staking, lending ,buyback or mining with your tokens? What other ways to enjoy and earn with Sifchain?
Odin – You can earn revenue through staking it as a validator or providing it for a liquidity pool as a liquidity provider. You’ll also be able to lend it to margin traders or use it for governance for new features and protocol management.
Buy back tends to be an ineffective way to increase price if done directly by a token team on exchanges but we are exploring vigilant ways to make sure the token supply of Rowan stays small so it is a scare resource relative to demand. Ways that can be addressed in a more decentralized fashion.
Q7. Roadmap is really important thing to make investor learn and believe about your project. Can you share us Sifchain roadmap? How was Sifchain journey from beginning and what are the next Sifchain plan?
Odin – Right now we are focused on allowing pegged Ethereum tokens on Sifchain. We will launch mainnet for this in Q4, maybe even this month! We had over 100 validators testing this with token swaps as soon as we opened up our testnet campaign.
Mainnet launch will coincide with a 12 week liquidity mining program to incentivize validators, swappers, and liquidity providers.
After that, we’re focused on delivering margin and limit orders which we see as 2-3 months away. Simultaneously, we’ll build bridges to as many chains as we can. We expect to get out 4 bridges a month starting in Q1 2020.
We have other supplemental features in our roadmap which we hope to announce after building out the basic platform.
Q8. Users often care less about technology, but rather the value of the token. How do Sifchain manage to strike a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of the token?
Odin – Yeah good question. We have separate teams focused on crypto economics and development. It’s very important to us that everything we do ultimately speak back to the Rowan token price. At the same time, we need a core understanding of the tech to deliver any value.
Telegram Questions
Q9. What is your long-term vision about the industry which you are working on? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace your project?
Odin – That’s a great question. You know we’ve actually struggled with communicating this stuff. Some people like to hear about a clear, concise short term vision and other people like to hear that you are focused on an expansive long term vision. It’s hard to create marketing material that satisfies everyone.
Here’s an excerpt from a post we’re hoping to get out about our long-term plans for Sifchain, if the short term plans work out.
The computational modeling and keen investor intuition won’t just be used to decide investors’ positions relative to Rowan, they’ll help inform the direction of the product and presumably improve it for investors of every relevant risk profile. This is what cadCAD calls “Computer Aided Governance.” <- https://medium.com/block-science/computer-aided-governance-cag-a-revolution-in-automated-decision-support-systems-9faa009e57a2.
Q10. What makes you conscientious about this industry? What is your motivation to build strong Sifchain?
Odin – Another great question we really want to address. For us, the real issue is that cross chain liquidity needs to become ubiquitous.
Ethereum is great but it has performance issues and it only covers a relatively small amount of the total cryptocurrency market cap. We want to enable control of the entire amount of marketcap for every current and new blockchain through on-chain transactions.
If we can do that and support limit orders and margin trading, we will have provided a strong platform for traders to have a one stop shop for everything they need with cryptocurrency trading. The holy Grail.
Q11. Truly you’ve done AMA in many telegram groups, so what next, what other way will you make your project more popular? How do you planning to solve the scaling problem And how do you overcome the threat of centralization?
Odin – Yeah this is helpful as well. Here’s another excerpt from a blog post we have not yet released:
The Sifchain core team and community need to work hand in hand to ensure that Sifchain’s mainnet is well-tested and well-supported, and that the full vision of the protocol is carried out beyond mainnet. If Sifchain’s mission appeals to you, we urge you to stay in contact by joining our Telegram, following us on Twitter, joining our Discord, and subscribing to our Newsletter.
If you feel called to contribute more, we encourage you to start by reviewing the code we’ve open sourced at https://github.com/Sifchain. You can always address outstanding Github Issues https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/issues and speed up time to completion. We’ll be attributing rewards for some development help over Gitcoin. Until we can get our Gitcoin account set up, you should just feel free to review the issues filed in https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/issues and if you fix one and we accept your pull request, you will receive $250 or more via USDC.
If you’re looking for a way to contribute to Sifchain while earning income, we will provide opportunities to do that. If you want to invest in Sifchain’s success fund a bug or feature reward for a new issue or small feature. In special cases, the Sifchain core team may even invest alongside you!
Another way to contribute is with code reviews. Look at our developer documentation https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/tree/develop/docs and our pull requests https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/pulls. This is a great place to review what’s coming to the protocol. You can identify ways to improve the protocol and submit PRs of your own. The Sifchain core team doesn’t guarantee it will accept your PRs without substantial revision, or that it won’t leave your PR without being able to review it in depth, but it intends to put as much effort into cultivating community contribution as it can.
Yet another thing you can do is maintain a Sifchain testnet node. We have a strong community of testnet operators who serve as the first user of all of Sifchain’s code. By running and maintaining a Sifnode, you help the community test and operate at scale.
Q12. Is Sifchain a fully decentralized project? How do you avoid being centralized more?
Odin – We have been actively reviewing frameworks like this one to measure decentralization https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-decentralization-test-ketsal-open-standards.
Q13. You launched Monkey Bars, How successful has the Testnet been and when should we be expecting your mainnet launch, also will there be other Sifchain testnets before then?
Odin – It was really attractive. We were looking for 10 to 20 validators and we got over 150 to sign up. We will release other testnets in the future and/or upgrade our existing testnet, the next one is coming out this week.
Q14. What are the plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand about the project easily?
Odin – We have a lot of work to do in that area. Actually, if anyone is a technical writer or can write accurate blog posts that speak to a general audience, please let us know. We are working on a lot of documentation now.
We have the budget to move quickly on this, we have just scaled so quickly on coding that documentation and communication has not been as strong a priority. We really want to improve here.
Thank you to Odin Borson and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day
