Dear Community,
Thanks all for participating in our MANTRA DAO 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!
Mayank – Hello 🙂 @denkomanceski welcome to CryptoNationIN 🥳
Denko – Thanks! Glad to be here
Mayank – Before we start, I request you to tell about yourself.
Denko – My name is Denko, I am the CEO of Reef. I have a tech background myself. Started development in early high school with C++ (did algorithmic competitions for few years), then moved into the enterprise world where I worked for 2 ERP providers (built some modules and some mobile apps which are still used to this day). Few years later I moved to one of the biggest healthcare platform providers in Europe. 5.5 years ago I got into crypto and started blockchain development myself. My first experience was with NXT (then turned into Ardor), and I have also been doing a lot of Solidity (Ethereum), Steem and some EOS.
Mayank – Could you please tell the community about the Reef Finance.
Denko – Yeah. Reef is a DeFi operating system — a permission-less smart liquidity aggregator and yield engine where any financial hub can integrate into. Powered by Polkadot, it shares its security model with the ecosystem, and enables cross-chain integrations across top DeFi protocols. Reef gives the retail investor access to the whole DeFi landscape with a very low technical barrier of entry.
Mayank – Amazing 🥳
Twitter Questions
Q1. Feature is the most vital thing in building project growth, a product will not develop without good feature and promotion, whatever it is good. so, how about Reef Finance? Can you provide a list of killer features that scare your competitors over your project?
Denko – Reef yield engine allows you access to all the currently available yield farming protocols. Since it’s powered by an analytics engine, it can maximize your yield by routing your funds to the highest yielding pools. The problem is that farming protocols and instances have different risk levels. We derive risk levels based on multiple metrics, from social media traction, to on-chain traffic. This way, the users have a better understanding of how they allocate their funds, and can adjust based on their risk tolerance. This is a feature that requires both statistical/machine learning skills as well as blockchain.
Q2. Most new DeFi projects are just copies of existing ones, they are just useless. So, what’s unique about your project & what makes Reef trustable as a long term project for users and investors?
Denko – First, Reef being cross-chain gives us flexibility, which means we are able to shift our product and features based on where the users are (currently on Ethereum) and what the users want/need in the future. Additionally, Reef abstracts away the complexities of using order books and learning how different DeFi protocols work. Just like Robinhood app gives access to the average user to the traditional financial landscape (derivatives, option chains, etc..), Reef gives access to the DeFi landscape and tokens and additionally augments the decision making process based on user’s risk levels. These are some of the very important things that make Reef unique.
Q3. Where did you get the inspiration for this unique project idea of REEF ? And what influence will we have on the crypto industry due to the project?
Denko – Reef happened naturally after observing certain problems repeating in different industries over and over again. Naturally, people resist complexity. The best way to learn about the inspiration would be to read the origin story: https://medium.com/reef-finance/reef-origin-story-5a16a4f346a8.
Regarding the influence, its important for users to not be super fragmented, so through Reef one can participate in the whole landscape. If the ladnscape is not fragmented, then we can build a stronger momentum around DeFi and bring new investors currently part of the traditional stock market.
Q4. Why did Reef choose to build on Polkadot ecosystem? What is the advantage using Polkadot for Reef?
Denko – Polkadot’s parachain communication (XCMP) and bridging mechanism, combined with the possibility to run solidity code on parachains such as Plasm, use native Ethereum addresses and huge ecosystem support (Web3, Parity) were the reasons why we chose to build on Polkadot.
Telegram Questions
Q5. Reef is essentially a Global Liquidity Aggregator. It reminds me of Orion Protocol, what makes Reef really innovative and not more of the same?
Denko – The global liquidity aggregation is just a third of our product. We also have the yield farming aggregator + the smart asset management. Those 3 things combined give the non tech-savvy user access to the whole landscape with low technical barrier of entry + a tailored exposure based on his risk level.
Q6. “Trade at best price”, “earn the best return of staking…” How do you assure the “BESTs”, what mechanism of your system provides all these features?
Denko – In the background, we are connected to all the DEX mechanisms as well as CEXes through Prime brokers. By best it means that based on the size we will route the order to the most liquid places.
Q7. Can you elaborate on the experience of the development team who developed #REEF FINANCE?
Denko – The dev team is based in Slovenia, we have been working together for over 2 years on multiple blockchain as well analytics projects together. Last year we mostly did analytics (B2B). In January this year we decided to focus on DeFi and started building Reef.
Q8. What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Denko – Please check the origin story I posted above.
Q9. Most defi projects do not maintain price stability, can ReefDefi solve that problem? What is ReefDefi’s investor attraction strategy?
Denko – Reef currently has 3 income streams: Basket engine, protocol fees and interest paid by powerusers who borrow tokens from the Reef pool in order to increase their voting power. All the 3 income streams are currently flowing in the Reef pool. In the future, through voting, we plan to introduce Reef Treasury which will be the recipient of the income streams, and the DAO can further decide how to allocate the funds (eg: grants, buybacks, etc.
Q10. Reef is able to connect several DeFi Protocols including Uniswap, Kyber, Compound, etc. What is the infrastructure that performs this ability?
Denko – We have infrastructure on Ethereum as well as Polkadot. We will be deploying our runtime modules on multiple Polkadot’s parachains as well.
Q11. What is the Reef Finance doing for the mass distribution of DeFi technology? How easy is it to use Reef Finance in an existing infrastructure?
Denko – As I mentioned before, Reef abstracts away the complexities of using order books and learning how different DeFi protocols work. Just like Robinhood app gives access to the average user to the traditional financial landscape (derivatives, option chains, etc..), Reef gives access to the DeFi landscape and tokens and additionally augments the decision making process based on user’s risk levels.
Q12. What are the main utility and real-life usage of the #Reef token? Could you give me 3 key points to convince me and other angel investors invest in #Reef in long-term?
Denko – Check the 3 income streams I mentioned above.
Q13. What makes Reef Finance different from the rest and who are your main competitors in cross chain niche?
Denko – Reef being cross-chain gives us flexibility, which means we are able to shift our product and features based on where the users are (currently on Ethereum) and what the users want/need in the future.
Q14. Recently hacking often happens in our crypto world, how does Reef Team respond to this situation? Does Reef DeFi has its own insurance and guarantees to prevent its platform from being hacked?
Denko – Reef’s infrastructure is a composition of multiple smart contracts, audited by multiple companies. We do not hold your assets or have access to any of them
Q15. What are the utilities of Reef token in your ecosystem ?
Denko – The reef token is a governance token, so the users will be able to vote on different proposals (releasing new features, readjusting certain parameters in the system, etc.). Besides governance, the token is powering our infrastructure, so you can pay the protocols fees with it. It can also be used to stake into the Reef pool and get RPTs (Reef Pool Tokens), but it’s also going to be used in the yield distribution mechanism (customizable payout ratio for the yield that the basket generated), which will allow the user to farm the Reef token and directly stake it into the pool. You can also read above the answer regarding the income streams.
Q16. The biggest barrier for newcomers in crypto is buying and withdraw with Fiat Currency, how secure and robust is your FIAT Gateway and what currencies are currently available locally?
Denko – We have been integrating different FIAT gateways in the past. Simplex is one of the gateways which we will integrate in Q4.
Q17. Why did Reef Finance choosed polkadot ecosystem instead of Ethereum ? Any reason.
Denko – Polkadot’s interoperability layer allows us to communicate with all the blockchains and still achieve high throughput. Additionally, we inherit their security model, which means we get to be highly resilient, can do forkless upgrades while still being able to maintain stable on-chain governance. We are fully compatible with Ethereum and the current DeFi ecosystem, but we believe in order to innovate and take the landscape to the next level, we have to take it cross-chain, and through Polkadot we are able to achieve that. I saw this question posted multiple times so here is the detailed answer.
Q18. Token burn” is beneficial for any project, in being able to control the number of token circulation and to provide greater incentives to investors. Does your great project have a plan about token burn?
Denko – We are currently exploring few deflationary mechanisms.
Q19. Why the Reef Intelligence Engine is an Off-chain Oracle? There not better option be On-Chain? Why you decided keep It away?
Denko – Initially, the intelligence engine will be off-chain because there is a lot of data and a lot of high-frequency processing. The moment we are able to deploy our solution in a decentralized cloud (eg: Crust.network) we will move the whole infrastructure there.
Q20. A strong project needs great investors, so how did Reef raise funds successfully? How do you convince investors to trust and cooperate with you?
Denko – We have raised 3.9m$ so far from known investors such as: QCP, NGC, Woodstock, Kenetic, Bitcoin.com, LD Capital, etc.
Q21. What are the benefits of providing liquidity at ReefFinance? What are the incentives at the moment?
Denko – You will be able to earn a % of the income streams (Reef pool has 3 -> mentioned above).
Q22. What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Denko – Please check the origin story: https://medium.com/reef-finance/reef-origin-story-5a16a4f346a8.
Thank you to Denko Mancheski, and Community for participating in the AMA. Have a nice day
