Spotlight of Web 3.0 Podcast Second Episode Transcript— Building within Polygon Ecosystem
In Spotlight of Web 3.0, we share about what you care about the crypto world. This is a talk series produced by Huobi Incubator, the incubation arm of Huobi Global Exchange. We support developers building the crypto space in many ways, and we think that sharing their stories is one of them.
Podcast Host:
Victor Lee, Investment advisor at Huobi Incubator
Speaker:
Steven Bryson-Haynes, VP, Head of BD — NFT & Gaming of Polygon Studios
Prashant Soni, CMO of Tristan
Jeral Rodriguez, Customer Success Manager of DeFiner
Stefanie Wei, Researcher at Huobi Research
Victor: Would the speakers introduce yourselves.
Stefanie: It’s nice to be back again, I am a researcher from Huobi Research. Huobi Research is a professional research institute and we have been deep dive into the crypto industry for many years. I think today’s conversation will be very interesting and meaningful as we are going to talk about what’s going on and what we can do in Web 3.
Jeral(DeFiner): I am a customer success manager at DeFiner and I am very happy to be here. DeFiner is a DeFi lending protocol. DeFiner is a combination of two words, “DeFi” and “ner”, which stands for Decentralized Finance innovator. Our DeFi lending protocol just cross chained to Polygon and we are building our next generation product, the DeFiner 2.0. We might dive a little bit deeper about this later into the conversation. I am very grateful to be here and being able to bounce ideas off each other and learn about Web 3. Excited about what we can bring to the table to make sure things stays secure, decentralized and in a way giving the power back to the people with this technology.
Victor: Of course, Web 3 is about inclusion. As more people are coming into finance, get them to participate in this movement is what we are looking for, definitely.
Prashant(Tristan): I am the CMO of Tristan and I am very glad to be here. In Tristan, we are making the Web 3.0 more accessible to people out there by simplifying the login process or just taking away this part in general.
Our team has been working together for over a year now and right now our project’s objective is to make the DeFi space more accessible. When you are trying to get into any Web 3 app you need to connect your wallet right? For a lot of users who are new into this space it just becomes daunting. Just to give you a little background about our company. Before founding Tristan our founder founded a consumer electronic business. We were specialized in providing tech solutions, e-commerce and FinTech solutions to South East Asia and South Asia. So when our team was thinking about we wish to solve for blockchain, it looks like a natural move for us to bring our insight of consumer behaviour into Web 3.0. Right now, we want to capture the market space of Web 2.0 and make products that would allow an easy transition for those users to enter Web 3.0 era.
Steven(Polygon): Thank you very much and good to be here. So my background previously was investment banking in Australia, listed around 26 companies. In 2017 I went deep into cryptos. I was the head of corporate for Australia’s largest crypto investment bank Digital X, which listed on the Australian stock market. In 2019, I did a lot of Esports deals, especially sponsorship deals, with top Esport teams. Around 9 months ago I joined Polygon studios to link up my gaming, investment, and crypto experience. I am now heading Polygon studio’s business development team. Polygon studio is the NFT and Gaming arm of Polygon, the head company being the Ethereum scaling solution.
Victor: Would you guys explain more about what your company do to our audience?
Jeral(DeFiner): As I sad before, DeFiner stands for decentralized finance innovator. We founded the project back in 2018, the very early stage of DeFi and the tail-end of the ICO era. There are two ways in finance, the centralized and the decentralized. We believed in the decentralized vision from the very beginning. Our company started off with a true peer to peer model and then slowly migrated into a pool model, which was what we have today. I would like to mention more about our V2 product, which is our next generation, a truly permissionless lending protocol. The idea here is that anyone can come to DeFiner and create a debt market for their tokens.
You mentioned in you question what problems are we trying to solve here. You see, there are Compound and AAVE in the world, who have limited offerings in their lending markets for crypto assets. When you go to Coinmarketcap or Coingecko you see that there are almost 20,000 tokens out there, but when you look at the DeFi lending protocols that are in the market, what do you see? 40, 50 crypto assets that have a debt market available? Those long-tail assets have the potential and ability to create those debt markets, and I know not all of them have those high risks involved. The reason why we currently have so few crypto assets with debt market is because of the liquidation mechanism. At DeFiner with our second generation product — DeFiner 2.0, we want to bring Web 3 and how that empowers people to the table. As more and more projects have the ability to create those lending markets based on different configurations, trading needs to be very permissionless, configurable, and also having privacy on top of their mind.
Victor: Can you explain a bit more about what differentiates DeFiner from other borrowing/ lending markets out there?
Jeral(DeFiner): Yes of course. First of all, I would like to give you a picture of what we are trying to do and anything similar within the market. Just like anyone can go on to Uniswap and create a trading pair, anyone can come to DeFiner V2 and create their own lending pool. The final 2.0 is a big project and we are launching it in different stages, the first stage is actually coming pretty soon with the creation of a child pool, a separate pool from our main savings pool. Later on, we will be adding completely configurable market creation.
The privacy features are very key and will be featured to users as options later on in our V2 product. As we can see currently in the landscape of DeFi and the blockchain industry as a whole, all transactions are 100% public. As attaching an identity to an address on the blockchain is not mission impossible, the privacy concerns on the associated users and their related data is increasing. Because of this, DeFiner wants to introduce a new privacy function with our V2 product into our smart contract. This will enable anyone that transfer their balance within our contract not disclosing any destination addresses information anymore. The lending contract will act as a black box and breaking the onchain link between your deposits and withdrawals, users at the end will have 100% privacy and in control of their accounts. Privacy is a big part of what we believe in. When the users can trace or having a trace list transactions in their will, a function that users will be having with our V2 product, it will achieve the true financial freedom.
Victor: Hi Steven, I would like to dive deeper into your role in Polygon Studio and the verticals of what you are trying to do. How would your role affect the Polygon community?
Steven(Polygon): Sure, our role is to onboard developers onto Polygon. We help them within a number of areas, the first being we have a Polygon Shares Investment Fund or Polygon Ecosystem Fund, it’s a $100 million fund that we solely invest into the Polygon projects. We also help projects within the tech integration side. So if you are looking at how you can integrate Polygon, what the best practice is, what the best tooling/ wallets are, if you wanting to speak to our tech team, we can set up a channel with you and work with you for all of those needs and requirements. We can also work through a marketing campaign with projects to help them reaching out to our millions of followers through our different social media channels and building their ecosystem. We have gotten around 8000 projects already built on Polygon now, so a lot of our work is around helping these projects to partner up with the others in the space, growing their ecosystems, and becoming very strong Web 3 projects within our overall Polygon Ecosystem.
Victor: Great! $100 Million fund and of course 8000 projects on the Polygon level itself, that is an awesome achievement. And of course we know that right? Because all of us have actually interacted with Polygon as well, and I think that is actually crazy. Just to imagine how far Polygon has come was great. Fantastic thanks for the introduction, Steven.
Let’s go to Prashant, can you talk about what your protocol does and how would that benefit the users?
Prashant(Tristan): Ohh sure. We have two core products, first is MetaWallet, a solution for the pain points within a lot of metaverse and Web 3.0. Let me introduce the pain points that we have studied in the market. The first point is accessibility marked the barriers. It’s really hard for users to join Web 3.0. You need to create a wallet, remember the phrase and you can’t just log in from any device that you want to, you need to remember every details.
The second point is the lifetime value and high churn rate of the users in the metaverse. For instance, we all remember the downfall of Axie Infinity and how it took a major dive in the recent past because it couldn’t retain the customers, the reinvestment from users is pretty low.
The third point is the limited user base. With more and more companies developing games but very few actually trying to solve the problem, it hinders the growth of Web 3.0 and decentralized space in general.
MetaWallet is a bridge between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. It allows you to use your social media identity to create a wallet. You just need to make one click and your Web 3.0 identity is linked to your social media identity. You can open any game that you want or access any Web 3.0 content you want with just one click from your discord, telegram or any social media app that you can think of.
For our second product, which is Survival, it’s a metaverse game. It is essentially a 2D pixel art based game. It has a very heavy emphasis on narrative for it to create a unique experience that’s fairly light, as we do not think that the current infrastructure on the Web. 3.0 is mature enough to handle games like Genshin Impact. We want to make something like Angry Bird which can appeal to a lot of users and masses and we can just make them move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.
Also for metaverse, what I would like to add is that, our solution is like when you access Microsoft and Linux. Linux offers you many more choices and options which you can use and same goes for Android versus IOS. Android gives you so many much features but still people prefer IOS and Microsoft. We want to bring the same convenience of Windows to the Linux with our MetaWallet.
Victor: Great, Thanks for the introduction, very detailed on the two products, the wallet and of course the metaverse, the ecosystem that you are trying to build with Tristan.
Let’s invite somebody from Huobi Research Department, Stafanie. Can you explain a little bit more about what Huobi Research is actually doing?
Stefanie: Yes, we have done a lot of research about the projects like DeFi, NFT, or GameFi. We also published reports and given out deep opinions about the blockchain, such as Level one blockchains and Level two solutions. Our institute is positioned right at the bank of market, and it is very exciting for us to know about what’s going on in the market, the new road maps, technology, and ecosystem building.
Victor: Thanks Stefanie, thank you everyone for the detailed introduction. What is everyone’s definition of Web 3? What is your point of view about the differences between Web 2 and Web 3?
Jeral(DeFiner): That’s a great question. For me, Web 3 is the decentralization aspect and the empowerment aspect of the Internet, of the Web. I think, the main difference between what we have seen today as Web 2 and Web 3 is that, with Web 3, people have the custody of their own data and the ownership, so to speak, of who they are on the web, without being commercialized or monetized by third parties. What we have seen today with Web 2 is, you know the conventional way that Internet has developed and connected over the world, being that aspect of centralization. Even though internet is a web across the world, who is in charge of, or owner of those servers that are providing data exchanges between points around the world determines the centralized party, and we see that there’s a big centralization around companies and corporations surrounding that, and they owning in a way our personal data. So with Web 3, in my opinion is taking that back to the users who will ultimately become the owners. People can own their own data and do what they please online and with all these integrations coming up and all that DApps that are integrating with Web 2 interfaces. By bridging that gap between Web 2 and Web 3, more and more people are coming to join and grow this space. So that is my take on Web 2 and Web 3 and the differences between them.
Prashant(Tristan): So from what I understand, Web 3.0 is broad set of ideas, which is a more decentralized Internet space and offers a more robust internet. Digital and real world are linked closer than ever thanks to machine learning and AI. I think broadly upcoming theme here will be about transparency and control over your data, as people start to realize the value of their data and how they can manage to monetize it. If you see the common theme in recent times, a lot of countries are realizing the value of this data and aiming to localize the data. I think that this is just my general view that Web 2.0 and 3.0 will coexist in their own space and niche.
Steven(Polygon): From my area, it’s quite simple. It’s giving the ownership and the value back to users rather than centralized organizations, and that’s done via the Internet and with the use of blockchain. Now we’re seeing from our side that one of the strongest use cases is in the gaming space, because it’s providing a lot of utility with earning those NFTs. Gaming is now offering a very strong opportunity to be able to actually use these NFT to grow value through Play-to-earn gaming. The strength of that is, if you’re putting a lot of time and effort into some of your favourite games, or if you can move that value from one to the other, you can earn a full time living out of playing games in some of these third world countries. It’s kind of everyone’s kids dream job really, isn’t it so? Yeah, for us it’s quite simple that we’re moving the value and shifting that back to the users rather than a centralized Web 2 company.
Stefanie: I totally agree with the other guests. I think in Web 3, our data, our identity, and our intellectual properties are owned by ourselves and not other centralized companies. So I think this part is very important. And because blockchain’s decentralized characteristics, we have the ability to build Web 3 world. With NFT and meterverse projects, we are able to rebuilt our identities in the Web 3 world, and our properties will be protected by the decentralized protocols. It is drastically different from Web 2.
Victor: Steven, could you tell us a bit more about Polygon’s focus for 2022? What are the verticals and focuses out there right now?
Steven(Polygon): Yeah, so at Polygon you need to go back to our initial aim, which is that Polygon is purely built to be scaling Ethereum. So originally it was the POS side chain or commit chain. However, we’ve now spent over $2 billion on ZK solutions, which are the next iteration of scaling Ethereum. These are going to be coming out live this year. They’re very much what we see as the next level of scaling, and also what the Ethereum Foundation have said that, ZKs for the next layer of scaling is going to be really pushing the use case of Ethereum. So there’s some of the big areas within the tech space.
We’ve also just launched Polygon Edge, which is where you can spawn your own side chains. We’re seeing a lot of use cases for that in gaming, where ultimately the amount of decentralization you have isn’t the strongest requirement. It’s more high throughput, low cost, and even having a permission chain where you can choose which games can come onto your chain. So we’ve now launched Polygon Edge as well and that’s getting a lot of interests for the gaming space that we’re really excited about.
On Polygon studios, it was set up 9 or 10 months ago as the advisory consulting arm for the NFT and gaming space for Polygon. It’s around assisting, onboarding, and helping developers grow into Web3. So that can start with a consulting piece of what are they doing within Web 2, how they should be converting over, what their strategy might be, what their use case is, what the advantages are. Working through that with them and then looking at what are their traditional products could be moved over, which new products might they be interested in building?
So after we’ve done that consulting piece, it then moves on towards: what out there in the ecosystem might they want to be using to partner with, to work with on a tooling perspective, so we can make a lot of those introductions. We can help, but tech resources can guide them through that process as well. When they’re ready to launch, we’ve got our in house marketing team to work on set of three to six month campaign within the Web 3 ecosystem. Grow them in that ecosystem to be able to reach a lot of new users. We’ve got access now obviously to all the PR channels such as crypto PR, gaming PR, financial PR, so we can definitely do a large collaboration there.
We offer grants and investments in the space to certain projects that we really want to back and get behind. So that’s another key point. So for us it’s very much working with developers to see what they want to do in Web 3, guide them through that process, and help them have a successful launch on the Polygon.
Victor: Fantastic. Could you explain slightly a little bit more about Polygon Edge for the developers? What is this and how would it work and benefit the startups out there?
Steven( Polygon): Yeah, so Polygon Edge is another form of scaling. As I said we have the POS chain, the ZK solutions and Polygon Edge, the mains through the moment. We do have other ones out there, but specifically for some of NFTs and gamings they would be the main one.
With Polygon Edge, we see that in the gaming space, if you’re looking at having a very large game, you’re wanting to do much more on chain transactions. So maybe you’re going to be having between 100,000 or even up to 1,000,000 transactions a day. But if all those transactions aren’t very high costs on moving millions of dollars or so on, then the value or the need of having a very decentralized application for security isn’t the main requirement. For gaming and other applications, they are looking at how cheap can the transactions be? How fast can they be?And then sometimes it can be both permissioned or permissionless.
So, if you want to create your own games network, if you’re a large game developer and you want to be able to have a permission system where other games can join your network if you want them to, Polygon Edge becomes an options when you are running your own chain. You can set the chain with how much decentralization you want. If you want to run 4 nodes or 100 nodes, and this obviously changes the speed and throughput within your own side chain. So we’re seeing now a lot of game companies have started to review this as an opportunity to be able to have very high throughput in games, have deep volumes on on-chain transactions.
The benefit of using Polygon Edge is that it is an EVM compatible chain, so all of the tech tooling ecosystem partners that are out there on Polygon and Ethereum can also be used on Polygon Edge. And it will have bridges back to Polygon and Ethereum. So when you’re running your games and you have millions of players on there and they’re creating value out of the assets created from your chain, they can then bridge those assets back to Polygon or Ethereum, moved them to exchanges, move them to Opensea, etc.. For instance, sell those assets and keep the value. So that’s to give you a bit of a snapshot of why Polygon Edge is now looking to be a very high opportunity scaling solution for the gaming space.
Victor: Great great, thanks for the explanation. I think it’s a very good solution, especially for a lot of developers. One step you talked about, like when you mentioning about what Polygon does, which is the advisory and consultancy, incubation and grant, and then there is support and marketing and access to the Investors network. Could you talk about the specifics on this? How would the process works? For example, how would a gaming company with Esports would be able to work with Polygon Studio, Polygon Edge or with the incubation?
Steven(Polygon): Yes, Esports is a great opportunity. I was worked with quite a few teams,100 Thieves, for instance. It was one of the largest Esports organizations out there. They just recently did an NFT drop on Polygon. Would have been about four weeks ago now.
That process was so smooth that it gave a lot of traditional Web 2 users such an easy introduction to Web 3. Quite simply, you go to the website. You can create a wallet with one or two clicks using your email address or Gmail or Instagram as effectively your wallet permission. So no more requirements of writing down your 12 secret words, storing them under the mattress, losing it, and then not knowing how to get back in.
That’s some of the areas we’re seeing. So for instance they used a very good solution to be able to have users come in create an NFT, mint it within 30 seconds, displayed in their NFT wallet. They onboarded, I think within 24 hours, something like 800,000 new wallets. So it was a really exciting time.
And we are seeing that now in the gaming space, specifically in Esports, it’s not created around “How can the Esports team make more money off their users and sell them more products”, if NFT is a product. They’re seeing much more around, what can they offer their users through added value, through utility, through use cases to be able to actually give real utility and acceptance to their users rather than buy more project NFTs. So that’s where we see this moving a lot, where it’s how much value and interactions can I give back to my users rather than how much can I take from them, and we’re really enjoying that.
So now you know 100 Thieves did theirs recently. Fanatic in Europe just did their NFT drop. On Polygon there another very large Esports organizations. We’ve got two or three more in the pipeline that we can’t talk about at the moment, but they will be announcing hopefully this month or next month, some very large US teams. That’s in that area. We work with them across either on tech development, support, ecosystem support, what they should be doing, how they should be, what type of utilities these NFT can have for their users, What we’re seeing as a growth trajectory in the space? How do their potential competitors build their products within Web 3? So all of these areas are how we can look to help the Esports organizations.
We’re working also with a group called Yesports, which is an Esports NFT marketplace and metaverse. They’ve already signed up with eight or nine leading Esports teams to be able to create the user experiences of NFTs together with the company for their users, have a metaverse opportunity there. And then over time, be able to give value back via NFTs. In the Esports space it works so well because both of them are 100% online, so these NFTs can give you things like interactions with your favourite players, training sessions with players, five on five with your friends versus the best five of that team. All of these are experiences that come great opportunities that lend people to Web 3.
Victor: The sports is the next low hanging fruit whereby you can onboard hundreds of thousands and millions of people from like the vector space right from the gaming space from like Fortnite or from PUBG, right? You know all these things are going to bring in so much more users on board. I think that you nail everything down. I think that Polygons is going towards the right direction to figure out how to onboard the next two billion customers.
Prashant, since that you were mentioning about Metaverse project and your own wallet, which is kind of a cross chain. Maybe you can expand it a bit more on how would your project work with Polygon and how would Tristan be able to onboard the next 2 billion people?
Prashant(Tristan): I think we share a lot of similarities with Polygon on this, where we want to make the transition from Web 2.0 to 3.0 as easy and convenient as possible. People should be able to use their email or social media account to login, and they should be able to login from anywhere without remembering those phrases. But the thing is that, if each metaverse were going have their own mechanisms, you need to grand them authority to communicate with your wallet. It will create trust issue. Our MetaWallet is going to solve with this problem by acting as an API between, which will allow users from Web 2.0 or anyone to login to metaverse anywhere with one click from their social media.
We are planning to onboarding a lot of users. Our initial plan is to get from the market share of Web 3.0, the old players from GameFi and DeFi space, then our focus is to get the user base from traditional Web 2 games, as you can see people who liked to play normal games are not there for play to earn mechanism or NFTs, and just want to enjoyed the games. We want the Web 3.0 games to be as simple and as easy as this.
We can help Polygon with it by incorporating our MetaWallet solution into their ecosystem, which would make it much easier to onboard new users.
Victor: Would DeFiner share about your thoughts on this question too?
Jeral(DeFiner): Yes of course. So I’ve heard the saying that Polygon wants to be kind of like the AWS of the crypto industry and here in DeFiner we have a vision as well, which is becoming the JP Morgan of this space. We truly believe that the future of the DeFi is multi-chained and Polygon in a way is helping with the adoption of crypto throughout the whole world.
Going back to your question. What I’ve seen in the crypto space and how we can help with is first of all the different cycles that are there in the space right now. 2020 was the year of DeFi, then we have 2021 NFT and then after that Metaverse. What I’m seeing throughout all of this, is that the DeFi and especially DeFiner and its role is that we will become or we are becoming the infrastructure of the entire blockchain/crypto ecosystem. So there will always be demand for DeFi and people actually now focusing on Polygon. We see demands from people to unlock more capital to optimize their yields. Because ultimately, people come to many of us here in this call because they see how that benefits them. A big part of it is DiFi, and DeFi lending protocols generating yields, et cetera. So I think as a DiFi learning protocol, we need to be very versatile in the way that we interact with other projects in this space and especially with Polygon, now that we can help this space grow.
Just to give you a background, we launched on Polygon a couple of weeks ago. On the day and just in about a couple of weeks, our TVL has grown to about 2,000,000. Our presence on Polygon has being growing and expanding as we helping other projects grow and covering their financial needs in the space. With the finer 2.0, that’s going to help them more as they will be able to create those debt markets for their tokens. So I believe it’s a combination of factors. But above all there is a need. There is a place for DeFi and DeFi lending in any project that is in this space.
I’m glad to know my colleague here from Tristan talking about wallets and how they benefited and integrated the market as they bridging Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. We’re working with wallets as well to make it easier for the users of DeFiner to connect from wherever they are to this service. Because ultimately, our focuses are our users and we go to where they are and make it convenient for them to connect with Web 3.0 services such as DeFiner and similar services presented here in this call with my colleagues. So yeah, thank you.
Victor: I would like to ask both Tristan and DeFiner as you guys are working with Polygon right now, what advice would you have for other developers or other protocols? How is the experience like working with Polygon? What are the support out there?
Jeral(DeFiner): Yes of course. That is a great question. With Polygon, our experience here at DeFiner has been amazing. I would say they’ve been there with us at every step of the way. We actually have been in contact with them since Q3 or Q4 of last year, whenever we’ve needed some resource, some communication aspects, they’ve been there along the way, so we’ve had a great experience with their team. They are very open and collaborative, so that’s one of the things that we appreciate about their efforts and the way that they support the projects building on Polygon.
At least in our case. They’ve been there for us. We’ve also had the privilege to work with the Polygon ecosystem, DAO, and we’ve been recipients of a Polygon grant as well, all throughout that process from inception, of the way up to this point, and the way that things are managed in the Polygon.
On the Polygon side I mean, I take my hat off and it’s been a great experience in terms of reporting, accountability, and just being present. Their team has been there. So that has been our experience on the Polygon ecosystem.
And to follow up on that is I would say to the community here and wherever you may be, a piece of advice would be, getting the connection, the network in right. If you don’t have direct contact with a member of the Polygon team, just networking through other projects which have that contact and that will make your life so much easier. Once you are in contact with their team, a whole world of opportunities will open up. Like in our case even our dev or tech team has been in touch with them. And they’ve been able to to provide with the right tools and the information necessary for us to deploy to the integration successfully. So I think a big part of it is just a networking aspect of having that connection and communication clearly defined with the team and getting their further needs.
Prashant(Tristan): We had been meeting with Polygon few months back, and ever since then we have been in contact with them. We have some special plans for them in our group, and Polygon have been really supportive so far. They successfully offer a low gas fees scaling solutions. As we continued to develop in the future, we are looking for more solutions that they are bringing to Ethereum 2.0. Besides it, Polygon ecosystem are growing very rapidly for a lot of support, with the marketing front, technical front, and making connections. We can say that many GameFi projects are developing very well on Polygon, and we are happy to progress together with the Polygon ecosystem.
Victor: Stefanie, can you also chip in on this? I know Huobi Research is not exactly with Polygon, but do you have any experience from your side working with Polygon Studio or a Polygon project?
Stefanie: Oh yes. We know that Polygon is EVM compatible and there are more than 7000 protocols have been deployed on it. We noticed among the top ten TVL projects, seven of them are multi-chain deployments, so I think the EVM compatible is very essential to the Polygon ecosystem. As there are fewer native projects in Polygon, we expect to see more native projects deployed on Polygon in the future.
Victor: Yeah, thanks Stephanie. So I want to ask one more question specifically to Tristan and of course to DeFiner. Let’s go to Tristan first. Could you let me know how do you differ from other metaverse projects?
Prashant(Tristan): Yeah sure. Compared to our main competitors’ metaverses, we have wider coverage. Our market covers both Web 2.0 and 3.0 users, and our games has been developed as instant apps instead of web only games. The games can be played from anywhere with your discord, telegram, and facebook accounts. We want everyone to have the ability to play the games in time, and no dedication needed to the game. We have better engagements from peers to creators, and Tristan place players, investors, creators at the central stage. As a creator, you can make your own storylines or dungeons with other players. You can get your rewards this way and own NFTs. It also ensures the game with fresh contents which is lacking in most of our competitors. You can see the updates in Axie are happening really slow, their user retention has suffered because of that too.
Our metaverse has three focuses, first is lower the entry barriers and make it as accessible as possible, which can be solved through our MetaWallet. Second, to promote social interactions compatibility across various chains like Polygon, Binance Smart Chains. Third, to improve the life cycle and lower the churn rate of the users. In order to improve on the third point, we have heavy emphasis on narratives and art style, the selling point is the fun and experiences that we offer, and not the play-to-earn themes.
I think in game experience is very important here. I think a lot of the games in the industry missed the mark. The experience is dictated by external factors like the price of the token. One thing that separates us from the others is that we are not offering one game, we are a platform. People have various games to play. And we have more products within our portfolio to keep the prize section and the game token economics in balance.
Jeral(DeFiner): So I think two things right now on our focus are cross chain and DeFiner 2.0 as you just mentioned. Going to what makes us different from other DeFi lending protocols in the market, I would like to emphasize first that we have an aggregator function of sorts, which pretty much means that whenever we have idle funds, our smart contract will auto deploys that unused capital into a secondary debt market. Because we act more like a bank in a way, and AAVA/Compound are more like money markets on this space. When banks have those idle assets, they deposit them into money markets. So that’s one observation because when you go into our app.definer.org, you’ll see that our APRs are slightly higher than other DeFi lending protocols out there. In addition, you get our FIN token which contributes to those yields.
Going back to your question about what makes us different in DeFiner 2.0, besides what I’ve mentioned already about the product, users with DeFiner 2.0 will come in and we’ll be able to create that lending market or debt market for their tokens, based on different trackers. You have the risk models, the interest rate models, the Oracle models that people’ll be able to configure based on the needs of their community. So we’re very user community centric and we want to make sure that projects have the right tools they need to incentive their communities. So a part of that is liquid staking in the near future.
As part of the road map that we have, especially with DeFiner 2.0, this year we have the launch of our smart contract factory pretty soon on DeFiner 2.0, which is basically that projects will be able to have create that debt markets right for their tokens, even those long-tail assets. Later in the year we will release the second phase or stage which is that configured childhood creation, that’s when we will enable anyone to create those pools based on different parameters they want. This is going back to fundamentals of Web 3.0 and people having ownership of their own assets and their own data, that’s gonna give both established projects in DeFi or crypto space in general and also retail the ability to create those debt markets depending on their needs.
Later on the road map we also are contemplating ERC 721 like NFT asset backed loans. That is something that we’re working internally, with our debt team, and in collaboration with other Oracle type projects in the market to make sure we get that right. Many of us here are very familiar with NFTs and how about using your NFT as collateral to unlock more capital for yourself and then use it to maximize your efficiency in the space. That’s also being contemplated in a part of the road map of DeFiner 2.0.
We will also be having internal balance transfers. It acts like a black box between sender and receiver, ensures the privacy for our users. So that will be part of the basic DeFiner 2.0 development in the near future. In 2022 and first half of 2023, we’ll have a booster stage of the final 2.0, which will includes the privacy feature, get into the secondary debt markets, and even introduces term and fixed rate loans. So that’s our main differentiator and I would like to invite everyone to stay tuned as our first stage of product is almost ready for release, so we’ll be announcing a few things in the near future. Thank you.
Audience Misubasa’s question: The main focus of any crypto community is on the price of the token. When prices go up, people are happy, but when it drops, people start to leave. What is the team plan for strengthening and growing a loyal community? How do you choose your investments?
Steven(Polygon): Yeah, the line was a little bit broken, so I’m not sure if I caught all of it, but essentially it was around what are we trying to find in some Alpha projects. So from outside, we look at very much around the team that’s building out the project to determine if it is a very big opportunity or a red flag. Another key consideration is the type of funds or investments that have already been put into the project.
Crypto is always inherently risky, it’s much more volatile than any other market out there, but I think as you do a lot of research around the team, what their success has been in the past, how credible they are to not be effectively a rug pool helps we make good judgement. We want to back really good teams that have done great projects in the past or have been from very successful start ups or or leading firms before and they’re wanting to jump over and join Web 3. So I think that’s a lot of what we look at and then the next stage would be who else is looking to invest in them at what relationships they’ve managed to build with other projects and well recognized investors or other projects in space.
Victor: Thanks Steven, I think you answered it very well. Steven and ourselves at Huobi are looking at the strong teams. The top thing we need to ensure is that we don’t invest into any scam projects. Our goal is not making quick money, so we want to invest into a project by first knowing who are they and what they do. This is not only determined from the investment point of view, but from the branding point of view too. Huobi and Polygon are taking our image and our potential impacts very seriously. After we go through a lot of projects, we can tell which project are there to scam and which project understand about building a very sustainable community and a sustainable token model, something that will determine a project’s success in the long run.
A piece of advice for you, Mr Misubasa, is do not chase after the quick money. People want to get rich fast and their projects go to the moon, but if things turn out bad it’s the retail investors who really suffer. So make sure to do your own due diligence and make your own investment decisions. Investing with a long-term mindset, just as Huobi Incubator and our panelists do. Thanks for asking a very specific question.
Check out more in Huobi Incubator’s twitter page: https://twitter.com/huobi_incubator
Read about other Spotlight of Web 3.0 episodes at: https://medium.com/@HuobiIncubator
DeFiner Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeFinerOrg
Tristan Twitter: https://twitter.com/TristanClub_
