ANKR: Could you tell us a bit more about your role at Thena?
THESEUS: I come from a corporate finance background, I used to work as a financial analyst before joining crypto in early 2018. I fell deep down the rabbit hole early on, which led me to meet many individuals in space, something that inspired me to contribute to the field full time. In 2020, I began working as an adviser for DEFI protocols on Ethereum, focusing mostly on system architecture and tokenomics engineering until we decided to develop THENA. For my role at THENA, I’m mainly in charge of product management and business development
APOLLO: Sure, I’m the marketing and operations guy, handling that side of things. Started out cutting grass for 5 euros an hour 20 years ago, spent a few years doing market research, a few more in operations, and ended up in DeFi. Been into crypto since the MtGox days Not our first protocol, for any of us
ANKR: What is Thena and why was it created?
THESEUS: THENA is the native liquidity layer and next generation AMM on BNB Chain. At core, it’s a DEX that uses the best of Curve and Uni V2 to offer an optimal trading experience, with low fees and low slippage.
THENA was designed to be a protocol for protocols, with our tokenomics carefully designed to enable a capital efficient, open and permissionless incentive marketplace that any protocols can tap into to incentivize liquidity. It was created because something like this didn’t really exist yet on BNB Chain.
We’re already seeing the potential of our collaboration, we’re proud to be hosting ANKR liquidity and seeing it rise so fast. Once we have metastable pools ready we aim to be the go-to DEX to trade ankrBNB !
ANKR: Could you also explain what are the main benefits of using Thena?
THESEUS: From a protocol standpoint, THENA is an open liquidity layer that can solve the cold start liquidity bootstrapping issue most protocols are encountering. Liquidity incentives are among the biggest cost for protocols and it can have a negative impact on its tokenomics.
THENA offers a capital efficient way for protocols to scale their liquidity through our built-in incentive marketplace, allowing protocols to reduce their incentive costs by as much as 70%. There are multiple ways to fully leverage THENA, the most beneficial one being acquiring veTHE which gives control over our emissions. ANKR is perfectly leveraging THENA by bribing and farming with their POL, allowing you to control more emissions week after week.
From a user standpoint, THENA offers full ownership of the protocol to its community which has a considerable impact on the future of our DEX. veTHE holders have full control over our weekly emissions and their decisions impact the profitability of the protocol.
veTHE holders generate yields from 3 different sources :
- Fees: You collect fees of the pool you voted for based on your votes allocated. Over time, holders are incentivized to vote for pools that generates the most fees, making THENA a self optimising DEX by aligning interests of every stakeholders
- Bribes: Protocol can offer rewards to incentivise holders to vote for their pools, increasing their share of emissions
- Rebase: to protect against inflation, lockers receive weekly rebase which help them maintain their ownership %
ANKR: Where do you see DeFi in the upcoming years?
APOLLO: I think we will see huge adoption this year. I feel the massive wave is coming. We were clearly oversold last year and all the fud got just overly ridiculous. Prices suffered, but are now recovering. We know DeFi is the way, and we will convince the others to do the same. So yeah evidently I’m overwhelmingly positive about the future of DeFi this and upcoming years. Things are progressing in the right direction
THESEUS: I personally think DEFI will continue to lead the charge in 2023 and beyond, we just layed down the groundwork, but DEFI still has a lot to prove. We’re still building in a closed ecosystem that needs to connect with the real world and DEFI has yet to show how it will disrupt our current financial industry. Don’t get me wrong, I’m confident it will, we just need to think on a 10 year time frame.
Guess who’s the bull between @0xApollo & myself ?
Now in terms of narratives :
- Liquid Staking Derivatives will outperform in terms of growth, as they already started to do so in 2023 and will start being deeply integrated in DEFI. THENA is focused on being the home for projects like ANKR to scale liquidity for it.
- We should start seeing real world assets bridged on-chain so that it can be used as collateral, this will unlock a ton of new applications.
- Non-EVM based blockchains will continue to perform well as an edge against Ethereum’s scaling issues.
- BNB will be the main door for retail and protocols like ANKR and THENA have to focus a lot on education to make it easy to understand and remove barriers to entry through knowledge.
- New models for derivatives will come out that will be way more scalable and efficient vs what we have now
That’s just a few, exciting times ahead!
ANKR: What do you think about regulation in the space? Necessary, optional or do we need to find a balance that enables more institutional investment?
THESEUS: I think it’s necessary to have more clarity on the path forward to mitigate regulatory risk. On one hand we all love having full ownership of our assets and being able to transact pseudo-anonymously at almost no cost and instantly, but it also comes with responsibility as no one will refund you if you get hacked or invested in the wrong protocol. We need to find a way to bring more accountability to protocols while also giving them enough room to innovate. The same thought could be applied to users, the yields is high because the risks are high.
I am for a regulatory framework but it can’t be based on the current system, it would hinder innovation and kill DEFI instantly. Giving clarity for founders and investors would pave the way for insurers, custodians and institutions to bring capital and resources in DEFI.
APOLLO: I would tend to just agree there. I am in favor of self-regulation for the industry and I think BNB Chain has done a great job in that. At the same time I think there’s a clear need for spaces where experimentation is allowed in order to push innovation
THESEUS: (Jokingly) I want to remind everyone that THE is a UTILITY token, in case anyone from the FBI or FED is tuning in
ANKR: Speaking about onboarding and bringing new users to the DeFi world.. what can DeFi protocols do to onboard more regular and traditional web2 users?
APOLLO: I think for web3 in general the user experience has been lagging behind web2, and that really should be one of the points to focus on moving forward (for all projects out there). Everything has be as simple and easy to use as possible. We’re getting closer to that every day but it’s a work in progress. Constantly improving based on user feedback. But there are still some limitations of course, such as the wallets itself
And education is another key part that we’re gonna have to focus on as well, not just how to use Thena but how to manage your assets in a secure way. Lots of work to be done
THESEUS: I agree with @0xApollo with the fact that we’re lagging behind web2, protocols need to put UX and education in the forefront of their operations. I know THENA is lacking in that front as well and our priority is on making it easier for newcomers to understand how everything works and make them feel comfortable when they use our dapp .
Also we definitely need a better wallet, Metamask doesn’t cut it.
ANKR: What’s the role of marketing in DeFi?
APOLLO: Marketing is obviously tremendously important. Even if you have the most amazing product, people have to find you first. We’re leveraging several tools to create more awareness, and you’re soon going to see the power of it as we roll out our referral program, which let’s you scale your earnings with Thena infinitely
Marketing is also about educating users, building trust, communicating in the right way, and setting the right expectations. And a lot of it is just community building — probably the most important part of it
THESEUS: I just want to add that marketing is key for us, as a DEX on BNB. Aggregators run less than 10% of the daily volume, it means users go to their favourite DEX to trade, regardless of price execution so we need to double down on marketing and education to onboard more users.
ANKR: What’s the role of community in your protocol?
APOLLO: I think it’s no hidden secret to anyone in the industry anymore that it’s all about the community. Community is the reason why we’re here, and community is ultimately the key to any project’s success. Can’t emphasize the importance enough. So we go above and beyond for our community
What this means is we have 24/7 mod team on both Discord and TG, answering any question you want at all hours. And the core team is there every single day answering questions. So it’s a top priority for us as you can see
It’s our most powerful voice
And when you have the brightest minds in DeFi as users, there’s no dream too crazy we can’t achieve together as a community owned protocol
THESEUS: On top of that, our community controls the weekly emissions which is key to scale liquidity and generate fees, they have a big impact on the success of our DEX.
THENA is a community-owned DEX first and foremost
