The content of the AMA session with ClearDAO project

1. Please introduce yourself and the team behind ClearDAO

Hello FLyECO community, my name is Alpha. I am a core contributor of ClearDAO.

We are a team of 20 full time members, with professional background in traditional finance, specifically flow and structured derivatives sales and trading, blockchain technology and traditional media.

Many members in our team are seasoned participants in the crypto industry, with experience in early stage investments, helping projects on marketing and community, and directly involved in the building of technology infrastructure.

2. What is ClearDAO and what’s the vision of your team?

ClearDAO is tackling the DeFi derivatives space, which as of now hasn’t really taken off.

But we expect DeFi to repeat what traditional finance has gone through, and eventually the derivatives market size will be much larger than the spot market.

Based on our observation, there are currently 2 main problems that are preventing DeFi derivatives from getting traction.

The first problem is that most DeFi derivatives projects today, they are putting too much focus on their own platforms.

These platforms offer exchange traded (standard) derivatives, which in our opinion are not what the users want.

What makes derivatives attractive to users is the bespoke aspect, which tailors to the needs of the buyers.

This is quite obvious in traditional finance where OTC derivatives market size is way larger than exchange traded derivatives.

We are taking an entirely different approach to DeFi derivatives. Instead of exchange traded products, we are offering bespoke products.

Instead of focusing on building one exchange, we are focusing on building the infrastructure that allows for multiple exchanges to build on top of it.

ClearDAO is building a DeFi derivatives SDK that enables developers to easily create bespoke derivatives and launch exchanges.

Developers from all over the world should know what derivative products are popular in their regions.

They can use the Clear SDK to quickly build these derivatives and launch their own exchanges.

By using the solution provided by ClearDAO, we can also introduce our ecosystem market makers and liquidity providers to our ecosystem exchanges.

This can solve a major obstacle with new exchange platforms that is the initial liquidity.

We have a muti-chain strategy in place since the inception of the project.

We will be on Binance Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Solana and Ethereum.

Then we will evaluate the next batch of blockchain ecosystems to support.

Our vision is to build a future where all DeFi derivatives are created, traded, cleared and settled on a network of blockchains powered by ClearDAO.

3. Tell us about the Clear SDK

The Clear SDK is our flagship product. It has 3 main components:

1. Derivative workshop.

This is where developers can create bespoke derivatives with a lego-style mix and match approach.

Start by choosing the underlying asset, it can be a single fungible token (such as BTC), or a basket of tokens (such as 70% BNB + 30% ETH) or even an NFT collection (such as the CryptoPunk collection).

Then choose the derivative that you want to create.

We are starting with barrier options and structured notes.

Soon we will add support for perpetual futures and CDS (coin default swap).

Then we will explore adding more option types (vanilla, binary and more) and other derivatives such as TRS (token return swap).

Note that for each derivative product there are multiple parameters that can be adjusted.

For example in our barrier option template, developers can specify whether the option is call or put, strike price, maturity, barrier levels, and whether it is knock-in or knock-out.

Our goal is to cover as many derivative types as possible, so eventually if you can dream up a derivative contract, the Clear SDK can build it out.

Then theoretically if you want to build a DeFi derivative project, there is no reason not to use the Clear SDK.

2. Open marketplace.

This component contains the open source code for white label exchanges.

We have already coded an automated trading platform, as this format is more familiar with DeFi users.

Going forward if there is enough demand for an order book style trading platform, we can explore coding that out as well.

3. Risk Management Tools.

We want to offer quantitative risk exposures to our users, so they can better manage portfolio risks and perform macro hedges.

When trading in the spot market, usually knowing the current prices and total value is enough for most users.

But this is not the case in derivative trading, especially for the purpose of hedging risks.

If you are trading options, you will want to know the greek risks, and if you are trading fixed income derivatives, you will want to know the duration and convexity risks.

Our goal for the longer term is to offer these quantitative risks to our users and even metrics like VaR (value at risk) so our users can make informed decisions and not put on a trade and hope for the best.

4. What are the new technologies developed by ClearDAO?

Most crypto projects are open source.

It is easy to copy and paste, put on a new name or deploy on a different blockchain, and you are good to go.

But ClearDAO is not a copy and paste project. We have been developing for close to a year by now.

To give you an example of our original tech, we all know that NFT is the next frontier, and it goes well with the metaverse narrative.

Naturally many dev teams are looking to offer NFT derivatives.

We spent a lot of time on NFT derivatives.

In DeFi, you need to use oracles like Chainlink for data feeds.

It’s not hard to build derivatives on BTC, as we can use Chainlink for BTC price feeds.

But for NFT derivatives, none of the oracles currently offer NTF price feeds and NFT prices are easily manipulated.

So our approach to NFT derivatives is to offer derivatives on the entire NFT collection, not on a single NFT.

Since Chainlink does not yet offer NFT collection prices, we are building it from scratch.

We grabbed all the historical traded prices from the OpenSea smart contract and other contracts to construct the NFT collection index price.

We use all the historical traded prices (not just the latest price) to make it less manipulate-able, and this is all coded and done.

When the Clear SDK is available for the public in the coming months, anyone can build CryptoPunks collection derivatives.

There are tons of NFT collections coming out, and most of them, the price trends down to zero.

You want to own the best NFTs, and CryptoPunks is the best of the best, but the problem is that one punk is just too expensive.

We will be offering CryptoPunks derivatives.

You can buy these and have exposure to CryptoPunks, so if CryptoPunks price goes up, you will make profit because you have CryptoPunks derivatives.

This is just one of the many examples of our new tech.

5. Can you tell us about your go-to-market strategy?

Our flagship product is the Clear SDK that enables developers to quickly design derivative and launch trading marketplaces.

Our main business model is B2B2C.

But at the same time, there are too many crypto projects coming out every week.

We know that just by making the SDK available isn’t going to attract developers.

So we will be launching the very first exchange built using the Clear SDK.

This exchange serves 2 purposes.

The first purpose is to provide actual derivative trading to our users.

They can purchase derivatives to enhance potential returns or to hedge risks.

Through actual user activities, we can collect feedback to improve our SDK further.

The second purpose is to showcase what the Clear SDK can do.

We believe having a live exchange can better attract developers to actually give our SDK a try.

Once our SDK and exchange is live, we will be working with ecosystem developers to help them through building out their derivative marketplaces.

We are actually in discussion with a Korean team.

So it is very likely that you will see a Korean derivative marketplace coming out in 2022 that’s powered by ClearDAO.

Our SDK will be made available to the public, so anyone can take it and build projects with it.

We will also work with select developer communities and teams to launch derivative marketplaces that is up to our quality standards.

6. How can developers benefit from using the infrastructures built by ClearDAO?

The benefits are massive.

Coding out a derivative exchange from scratch and do it well, takes a team of experienced developers.

With the Clear SDK, we are enabling developers with 2 years of professional experience to easily launch derivatives exchanges.

So this not only lowers the experience required, it also reduces development time.

As mentioned earlier, a common hurdle for new exchanges is the initial liquidity.

An exchange without liquidity is not able to attract users, and an exchange without users is not able to attract liquidity providers.

This is a tough problem to solve.

ClearDAO has forged strategic partnerships with world class market makers and liquidity providers.

Kronos Research, Redline, VRM are all our ecosystem partners.

There are more top tier confirmed partners that we will unveil in the near future.

Our partners are committed to inject initial liquidity to our ecosystem exchanges.

This effectively alleviates a major headache to our ecosystem developers.

With much of the coding and initial liquidity out of the way, developers can spend more time on marketing and community building.

ClearDAO will also provide marketing support for our ecosystem projects, so they will be starting community and marketing with an initial base.

We make building DeFi derivative platforms super easy.

If a team has a good idea, with entry to mid level coding experience, they can make it happen with the Clear SDK.

As mentioned earlier, we identified 2 problems preventing DeFi derivatives from going mainstream.

The first problem can be solved by incorporating customization into derivatives, which is exactly what the Clear SDK is for.

The second problem has to do with the participants in DeFi.

They are not like the professional sophisticated investors on Wall Street who know derivatives inside out.

Derivatives are unfamiliar to most DeFi participants, who really either don’t have time or don’t bother to learn about derivatives.

So to get these people interested in derivatives, it is very likely that extra incentives are needed.

This could be accomplished by adding elements of farming, NFT, or gaming into derivatives to make the overall product package attractive or user experience fun.

Our ecosystem developers will be spending less time coding derivative products and exchange functionality.

This means they will have more time to think about the creative ways to incorporate derivatives with other elements to make DeFi derivatives desirable.

7. Is the project open source, what’s your plan to stay competitive?

We are an open source our project, just like any amazing projects in crypto.

Anyone can copy and paste our code, but our strength is with the community and our ecosystem will just keep growing.

Our ecosystem projects will have to announce that they are powered by ClearDAO just like projects using Chainlink have to announce they are using Chainlink.

When people start to realize ClearDAO is going to be successful, when they begin to fork our code at that time, we would already have several ecosystem exchanges

We’ll have the strongest community that’s running the same code and other dev teams forking our code just shows that our code is badass.

It’s like DEXs forking Uniswap code, and rebase projects forking Olympus code.

Really, it just makes the original code so much stronger.

Plus, we are not focusing on one exchange or one platform, we are building an entire ecosystem that is open to everyone.

Once we have our brand recognized worldwide, it doesn’t really make sense to fork our code and be one step behind.

Uniswap and Olympus are doing their own platform, they are not building an ecosystem, so it can make sense to fork their code and launch a copy.

But ClearDAO is already welcoming anyone to use our SDK and use our code to build things.

I don’t see people will want to fork our code.

They will analyze our project and eventually decide to join us.

8. Please introduce the governance aspect of the ClearDAO ecosystem

CLH is our project token, it is mainly used for governance.

Our governance system is expected to be online in 2022, where DAO members can create proposals to be voted on by all token holders.

The Clear SDK is the flagship product of our project.

Once we have developed everything laid out on our roadmap, our token holders can decide how to further improve the SDK.

This can be support for a specific derivative product, new exchange functionality, or deployment for new blockchain ecosystems.

In addition to steer the development progress of the Clear SDK, token holders can also vote to adjust the parameters on the marketplace that is managed by us.

This can include changing the trading fees and improvement on the UI and more.

Besides using the token for governance purposes, the token can also be staked for yields.

We are also looking to add more utilities to the tokens in the future.

The ecosystem marketplaces launched by 3rd party developers with our support, their exchanges should incorporate use cases for the CLH token.

So as our ecosystem matures, CLH will have more utilities and thus more value.

9. Any exciting news you would like to announce here today?

ClearDAO is an ambitious project.

We have been building since early 2021, and have lots of unique technologies created.

Our dev team is currently fine tuning the details and making sure everything is functioning as intended.

Our IDO/IEO is scheduled for this week!

FlyECO is our only IDO partner

we also have IEO on KuCoin and airdrop on Gate

For the next several weeks we will be making some big announcements.

If I were you, I will join the ClearDAO Telegram community and stay up to date.

The public alpha version of our barrier option marketplace is currently on BSC and Arbitrum testnets.

Anyone can visit demo.cleardao.com and try it out.

For starters, we have a short guide to assist you along the way.

Testnet guide: https://medium.com/@cleardao/guide-to-cleardao-marketplace-public-alpha-78286ec1f52c

I would encourage everyone to give it a try.

Once you have tried it, please be sure to join our Telegram group and let us know what you think of the public alpha.

We would love to hear from you.

10. There is fierce competition in the Decentralized Derivatives space. Obviously, you can find other projects that are similar to yours. What is your Unique Selling Point?

Our approach to DeFi derivatives are different, most projects are offering one marketplace, we are offering an SDK that can be used to build derivative products and exchanges. our project is much more ambitious. we are building the infrastructure for DeFi derivatives.

11. The crypto industry is a fast-paced industry, how flexible is your Project to change quickly and keep pace with technology trends? What is your long-term vision for the forecasting industry in which the ClearDAO operates?

We have a very strong team that can quickly react to changing market conditions. our SDK is very flexible and can support various kinds of derivatives. we plan to be on as many smart contract ecosystems as soon as possible. already supporting Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum and Solana.

12. How does project increase the token’s value, liquidity and utility? So that it can lead to an increase in token prices? What is your plan to make your project stable and provide the highest return for investors in the long term?

Our ecosystem will always have new exchanges launched by our partners and developers. all these platforms will need to incorporate use cases for CLH. so CLH utility will keep growing and demand will keep growing as long as we can onboard developers to use our SDK to build derivative exchanges.

13. Do you have or will you have some partnerships with the project of FlyECO?

This is defintely possible! our SDK is expected to launch in Q2 of 2022. We will be exploring lots of partnerships and will prioritize FLyECO partners.

14. Regarding about the current market situation is too unstable, holding back investors.. So can you give me some good reasons why I should buy your tokens in this market situation? And also why should your token holder keep holding?

Good question, you will need to first ask yourself if BTC will make new high in 2022. if the overall market is good, and if you think DeFi derivatives is a good sector to invest in, i think CLH is a good investment cadidate, but you should do your own research and come to a conclusion.

15. Do you have the plan of community building? Or you just aim for the institutions users?

We’ll be working with both institutions and individuals. we already onboarded many market making teams that are regarded as the best in the crypto space. we’ll also work with developer communities to push adoption of our SDK.

When our ecosystem has new exchanges, they will always have initial liquidity mining and promotion events. all these are great opportunity for community members to participate and earn high APY rewards.

16. Why did you choose ERC20 for your token? BEP20 is much cheaper.

Our token will be on several blockchain ecosystems. we’ll have both ERC20 and BEP20, and even more down the road. we want to attract as many users and partners possible and won’t be tied to a single blockchain ecosystem.

17. What is the biggest challenge you face currently in terms of becoming a successful project?

Good question. i would say the challenge is to eventually attract wall street institutional players when they enter crypto. this has not happened yet, but we are preparing for that day, so when it comes, we are ready. we do have several members in the team with Wall Street background, so we should have an edge to establish business relationship with them. before that day comes, we’ll be focusing on our SDK, and make sure we have a solid foundation built with the crypto crowds.

18. Most users only care about immediate benefits rather than the real value of the project in the long-term. How can Your Project convince users invest to your platform in the long-term?

I would say our tokenomics is well designed to benefit short term investors.

for long term investors, we’ll have our product, the SDK, to do the speaking for us. long term investors are usually more sophisticated, and if they can spend time with our SDK when it becomes available, they will know the capabilities of our dev team, that we can deliver world class products.

19. Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to join your project? Because the success of a project attracts more investors who haven’t yet entered the crypto world. What are the plans to raise awareness about your project in the non-crypto space.

We’ll be focusing on crypto. the way we see the world evolve, more people are coming into crypto. our bet is in the crypto space, and we believe traditional finance, and even central banks will embrace crypto. so i would say we’ll be spending a much time in crypto to get as big of a market share, and when we are satisfied with what we have acheieved in crypto, we can explore to see if it makes sense to expand beyond crypto.

Even with gaming, VR and metaverse, they are entering into crypto. we have been in crypto for a long time, we have the advantage in crypto and we dont want to give that up.

20. One major source of problem in DeFi is smart contract vulnerability, which has lead to loss of funds, what steps have been taken your project to fix this major problem and avoid future occurrences? ClearDAO already audited? by who?

Our smart contract is audited by Certik.