Tokoin-Fantom AMA Recap
Tokoin has recently joined Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem. Tokoin’s native utility token TOKO can now be used as collateral for minting synthetics, including fUSD. This partnership will empower TOKO holders to use fMint to access fUSD and other synthetics, which can be used with other Fantom DeFi products.
On Tuesday, 5th August, we had the pleasure of having Michael Chen (Chief Marketing Officer, Fantom) and Connor Hughes (Operations & Marketing, Fantom) in our official Global Tokoin Telegram group. They were joined by Eddy Christian Ng (Chief Operating Officer, Tokoin). Michael and Connor spoke about Fantom’s partnership with Tokoin, interacted with our community members, and answered some of their questions. The session was moderated by Silvia, who is the admin of our Telegram group.
Here is a transcript of the AMA session. Some of the questions and responses have been edited in order to keep them concise.
Q1. Silvia: Can you tell us what you did before crypto, how you got into crypto, and a little bit about yourself?
Connor: I got into crypto through Fantom, actually. I’d been a community member for a while, helping out in the community chats and learning more about the project over time. Things progressed from there and I joined the team, and I’m now working on Operations & Marketing. Before crypto, I was studying for a degree in Economics & Management at the University of Oxford, as well as consulting for some UK companies in areas of retail pricing models and robotic process automation.
Michael: I think I bought my first BTC in 2016 or so, but I really got heavily into crypto around early 2017, after discovering ICOs and the hype (like many others in here). That was truly the Wild West, and it made me wonder why people weren’t communicating as well or marketing properly. So I decided to make that my job from late 2017.
Eddy: Before entering crypto I was actually a banker. I also cofounded a startup 2015, and worked there till 2018.I came to know about the crypto industry through trading, and thought of building something using blockchain at Tokoin because of the challenges that I had faced dealing with MSMEs in my previous startup.
Q2. Silvia: What are the major milestones that Fantom has achieved so far?
Michael: Well, I love that question because I can never stick to a single answer for that. But today I think it’s what we’ve managed to get going with our staking ecosystem and validators. I have spoken to a lot of different project leads, and they’ve noticed what we’ve done. We’ve got a fantastic community who understands that staking isn’t just about making money, but that it’s dedicated for network security. So, without paying any staking farms, or resorting to any weird and gamified growth hack strategies, we got to 64% of the supply staked. Even though we had a pre-circulating supply on Ethereum, and people had to learn how to swap and use the new wallet. That makes me really proud.
Connor: For me, there have definitely been a few to note. We released our high-throughput, near instant finality Opera mainnet at the back end of last year. We’ve become one of the fastest staked networks with a pre-circulating supply (over 1.6 billion of the circulating 2.45 billion FTM are staked and it’s growing rapidly), and we’ve secured some great integrators that’ll make extensive use of the network (Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health for tracking pharmaceutical products, for example). Then there’s the upcoming milestone, Fantom Finance, which I’m sure we’ll unpack more throughout the rest of the AMA.
Q3. Silvia: What exactly is Fantom Finance? Could you please tell us something about it?
Michael: Fantom Finance is basically a name for an ecosystem of DeFi tools and applications that we’re building. At the core of it, you have fUSD, which is a crypto collateralized Stablecoin, which can then be used in fTrade and fLend to borrow, trade and so on.
Connor: There’s a couple of different aspects to this I think. Fantom Finance will be the suite of products that sits on the Opera mainnet: fMint, fLend, and fTrade for now. Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem on the other hand is more than that. It will include Fantom Finance, but isn’t limited to the Opera network. We want to provide as much value as possible to users, which doesn’t mean stubbornly limiting functionality to our own chain, but doing what makes sense for each component.
And for the simple TL;DR on the 3 components of Fantom Finance –
fMint: use collateral to mint synthetic assets (fUSD, or fBTC, fETH etc.)
fLend: supply assets to liquidity pools, and then also be able to borrow against those supplied assets
fTrade: swap between different assets on the Opera network
So a user-flow might be: lock FTM collateral, mint fUSD in fMint, supply fUSD to fLend, borrow fBTC against supplied fUSD also in fLend, sell fBTC in fTrade. All at low cost and high speed.
Q4. Silvia: fTrade, fLend, fMint, what does the “f” stand for? Is it Fantom or something else?
Michael: Yeah it’s supposed to stand for Fantom. Some people think fUSD stands for “f*** USD” though, like an anti-fiat ideology. We don’t really try to define it anymore; people can interpret themselves what the “f” means. I wanted to call it USDf to remove that confusion, but fUSD sounds much better in the end.
Q5. Silvia: What are some of the features of Fantom DeFi that make it better than existing solutions such as MakerDAO, Compound, and Kava?
Michael: Let’s say different instead of ‘better’. I respect those projects a lot so I don’t want to antagonize their communities. But I think that having all that functionality in one suite, rather than separate modules that were built to be stand-alone, allows us to design more sophisticated applications on top of them without adding too much complexity.
Connor: I think I have alluded to it in the previous answer, but the goal isn’t to necessarily fight for market share against these other products, but acquire market share primarily through increasing the size of the market.
I think that with a lot of DeFi products, new usage is born from new products, rather than new products taking existing usage. For example, if we create something that ties in nicely with existing products for new DeFi strategies and new functionality, then we’ve increased the size of the market, without anyone necessarily having to lose out. That’s what we’re seeing a lot within the Ethereum space at the moment. One person will build on top of someone else’s work, and then somebody entirely else will build again on top of that. All of this drives the most efficient capital usage and reduces friction etc.
Michael: I’m doing a lot of yield farming in the ETH DeFi ecosystem as a hobby, and the complexity sometimes scares me. And it costs me a lot of money in fees too to do 10-step leveraged Stablecoin strategies. It’s not ideal, but some would say that DeFi right now isn’t for “normies”, but rather for rich programmers and people with significant holdings in the ETH ecosystem. Can we change that culture? I don’t know, but I hope we can.
Q6. Silvia: Last but not the least, why did you decide partner with Tokoin? How is this partnership helpful for both projects?
Connor: When we onboard collateral specifically, we’re looking for a few things: a great community that we think can grasp and learn about the DeFi functionality available and utilize it well, a team we can work with long-term to benefit both projects, and AUM for the Fantom DeFi ecosystem. We see a lot of potential in all of those areas for Tokoin, and we’re excited to be able to work with the team to push TOKO collateral as a first step.
Michael: One of our blockchain developers is a huge fan of Tokoin. He told us that we MUST strike this great collaboration, and we don’t regret it. We can add a lot more established assets to the DeFi stack, but those are already represented in many other protocols. We want to increase the size of the market, not cannibalize other participants.
Eddy: From Tokoin’s side, we believe that this year is the year of DeFi. We also have DeFi in our roadmap, so for us this is the perfect time. Our MSME partners can also benefit from this partnership.
Q7. Community member: You organized a rewarding AMA session, but what do you want to receive from the community?
Connor: Staking is the low-hanging fruit that the community can help with. And once the DeFi suite is out, using that (after adequately learning about it of course) would be the next step :)
Michael: I would like to receive a week of holiday sometime in the next 5 years when we succeed! But on a serious note, we’d love to receive help in connecting with real-world businesses to use the tech. I remember buying my first Bitcoin because someone told me to, and I remember using it because someone told me I could buy computer parts with it. We all need our little evangelist.
Q8. Community member: What are the benefits of Fantom Opera? Is it perfect or is it still in the refinement stage?
Michael: Nothing is perfect. Even with audits, peer reviews, and so forth, even the brightest minds can miss something. Only time will tell.
Connor: Low cost and high speed. Our consensus protocol can scale much more than other solutions. Having said that, we’re currently restricted by the EVM that we’re using. Work is going on to bring a new Virtual Machine out that’ll significantly improve performance yet again.
Q9. Community member: Most investors just focus on the price of the token in the short term instead of the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for long term investors?
Michael: Our set of validators is made up from teams who build on Fantom, those who have a strong conviction in our capacity to keep building for years to come, and those who stand behind our team members as individuals.
The reward in a space like this for builders like us is knowing that we’ve managed to innovate, and that’s where I think our stakers are also in terms of mentality.
Q10. Community member: What industries and user groups is Fantom mainly aimed at? Do you plan to establish partnerships with local cryptocurrency developers in each country to make the use of Fantom more global?
Michael: We’re looking for more developers in Europe right now mostly to align with our GoFantom team, which is building a lot of ecosystem tools. ROI on funds spent for hires with the GoFantom team have been significantly higher than hackathons or events.
Connor: We’re very active in Afghanistan at the moment. It’s a country that is primed for a technological overhaul and has a great attitude to embracing the cutting edge in technology. Having said that, our blockchain development efforts aren’t limited to that area. We recently on-boarded a seller of luxury watches in Amsterdam, for product anchoring on-chain. Our team is distributed worldwide which makes global outreach much easier than if we were all centralized.
Q11. Community member: How does the Fantom team rate the availability of DeFi Fantom Finance from 1% to 100%? What work is being done now — integration of new projects, testing?
Michael: Availability will be high. Ease of use will cool, barrier of entry will be low (no high transaction fees to setup strategies)
Q12. Community member: Will fUSD, fBTC and everything else depends on Fantom gas?
Connor: Yep, you’ll need to use FTM as gas when interacting with the DeFi suite, but the cost will be near-zero. We’re talking in the range of 0.0001 cent USD.
Q13. Community member: How long has this idea of Fantom existed?
Michael: The idea came from a brainstorming session at Yonsei University around January 2018. It came to fruition in 2019.
Q14. Community member: What is the Fantom vision and mission for this year?
Michael: Fantom Finance MUST launch. To be honest, I think we can work a bit more on vision because we’ve been in “build-only mode” for the last 2 years (less dreams, more tech delivered). Personally, I’d like to see DeFi become a blockchain agnostic narrative because right now the entire DeFi game is with Ethereum. But that won’t change this year I think; we need a lot of time to prove ourselves valuable in that ecosystem. MakerDAO took multiple years to get to this level of adoption, we can’t expect to do that in less than a year. Only time can tell.
Q15. Community member: Etheruem has the largest onchain value to date. Will FTM build cross-chain functionalities to mirror the value?
Michael: I believe that this is needed, 100%. But I’m not sure if there’s a reliable solution yet that we can rely on yet.
Q16. Community member: What Features makes Fantom an interesting option for developers over other DeFi blockchains projects? How important are developers to your ecosystem? What benefits and advantages does your platform provide to the crypto industry?
Connor: Solidity compatible, so it’s easy to get started for the majority of current DeFi developers, and no learning curve. Cheap to test, cheap to build, cheap to use, and fast. Developers are crucial–, the more that’s developed on Opera, the more it’s used.
Q17. Community member: Will Fantom Finance achieve all its goals within half a year be achieved?
Michael: We were planning to launch earlier, but our technical advisor Andre peer-reviewed it and told us to rebuild some modules — so we decided to do things the right way. Jakub and his GoFantom team are working on it.
Q18. Community member: Will TOKO utilize the Opera chain in the future to co-exist with the ETC20 token? Will you possibly build DeFi applications on top of Opera?
Eddy: We actually have a lot of plans in our roadmap. You should keep following our updates. We’ve actually been talking to a couple of partners about building on their public chain.
Stay tuned to our communication channels to get the latest updates about Tokoin, and join us for much such fun and informative AMAs in the future.
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