CryptoDiffer AMA Recap
Akropolis recently had an AMA with the CryptoDiffer team, and it was such a nice session that once again, we decided to compile the most interesting questions in an article.
The questions have been classified into sections for easier reading and understanding.
General
Q — What types of problems is Akropolis trying to solve?
A — We want to give people an opportunity to save and get access to cheap uncollateralized loans. Uncollateralized lending is one of the basic things that help people in developing countries to increase their quality of life (e.g. Grameen bank). But this type of lending has high risks and it is not yet implemented in the DeFi ecosystem. We solve this problem by the creation of community incentives for correct risk evaluation — and build a product that can be seen as a community bank.
Q — How do you plan to explain such technical topics to a wider audience? How do you plan to show the world that your product is not just another useless blockchain solution to a non-existing problem?
A — In very simple terms, the problem that we are addressing at a fundamental level is how can people exchange value/enter financial transactions without using banking system and the problems that come with its design: ability to control the money supply and therefore dilute your savings; interbank lending system resulting in a financial crisis in the US affecting fundamentally sound economies in other countries.
So the problem we are addressing: how do you prevent consequences of the crisis of 2007/08 for ordinary people? When you savings/pensions evaporate through inflation or government default, when because of the run on banks you can’t take your remaining funds from the bank, and when you can’t get a loan or get access to any kind of credit because your regional bank has been funded through the interbank lending system and is now de facto not able to perform?
A distributed ledger, removal of operational costs and intermediaries go a long way towards that.
Q — Don’t you think old and new blockchain projects constantly promise or offer the same things to users, customers, companies?
A — We think that the crypto field is evolving rapidly. Many financial services have appeared in the last 1–1.5 years. Of course, many projects develop similar products, aim to solve the same problems. But competition is a good thing as it gives additional incentives for the industry to grow.
DeFi & Adoption
Q — Your main direction is DeFi. Will it have any significant role in crypto adoption? How do you see the future of it?
A — There are billions of people without access to basic financial services. But most of them have smartphones (or at least phones) that can be used as a mean to access DeFi services. So yes, we think that DeFi will be one of the boosts for crypto adoption.
Q — DeFi is a concept that has been mentioned a lot recently when blockchain projects started to build protocols and applications to support DeFi. So, does AKRO have any competitors in this field? Are there differences in your team visions and missions about DeFi compared to other projects in this field?
A — Our product has two main use-cases — collective investments and uncollateralized lending.
Any lending? credit service in DeFi (such as Maker, Compound) or investment service such as Melon could be seen as our competitors. However, there is a significant difference between Akropolis and other DeFi services — our vision is more community-based. Members of AFOco-op decide where to invest their assets (unlike finance management delegating in Melon), and who receive loans and under what conditions (which helps us solve the important problem of uncollateralized lending in DeFi).
Q — Most people learned about the name AKRO relatively recently. What are the biggest obstacles to mass adaptation of this solution (product)?
A — The main obstacle would be the same as for most crypto teams/products out there — to use it properly, a user should already be familiar with crypto basics. So in this sense, adoption will depend on crypto industry adoption in general. We think that this user acquisition from outside crypto is one of the key problems in the whole crypto industry which can be solved only by joining forces with other projects — this is one of the reasons for our collaborations with such well-known projects as Maker, Polkadot, etc.
Product
Q — If a person from the community who borrows money tries to leave without paying it back to the lender… How Akropolis will resolve this issue? As there is no credit score system so how much one can borrow (maximum or minimum limits) in Akropolis?
A — We are implementing a credit scoring system analog through a staking model — 3rd parties (network keepers) can stake for participants and thus create a public rating of reliable borrowers. More details can be found here: https://wiki.akropolis.io/tokenomics/. Network keepers are rewarded in case of a correct risk assessment (they receive a part of the interest that the borrower pays) and are punished otherwise (their stake is being slashed).
Q — We have seen Akropolis recently launched its first AFO governance module. So what positive effect does this have on the development of the entire project? Will more governance modules be published in the future?
A — We tested the basic hypothesis of the DAO work. We realized that there is a need to implement some additional features (such as ragequit). In addition, the limitations of AragonOS became apparent to us. Now we are working on our own DAO framework — AkropolisOS and on improving governance mechanisms in the DAO. Please follow our updates — we will share more in the near future.
Q — If the target users are unbanked, are we talking about this project focused on third world countries? Which countries could benefit from this project?
A — First of all, we focus on DeFi users who want to get a loan without 150% collateral. But in the future we think our product will be interesting to emerging markets — for example, Akropolis Network can replace Chamas and other community alternatives to the banking system.
Q — How safe is Akropolis? Is it enough to make users safe, reduce the risk of losing money and personal information?
A — First of all, Akropolis does not store private user data, so it could not be stolen from Akropolis.
Second of all, Akropolis is non-custodial solution. All financial operations (such as lending, investments etc) are done on-chain via smart-contracts. This way only AFO users can decide what they will do with their investments.
This being said, crypto industry is still in its infancy in terms of development. Nobody is protected from vulnerabilities and hacker attacks. To prevent this we will do a full security audit with trusted auditors.
Q — What are the advantages of C2FC and what is its place in Akropolis ecosystem? Why use the C2FC token for the Cashflow Relay and not the AKRO token?
A — The C2FC is a digital token (ERC721), which acts as an automatically executed right to claim a defined part of the future cashflow that arrives at the issuer Ethereum address within a given time frame.
The advantages of C2FC are in the following features:
- Direct debit initialization by the sender
- Ability to realize escrow logic for payments receiver
- Ability to transfer ownership to receive recurring payments: transferred to another person
- Tokens are composable and can be grouped into a portfolio according to predefined characteristics
An already operating business or an individual who has regular income payments and needs additional liquidity can issue C2FC for defined future periods and trade them at the marketplace. It looks like exchanging future cashflows for “money now” by selling discounted C2FC or borrowing funds, using C2FC as collateral. This allows creating cashflow financing application for DeFi.
Q — What’s AkropolisOS and how it will help developers to efficiently build DAO/DeFi apps? How is AkropolisOS better than the existing solution built on AragonOS ? & what are the advantages of choosing AkropolisOS?
A — AkropolisOS is a framework (set of libraries) for building a DAO. We took inspiration from OpenZeppelin SDK which modular architecture proved to be one of the best practices in the market for creating building blocks from which you can assemble smart contracts customized for specific tasks.
It will allow any developer to quickly build a DAO with the properties he needs. AragonOS works as a platform that sets certain rules and restrictions for all DAOs running on it. This leads to certain limitations that complicate the development process.
I think it's worth pointing out that the current Instanbul upgrade would not have the same debilitating impact on AkropolisOS vs AragonOS (exactly because of its architecture).
Q — I see you have a collaborative relationship with MakerDAO, how do they help you in your project? And are you planning to partner with other stablecoins?
A — We cooperate with stablecoins to provide the possibility to save and invest money in stable currency regardless of geographic positions and local currency of our users. And we are happy with our relationships and will continue to work closely with MakerDAO (more news out soon), they are by far one of the most supportive and responsive teams in the ecosystem.
We plan to cooperate with more stablecoins, but only with reliable and trusted ones as we don’t want to expose our users to legal and financial risks.
For the full AMA transcript please check CryptoDiffer article — https://cryptodiffer.com/news/akropolis-ama-recap
For more general questions and answers you can always visit our FAQ at https://wiki.akropolis.io/FAQ/
Learn more about Akropolis:
Website: https://akropolis.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/akropolisio
Telegram: https://t.me/akropolis_official
Do you have any questions? Reach out through email team@akropolis.io or via Telegram.
