Sypool AMA Recap
To help celebrate the listing of Sypool (ROWAN), AscendEX’s Mary Zheng sat down for an AMA with Sypool’s Founder “Jackson” to gain more insight into the project’s success and strategy for the future.
Mary | AscendEX
Hi @jackson_Sypool. For those that are not familiar, can you briefly describe Sypool and what problems the project is aiming to solve?
Jackson | Sypool
Sypool is an asset management protocol, which hires professional managers to manage users’ assets. And we are trying to bring the most sophisticated trading strategies which have been practiced for years in traditional markets. As far as I know, we are the first to introduce quantitative trading strategies into the crypto world. Every fund’s shares are tradable in the secondary market.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
That sounds pretty cool. In terms of the native token — SYP, how does the SYP token function within the platform and why is it needed?
Jackson | Sypool
SYP is our governance token, which means it represents and absorbs the value this protocol creates. The value derives mainly from the profit our managers create for our users and the growth of the entire ecosystem. SYP will be involved in every aspect of Sypool: management fee, staking rewards, ecosystem incentives, and future functions or apps.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Cool. Could you share the development status and progress of the project thus far? Including the major partners and perhaps some statistics.
Jackson | Sypool
We started this project about half a year ago. Last month we launched our testnet and we hosted 2 rounds of public tests during that time. Our backend data showed that over 10,000 users have participated in the testnet. And our community grew rapidly in the past month. As I checked, there are almost 100 thousand users following us on Twitter, telegram and discord. Besides our investors, we are deeply collaborating with our oracle partner, PYTH, for price feeding and anti mispricing attacks. Our liquidation partner, LIQ, would help us in derivative liquidation. Define has launched 2 rounds of our NFT. And of course, our IDO platform Dexlab has done a lot for us.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Very impressive. What does success look like for Sypool? What are the biggest risks and challenges Sypool will need to overcome to consider the project successful?
Jackson | Sypool
Well, Sypool is only the first step in building our Defi Lego. Later on, we will plan to release more features and products. But the main idea is to create more value for our community and make more contributions to the crypto world as our community contributes to our protocol. But we are restricted, not only by the development of the crypto industry and other force majeure, we couldn’t be sure that this industry would grow as it did in the past 10 years. I mean, no one could really predict the future. So, uncertainty is our biggest enemy. But we will try our best to do our part.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
May I ask who the users/clients will be on your projects and what are some examples of use cases for them?
Jackson | Sypool
Sure, as asset management protocol, our first users are supposed to be those who want to manage wealth. Certainly, we will provide professional services for them as we did in traditional markets. We will have four products based on different risk levels. They are Index SAP (low), Trader-based SAP (Medium), Quant SAP (Medium) and Structured Yield Fund which tracks the performance of other SAP or index, but stratify returns according to different risks.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Let’s talk about the current landscape of other projects doing something similar. What separates you from some of the competitors?
Jackson | Sypool
That’s a hard question, but firstly we want to thank all our competitors for providing so much inspiration for us. We wouldn’t achieve this if it weren’t for them. For example, Set protocol, Enzyme and PieDAO give us the initial idea about how to tokenize fund shares and how the framework should be. Later on, we learned from their successes and mistakes, and furthered the design by adding our work into this sector. So learning and discovering our advantages, that’s what separates us.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
What is your strategy in regards to attracting more users to your protocol?
Jackson | Sypool
In short, our future and innovative products.First, we will continue developing more professional financial products (SAP) as well as attracting professional fund managers to set up pools. I believe through our high-quality products, many fund lovers will get interested. Second, as we always said, our vision is to build a comprehensive DeFi protocol, so we will add more and more DeFi lego pieces to our protocol. Staking, LP, LP token staking, also derivatives such as perpetuals and options will be added in the future. Third, Metaverse! It’s the hot spot now. We are thinking about how to combine it all. For DeFi players, they could enjoy staking, providing liquidity. Also LP tokens will be able to be staked in the future. Btw, we are planning some interesting NFT products such as adding financial elements to NFT.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Can you please elaborate on the goals you are aiming to achieve in 2021?
Jackson | Sypool
We will list our SYP on both Dex and Cex within one hour! After listing, staking will be available soon. Before the mainnet launch, we will test functions such as new manager application, community governance and dashboard with ETH or BTC standard. And we need to have our codes audited. At the end of 2021, we plan that the mainnet will be launched! That might be another big milestone for us.
Mary Zheng | AscendEX
Cool. Last question from my end is a non-project-related question — which sector of crypto markets excites you the most?
Jackson | Sypool
I believe that’s the paradigm shift about value creation. How this industry makes consensus valuable is very attractive. We are halfway between Web 2.0 and 3.0. And we are exploring the new organization forms. Different from last century, we are, or we have been experiencing a revolution around how we produce and how we consume. Perhaps decentralization gives us a new solution to our problems. I mean, centralized institutions are necessary. The Tragedy of Commons suggests that decentralization has its own limits. But as an alternative, crypto markets would play a more vital role in our world once it finds a suitable use case, just like the internet found social media and digital advertising.
