Recap of AMA with Centaur Team

Dear Centaurians,

Thank you for being a part of the AMA with Centaur’s Co-Founder Sean Kor and Centaur’s communication lead Taylor today.

For all those who couldn’t join us for the AMA, please find the transcript of the AMA.

Please note: Apart from the order of a few questions & minor spelling corrections, the rest of the text of the AMA remains unchanged.

[Transcript: Update From Sean]

Sean: Hey hey everyone! Welcome back to our Centaur AMA. We’ve been really busy these past few weeks and I’ve got quite a number of updates today!

Anyway the first update on the list is a great one!

As we’ve probably seen, our Centaur community is growing by the day. In recognition of the more senior members who have been contributing their time and effort to guiding the newer members along, we’ve decided to expand our Centaurian program!

Sean: The next thing on the list is a quick review of the Polygon launch. It’s been quite a journey since we first deployed Centaur Swap on Ethereum and we’re now looking towards expanding out across multiple protocols. Polygon is just the first of many and I think it’s a good stepping stone for what comes next.

This time around, I’d say a big part of it was thanks to the Ecosystem support we got from the Polygon team and their distribution channels, as well as the support of the Quickswap team. We also just rolled out the Quickswap Liquidity Mining program https://t.me/CNTR_ANN/171 and it’s integrated with both Adamant Finance and Polycat Finance for convenience in compounding.

There’s some administrative things we’re still working on, one of which being the updating of details on Coingecko to include the new pairs and contract addresses deployed on Polygon. We’re also aware that the CNTR logo used on the Quickswap farms is the WHEY logo and we’ve raised this point to the Quickswap team.

We’re also making some adjustments on the back-end to clean up the user experience. If you noticed, we’ve amended the refresh rate for the Polygon farms so it doesn’t flicker as much as the initial launch. We’re also exploring options other than the Graph so we don’t have to deal with the 0 TVL every other week.

Moving forward, we’re placing a higher emphasis on the swap with two major goals:

1. Increase the number of supported tokens

2. Increase the number of supported protocols

A few weeks back, I mentioned that token listings were not on a high priority as we may very well specialise into a niche field (something like Curve specialising into stable swaps). However, we’ve had some interesting developments on the technical side and we’re now exploring the possibility of expanding the number of tokens supported on Centaur Swap.

Due to the requirement of price feeds, it has always been tough to work on this aspect. However, we’ve been reaching out to more partners since before the Polygon launch and we’re exploring alternative avenues to work around this choke.

This will, of course, require some time to build, test and implement!

[AMA Transcript]

Question: Your TVLs didn’t even go up anywhere high and you’re on promotional apy now aren’t you?

Sean: Regarding TVL, I think one of the considerations is that unlike other projects, we didn’t seed the pools / farms, nor did we pre-mine or raise funds for it. I’d also argue that the TVL isn’t a major focus of mine right now as we’ve still got other plans for Centaur Swap in the coming future. Of course, a higher TVL is better for traders and marketing but in its current state, it doesn’t exactly hurt us.

A large TVL can be achieved by running a cap raise, baiting whales into farming, loading up the pools and artificially inflating the TVL. However, most of these options are not sustainable in the long run and not something that we are steering towards.

Question: SOL and Fantom are mooning right now, are there any plans to include them in the supported protocols?

Sean: On the protocols side, we’re looking at other EVM compatible chains first as these are easier to work with and most of them have an established bridge to and from Ethereum.

Of course in the long run, we still want to have Centaur Swap deployed on as many protocols as possible, but platforms like Solana, Polkadot and Elrond would require a complete rewrite for the smart contracts and a new set of audits to be done.

Question: Very general question but what does all mean for the Farming? Will users still be farming WHEY or will other rewards be introduced?

Sean: WHEY will continue to be the governance token for Centaur Swap. We went to great lengths to get it to be compatible between Ethereum and Polygon and will do our best for it to be interoperable with the other protocols

When a new protocol is launched, we will reduce the future emissions rate proportionately to accomodate the distribution on the new protocol. Similar to how we reduced the ETH rates by 50% and transferred it over to Polygon.

Question: Could we have a version of the swap on COSMOS once the ETH-CNTR bridge is built? Or just more integration with that ecosystem, like farming on Osmosis? Seems to me that one ETH L2 is a good starting point…

Sean: I’ll need to get back to this question in the next AMA. We’ve been having some internal discussions related to the Centaur Chain and our CeFi integration roadmap. It’s not concluded yet so it would be difficult to answer you at this time

Question: The EVM-based compatability approach sounds awesome! Can you speak about whether this is because of your Cosmos IBC approach or is it more of a custom approach requiring more tailored tooling?

Sean: I think it’s partially inspired by both Cosmos IBC and the Relay-Parachain structure implemented by Polkadot. The goal that we are working towards is definitely a more custom approach though as existing market solutions aren’t cutting it right now. It’s the same consideration we had when building Centaur Swap, where we took references from multiple existing solutions and felt that its something we had to mould with our hands.

Question: can you speak a bit about your current thoughts on how WHEY voting and proposals might work? As in will there be some simple tools to participate in governance over time? maybe in Q2 or Q3 of next year?

Sean: I’d preface this by saying that it’s one of our ongoing discussions and what I’m describing is definitely subject to changes.

In my opinion, WHEY / CNTR governance is better done on an advisory structure, where investors / community members can make proposals and vote on them, and such proposals would then be discussed within the team, with the result of those discussions being made public afterwards.

This might run contrary to how de-gov is being handled across the industry and there are many models in place right now. However, I think that for projects that are still primarily being led by a core team, it’s important to have some degree of oversight. With this, it would then allow for governance proposals to be more flexible in nature. as opposed to some implementations of A/B voting, which in my opinion defeats the purpose of decentralised governance. Good proposals would be executed by the core team to the best of their abilities, whereas rejected ones would have their constraints explained and possible alternatives provided. This would also lead to more refined proposals as they would represent a balance between the will of the community and the execution ability of the core team.

Question: I think that sounds great, but that we need the mechanism to put proposals forward…m. and we might need a discord at that point to keep track of them?

Sean: Yeap, we can work with existing proposal platforms first. I think there’s a few that I’ve seen around. Apart from that, the implementation would also be best executed when the community grows larger, which is also one point I’ve brought up before. Until such time, I think the AMA format that we’ve been using can be considered as a sort of pilot test for that model.

Question: Regarding the roadmap of CC, is it possible for you give some more details on the CeFi use cases?

Sean: For the roadmap, it’s an ongoing and pretty in-depth discussion so I’ll talk about it in the next AMA.

For the CeFi use cases, we are working with traditional firms across a variety of industries to implement blockchain technology and assist with their day-to-day operations. These would range from financial use cases such as payment processing on chain for increased transparency, audits and settlements across multiple entities, to other use cases such as digital certifications and signing!

Question: Great to hear that. Would this be first available in SEA region, then expanding to more regions?

Sean: Mostly focused on the SEA-region for now. Unfortunately, unlike the crypto-space where everything is highly globalised, the CeFi parts have to be launched regionally due to licenses and other tedious processes.

Question: For the CeFi use cases, do you have any thoughts about having DeFi insurance platform partners/offerings?

Sean: This was something we wanted to work on at the very beginning but was cut due to a significant bloat in our project scope. I think it’s possible to revisit it in future!

It’s been a much longer AMA than I thought it would be so if there’s no other pressing questions, we’ll end it here!

Thank you for being a part of the Centaur Community.

About Centaur

By combining the best elements of decentralised finance with measured regulatory control, Centaur is bridging DeFi and traditional finance. For more information, please visit our website, join our Telegram community discussion group and announcement channel.

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Signing off,

Centaur