Recap of AMA with Centaur Team

Dear Centaurians,

Thank you for being a part of the AMA with Centaur’s Co-Founder Sean Kor 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 another AMA, it’s been a rough start to the year for crypto in general but here’s to hoping for a quick and steady recovery! I’ll be going through what we’ve been working on this past month and where Centaur is heading in 2022, and as always, feel free to drop in some questions if you have any!

A key observation for this year is that there’s growing interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies, for both institutional and retail investors, albeit in different directions. On the institutional side, we’re facing greater curiosity in its applicability as an alternative investment, whether speculatively or for yield and interest generation purposes. Whereas for retail, it’s mostly been gaining traction for NFTs, which are much more relatable for a wider audience while still having some potential for appreciation and growth.

Sean: Centaur has been focusing much more on the CeFi/Institutional side of things, targeting the practical uses of blockchain technologies to streamline administrative and financial solutions. More recently, we’ve been looking into the support pillars of finance, such as auditing, custodianship, fund administration and such. These stem from our direct experiences, as existing market solutions are quite lacking and incumbent players are unable to keep pace with the rapid innovations within the space.

[AMA Transcript]

Question: Just wanna check is there any updates on the progress on the consortium chain?

Sean: The consortium chain is part of it, along with the work done with Lab Moneta and Anak Indonesia that was announced earlier this month. With a consortium layer as an intermediary, reporting processes can be streamlined, which then improves the and supports the auditing processes through optimization of data generation and aggregation.

Question: I know this is a recurring qns, but when can we expect to see CSwap v2? Really excited for the new features!

Sean: No worries I completely understand. One of the key challenges faced as I’ve mentioned before is the lack of infrastructure to support CSwap at a technical layer. In our discussions, I’ve considered building our own native oracle solutions (an idea that was in the original whitepaper for Centaur) to address this issue, but for the moment, development bandwidth is tight as the bulk of the focus is on the CeFi side. We’re constantly looking to expand the team though and I would definitely like to increase our engineering efforts on the DeFi and crypto aspects!

Question: Hey Sean, the recent giveaways have been rather “OG” centric as the tasks that were given were mostly retroactive, will future events be centered around new user adoption? A balance would be nice too

Sean: Good point! I’ll keep this in mind such that future campaigns will start on a level playing field. I think its been tricky to balance between rewarding our long term supporters and still providing opportunities for our newer members.

Question: Hey Sean! Wanna know if there are plans to introduce a new blockchain onto cswap in 2022? And what will you guys be potentially looking at?

Sean: This would tie back to the oracle issue we’re facing but moving ahead, it’s definitely going to be the bulk of the EVM compatible chains

Question: HI ser, what are the broad goals for Centaur this year?

Sean: For this year, Centaur’s direction is to push for the rolling out of the CeFi initiatives in a manner that focuses on practical applications and utilities. A big part of it is business development and onboarding of clients/partners to get us where we’re going, and also the technical milestones to back those integrations.

Question: Thank you, could you touch on a little one how centaur would go about their operations in the face of the changing crypto landscape in 2022? Particularly on compliance and regulatory aspects

Sean: This is something that we’re facing on a day to day basis, especially with the bearish sentiments looming over us. Investors are definitely more wary, with the ARK Index underperforming significantly and we’ve had to spend a fair bit of time alleviating their concerns.

It’s also why Centaur is increasing our focus on the practical implementation aspect, as technical use cases and cost savings are evergreen, mostly independent of macro conditions.

Question: That would be great! Just a curious question, how much more difficult would it be to introduce a non-evm compatible chain onto the swap?

Sean: Depending on how different the architecture is, it could be anywhere between something like a translation job or a full redesign and development of the platform. On some of the larger chains, there are also solutions for EVM compatible pallets such as the implementation setup by Moonriver and Plasm on Polkadot so that reduces alot of the work for project teams.

Question: Any plans to open up new series of funding to help with developing infrastructure?

Sean: We have some ongoing discussions for this but it would be more on the equity side of things!

Question: Hi Sean, hope you’re well. Would it be possible (perhaps later) to get an update on the status of all partners, i.e. are we still actively partnered with them and what will that partnership bring? I feel like there were a lot of partnerships in the early days that might have run their course, and some we didn’t hear much about following the announcement

Sean: Off the top of my head, the one’s that we are working with on effectively a day-to-day basis would be Lab Moneta and the recent Anak Indonesia ones, as well as some unannounced partners on the CeFi side.

For ongoing discussions, we are still in frequent contact with Polytrade, Cover Compare, the three different oracle projects and most of the protocol layers we’re integrated/integrating with.

As for the others, some have concluded but we do still catch up with them every once in awhile, such as Unifarm and Bonfi, whereas others have pivoted and may not be as applicable, although still very successful in their project, such as PAID Network.

The rest of the partners would probably be better suited for future integration, where the case is either that we’re waiting on them or they’re waiting on us for technical milestones.

Question: It seems that the lack of the required oracle has become a big problem for the release of the second version of the swap and may delay the launch for quite a long time. When will there be updates for the swap of the first version? After the integration of USDC, I would like to rejoice at the new use cases

Sean: For listings, we’re definitely open to it if there’s demand and utility there, but when we reviewed the possible listings the consensus was that there aren’t many options based off Chainlink’s feeds at the moment. I can get the team to do another review next week.

Question: Will an updated roadmap be published?

Sean: Yeap! This is something we’re ironing out, and hoping to put out soon, the reason for the delay is due to discussion on resource allocations for focusing on DeFi vs CeFi.

Question: Is it possible that the mainnet remains as a consortium chain if a majority of partners want it to be?

Sean: Hmnn, it is possible but unlikely, as the benefits of opening up would definitely far outweigh keeping it in a consortium manner. In such a scenario, it would also seem to be possible for a silo-ed structure as a compromise, though this would require much more research to pull off. At present, the partners are aligned on using the consortium structure as a testbed, with the eventual goal of opening up.

Question: Is there anything to add in terms of marketing? are we going to change this part or is now not the best time to pay special attention to this?)

Sean: Ah thanks you know me so well haha. The team is intending to push for coverage to ride on the recent wave of institutional interest, though this would be more akin to traditional PR strategies for that target market, as opposed to the KOL distribution channels we may be more familiar with. The current flavor of the market is definitely on NFTs and Metaverses though so cutting above the noise would be a bit of a challenge.

Question:Any idea when the first remittance payment will be settled on CNTR?

Sean: The technology is about ready but we’re mostly caught in regulatory and compliance hurdles for now so the horizon is still slightly blurry on that end.

Question: Would there be any utility to CNTR or WHEY adding liquidity to Maiar Exchange and thus further strengthen the partnership?

Sean: I think this would be a little tricky as we haven’t had the swap built in rust yet, though that’s something I’m really keen on (a rust version of cSwap would make it compatible with a number of chains including ones like Casper too)

Question: Sean’s last question, but no less difficult, how many hours a day do you sleep? Thanks for the time we spent together! Let’s GO CNTR

Sean: Too few hours a day Thanks for sticking by us, I do appreciate it! And I have got to go now! Until next time!

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