Recap of AMA with Centaur Team

Dear Centaurians,

Thank you for being a part of the AMA with Centaur’s Co-Founder Sean Kor yesterday.

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: Welcome to another AMA! We’ll do a quick recap on where we’re at right now and where we’re going! Do feel free to drop in questions along the way!

Last Monday we had our first token listing on Centaur Swap for USDC which went reasonably smoothly. The deployment of the pool and farm was clear on the technical side and I’d say that the bulk of the time spent was actually more on marketing and coordinating the launch.

Right now there’s a 26k TVL for USDC so be sure to throw in some with no IL risk haha

Aside from that, a vast majority of our efforts have been spent on the CeFi side as we’re trying to wrap up some discussions before they take a break for the festive season.

Interest is at an all time high, with other factors such as the ongoing congressional talks and blockchain and cryptocurrencies contributing to this, and we’re working to position ourselves as an entry point into this very daunting space.

[AMA Transcript]

Question: How has the process on USDC integration in CSwap been? Any potential difference between USDC and the other stables like DAI or USDT that were previously integrated?

Sean: I’d say it was something new to us. We did go through a few rounds of testing beforehand as we haven’t done a pool deployment post launch at that time. The other stables like DAI and USDT were done on the initial deployment of Centaur Swap, and getting the farm to sync up with the pool required some finesse but its definitely been a good learning experience. For assets that are already have an existing Chainlink price feed, we’re looking at a technical turnaround of under one day for deployment, maybe an added day for testing.

Question: Any updates on the CeFi partnerships mentioned in previous AMAs?

Sean: Heyhey! Yeah we’re trying to work out some kind of press release or announcement of collaborations on that end. Part of the reason why there’s been delays on this is because of the negative connotations associated with cryptocurrencies right now but I do think that sentiment is gradually shifting. Retail investors are already pretty deep into the space and crypto funds/VCs also have a strong foothold. The only ones out of the game right now are institutional funds and the wall street guys and that’s the market we’re looking at.

Question: Hey Sean! As Centaur is Singapore based, will a taxation law passing in Singapore targeting Crypto related income affect Centaur’s operations in any way

Sean: What we’ve seen so far is that taxation processes for cryptocurrencies and related income is still in its early stages. The common approach seems to be taxation of ingress/egress of funds (i.e. when crypto gets converted into fiat and vice-versa). It’s a simplistic approach and definitely ignores the different categorisation of incomes that are taxed differently.

A more detailed way of looking at it would involve breaking down their purposes. for utility tokens (typically used to pay fees for services or products), these would be taxed as sales revenue. Whereas for securities, these would be taxed as capital gains. This seems to be the ideal case but it’s really tough to work with since all cryptocurrencies and projects are structured as utility tokens because security tokens would come with their own bag of challenges (increased regulatory and compliance requirements).

We’ve been dealing with this alot too, particularly because Singapore is in the process of working out tax structures for it and various regulatory processes for cryptocurrencies. This is a whole separate topic though which would involved different means of regulations. In brief, our feeling is that regulations are beneficial as they lend legitimacy to the space, although most would consider them as an unnecessary hassle.

Question: As Centaur is introducing more tokens, like the most recent USDC on CSwap has caused WHEY emissions rates to be divided across more farms. Is there a concern that this will disincentive users for using the platform due to falling APY rates? Is it viable to increase the overall WHEY emission rates as more Tokens or Users come onto the platform?

Sean: Hmn this is a tricky question since it’s more related to economic theory and there isn’t a hard and fast answer to it. The logic was that increased offerings for tokens such as USDC would help to increase adoption of the platform, which would then drive demand for WHEY and offset the APY from the distribution. My feeling is that if the overall WHEY emission rate is increased, it would be counter to the sustainability of the platform as the rate of inflation would be increased for every token listing. The Weightage structure is the one employed by Sushiswap which is where we modeled our design from and I think it’s been working for them so far.

Question: First question :one regarding roadmap, as this is nearly complete, what are the major steps looking at a the bigger picture in 2022, 2023, and beyond?

Second question: any thoughts on a radix integration?

Third question: is the current TVL sufficient to ensure wider adoption, and if not, what incentives exist to broaden that aspect?

Sean: 1. I think when 2022 comes around, we’re going to be bringing our attention back to the CeFi side which is the initial goal of Centaur, bridging between CeFi and DeFi. On the DeFi side, we’ve got the wallet which is still in active dev and the Swap which has been launched. We’re also waiting for our new partner oracle to be deployed with their tech for price feeds, after which we would be able to roll-out Cswap v2. During this period, a lot of the emphasis is going to be on onboarding and integrations.

2. Not for Radix, I did briefly consider AVAX due to the increase in DeFi activity there but I think the low liquidity is still an issue for Cswap

3. We’re working out some marketing campaigns for Cswap and the recent USDC listing to incentivise both liquidity providers and traders to experience what its like!

Question: Defi 2.0 seems to be the rage recently. Is Centaur looking to hop onto the trend? if not how is Centaur poised when other bigger platform roll out their DeFi 2.0 related products.

Sean: By DeFi 2.0 are you perhaps referring to the recent curve wars and Olympus DAO forks? Though conceptually interesting, I think that OHM-forks don’t bring much to the value chain as most of them have strayed from the core concepts of securing Convex locked vecrv. Algostables and partially collateralised stablecoins have been pretty interesting and we’re delving deep into those but it’s not particularly related to what we’re doing. For the DEX space, I’d say the most recent major innovation is still Uni V3 which has questionable levels of adoption at best. I’ve seen some other single-asset-staking DEXes but they seem to be working on Bancor’s router model and aren’t truly single-asset, just a mint/burn structure that offsets the second token. Integral was something I was quite hyped about as a liquidity aggregator but they seem to have their own challenges they are working through too.

Question: Do you have an office? How many people are working on the project?

Sean: We’ve got our main office in Singapore and there’s about 15 full-timers here. We’re also supported by external marketing teams, market makers and a close group of advisors.

Question: It is perfectly. Are there plans to become more transparent with the community? Maybe an hour-long interview from the office? So that people begin to feel the reality of what is happening and that the project is really worth the investment of hopes and time. Do not think that doubts crept in me, many people and newcomers are sensitive to the market. Or is what happens behind the scenes with your fintech partners enough for you?

Sean: I think in market predominately dominated by anons and twitter profiles, we’re well ahead of the curve in terms of transparency 😅 In terms of communication, these AMAs are actually pretty tiring and I’m writing these all by hand, which is probably why most other projects stops doing them after their IDO.

It’s not about one or the other, the fintech partners have always been a core focus of Centaur, and Cswap has been the value add to the DeFi ecosystem that we worked on as an added bonus. The belief that we are addressing a real market need, have the right networks and access to these players and are still at the forefront of this technology is enough for us.

Anyway if there’s no further questions, I’ll be wrapping up the AMA here. Thanks for taking part everyone!

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