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. This is also the last AMA for 2021.

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 to the last AMA for 2021! We’ll do a wrap up for the end of year today and touch on some of the key milestones for next year too! Before we do the annual wrap up, I’ll quickly go through the Cswap USDC campaign first!

Sean: As mentioned in the last AMA, it’s a simple campaign we’re running to encourage more activity for Cswap, which helps on both the marketing side and also to test the technology.

Sean: I believe one of the points brought up a few days ago was a swap from DAI to USDC with a significant slippage. This is actually because most of the traders were swapping TO USDC FROM some of the other coins, meaning that USDC liquidity was removed from the pools. This resulted in an undersupply against the target price, and a premium was applied on it to correct the balance. A trade from USDC to DAI would then have yielded a positive slippage, where you’d receive more DAI than USDC.

The giveaway tasks include any trade that interacted with the USDC pool, whether swapping to or from USDC.

Alternatively, liquidity providers who contributed more than 1,000 USDC would also be eligible for the giveaway.

For the second point, one of the main questions was whether existing LPs would be part of the calculations. We initially had no plans to include them as the campaign was designed to attract new users to work with the platform. However, after further discussion, we decided to include it in the calculations as liquidity providers could just withdraw and redeposit, which would have been a waste of gas.

For the giveaway, we’ll tabulate the numbers and addresses and do the distribution some time next week!

Sean: The past year has been pretty hectic for us, starting with the fundraising back in last October to the launch of the various platforms, protocol deployments and CeFi integrations.

At times, we’ve tried to push the boundaries as much as possible, and we’ve always tried to focus more on creating value wherever it makes sense. The swap was the first and major pivot for us, shifting from a ZKP privacy swap over to a single-side liquidity / IL mitigated one. It’s something we’re proud of deploying, and continuing to work hard on.

Of course, there were also other instances where the situation and broader market sentiment were mistimed and we had to adjust accordingly. For the mainnet in particular, we made the switch to a consortium chain as opposed to a public one for the initial launch, due to external conditions.

I’d say that a big part of our approach is to ensure we remain adaptive and flexible in this industry, while staying true to our core and strengths.

[AMA Transcript]

Question: Will the team be making any changes to the core focus of CNTR in 2022?

Sean: No, in fact for 2022, we’ll be focusing more on the core of CNTR, which is to focus on bridging the two world of CeFi and DeFi. The discussions over the past few months have been fruitful and we’re looking at getting some PR piece out in the next couple of weeks. It’s been greenlit and already being drafted right now so that’s something to look forward to in the new year.

Question: Also wanted to know, as more tokens and traction come into Cswap, can we expect to see an adjustment in the emission rates of whey?

Sean: The emission rate of WHEY is unlikely to change EXCEPT in the case of a new protocol deployment, where we will do what we did for the Polygon one. The emission rate per chain would be adjusted proportionately to support farming on the new protocol, but the net emission rate and the total supply of WHEY will always remain unchanged, barring minor fluctuations due to varying block timings.

Question: Are we expecting more tokens after usdc, and are you guys mainly targeting stables?

Sean: For the existing version of the swap, we’ll focus more on stables and large cap crypto. V2 will focus more on smaller cap tokens once the oracles for those platforms are ready!

Question: Are there any measures the team is thinking of to attract more liquidity into CSwap? Besides the recent campaign of course

Sean: Yeap for sure, but a good number of these campaigns can only work with the V2 version of the swap once we get the smaller cap coins deployed. This is because we’ll have the support of the various token partners we’re working with, and most of them have pledged to deploy a portion of their treasury tokens into the liquidity pools.

Question: Just to sum it up, i know this is a little general, but what do you think were some of the highlights of this year?

Sean: Hmnn, for me personally, I’d say the first botched deployment of Centaur Swap back in March was very eye opening for us. Before deployment, we ran all sorts of tests and worked with some of the key community members at the time to make sure it was ready. Despite that, the mainnet deployment still had some issues and we had to iron those out within a couple of days. It was really fortunate that we caught it early instead of after the liquidity grew to a larger size and it was a good learning experience for the entire team.

Question: Hi Sean, wanna ask how is the progress of the upgrade to V2 on Centaurswap? What will be main features be and when can we expect it to roll out?

Sean: We’re about done on our end but the primary challenge is that existing oracles are still lacking. There are already some on-chain solutions for price feeds but a number of them are low fidelity, pulling data from lagging or aggregated sources. This poses a risk to the liquidity pools as the price feeds are core to the swapping and settlement process.

Question: In hindsight what were some of the things that the cntr team would have done differently in 2021

Sean: Hmnn in hindsight, I think we would have placed a greater emphasis on market timing, VC selection and ongoing trends.

We’ve always been very in-tune with the market but I think during the height of the bull market earlier this year, there was a good number of nonsensical trends going around. A vast majority of those projects have been totally shut down by now and the rest of the sectors are pretty diluted, with minimal innovation.

For instance, the launchpad sector kicked off earlier this year and I think Zela or one of the other community members asked if we would pivot into doing something of the sort. We were hesitant as it wasn’t our core focus and we did expect that it would evolve in a different manner. However, with the benefit of knowing what happened, it’s clear that the sector is now heavily diluted and innovation is still kept to a minimum. The potential for utilising VRF and provable on-chain randomness wasn’t applied, nor other interesting DAO structures that could have reduced some of the stagnation.

Question: I assume you guys are still working with Chainlink right?

Sean: Yeap, we’ll continue to work with Chainlink for the existing version of Cswap but for V2, we’ve got a few partners we’re integrating with.

Question: Also, will there be some sort of marketing push after CNTR hits its developmental milestones, like Cswap V2 and the tradfi institutional integrations

Sean: Yes! We’re trying to start with some announcements for the tradfi integrations right now, just as a teaser since it comes up every other week in this group.

Question: How will CNTR change the landscape of the crypto scene in 2022?

Sean: I think there’s already a growing shift towards regulation and taxation of cryptocurrencies, which in itself is a double edge sword. The negative aspects are pretty clear but I feel that there are benefits too which are often understated. Regulations lend legitimacy to the space and that’s something we really need in order to garner serious interest from institutional money.

That’s aligned with what we’ve felt for Centaur back when we first conceptualised it, and my co-founder, James has been working hard on rolling out the CeFi and licensing aspect for the entirety of this year.

Question: Golden hands here, question! Most of investors just focus on the price of token in short term instead of real value of project. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for CNTR investors long term?

Sean: CNTR has always worked on a long term structure, with exceedingly long vesting schedules for the major components (Seed, Team, Ecosystem). This is because the CeFi integrations require durations denominated in months and years, which is a stark contrast from the days and weeks turnaround that we’ve become familiar with in the crypto space.

For me, it’s a difficult balance as we have to assign resources to the CeFi aspects while still maintaining the DeFi segments for ongoing engagement and quicker deployments.

In the longer term, I’m pushing for the CeFi onboarding to feature CNTR heavily once the mainnet is integrated with their back-end operations.

Question: Can you prognosticate a bit about what you and the team think about the future of defi within the Cosmos ecosystem and Centaur’s potential to leverage / collaborate with the rising stars like Terra / Do Kwon?

Sean: I think that Terra is pushing boundaries for DeFi and we’ve been following the developments for Astroport and Mars very closely. It’s really impressive work and they’ve always been driving innovation, starting with UST as one of the early versions of an algo-stable-ish approach.

There’s definitely a good reason why many projects are choosing to work with the Cosmos framework, and it’s something we’re very attuned to. Once we have the bandwidth for it, I’d want to deploy the swap onto Cosmos and it’s associated chains as the ecosystem is growing at a really steady pace. Their emphasis on good working technology also resonates with us very strongly.

Question: One more Question: for 2022, do you anticipate expanding your team so you have a pod dedicated to the Hadar app, one to CSWap, and one to the complex needs for CeFi?

Sean: We’re actually already working with a similar pod structure. Although there’s still quite some bit of overlap between the pods. Due to the nature of our solutions, it’s impossible for completely silo-ed teams. For instance, the Hadar app team comprises mostly mobile app developers and requires support and advice from the Swap and DeFi team. Similarly, our mainnet team has to be included in the CeFi integrations as there’s a heavy overlap between the two. Lastly, the marketing and legal teams are overarching and involved in all aspects of Centaur. The work is also split among the co-founders too so I’m mostly dealing with the DeFi side, which includes Hadar and Cswap, as well as our community and crypto marketing segments. More recently, I have been including myself with the CeFi aspects to support the integrations too!

Well everyone, thanks for joining us here and sticking with us throughout the year! I’ll end the AMA at this time, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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