Trader Joe AMA Recap

Date: 8 July 2021
Guest: Trader Joe | Cryptofish, co-founder (@cryptofishx)
Host: Pedro (@0x_pedr0)
Venue: Elk Discord
Format: Text

This recap is a lightly edited transcript of the AMA with banter removed for length.

Pedro (Elk): Let’s all give a warm Elk welcome to @cryptofish from Trader Joe!

Ok, so we’ve had a ton of good questions from the crowd here and on twitter. There is clearly lots of interest in what you guys are doing — could you start with just a quick elevator pitch of what Trader Joe is?

Cryptofish (Trader Joe): Sure. So the tl;dr of Trader Joe is that we’re a One-Stop Trading Platform on Avalanche. Our goal is to be a DEX that’s solely focused on trading — first with swaps, then when lending comes out we’ll have leveraged trading. And further in the future, to add more trading products, like options.

Pedro (Elk): Leveraged trading, wow! Happy to see fellow DEX friends with innovative roadmaps. Options are interesting as well…I’m excited to learn more myself today. So instead of me hogging up all the questions, I’ll jump into some from our community, if that’s alright

Let’s start with a not-so-easy-but-important one:

“I know that Trader Joe is solely focused on DeFi related features such as lending and borrowing, probably vaults and strategies etc. Can you shed some light on what happens behind the scenes? How do you approach each problem both from a technical and from a non-technical aspect?”

Cryptofish (TJ): I love these kinds of questions. Murloc is a product manager and I’d say both of us are very focused on doing things that make sense for the user. When we plan a new feature, we try really hard to strip away a lot of the things that we think are unnecessary. This is actually quite hard to do; in crypto, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking complexity equates to a better product.

Some common examples are things like lock up periods, withdrawal fees and voting on pool weights with your tokens. These all sound like very logical things to do, and your most devoted followers will love you for them, but if we take a step, we think to ourselves: how many users actually want to vote on pool weights on their tokens? If we think it only just adds more friction to the product with only little benefit, then it’s just not worth adding.

So a lot of our approach to the product is just doing the most minimal thing possible.

After designing the product, this is where Murloc shines. He’s incredibly skilled at product management and will create user stories and user flows. For example, if you click this button and it’s a “success”, what happens next? If it fails, what should happen? These small details we like to be quite pedantic about.

Then once everything is designed and spec’d out will we actually get down to coding it.

Pedro (Elk): Sounds like everything is very user-centric. Is that how you guys think?

Cryptofish (TJ): Yes absolutely. Our philosophy is very much about focusing on the important and stripping away what we think is not.

Pedro (Elk): Awesome. We also believe in simplicity and focus on the community. OK, next question, from @xxxxxxxx:

“Another exciting trading platform with farms coming from the Avalanche ecosystem. How do you plan to differentiate yourself from others?”

Cryptofish (TJ): We’ve added quite a few features from day 1 to show that we’re different: new UI, candlestick chart, zaps, migrate and double reward farms. I think personality-wise we’re also quite different: we’re willing to try different things with our marketing and with our product, for example, the Farmer’s Market which we just introduced that will boost a farm for 3 days every week.

Roadmap-wise is where I think we differ the most. With Trader Joe, it’s clear: DeFi only. We’re not gonna go astray and start doing bridges or NFTs. We’re strictly focusing on DeFi with trading, lending and soon leveraged trading. As far as I’m aware, no other DEX is focusing on this.

Pedro (Elk): Trader Joe does have a great personality as a project! It’s always refreshing when teams are not afraid to think outside the box. Really cool artwork too, by the way! Next question from @xxxxxxxx:

“I can see in your roadmap that you plan to write research papers in Phase 3 and beyond. Do you have contacts with any universities or do you intend to do this on your own? And also what made you pick the Minecraft-like design for your token? Is it a temporary decision?”

Cryptofish (TJ): The beauty of research in DeFi is that there is no Journal of DeFi. So really, you don’t need to be part of some prestigious university and pray that the editor of some journal will publish your paper. All the research can be found on Twitter! All you need is to have an active account, post some good content and tweet out your paper! If it gains traction, then you know you’re onto something.

As for writing the paper itself, a DeFi research paper is pretty light on math and doesn’t require you to conduct any experiments. So really it’s the same as writing a litepaper/whitepaper or a medium article, which anyone can do. You just need a compelling solution to a problem.

Other than that, we’ve personally done research in our own academic institutions. I did a bit in machine learning so I’m quite confident of writing a paper, but the main point is that DeFi research doesn’t require the same level of rigour. Just good ideas and a will to write.

About the Minecraft-like design: we really feel culture and identity is the most important thing in crypto, even more than tech! So we looked around the different chains and tried to figure out the identity of each chain. BSC for example, is kinda like a “game casino” culture. Eth on the other hand is about anime and 8-bit cryptopunks. Avalanche is still finding its identity however. And given that it’s an improved version of Ethereum, we felt like it should be like going from the Super Nintendo to the N64. The Super Nintendo was great, but the N64 was even better !! Hence why we decided to go with the 3D polygon look.

Pedro (Elk): Lots to take in there…great question and wonderful answer. I was both a super nintendo and N64 guy. Remember Starfox? That was my jam.

Cryptofish (TJ): Mario Party mate.I still remember those hand blisters.

Pedro (Elk): Ha, another classic! Well before we fall into a memory lane rabbit hole, let me roll on with the next question from the crowd. From @xxxxxxxx:

“According to docs, the final $JOE token will be emitted approximately on Jan 3, 2024. How will you reward liquidity providers after all $JOE tokens are emitted?”

Cryptofish (TJ): Good question. Well if you think about it, the trading fees you get from providing liquidity is supposed to be the incentive for you to provide liquidity. Yield farming only added an extra incentive and made it much more profitable. But to answer your question, just providing liquidity isn’t lucrative at all right now because of impermanent loss and also because it requires you to put some much capital for a small amount of profit (capital inefficient).

I really think capital efficiency is key for AMMs in the future. Uniswap v3 is starting to show this is the future and I firmly believe that’s the path we’ll take too before JOE finishes emitting.

Pedro (Elk): You’re right. Liquidity providers are the heart of any AMM, and capital efficiency for them is critical

Cryptofish (TJ): Yup definitely

Pedro (Elk): (I’ll shamelessly plug ELK providing Impermanent Loss protection for our LPs)

Cryptofish (TJ): Hehe, well there’s really two ways to solve this: solve IL or solve capital inefficiency.

Pedro (Elk): True. Anything to hint at on your roadmap as far as capital efficiency goes? Or an ongoing project for the team?

Cryptofish (TJ): We’re firmly focused on lending first. One step at a time.

Pedro (Elk): We’re all looking forward to how it unfolds. OK, I have another question from the group. This one is pretty long, so prepare yourself. From @xxxxxx:

“First, it’s really exciting to see two projects that I follow with great interest working together. The ELK-AVAX double reward farm from Trader Joe is a really great farming opportunity and I wish to see it renewed in the future. Thanks for that guys, really appreciated!

As for my question, you at Trader Joe stated that you would like to expand outside of Avalanche at some point in your development, mentioning the difficulty to “get into” the ecosystem as one of the obstacles ahead. It turns out that Elk is trying to solve this problem by connecting as many chains as possible with their bifrost. From that point, we can all see natural cooperation take shape. To be honest, I would be really enthusiastic about it, and I’m absolutely convinced that you have your views on that. So, may I ask to delve into your vision about a broader cooperation between the two projects?”

Cryptofish (TJ): First I want to share my thanks to the Elk team. When we came onto the scene as an unknown team, they were the first to welcome us with open arms. What we’ve learned in our short time in this space is that having strong relationships are game changers and working with Elk has been nothing but easy. You absolutely need friends in this space; it’s really the same as the business world.

How would this relationship play out in the future? Well, DEXes and bridges always bring natural synergy and I’m sure we’ll be having conversations about this very soon! But for the meantime, we’re both very happy to give each other advice and help promote each other’s projects as much as possible.

Pedro (Elk): As I mentioned earlier, great teams think alike! We are all stronger together. Another good Q from @xxxxx:

“Hi guys! So excited as a project! I have a question: Have you guys had any roadblocks while implementing Chainlink into the Avalanche network? How has that experience been so far? Any plans on more integrations with Chainlink in the future? Thanks!”

Cryptofish (TJ): Not at all. Chainlink is such a well-run project and they’re always happy to give us updates. It sounds like the nodes are already operational, they’re just waiting on a contract deployment onto Avalanche, so they should be live soon! I think any more integrations with Chainlink will involve sponsoring more price feeds for different tokens. First we’ll start with AVAX/USD and ETH/USD, but the dream is to get price feeds for all Avalanche tokens. ELK/USD would be nice.

Pedro (Elk): Chainlink is definitely another great partnership for you guys. Link feeds are a game changer. OK, a few more questions from the community. Next up, @xxxxxxx:

“What sorts of plans do you have for xJOE?

For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen staking native token (in this case staked JOE = xJOE) and harvesting an LP of your choice, which then you’d add the LP to your existing LP, and harvest more JOE, turn it into xJOE, this goes on and on, is this possible?”

Cryptofish (TJ): I think the LP harvesting is technically possible, but would require some complex contracts for sure!

The xJOE has kinda confused everyone and I think a lot of it is because people think it’s supposed to act the same way as xPEFI or xSNOB which isn’t the case. The idea is you stake it, which converts it to xJOE. We then collect fees from pools and send it to the xJOE holders; the ratio of xJOE:JOE goes up and when you convert your xJOE back to JOE then you get more than what you started with.

TLDR; it’s really complex, we’re currently working hard to make it easier to understand!

In the future, xJOE holders will also get % of earned interest and closed liquidations too. And the idea is to always have the xJOE token receive a portion of revenue from future trading products we release.

Pedro (Elk): Stake your JOE and watch your bag grow!

Cryptofish (TJ): Oh i forgot. We’re also looking to be able to use xJOE as collateral when lending comes out!

Pedro (Elk): @xxxxx getting straight to the point now:

“Will you be posting jobs or bounties?”

Cryptofish (TJ): We have posted jobs! We prefer not to do bounties. If you’re good enough to do bounties, then you’re good enough to join Trader Joe.

If you’re curious, we have a jobs board on our discord.

Pedro (Elk): Awesome. Let’s wrap things up with a perfect question to bring us home, from our very own Local Elk @xxxx:

“What is the end game for Trader Joe?”

Cryptofish (TJ): To be the premier platform for all sorts of trading on Avalanche!

Pedro (Elk): Well from what I’ve heard today, you guys are well on your way! We’re psyched to have such great partners and look forward to being along for the ride.

Cryptofish (TJ): Thank you, still long ways to go, but a good start indeed. Thank you for hosting us. If anyone is interested in learning more, here are some links:

• Telegram: http://t.me/traderjoe_xyz
• Discord: http://discord.gg/VgBTj6Sh5p
• Medium: http://traderjoe-xyz.medium.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/traderjoe_xyz
• Website: https://traderjoexyz.com

Pedro (Elk): There we go! Thanks again everyone, it’s been another great AMA. Hope you all have a wonderful day!