Nov 16, 2020
PlasmaPay — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — October 29
On Thursday, October 29, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Ilia Maksimenka, CEO.
We asked him questions about the development of PlasmaPay.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
PlasmaPay is a crypto/fiat wallet and payment dApp on Plasma Chain.
Plasma blockchain will provide for DeFi and dApps services a very scalable infrastructure to run a smart-contracts and new applications.
52% of the total token emission will be distributed as a reward for users who provide liquidity on DEXes.
Users who open a business account on PlasmaPay for its e-commerce will get instant liquidity after each payment.
$PPAY will be used to pay a commission for a cross-chain swap of any assets.
Introduction
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What did you do before crypto, how did you get into crypto and did you have any other venture in crypto previous to being involved with PlasmaPay?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: I have a background in corporate finance, stock exchange and fintech, worked before as a new tech analyst in government, corporates and as a fund manager in a private investment bank. I was a founder of different startups in the financials and AI space from 2010 to 2016. I came to the crypto space in early 2013 and started PlasmaPay project in 2017 with a very skilled team in crypto and security space.
Product
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What’s your role at PlasmaPay and what is the project about in a few simple sentences?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: I’m the CEO. PlasmaPay is a crypto/fiat wallet and payment dApp on Plasma Chain. It’s a most advanced system for fiat on-/off- ramp with operation in more than 165 countries and supporting Visa/Mastercard/SEPA/SWIFT/e-wallets. #PPAY is the main token of PlasmaPay and cross-chain infrastructure for Plasma chain. Our goals with a #PPAY infrastructure to connect globally fiat to DeFi market and provide people with advanced products to manage their portfolio and control digital funds on-chain.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What’s Plasma Chain? There are other fiat on/off ramp solutions. How do you differ from them?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We see that for future DeFi and Fintech services, we need to have a new infrastructure platform. Plasma blockchain is just a piece of that infrastructure in Plasma Ecosystem. Plasma blockchain will provide for DeFi and dApps services a very scalable infrastructure to run a smart-contracts and new applications. Developers will have up to 50.000 TPS on-chain, zero transaction fees, access to global fiat ramps and Plasma oAuth infrastructure to provide for their users a smooth and convenient onboarding to DeFi applications. We also plan to build for dApp developers advanced tools, IDE, and non-code platform to design a smart-contracts in the visual editor. All this infrastructure provides for dApp developers, banks and financial institutions the entire building-block platform with the full freedom of design new fintech services.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: I read that you have over 100,000 customers
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Yes, that’s true.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: That’s very impressive. How did you do that? Also, what’s the volume you’ve handled through the platform over these 3 years?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We worked as a payment system so people use us to buy crypto or e-commerce businesses use us as a gateway to receive payments. Volume is slowly growing as more and more people and business start using us in 2020. I think that’s not a big number of customers in compare with CoinBase and Binance).
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Would you say you’re a competitor to crypto card providers like Wirex, MCO, and others?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: A little bit. We are competing with many of them, but the idea behind Plasma is to build a full vertical platform from blockchain to products for end-users.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: So you’re not only allowing people to buy or sell crypto but give them easy access to DeFi products?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Yes, make DeFi looks more like a normal bank account for people with savings accounts, insurance, and lending.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What is the token use case? How did you make sure it captures the value of the ecosystem you’re building?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We are launching the full ecosystem for DeFi world with a basic $PPAY token. It will have many utility (card order, commissions for developers, and payment for internal services) and DeFi functions, such as staking, governance, rewarding, and liquidity mining. The main goal of PPAY is to become a cross-chain infrastructure to connect Plasma chain with liquidity on different chains, such as Ethereum, EOS, Tron.
In the #PPAY ecosystem, we will have a lot of different use cases for the token as a utility and as a DeFi asset.
- Rewards: You will be able to stake token and get rewards from the pool of system’s fees.
- Liquidity mining: 52% of total token emission will be distributed as a reward for users who provide liquidity on DEXes.
- $PPAY will be used to pay a commission for a cross-chain swap of any assets.
- Governance: Hold a token and vote for any updates on contracts or make a new proposal.
- A lot of utility functions inside the PlasmaPay platform.
You can find more info on our site or whitepaper
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: That’s a big number reserved for liquidity, that must be one of your priorities.
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Absolutely.
Q — Twitter user @Vn69676675: Why do the old-money economy and the crypto economy need a connection by a bridge — which is PlasmaPay? What problem does PlasmaPay want to solve regarding traditional payments? Where do you see weaknesses in the traditional structure of the finance industry?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: The old money economy has some big issues: too many regulations that create a lot of problems for globalization, global e-commerce, and cross-border payments; high fees for payments; unevenly developed financial infrastructure in developed and developing countries; slowest transaction speed (some of SWIFT wires take you 3 days to receive). All this problem can be fixed with an advanced global financial infrastructure, that we believe should be built on blockchain, like Plasma.
With PlasmaPay, we’ve already solved the fee and speed problem for e-commerce. Anyone who opens a business account on PlasmaPay for its e-commerce will get instant liquidity after each payment and will be able to do a global e-commerce business without limitations. It’s all live, go and open an account on app.plasmapay.com and test our digital payments with stable coins of 42 countries.
Q — Telegram user @semogaberkahXD: Which specific DeFi product is $PPAY offering or are you offering them all?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Yes, we are planning to bring a full list of DeFi products in one. You will have staking, borrowing, lending, DEX, synthetic assets, etc. All this will be in one beautiful dashboard for you with fiat on and off-ramp.
Q — Telegram user Cengizhan Tekin: The fees for withdrawing, depositing and exchanging on the wallets raised considerably. Do you provide any advantages in terms of fees so that I can think of switching to PlasmaPay Wallet?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We have many payment methods for fiat on and off-ramp. You can find all the fees here.
Q — Telegram user Muhammad Novreysa: Many projects are dead and core members of some projects have left. How we can trust PlasmaPay?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We’ve already 3 years on the market and nobody left the project. Now, we are building a big DeFi product and our team is very excited about it. We also have many reputation investors who are backing us and also believe in the future of the project.
Q — Telegram user Cali Fernandez | Narwhalswap Ambassador’’: Is there a chance Plasmapay having a mining pool or staking reward?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Yes, we will have both, but our main priority is to launch staking contract and liquidity mining.
Q — Telegram user U Fig: Is PlasmaPay already a profitable startup?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We’re already a profitable startup with many customers. I hope we will grow 10 times with customers and reach 1M by next year.
Q — Telegram user Smirnov: 52.5% of your supply is meant for the community? How will it be distributed?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: The tokens will be distributed between liquidity mining for people who provide liquidity in our DEX and between our community governance, who will control all protocol fees and proposals.
Q — Telegram user Muhammad Novreysa: Where I can buy $PPAY?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We will announce soon in our main channel the date of listing and the first two exchanges where you will be able to buy tokens!
Team
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: How many people are in the team? For how long have you been working on PlasmaPay?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We are 25 people on the team, most of them are highly skilled developers in blockchain and cybersecurity.
Finance
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Yes. We raised some funds for equity in 2017 and PPAY is our first token fundraising. PPAY initial stage of seed and private sales, we’ve already had huge demand from the strategic crypto investors. We will announce all the details about our strategic VCs and plans for listing very soon, please follow us on our telegram community and to get the latest updates, and will be the first buyer on the public market.
Q — Telegram user Winter Kommt 🥶: What is HyperLoop and why can commissions only be paid with $PPAY? If I accept Fiat money at PlasmaPay, can I withdraw it directly to my bank account?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: Hyperloop will allow you to move any token on Plasma chain where you will have the same DEX but with fast transactions (up to 50.000 TPS) and zero transaction fee. All fees will be paid in $PPAY token.
Only corporate accounts can withdraw funds now to a bank account, all individuals can withdraw their funds on a card or in e-wallet.
Security
Q — Telegram user JaKi: Has your smart contract been audited by any blockchain system? Why should we feel safe when providing liquidation for PlasmaPay?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We have a very strong partner Certik, (they just listed on Binance), who does all our security audits and protect our users with insurance from any mistakes.
Q — Telegram user Emi 💌: Why are users not allowed to change their email address on PlasmaPay? What are the reasons behind this?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: This is because the main attack vector in all services is restoring the password via email and changing email, so people can recover their stolen accounts and lose funds. In our system, you can’t change the email that protects us from many basic hacker attacks on the system.
Business Development
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What stage is the project/product at?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: For the past 3 years, we’ve built and made live our payments system with crypto and fiat accounts, PlasmaPay and our blockchain Plasma.
We are working hard on the adoption of crypto for the masses since 2018 and the most advanced system for fiat on-/off- ramp with operation in more than 160 countries and supporting Visa, Mastercard, SEPA, SWIFT and e-wallets.
Our goals with a #PPAY infrastructure to connect fiat to DeFi market and provide people with advanced products to manage their portfolio and control digital funds on-chain. All DeFi products and our DeFi dashboard will be launched in the next 2–3 months.
Q — Twitter user @alej_pacedo: What fiat currencies will coexist in the PlasmaPay ecosystem? Will your dApp be able to be used in Latin America?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We now support 42 stable coins on our mainnet of Plasma blockchain. You can easily buy it and store it in our digital non-custodial wallet, or exchange to crypto at any moment.
Our dApps will be available in all countries without any limitations or restrictions. All this will be decentralized and has governance with our $PPAY token. So if you hold our token, you will be able to provide your proposals or manage our on-chain fees.
Q — Telegram user Muhammad Novreysa: What are your major goals to archive in the next 3–4 years?
A — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay: We want to build first Bank 2.0 that fully backed by the blockchain and DeFi protocols.
Thanks for coming in! We all learnt a lot about PlasmaPay. Keep us updated. Where can we follow you? — Alex Raffin from GAINS
Thank you all for AMA!!! I had fun. Learn more about PlasmaPay from our pages: Website, Medium, Telegram, Twitter and GitHub. — Ilia Maksimenka from PlasmaPay
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