Greetings Baristas,
Recently, I had the honor to represent LatteSwap in an AMA session with CryptoFi Vietnam (9/29). As usual, I’d like to share with you the recap of the session, so that you can stay up to date with all of our latest developments.
Please find the transcription of the session below:
Question 1:
To start the AMA, please have a quick introduction of LatteSwap so our community can have a better understanding. What is LatteSwap all about and how did you reach $1.2b TVL after launching for only 2 days?
Answer:
Of course! Let me give you a quick summary of LatteSwap: LatteSwap is a decentralized exchange with a focus on bridging the DeFi and the NFT space together with its NFT integrated functionalities. The platform offers three main features to the users: trade, earn, and collect. Users can trade cryptocurrencies with ease, participate in safe and attractive earning opportunities, and collect LatteSwap’s highly exclusive NFTs that possess real tangible utilities.
As for the TVL, to be honest with you, we were also quite surprised and didn’t really expect our TVL to cross the $1Bn mark let alone within just the 48-hour period. We’re truly grateful for the support we received and promise to continuously work hard to consistently improve the existing and release new features to the market.
I believe there were a few factors that played a key role in helping us achieve this incredible feat:
1. NFT integrated functionalities — We are one of the first protocols that actually create real use-cases for NFTs by incorporating NFT integrated functionality into the core of our protocol structure rather than just adding it as an afterthought. I believe we have a lot of potential to become an established pioneer within the NFT x DeFi space.
2. Protocol Safety — Although we have just launched, we made sure to do everything in our power to ensure our users’ funds security. This includes getting 2 audit reports from Peckshield and Inspex, creating our own bug bounty program with Immunefi, and implementing the timelock function on our contracts. I think this is what gave our users the confidence to trust us with their money.
3. Trustworthiness — I believe LatteSwap has put in a lot of work to show that we are a legitimate protocol that is here to stay. Our protocol vision and roadmap are well-defined. Our Docs is also very detailed, as we try to make sure we make as much information available to our users from day one. In addition, not only were our website and user interface carefully designed, but our tokenomics are also well thought out. We made sure to reward early adopters as well as protect HODLers from price inflation. This is how our bonus rewards period, rewards lock up, and our buyback and burn program came about.
Question 2:
We can see that you’re selling NFTs. What role will those NFTs play in your platform?
Answer:
Our unique value proposition primarily lies within our NFT integrated functions, which are specific to each of the NFT collection we launched:
1. OG NFT — Our OG NFT provides its owner with a passive source of rewards. The NFT gets a fixed allocation of all $LATTE emissions. As long as you hold the OG NFT, you will receive $LATTE tokens in perpetuity! All of our 2,864 OG NFTs were sold out within just 48 hours upon launch, signifying the community’s confidence in our project and vision.
You can buy OG NFTs in a secondary market on Treasureland here: https://treasureland.market/assets?contract=0x7f5daf18a06433c87bd81ea7ea19976e64100a66&chain_id=56
2. Booster NFT — Our Booster NFT provides boosted rewards on LatteSwap’s LP pools when it is staked along with LP tokens. For example, we have Soy Milk Booster NFT, which provides a 50% boost on rewards for all the stablecoin pools. To give an example of how it works, let’s assume you are farming on the USDT-BUSD pair and the pool provides a 50% APR. If you stake your LP tokens along with Soy Milk NFT, you will get a total APR of 75% (as 50% + 50%*50% = 75%)! FYI, Our booster NFTs are still available for grab at LatteStore.
If you want to maximize your yields from farming, you can purchase our booster NFTs here: https://app.latteswap.com/latte-store
Question 3:
What’s the benefits of swapping tokens on your platform compared to other DEX?
Answer:
What usually attracts traders to an exchange is the amount of liquidity that is in the platform. With higher liquidity, traders can swap more efficiently with less price impact. At the current moment, we have about ~$700Mn locked. Most of that 700Mn TVL is in LP and not in single asset staking vaults, which means that our users have ~700Mn TVL to swap from!
Given that we have just launched a week ago, our DEX still offers a limited number of pools. As we continue to improve our platform, we’ll add more popular pools to support trading on more pairs. We are also launching our DripBar program in October, so you can expect to see more liquidity pools in the foreseeable future!
Question 4:
What is DripBar about and when can we expect to see something useful there?
Answer:
DripBar is our official token listing program. Its main objective is to build a network of trusted partners for LatteSwap and add more liquidity pools to the platform to attract more users and grow the platform’s revenue. As a partner, you can expect to receive significantly more liquidity by participating in our DripBar. As a user, you will see more earning opportunities on LatteSwap!
If a prospective partner protocol decides to participate in the DripBar, they will receive several benefits:
1. Allocate incentive rewards to our partner’s LP pool — we will allocate a portion of $LATTE emission to your liquidity pool. The high APR will incentivize users to provide liquidity to our partner protocol liquidity pool.
2. Add their token to our official list of LatteSwap’s default token list — this greatly minimizes any risks on fake tokens to our partner protocol’s community
3. Conduct an AMA with our community — as the partner protocol will become a part of our official token list and will provide our community of Baristas multiple earning opportunities, we would like to give our partner protocol a chance to introduce what’s special about them to our community to attract more liquidity.
Lastly, LatteSwap community will have the opportunity to earn rewards in the form of the tokens our partner protocol.
Users will be able to participate in DripBar next month in October! However, we have already opened the application pool for any prospective partners. If you are part of a project team and would like to participate in LatteSwap’s DripBar program, please feel free to reach out to me through my TG, e-mail at contact@LatteSwap.com, or fill in our DripBar interest form below:
DripBar interest form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdEvaSEOXI3wddYgKONE2k2RToETkkmS2h4nz5Qud9_8MFkKw/viewform
Question 5:
Besides $LATTE, we see that there will be $BEAN as well. What are some use cases of $BEAN?
Answer:
That’s a great question! I’m glad you asked!
$BEAN is a token users receive when they deposit $LATTE into the single-asset staking pool. It acts as a receipt for your $LATTE deposits. You will also need them when you want to withdraw your $LATTE.
But that’s not all! You can use your $BEAN to earn additional rewards! To start, $BEAN will be the token you need to stake to earn rewards in the DripBar. This will greatly improve the rewards APR for our users as they will be earning both $LATTE and partners’ rewards tokens simultaneously. We will add more utilities for $BEAN in the future.
Question 6:
NFT games are trending recently, do you have any plan to launch a NFT game that utilizes your NFTs?
Answer:
This is one area we want to explore and we have tentatively put it for Q2 of next year. As things in blockchain change quickly, we’ll remain flexible and decide on the plan accordingly closer to the timeline.
Our main focus now would be to build and strengthen our core features which are DEX and NFT functionalities related to it.
Question 7:
Similar projects are expecting to launch their own stable coins (Alpaca Finance and AUSD, we’re talking about you). Are you planning to have your stable coin as well?
Answer:
Most definitely! We plan to create our own stablecoin too. The stablecoin would be a part of our lending feature. As we mentioned previously, one of DEX’s competitive advantages lies within its ability to offer the best possible capital efficiencies. That is where our lending feature and the LUSD comes in.
When the feature launches in Q1 of 2022, we will allow users to put up their LP positions as collateral to take out LUSD as loans. This will greatly improve capital efficiencies for our liquidity providers. In the meantime, you can check out our detailed roadmap from the article we have just released a couple of days ago.
Question 8:
What about crosschain? It’s been on the radar for a while now. Will you implement crosschain on your platform somehow?
Answer:
Of course! If you read our docs and our detailed roadmap article, you will realize that we don’t want to just be on BSC. Our aspiration is to become the leading DEXes across major chains!
However, Rome was not built in a day and every long journey begins with a single step. While we have a big aspiration, we have to make sure that we have a solid fundamental first, and that is why in the beginning, we will focus our efforts on building our core product and communities on BSC as the foundational layer.
We have a number of large features that we plan to release in Q4 ’21 and Q2 ’22. When LatteSwap matures to a certain extent in terms of our user base, our products, and our branding, we will go crosschain.
Question 9:
Let’s talk about security, an important aspect in every project. Can you share us more details about LatteSwap security so we can assure that our assets are safe there?
Answer:
Of course! LatteSwap places a significant amount of emphasis on our users’ security. Let me elaborate a bit more on the topic:
FIrst of all, our smart contracts have been reviewed by two professional auditors — Peckshield and Inspex even before we launched. You can view the audits report here: https://docs.latteswap.com/latteswap/security/audits
But as you know, getting your contracts audited does not always protect you from potential vulnerabilities. This is why we have also set up a bug bounty program with Immunefi as an additional layer of security The program is already live with rewards of up to $50k. If you’d like to participate in our Bug Bounty program, you can visit this link: https://immunefi.com/bounty/latteswap/
Furthermore, our contracts are time-locked for 24 hours. That means that there will be a delay before changes to our contracts come into effect. During this time, if the community no longer feels comfortable leaving their funds with us because of the change, they can always withdraw their funds.
Question 10:
Where can we find out more about LatteSwap on social media?
Answer:
We are currently on twitter, Discord and TG. You can find us through the links below:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/latteswapOG
Discord: https://discord.gg/ZbhaHqUFYr
Telegram: https://t.me/LatteSwapOG
Telegram Announcement: https://t.me/LatteSwapOGAnnouncements
We also release our updates through articles on Medium! Be sure to check us out there as well! https://medium.com/latteswap
Question 11:
Thank you very much. Now we’re moving to 05 questions which are submitted by CryptoFi Việt Nam community. Are you nervous?
Answer:
Nervous? I just had a cup of latte. 😜
Nothing can make me nervous when my blood is full of caffeine. Bring them on!
Question 12:
What can I do with my booster NFT after it’s out of energy or it will be basically an useless NFT?
Answer:
At the current moment, Booster NFTs’ utility is only in its boosting ability. We might be adding some additional utilities to it in the future. Please stay tuned for more details. 😀
For now, you still get to enjoy the beautiful artwork of your spent NFTs.
Question 13:
In your roadmap you’re expecting to add more NFT functionalities in Q1/2022. Do you have any idea yet or that’s just your plan? If yes, can you share more details with us? I bought 2 Dark Roast Espresso NFTs and would like to know whether I should keep them for future uses or sell them now to take profit.
Answer:
Woah! Let me first congratulate you on being among the very few people who own our rare and limited edition OG NFT. There are only 88 Dark Roast Espresso NFTs in existence, and even some of our team members were not able to get their hands on the NFTs in time!
We have many ideas on additional NFT functionalities, but the details are not yet finalized so we can’t share it at the moment. What I can say is that OG NFT holders are our most loyal users who put a lot of trust in us by giving us early support, so we definitely want to reward them for their loyalty.
We will definitely be adding more utilities to the NFTs in the future. While the details are not yet finalized, we have so many innovative ideas that we are exploring and do not want to share with everyone yet. Please follow our social channels! We’ll be sure to provide you with all the latest updates there!
Question 14:
What’s exactly the use case of $LUSD?
Answer:
As stated earlier, LUSD is LatteSwap’s own stablecoin and will be a part of our lending product. The main objective for developing LUSD is to provide our users an opportunity to increase their capital efficiency! We’ll allow users to put up their LP position as collateral to mint LUSD. The feature is scheduled to go live in Q1 of next year.
Question 15:
What is the utility and use case of $LATTE? How does it reflect the value of the ecosystem you’re creating? How will you incentivize $LATTE holders and encourage network participation?
Answer:
Let me just post an excerpt from our Docs on the utilities of our tokens below:
Our Governance token, $LATTE, has three primary utilities:
1. Accrue value through platform economic benefits
LatteSwap has put in place multiple buyback & burn mechanics to help $LATTE token holders capture platform economic benefits from just holding the tokens, as a portion of our platform revenue is allocated to these mechanics. As mentioned above, our existing sources of buyback and burn come from:
- 20% of BNB income on OG NFTs
- 25% of BNB income on Booster NFTs
- 0.04% of every trade made on LatteSwap
As we’ll continue to develop new features/products, we’ll also add more revenue sources for our buyback and burn program.
2. Participate in the governance process
$LATTE is LatteSwap’s governance token. To participate in our governance process that was mentioned above, you must have $LATTE tokens. Token holders will be able to vote on key decisions such as emission rate, or the design of LatteSwap’s NFTs’ parameters. The governance feature is scheduled to be implemented in either Q4 of this year or early next year.
3. Earn rewards in partner protocol tokens
One of LatteSwap’s planned key features is our DripBar, where Baristas will be able to stake their $BEAN tokens to receive rewards in the form of our partner protocol’s tokens. This will greatly increase our users’ capital efficiency, as they’ll be able to earn $LATTE from our $LATTE single asset staking vault and also rewards in partner protocol tokens in the DripBar, using the same amount of capital!
Question 16:
Do you have any connection with Alpaca Finance? Rumors say that LatteSwap is a fork version of Alpaca Finance, like how you can stake $LATTE/$ALPACA to receive $BEAN/$ibALPACA and use it to stake the second time, and $AUSD/$LUSD as well. Alpaca Finance also has a dedidated stake pool with $LATTE reward. Are the rumors true?
Answer:
Haha people do ask us that a lot!
Let me just first start by saying that Alpaca Finance is our first official partner and we participated in their Grazing Range program, so it would not be weird for people to think that the two protocols are connected.
Although we are partners, we are definitely not a fork version of Alpaca Finance. The two protocols are different. Alpaca Finance is a Leveraged Yield Farming platform, while LatteSwap is a DEX. However, we must admit that we took some inspiration from them, and that’s the beauty of Blockchain! When things are transparent, you can kind of see what’s working well for other protocols and adapt the recipe to fit your context. This is just like how we used SushiSwap’s MasterChef contract and added some adjustments/improvements upon it to create our very own Master Barista!
Question 17:
That’s the end @matcha9559. Thank you so much for spending time with us and all the very best for LatteSwap. Do you have anything else that you want to tell us, the very first people to purchase and own your OG NFTs?
Answer:
I’d like to extend my sincerest gratitude to all of you! Thank you so much for believing in us and our protocol. We promise you that we will make sure to work hard and continue to release new features and improve our protocol with new innovative concepts. Please stay tuned as we release more announcements! And as mentioned earlier, we have many things planned under the hood that we are really excited about! 😁
That’s great @matcha9559. We love to see how you react to a question which you weren’t prepared for. Again, best wishes for LatteSwap. MOON MOON!!!
