Hello Baristas,
Hope you all are keeping safe! As I have just participated in an AMA session with Crypto Kudasai JP a few days ago (Sep 28th), 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:
Would you mind introducing yourself, telling us about your background and the team working on LatteSwap?
Answer:
Of course! Minasan, Konnichiwa!
My name is Matcha, and I am part of the founding team of LatteSwap. I currently lead the marketing and strategy efforts for the project. Our team is run by multiple cryptocurrency veterans who are special experts in their own fields. Even though we are anon, I can share with you a quick summary of our core team members.
Coco Coke, Co-head of Engineering:
Coco Coke leads our team of software engineers to develop the LatteSwap platform.
Mint Chocolate, Co-head of Engineering:
Mint Chocolate co-leads our development team along with Coco Coke.
E. Grey Frappuccino, Head of Product:
E. Grey Frappucino leads all the product design for LatteSwap. If you love our UI/UX, please show him some appreciation!
MochaJoe, Head of BD and Content:
MochaJoe is in charge of business development as well as our content initiatives. He was also the one who designed all of our NFTs and their backstories. For any project interested in partnering up with us, you can reach out to him!
As our platform is expanding very quickly, we are actively looking for passionate and skillful Baristas to join us to help us achieve our long term aspirations! We are recruiting for a Japanese mod with connections within the Japanese cryptocurrency space to help us create awareness of LatteSwap within the Japanese communities as well as help us educate prospective users of our innovative products! Please DM me if you are interested!
We are also actively hiring for other roles such as content creator, business development, marketing, etc. If you are interested, we have a list of job descriptions in the link below. Be sure to check them out!
Link to JD: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1y5nkp-BTcdJVRK3AJ8QZcjQ54ZeNVdo8?usp=sharing
Question 2:
Can you tell us about your LatteSwap project? What problems does LatteSwap solve that existing competitors haven’t and what is its competitive advantage?
Answer:
Let me first start by explaining what our protocol does. 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.
Actually, your question on what problems our protocol is trying to solve is a very good question. There is no denying that the space is growing very rapidly. In 2020, the total transaction value of NFTs was recorded at ~$380Mn. In just the first half of 2021 alone, that number jumped to ~$25Bn — a 60x increase in just the 6-month period! However, the problem that we’ve observed and still persists within this space remains that most NFTs lack real utilities. Many collectors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase these NFTs only to have them sit idly in their wallets. There’s also an issue on liquidity, as many NFT collectors are unable to sell their collections of NFTs. That is where LatteSwap comes in! We want to create real use-cases for NFTs by incorporating NFT integrated functionalities to the core structure of our protocol.
The NFT integrated functionalities lie within the two NFT series, whose sales had just started last week. Each NFT series has its own utility:
1. OG NFT — Our OG NFT functions in a similar way as holding a stock of a company, as the NFT gets a fixed allocation of all LATTE emissions. You can think of it as a dividend payment, except our OG NFT has no expiration date! 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.
If you’d like to purchase an OG NFT, you can buy at re-sale price on Treasureland here.
2. Booster NFT — Our Booster NFT provides a boost on LP pool at LatteSwap when it is staked along with LP tokens. For example, we have Almond Milk, who provides a 35% boost on rewards for all the ETH/BNB/BTCB pool. To give an example of how it works, let’s assume you are farming on the BNB-BUSD and the pool provides a 100% APR. If you stake your LP tokens along with Almond Milk, you will get a boosted APR of 135% (as 100% + 35%*100% = 135%)! 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.
As you can see, our NFTs provide real utilities to our NFT holders. Not only were the NFTs beautifully designed, but they also provide you the opportunity to earn more. And when NFTs provide real utility, they are not so hard to sell, solving some of the liquidity issues! Actually, many of our community members bought their first NFTs at LatteSwap!
In the future, we’ll continue to add more NFT-related utilities to our platform. We are also exploring the ideas of creating utility for NFTs from other protocol by allowing them to be staked as a Booster NFT at LatteSwap. We’ll release more details soon! 😀
Question 3:
Did your team build technologies or protocols that are specific to this project? Or are there any notable technologies the team is applying?
Answer:
Our MasterBarista contact was inspired by SushiSwap’s MasterChef contract. However, we made a few improvements upon it, by incorporating NFT-related concepts to the contracts.
One of the things that the MasterBarista contract allows is staking of NFTs. We believe we’re one of the first, if the not the first, protocol that allows user to stake NFT to earn boosted rewards.
In addition, to our Booster NFTs, we also have our OG NFTs, which can be staked to earn an allocation of total $LATTE emissions. If you’d like to review our MasterBarisa and other smart contracts, you can get their addresses here.
Question 4:
Can you briefly share LatteSwap’s top milestones, upcoming target milestones and roadmap?
Answer:
Since our launch on September 19, we have had quite some remarkable milestones. In just 13 hours, our TVL surpassed $1 Bn — a feat we are truly grateful for. In addition, our total trading volume grew beyond the $200 M mark last week! We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude towards everyone on BSC who had made these incredible feats possible for us!
However, this is just the beginning of our journey to become the #1 DEX, as we have so many things planned in our Roadmap. Actually we just published an article last week, detailing our plan over the next six months here.
You can read all the details there, but to summarize, we have a packed schedule to deliver many great features in the upcoming months. There are a couple things I want to highlight:
Q4 2021:
- Expand beyond the constant product AMM model. We will have a more efficient model for stable pairs under LatteSwap brand.
- NFT market place
Q1 2022:
- Our own stable coin LUSD. liquidity providers will be able to use their LP tokens as collateral to mint LUSD, improving capital efficiency for our users.
For those who are a part of our community and are our early adopters, thank you for believing in us! We promise that we’ll reciprocate your continuous support by continuing to work hard to constantly improve our protocol and execute the roadmap we’ve laid out above.
Question 5:
What obstacles has your project encountered so far? How did the team resolve them?
Answer:
As it has been only about a week since we launched our protocol, we have not yet run into any major obstacles. However, nothing is certain. Obstacles or threats may not come today, but that does not mean we are safe from them, especially in the world of DeFi, where new technology, new exploits, and new competitions emerge every single day.
While we have quite a strong plan, we will remain flexible and will always be ready to adapt if/as new trends emerge. Just like Soy Milk, we believe that our resilience, grit, and perseverance will allow us to resolve any potential issues/threats to come and achieve our aspiration to finally come out on top in no time.
Question 6:
Can you give an overview of your tokenomics and the utility of LatteSwap Token?
Answer:
Of course! Let us first start off by saying that we are a fair-launch project on the Binance Smartchain network (BSC). There was no pre-sale or pre-mine, and over 87% of the tokens will be allocated to our communities! As we like to say, we built this product for the community and our goal really is to take LatteSwap to the forefront of all DEXes, not only on BSC, but also other chains in the future!
As for the token supply. We adopt a similar model as PancakeSwap where our token, $LATTE, does not have maximum supply cap. However, to ensure we protect our token holders from inflation, we have a number of buyback and burn from multiple sources of our revenue as our deflationary mechanism. Currently, here are all the sources of our buyback and burn program:
- 20% of BNB income on OG NFTs
- 25% of BNB income on Booster NFTs
- 0.04% of every trade made on LatteSwap
As we develop more products and release more features, we’ll be sure to add more sources of our buyback and burn program to strengthen our defationary mechanism. In the future, we will also implement governance, where our token holders can vote on the emission rate of $LATTE, should the community feel like the current emission rate is too high.
In terms of token utility, there are three primary utilities to our tokens:
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
We have only just started buying back for the first burn, which will be on October 3rd. And since all our OG NFTs were sold out, you can expect that a lot of buyback and burn will take place — all the prices and quantity sold of our NFTs are on our website. We’ll let you do the calculation. 😉
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. Besides rewards emission, token holders will be able to vote on key decisions such as protocol parameters, or the design of LatteSwap’s NFTs’ parameters. The governance process is scheduled to be implemented in Q4 of 2021.
3. Earn rewards in partner protocol tokens
One of LatteSwap’s planned key feature is our DripBar, where Baristas will be able to stake their LATTE tokens to receive rewards in the form of our partner protocol’s tokens.
You can learn more about our tokenomics here.
As for our market cap, with the current circulating supply, our $LATTE market cap, at the time of writing, is only about $~6.5Mn, which is outrageously low given our >$1Bn TVL. If we apply the same Market Cap/TVL ratio as other DEXes on BSC, you will realize that we are severely undervalued. In fact, we did an analysis on that — you can find it here.
Our original listing price was 1BUSD:1LATTE.
Question 7:
Will the smart contracts be open-sourced?
Answer:
All our smart contracts are open-sourced and have been reviewed by two professional audit firms. You can find all the audit reports here.
Alternatively, please also feel free to review our codes here.
Question 8:
What is your marketing strategy? How do you intend to attract your first users?
Answer:
Marketing is definitely very important, especially if you want to grow your user base. That’s why we would like to focus on the following, just as outlined in our roadmap article, to ensure we are able to achieve that.
1. We will promote LatteSwap through various communities and key regions through marketing activities such as promotions with KOLs and AMA sessions to create awareness for the project as well as educate prospective users on our products. As mentioned above, if you are a marketing expert or believe you can help us grow our communities, feel free to reach out to me! We are hiring!
2. We will develop partnership with other DeFi projects to increase reach, collaboration, and composability. Our first such initiative is the DripBar which will launch in October. We are already in discussion with several projects and will make an announcement when the details are finalized. Please stay tuned!
Question 9:
How does the team source revenue to sustain its operations?
Answer:
That’s a great question! There are three sources of revenue for the team for the team to fund its operations and that platform’s growth:
1. NFTs sales: within the first 2 weeks of launch, LatteSwap is selling our Booster NFT series and our OG NFT series. While a portion of revenue generated from the sales of these NFTs will be used for the buyback and burn of $LATTE tokens, the remainder will go to our warchest for large BD expeneses such as exchange listing fees and audit reports. We will also use this fund to expand the team. With a sold-out OG NFTs, we now have quite a long run way to sustain operations for the foreseeable future.
2. Development Fund: Another source of income for our operations is a share from $LATTE emission. Based on our tokenomics, about 13% of the total $LATTE emission is allocated to the Development fund.
3. Trading Fees: A portion of the trading fees (0.04%) also goes towards the development fund.
Question 10:
There have been many incidents of hacks recently. How are you handling security?
Answer:
For us, security is a top priority. Our codes have been reviewed by two professional auditors, Peckshield and Inspex, before we launched. You can view the audits report here.
We also have other measures in place to ensure our protocol is as secure as it can be. We now have a live Bug Bounty program through Immunefi with rewards up to $50k. Here’s the link.
Furthermore, our contracts are timelocked for 24 hours. So any changes will be delayed before it can be executed. During that time, our community will be able to review the change and withdraw money our of the protocol should they no longer feel comfortable leaving their funds with us.
Question 11:
Have you made any agreements with companies, projects or notable developers?
Answer:
Currently, our official partners are Inspex and Peckshield, who are our audit partners. We also partnered with Alpaca Finance and participate in their Grazing Range program.
We realize that partnerships are one of the key success factors. As a result, we’ll continue to expand our network of partner protocol whether through the DripBar or other initiatives.
Question 12:
Do you have any news/updates about LatteSwap that you would like to share with us?
Answer:
Yes! As we have now opened the application for DripBar, let me elaborate a bit more on the program and why it’s a good opportunity for our prospective partner projects. The DripBar program is our official token listing program. By participating in the DripBar, our partner project and its token will receive the following benefits:
1. Liquidity and natural buying demand of your token from earning opportunities at LatteSwap
2. Exposure to our fast-growing and highly active community of Baristas
3. Credibility of your tokens within our platform
The objective of Dripbar is to build partnership and collaboration with our partner protocol and its community. Dripbar will create earning opportunities for both LatteSwap and our partner projects’ communities. Users can stake $LATTE tokens to earn rewards in the partner protocol tokens. At the same time, liquidity providers in our partners’ pools will receive $LATTE rewards as an incentive.
If you are a protocol looking to partner or list your token with LatteSwap, please feel free to reach out to me through my TG, e-mail at matcha.latte@LatteSwap.com, or fill in our DripBar interest form here.
Question 13:
What do you think about education? Do you offer step-by-step guides for beginners? So how do you attract and educate new people and new users / traders / investors to know and understand latte swaps, blockchain and crypto?
Answer:
Yes! We have a very detailed step-by-step guide! You can check it out here: https://docs.latteswap.com/latteswap/step-by-step-guide
I think LatteSwap’s UI/UX also makes it easy for users to use our platform. Instead of bombarding our users with charts and jargons, we try to make everything as simple as possible. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced farmer, everything should be easy to use & understand!
In addition, we write quite a detailed Docs on the protocol. In fact, we make quite frequent updates to our Docs. We’ve actually just added two guides regarding how to transfer NFTs or check Booster NFTs’ remaining energy based on our user’s requests. Everything you need to know should be in there. However, if our Docs does not cover everything, then you can always ask in our official telegram group here: t.me/LatteSwapOG
Question 14:
Why were you able to expand TVL so rapidly, and what is the secret to maintaining it? And do you view this situation favorably?
Answer:
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 15:
Look up on your website and I’ll do something about DripBar. Can you tell us more about the DripBar? How Much Asset Do You Need to stake?
Answer:
Yes! As mentioned earlier, our DripBar is our official token listing program, where partner protocol provides us with a fixed amount of their tokens, which will be allocated towards the single asset staking vault we create for them. In return, we’ll allocate some $LATTE emission to their liquidity pool.
As a user, you will be able to stake our $LATTE to earn rewards in our partner protocol tokens in the single asset staking vault. Once you receive our partner protocol tokens, you will then be able to use it to provide LP to earn APR from trading fees and incentive rewards. Basically, it’s a program that will offer multiple earning opportunities to our users!
There’s no minimum amount required to stake in the DripBar. There’s also no withdrawal fees or deposit fees!
Question 16:
Is there little merit in buying a Booster NFT without an OG NFT?
Answer:
The Booster NFTs and the OG NFTs are actually not stackable, which means you cannot use Booster NFTs to boost $LATTE emission from OG NFTs. However, our Booster NFTs actually provide quite a good multiple on your invested capital. Each Booster NFT has a concept called maximum energy, which indicates the maximum amount of $LATTE that can be minted as boosted rewards.
If you purchase the first batch of our Booster NFTs from LatteStore, you will realize that each Booster NFT has a maximum energy of 8,888. Based on the current $LATTE price & $BNB price, the maximum energy gives you 4x on your invested capital! So be sure to grab them while supply lasts!
Please also note that each Booster NFT works on different LP pools.
Soy Milk: All Stablecoin LP
Almond Milk: BTCB/ETH/BNB LP
Whole Milk: Any pools
You can find the list of eligible pool for boosting for each Booster NFT here.
Visit LatteStore here.
Question 17:
Kudos to your preparedness. I really love your UI. I have one question. I see you have DEX and will have NFT marketplace. But there are quite a few players in these markets, how will you compete with them?
Answer:
Thank you for your kind words.
First of all, let me add on why we believe our DEX can remain competitive in the market:
1. Cryptocurrency veterans: LatteSwap is run by a team of cryptocurrency veterans. Not only are we experienced, but we are also hardworking and resilient. We are certain that with this team, we can take LatteSwap to the forefront of all DEXes. If you are interested to become a part of our team, please do not hesitate to DM me 😜
2. Capital Efficiency: We are confident that we can achieve the best capital efficiency for all of our users, with the future releases of the LUSD as well as some undisclosed functionalities of the DripBar. Please stay tuned for more details!
3. Marketing: We will spend a lot on marketing to bring in new users! We raised quite a bit of money from the sales of our NFTs! We will utilize those money effectively to ensure we expand our currently small user base!
As for the NFT marketplace, we will definitely add some functionalities that are currently not available at many other NFT marketplaces. We are currently exploring the idea of allowing our users to put up their NFTs as collateral to borrow LUSD or even the idea of fractionalizing NFT ownership. We don’t want to give you too much details yet, but I can promise you that our NFT marketplace won’t be just a normal marketplace 😉
