Expanding Horizons: AMA with Crypto Spartans community
Meta Pool is constantly building to reach new horizons, our AMA’s with the crypto community hold great value to interact and share our projects and ideas, we always have in mind your best interests, constantly growing and inviting all of our users to join us and participate.
We give you a new session of the best Q&A hosted by the Crypto Spartans Team!
1. Can you briefly introduce Meta Pool to the community?
Liquid Staking is a basic, almost infrastructure part of any proof-of-stake-chain. You have two options:
- Option 1: Staked and Lock.
This is the “native way to staking”, you choose a validator, you stake your $NEAR, and those get “locked” but pay a staking reward approx 10% APY.
Problems are:
- It is capital-inefficient, while the NEAR are locked you can’t do anything else with your capital.
- In order to unlock, you need to wait 36–48 hours, that’s a lot of time in DEFI.
- Option 2: Meta Pool, Liquid Staking.
This is the new way, liquid staking.
What Meta Pool contract does is: staking your $NEAR (diversified in 50 validators), and then the contract gives you back stNEAR, a token representing your share of the total staked NEAR.
The contract also has an internal stNEAR/NEAR pool, where anyone can provide liquidity.
With those 2 things, the problems are resolved:
- It is capital efficient, because now you have stNEAR to use as collateral to borrow stablecoin in OIN, or you can provide liquidity in Ref, earning additional yield, for example META/stNEAR in Ref is paying 200% APY now in Ref & META tokens.
Meaning your capital is no longer “locked”; you have used your $NEAR to secure the network, you are earning the 10% APY and also you have stNEAR to play DeFi and get additional yield.
- Waiting to unstake the liquidity pool in Meta Pool, allows you liquid unstake, meaning you swap stNEAR->NEAR, immediately for a fee so no more waiting, or more precisely, you can buy the waiting time from a liquidity provider. You often hear “time is money”, well this is the case with Meta Pool liquid-unstake.
So Meta Pool solves both problems and again, it’s a no-brainer decision to do liquid-staking vs locked-staking.
2. So can we say that stNEAR is like bETH that binance gives after staking ETH?
stNEAR is like stETH to be more precise, but bETH works too.
3. What project milestones have you achieved until now and what are you working on currently?
Important knowledge: We launched self-bootstrapped, no investment during development, no investing before launch in August last year. No marketing campaign, just our participation in the NEAR ecosystem.
Meta Pool final governance phase is a DAO with vote by $META, but right now it is controlled by a council of three:
- NEAR Hispano (NEAR Hispanic & Latin America community) — That’s represented by Claudio Cossio
- Narwallets.com — A Metamask-like wallet for the NEAR ecosystem — That’s me
- OpenShard Alliance — One of the oldest NEAR Guilds, first ones to run sharding — That’s Blaze
Since we launched bootstrapped, our goal was 800K $NEAR and 1000 users by the end of the year. But were pleasantly surprised, now Meta Pool handles 3 million $NEAR and we’ve 6000 registered users
So we are pretty happy, and we’re now working on:
- More integration in Ref for stNEAR.
- Exposing stNEAR and $META in Aurora.
- Increase utility for $META, we’re analyzing vote-locking and buyback in the Yearn style.
And this is alpha info, we’re sponsoring some very cool NFT PFP for the NEAR ecosystem.
4. What problem did you see with current staking platforms and how is Meta Pool trying to solve some of those problems?
Meta Pool is the only liquid-staking solution in NEAR, so we’re only solving the problems I described.
That’s why I say that this is like an infrastructure part for the ecosystem, and we intend to become the default way of staking in NEAR and more or less fade in the background.
If you look at it from the DeFi side, we’re trying to liberate 400 million $NEAR that are stacked-locked right now, and we intend to do that as fast as possible. Imagine 400 more million $NEAR for the NEAR DeFi nascent ecosystem, that would be great!
Another thing that I didn’t mention is that we’re purposely fair and neutral regarding validators
We don’t run a validator and we don’t pick where to stake. The distribution is made by an open source program, that measures performance and concentration and fee for each validator in NEAR; and choses the ones with better APY, as long as they’re not the concentrated ones
We want to increase censorship-resistance for the NEAR network, its “Nakamoto coefficient”, and the way to do that is to spread all the stake. So again, by using Meta Pool you can earn extra yield in DeFi and at the same time secure the NEAR network, which translates into better NEAR value, better NEAR price.
5. What are your top priorities in 2021 to 2022? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year? Which part of the project are you most focused on right now and how many killer features of your project makes it go ahead of it’s competitors? Could you tell us two or three features of the project?
- Top priority: We intend to grow to 20 million NEAR TVL, even if that looks too much, that’s only 5% of the total NEAR staked and locked, not being useful to NEAR DeFi, and again, considering that it is a no-brainer decision, it is important to communicate how liquid-staking works, so good AMA’s like this are fundamental.
- Plans: Expose stNEAR in Aurora. Aurora is an EVM-compatible ecosystem running on top of NEAR, which means Aurora uses NEAR validators and consensus to operate, which means that in order to earn NEAR staking APY in Aurora, the only way is to get exposed to the underlying staking mechanism thru stNEAR, so the Aurora thing is also important
- META locking and voting in the Yearn style. We’ve no competitors right now, but we behave as if we had a lot of them chasing us. That’s the only way to grow and the speed required in the DeFi space.
6. Could you please tell me how Meta Pool is designed to incentivize and reward token holders using your protocol by delivering benefits in the following aspects?
- Fee Discounts
- Staking Rewards
- Token Burns
- Reduced Slippage
- Liquidity Mining
- Governance
- There are no fee discounts now, but they can be introduced in the future. A part of the liquid-unstake fees go to the treasury so that part can be applied as a discount to $META token holders.
- stNEAR increases in price every 12 hours like clockwork, the NEAR staking rewards are included in the price.
- We’re intending to buy back and lock META. This article is a good look on our plans:
- No plans for the moment. There is not too much slippage in the liquid-staking pool, because it is an ad-hoc pool. The price of stNEAR in NEAR is computed as total_near_staked / total_stNEAR_supply, that’s why it’s a predictable ever increasing price.
- Right now we provide $META to anyone holding stNEAR and also on Ref Finance farms; we’re planning to move all liquidity mining to Ref Farms to incentivize the use of stNEAR in DeFi instead of just laying there in the wallets.
- Governance: We intend to implement Yearn style, and collaborate with AstroDAO in order to have the tools in NEAR for good governance. Remember that NEAR DeFi space is nascent and that implies opportunities and also growing pains.
7. Have you been audited? Have not heard you talk about the security of funds, that is what every investor craves for and plans to escape incase of insecurity if funds, scams and rug pulls. How strongly built are your security put in place?
We’ve booked BlockSec in December, they start and plan to end the audit this month. Very smart guys, we’re thrilled to be working with them. Previously and before the launch we had two code reviews with Eugene from the NEAR core team, those went great and we secured the contract. The contract has been operating without any noticeable glitch.
8. Did you consider community feedback/requests during the creation of your product in order to expand on fresh ideas for your project? Many projects fail because the target audience and clients are not understood. So I’d like to know who your ideal consumer is for your product?
Yes! To be honest with you Meta Pool was in beta for MONTHS before launching. Thankfully a lot of people helped with that and Narwallets.
9. Do you have tutorial videos so we can get to know your project more clearly or do you have a YouTube channel or something? Can you share it with us?
There’s a very good video on how to operate Meta Pool, please ask in Meta Pools’ discord, also:
how to use metapool — Buscar con Google
10. Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and there are many new platforms under development. So what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have plans to grow there?
Yes, this is a very important market for us, because it is for NEAR. A lot of NEAR happy users. Since we intend to make stNEAR the “basic lego piece” for the money lego that’s DeFi, we follow all NEAR important markets.
11. How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not good? Do you have local communities like Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, so they can better understand your project?
We’ve GREAT local ambassadors, and we think that’s VERY important to have them, you can check all the regional discord channels.
12. What is your earning mechanism? How do Meta Pool generate revenue?
We have:
- 2% Management fee. Meta Pool is staking in 50 validators, when all the staking rewards are collected, Meta Pool mints 2% from the staking rewards in the form of stNEAR for the treasury. Since we do that before increasing stNEAR price, effective fee is 1.95%
- Meta Pool also gets a part of the liquid-unstaking fees. That flow is more variable, and it depends on liquidity-pool depth and market conditions. For example, when NEAR soars, we’ve a lot of liquid-unstaking from people wanting they NEAR immediately
All this makes us cash flow positive. The protocol is self-sustained.
13. Is your platform global or is there any restriction to certain regions?
We’re in the cypherspace, as long as you’re a citizen of the cypherspace we’re open. We value freedom and self responsibility.
14. Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology that can replace your project?
Yes, that’s why we move fast and we aim to become part of the infrastructure.
If you still have any doubts or wish to be part of our project, don’t hesitate to join our official platforms and reach out to our team!
