Stronger together; AMA with the Meta Pool Thai Community

Constantly holding sessions of Ask Me Anything is an activity that helps to clarify doubts and have an active and united community, below we have the questions that were asked in the past AMA of the Thai community.

Hello everybody, my name is Claudio, founder of Meta Pool, thank you very much to the Thailand community for hosting us today and sending your questions, I know we’re full, but we wanna answer as much questions as you have and engage with us on our Discord server, so let’s get this started.

1. Can you do an introduction for yourself and the developer team?

Yes, so my name is Claudio, and with my co-founder Lucio, we founded Meta Pool, which is a liquid staking solution on NEAR. Currently we have a team of four developer, so it’s Lautaro, Daniel and Alan, who also with Lucio on our development team, we got Clara on operations and leading, as well on communications we got Mariel, Missael as well that is helping us up spread the word and answer some of the questions that you have in telegram or on discord, and right now I’m kind of like a man of many hats, so basically doing fund raising, partnerships, a little bit of marketing as well, that’s kind of what we do.

There are advantages of staking here with Meta Pool. This is the main reason why we built Meta Pool, before Meta Pool there was no option between what a NEAR token holder could do, you either have to stake and or participate in applications on the NEAR Protocol. What we’re enabling is for NEAR token holders to stake their NEAR and when we mint a liquid token called stNEAR, which is a value of all the new rewards plus the NEAR being staked, and that token can be used in other decentralized applications, in this case, for example, Ref Finance who has a farming pool and also, OIN Finance is gonna be launching very soon on the on the NEAR Protocol network and now you’re gonna be able to collaterized your stNEAR and mint a new stable coin called NUSDO.

Please go to Twitter and go search OIN Finance V3 DAO, you will see them talking about NEAR. Those are the advantages, you can still keep earning your NEAR rewards, staking rewards, on top of that you’re gonna get $META tokens as well, which is the governance token of the Meta Pool Protocol, and then you can get a good APY’s or good yields and farms such as Ref, we will be announcing something soon regarding Aurora so so be on the lookout for that so there’s more utilities coming to the stNEAR token.

2. What is the key difference of staking NEAR on NEAR wallet and Meta Pool dapp?

The key difference here, and this is another thing why we build up the Meta Pool Protocol, when you are staking through the NEAR web wallet, the relationship is 1 staker to one delegator node, one to one, when you’re staking in Meta Pool, you are distributing your NEAR to more than 51 different validator nodes and what what it does is that it helps decentralize the network, most importantly it improves the Nakamoto coefficient for NEAR Protocol, which is the ability for the Protocol to sustain a civil attack reported of 51%, and also helps strengthen the network, because if you have a large amounts of NEAR being stake in certain validator nodes, if for one reason or or another that validator goes down, maybe infrastructure, maybe an outage, maybe a flood, then the whole network is gonna suffer, and the people that have staked on that validator node will not get their rewards.

That’s one of the main differences between staking in Meta Pool and staking in the web wallet, you’re basically helping decentralize the network, you are providing value to the whole network, because currently Meta Pool does not stake on the top ten validator nodes but we’re helping new validator nodes that are coming into the network get more allocations of NEAR, that’s that’s basically some of the key differences.

Very important, in this case we do not control your keys, all those services even the web wallet, staking service, is non custodial, that means that you’re always in control of your tokens.

3. Does Meta Pool run its own validator node?

No, no we don’t write it because that goes against our ethos. and that it’s a conflict of interest and we will never run a validator node, what we would do actually is, when the treasury gets enough funding is, we would help new validators that want to come into the NEAR Protocol we will help them with some staking, and through the Meta Pool Protocol, and through the treasury will help them fund it, for instance we would like to see validator nodes in Latin America or we would like to see more validator nodes in India, for example, so it’s helping decentralize the network, that’s the main reason why we built the protocol.

4. What is the uptime in percentage of the staking fee be like?

No, we don’t have any percentage shift so we won’t don’t run a validator node.

5. What will be the use case with $META?

The top use case for $META is a governance token, that means as you know when we launched in August 23rd, the Meta Pool Protocol is running on Astro DAO, which is the main framework for governance for the NEAR Protocol, we’re kind of alpha beta testing it, when we launch it should we thought that it was gonna be ready for token voting when the $META tokens where unlocked, that was not the reality, one of the use cases that were intermediate use cases that were providing is, we’re gonna be launching a $META, stNEAR farm pool on Ref Finance, more to that in the next couple of days, we will announce something, but it’s gonna be pretty soon.

6. How $META will appreciate the value overtime for holders?

The reality is, our goal is not for the $META token to appreciate the value, that’s not the intended use for $META, the intended use for $META is for it to be used as a governance token that’s it. Can we provide mechanisms in order to provide, for example, a platform where you’ll come and stake your $META tokens and you get some rewards or even you get more voting power in the governance of the protocol, we will look into that, we will discuss that openly with the community, we’re gonna be open up a couple of channels after the IDO, one it’s gonna be called the DAO channel, so we can have those open discussions with everybody from the community on how to move forward on the best use of $META, but the straight answer is no, we’re not doing this in order for $META to appreciate in value, we want stNEAR to be the token that is is being more widely used inside the whole NEAR ecosystem.

7. Can you provide the use case of stNEAR in the NEAR Ecosystem DeFi?

It is used as a pair farm on Ref Finance which is stNEAR or wrap NEAR**, there’s 10% APY on it, it’s not that large APY, but then again it’s a good deal on it, because you need to understand that stNEAR is always accruing in value every 13 hours, when you put it to farm there’s no impermanent loss on that token, maybe on the pair, which is gonna be wrap near**, they are both correlated, so that’s a really strong pair to do some farming.

8. What other one borrowing?

Borrow Cash is launching soon on the NEAR Ecosystem they’re gonna be supporting stNEAR as a collateral, this week OIN Finance it’s gonna be launching their platform and they will be using stNEAR as the main collateral for it as well, definitely , there’s more to come as well we’re talking to some game applications, so more more news on that front.

9. If I use stNEAR at Ref Finance in the liquidity pool, will still be eligible for $META token distribution from staking NEAR?

Yes, actually that’s something that we need to work with the Ref Finance team because the main contract in Ref is accruing those $META token rewards, we either have to change how the contract is behaving and change those functions, but the answer to that is yes, you are accruing it, only that it’s being concentrated on the Ref Finance smart contract, and we need to distribute it to all the LP’s of that farm.

10. Any plan for Meta Pool to build on Aurora?

Yes, we have something that we’re gonna be announcing this week regarding that, stay tuned for that one. We’re gonna be bridging META and stNEAR, actually, really excited about.

11. Is it possible to add stNEAR, wrap NEAR, liquidity pool on Trisolaris?

No, you can’t, those tokens are native on NEAR tokens and if you want to bridge them over to Trisolaris you have to do it through Aurora, but more on that as soon as we’re working on it.

12. Using stNEAR on Skyward it’s an excellent way to expand Meta Pool. Is it possible to use stNEAR for any future IDO on Skyward Finance?

**Yes it can be used, but the reality for it is, like they say we ate our own dog food, we found that there’s a lot of areas of opportunity and something that we oversaw when we’re doing our diligence on skyward, let’s not just focus on Skyward, any launch app platform, we are willing to fund it and we’re willing to support projects that wanna launch their projects in any launch app, not just skyward, more news to that as well in the next coming days.

13. Is it possible to show the Meta Pool roadmap for 2022?

Yes, that’s something we’re working on, we need to update the gitbook on it, the idea is just we’ve just been so focused on the IDO, we’re gonna put a link to the Skyward page, that is featuring Meta Pool, with did a small write up on the Skyward page, let me go ahead and then read you a little bit about it:

One of the things that we’re doing for Q1 2022 is token voting on the DAO, we’re gonna do that with Astro DAO, treasury fund allocation as well, that’s through the DAO’s, we need to get token voting in order for that to be done, better diversification, validated distributions. One of the big ideas that we have is, when we were launching Meta Pool, is why shouldn’t we have a say through the web wallet, you have the list of validators that you can choose, the problem with that is, you can only choose one, our focus is why not 10 or 15 or maybe regionalize it, I wanna stake where the nodes are from Asia Pacific or the founders are from India, or it’s located in Argentina, or in Russia, in Saint Petersburg or Ukraine, it’s just it why couldn’t we choose where we gonna be stake our NEAR.

The idea is once you have stNEAR , what if I want to extract just the NEAR but still keep the rewards, I think we’re pending to write a blog post about the idea, our focus is for that to be voted by the community, if they find out that there’s something valuable for them on this diversification strategy, I think that’s something worth everyone’s time and our effort to build it.

Then we have the borrowing contract and collaboration with dexe’s, I think that’s another important one that we need to be looking for. A dividend’s pool also for stNEAR, $META, the fees vary from 3% to 0.3%, that is going direct to the treasury, and why not let those fees be distributed for a long term $META token holders and stNEAR token holders, that’s where the escrow curve a feature that you see on the curve platform paperwork, and and we will see how that goes, we are still on an early stage and we need to understand, we have the enough developers and the bandwidth to definitely take advantage of this.

14. Any plans for UI dashboard improvement?

Yes, totally, and this is a very important question and just for some context, we launched on August 23rd, these last four months have been very hectic, it’s through the fundraising for the seed round presenting at NEAR CON, getting the team together because we started it, Lucio and myself, Alan and Fritz who was our freelance designer, we were four people and now we’ve grown and so that’s something that’s totally on the roadmap, and then we need to discuss, if you have ideas where will be open up the beta testing groups, what’s the UX/UI, bug hunting, we’ll see how we call it, but it’s basically what can we improve on the navigation and the user experience.

15. The separate APY from NEAR staking APY from META rewards?

Yes, those are really important ones, that’s why we did the IDO, now with the IDO and that a price discovery has been set for $META, that will allow us to provide a better APY number, instead of just separating it, but thank you very much for the suggestion.

16. Can you provide the historical price for stNEAR, NEAR, this should see how stNEAR is growing?

Yes, we do have that, it’s an internal dashboard to grafana, we will be opening up a grafana dashboard for everybody to review, so that’s up on the roadmap, it’s just that we’re basically, what do you wanna do, you wanna do UI changes or do you wanna get more exposure for stNEAR, better funds, I think that question answers itself.

17. Can the dashboard track the stNEAR on the other DeFi platforms to the NEAR Ecosystem?

Yes, we can, that’s doable.

18. It would be excellent to the user to be able to track their stNEAR?

I don’t know we can provide that level of granularity, it will certainly be expensive, because you have to query the pool the $META contract and the $META contract needs to compute, for free, I think we will need to discuss this more openly, and see where the user is gonna get value out of this, and just start setting the cost of building it, tracking it, and maintaining it. It’s more complicated than this, than just putting up a dashboard, needs to be, live data, real time, patience, we’re building as we go, there’s gonna be some UI changes coming for 2022.

19. Do you involve the code auditor before launching this smart contract?

Eugene from the NEAR Core development Team, that helped build NEAR, he did the the audit of our code, it was a code review actually, he provided some really good feedback, the code for the smart contract has been looked upon by the NEAR Core Team and, it’s been on mainnet for four months and we haven’t had any problems so far, but to answer that question, on January 3rd a third party is gonna audit our smart contract code, looking forward for that one.

20. Are there any ways to spend stNEAR on NFT’s or GameFi platforms?

That’s a really great question, we’re looking for those GameFi platforms, we’re looking for NFT’s platforms, we’re definitely gonna be talking to Mintbase, we’re gonna be talking to Paras, to Nativo NFT, there’s a couple of partners we wanna get the ball rolling with, and a couple of games as well, definitely we will be playing in the Human Guild and working closely with them to implement the stNEAR into GameFi platforms next year.

We will see a couple of proof of concepts out there and on the mainnet, really looking forward to exploring with all the GameFi, how it’s going in other platforms or it’s definitely gonna be exploding on NEAR as well, anytime soon.

That’s last question, thank you very much! To the Thailand Community, I know you’re a very young regional community in Meta Pool, I would like to thank each and every one of you, also to the NEAR Ambassador who’s leading it. Thank you very much for for providing all the guidance and hopefully we will have more questions and we can do a live AMA soon, so thank you very much for your time, and until next time, keep on staking!