The Interchain Lab Ep. 10 — Quasar
The Interchain Lab occurs biweekly on Fridays at 3PM ET (20:00 UTC) in the Osmosis discord lounge. This week on the Interchain Lab: Hosts Togg and Waterspinner sit down with Valeyo from Quasar to discuss their upcoming launch and go over some of the features to be expected!
Valeyo (or Valentin), 23, has been in the crypto space since he was 16. Valentin worked in a couple research companies in Germany, then 2017 rolled around and crypto took off. He was picked up by a company using NFTs for supply chain use cases, and from that point started to go more in to the building side with Quasar.
What is Quasar is bringing to the DeFi space in a sense of asset management?
Valeyo: ‘A bit of background — when covid hit and the market crashed I convinced my family to let me invest their money for them. Everything increased- I wasn’t some master trader. What I realized was, with the available time I had to spend in the space I was much more confident in my decisions. Asset management is a tool by which you can get back time in your life, by not choosing to invest that time in to money management.
There are high barriers to entry in traditional finance that gate keep normal folks from accessing proper asset or money managers. What we’re experiencing in crypto right now is what every maturing market experiences. We need permission-less, secure, non-gate-kept access to money management. We’re currently tackling the infrastructure to make that happen.
With so many different protocols vying for attention, anyone new to the space will be overwhelmed. Quasar cuts through that noise and allows users to have ecosystem exposure without having to individually manage however many different chains and tokens or positions.’
What do you think the conditions for adoption of crypto in to traditional monetary systems are?
Valeyo: ‘I think the natural reason why countries with bad policy adopt crypto quicker is because people are being forced to understand how money works. We’ve had slow adoption in the west because of our culture — money was stable, stocks go up. But then with COVID, and inflation, people are waking up and starting to learn more about how their monetary policies work. Once people start looking in to that, crypto is a natural progression to end up on and education is what follows the curiosity.’
What are the vaults on Quasar?
Valeyo: ‘A vault is just a basket where people can pool money. Essentially a vault can do anything a user can do with it, ie leveraging, LPing, staking, lending, etc. A vault is a way to abstract away and consolidate something happening. For example, it could be a Youtuber managing his money with his community. It is a place where you can create the only interchain etf where you hold the underlying assets on the actual chains. It’s a way for people to come together and execute strategies together’
Togg: ‘So you’re talking about all of these options across all these different platforms — but because we have IBC I can see how you can leverage that fact to get these vaults to be able to do these things’
Valeyo: ‘Exactly — and here’s some Alpha! Our public test net that launched a month ago you can basically only press one button which is to bond money to a vault. But on the back end, the money in quasar has multiple tokens being deployed in one transaction; lp’d and are being managed by the vault. So it’s already happening! For the first time ever you can manage an LP position over IBC.’
Are vaults user created or Quasar created?
Valeyo: ‘It’ll start with quasar created vaults. Less than a month after launch, it’ll open up to user created. Originally you’ll need to be a developer to launch one, but eventually will have automated building blocks to create them as well.
There’s a lot of other asset management platforms out there- almost none of them are permission-less, which quasar is. We’re the platform to enable asset managers to do their job well. ‘
What Indexes will be introduced?
Valeyo: ‘When I came to Cosmos I thought Atom was the best token to buy. I thought it’s like the ETH of Cosmos. It took me a while to understand it wasn’t the commodity behind everything — But digging in, and learning you need to manage a ton of different tokens on different chains, you need to create an index for a normal user who doesn’t have the time to manage these things.
You basically have a token bound to the price of the underlying assets- that’s pretty much it. Normal ETF’s, you don’t have access to the underlying assets, but quasar allows for full redemption. Unstaked tokens allow for high liquidity, but bonded/staked etf is probably going to be the more interesting one.’
What is a quick tldr of an ETF?
Valeyo: ‘Exchange traded fund — it’s a fund (or vault) that is publicly available. Think of the S&P500- it’s a collection of the 500 biggest companies weighted by market cap. That’s an ETF. What it allows you to do is diversify your portfolio — holding many different types of assets. Instead of one token or one industry, you’re investing in to an economy. In Cosmos what that looks like is a vault share token (ibc etf, ibc index). This token is bound to the price of the underlying assets. You can lend against it or borrow against it as well.’
What does it cost to set up a position with one of these indexes?
Valeyo: ‘Creating a vault requires to lock up $QSR. That’s the only cost to create a vault. I don’t think governance will be opposed to lowering or changing that initially set amount once users are able to script their own vaults. However, users don’t need $QSR tokens to use the platform — no gatekeeping is important for accessibility for Cosmos users. Other use cases of the $QSR token is to have vault based governance. The point being that vault users won’t want $QSR governance controlling vaults that they have no deposits in. Vaults should be governed by those who have skin in the game.’
Are there going to be vaults outside of cosmos?
Valeyo: ‘We’re IBC maxis. We will grow with cosmos, and since cosmos will go beyond and connect to other chains, we’ll be expanding right along with it. We’re an interchain protocol — theres a lot of advancements that needed to happen for us to get here, and many more to come.’
So you’ve just released a launch date. How has the test net gone? Anything you can share?
Valeyo: ‘Launch date is March 23rd. We’re going to do something unique — we’re not going to launch our token with our main net launch. From day 1, you’ll be able to deposit $osmo and $atom to a vault. Those vaults will send tokens to be LP’d on Osmosis. The User experience to start with will technically be a bit boring, but the point is to grow on top of there and add more strategies once everything’s up and running correctly.’
It was mentioned in the docs about a quasar treasury.
Valeyo: ‘We’re in a unique position where we’re neutral — because of that it’s a natural fit for us to want to hold assets that we’re sending around. The plans, though it can change through governance, is to have a much diversified treasury. We’ll operate in a way to sell quasar tokens at discount points to accumulate the treasury in a balance that matches governance desires.’
How do you value the $QSR token in the grand scheme of things from a protocol perspective?
Valeyo: ‘Our goal is to be the backbone of DeFi asset management, period. If we’re building all the rails, we’ll be the token that has equity in all those ecosystems. The meme of governance tokens isn’t really applicable since our treasury will be diversified in to other protocols tokens. Secondly, they must be locked for vaults which are utility. On top of that, the aspect of it being a gas token shouldn’t be underestimated either.’
Make sure to keep an eye out for the Quasar launch on March 23rd! Be sure to check out the full recording of this episode of TIL for more juicy info not covered in this writeup! Check in with the Quasar team on their Twitter, Discord, or check out their docs for more information.
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