July 15th AMA: Recap and Highlights

Future of Polkadex, product development, staying ahead of the competition, marketing strategies and PDEX token — all this and more in this comprehensive AMA recap. Full transcript included!

Yesterday, Polkadex’s Executive Director and Co-Founder, Vivek Prasannan, and CMO, Kseniia Baziian, joined the Polkadex Telegram channel for our 5th and biggest Telegram AMA (Ask Me Anything) session yet. Vivek and Kseniia answered the best of the 250+ questions submitted by the Polkadex community before the AMA and also managed to answer some of the questions submitted live during the event. It spanned almost two hours, so expect a lot of information about various aspects of Polkadex! To save you some time, the team has compiled this comprehensive recap with all the highlights of yesterday’s AMA. However, we also included the full Q&A transcript at the end of the recap.

First things first

Vivek goes into detail about Polkadex’s funding, development, on-chain governance, revenue generation, and its scalable architecture that enables 500,000 transactions per second. He mentions how he and Gautham are very satisfied with the progress that Polkadex team has made so far and says they “couldn’t have asked for more”. He lists recent achievements like raising over $3 million in funding from prominent VCs and institutional investors in the space, participating in Polkadot Decoded, receiving a Web3 Grant that bootstrapped the project at the launch, growing the team more than tenfold, and being on the finishing line to the Mainnet launch now with a clear roadmap for the future.

During the AMA, Vivek had high praise for Gautham J, CEO, and Deepansh, COO, and the rest of the Polkadex team. He also revealed some of the lessons the team has learned along the way and why the path of innovation means “facing issues that no one has experienced before.”

Why many crypto projects fail

A few questions were focused on Polkadex’s funding, and whether the development of the project was reliant on PDEX’s market performance. This is what Vivek had to say when asked why many crypto projects fail and how Polkadex is different:

Many projects fail because they depend on selling their tokens to deliver the project. If the project raises funds in a normal manner from institutional investors, it can deliver at least what was promised and move to the next funding stage. We raised funds from prominent institutional investors and VCs to stay functional no matter how the market turns.

Current market conditions, token sale and the Polkadex roadmap

In fact, in February of 2021, Polkadex raised $3 million during the seed and private investment rounds from well-known blockchain-focused institutional investors and VCs including Kenetic Capital, NGC Ventures, CMS Holdings, Genesis Block Ventures, Waterdrip Capital and others. Since both rounds were raised in fiat and we assumed the worst/longest-case scenario for all the projections before the raise, we are confident about having more than sufficient funds to realize our vision and finalize every step of our roadmap. As Vivek mentioned, contrary to some popular opinion,

We do not rely on our token to fund project development at all.

On this note, Vivek was also asked if Polkadex’s sole plan was to sell tokens to profit. His answer was clear and concise:

We distributed tokens to achieve decentralization, not to raise money to fund our project. We raised hardly 5% of our total fundraising through our IDO. Why would we worry about the market then?

Revenue generation for Polkadex

In addition to Polkadex’s funding, Vivek was also asked how the project will generate revenue. He mentioned:

Polkadex will also earn revenue through the trading fees from the trading apps running on the Polkadex blockchain. In its turn, the Polkadex blockchain will earn revenue from the token utility and velocity created by the applications that run on top of it.

Staying ahead of the competition

Knowing Polkadex will be a game-changing product for the industry, the team has anticipated copycat projects who will try to compete with Polkadex after the launch. In this context, Polkadex will continue to rely on our R&D team to keep us ahead of the game in the long term and continually work to widen the distance between Polkadex and our competitors. Substrate and other technologies in our stack will allow us to issue any upgrades seamlessly, without worrying about forking the chain. This gives us a sustainable market advantage.

How Polkadex avoids possible regulatory issues

The team thought about the regulatory issues that exchange might encounter in the future and worked the solution into the product features. Polkadex Orderbook will remain compliant while protecting its users and creating the perfect conditions for a flood of institutional liquidity thanks to the Decentralized KYC process done in partnership with KILT Protocol and Fractal. With Decentralized KYC, each user’s personally identifiable information (PII) will remain in their wallet and will never be revealed to the Polkadex team or any other DApp that needs to verify the user’s credentials. This will serve as a ‘moat’ against any possible regulatory trouble while preserving users’ privacy and contributing to a self-sustaining Polkadex.

PDEX token

Many questions naturally revolved around the PDEX token and investors’ thoughts. Vivek assured the community that Polkadex’s investors are experienced VCs who believe in the bright future of Polkadex, the long-term utility of PDEX and its synergy with the Polkadex ecosystem. Some AMA participants expressed worries about the upcoming token unlock. According to the planned PDEX distribution schedule embedded in the tokenomics, we will gradually release tokens over time but reach the total supply of 20 million tokens in circulation only after a few years from now. Vivek stressed that PDEX serves many purposes, the most important of them being securing the network through staking. As the Polkadex tokenomics were designed in collaboration with experts from Cryptoecon, a respected centre of cryptoeconomics, holders can be assured that everything about PDEX was designed with intent. Simply put, though the Polkadex blockchain is inflationary in the short-term the utility of the native token will offset it and bring the deflationary effect. Finally, Vivek mentioned that the figure of 20 million in circulation is not arbitrary but rather part of PDEX’s role as an integral part of the Polkadex network, with multiple use cases across Polkapool, Polkadex Orderbook, Polkadex IDO Pallet and governance functions.

Polkadex Orderbook and Polkapool as 2 separate products

Contrary to what some community members may think. Polkadex is not a hybrid DEX! Polkadex has 2 separate products with separate liquidity pools:

⚫️ Polkapool: an AMM based DEX that is completely on-chain and features feeless transactions, no KYC and no frontrunning.
⚫️ Polkadex Orderbook: a High-Frequency Trading (HFT) order-book, with fiat support, decentralized KYC and trading bots, that aims to provide users with the convenient experience of a centralized exchange but with the added security of the blockchain for users’ funds.

Marketing Strategy

On the marketing side of things, Polkadex CMO, Kseniia Baziian, stressed that Polkadex does not believe that relying only on a ‘build it and users will come’ strategy and mentioned that marketing is a “pillar” of Polkadex growth that goes “hand in hand with product development.”

Kseniia dived into the short, medium and long-term marketing strategies at Polkadex and remarked on the need for a close relationship between product development and marketing strategies. In the short term, Polkadex is focused on organic growth & building a strong and informed community of Polkadexers. As Polkadex approaches Mainnet launch, the team will increase paid marketing activities to incentivise newcomers to try the Polkadex platform and see how they can benefit from its advantages. The long-term marketing strategy focuses on incentivising users to switch to Polkadex through methods like referral incentives and will be powered by high-level partnerships and cross-marketing through new token listings on Polkadex Orderbook and IDOs on the launchpad.

Recent marketing activities

In the past month, Polkadex has achieved nice organic growth. We were featured in over 20 crypto & fintech publications, received mentions and reviews in 50+ videos from YouTube creators and experienced a 10% average increase in social media following, the number of token holders and other important marketing and business metrics. The team has also seen steady growth in the number of active Crowdcast & Telegram AMA participants, as well as the increase in engagement across social platforms. All of the above means that the interest in Polkadex grows both among the community members & influential third parties On the social media front, the Polkadex team launched our Discord server, started active community management on Reddit, and significantly increased the amount of content on the Polkadex YouTube channel by releasing more videos, including the first promo video for Polkadex Orderbook.

Responding to FUD

In question 20, Kseniia was asked about how Polkadex responds to community member who may doubt the project or consider it to be a scam.

We can’t force anyone to believe in Polkadex. The only thing we can do is build a great product and stay as transparent as we can about everything we do.

She went on to list a few items that make it easy to see why Polkadex is the real deal, including Polkadex ties and recognition from the Polkadot ecosystem & DeFi Alliance, constant activity on Github and dev updates on social media, and the lack of anonymity within a team that is always willing to answer any questions in the most transparent way possible.

The importance of partnerships

Kseniia also chatted about partnerships and how collaboration can contribute to a better crypto ecosystem. She mentioned Polkadex’s partnerships in product and business areas and expressed our willingness to partner with “quality providers that can enrich our ecosystem and make our community happy with what they bring to the table.” She also teased some exciting talks&works with partners happening behind the scenes now and that will be announced soon.

Global team = global approach

Kseniia was also asked about adopting more local and language-based approaches to marketing and whether that would be a focus for Polkadex (Question 22). She remarked that since Polkadex’s team is spread out around the world, the marketing approach is inherently global, too. However, her response also considered the importance of more targeted regional efforts and highlighted that the goal was to head in that direction closer to the launch of the Polkadex Mainnet. The global expansion will start from India as it is home to a “vibrant and fast-growing crypto market and all 3 co-founders are from there, so we have knowledge about the market and behaviours.”

What about newbies? Will onboarding be easy?

While Polkadex plans to attract existing DeFi and DEX users first, as they are familiar with the space and urge to use a better product, we will also target centralized exchange users and crypto newbies with an educational approach. This direction will include the roll-out of an editorial on the Polkadex website to start users on the right path by building a crypto and trading knowledge base and also focus on more technical topics. In the future, Polkadex may consider traditional mass-media methods,too, to bring more users directly to the DeFi world!

In addition, Polkadex will also be multi-platform and easy-to-use while catering to users ranging from professional traders and crypto natives to less-experienced retail traders and crypto newbies. Polkadex’s native fiat support, the first in the industry for a DEX, will also help tear down an important obstacle that currently blocks many users from reaching DeFi. Instead, Polkadex will help first-time crypto buyers jump straight into DeFi while giving them a platform that will ‘hold their hand’ every step of the way.

More exchange listings?

The Polkadex team often gets the question of whether PDEX will be listed on any another exchange in the hopes that may reflect positively on the token. While securing more listings is part of the team’s strategy, it is “by no means an end goal,” according to Kseniia. PDEX is already listed on “reputable global CEXes like KuCoin and Gate.io, respectively 6th and 10th largest by the number of users and volume.” While it is important to note that the Polkadex team is currently talks with major exchanges, it is equally important to understand that exchange listings are not the answer to everything in crypto and such events have to be timed properly to reach the desired effect for the community.

Stay up to date with Polkadex

Overall, while yesterday’s AMA was the team’s most detailed session yet, you may still have questions for the Polkadex team. If that is the case, please join the Polkadex communities on Telegram and Discord, follow Polkadex on Twitter,and/or post on r/polkadex on Reddit, and we will get to your question soon enough. We hold regular AMA’s so you can also just wait until then!

Every two weeks we pick the 4 Top Polkadexers (one biggest supporter of Polkadex on each channel) and give them $100 in PDEX as a reward… Could you be next?

Be sure to also check out the Polkadex YouTube channel for video content, including past AMAs, demos, and more!

For those of you who don’t want to miss anything, below is the full transcript of yesterday’s AMA containing every question and answer!

Full AMA transcript

Question 1: How old is Polkadex project? What are your long-term goals for Polkadex development?

Vivek:

I, Gautham and Deepansh (3 co-founders of Polkadex) formed the seed idea for creating a decentralized exchange in early 2020. This was the continuation of the research & development efforts the team members have been involved in throughout 2019. We can take the date of Web3 Open Grants submission as the start of Polkadex, as it was the first funding we got. This date is September 13th 2020.

The seed & private funding rounds closed in February 2021. We conducted an IDO in mid-April 2021. So you can see that Polkadex is yet a baby.

Our long term goal is to create the perfect decentralized exchange that will make DEXes usable for mainstream finance, as well as trading digital tokens of all kinds. Polkadex’s mission is to bring DeFi to the masses through innovation & usability.

Question 2: What is the structure of this project: is it decentralised or an open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how will the governance be handled?

Vivek:

Polkadex is an open-source project where anyone can contribute. It is decentralized because it works based on the rules and logic implemented as a protocol in the blockchain. Polkadex does not depend on a central operator.

If the central operator withdraws, the blockchain can use on-chain governance to replace them.

Governance is handled through governance votes cast by the validators of the network and based on the number of tokens staked.

Question 3: How will Polkadex solve the scaling problem? And how does it overcome the threat of centralization?

Vivek:

Polkadex has already solved the scaling problem with our TEE architecture. It allows us to reach up to 500,000 transactions per second with millisecond latency which is what we need to run an exchange.

The threat of centralization is a misnomer here. You need an operator to run the TEE whose whereabouts are registered on-chain. Anyone can be an operator if the blockchain registers it. If there is any misbehaviour from the TEE operator, Polkadex blockchain can use its governance to remove the operator and replace it with another one.

Question 4: There is a widely held belief that most projects will not survive in the long-term. That’s probably true. What lessons have you taken from your experience and watching other projects in this space?

Vivek:

Many projects fail because they depend on selling their tokens to deliver the project. If the project raises funds in a normal manner from institutional investors, it can deliver at least what was promised and move to the next funding stage.

If you roll a dice coin and depend on the token to fund the development, you are leaving the project’s fate up to market conditions, which is a gamble. It is similar to companies depending on the value of their shares in building and running their operations. Nobody does that in the traditional tech or finance world, neither should anyone in crypto. Companies raise funds through clients and investors, while shares simply reflect the company’s value.

We raised funds from prominent institutional investors and VCs to stay functional no matter how the market turns.

Question 5: What have you learned from an early version of your product? Do you have some major obstacles on your way now?

Vivek:

We released 2 versions of the Testnet previously and are investing a lot of time into R&D at Polkadex, so there are lots of learnings.

From the first version of Polkadex Orderbook, we have learned that direct on-chain positioning of orders in the orderbook will create a latency that will be a turn off for customers in the long run. With this knowledge in mind, we had to move our architecture to a TEE base, though having to face many delays in the process. This is also a tech breakthrough that later on allowed us to scale to 500K tps without compromising custody or security.

We are on the path of innovation, so sometimes our team faces issues that no one experienced before. Hence, it’s all about learning, creative problem solving and researching more and more. We believe we are doing the right thing and for us building a product that will meet our goals and vision is way more important than plainly playing by the rules. It’s all about the quality and functionality of the final product.

Question 6: Could you tell us about the Polkadex team and their background? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced team members, and some of those didn’t go so well due to easily avoidable mistakes.

Vivek:

Building on the blockchain is like building the Internet in the ’90s. Having experience is great but it is not a guarantee that the project will succeed. The scene is for innovators who are not afraid to encounter bumps along the road and are able to mix their inventions with existing tech for the best result.

Personally, I’m a computer engineer and come with close to 15 years of IT consulting experience. I have built my company from scratch and successfully scaled to 50 people before I called it a day. This experience is more than enough to set this company up and running.

My co-founders Gautham and Deepansh are younger engineers with business acumen who have such bright minds and work ethics that are difficult to find even in very experienced people.

Our team is a mix of different backgrounds, experiences, locations and ages. We value talent, achievements and the ability to stay agile above anything else.

At the moment, due to the heavy focus on R&D and rapid development of the blockchain industry, projects require to have a startup DNA rather than think in a traditional way of working on a scale.

Therefore, we are best positioned to bring this product to the market for people to use because we have a solid team base and we always stay open-minded.

We need to worry about scaling only after we release the product. However, even now we are hiring extensively and formed a great team already. 👍

Question 7: Many industries were heavily affected by Covid-19 epidemic. How does it affect the growth of Polkadex? What are your plans to turn challenges into opportunities for Polkadex development?

Vivek:

Covid-19 was a blessing in disguise for the Polkadex team. We could build this company without even moving out of our homes. We were able to meet people, hire talent and work without any distractions. So, we believe we have already turned the Covid-19 challenges into an opportunity for Polkadex.

Question 8: What do you think of the current state of the crypto industry? What do you think needs to be improved?

Vivek:

As expected, the crypto industry now is full of people who have come here only for profiteering. Though we cannot blame them, this leads to hype and FUD that takes away capital from quality projects and feeds the undeserving ones.

Especially for people who are entering this space for the first time, finding the needle from the haystack is the biggest challenge. There is only a small percentage of people in this industry that sincerely want to change the financial world. And a small, but growing number of investors, who are really willing to understand this new reality. The rest are here to make quick money. To balance the industry we need to fund projects that create long term value and stop funding projects that thrive on speculation alone.

Question 9: Going from a startup project to a mainstream project and being a pioneer in the industry, does the team anticipate that many new startups will show up and compete?

Vivek:

Yes, we know that having the first-mover advantage is a short-lived strategy. So is the network effect. Both are overvalued by the industry.

Though when compared to other industries, the network effect has a greater impact in crypto, relying on that alone will not take the product anywhere.

We expect many copycats to try to steal the thunder from Polkadex and will compete with us. We rely on our R&D for keeping us ahead of the game in the long term.

We still think the stuff we are developing is far more superior to any DEX out there and it will take them at least 6 months of effort to catch up with us even after our launch.

Our long term goal will be to widen this gap and give people a product they will fall in love with. Substrate and other technologies we use will help us upgrade seamlessly.

🏆Question 10: For project development, the main priority is to have sufficient funds. Do you have sufficient funds for development?

Vivek:

Yes, we are fully funded since February 2021 as I mentioned in another question. Our funding was in fiat from institutions and VCs that you can check on our website. We took the worst/longest-case scenario for all the projections before raising funds, so we are confident about having more than sufficient funds. The crypto market conditions will not affect the roadmap that we already announced.

Question 11: I see many projects start with very good ideas. But if there is low funding from Token Sale before launch, they abandon the project. What makes you sure this won’t happen with Polkadex?

Vivek:

This won’t happen with Polkadex because as I mentioned earlier, we do not rely on our token to fund project development at all.

Question 12: What is Polkadex’s revenue model? In which ways do you generate revenue/profit?

Vivek:

Polkadex will earn revenue through the trading fees from the trading apps running on the Polkadex blockchain. In its turn, the Polkadex blockchain will earn revenue from the token utility and velocity created by the applications that run on top of it.

Question 13: Many projects have been shut down in different countries because they are not using the right regulations and licenses. In order to reach the whole world, how Polkadex will handle this problem?

Vivek:

We thought this through while working on the project from the ideation stage. Our moat for facing the regulations and standing strong in the future is decentralized KYC.

We decided to implement it right away so that after gaining traction, we don’t disappoint people by abandoning the project and become another community-run relic.

Question 14: Many projects focus solely on selling tokens rather than making a real contribution to the blockchain world. Will Polkadex really fix a problem?

Vivek:

If you are a trader reading through what we are trying to fix it’s mouthwatering already. I have been a casual trader myself for many years and I know that if we achieve what we stated in our goals, it is going to fix a lot of problems for the industry in general.

As I said, we distributed tokens to achieve decentralization, not to raise money to fund our project. We raised hardly 5% of our total fundraising through our IDO. Why would we worry about the market then? So we don’t rely on our tokens to achieve what we have announced in the roadmap.

Question 15: Do you feel satisfied when you look back to the day when you started Polkadex?

Vivek:

Of course, 101% we couldn’t have asked for more!

You have to imagine, we started with Gautham being the only developer in the team, then I joined to support him and now we are a big strong team, with $3.5 M in funding, Web3 grant, Polkadot Decoded and other industry events speaker slots, great partnerships with world’s best teams, on the finishing line to launch our Mainnet, having a clear roadmap and excellent work environment.

All of that in less than one year. What else can you ask for? 🙌

Question 16: Is there a chance early-stage investors can help the project by assuring they are not selling their tokens? We know you can’t tell them, but talking to them about it will benefit other investors and put trust in Polkadex.

Vivek:

All of our early-stage investors are experienced in the industry and are in the project for the long term. They promised not to dump their tokens, but there were 1–2 odd cases with investors who didn’t stick to their word when the first tranche was released. We don’t want to name them, but we know.

Any investor who came in early knows that the value of these tokens will be realised only when the value is built into the blockchain, not before. So let the weak hands sell because anyone who has common sense and knows the basics of blockchain economics will wait for the final use case to roll out and show the full utility to realise full token value.

Disclaimer: I am not giving you investment advice, but making use of our grey matter to think will do no harm 😉

Question 17: As an investor, I find unlocking nearly 1 million PDEX tokens unfair. Is there any way community can put governance to work and push back the unlocking date?

Vivek:

Polkadex was designed to have 20M tokens from the start. The logic of adding vesting was to slow down the progress at the beginning. Projects’ tokens have to be assessed from multiple sides. It became trendy in the industry to state that tokenomics is everything. It is true for projects with zero use cases, but as you know Polkadex is a completely different story.

Even with 20M tokens, if you estimate the use case you have on the tokens with the full feature roll-out, believe me, you are still heading for deflation. Without at least these many tokens in circulation, we cannot secure the network with enough stakers and also create the liquidity and velocity needed to fund the activities. We will show it in action when the Mainnet launches. Imagine you are trying to secure a $20M network, and we need an ideal stake of $10M for it. How do you expect to do that properly without releasing the tokens?

Question 18: Creating a token is easy, but it takes professionalism & intelligence to keep it valuable in the long term. What is your plan to make PDEX valuable in the long run?

Vivek:

PDEX utility will increase gradually because token use cases will improve with the application we are building.

This is not investment advice by any means, but any commodity gains value based on supply, demand and speculation. Right now the only driving factor is speculation as we are building the product. So, people are trying to bet on the future.

When supply and demand will be factored in after Mainnet and the product itself launch, PDEX will get plenty of use cases across Polkapool, polkadex Orderbook, Polkadex IDO Pallet and governance functions.

It will be a busy network. Not to mention the stakes needed for decentralized interoperability to work for bridges.

In crypto, you always need to look through the FUD and dig deeper into the fundamentals.

Question 19: Marketing is very important in crypto. What is your for short-tem and long-term marketing plan?

Kseniia:

We share the same opinion and I don’t believe in the ‘build it and users will come’ approach only. Hence, marketing is one of the important pillars of Polkadex and will go hand in hand with product development.

Our marketing plan is divided into stages depending on the product development, as the goals will vary. In the short term, we are focused on organic growth & building a strong community of Polkadexers. Moving to the Mainnet launch, we will increase paid marketing activities to incentivise newcomers to try & use the Polkadex platform.

At the moment as we are waiting for the Testnet product, we are working on keeping our community informed about our development through Crowdcast demos & AMAs, educating existing members about different aspects of the project via content & social media and attracting new supporters through owned and third-party resources.

As the current market situation keeps some members of the crypto community indecisive, we don’t do anything aggressive and costly in terms of marketing. Moreover, paid activities bring real ROI when the product is usable already. However, our outlook on the whole market is positive and we are developing Polkadex according to the roadmap, so we are building up the basis for a push when the time is right.

The long-term marketing strategy is incentivising users to switch to Polkadex through referral incentives. We expect this is the necessary ‘hook’, but the rest will follow when users see how their trading game improves with Polkadex.

In the medium to long term, our focus will shift more towards quality partnerships both for product and community. We will also attract more users through tokens listed on the Orderbook and projects executing IDOs on the Polkadex platform. All of these activities will help Polkadex get more spotlight from third parties.

Question 20: If anybody thinks your project looks like a scam that can’t be trusted, how do you make them believe in your project?

Kseniia:

I think the question is not quite right. We can’t force anyone to believe in Polkadex. The only thing we can do is build a great product and stay as transparent as we can about everything we do.

If someone ventures an opinion that Polkadex is a scam, it means they did not do proper research on the project. Why?

⚫️ We already got some valuable recognition from the industry such as receiving a Web3 grant, speaking at the Polkadot Decoded event, acceptance to Polkadot DeFi Alliance and some prominent names in blockchain space among our investors & partners, etc.

⚫️ We have a very active Github and show each step of the product development + provide dev & business updates weekly on Twitter and Telegram, as well as the monthly recap via email and Medium. Moreover, as Vivek mentioned we already released 2 versions of the testnet previously, so people saw that the product is in the making

⚫️ We are as transparent as it gets and try to answer each query that we get on social or by email from the community. You can literally start your personal AMA with us any day

⚫️ All 3 co-founders, me and the rest of the team have open profiles and are approachable. You can see us answering community from time to time and doing regular AMAs

I think that it’s up to future & existing individual supporters/investors to make an effort by reading our articles/ watching our videos/ asking us questions they have/checking what is the opinion of the industry about us.

We can’t and will not force anyone 😅 But then again we want to create a strong educated community of crypto users who know that investing is a personal responsibility and requires some effort to get comfortable with your choices.

Question 21: The race for success in crypto is a very long marathon and you can never do it alone. What is your opinion on the partnerships and collaborations you need? When will you give priority to partnerships?

Kseniia:

Indeed, we need a strong ecosystem, as we are planning to be here for the years to come.

Currently, we have some great partners from the product side (Openware, KILT, Fractal, IntegriTEE and others) and industry side (Polkadot DeFi Alliance, MarketSquare, CoinMarketCap and others). You can check our ecosystem partners on our website in the dedicated section www.polkadex.trade.

We are also already in the works with some amazing partners now and will announce each partnership gradually. Our approach here in general is going to the community with agreement on hands rather than just hyping things. That said, we have lots of very exciting things happening behind the scenes 🤩

In general, we don’t set limits for the type of collaborators now or in the future. We are happy to partner with quality providers that can enrich our ecosystem and make our community happy with what they bring to the table.

Question 22: Is Polkadex a global project? Is there a plan to cover Korean, European and African communities? Will you launch multiple language lines for non-native English speakers?

Kseniia:

We are a global project. Even our team is spread across the world.

At the current stage, we are focusing on the English-speaking community and we also have an active Chinese community.

We used to have some presence in Vietnam around the IDO time but decided that we need to shift focus and have more awareness among English speakers first. Currently, we don’t have enough bandwidth to pay proper attention to the regions. It’s a ‘go big or go home’ kinda situation — either you invest money & effort into regions and get great results, or do something small with a mediocre effect.

We will pursue other regions closer to the Mainnet launch. Now we are finishing up work with a research company that helped us identify the most interesting markets for Polkadex development.

Our global expansion will start from India. It is a very logical step as it is a vibrant and fast-growing crypto market and all 3 co-founders are from there, so we have knowledge about the market and behaviours.

However, we are working on launching language-specific communities as well. If you have suggestions for specific languages you think we need to go after, please, let us know 😊

Question 23: A project like Polkadex may require spreading awareness and educating new users. Do you offer any ambassador programmes?

Kseniia:

Community is very important for us and our ambassador program is in the making now. We’ll announce as soon as we finalise everything. We already have some really strong supporters that talk about Polkadex on a daily basis. PS Huge ‘thank you’ from the whole team for supporting 🤗

At the moment we run the Top Polkadexer program across 4 social media channels. You can see details here. And we even had our first Top Polkadexers chosen 2 days ago.

We also offer prizes for participants on each AMA.

Question 24: I am interested in contributing to the project as a developer. As a community-driven project, do you have any relevant programs?

Kseniia:

Yes, we are now looking for beta-testers. You can sign up here. We’ll announce the date and chosen testers shortly.

Different bounty programs will follow, too.

Also, we are actively looking for Rust developers who enjoy working on a consensus level. If that’s you — please send your CV to business@polkadex.trade. We’ll be happy to talk with you.

Question 25: Education for cryptocurrency is necessary nowadays. What’s your plan to attract those people who don’t know about cryptocurrency?

Kseniia:

We plan to attract existing DeFi & DEX users first. They are a natural initial audience as they are already in this space and know a good product in the sea of competitors.

Next up are the users of centralized exchanges and crypto newbies. For them, we will take an educational approach and provide a wealth of information both as crypto&trading knowledge base and more technical topics focused on the platform use. The current plan is to roll out an editorial on the website.

At this stage, we’ll also consider moving marketing to more mass-focused mediums such as financial TV channels, traditional finance media and influencers, etc.

🏆 Question 26: One of the biggest issues for DApps is onboarding. What solutions do you have or are working on to try and resolve this problem?

Kseniia:

We have quite a few solutions 😊 In large part onboarding issue will be addressed by easy UX and the opportunity to access the platform from multiple devices.

We aim to create a very straightforward and easy to navigate platform because we want to cater to both professional traders/crypto natives and retail traders/crypto newbies.

We are also paying attention to the educational part and are creating strategies for the content materials such as how-to guides, industry terms, trading hacks, etc. and in-app onboarding support.

Essentially, Polkadex is designed to attract newcomers because we will offer some unique features for DEXes such as fiat support. Hence, Polkadex will be easy to use even for first-time crypto buyers.

Question 27: As you are building and growing Polkadex, do you take into account community feedback, contributions and requests?

Kseniia:

Definitely! We always welcome any feedback. In fact, the majority of our content is written after feedback from followers & supporters.

You can be sure that all the suggestions via social or email (business@polkadex.trade) are taken into account.

Question 28: At this point, do you think you need exchanges like Binance to keep growing? Or is it better to forget those things and focus on other activities?

Kseniia:

Securing more listings is definitely part of the strategy but by no means an end goal. I think, it’s another trend in the industry to see listings as the answer to everything. In reality, getting listed does not guarantee explosive growth as you can see from the story of many tokens.

Polkadex is already listed on reputable global CEXes like KuCoin and Gate.io, respectively 6th and 10th largest by the number of users and volume globally.

We have good connections and are in talks with some major exchanges now. However, at the current stage of the market, we have to be cautious with any big moves because there is no guarantee that they will be effective. So we want to evaluate pros and cons right now before rushing into anything.

Question 29: I believe in your product and $PDEX but I don’t see any marketing or Polkadex name mentions. Can the marketing team share a roadmap for the future? Although the whole market is down when the situation gets better can we see $PDEX popping everywhere?

Kseniia:

We must be looking in different directions 🙈

From what I saw, Polkadex this month:

⚫️ Got 20 features in crypto publications

⚫️ Received mentions and reviews in 50+ videos from YouTube creators

⚫️ Had 10% increase on average for following across social media, number of token holders and other marketing/business metrics

⚫️ Had steady growth in the number of active Crowdcast & TG AMA participants, as well as engagement across social platforms. In fact the number of questions for this AMA is exactly 2,5X from when we started hosting regular ones

⚫️ Launched Discord, started active community management on Reddit and increased own video presence on YouTube

⚫️ Released the first promo video for Polkadex Orderbook

Don’t forget that we are a very young project but can already compete in marketing numbers (and are in fact compared) to much more established players in the crypto world. I believe, that says a lot.

I tried to outline the detailed strategy in the earlier questions.

On the final note, anything in marketing requires time, so have a little faith & patience. I promise you’ll see the results soon 😉

Live questions

Question 30: Polkadex is cooperating with KILT Protocol and Fractal on the decentralized KYC process. What made Polkadex choose them as partners? What is the purpose of decentralized KYC in Polkadex? Does it benefit Polkadex users?

Kseniia:

We chose them because they are pioneers in the field and our fellow Polkadotters, so we share a common ecosystem. Why and how it works is described here.

Question 31: Have you been audited? Have not heard you talk about that security of funds is what every investor craves for and plans to escape in case of insecurity if funds, scams and rug pulls? How strong is your security?

Kseniia:

We had 2 audits from Halborn and Omniscia. Now undergoing through another one. We literally talk about security all the time, as it is the most important part of any exchange. Feel free to check our website, docs, articles on Medium or talks on social media if you need more info about the security of user funds at Polkadex.

Question 32: Polkadex and Fractal will use the KILT protocol as the underlying infrastructure to manage the KYC credentials required by Polkadex. Does it mean that Polkadex customers need to use Fractal and KILT to pass KYC? One of your missions is to use KYC to build a perfect decentralized exchange?

Kseniia:

We do Decentralized KYC, so it works in a different way from the KYC on CEXes that everyone is used to. Here is the talk that we had with both KILT and Fractal CEOs to explain the process and logic behind it.

Vivek:

KILT is another blockchain with similar properties. So there is no harm in two blockchains with identical properties talking to each other in a decentralised, trustless manner. Fractal comes into the picture as one of the attesters under the KILT protocol. Their architecture will hold multiple attesters in the future which means that there is no dependency on Fractal as things unfold in the future. Hence making the system decentralised overall.

Question 33: Has Polkadex considered integrating any deflationary models to increase the value of your tokens?

Vivek:

Our tokenomics was designed in collaboration with cryptecon.org, a reputed Swiss firm. One of the economists from there is also part of our advisory board.
We have done great research and given a lot of thought before settling down with these numbers. Inflation and deflation are complementary and the balancing is what is needed to make sure the utility of the token is also taken into consideration and not just its price.
PDEX is not exactly like Bitcoin. It is used for so many different things. So there needs to be a balance, and that is why we have designed the blockchain itself to be inflationary but the utility around it will have a deflationary effect.

Question 34: The central point of any platform dedicated to the trading market is to have a user-friendly interface, so I want to know how simple or easy it is to use your trading tools?

Kseniia:

Definitely! UX is the cornerstone of Polkadex. We aim for a CEX-like feel and functionality in a fully decentralized environment. These videos will give you a better understanding of how Polkadex will look like in our desktop and app versions.

Question 35: I understand that Polkadex does not charge transaction fees, so how do you plan to solve the distributed denial of service (DDoS) problem that is usually associated with zero network fees?

Vivek:

We solve it by introducing an opportunity cost of staking bringing more value in order to provide feeless transactions. This will go under audit this month and you will be able to see it in action in the coming rollout.

Question 36: I heard that the Polkadex team demoed their mobile app this week. Can you tell us more about this app? What features will be included? Will Polkadex release it for Android and iOS? When do you plan to release it?

Kseniia:

Our main goal is to create usable products for everyone, so the experience and features will be the same across multiple devices. You will be able to access Polkapool, Orderbook and IDO platform from desktop, mobile and app.

Question 37: Polkadex is a hybrid DEX with AMM. Do you have an order book and liquidity pool? Can a trader switch between the order book and the liquidity pool?

Kseniia:

This is a wrong view of Polkadex that has been circulating in the community recently. We are not a hybrid DEX, we have 2 separate products that have separate liquidity pools:

⚫️ Polkapool: which is an AMM based DEX completely on-chain with feeless transactions,no KYC and no frontrunning

⚫️ Polkadex Orderbook: which is a High-frequency Trading orderbook, with Fiat support, decentralized KYC, trading bots, aimed to provide the similar experience of a centralized exchange but with the security of blockchain for user funds

Question 38: Does Polkadex have an app for IOS or Android mobile devices?

Kseniia

It will be available on both Android and iOS come Mainnet.

And that’s a wrap! Other exciting things are in the pipeline, so stay tuned through our community & social media channels:

Website| Twitter| TG Chat| TG Announcements| Medium| Youtube|Reddit | Discord