DEEP DIVE KUJIRA — Where everyone deserves to be a whale

TL;DR: ORCA, Kujira’s first dApp enables you to scoop up the collateral of your overleveraged Lunatic friends at a discount, when the market turns against them. Interestingly enough you are actually doing them a favour.

Introduction

It is safe to say lending against your crypto collateral is one of the most popular things to do in Decentralised Finance. You could almost go as far as calling it one of the cornerstones. If we look at Anchor Protocol, the total borrow amount has gone up to 1,181,352,032 UST in less than a year.

Now that the new liquidation contract on Anchor has passed the governance process, it’s time to talk about Kujira. What this new team building on Terra aims to do is to level the playing field in DeFi, by building apps that give a great user experience. The goal is to open up opportunities that were once reserved for whales only, starting with liquidations on ORCA.

We can understand that the idea of liquidating your fellow DeFi user might give a bad taste in your mouth, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than just whales and bots being able to get involved with liquidations, normal DeFi users will now be able to participate too.

Before the introduction of Kujira’s dApp, DeFi users have been liquidated on a first come first serve basis, not necessarily at the most favourable terms. ORCA helps out users on both sides of the coin, because borrowers who get liquidated will lose less of the dollar value of their collateral.

How it works

A user connects through ORCA, which is a front-end interface, with the Terra wallet Chrome extension. Through ORCA the user then submits a bid to Anchor’s liquidation contract with the preferred discount rate they call a premium. Since this bid is a deposit in the liquidation contract, the user can only have one bid in place, but the bid is retractable at any time. Once an Anchor loan gets above the LTV threshold, the loan will get liquidated to the first bid in the queue. To be precise: Assets are sold from the lowest to the highest premium and split evenly between users bidding at the same premium. After a user has placed a bid, the user now just sits back and waits, while bots are side-lined.

The ORCA user interface is pleasing to the eye and very intuitive, living up the team’s mission statement (‘’easy and cost effective to use for everyone’’). Projects building on Terra have seen a lot of buzz and by the looks of it Kujira is no different. While the Anchor contract hasn’t switched over yet (Nov 6th), there has been substantial interest from the crypto community in ORCA, with bids in bLUNA and bETH markets currently over 200k. What’s interesting is that Anchor recently announced that they will be linking to ORCA from the Anchor web app.

Team

When investing early in projects, the formation and credentials of the team are crucial. We at Qi believe this one is a winner. For this article we asked for a detailed description and opted to include their submission in its entirety. The team consists of:

A Web application developer who bought his first bitcoin in 2012, and has been fascinated by cryptocurrencies ever since. He’s especially interested in how DeFi can disrupt traditional finance and enforce a truly free market economy, which can react faster than a traditional institution ever could.

A software engineer for 14 years, getting into smart contracts in 2017 after the acquisition of his last startup. He is an advocate of how smart contracts and the permission-less trust that they bring, can empower and enrich the lives of those the current financial system has left behind.

A UI developer for 15 years, with a strong focus on business development and project management over the last 8 of those. After getting into crypto in 2017, he’s not looked back.

A UI/UX designer and front-end developer with 20 years experience across multiple industries including blockchain, health, banking, multimedia, tech and gaming. Winner of FWA, Awwward and CSS Awards. He is no stranger to fresh and intuitive UI, which we think shows in ORCA.

A developer of 21 years delivering solutions for companies around the world. Since 2016, he has specialised in big data and the value Machine Learning and AI can bring to real time processes and digital technologies like blockchain. He is a proponent of the core values of blockchain — decentralisation, transparency, immutability and trust-less consensus

A marketer with over a decade of agency experience and a keen fascination with cryptocurrency’s potential to revolutionize culture, society and civilization in general.

What gives further credence to the Kujira team is the fact that Anchor is linking to ORCA on their platform and that both teams are hosting online community events together. Although this last example might sound insignificant, it indicates the synergies between the two.

Roadmap

Kujira’s plan is to have its own ecosystem of dApps. If the team keeps delivering as swiftly as they did with ORCA, that seems like an inevitability. Updates for ORCA that are planned, are added functionality like enhanced tools for stakers, automated functions for re-bidding and new collateral markets.

The team is currently also working on Beluga, which allows users to send any CW20 token on Terra to multiple addresses simultaneously in one transaction. Which is a neat feature for payroll applications, amongst others.

While at this point there are no specific details available, the team indicates they will be taking all Kujira apps cross chain. As the Terra ecosystem expands and matures with dApp integrations and bridges to other chains like ETH and BSC, this will also expand the utility of the KUJI token.

KUJI Token

The utility and staking token used on all dApps by Kujira, is called KUJI. When paying fees in the KUJI token, users will get discounts, and there will be KUJI staking rewards when LP-ing in the KUJI-UST pool. In the ORCA dApp, the KUJI token will be airdropped to liquidated borrowers, to incentivise them to be on the other side of the trade next time. The revenue sources in ORCA are in UST when liquidations execute and in $KUJI when withdrawals made by users. This revenue will then flow in the liquidity pool.

At time of writing this article the specific details for the upcoming IDO of the KUJI token aren’t out yet, but the platform will be https://app.starterra.io/. Interested buyers should keep an eye out, since the IDO is promised to be soon. For tokenomics and vesting schedules see below.

More Information

Kujira Twitter: https://twitter.com/teamkujira

Kujira Telegram: https://t.me/team_kujira

Kujira Website: https://kujira.app/

Kujira Litepaper: https://docs.kujira.app/litepaper.pdf

ORCA dApp: https://orca.kujira.app/

About Qi Capital

Qi Capital is a group of like-minded and experienced individuals from around the globe, sharing two common objectives: providing insights about crypto and DeFi, and proactively working with ambitious teams on the future of decentralized finance. Our core principle is to promote and foster individual creativity, growing not only as a group but also as creative thinkers and builders. To learn more about us, check out our website www.qicapital.org and our “Qi Podcast” via www.buzzsprout.com/1729379/ or engage with us on Twitter: @QiCapital.

Disclaimer

This content is for informational purposes only and you should not make decisions based solely on it. This is not investment advice. All market prices, data, and other information are not warranted as to completeness or accuracy, are based upon selected public market data, and reflect prevailing conditions and the author’s own views as of this date, all of which are accordingly subject to change without notice