Community Q&A with sif_moon

This past week on discord, sifDAO member cryptomasterflex sent the below questions to get a more direct update on certain features and happenings. While I (sif_moon) answered these questions directly in Discord, it was also requested that these questions & answers be saved somewhere for easy access by others. Enjoy.

Margin:

• Do we have a finalized launch date for the initial margin release?
  No finalized launch date yet. There is still lots going on behind the scenes here. We have a designed FE for it (getting some great feedback on this from the alpha testers right now). We have fixed a few bugs already, and are still fixing some others related to mtp health calculations. Once these are fixed, the alpha test group will continue to plow ahead on testing and providing feedback. Please do keep in mind that it is our intention for this roll-out of margin to be slow and intentional. We are thinking of only enabling a few pools (like 4–5) and potentially only enabling certain people via an ‘opt-in’ mechanism. I.e. people can apply to get access to open margin positions. The reason for this is to really ensure a clean and successful roll-out of the feature. Having it start small with some controls and guardrails in place could be very very helpful here. More on this to come soon though!
• What will happen to the current pooling and staking APY?
  Well, the current pooling APR will go up (I’m not going to say exactly how much, but projections look quite nice). Also remember, that poolers can earn interest in BOTH sides of the pool. Meaning: if you are a pooler in the ATOM:ROWAN pool and people are longing ROWAN with ATOM, the interest that is paid to you as a pooler would actually be in ATOM. So when you see an APR percentage of like ~200%, that 200% will be a combination of both ROWAN and ATOM (just depends on what type of positions are being opened and if we have our LM rewards program still running). For stakers, the launch of margin will have no direct impact on this (see next question as to why).
• How much of margin revenue will go towards APY to poolers?
  For the initial release of margin, ALL revenue from margin will go to poolers (net an amount that would go to an insurance fund). In the future, we want to build in the ability for a percentage of revenues to go to poolers, and percentages of it to go elsewhere (like stakers, the protocol, a buy-and-burn bucket, ect).
• Should we assume that inflation will stop immediately upon margin release, or will it be gradual?
  No it won’t stop immediately. I assume you are asking about LM rewards here. We would want to see how things are playing out before we shut down the current rewards program. But the idea is yes at some point in the near future, we will very aggressively tamper these out, or just turn inflationary LM rewards off because there really isn’t a need for them to be turned on anymore.
• How long after the initial release will the UIX for margin be released?
  As of right now., the UI for margin will be released alongside v1. Meaning: the very first release of margin will have a FE to support it.
• Let’s assume margin generates 100% APY to poolers. Can we give 80% to poolers and burn 20% or some ratio approved by the community?
  See my answer above. In the beginning: no. BUT, once we build in the ability to take the interest from margin and split it to various groups, one of those groups can be a ‘buy & burn’ group. Meaning the interest would be used to buy and burn ROWAN.

User Interface

• Do we have an estimated launch date for the updated UIX?
  Not yet. But I will say: it is looking very dope. We have shown initial concepts to a group of people that were interested in providing feedback (which has been taken into account in newer designs). The new UX will also include our upgraded branding we have been working on for so long (cannot wait to release this to everyone). Let me touch base with the team to see if there is an ETA on the release of the new UI and report back.
• Can the community test and review the UIX in a sandbox to provide any late-stage bug or usability feedback?
  I would say yes here. It's a continuous goal of ours to get the community more involved in product feedback and testing. I would absolutely love to get some people into our TestNet when the timing is right to get them testing and finding any additional bugs.
• It would be great to have a dashboard that showed some combination of the following:
  i. current supply (24-hour % change)
  ii. # of tokens burned day/week/month/YTD (if we start burning)
  iii. TVL (24-hour % change)
  iv. # of wallets holding rowan (24-hour change)
  v. Median wallet size in Rowan
  vi. Margin revenues per day/week/month/YTD
  vii. Swap fees day/week/month/YTD
  viii. Current Staking APY
  ix. Total Rowan Staked (24-hour change)
  x. I think that would go a long way for transparency and give users some comfort in understanding how funds are being utilized.
  This won’t be in the initial release of the newly upgraded FE. BUT! I actually think this could be a dope community-run little project tbh. We have some very powerful and easy developer tools to help here that could make this type of dashboard fairly easy for a dev to whip up. If anyone is interested in doing this (and applying for a grant to do this work), please reach out directly to us on Discord!

Peggy

• Great to see plans for Cardano integration! Hopefully this will bring a whole new set of eyes on Sifchain and ultimately more TVL
  Yup, we hope so too! We had a nice little uptick in wallets being created after we announced our submission for it, so let’s hope this momentum continues!
• Does Peggy bring any direct revenues to Sifchain? If so, how are those revenues used?
  As of now, peggy 1 (and peggy 2) does not charge any additional revenue fees on top of the transaction. We’ve done some number crunching on this to see if this is something we want to change, but as of right now: the peggy bridge does not charge additional-revenue specific fees.
• What’s next after Cardano?
  Oh man! So much more. We actually just submitted another grant application this past weekend. Cardano was just the first chain as part of our grant initiative. We will announce more on this soon. But Cardano is literally the tip of the iceberg. We have been in direct contact with ~15 chains around peggy 2 and getting them excited about it. This includes chains like: Polygon, Metis, Nervos, HBAR, Klaytn, Avalanche, Moonbeam, Fantom, Celo, and more.

Marketing

• Marketing has clearly been improved since the new director has come on to Sifchain. Is there a plan to do a marketing blitz once any or all of the above are launched (margin, UIX, Peggy)?
  Glad you noticed :). I posted this in another channel but will copy+paste here too:
  For a looooong time, we did not really have a major focus on marketing. The focus was basically all on product. The marketing we did do was very, very minimal. Fast forward to present day:
  — We have a legit head of marketing now (very good at what she does)
  — A legit PR team
  — A legit paid advertising team
  — A legit marketing strategy
  — And now we are slowly but surely ramping things up. Marketing doesn’t happen overnight (especially good marketing). It takes time and diligence. It also takes a level of balance of marketing the right thing at the right time to the right people.
  We have been focusing very heavily on marketing over the past few months to really get things organized and situated to allow us to successfully execute on marketing campaigns. Yes, marketing takes time, but we are on a good track now

Future Plans

• Are you able to share anything else in the pipeline?
  The last major pillar that is of key focus is on dev tool optimization. We have some very very exciting stuff to share on this front too soon