Last week we had the pleasure of hosting some of the team over at EMDX for a quick series of questions led by our host, Zack, on our Telegram channel.
In this article you’ll find a recap of this AMA, along with the answers provided by Sebastián and Berni from EMDX:
Please introduce yourselves to the community and tell us; how did you get started in DeFi?
Sebastián: Hi all, I’m Sebastian CTO at EMDX, nice to be here.
Our value proposition consists of adding a new array of products to the derivatives DEX venues, because apart from typical crypto assets we are listing perpetuals on FX, equities, indexes, commodities, and so on… We recently listed the first FX pair on the testnet platform, ARS/USDC (Peso Argentino 🧉🇦🇷)
Berni: My name is Bernardo Corti, I am CEO of EMDX.
My background is in economics and finance and after working for 10 years in the finance industry in 2015 I co-founded Cryptologic, a blockchain technology development company.
Since then we’ve been developing blockchain technology for many projects and teams across the world. In 2021 we decided to move our core team from Cryptologic and start developing a DeFi protocol for derivatives, that was how EMDX was born.
What exactly is EMDX for those unfamiliar with it?
Berni: EMDX is a derivative DEX with focus on derivatives for REAL / TRADITIONAL assets, enabling listing of products ON DEMAND with full liquidity from “day 1” and part of bringing to the DeFi ecosystem a new array of financial products.
We are offering listing on-demand with FULL LIQUIDITY from the very beginning; this is a key difference from many DEXs out there that only offer listing on demand. The big challenge there is to provide liquidity to grant a long life to the product and in doing so we will have a lot of teams and protocols to create a derivative market for their own tokens.
In addition we are going to provide different derivatives products like options, according to our road map we will be offering DOV’s by Q2 2022. For those who don’t know what DOVs are; they are “decentralized options vaults” and allow users to write / issue options and have passive income, while other users can purchase those options and speculate or hedge their positions.
Please expand briefly on some of the main value propositions of EMDX?
Berni: Adding more about our value proposition, I’d highlight that EMDX wants to be the fastest exchange at listing any financial product as long as we have price feeds for our derivatives products.
Currently our whole pipeline to list any product takes us about 30 days and we think we will reduce it by half in the next few weeks. So our community will prove that after voting and deciding what tokens should be listed they will be there available to trade, and with FULL LIQUIDITY, practically in real time.
Another value proposition consists of our tokenomics design.
Could you please expand a bit on your tokenomics that you just mentioned?
Berni: EMDX’s tokenomics design is part of the DEFI 2.0 trends, our token was designed to reflect intrinsic value and to be a long term value asset.
The EMDX token will be backed up by most of the fees collected from our exchange. We established a vesting and distribution system based on the EMDX platform performance, it means that depending on the average trading volume in EMDX, the amount of tokens released for circulating supply will vary. So the higher the trading volume, the more tokens unlocked, and conversely the lower the trading volume the fewer tokens unlocked.
We will be comparing our average daily volume (for the past 60-day period) with the 100 most liquid exchanges according to the DEX ranking from CoinMarketCap. That will be the reference for our formula to calibrate the circulating supply.
What steps have you taken to enhance the security of your protocol?
Sebastián: This is a very interesting question and also very important, as we all know the security flaws and their impact on protocols like EMDX. To mitigate this kind of attacks we are taking all the off-chain and on-chain security measures that standards dictate of current times.
When it comes to on-chain (smart contracts) we’ve done security audits to make sure that all the code is reviewed by a third party security firm and for the off-chain we’ve also done infrastructure and web application security tests to ensure the robustness of the systems.
That being said, we have all the monitoring and cloud protection tools enabled by our technical team to quickly find and solve any problem that we may face. For example last week we’ve been impacted by a DDoS attack (pretty common type of attack) but it was quickly detected and the impact of it was nothing more than a slow down on our asset responding resources.
Also, as good applications and projects do, in the upcoming weeks we are launching a bug bounty program to rewards users for their findings. 🐛
Can you give us a brief summary of spot vs perp differences?
Berni: Ok, they both may seem similar but are very different financial products. Spot trading means that traders are exchanging real assets, e.g. you send USDC and you receive BTC or AVAX. On the other hand, perpetual swaps are basically future contracts without expiration, and allow traders to get exposure to the underlying asset price in a synthetic way, meaning that traders do not hold the underlying asset but they have profit or loss depending on the price of that underlying asset.
Simultaneously perps, as most derivatives, offer the chance to trade with leverage, that is to say that traders can multiply their purchasing power many times, for example EMDX allows traders to use 10X leverage. So, by using leverage you can amplify your profits as well as your losses.
One more difference is that with perps traders can take a short position, it is to bet that the price of an asset is going down. The short function in perp markets is really interesting for those who want to hedge their positions, for example if you are trying to catch APY you can hedge your tokens by taking short positions, in that way you will have a market neutral position and simply get your APY.
Did you work with traditional institutions for the development of the platform? If so, what is their contribution and interests?
Sebastián: Yes, we have worked together with the biggest derivative exchange in LATAM. Basically they provide market data through their own node within the Chainlink oracle network so that we can pull this information to build robust and solid financial products.
For example, they provide highly reliable price feeds that we use as the index price for our perpetual pairs and Chainlink is part of these partnerships too. Our plan is to replicate this model of partnership, involving traditional exchanges and markets to provide real prices and market data. Their contributions and interests basically provide all the market information that they are able to generate and start participating in the new paradigm of the financial industry.
DeFi should get benefits from the liquidity that may come from these traditional sources. Also from the beginning we were working together with the Ava Labs team to carry out the different development steps of our platform ❤️🔺
Community Questions:
“Is this the main place to get info for the airdrop?”
Berni: Yes! It is, but we’ll be releasing much detailed information soon.
Sebástian: Yes, and you can also follow our social channels to get more information about the next airdrop stages.
“Any plans to utilize subnets?”
Sebástian: Yes, as part of our roadmap we are going to create a subnet to cover our AML/KYC module, this module will be used by the institutional traders and regulated exchanges.
“Is EMDX staking coming?”
Sebástian: Yes! this will be announced after our trading competition, that will take place very soon, likely by the end of march.
“Could I ask when the launch is?”
Berni: Sure! It was planned for March 22, but we have had some delays and at the same time we don’t want to overlap our mainnet launch with the avalanche Summit. That’s why we are planning our production stage for the first days of April, right after the trading competition.
We thank the EMDX team once again for their time during this event along with their insightful answers to our questions. We’re all looking forward to another successful project launch on Avalanche.
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