STONE Defi with Alex Lam
Brief Information
STONE is the only yield management protocol focused on creating “Rock Solid Yield” for all the users in the DeFi ecosystem. Stone is positioned as the anchor yield aggregation platform that aims to expand the current DeFi yield market and include the yields from the staking assets.
Introduction AMA
Eric: Hello everyone!
We have here the @stonefortress team!
Welcome @Alexlam2013 @vk_1118 ! How are you. where u guys at right now and whats the time?
Alex: Hi everyone!
Vincent: Good day everyone. It’s my pleasure to meet you all. I am now in Malaysia and the time is 7pm
Alex: It’s 7:00PM here , we base in Singapore. just finished dinner,haha
Eric: Haha. Can you please introduce yourself (position) and a bit of your background?
Vincent: I will let Alex go first. My turn next.
Alex: Thanks Vincent. This is Alex Lam, and I am the project lead of Stone. I worked in a Government-affiliated Institutions of Property before joining crypto. I founded ROCKMINER at the end of 2013, which focus on BTC mining investment and hosting, and I co-founded RockX at the early of 2019 as well.
RockX is a PoS platform and running PolkaDot, Terra,Kusama, Solana,Oasis and other Nodes. There are more than 65M USD assets running at RockX now and I started Stone around last September. Over, here u go ,Vincent.
Vincent: Perfect. Hi guys my name is Vincent. Currently in charge for Marketing and Social Lead with Stone. I was the BD director with a crypto fund name Chain Capital for few years. I have also advise numbers of project in past years and helping projects to grow and achieve milestone accordingly.
Currently I am more into DeFi space, and that’s why Alex and me are here to share more about Stone today.
Eric: so What is Stone Defi?
Vincent: I will answer first. STONE is the only yield management protocol focusing on create Rock Solid Yield for all the users in the DeFi ecosystem. Stone positioned as the anchor yield aggregation platform that aims to expand the current DeFi yield market through inclusion of new yield bearing assets and new cross chain assets.
Eventually, Stone will evolve to be a global yield marketplace with the inclusion of multi chain liquid Proof of stake (POS) assets. To leverage the capability of substrate and polkadot, Stone is also looking to provide more innovative products base on a wide range of yield bearing assets to users across multiple chain.
Eric: What is STN and what are the uses?
Alex: Vincent, do you wanna take over this one?
Vincent: I will let you go dude.
Alex: Ok, it’s my turn~ STN token is the governance token that will play a crucial role in the Stone ecosystem.
STN’s primary function is for protocol governance and it is further empowered to reward liquidity provision during the bootstrapping (each pool would have its dedicated STN rewarding scheme to build up sufficient size)
And more interestingly, STN will be used to incentivize portfolio rebalancing (for example, STN reward may be higher for certain pool to attract more funds there in order to maximize yield farm), pay transfer fees for the cross-chain execution and act as the security deposit to safeguard funds in the liquid staked assets.
Eric: How is Stone different from competition like YFI?
Alex: Thx, that is an interesting question~
Vincent: Yup. Interesting question.
Actually there are many yield aggregators in the space, YFI as the most well-known one. However we have not seen one protocol that have put priority on rock solid yield before anything else.
Most protocols are trying out risky strategies for high yield while risking funds in the pool. And ya, we have not seen yield aggregators tap into liquid staking assets like Stone does.
Stone is the first one to announce such innovative strategy. Stone will compete with YFI and others for stablecoins and ERC20 AUM.
Eric: So what does rock solid actually mean, can u give an example?
Vincent: However, no one is there to compete with Stone for liquid staked assets, like DOT, ETH 2.0, etc. Our view is that the overall defi space is much bigger than the current one. We have right now stablecoins yield farming and ERC20 yield farming. these are like FOREX yield farming and stock yield farming.
Alex: This question is really very good. I just read the news minutes ago. Some of the Curve and Yearn new vault pools have some issues and closed. Stone won’t go into new protocols because APY is high, but will assess it’s credibility and how sustainable that APY would be.
We will not courage users to any pools just high APY or without audit. We also introduce index to hedge the risks of single assets, and Stone will be able to deploy the underlying assets to generate additional yield for index holders.
To make it simple terms, sharpe ratio is one guided tool for risk adjust allocations, don’t only look at apy but overall assessment. for this part, we published litepaper on www.stonedefi.io, with more mathematical explanations of Sharpe Ratio and portfolio rebalancing. here, i will not go into the formulas..
Eric: That’s very true. Interesting. How big is the team now?
Alex: We have 7 people right now, 5 in SG, 2 in China, 1 in India. However we have strong and promised long term supports from RockX.
Eric: Wow. YFI just got hacked a few days ago, How are you handling security?
Alex: There are lots of hack things happened in Defi projects. Firstly, Defi projects are very young, but the ideas are good and which can affect traditional financial market for long long time,we need optimize them.
For Stone, we have several ways to make users assets safety in platform:
- Inside testing, all strategies will be tested by ourselves funds ;
- After that , we will do on third part audit.
- We will very very careful to any new strategies; not many people know that audit can check code issues, namely tech problem, it can not check the strategy issues.
Eric: Will the smart contracts be open sourced?
Alex: Yes, definitely, we will upload code to github after audit.
Eric: How will the project handle adding or removing strategies?
Alex: Firstly, we stick on the strategy safety both at tech and economy. For instance the stable coins strategies run for long term. Secondly, we will only add LP strategies which all tokens in LP with basement valuation.
For removing strategies, we will move / stop which are high risk or the issued be found by us or communities. but now, we didnt remove anyone yet, our product not really luanched, so, lets see how we will do in future~
Community AMA
Q: How were you able to merge ETH 2.0 functions into your alpha version? Was this an easy thing to accomplish? Because i know most projects are unable to do it due to different nature of ERC20 projects
Alex: We are cooperating with projects, for instance Stafi , Ankr and others, who are assets issue platforms, when they issued assets which are mirrored on ETH, then the new ETH2.0 seets , aETH ,rETH and others can be transferred freedomly; those assets can transfer into smart contracts supplied by Stone. To be honest, its not an easy way but we finished 3 ETH. as u mentioned , different ETH2.0 with different nature, and we need consider the reputation of platforms as well, basically they are assets issued platform, we have to make sure those assets are realy ones.
Q: How will Stone incentivize its stakeholders and users to work together towards the exponential growth of the yield farming space? Are there kind of rewards with active participating?
Vincent: Although there are no tokens issued yet, the rewards will be given to participants for testing, and contributors into Stone. The reason to do it like this is that we want to get more input from the community of how to better use tokens to incentivize positive actions. And we want more people to know about Stone before tokens are issued so it helps to create an engaging community.
For the token reward rules and schedule, pls stay tuned for our announcements. 😎
Q: RAMP is one of your partners and it is highly endorsed by the Dudes here as well. Could you please let us know what kind of assumptions do you have for this partnership and how do you expect RAMP to help Stone in providing the maximized results on Proof-of-Stake staked assets?
Vincent: When u talking about ramp, u definitely know what ramp is doing and we are both aiming to liquid the staking assets. So with the partnership with ramp, I strongly believe that this will help us to better achieve rock solid yield and create more innovative products on Stone and let our participants feel more secured and glad in DeFI space.
Q: Can you tell more about the innovative asset funds that you utilize/create in order to provide maximal returns for the users, obviously in a way that the funds would remain secure? Will you focus on all kinds of cryptocurrencies or some specific ones?
Vincent: Instead of saying maximize returns, Stone is focusing more on securing stable return for users. We will start with stable coin like usdt and usdc and sooner there will be more and more partnerships will be announce. Pls stay tune 🔥
Q: Stone aims to create a robust passive income platform to meet the needs of the DeFi industry. How does stone generate income/revenue to support/finance this project?
Vincent: Passive income vaults will be mainly stable coin strategies that we have developed on, in the meantime we will also offer a guild tool for the users to consider using allocation matrix. We will launch the project in this month and we are currently in the process of auditing our smart contract.
Q: What exactly are the ‘Risk Optimized’ Return indices to be implemented by Stone, how are they optimized and how will you work with yield based derivatives?
Vincent: This is more particular to the index constitution which we would like to introduce risk based index, which can be understood as, we screen or monitor the constituents using the standard deviation.
Q: Stone is gradually planning to launch with more and more users on the alpha testing phase. Could you please share some numbers with us regarding this? How many users will you initially allow to join on alpha testing and how long will it takes before the platform will be fully accessible for anyone?
Alex: This is relative to all of us. the alpha testing will open very soon, we wanna open after audit, however it depends on community demands. We can open anytime actually, because some strategies are ready. we may not limit the members amount , but will limit the assets amount of each wallet ID. we will announce before starting, then all of u who followed Stone early can join it.
Q: How does the dynamic portfolio management technically function that is being implemented in STONE DEFI’s platform? What kind of further implementations are you planning to have against impermanent losses?
Alex: In my oppinion, IL is not technique issue, but economic/strategy instead. so , we are going to use Sharpe Ratio as we mentioned.
we introduce the concept of Sharpe Ratio, by looking at both the yield it self, and also the risks associated with that yield. That includes the longevity of yield and also the risks of the platform itself.
We introduce index to hedge the risks of single assets, and Stone will be able to deploy the underlying assets to generate additional yield for index holders
To make it simple terms, sharp ratio is one guided tool for risk adjust allocations, don’t only look at APY but overall assessment. We will publish an updated litepaper soon, with more mathematical explanations of Sharpe Ratio and portfolio rebalancing.
Q: Lending, Borrowing and other DeFi services are so much repeated in many DeFi projects, so what is the real innovation that your project is bringing to DeFi? What are you able to do that other can’t?
Alex: This is a very good question, we saw lots of lending and borrowing projects, because those projects make sense for business model and have the real market, that is why I mentioned basement valuation, so, those are good.
However, we saw new things: how could we active the locked/staked assets, which are much bigger than current Defi tokens?
So, the important innovation from Stone is that we will extend utilities of lots and lots of assets.we start from POS assets, multi-chains, and finished rETH and aETH already.
Closing Remarks
Vincent: Welcome. Hope to answer more but unfortunately the times was too limited.
Alex: Did we do a good job~@ERCSU @cryptopatsu
Eric: Absolutely!
Patrice: Alright! You guys are an incredible duo!
Vincent: Thanks everyone and together rock the STONE
Patrice: Why don’t you invite our members to your social media and where to get more info.
Alex: Guys, welcome to join us, will be lots of news updated in coming days.
Great minds think alike~~~
Patrice: You know it! 😉 Thank you so much @Alexlam2013 and @vk_1118
Alex: Thanks all of you!
Vincent: Thanks guys. Stay safe and have a good day.
Eric: When is your public sale?
Alex: Not finalized.
