Jan 19, 2021
Unbound with Shashwat Gupta and Tarun Jaswani
Brief Information
Unlock Liquidity from AMM Pools! Unbound is building the derivative layer of AMM’s with First-Ever Debt-Free Liquidity Provision System. The Unbound Protocol charges no Interest and it’s Liquidation Free. The Unbound Factory smart contract supports Uniswap, Balancer, Mooniswap, Bancor, Curve.fi etc
Introduction AMA
Eric: we now begin for real! So here with us today is @Meethlaksh and @SaurianX of Unbound.finance. One of the most exciting projects i have encountered since FRAX!
@Meethlaksh and @SaurianX please introduce yourselves to the AMA Room. Please tell us your roles, your background and how you came to discover crypto.
Shashwat: Sure! I got in the crypto space full time in 2016 and started Altcoin Buzz, a crypto content and media company in 2017. Been running it since then.
I met Tarun in 2018 at an event and he was the first VC who wore a dev hat and it was fascinating to learn more about tech insights of crypto projects.
We did a lot of investments together and were early in Ren, aave, xdai stake, enjin, and many others.
In Jan 2020, 1 year year ago we discovered uniswap version 1 and started focusing on understanding and spending time on the AMM space.
In March 2020 we started working on Unbound together.
Eric: Love it when founders are deeply passionate about the space before they did a crypto startup! How about you @Meethlaksh ?
Tarun: I am an Telecom Engineer and was working on VR before I enterted the BC space 2017. Was fascinated by the potentail and started with investements untill I came across AMMs and decided this could be the killer app of BC
Eric: So in your own words, what is Unbound.finance?
Tarun: The DeFi Treasury For Liquidity Pool Tokens. Our factory contracts mint synethic assets using LPT as a fuel
Eric: Can you expand this a bit? What is a factory? and what kinds of synth is possible?
Shashwat: Unbound is a defi Treasury for existing Liquidity Pool Tokens, building a derivative layer on AMMs. We are
- making AMMs more capital efficiencient
- enabling users to mint a decentralised stablecoin and other synthetic assets.
- Experimenting in building an ecosystem with no liquidations
- Charging no interest hence the system creates no-debt position while collateralising the assets
Tarun: We collatralize LPT and mint syethetic assets. First of which will be decentralized stable coin UND(soft pegged to USD) and following this we will launch uEth (pegged to Eth)
Eric: This is very exciting. Will you be supporting uniswap LP tokens only?
Tarun: We plan to do a sandbox launch in next 4–6 weeks. This will accept golden pairs like eth-dai, eth-usdt, etc from Uniswap. We will then follow it up with expanding to other AMMs in time
Eric: so in plain words, what is the benefit to a defi user will unbound.finance bring?
Tarun: We are building the next lego in the defi space and should enable LPT holders unlock liquidity from from their tokens.
Shashwat: We will start with Uniswap LPTs in our sandbox mainnet launch 4–6 weeks from now and you can test this on public Kovan testnet here http://testnet.unbound.finance/
We have created a private testnet with LPTs from Uniswap, Balancer, Sushiswap, and Luaswap.
Unbound will be the first platform that makes AMM more efficient and hence for the first time liquidity from one AMM can be moved to another without really removing it.
Though we are starting with Uniswap, we are AMM agnostic and eventually, we intend to the Blockchain agnostic as well.
Tarun: This also lead to reducing ineffencies of liquidty in the AMMs space and maybe we can make the AMMs friends instead of foes.
Eric: so as a first use case, when i provide liquidity to the Eth-dai pool in uniswap. instead fo those LP tokens doing nothing. I can use Unbound.finance to collaterize a loan of your stablecoin and maybe use that stablecoin to buy a new token.
Otherwise those eth-DAI LP tokens would just sit there and do nothing.
is this correct @SaurianX ?
Shashwat: Bingo. You will be able to mint $UND (sounds like ~USD) 😁 Stablecoin
Eric: So what are the tokens involved in this ecosystem?
Shashwat: UNBoUND
- UNB is the governance token
- UND is the Stablecoin
- Other synthetic assets — this is the ambitious part of our roadmap where we will be mint many other synthetic assets starting with uETH for example.
Eric: so this becomes like an SNX, right?
Shashwat: Yes
Eric: Will you guys be supporting other blockchain such as polkadot or cosmos?
Shashwat: Easier to mint and decentralized imo.
Eric: Its like SNX but using LP tokens.
Shashwat: We follow liquidity and AMMs. If there is an AMM on any chain we will start exploring it and if it starts pulling liquidity, we will start building on it.
Eric: So how much of the product has been built out? when is this going to be live?
Shashwat: We are product centric people and nothing is more important than that for us. We have been building for 9 months now. We built our first testnet even before we had a name or a whitepaper
Here is our public testnet https://testnet.unbound.finance/
We are now working on release a Sandboxed mainnet in the next 4–6 weeks.
Eric: Awesome. How big is the team and where are they based?
Shashwat: 7 devs + 6 others.
Eric: Next: Can you list all the partners and networks that are supporting you?
Shashwat: Team is pretty decentralized, I am in Singapore, Tarun is in Delhi. Though majority are from india, we have team in Canada, Phillipines…
We have investments from -
Enjin Founder
Gnosis Founder and CTO
Zilliqa President
Terra Virtua Founder
Frontier Founders
Tomochain
Persistence Founder
Fuse Network Founder
Razor Network Founder
DaoMaker
And over 10 funds. We are not releasing our VC’s and fund cap table yet.
Community AMA
Q: The increase in number of institutions buying Bitcoin is a clear sign that mass adoption is around the corner, and with mass adoption, regulations is inevitable. What’s your take on regulations? Will it impact the Unbound positively or negatively?
Shashwat: Regulations are key to mass adoption. We are builders and innovators and wish to work in the realm of regulations. We are not an anonymous team, and we are transparent and well managed. Understanding and even working with regulators is something we intend to do if needed.
Q: Unbound is built on Ethereum blockchain, however, there are other thousands of project out there built on ethereum blockchain, so how do you intend to stand out among them? Do you think Eth blockchain is a good starting point or you plan Integrating with other chains soon?
Shashwat: You need to think of Ethereum more like ‘the internet’.
Now there are many sites on the internet does not mean there will be no value in new ones or every site has value.
There will able be value in good and innovative products that solve some problem.
You just need to decide if Unbound solves a problem for you to be interested in using it. :)
Q: Do you have a Coin Burn / BuyBack system or your Token Burn plan to increase Token value & attract Investors to invest?
Shashwat: No.
Q: What is the main vision that the UNBOUND project aims to achieve in the cryptocurrency market? But what role would you like your project to play in this?
Shashwat: There over $5 billion of liquidity locked in AMMs. We will be the first protocol that will enable unlocking this making AMMs capital efficient.
Q: Could you please tell us more about your Staking Program and Marketing Roadmap?
Shashwat: We don’t have a staking program but something more interesting which we will reveal in time to come.
We will reveal marketing roadmap soon as well. We have not started any marketing efforts yet. Will start after sandboxed mainnet. Building in stealth mode has been pretty good for the development side.
Q: The idea of the UNBOUND FINANCE project is really unique and incredible, how did this idea come about?
Shashwat: We just kept focusing on looking under the hood on AMMs like uniswap and balancer and spending time on decompiling smart contracts and figuring how they work. Just understanding them and LPTs and impermanent loss better made us come up with the idea. And then we worked on solving other additional problems while building testnets.
Tarun: Our penny drop moment came when we realized the AMMs are an iteration in value discovery through arbs. Having two commodities trade with each other based on a Maths formula with no predetermined varable was incredible. We realized this could be the killer app of Blockchain. We then starting researching under the hood and figured out how amazing LPT tokens were and how amazing they could be as a collateral. From there on it was an organic growth. Infact we built the POC first then named it and then wrote the white paper.
Q: How did you solve the liquidation problem? Are these solutions a temporary fix or permanent solution?
Tarun: https://docs.unbound.finance/no-liquidations-in-unbound-explained
Q: How to become a Liquidity provider in Unbound Finance? What are the benefits of being a Liquidity provider? Is there any locked-in period for providing liquidity in your network?
Shashwat: Our first incentivized pool will be [UND+stablecoin] pool. On this pool you will earn (besides 0.3% uniswap fee), 40% on all of the platforms minting fee.
Tarun: Just provide liquidity to any of our UND pools through uniswap or https://testnet.unbound.finance/earn..and you will start earning a portion of your minting fees
Q: There is fierce competition in the finance industry. Obviously, there are other projects that look like you. How will UNBOUND FINANCE deal with its rivals? Do you have details to guide users to you?
Shashwat: There is over $5 Billion of liquidity on AMMs provided by less that 40k wallet imo. These numbers will be going up only.
We will be the first platform that helps unlock that liquidity and have a lot of interesting from already existing LPs to AMMs.
Also, there is liquidity on the sidelines that might be attracted to be added if the system becomes more efficient, which Unbound makes it.
Q: Minting fee that you charge is constant or variable? Do you have any plan B to cover any unexpected costs ?
Tarun: MF is like a stability for the ecosystem. It’s designed to variable for each LPT that Unbond accepts. At present this is the only fee and a 40% of ist gets accumulated in a SAFu fund that may be used to generate yields.
Q: For being a great project, the project must built with absolute security and safety to create useful features with real use-case. Does UNBOUND have all criteria above?
Tarun: Security is top priority for us too. That’s the reason we did our threat modelling exercise with Peter Kacherginsky(please google his work) and we will be going on Mainnet after atleast couple of audits.
Q: What is difficulities and chances that Unbound Finance face right now while crypto/blockchain market is still young and need time to grow?
Tarun: Defi is a space where attacks are more of a feature than anything else..so definatley security is the biggest chalange and ofcourse most the attacks are targetted towards Oracle design and avoiding single point of price discovery ..This was the bigest challange for our team
Q: Why did you choose to build on the Ethereum blockchain and how will the governance and development processes work with the DAO that you initiate for community development?
Tarun: We follow liquidity and the max liquidity is on Ethereum. The details of the DAO will be released post mainnet
Q: What are the AMM protocol supported by UNBOUND FINANCE ?
Tarun: we will start with Uniswap and then get Balancer, Sushiswap, 1Inch etc on board. We will follow the liquidity and our contracts can support any AMMs that have LPT as an investment receipt
Q: So many projects just like to speak about the “long term vision and mission” but what are your short terms objectives? What are you focusing right now?
What plans do you have to help drive demand and scarcity for the token?
Shashwat: Shot-term goal
- launch sandbox mainnet
- after that work on mainnet and launch of dao with UNB TGE.
Q: Can you briefly Describe the top milestone you have achieved so far from inception? What are future target milestone?
Tarun: Our testnet https://testnet.unbound.finance/..we have had close to 200 users in las 10 days.
Q: Are there any hidden gems about your project you have not talked about that you believe makes you better than other projects similar that would make me what to invest?
Tarun: I guess something we are really excitd about is possibilty of Oracle feeds that could be a natural extention in the future. Also we are using Graphql and Ethersan instead of a ceneralized database for Account and Analytics. This is both scalable and gives community developers to use the indexed data in their Dapps
Closing Remarks
Eric: Its a wrap! @SaurianX @Meethlaksh please invite everyone where to follow news of Unbound.finance
Shashwat: Please join the Unbound chat https://t.me/unboundfinance
and ask any questions you have or we have may have left out.
Thank you @ERCSU for having us.
Tarun: Thank you Very Much Guys..its been a pleasure 🙏
Eric: Awesome AMA! I really am quite impressed with it. Hope everyone is too!
Shashwat: 🔥 Thanks for your time man!
