SparkPoint AMA Series: Getting to Know More About SparkDeFi

The cryptocurrency community learns more about SparkDeFi.

The last quarter of 2020 was jampacked with Ask Me Anything (AMA)sessions for the SparkPoint Team. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Andy Agnas, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Rico Zuñiga, and Senior Marketing Specialists Carl André Bongalos and Melissa Mesias joined the following Telegram communities for a series of different AMA sessions:

• BitMart Exchange - October 23, 2020
• Satoshi Club - October 28, 2020
• CryptoDiffer - November 4, 2020
• Bigcoin Vietnam - December 1, 20202
• The AMA Room - December 7, 2020

The team answered interesting questions ranging from general ones about SparkPoint, how the company started, and what is the ecosystem made of from various cryptocurrency community members. Specifically, the series of AMA sessions focused more on SparkDeFi. Here is the set of questions from the combined recap of the five Telegram AMA sessions about SparkPoint featuring SparkDeFi:

Q: What is SparkPoint?

ANDY: SparkPoint Innovations Inc. is a duly SEC-registered company in the Philippines. SparkPoint was founded on October 5, 2018. The company aims for a mainstream mass adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. With that, we have developed various products that comprise the SparkPoint Ecosystem. SparkPoint has been around for more than two years already and we continue to build and bootstrap a robust suite of blockchain products. Our utility token SRK is one of the few tokens that has an ROI of over 700% according to CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.

Q: What is the SparkPoint Ecosystem?

DREI: The SparkPoint Ecosystem is made up of SparkPoint Wallet, SparkLearn, SparkPlay, SparkEarn, and of course our latest product, SparkDeFi. All of these are ongoing projects which we continuously improve by releasing relevant updates and content. SparkPoint Wallet is a non-custodial mobile cryptocurrency wallet that supports various cryptocurrencies and exchanges. Recently, SparkPoint Wallet just released a major update which is the Uniswap support. We are also working on the requirements for a VCE license. This will enable us to legally support fiat integration in the SparkPoint wallet in the Philippines.

MELISSA: Another part of the SparkPoint Ecosystem is SparkLearn. It is an e-learning platform that focuses on sharing content about blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and financial literacy. We are currently preparing free courses for these topics and there is an ongoing enhancement of the system that covers onboarding of mentors, improvement in the platform’s UI and UX, and adopting the Learn-to-Earn model. SparkPlay is a group of mobile game applications. Crypto Slicer, Crypto Burst, and our new mobile game Crypto Shooter which is still in beta. In total, there are 38K+ downloads for our 3 mobile game apps. We also have SparkEarn, our referral program where you can earn crypto rewards. In the future, it will be transitioned into a general SparkPoint platform. This means that there will be one entry point if you are going to access the products or services like SparkLearn, SparkPlay games, or SparkDeFi.

And of course, SparkDeFi, our latest product, is a governance token-based platform that empowers individuals to unlock the true value of their cryptocurrency assets. We have officially launched the SparkDeFi Website and SRK-ETH Liquidity Staking with 32M SRK tokens allocated as rewards for stakers.

Q3: You [SparkPoint] established the project in December 2018, almost 2 years now. Yet, I have seen that you didn’t manage to get into one of the top projects at this time. Let us know what went wrong, what has to be changed in your opinion to get to the top?

RICO: Let’s see, first let’s put it into perspective to get a clearer picture. We’ve raised less than $50k in funding when we launched compared to millions of dollars from other projects. Most of these projects with millions in funding have already failed, and here we are 2 years later with less than $50k still standing. With $50k funding, it is very hard to reach a top project status for any company, but what our team has done with so little is hard to replicate. This can only be achieved through patience, tenacity, discipline especially in handling the limited resources, maturity, and strong leadership. From this meager $50k funding, we’ve launched 3 games and 2 apps (including our SparkPoint wallet) and these apps have collectively reached tens of thousands of users. We’ve also grown our team from 2 to 10 full-time employees. With only $50k funding, we’ve turned the SRK token from $0 into a $20M market cap token during its peak ATH. Now imagine what we can do with the $330k+ funding that we’ve raised so far in SparkDeFi. Some things went wrong of course which is normal with any project or company. And I think one of the biggest hurdles is the amount of funding and resources that we had. This is what we’re trying to solve now with a bigger round of funding for SparkDeFi.

Q: Are you planning to burn or buy back any tokens from the market in the future? Do you have such programs?

RICO: We do have an ongoing Buy Back and Burn program for our SRK token. In fact, our next Token Burn event will be this December 30. We’re planning to burn 360M+ SRK tokens which will reduce the total supply to 14B. We plan to continue doing this until the total supply is just 10B which we hope will deflate, stabilize, and strengthen the price. As for SFUEL, we don’t have concrete plans yet for a similar program but we’ll let everyone know when we do.

(Learn more about the SRK Buy Back and Burn Program.)

Q: What can we expect from SparkDefi? Can you give us a short term and long term roadmap for it?

RICO: Our team is very excited about SparkDeFi and its future. Right now our devs are working on our next liquidity staking smart contract which is SRK-BNB. It will be launched on Binance Smart Chain before the end of the year.

DREI: Also part of our SparkDeFi targets this month is the token generation event and “Initial DEX Offering” of our governance token, SFUEL which will also coincide with an airdrop distribution of SFUEL to SRK holders. Details are still being finalized so please stay tuned and follow SparkPoint and SparkDeFi on our social media accounts for updates.

Most of the other features under the SparkDeFi platform will be developed and launched next year. This includes 2 more liquidity pairs, our P2P lending/borrowing platform, our own custom DEX (SparkSwap) which will also be integrated into our SparkPoint Wallet app, DeFi assets management dashboard, and decentralized governance via our SFUEL token.

Q: How is SparkDeFi different from other DeFi platforms and how can your team compete with other more established teams?

RICO: On the surface, there’s not a lot of differences from other projects. We’re still in the very early stages of DeFi so there are still a lot of unknowns and we’re still discovering new things about it every day.

But one big difference that I can say is that our project chose the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) platform instead of Ethereum which somehow goes against the status quo.

We’re still going to use Ethereum for the SRK-ETH liquidity staking, but for the other parts, we’re going to deploy on BSC. You could say we’re not that mainstream because of this decision to choose BSC. But we’re targeting a very viable niche and possible challenger to Ethereum.

As for the most significant difference, I’d say it’s the team behind it :)

Well, every team is different. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. What our team has though is a solid experience and a good track record of delivering projects and meeting targets.

That is despite all the challenges we face including the recent super typhoon! We thrive despite these constraints.

I also think that we have an advantage in terms of location/country when it comes to cryptocurrency regulation and the remittance market. The Philippines has one of the biggest remittance markets in the world.

We’re in a great position to disrupt this market once we’ve secured our VCE license, hopefully within the next couple of years.

Lastly, we’re also introducing SparkDeFi as a decentralized banking alternative to Filipinos while also taking care of the education aspect to attract more informed users to the platform and for a more holistic approach to DeFi.

Q: Why are there 2 tokens, SRK and SFUEL? What is the difference between them? How does it benefit the community and its holders?

RICO: SRK is our utility token used in our different products. SFUEL is the governance token in SparkDeFi. We created a new token, SFUEL because SRK is not designed for decentralized governance. Also, SFUEL will be launched on BSC (Binance Smart Chain) to take advantage of its faster and cheaper transactions, which are two of the biggest hurdles in DeFi right now. SRK holders will benefit from an airdrop of SFUEL in the coming months, similar to what Uniswap did with their UNI tokens. As to the number of people exposed to our technology, we can’t claim a lot, so far we’ve reached around 43k+ with our mobile apps, around 25k+ in our SparkEarn platform which in turn are also SparkLearn users by default (they use the same login credentials), and a few thousand holders of SRK tokens from all over the world (can’t say exactly how many countries). Like any other project, we’re also aiming to reach millions of users in the coming years.

(Learn more about SparkDeFi’s governance token, the SFUEL.)

Q: One of the unique offerings of SparkDeFi is the P2P Lending and leverage NFT as collateral. Since NFT price is volatile, can you explain how the NFT collateral works? How does P2P lending works?

ANDY: The concept is similar to farming fungible tokens. Initially, they will mine our own NFTs, and soon we will try to collaborate with other projects such as Decentraland, CryptoKitties, Gods Unchained to enable mining of their NFTs in our platform. For more details, please visit our web app preview: https://srk.finance/app/stake. NFTs is a growing industry and its popularity has jumped considerably, as the concept is seeing a massive inflow of funds. For this reason, we also include NFTs as an important feature in our lending platform where users can use their NFTs as collateral. The approach is the same as the fungible tokens being used as collateral in our P2P Lending.

MELISSA: The process in P2P Lending in SparkDeFi is very simple and straightforward both for fungible and non-fungible tokens. Generally, there are two parties involved who are the lender and the borrower. Parties should consider first certain economic factors such as interest rate, collateral, maturity date, and principal before proceeding with the loan agreement. So P2P Lending in SparkDeFi will work like this:

For the borrower (Request a loan) :
1. Request or apply for the desired loan
2. Accept the terms and deposit the collateral
3. Receive the amount borrowed
4. Repay the principal including the interest and
get back/recover the collateral

For the lender (Create an offer):
1. Pick up or create a loan offers
2. Negotiate and agree with the terms
3. Transfer the principal amount
4. Receive full payments including the interest minus platform fees.

All transactions will be executed through a smart contract deployed using blockchain technology in our P2P Lending platform.

Q: The risk related to the P2P lending platform is the smart contract risk. So, has your smart contract been audited by any blockchain system? How does SparkDefi apply for a witness node or deploy/manage a smart contract? Why should we feel safe when lending assets from SparkDefi?

RICO: For the recently launched SparkDeFi Liquidity Staking contract, we forked Uniswap’s existing contracts which means we’re leveraging all the security and testing that they performed on their code. It’s also been battle-tested already in production through their recent liquidity staking for UNI.

Aside from this, we’re also doing the following:

1. Static analysis such as Securify (https://github.com/eth-sri/securify2) and Slither (https://github.com/crytic/slither) to help us minimize the risk in the security of our contracts as they report possible vulnerabilities in our smart contract code.

2. Surya Reports. The Surya tool can help to understand the different behavior of the contracts. We will generate Surya reports and examine them to ensure the quality of our code.

3. Smart Contract Security Audit. We will seek the services of a third party such as Certik Foundation to perform an audit of our smart contracts to verify their integrity and reliability.

As for feeling safe when lending assets, we’re doing our best to keep our platform secure and safe but we still recommend to all our users to do their own due diligence before deciding to use our (or any other) platform :)

Q: What are your plans for global expansion? Is SparkPoint focusing on the Philippine market at this time?

RICO: Right now we’re focused on growing our team here in the Philippines but we’re targeting a global market. We’re in a position to take advantage of the Philippine government’s openness in accepting Blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies that is why we apply for the VCE (Virtual Currency Exchange) license so that we can support fiat (in PHP) to crypto and vice versa transactions. We also have plans of expanding in the North American market, particularly Canada, in the next year.

The SparkPoint team truly enjoyed connecting with Telegram users of different cryptocurrency groups all over the globe. See you in the next AMA session!

Learn more about SparkPoint and SparkDeFi from the following links:

SparkPoint Website: https://sparkpoint.io/
SparkDeFi Website: https://srk.finance/
SRK-ETH on Uniswap: https://srk.sh/uniswap
Trade SRK: https://srk.sh/trade
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/sparkpoint
SparkDeFi Telegram: https://t.me/SparkDeFi
SparkDeFi Twitter: https://twitter.com/SparkDeFi
SparkDeFi Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SparkDeFi
SparkDeFi Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sparkdefi/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparkpointio
GitHub: https://github.com/sparkpointio
CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/sparkpoint/