Hi All,
For those of you who don't have discord, here's a transcript of our no holds barred AMA with Yamcha and Krill last night! Thanks to Mighty M for organising the event and Ringsel for putting the document together:
FIRST TRANQUIL FINANCE DISCORD AMA 11 NOVEMBER 2021
TOP QUESTIONS BY VOTES
Q: How does Tranquil strategically plan to compete with popular lending protocols coming to the chain like Aave?
A: An advantage we have over a large cross-chain protocol like AAVE is being much more nimble and responsive to the needs of the Harmony ecosystem in particular. If you look at Sushiswap and Curve on Harmony, they are clearly after thoughts by their dev teams. The most critical piece of this strategy is launching a liquid staking token (stONE), which would be a key differentiating factor for Tranquil.
Q: Hi guys. Im a huge fan of the platform (as are we all). What plans do you have for $TRANQ utility? Right now all we can do is hold it and/or trade it for $ONE.
I would like to add, besides being a potential governance token. What other utility would tranq have.
A: Right now, you can stake TRANQ in the single staking pool or provide liquidity on Sushiswap, so there is already utility. We want to add TRANQ as a lending/borrowing market, but this is too risky at the moment.
I think “utility” is a somewhat misleading concept to think about tokenomics. Ultimately, we want TRANQ to reflect the fundamental value that the protocol generates. Most cryptocurrencies have limited “utility”, so I think the underlying concern here is actually the price going down.
Some ideas we’re considering are a bit further off, like experimenting with GameFi and NFTs, or launching new protocols and airdropping tokens for TRANQ holders. We’re still very early, and there’s so many more avenues to explore in the future.
Q: How do you plan to counter sell pressure of TRANQ, any mechanisms in pipeline? Like tranq collateral or rewards for locking similar to dfk? I believe sale pressure is from rewards of lending/borrowing, so if the whales come in then it will increase sale
pressure too.
How do you plan to increase buy pressure of tranq? Any plans to introduce launchpad? Or providing incentives to burn tranq? Any new ways to use it like providing FLASHLOAN using tranq as collateral?
A: Given the community discussions, we’ve been thinking about this issue a lot. Other lending platforms, like Geist, are facing a similar problem. Unlike a farm where you need to buy the farm token to participate, there is no natural buy-pressure from simply depositing assets with little risk. This is why rewards are very small on established protocols like Compound and AAVE.
We do like the idea of a lockup mechanism. Instead of rewarding TRANQ to lender/borrowers that they can sell right away, we can potentially reward a new token rTRANQ instead, that can only be redeemed to TRANQ in X months. This would prevent immediate dumping by farmers.
Q: What are the plans for the ONE liquidity from the ICO? Are there any plans to try and peg the price of TRANQ to another asset?
Follow on with this question. Are there any plan to incentivize the project with ONE token from xtranq sale? If yes, what is the % will be use for incentivize. Can you give us a few example on how it’s being use?
A: The goal of the ICO funds is to fund the long term development of the protocol. Although it’s tempting to simply use it to prop up the token price with various incentive schemes or simply buying back TRANQ, we want to make sure this builds long term value for Tranquil, rather than a short term flash in the pan.
To give an example of a potential good use case, we would want to boost incentives before a major push to attract TVL. This would be a strategic decision when the time is right to maximize impact.
Given xTRANQ holders are locked up for a few more months, it’s clearly not in their interests to support the price right now with short term incentives, as tempting as that may be. Ultimately, the token price needs to reflect the fundamental value of the protocol, which is the only sustainable approach.
Q: Any plans to list on a CEX or is anything in the works?
A: A maybe on this one
Q: Harmony has a bridge with Terra Luna. Can we please add UST?
A: We’re definitely looking into other stablecoins to add to Tranquil, like DAI and UST. We want to wait until after integrating Chainlink before adding new markets though.
Q: Any plans on below items
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Automatic restake of rewards from xtranq to single staking.
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Automatic restake of rewards from single staking to single staking.
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Automatic restake of rewards from LP pool to single staking.
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Automatically stake of rewards from lending/borrowing into single staking.
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Lock single staking coins for 7 epochs similar to Harmony One.
Above will reduce price swings and investors can comeback after xtranq unlock or CEX listing without bothering dev’s much.
A: Thanks for the suggestions. These autocompounding features seem like qualify of life improvements. There are already a few autocompounders for Tranquil already, but our own would be nice as well. Just have to balance this work with other dev work.
Q: Will the future staking derivative of stONE be activated through the native tranq token to add usage to the token or will it automatically be done through ONE?
I see stONE being important to the success of Tranquil and differentiation from aave and aave forks. Do you have any more information your able to provide on specifics & timelines?
A: You’re absolutely right, we also believe stONE will be an important step for Tranquil to succeed. We have a plan mostly hashed out on how we want to achieve this vision. It’s still early, so no specific details yet, but we want to launch this by the end of the year. Like most liquid staking protocols, it would simply involve converting ONE -> stONE and vice versa.
I know that's a lot to read!
PUBLIC QUESTIONS
Q: What is the time update for BTC Bridge and ChainLink ? These 2 features seem paramount. Also, how closely do you work with the Harmony (ONE) team?
A: Those items are a bit beyond our control but based on Harmony’s roadmap they should be coming by the end of the month, I also want to add we support both these projects 100% and will integrate as soon as they are ready
Q: Is there are any major partnerships with projects inside and outside the harmony chain. Defi Kingdoms is a common one which comes up
A: We would be open to partnering with defi kingdoms but they seem to be more focused on gaming aspects at the moment. We are talking to a few other teams behind the scenes but one thing we want to be very careful with is on boarding new collateral assets
Q: Besides potentially locking TRANQ rewards, are there any plans for having a locked cooldown for the single staking pool of TRANQ? If part of the ICO funds are used to attract and retain investors on a strategic moment, could these sort of locks counter a potential pump and dump?
A: Yeah it’s something on our mind to have rewards but locked for a certain amount of time. It doesn’t prevent dumping after the unlock however, but it should help a bit
One thing that concerns me about these lock schemes in other protocols is whether you are simply kicking the can down the road
Q: Question for both Yamcha and Krillin What drew you two to the Harmony Network? Also how many developers on your Tranquil Finance Team? I would love to know more about the team and your backgrounds.
A: Currently it's just the 2 of us working as devs. However, we plan on hiring a few more devs to add more features and launch more projects.
We were attracted to Harmony ONE due to the low cost and high transaction speed of the block chain. Also, we think the dapp ecosystem and community has much more potential than other L1 chains.
Both of us have had over 10 years of software development experience at large US software FAANG companies. Yamcha also had previous experience working on crypto-security projects you may have used on your phone. We are very interested in blockchain web3 technology and believe this is the future of computing.
Q: Thoughts on stake tranq earn one?
A: This is an idea we're discussing. It falls into paid incentive schemes that we want to make sure build long term value
Q: Another frequent question we get from our friends who share concerns in general chat is, how will Tranquil finance be combatting emissions?
A: I feel the only way for Tranquil to be sustainable is to have emissions as low as Compound and AAVE. That requires time to build trust, however, but in the meantime, we're looking at lockup schemes that may alleviate the short term dumping
Q: So when do you plan to add liquidity? There was over $5 mil raised and team hasn't added any liquidity.
A: Liquidity is not the issue here. We have sufficient liquidity for the circulating supply and market cap.
Q: another question we got asked a few times in the last week is, once three security goals have been completed, will there be a big marketing push to bring off chain money on to Tranquil finance?
A: Yes this is the plan! However, we definitely need the help of the harmony team for this. It’s hard to do this singlehanded
Q: What are the new adjusted daily emission from pools/rewards
A: It's 186.9k TRANQ per day currently for pool / reward emissions. Seed Vesting at 65k / day.
Total: 252k TRANQ per day
You can find the updated emission schedule here:
https://docs.tranquil.finance/technical/protocol-info#reward-emissions
Q: Other than stOne, do you have plans for other differentiators from competition?
A: We envision our end goal as a decentralized FTX, which we believe is possible thanks to the speed and low cost of the Harmony blockchain.
https://docs.tranquil.finance/info/roadmap
In the long term we want to use the collateral you deposit in Tranquil to power leveraged trading and borrowing use cases like a decentralized FTX.
Given the success and adoption of DFK, we also have ideas of combining Gamification with a lending market.
Q: Are There any partners help #tranq get in touch with other companies/governments?SO ,How big is word-of-mouth marketing for Tranquil ?
A: I think we have good presence so a lot of projects reach out to us directly for partnership
Q: What is the advantage to do a LP pool and reward tranq for providing liquidity rather then just add tranq from the lp pool with ONE to liquidity at the launch?
A: Incentivizing liquidity is very similar to the single staking tranq pool as both give tranq holders a reason to use their token. Liquidity is more useful than single staking as it’s actually providing a service
Q: Yeah but if the same amount of tokens that are currently in the rewarding LP pool would be paired with ONE from the start and added the volatility of tranq would be much less cuz the would be more liquidity for people to sell into their rewards
And this is very important because the inflation is the biggest in % in the first days
A: This doesn’t really solve the market dynamics though. There would still be selling and the sheer scale in the first day indicates more than just emissions
It was me due to market hype and bust in my opinion
Q: There would be selling but due to better liqidity it would not be that volatile and while this LP farm is creating utility like u say in the same time it’s creating more emission
A: The single staking pool also creates more emissions too, but LP providers are offering more utility.
Q: What are you gonna do with millions from ICO asking as I saw several lending platform on other chain that currently maintain 500m tvl and had a similar roadmap as yours but had only 500k idos?
A: We’re on a chain with 200m TVL so it’s not really comparable
We have a much higher hill to climb
Q: How is 1WBTC used as collateral on the Tranquil Finance site currently, there is 212.3432 1WBTC in the supply markets?
A: 1WBTC is bridged from ethereum and is not native to Harmony ONE. The 1BTC solution the harmony team is building will allow cheap and simpler way to bridge BTC into harmony.
They are 2 different tokens. We hope to partner with Harmony and incentivize people to use 1BTC
1WBTC is different than 1BTC. 1WBTC is bridged from ethereum, but 1BTC is from the new Bitcoin bridge
END OF AMA
