Recap of AMA with Centaur Team
Dear Centaurians,
Thank you for being a part of the AMA with Centaur’s Co-Founder Sean Kor today.
For all those who couldn’t join us for the AMA, please find the transcript of the AMA.
Please note: Apart from the order of a few questions & minor spelling corrections, the rest of the text of the AMA remains unchanged.
[Transcript: Update From Sean]
Sean: Hey hey hey everyone! Welcome back to another AMA! There’s been a few different topics in our community the past few weeks so I’ll get to those soon, here’s what we picked up so far:
- Governance structures, voting, whales
- Consortium Chains and how they work
- L1s and our integration roadmap
But before we get to that, I’ll do a quick recap of the past two weeks!
Sean: Since the last AMA, we’ve announced three partnerships
1. Unreal Finance
2. Swapz
3. Polytrade
Each of them are focused on a different aspect of DeFi and we’re really glad to be working with these amazing projects.
In the case of Unreal, they are a platform that allows you to draw out stablecoins backed by future yield, in a manner similar to Alchemix . We’re exploring the possibility of including Cswap and WHEY as part of this structure, which would help to unlock liquidity while still contributing to the ecosystem.
For Swapz, they are a multi-chain bridge, currently focusing on stablecoins (no slippage there) and compatible with a few protocols already. We’re looking into applications of their technology for the swap for the possibility of cross chain swapping using the liquidity pools, unlike the current queue system applied by anyswap.
Lastly for Polytrade, they are a big player in the trade finance space and we’re collaborating with them on some CeFi angles. There’s quite a bit of overlap in our potential partners so this is quite synergistic for us.
Sean: Apart from that, we’ve also concluded the governance vote for transferring weight from the WHEY farm to the WHEY-LPs
Sean: On the topic of consortium chains, I’ll do a brief primer on how it works and why we’re experimenting with it.
Centaur Chain uses Cosmos SDK as its base technology and we were designing it around business use cases, as opposed to a general L1 / turing complete virtual machine.
This is because the CeFi side requires very specific applications that are not common or typically frowned upon in the industry. For instance, banking and remittance would require the ability to centrally issue, mint, burn and potentially reverse transfers. These are often due to regulatory and compliance requirements, which has been a major issue in recent days.
In Singapore, for instance, a number of exchanges have just listed it as a restricted jurisdiction. These include Binance, Bybit, Ascendex and just yesterday, Huobi.
We’re down to FTX, Okex and Kucoin right now haha
There’s been some impact to what we’re doing too as the regulatory landscape has started shifting in this direction and it’s been quite a tedious process to ensure the solutions we’re building can be executed in a compliant manner
The consortium chain structure is a permissioned network (in that addresses have to be approved before interactions) but still decentralised among its approved nodes and validator set. An example of this could be a collaboration between three banks (in practice it will be a lot more), A/B/C where each of them operate one validator. Commitment of any blocks and transactions would require 2 out of 3 validators to approve it and no individual validator can shutdown the network.
Users of the bank would then have an address that is approved by the validators via the bank onboarding procedures, which includes KYC/AML among other things. Once that is done, they will be able to interact with the chain on their own.
This is the current plan for the initial rollout of the mainnet, at least until the regulatory landscape stabilises and we are able to work with a public network
[AMA Transcript]
Question: Awesome! Would like to ask how soon can we possibility see another token added to Centaur Swap and is there an ideal benchmark number we are going for?
Sean: I’ll get to this in a bit but in summary, we’re going to be rolling out another gov proposal to determine token listing for cswap. Currently working with Chainlink compatible feeds first until the v2 is ready!
Question: Speaking of gov proposal, would like to know your thoughts about the recent governance votes. Noticed there have been some queries surfaced in chat about the efficacy of the vote given the presence of some Whey whales
Sean: So for this vote, its purpose is to increase the rewards for the LP pools, which would encourage more participation in the Sushiswap/Quickswap pairs, which would in turn help to manage liquidity and reduce slippage.
We did it in two votes
1. To check if there was support for this proposal
2. To determine the amount of reduction applied
Because the second vote was done in a multiple choice manner, the votes were distributed among the top three options and an address with a large WHEY holding was able to shift the voting results significantly
Because the second vote was done in a multiple choice manner, the votes were distributed among the top three options and an address with a large WHEY holding was able to shift the voting results significantly
Therefore, the solution to this would be to both increase the distribution of WHEY, and encourage participation in the voting process.
Separately, the voting process can also be improved to reduce the impact of split votes. This ties in with the proposal put forth by @barrerillo87 which I’m inclined towards. In the case of a multiple choice vote, a follow-up vote can be called for the top two options.
The tradeoff for this structure would be the time needed to execute such governance processes, as each proposal requires a reasonable amount of time to enable participation.
Question: Is there any form of incentivisation for people to vote as I’m pretty sure some people with whey are not voting
Sean: Regarding incentivisation of votes, we’ve got some simple ideas so far. One of the recent partnerships include a token swap and airdrop to the community members. On our end, we will most likely be airdropping these tokens to all voters who took part in any of the previous governance rounds. It will be done on a per-address basis and the voting power is not going to be factored in. As long as an address has casted a vote, it will be eligible for the airdrop.
Question: Will you keep chain link or switch entirely to a new oracle?
Sean: For this, we will remain with Chainlink for the main version of Cswap and the v2 will be launched as sort of an “Innozone”. This is because the new oracle provider uses a different method of price updates when compared to chainlink, and the liquidity pools deployed for it should be isolated from the rest of the pools.
The foundation technologies behind Centaur Swap and the Innozone will be the same, the only difference would be the oracle provider. The tradeoffs would be stability <> listings.
Question: Last ama there was a teaser about a Whey-CNTR swap going on. hehe any updates or new teasers?
Sean: Right now, we’re migrating the dev environment onto the Kovan testnet to see how it interacts with Chainlink oracles. There’s also some updates that’s still pending on the oracle side but we’ll be sure to push them out once we have something concrete.
Question: Can you speak a bit about how your new partner that provides DeFi insurance will operate? I.E. your vision for how we will engage with their services on CentaurSwap in the future?
Sean: I’ll assume you’re referring to the DeFi insurance yeah. Cos there’s a second pillar for the CeFi side which handles stablecoin depegs.
On the DeFi insurance, the partner is supposed to assess the risk and deploy a pool for contributions. This approach is similar to Nexus Mutual (NXM). Community members / retail investors can either contribute to the insurance pool or take out an insurance policy against the pool. If the platform gets hacked within the policy duration, the users who took out a policy will be able to claim against the pool, however, if the duration concludes and the platform did not get hacked, the contributors to the pool will get to keep their principal and the premiums earned.
It’s pretty close to a prediction market structure, but requires some form of governance to handle disputes and define hacks/attacks.
This is my understanding of DeFi insurance in general and also aligned with what they have explained thus far
Thank you everyone for attending today’s AMA I hope all of your queries were answered succinctly!
Thank you for being a part of the Centaur Community.
About Centaur
By combining the best elements of decentralised finance with measured regulatory control, Centaur is bridging DeFi and traditional finance. For more information, please visit our website, join our Telegram community discussion group and announcement channel.
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Signing off,
Centaur
