Transcript from Cryptodaku’s AMA with Centaur’s CoFounders, James & Mark
In this interview James Hong and Mark Harris speak with Cryptodaku concerning everything Centaur stands for, why blockchain enthusiasts consider us as the future of decentralized finance and much more.
Daku: Welcome everyone. We are having Centaur team here for this round of AMA.
James: Hi everyone! Thanks for having us!
I’m James, Co-Founder of Centaur. I oversea the bulk of our global operations and set out the overall direction for Centaur. At Centaur, we strive to achieve a balance between realistic and practical solutions, while pushing the limits of decentralized technology. Feel free to ask me anything!
Mark: Hi I’m Mark, Co-Founder and Business Development head of Centaur. I’m in charge of the B2B partnerships and user adoption in the EU/UK region. Much of the traditional Financial Institution partnership had been secured by my team and I over the past year to build on Centaur’s vision to DeFi financial systems in a progressive manner. I look forward to answering any enquiries that you might have about Centaur. Cheers.
Daku: Nice, we all are excited to know more about project. Before We start, can you tell us more about Centaur and why you call it as future of Defi? Also, what are your primary focus for next 30 days and next 100 days from here.
And then we will open floor to community for asking questions…
James: Sure! As you shared earlier, Centaur utilizes a semi-decentralized approach to the building of our financial solutions. We believe that the best way forward for DeFi is not to compete against classical financial systems and regulators, but to instead cooperate with them. Our solutions combine the best parts of decentralization, leveraging on the inherent transparency and security of blockchain technology while still providing the efficiency of well established traditional financial solutions and ensuring there is a fail-safe layer through those processes. This will provide a foothold to onboard users who may be familiar with existing financial solutions but still keen on experimenting with decentralized ones.
Mark: We’ve been getting many enquiries about our public sale and that is definitely one of our priority in the coming quarter. We also have exciting partnerships to announce in the near future with some of the top projects focusing on oracles and privacy. More details will be announced in our telegram channels so please follow us at the Centaur community channel.
Daku: Any tentative date for public sale ? and model?
Mark: The public sale will be held within the next three months. The actual format will be announced shortly, it will be something exciting and done in a sustainable manner. In the meantime, CNTR will be awarded to the best questions asked in today’s AMA.
Daku: Nice, looking forward to it. Lets open floor for live AMA.
Can you tell us more about cross chain interoperability. And how you achieve it?
The liquidity pools deployed on each protocol utilize zero knowledge proof to verify transactions. The central chain (Centaur Chain) will utilize oracle nodes to provide cross-chain communications and validation of the proofs.
As i heard DeFi everywhere! But, What’s the main benefits of DeFi? Which major problems are there in Centralized Finance system which can be solved by DeFi? What’s the benefits of Centaur over other similar platforms?
The main benefits of DeFi will most definitely be the transparency in terms of pricing and ownership to personal assets. In a centralised finance setting, most charges like custody fees, trading fees, lending rates are often determined by the financial institutes or government, users like us do not have decision making power. In Centaur, we use a semi-decentralised approach where we allow users to determine the key decisions while maintaining accountability, for example, our lending platform that is an important part of our product roll-out will allow users to borrow against their online and offline asset without overcollateralization. We also intend to lower the spread against loan to capture market share, this spread shall be determined through a voting process amongst the validators.
When it’s come to DeFi one and only one thing came to mind is Security. As there were more hacks on DeFi Platform.
I fully agree with this and security is one of the key things we’re paying attention to, especially due to the recent attacks on other DeFi projects. For the solutions we’re rolling out, there will be multiple rounds of smart contract and code audits executed before we deploy them. However, one other concern that is common in the crypto industry is phishing attacks and we believe that clear communication between us and our community members / investors is the way to mitigate this.
Adoption & Awareness about Platform is very important for any Creator as well as Users! So, What are your plans to attract More users as well as Creators with Non-crypto users too on Centaur platform?
Great question! We’re focusing heavily on user friendliness through the application of good User Interface / User Experience principles. We believe that by doing so, the difficulty and barriers to entry can be reduced, allowing users to begin their journey in the cryptocurrency space.
Defi is one of the hottest topic in the blockchain space. What do you think about this?
I think DeFi is certainly worth the hype as it looks to be the most promising use-case as at current. Our team also believe that with the development of DeFi, the unbanked population of the world will then be able to access certain “banking” services that might improve their quality of life. However, the space is definitely under a lot of challenges, mainly regulatory one, which Centaur seeks to answer with our partnership with licensed entities globally.
Do you think that DeFi structure for finance is best option? As, users can be anonymous & do cross border payments very easily through DeFi ! But How DeFi will stop illegal activities like Money Laundering or any other related illegal activities ?
I think this is a very important point and one of the main reasons we decided to start Centaur. We shared the same concerns as cryptocurrencies and its inherent nature of pseudonymity increases the risk of illegal activities. For Centaur, the centralized aspect of our “semi-centralized” approach requires the use of KYC/AML processes to mitigate these issues.
Currently, Staking is the most trending Topic in crypto world.. So, can you tell us some details that Centaur project supports Staking as well ? If yes, then Whats the current average staking reward of Centaur project?
As for the point regarding staking, our mainnet will support staking using our native token, CNTR. The 100 top nodes with the largest stake will be our validators and block producers and will be able to earn staking rewards. As to the specific details, we will only be able to provide them at a later date as we are still fine tuning and optimizing the numbers through out testnet.
Centaur is an ecosystem of products that make DeFi accessible for everyone.but how does taxation work on this side of things as that varies for different jurisdictions?
While the cross-border and pseudonymous nature of blockchain technology pose some interesting challenges for international taxation, the tax law in many progressive countries have been evolving rapidly to keep pace with technological developments (see for eg taxation of online/digital services). For example, Singapore has amended its legislation to state that digital payment tokens are exempted from GST (basically a value-added tax), changing its previous position that tokens are a supply of services. With increased guidance and cooperation from tax authorities around the world, we believe that there will be increased clarity in this area.
Next phase of blockchain adoption will be coming from the Defi space. What is your view on this? What are Centaur plans for Blockchain’s mass adoption?
At Centaur, our plan for mass adoption of blockchain technology is by encouraging a spirit of cooperation and inclusiveness. We will do our best to work with other projects in the crypto space, especially DeFi centric projects. By onboarding these projects into a shared ecosystem, the offerings for users will be greatly increased and cross platform synergies will support the growth and development of blockchain technology as a whole.
Who is your Targetted Userbase? On which type of Users & industry you’re mainly Targetting?
Our targeted user base would definitely be the existing crypto players and more, adoption has been a longstanding issue and we seek to expand the adoption of Centaur platform through our deep partnerships with traditional finance institutes, for example, one of our partners iMillion is a UK-based payment processing company which transacts about 200million USD in a month, they are also able to provide card-based(visa/master) solutions to corporates. Our pilot project with them seeks to transfer about 10% of their user-base onto the Centaur network within the first 6 months.
Can You talk about the Benefits of Tendemint Consensus Mechanism?
We chose to utilize Tendermint Core for three primary reasons, the high throughput, extendability due to its modular architecture and finality from its BFT consensus.
What role does the CNTR token play in the Centaur platform? What are the benefits for long-term CNTR holders?
The Centaur Token (CNTR) will be used primarily to pay for network fees (gas) on the Centaur Chain. Aside from that, it will be used to support our ecosystem partners as oracle and staking rewards for their contributions. CNTR can also be used as collateral for our dApps and as a representation of voting rights for ecosystem based decisions.
Which types of Services are offered by Centaur platform to it’s users? like Lending, staking?
As can be seen in our Whitepaper and Website, we are currently focusing very much on the cross-asset lending platform and investment via staking. In the future, we are definitely looking into B2B partnership that includes services like payrolls, insurance and card products to expand our ecosystem.
What is your technology advantages compared with your competitors? And how you can sustain that advantages over time?
The key technologies we are applying are Zero Knowledge Proofs in the liquidity pools and crosschain transactions. We are building our interoperability layer in a manner that allows for backwards compatibility and not just future projects on the same framework or consensus. I think the most important trait for our company and team is the willingness to pursue innovations and the ability to add new products by leveraging on the strengths of our ecosystem partners, with an ultimate goal to enhance the DeFi and blockchain communities.
Recently Centaur partnershiped with elrond, can you talk about the positives?
The recent partnership between Elrond and Centaur has helped us gain some recognition within the DeFi and crypto space. We have also gained a lot of followers from twitter and telegram because of the exciting news that is about to come from the partnership! In the long run though, we see a great amount of synergy between our two protocols and we hope we can bring DeFi solutions to the Elrond chain, while enhancing our protocol capabilities with their technology. Feel free to also check out Elrond as their main net is launching in under 2 hours!
Blockchain has many Disadvantages as well, How do you plan to merge Blockchain as well as existing Technology to make it more Secure?
We agree that due to the youth of blockchain technology, there are a number of disadvantages and restrictions that projects often face. As such, our approach is to use centralized technologies and solutions to offset the restrictions of blockchain technology. Some of these hybrid solutions come in the form of operational support and not just technological upgrades, such as the implementation of off-chain KYC/AML with on-chain address whitelisting for more sensitive or at-risk areas of our dApps.
Are you concentrating on certain geo space from which you have strong centralized partnerships with or is it going to be a widespread debut?
Centaur aims to be compliant with the regulations around the world. As such, we will be starting with countries where we have licenced partners or where it is clear that the use case is unregulated. Eventually, with more clarity in the regulation of blockchain technology, we aim to achieve worldwide adoption.
What differentiates Centaur from its competitors in DeFi?
By taking a semi-decentralised approach to constructing solutions, Centaur is able to leverage on the transparency and security of decentralised architectures while providing a fail-safe layer through centralised systems and processes. One such example is with our loans platform, we are able to execute under-collateralized loans as mentioned earlier due to our approach. The licenses that we have access to also ensure that we would be able to operate smoothly and in a manner that is regulatoraily compliant.
What’s the most difficult part do you think that Centaur will Solve in this DeFi Space ?
We believe that the greatest challenge facing DeFi currently is adoption, especially for the unbanked population. With every challenge comes an opportunity and the unbanked population presents a $380B opportunity. We are currently in the midst of working with local stakeholders in South-East Asia which we are optimistic will allow us to effectively tap into the unbanked markets in those countries.
Centaur is using a semi-decentralized approach, which centralized/tradfi services do you think are most important for widespread adoption?
We believe that the most important CeFi services are: fiat onramp and the use of credit bureaus and the judicial system for lending. Fiat onramp allows for faster and more effective onboarding of users while the use of credit bureaus (for credit rating reports) and the judicial system (for enforcement of bad debts) is essential for the proper functioning of the un- and under-collateralised model that Centaur is adopting.
As an CEO of Centaur, what is the value you receive from the community and how will it help you improve Centaur in the future?
The success of any DeFi depends greatly on the adoption by the community. By its nature, DeFi is by the people, for the people. Many of the centralised elements of Centaur are simply bridging measures while the blockchain industry as a whole matures and adoption amongst the general public becomes commonplace. Once the industry matures and adoption grows, Centaur aims to transition into a full-decentralised model.
Learn more about Centaur:
Welcome to the official channel for Centaur. We’re building a set of decentralised finance solutions involving a hybrid approach to decision-making, risk-taking, and record-keeping.
· Main website: prodefi.io
· Telegram community: https://t.me/ProDeFi
· Contact us: contact@prodefi.io
