BlockTalks x Centaur AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Centaur, on October 29th, at 11.00 AM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by James Hong, Co-Founder at Centaur so here we are up with the AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this blog post will be a saver & feeder of knowledge for them.
INTRODUCTION
James Hong — Hi everyone, I’m James, co-founder of Centaur. I am a serial entrepreneur that started in the Maritime industry a good number of years ago but have since transitioned into deep tech and fintech. By leveraging on the networks I’ve established over the years across Southeast-Asia, I spearhead the integration of blockchain technologies into emerging industries to drive digital transformation and digital banking solutions. At Centaur, I manage most of the business development efforts for the Asian region together with our Singapore team.
Introduction Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. Could you please introduce Centaur to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — Yes definitely, Centaur is working towards being the bridge between decentralised and traditional finance by tapping on the strengths of both aspects. We are hoping to create solutions that expands the use cases of Defi, while remaining transparent and accountable in our approach and protecting the interests of our community and our investors. One of our first steps will be to resolve the over-collaterised loans situation that is currently prevalent in the market as this restricts liquidity and prevents the market from being fully efficient.
Q2. What are the advantages of Centaur to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — I think one of the current problem is the legacy chains in the market had many issues in enabling efficient DeFi solution because it was developed in such an early stage that fundamentally they are unable to have the high throughput and speed required real money flow. The Centaur chain is built using tendermint core SDK and which has the speed and ability, we have the capability to design economics and add on modules natively on to the chain, hence solving most of the problem.
We are a full package to put it short, instead of individual fragmented solutions that is in the market now.
Q3. What are the major milestones Centaur achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — On the technical side, we have successfully deployed our liquidity pools on Etheruem testnet and Binance Smart Chain testnet. These liquidity pool uses zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) technologies to ensure there is transactiional privacy. We have also launched our own Centaur Chain testnet based on the Cosmos SDK and we’re looking to do a main net launch by Q1 2021.One of the collaborations we are working on is the Elrond eGLD liquidity mining program, where eGLD holders can stake their eGLD for 2 weeks on the Elrond mainnet and earn CNTR (ERC20) tokens on Ethereum. This program will be a pilot Yestest for our future solutions, which utilize our liquidity pool and cross-chain capabilities. Beyond that, we will be launching our staking program in mid-October, which will allow CNTR holders to stake their tokens for rewards.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Centaur Team!
Q1. Is the Centaur team planning to create a platform to integrate all, Staking, Unsecured lending, Cross-chain DEX products for easy access to users?
Ans — Yup that’s right, it really seems like you read through our project. We think these are the main pillars of finance, whether it is centralized or decentralized.
1) Staking creates liquidity provision
2) Lending creates returns on the liquidity provided
3) Dex provides a marketplace
As you can see from our V1 staking platform, it is very user-friendly, only three clicks to finish the process, more than 61mil CNTR had been staked in 24 hours, we believe user adoption will increase as more people see the design of our product.
Q2. Most projects are moving to fully-decentralized approach but CENTAUR is different. You are utilizes the semi decentralized approach. How will this approach works? Which part is “centralized” and which is “decentralized”?
Ans — This approach will mean that we will build solution that encompasses the benefit of both systems. For example, when you look at CEX or Centralised asset management platforms, they make a lot of profit through people trading fees, but nothing really goes to the people that are providing the liquidity.For dex, the liquidity is often restricted by the transaction fees on Ethereum, so we have propose a semi-decentralise structure for settlement to be handled on the Centaur Chain and propagated to the different liquidity pools using our native oracles that are gasless.
With that said, we don’t think there is an absolute way that things should be going forward, we believe both centralized and decentralized options will co-exist, it’s just a matter of preference for users.
Q3. Centaur recently launched its Native Staking program. Can you explain how robust your staking network is?
If we decide to unstake our $CNTR token at anytime, do we have to pay a fee? Is there any duration required to stake our $CNTR token?
Ans — The V1 staking platform is launched at staking.cntr.finance. Excluding our treasury and ecosystem tokens that are still un-used, we have about 40% of the market supply staked, this show the confidence that our community and investors have in our platform. This version is a one-month lock with interest paid upfront.
The V2 of the platform will be much more flexible, it will have daily flexibility and block-by-block release structure. There will be no fees for the V2, please follow us https://t.me/cntr_ann for more updates on our V2 staking.
Q4. Right now Centaur can interact with Ethereum Network and Binance Smart Chain, but apart of them do you have plans to add more networks? Like Tron or Cosmos?
Ans — Centaur can build liquidity pool on any chain that has smart contract abilities, so as long as there is sufficient demand for us to run our solutions on it, we are all emcompassing. Tron is certainly one of our first few integration, we will also be looking into Elrond, Substrate etc.
Q5. Staking with a reward of 10% per month is a fairly large reward, does it not affect the centaur price. How does Centaur maintain price stability?
Ans — Again, we believe in the power of decentralization, these rewards are just a redistribution to our early support, and if our community is here with us at this stage then they certainly deserve these rewards.
We would continue to launch our staking V2, continue to work on partnerships with other platforms, continue to offer more use cases to encourage the holding of CNTR. We are also committed that 50% of the revenue streams that come in in the future from our fintech integrations will be re-deployed to market buy-backs on CNTR to repurpose for other community benefits.
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to Centaur Team!!
Q1. Many projects rug pulled and exit scam recently. Why should investors trust your project not to do the same?
Ans — I think it is sufficient to say that we have been very transparent with the tokens contracts, the contract address is publshed on our medium. I think in general the public should always only invest in Liquidity Pools that are audited by a third party firm if they have no technical ability to do that.
Q2. How will Centaur resolve the over-collaterised loans situation that is currently prevalent in the market? What are the unique solutions that Centaur offers?
Ans — We intend to resolve the over-collateralization by accessing the lenders through traditional credit reports that are available to us via our wide network of traditional financial players, we will however keep the interest decision and the liquidity pool decentralised. This is definitely not an easy initiative; hence we will roll this out in countries like the UK/Singapore where credit records are highly reliable and default rates are low. As user on our platform gains credibility on our platform, we can then slowly steer towards their on-chain reputation for future borrowing.
Q3. What is the main motivation for people to take out a loan on the Centaur platform than to take out a loan from a bank? Do you have a strategy to attract people to your platform from outside the crypto space?
Ans — Well you can’t take a crypto loan from a Bank. Certainly, our loan solutions will be build into platforms with other credit companies, fintech companies that we are partnered with, hence allowing their existing user to transit into the use of Centaur loans seamlessly.
Q4. One of Centaur’s primary goals is to drive massive adoption. What is the strategy for attracting non-bank people like migrant workers at Defi?
Ans — The adoption within the unbanked population is more than simply a technological problem. We at Centaur understand this and as such we are working closely with the authorities in South East Asia through our local partners. We believe we are well-positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.The unbanked population amounts to close to 1.7B globally and represents a market opportunity of about $200–300B.
Q5. How can be used Liquidity Pools to earn? Will there be an expansion of the used networks, because, for example, Ethereum is not very reliable and stable?
Ans — The liquidity providers in the pool will earn either transaction fee or yield from the exchanging or lending from the liquidity pool. We will definitely not only have one pool, since our design of LP single-side contribution and balancing over oracles, it allows us to build many LP across many chains. By the way, we are also testing our LP mining contracts that will be rolled out in the next two week for our Uniswap pool, there will be rewards for Liquidity provider and please follow our ANN channel closely for updates!
Here are some important links of Centaur 👇
Official Website — https://cntr.finance/
Blog —https://medium.com/centaur
Telegram —https://t.me/OfficialCentaur
Twitter —https://twitter.com/OfficialCentaur
