BlockTalks x Konomi Network AMA Transcript!
Hello! BlockTalkers & Blockchain Enthusiastic!
We recently hosted an AMA with Konomi Network, on January 3rd at 02.00 PM UTC. Many of you might have participated or many of not. But we make sure no one missed out from the knowledge shared by Jayden, COO at Konomi Network 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 Questions Asked By Team BlockTalks
Q1. Please make a brief self-introduction and introduce Konomi to everyone.
Ans — Hi everyone, this is Konomi’s COO Jayden. I have been working in Singapore after graduating from the National University of Singapore with a major in electronic engineering, I used to be OFO’s regional manager in Singapore, responsible for OFO’s expansion and operations in Singapore. Later I founded Mileslife, A technology startup company that used technology to improve the efficiency of the tourism industry. I have been interested in blockchain and Bitcoin since 2015, so I participated in Bitcoin mining and ICO investment in the early stage. At the beginning of 2020, I felt that DeFi has really brought application scenarios to the blockchain, so I joined the Konomi project founded by several NUS alumni. Currently, I am responsible for the operation of the project and business development in China. Most of our team members are still based in Singapore and the focus of the project was mainly on development. With the improvement of our product development progress, the project has also recently received a grant from the Web 3 Foundation, and we have also begun to speak out in the market. This is Konomi’s first AMA event on Telegram. I am very happy to communicate with the community here
The vision of Konomi at the beginning of its establishment was to enable financial applications on Ethereum to seamlessly connect to the Polkadot ecosystem, and to provide the users with a complete asset management experience — from liquidity protocols, to lending market, as well as the management of ecosystem assets. Polkadots has more application scenarios which are different from Ethereum in terms of governance and parachain auctions due to its better base layer performance. As a result, we believe that Polkadot-based financial applications will also have more opportunities than Ethereum. Thus, at the initial stage of our product design, we first built the underlying facilities which are decentralized liquidity protocol and lending protocol.
Q2. What are Konomi’s main products?
Ans — Konomi platform is offered as a web application in the beta phase and will support mobile version for better user experience. The product includes three key modules:
Konomi Trade
Konomi Trade allows users to access liquidity for assets in the Polkadot ecosystem. It supports smart contract based liquidity protocols starting with constant product automated market makers. Users could connect decentralised wallets to the protocol and trade with immediate on-chain execution. Since the platform is decentralised, users could trade long-tail assets without any restrictions.
Konomi Lend
Konomi Lend is a decentralised money market protocol for users to borrow and lend assets. The product is currently based on a collateralized debt position model. It is an important milestone for crypto assets to have compound interest and this feature could incentivise users to hold the assets. DOT will be first supported as the default collateral, since it is the native currency in the ecosystem. As the parachain and para-thread auction is launched, there will be more room for innovation in financial products since projects will need to bid for DOT supporters in order to share the consensus in the Polkadot ecosystem. Komoni Lend also has the capacity to become an alternative solution for projects to raise DOT in exchange for their project tokens. For example, projects could accept DOT as a collateral to borrow the native tokens issued by new projects and receive interests.
Konomi Wallet
Konomi Wallet helps to aggregate user positions in decentralised wallets and to manage the active positions in the different protocols. Just as a banking customer would find it troublesome to have several banks at the same time, it is difficult for non-professional users to keep track of positions in different DeFi protocols. It complements Konomi Trade and Konomi Bank to give users the one-stop experience to manage assets on DOT.
Q3. What are the target users of Konomi?
Ans — KONOMI is targeting crypto users that are looking into investing, trading and managing assets in an efficient way. It is currently deployed as an independent blockchain using the Substrate framework. At launch, it will support functions in trading, deposits and lending. As the Polkadot parachains are launched and that interchain communication protocols are live, Konomi could support more financial products specific to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Q4. What is the current stage of Konomi’s product development? Is there an approximate time for the official launch?
Ans — Konomi’s technical design mainly has five components. The first two components have been completed. They are the asset components including an AMM module which is similar to Uniswap’s asset exchange protocol that supports users to perform asset exchange, add and remove liquidity operations and lending module that support multiple assets. In addition, the lending component will be launched before the end of this month. This is the key and unique aspect of Konomi, and it will support various types of lending pools. The user can mortgage assets in these pools to earn interest. If the users have enough collateral, they can also borrow other assets in the pool while paying some interest. The remaining governance components and oracle components will be completed in Q1 next year. The official launch time of the product is also closely linked to the launch time of the Polkadot Parachain.
Q5. The token economic of Konomi
Ans — The token will be used for decentralised government, user incentives and asset staking. i will elaborate a bit more on each part
For decentralised governance
The design and implementation of the protocol would be determined by token holders. For parameters like pool staking fees, transaction fee burn, liquidity mining ratio, are initially set by the protocol itself; token holders could update the numbers and the smart
contract itself based on the voting process. In order to encourage users to participate in the process, there could be some profit set to reward the voting participants.
Asset staking
Konomi token could be staked to participate in the base layer consensus and earn system rewards. It is also the staking currency to share platform revenue and ensure that the debt positions are safe.
For User incentives
As a decentralised product, getting liquidity is crucial for the user experience and platform adoption. Therefore, a large proportion of the Konomi tokens are reserved to encourage users to add liquidity to the platform and to use the products. By depositing assets to the protocol, users could automatically market make for the protocol.
In designing the user incentives, the protocol also takes into consideration the long term sustainability of the token. As there are more liquidity mining programs launched by DeFi protocols, users tend to participate in those programs in order to earn tokens rather than to fulfil their true needs. In the meantime, as more tokens are generated, there is continuous selling pressure to the network if no strong use case is designed to create demand for the token. Therefore, in designing the liquidity mining program, priorities would be given to long term supporters and market makers for the protocol.
Questions Asked on Twitter For Konomi Network Team!
Q1. I read in your whitepaper that a large proportion of the Konomi tokens are reserved to encourage users, in what ways do you encourage the community?
Ans — We reward early users that could provide liquidity to the protocol to kick start the launch of the platform and help provide a better user experience. Also, we might reserve tokens that could encourage developers that bring applications and users to our platform.
Q2. Now-a-days I have seen that many assets are on Polkadot. KonomiNetwork is also a market on Polkadot. So what is Polkadot?What are the advantages that you have seen on marketing in Polkadot?
Ans — Polkadot has been the the talk of town for quite sometime. Actually, users can find detailed introduction and structure of Polkadot from their official website. As for us, we choose to do our project on Polkadot because of its performance compare to other chains. Let’s said if we compare Polkadot with Ethereum, Polkadot has the advantage of less gas fee, faster TPS and most importantly, it support cross-chain transaction when Parachain is launched.
Q3. I was reading on Medium that Konomi’s main interest is to support decentralized money markets, but how will Konomi handle liquidity protocols so that its assets have greater insurance against any fall?
Ans — Risk management is always the top priority for lending projects. Currently, we are in the midst of developing our risk management module. It will feature functions like auto liquidation mechanism.
Q4. It says in your whitepaper Konomi aims to brigde the gap between crypto and fiat world. What are Konomi’s plans in the short term to achieve this objective? How will you compite with other similar services in recognized blockchains?
Ans — We believe that the majority of the users still would be coming from the traditional FinTech world. We don’t want to prioritize ourselves in building the bridge between crypto and fiat but we do want to explore partnership with these service providers and help connect fiat users to our product. We also have on our advisory board Jonathan who’s leading the blockhain strategy at PayPal.
Q5. Has your Konomi Network network project been meticulously built over the timelines? What motivated you to develop this project? Do you have a plan for the future when people around the globe know and use Konomi Network?
Ans — Our vision is to connect assets to the Polkadot ecosystem and give DeFi users a better experience with a more power base layer protocol. We start with deploying a Substrate chain and start with supporting the base layer money market protocol and liquidity protocol. In the future, we want to have more applications on our chain and plugs into the Polkadot parachain ecosystem.
Q1. For Konomi Lend, will DOT be the only supported token as collateral since it is the native currency in the ecosystem or will there be more room for other tokens in the nearest future?
Ans — Yes, we will be supporting more assets as Parachain is launched but at starts, we would like to support mainstream assets such as Dot.
Q2. What is your top 3 things for priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?
Ans — As for our development roadmap, we will complete our governance module and risk management module in Q1. Testnet will also be launched. Subsequently, we will be integrating Oracle for price feeding and develop staking module in Q2.
Q3. You have just announced that The Blockchain Strategy of PayPal, Mr. Jhonathan Padilla, has joined the Advisory Committee of your project. Could you tell us what implications this has on the future of Konomi? What will Mr. Padilla bring to your initiative?
Ans — We believe JP’s background could help us to explore more partnership with tradional Fintech and it also implies that Paypal wants to explore more about Polkadot. We will be having an panel with JP so please stay tune with us.
Q4. Being listed in Giant Crypto exchange such as BINANCE, HUOBI, BITHUMB, OKEx etc is a dream for most cryptocurrency project. Do you plan to list on these exchange in near future or still keep focusing on build excellent product and attract more users?
Ans — Of course we would continue to develop our product after listing.
I noticed that many people asking about why do we choose Polkadot instead of Ethereum which is more matured. Because we believe that Polkadot is the begining of Web 3.0 and its cross chain features will definitely derive more application scinarios which cant be done on Ethereum
Here are some important links of Konomi Network👇
🌎 Website: https://www.konomi.network
📱Twitter: https://twitter.com/KonomiNetwork
📢 Telegram: https://t.me/konominetwork
