BlockTalks x SynFutures AMA Transcript!
We recently hosted an AMA with SynFutures, on October 9th at 10 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 Matt TFG, Partner & Chief Strategy Officer at SynFutures. 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. Could you please introduce SynFutures to our community in layman’s term?
Ans — SynFutures is a decentralized synthetic asset derivatives trading platform (i.e. derivatives DEX)
In Version 1, we launch a Ethereum-based futures market for a variety of assets, including Ethereum native, cross-chain, and off-chain real world assets to be synthesized and freely traded against ERC 20 tokens as margin.
For more details, you can visit the website www.synfutures.com here.
Q2. What are the advantages of SynFutures to the other alternatives in the Blockchain field?
Ans — 1) List any assets within 30 seconds
Put simply, SynFutures is the Uniswap for futures contracts: users can easily list their own futures contracts of arbitrary trading pairs with just a few clicks. There is no need to even go through a DAO or committee like other DEX do.
2) Single-token LP
Users can use one token to provide liquidity to various asset pairs, whether it be large-cap cryptocurrencies, altcoins, traditional equities, gold, indices, or any other asset they desire. Typical LPs use USDC, USDT, ETH, WETH, WBTC, BUSD etc for their liquidity provision without exposing to the underlying asset directional risk.
3) Rigid risk management and safety
Backed by solid experience from the TradFi financial engineering and DeFi protocol safety, SynFutures has many risk management features (e.g. anti-flashloan attack, EMA smoothing method, etc.) and has gone through external code audits.
Q3. What are the major milestones SynFutures achieved so far & what are in the future pipeline?
Ans — We are relatively young and are experiencing fast growth
In January SynFutures has been seeded by Dragonfly and Standard Crypto
Matt TFG, [09-Oct-2021 at 3:40:54 PM]:
In June we announced 14mio USD Series A funding led by Polychain and a group of VCs
In Sep we launch Beta version
And shortly afterwards, we will be launching our SynFutures v2 in late Oct
The philosophy is that we would like to democratize this market for average users/beginners
Going forward we would continue to level the playing field for the average investor by improving our users’ capital efficiency, simplifying the UIUX and launching new products.
Quite a lot in the pipeline. So the dev team is busy (and expanding)
Questions Asked on Twitter For SynFutures Team!
Q1. What is the main goal of your project,? And what was the biggest problem your project has had before, and how did your team solve the problem?
Ans — With the philosophy to democratize the derivatives market, we want to provide all the traders a place to trade any asset they want at anytime, in a DeFi way. And to offer a better derivatives product in the DeFi world.
The SynFutures v1 already allowed users can create their asset pairs in a permissionless way on SynFutures, and take leveraged long or short positions based on anything such as BTC, altcoins, gold, hash rate, and real-world assets.
Today it is live on 4 different networks, including Ethereum Mainnet, Arbitrum, Polygon, and BSC. This list will continue to expand.
The v1 info can be found here. https://medium.com/synfutures/synfutures-v1-closed-alpha-is-open-now-with-a-2021-roadmap-85d6d96d952e
Now we learned that the users would like a “perpetual” type of product. So SynFutures v2 will also be launched shortly this month, featuring shared margin mechanism, perpetual futures which is more friendly to retail users, smart vault and auto hedger for liquidity providers, etc. Currently there is a large demand from communities and our backers for SynFutures v2.
Meanwhile, we have also developed some unique products popular to targeted user base. One example is the world’s first fully decentralized Hash Rate futures. You can read more about it here with tech details.
Also, earlier last month SynFutures team unveiled world’s first NFT-based futures (NFTures), where you can go long or short on NFT (fractionalized), with a smooth single-token trading experience supported by continuous liquidity of AMM, without going through the auction-based intermittent liquidity pain like OpenSea.
More details: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/05/nft-market-too-frothy-now-you-can-short-it/
And welcome everyone to sign up for early access: https://nftures.com/get-early-access
In short, finding what the users’ demand is the biggest challenge we always put in front of ourselves.
With the strong engineering and tech capabilities and strong backers, we aim to constantly develop new defi derivatives products to the need of users.
Q2. Do you have an active referral or ambassador program for users that we can attract a new community?What are the ways that generates income/revenue to maintain your project and what is its “Revenue Model”? How can it make benefit win-win to both invester and your project ?
Ans — We are in constant upgrade of our community structure to attract more users to join, Ambassador program, NFT program, and shortly will launch a community-driven academy.
We are a community-led protocol. So this is also at the core of our structure
The SynFutures Ambassador program is one of our innovative ways to give back to the community while at the same time driving engagement up through collaboration with our community.
And given that we are in process to further decentralize and transition into a DAO, we launched a pre-DAO committee.
FutureX is our pre-DAO committee that precedes the development of a fully fledged DAO that will eventually control all SynFutures decisions and actions.
Our next FutureX will take place at 13:00 UTC Oct 11th, welcome to join us to discover what is next of Layer 2.
Regarding revenue model
we are AMM-based liquidity model, therefore the parties here are Traders, LPs, and (future) token holders.
Now the Traders would generate trading fees exactly like in Uniswap.
Shared by LPs and (future) token holders.
It is a simple formula ha, in the DeFi spirit :)
Sorry I forgot to mention, besides these, there will be trading competition and referral program coming soon this month, please stay tuned on our official channel
Q3. Currently DeFi project is on fire. But you know very well that, contract security is a big issue in DeFi. Has your smart contract been audited? How do you guarantee the protection of users’ funds?
Ans — Safety is at the core of our product design. Our CTO has a PhD in cryptography. And all contracts go through at least one external auditor (some have 2–3)
Sharp spikes driven by flashloans in oracle prices have been known to cause un-intended liquidations in many other projects. In SynFutures’ design, we have built anti-flashloan mechanism, where the price of underlying futures cannot move by a certain % in one block (a proxy of “very short period of time”). Also the liquidation mark price is smoothed with TWA method.
3 months since we launched, we have not had any flashloan-driven liquidations. So I would deem such measures effective.
Q4. How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken wellCan you expand our knowledge about Your Roadmap this year and the future and any Updates on your Research and development progress
Ans — Matt TFG, [09-Oct-2021 at 3:59:30 PM]:
Our aim is to democratize the derivatives market. Our clients are any potential users who would like to trade derivatives, including retail and institutions.
We realize that the larger demand in derivatives are actually on the retail side rather than institutions. This on the surface looks different from the traditional finance world, however completely in line with what we see in the centralized exchanges or “tradfi world”
As of today total users in the world of DeFi it’s about 3 to 5 millions. This is the user number of uniswap, slightly lower than the monthly active users of metamask wallet which is around 10 million.
We believe that the potential derivatives market size is larger than any of the number we mentioned earlier. Therefore in 6 months to 1 year’s time we will be receiving new demands from people who are unfamiliar with derivative, unfamiliar with cryptocurrency, and of course people who do not speak English.
We are positioned for such growth.
№1, we built easy to use user interface which is very rare in the world of DeFi.
№2, we are building a global community and global user base rather than focusing in a specific jurisdiction origin.
№3, on top of the English centric content strategy today, we will shortly launch a couple of local language community channels all in our discord server, with the help of community of the ambassadors. If you are interested in becoming our local channel leader, please go and apply via https://synfutures.wufoo.com/forms/pk9be731sl0h08/
Q5. SynFutures launched FutureX, their pre-DAO committee that will control all SynFutures decisions and actions. So, does this mean that you are preparing for full community governance of the platform? What are the positives and negatives you have evaluated with FutureX?
Ans — Matt TFG, [09-Oct-2021 at 4:02:46 PM]:
Yes, our transition to full community governance will be a step-by-step process and managed with a relentless focus on security. We aim to strike a balance between diversified ownership and efficiency in decision-making and execution.
FutureX is our pre-DAO committee that precedes the development of a fully fledged DAO that will eventually control all SynFutures decisions and actions.
In our last FutureX, we explore the financing edge of NFT, DeFi, and the intersection between these two inventions currently taking the blockchain sector by storm.
You could also see the recap here:
Now talking about positive and negatives
In fact the positive aspects go without saying… ：）
Such as building up community involvement, raising community awareness, and ensuring a smooth transition into a completely decentralized DAO.
I would say the “negative” aspect is that we become 2x-3x busy as before especially on the marketing and operation side. With our previous tech/product/finance background, it is a first time for us to organize such meet-ups, with all the strong community support!
Questions Asked by our BlockTalks Community Members during live Session to SynFutures Team!!
Q1. Do you have any NFT plans and its integration ahead in the roadmap? Also do you have any passive income options and incentivization reward for a long term hoder?
Ans — Yes. In fact, we have unveiled the prototype of world’s first NFT-based futures contract, where users can go long/short with leverage (basically expressing their views on certain NFTs with money). The UI is also an unique point which is Tinder-like.
Currently we are running an NFT airdrop for our users, welcome to participate: https://twitter.com/SynFuturesDefi/status/1445973408848625667
Q2. Nearly 90% of investors only focus on short-term token price instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivations and benefits for investors to hold your tokens in the long term?
Ans — This is a good point. Where many good projects fail because of short-term dump by their investors, we are backed by some of the largest and long-term-view funds such as Dragonfly, Standard Crypto, Pantera, Polychain, etc. So this way we are aligned with investors on long-term development and truly bringing change to DeFi derivatives market with constant development of new products, rather than short-term cash in.
Also, we have not yet issued token.
Q3.Understanding Crypto derivatives have been a major challenge to most people including me. Do you have any interest in simplifying it for users to help improve/promote their engagement with your platform?
Ans — Absolutely. So far today, DeFi derivatives is unfortunately a “small circle” with less than 100k users in total. We believe for such market to grow to 100m users (1000x of today), the biggest hurdle is user education. Initially we tried to write explanatory contents, and videos. These works to some extent. However if you truly believe that 100m users number, then the best (in fact only) strategy is “not educating your users at all”, but build something they can easily and intuitively use without reading any extra support materials. That’s what we are going to do.
Q4. I could see that they currently use Uniswap and Chainlink for the index price of the tokens, but do they always plan to depend on the information provided by these? Or do you plan to expand by incorporating data from other oracles?
Ans — For SynFutures, we already takes in various forms of oracle data, from Uniswap-and-alike, Chainlink, and their forks/variations on different chains. Now further to that, SynFutures team built permissionless decentralized oracles as well, such as Hash Rate, and cross-chain NFT pricing (in pipeline).
But what’s more important is that SynFutures use these oracle prices only for spot-convergence at maturity (incl periodic maturities in perpetual futures case). The price discovery is enabled on the futures contracts themselves, rather than by the oracles as most other projects do. So market determines price, tradable price.
Q5. How would you be able to attract arbitragers to come onboard the SynFutures platform ? How do you intend to promote outreach of your platforms across the several local regions of the world ?
Ans — Good question. Our users strategy is to focus on “real users” rather than bots. Therefore from day 1, when there are (and there still are today) arbitrage opportunities, we write articles to our community and engage them in exploring such arbitrage. This strategy works well, as we are seeing more than 10,000+ unique addresses already even though we are still in Alpha/beta. This user number is far larger than many other DeFi derivatives projects, especially those focusing to serve bots.
