On 15th of April 2022 at 12:00 PM UTC Crypto Talkz hosted AMA with Equilibrium
šMr. Alex Melikhov – CEO of Equilibrium shared us the Details about ā Equilibrium ā and itās Unique featuresā¦ š
Host : šHello Chat , Welcome to another exclusive Crypto Talkz AMAā¤ļø
Today with us we have @hello_melikhov from @equilibrium_eosdt_official !
Alex Melikhov : Hello everyone! Nice to meet you all hereš
Host : Hello @hello_melikhov .It’s a pleasure to have you here, thanks for joining us š
Alex Melikhov: Same here š
Host : How is your day going so far?
Alex Melikhov: Doing great by the way. How are you?
Host : Im fine. Thanks for asking š
So, without making a delay…Let’s start our AMA with basic Introduction Segment š
Introduction Segment
First, Can you make a brief introduction about yourself and the Equilibrium?
Alex Melikhov:
First of all, I’d like to thank you for inviting me here.
Iām Alex Melikhov, the Founder and CEO of Equilibrium and Genshiro. I’m an engineer in applied mathematics. Before blockchain I was focusing on fintech, mostly payment systems and gateways. I became completely involved in crypto after co-founding Changelly in 2016.
My current team has been working together since 2017, when we began building on Ethereum. In April 2019 we launched the first EOS-based stablecoin. Today it is the most liquid decentralized stablecoin and the biggest DeFi project on EOS.
Currently we are working on Polkadot-based Equilibrium and its canary network on Kusama called Genshiro. And as you guys might be aware, we’ve recently won 2 parachain slots – both for Equilibrium and Genshiro.š
Can you tell us more about Equilibrium and how it differentiates from other projects?
Alex Melikhov:
Absolutely. From the user perspective, Equilibrium is the first interoperable money market that combines all significant DeFi use cases in one easy-to-use interface.
These use cases include pooled lending (like Compound), synthetic asset and decentralized stablecoin generation (like Synthetix and MakerDAO respectively), and trading (like dy/dx).
Equilibrium allows users to stake and earn, lend, borrow, raise liquidity in synthetic assets and decentralized stablecoins – all in one place.
Recently weāve also launched Epsilon – official implementation of CurveFi on Polkadot. You can now swap your stablecoins with minimum slippage directly on Polkadot. Check this out: https://epsilon.io/en
Let me also briefly cover Genshiro. In general, Genshiro is Equilibriumās Kusama-based canary network. It is a bolder version of the products that we will later offer on Polkadot. It represents a cross-chain DeFi conglomerate complete with a lending platform and cross-chain DEX (in development at the moment), both traditional and AMM. Genshiro inherits an experimental spirit thatās quite common for the Kusama network. There will be more experimental elements, like support for a wider range of synthetic assets that can represent derivatives from the world of traditional finance, like gold and ETFs. We will also offer support for a wide range of ERC-20 based tokens.
Genshiro is already live and in production with around $9 million TVL. Check this out here: https://app.equilibrium.dev.eq/gateway/en/portfolio/earn
What are some of the major milestoneās you guys have hit so far and why are they important?
Alex Melikhov:
Sure. As you guys probably know, Equilibrium will be onboarded as the 12th parachain of the Polkadot network. Thatās a huge milestone for us and we want to thank our community for their support and involvement. It took us more than two years to become a meaningful part of the ecosystem since we released our whitepaper and started developments on the Substrate framework in February 2020.
One more thing to note: we will be launching the first orderbook DEX with margin trading on Polkadot! It will allow for trading with high leverage being combined with a money market that applies the lowest collateral requirements ever. We are sure that these innovations will drive liquidity to the ecosystem and attract advanced market makers along with retail investors.
Let me share our roadmap with you guys.
Also feel free to check it in details here: https://bit.ly/EQ_Victory
But thereās more. Recently we have launched a Liquidity Bootstrap event in Genshiro. We have managed to gather substantial liquidity both into the market maker pools and into the bailsman pool and we are thankful to each and every member of our community, who participated in the event.
You can join the event and receive up to 140% APR here: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/gateway/en/liquidity-provider/pools
And if you have any questions on how Genshiro protocol works or how you can earn with it, donāt hesitate to look in our wiki here: https://docs.genshiro.io/genshiro/
May I ask at this point, do you already have some partnerships lined up?
Alex Melikhov: Of course. Recently weāve partnered with AU21 Capital: a leading venture capital firm primarily investing in innovative and revolutionary crypto/blockchain projects.
Also, let me cover here our revolutionary xDOT mechanics. In general, xDOT is a special token you get when you contribute your DOTs to parachain auctions via Equilibrium. Right after that you can use xDOTs inside the Genshiro money market: supply liquidity and earn APY over 45%, borrow liquidity against xDOT, trade on Equilibrium DEX using xDOT as margin. Sell xDOT or provide liquidity by putting them into the corresponding Balancer pool. So you can make use of your DOT and not just leave it for 2 years in the crowdloan module.
And don’t forget to check our fluid xDOT product and vote for your favorite project here: https://xdot.equilibrium.io/en
We set up a lot of partnerships with the most influential projects: Astar, Acala, Parallel, Clover, Efinity, Composable Finance, Centrifuge, HydraDX, Interlay. Thanks to that, our community were able to vote during their parachain campaigns and receive xDOT along with the crowdloan rewards.
And you can check our previous partnerships with Band protocol, Bluzelle, Chainlink, Curve Finance and much more in our Medium here: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt
And lastly, Is there any bullish information that hasn’t yet been made public that you can share with our community for ‘exclusive’ news before we wrap up our first segment?
Alex Melikhov: We are always eager for some exclusive news, arenāt we? š
Let me shed some light for you guys š
Alex Melikhov:
Good question though and I think I can share some insights with you guys. First of all we’re proud to announce our collab with Republic Crypto. As you can know there are several hurdles in DeFi at the moment:
1. The most common among them is excessive overcollaterization. Since most lending protocols require heavy over-collateralization thereās a usual situation when users need to pledge $200 in order to borrow $100.
The second is liquidations. It is always done via auctions which is risky.
2. Currently 90% of collateral locked on Ethereum is subject to possible auctions. There might be no arbitrageurs willing to buy liquidated assets even at a discount, which puts the solvency of lending protocols at significant risk.
3. The lack of utility. Borrowers can’t utilize their loans directly in lending protocols. Most loans in popular money markets are taken in major stablecoins for new investment opportunities. But users need to switch to other applications as there is no trading functionality on the initial platforms.
4. The last, but not the least is no cross-chain functionality. DeFi liquidity is fragmented across multiple networks. Due to the lack of seamless cross-chain transfers in major DeFi protocols, a big part of the ecosystem remains underutilized.
Thatās where Equilibrium shines. We are the first DeFi 2.0 protocol on Polkadot with novel on-chain approach to risk and pricing for asset portfolios. It enables borrowing with minimum collateralization as low as 105% and margin trading with up to 20X leverage.
Our Republic campaign will help us to attract a lot of liquidity into the ecosystem in general and to the Equilibrium in particular. And I also want to share some exclusive news for you – we are ready to announce the waitlist next week. There will be some incentives for waitlist subscribers, so donāt miss an opportunity. We aim to launch our Republic campaign in May 2022. We allocated 720 millions EQ tokens for an event, which is 6% of total EQ allocation.
By the way we are also offering special conditions for influential communities and industry media. So, feel free to contact us in any of our channels, if you are eligible and interested.
On April 28 we will host the annual PolkaDeFiance conference. We are waiting for you there if you are aiming to be on the cutting-edge of innovations in the rapidly changing DeFi universe and you need to constantly pick out certain signals from the noise.
The famous industry speakers will cover the dead latest on whatās actually going on in the Polkadot DeFi ecosystem and why it matters.
We are looking forward to see all you guys here, along with our guests: Kenny Li of Manta, Eric Wang of Parity Technologies, Alexei Zamyatin of Interlay, Tyrone Pan of Bifrost.Finance and many more!
Register for PolkaDeFiance here: https://polkadefiance.com/
Host : Thanks for that well detailed introduction about Equilibriumā¤ļø
Twitter segment
Q1. Can you tell us a bit about Equilibrium’s ability to push the boundaries of current Ethereum DEXs with the opportunity to add tokens from the Polkadot ecosystem? Will Equilibrium DEX not be limited to ERC20 tokens like other DEX?
Good question. Our DEX has a number of strong advantages that stem from its robust technology:
1. Polkadotās āblockchain of blockchainsā approach allows for interconnecting different blockchain networks and their underlying assets, expanding the DEX asset universe to many different blockchains and parachains.
2. Substrateās design and scalability let Equilibrium build a decentralized exchange that matches the performance of its centralized counterparts.
3. Equilibriumās risk engine, oracle, and assets module allow for making tradable derivative contracts on real world financial instruments (like perpetual swaps).
4. Our lending platform will serve as a robust source of liquidity for margin trading and DEX will be highly leveraging its capabilities.
We will build our fully on-chain exchange first since we want to make the exchange margin engine an integral part of our borrowing and lending protocol.
We considered the drawbacks of the fully on-chain approach described above, and hereās how we will tackle them:
1. Placing or modifying an order requires paying transaction fees. Equilibrium has an ability to āweighā the transaction fees of each public method inside the blockchain, so we will minimize order management fees or even set them to zero. With zero fees, however, we want to restrict users from spamming a blockchain with orders or flashing. One solution is to introduce rate limits that depend on staked EQ amounts.
2. Settlement is slow: In Equilibrium, each block is 6 seconds long. This is a fair amount of time to still be comfortable from a UI perspective, as trades will settle once per block. Yet we do have a capacity to further reduce the block length by optimizing transaction lengths and working more efficiently with on-chain storage.
3. Not scalable: This is a concern that comes with a growth of transaction volume on our exchange, as scalability is limited by our blockchainās capacity, Equilibrium currently can handle 1,000 transactions per block on average. There are ways to overcome the scalability issue by using the previously mentioned layer 2 solution on top of the substrate off-chain worker technology, where we move order matching and trade settlement off-chain and make balance updates in batches on-chain.
Q2. For both investors and users, the platform must be excellent Integrity necessitates openness and trustworthiness. Tell us more about your transparency (such as team members) and your security measures. Is your platform currently being audited?
That’s the important one, indeed. Equilibrium was recently partnered with Quantstamp. Quantstamp will audit Equilibriumās core components, including the code which governs its underlying business-logic on balances, its risk and price modules, and its ābailoutā mechanics.
Quantstampās audit is of key importance to ensure the quality of Equilibriumās performance. The main reason is that you are customizing a blockchain runtime when you are building on Substrate. If a bug affects a part of the logic on the Substrate, the blockchain as a whole can come to a standstill.
Q3. Do you have links we can use to stay updated with this project ? Are there channels, or probably local communities where users can get the latest information especially your medium you mentioned?
Sure! We are welcome our newcomers. Here’s the list for you folks of all media. Subscribe and stay tuned. š
š Equilibrium Twitter: https://twitter.com/EquilibriumDeFi
š Genshiro Twitter: https://twitter.com/GenshiroDeFi
š Our Medium: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt
š Publish0x: https://www.publish0x.com/@EquilibriumEOSDT
š Telegram community: https://t.me/equilibrium_eosdt_official
š Telegram News Feed: https://t.me/equilibrium_news_feed
š Genshiro community: https://t.me/genshiro_official
š Genshiro News Feed: https://t.me/genshiro_news_feed
Q4. Equilibrium is based on Polkadot and features a Kusama parachain named GenshiroDeFi. So,Ā What potential benefits has this technicalĀ architecture offered byĀ Equilibrium, and how has it allowed them to regulate risk better than the previous?
Equilibrium is our cross-chain money market that combines pooled lending with synthetic asset generation and trading on Polkadot.
Genshiro is a canary network of Equilibrium that shares the experimental spirit of Kusama. It will be a testing site for our future products before theyāre deployed to Polkadot. This means we get to implement some new features for future iterations of Genshiro, like derivatives, perpetual swaps, and futures contracts on gold, ETFs, commodities, and stocks.
You can read more about Genshiro here: http://bit.ly/Genshiro
And also try it our, stake your liquidity and earn up to 140% APR at the moment: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/gateway/en/portfolio/earn
Q5. I saw that you recently announced collaboration with Republic Crypto. What is this collaboration exactly for? Are you guys planning to have a big surprise for the community? What is the purpose of this?
Yes, as I already mentioned we are launched our cooperation with Republic Crypto. We are aimed to attract more liquidity to the Polkadot ecosystem and to the Equilibrium. Because we are aiming on the wide audience, Equilibrium is planning to expand its products to this audience and attract much more users and liquidity as the result.
I have strong feeling that this will help of spreading the word about Polkadot ecosystem to the whole crypto world. š
Telegram Live Segment
Q. You chose to work on DOT but still don’t use the
DOT blockchain, I don’t understand that, could you explain me why?
and Why must $Polkadot be used in the products offered to earn the intended rewards?
Good questions. That’s not quite right. Equilibrium is built upon Polkadot and recently won parachain slot. Onboarding as a parachain will be initiated after the second auction of the current batch comes to the end on March 31. The process will require some technical preparations from our side and accuracy. Our main focus will be on cyber security and bootstrapping initial liquidity.
But at the end of this process Equilibrium will be fully integrated in the Polkadot ecosystem and support it’s famous interoperabilityš
Q. One of the functions that caught my attention in Equilibrium is that it will allow us to reuse the DOT tokens blocked in the auctions and give them liquidity. Can you explain how this process works? I personally have some DOT tokens locked for two years, so what should I do to make them useful with Equilibrium?
That’s right. Thanks to our new fluid xDOT staking, users will be able to stake their DOT for their favorite Polkadot parachain and get xDOT, which are DOT wrappers on our canary network on Kusama, called Genshiro. Genshiro is already up and running and offers a lot of functionality, like a working lending platform with over $8 million of real liquidity already locked.
You can stake xDOT in our protocol and receive up to 140% APR at the moment. Or use it as a collateral and borrow against it some liquidity which you will be able to use on our built-in DEX in near future. The opportunities are really endless here.
Here you can vote for your favorite project, receive xDOT and EQ tokens as a bonus reward: https://xdot.equilibrium.io/en
Q. Where and how can I buy your $EQ tokens? Do you have any $EQ token purchase link? and, which wallet does your $EQ token support ??
You can participate in our Republic campaign. The rates will be quite attractive for all participantsš We will share details on how you can participate and what you will need to do. Subscribe to our media and stay tuned: https://t.me/equilibrium_news_feed
Q. Can You Explain How is your Tokenomics Distribution? How many tokens Will be minted ? And How Many Tokens Will Be locked By The team? ą¦ą¦æ ą¦ą§
The Equilibrium token (EQ) will serve as the main utility token of the Equilibrium blockchain which in turn will be a parachain in the Polkadot network. As such the EQ token will have several features, like Staking opportunities, Bailout and collateral liquidity, work as Platform currency and as a Governance token.
You can read more in our tokenomy here: https://equilibrium.io/docs/EQ_token_economy.pdf
Q. Could you tell us about your project called Genshiro that you started on Kusama? Why did you choose Kusama to start Genshiro, what possibilities did Kusama provide to Genshiro?
Like I mentioned above, Genshiro is a canary network of Equilibrium that shares the experimental spirit of Kusama. It will be a testing site for our future products before theyāre deployed to Polkadot. This means we get to implement some new features for future iterations of Genshiro, like derivatives, perpetual swaps, and futures contracts on gold, ETFs, commodities, and stocks.
Currently, you can stake your liquidity and earn up to 140% APR in Genshiro: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/gateway/en/portfolio/earn
š Here below are links for you to get the latest update about Equilibrium
Community: https://t.me/equilibrium_eosdt_official
News: https://t.me/equilibrium_news_feed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EquilibriumDeFi
Website: https://equilibrium.io/en
Medium: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt
Discord: https://discord.gg/p2FmYuW5Hu
Github: https://github.com/equilibrium-eosdt