ADA Finance AMA Summary Recap with Shin Chan Community

We held a live AMA with Founder | CEO, Christof Waton from ADA Finance on 30th November 9:00 PM (UTC+8). Here’s the recap for those who missed it.

Introduction

Mika | Shin Chan: Before AMA start, can you introduce yourselves and the team background?

Waton: Sure Mika

Im Christof Waton, Founder | CEO at ADA Finance.
I have been in crypto (bitcoin) since 2014 and started my professional career in 2018 with as co-founder of an investment community, like Shin Chan.
Grew to become CBDO at a liquidity framework and consultant at centralized exchange.

In 2020 I started my own consultancy firm, P2P Solutions, and wrote out DeFi ecosystems YFdai (developed november 2020) and Howdoo (should be still developing) There was so much more that DeFi could offer so I started my own project, P2P Finance, which got rebranded to ADA Finance.

I will only reveal the C-level Team members:
Laurynas Antanavičius — CTO
I worked with Laurynas in the liquidity framework where he was CTO aswel, so we understand and know from eachother what we can deliver and how to work with eachother, which is very important ofcourse to have the CEO and CTO on the same page as we delegate the company.

Mate Tokay — CBDO
Mate is the former CEO and co-founder of Bitcoin.com
There are few people that can get business development work done very swiftly with his network / connections.
His experience as co-founder of bitcoin.com makes it easy for me to work with as he understand the CEO / Founder position and gives great feedback on the business development strategy that we are deploying.

We have a head of marketing, who is transitioning from another job so we can’t reflect him yet.
However, with the activity being picked up and marketing getting more structured, im sure the community already noticed that we have additional resources and employees there aswel.

In total, we have 14 in-house people.
Taking contractors into consideration we have 21 people on the payroll.

Mika | Shin Chan: Can u also tell us more about ADA finance

Waton: Ofcourse, would be bad if I couldn’t 😉

ADA Finance is a cross-dual-chain DeFi ecosystem that is focussing on the passive earning opportunities within the ADAFi ecosystem.
We are developing on both Cardano and Avalanche in parallel, bringing the same ecosystem on both blockchains.

ADA Finance brins 2 main products: ADAFi Swap, with margin trading, and ADAFi Launchpad.

The DeFi features that we are bringing:
Staking (up to 20% APR)
Farming (liquidity staking)
Peer-to-peer lending, that feeds the margin requests.
DAO program, which is a motivation to stake long term as there are minimums required for claiming the DAO title, which gives access to the DeFi fees on the platform

Mika | Shin Chan: Do u have any upcoming news or events that the community need to keep an eye on?

Waton: We are in the final stage of confirming a few great partnerships and advisors.

Updates about ongoing partnerships and programs are expected to come in shortly aswel.

For business development, those excite us the most, but ofcourse announcing the final line-up of launchpads and the dates is being prepared as we speak!

Twitter Section Begins:

Q1: #AIBCSummit is considered as the biggest European Blockchain Summit.Its promising to see that,
@ADAFinance
was selected as the ‘Best DeFi Project of the Year’.Congratulations♥️.So what all unique features helped u to be the BEST project & how do u intent to keep up the good work?

Waton: Oeh, thats a great starter!

First of all, thank you for the kind words Arun!

As a project we indeed received a lot of positive feedback and attention. I think developing the project and continue to build on the strong connections that were established at the AIBC summit in Malta to wrap up some great partnerships.

To continue with the good work is not just establishing partnerships but delivering to the ecosystem. One of the most important things from business development side is the contribution to the Cardano Ecosystem, with our Haskell Academy program and the first, licensed, smart contract code in a public repository on GitHub.

DeFi and passive earnings are a real world solution, banking the unbanked, so that’s the focus that we want to keep.

Q2: Whether ADAFISwap is the first AMM to make personal assets exchangeable in the DeFi space, what about its liquidity providers’ support? Any swap system will fail without them. So, what incentives do you have in place to encourage more people to accept and use your product?

Waton: From the community perspective, we incentivise and reward liquidity providers with the farming smart contracts.

Users that provide liquidity to the liquidity pools receive Liquidity Points which determine their share of the trading fees of that pair.

Those liquidity points can be put in a Farming smart contract where users get their share of a fixed reward pool on top.
In our address milestones, we tap into the referral / affiliate program aswel, so there is a motivation for users to grow their network and promote the liquidity providing to our AMM protocol.

Institutional perspective, we are finalising a big player in the crypto industry. To protect the partnership, we will not announce it early. There are institutional liquidity providers, that we have a verbal agreement with. However, officially partnering up with the ecosystem liquidity providers is not possible as they have already signed up as official partner elsewhere. That does not keep them from being a liquidity provider for ADAFi Swap aswel.

Our goal, is to start the ADAFi Swap with 100m $ TVL.

Q3: From what I’ve learned, the growing DeFi Ecosystem needs help from the same projects it wants to grow. Has ADA Finance contributed to the evolution of DeFi? Can you give us an example?

Waton: This question can be understood in many ways, but i think to know what you mean with it.

ADA Finance is the first Cardano project that released the off-chain code staking code in a public repository, which is licensed. Any project that forks the code, has to put the staking code in a public repository aswel. This helps projects to get staking smart contracts built within the Cardano Ecosystem.

With our avalanche development, we are looking to take the same road.

The ADAFi Launchpad incubates projects, approved by ADA Finance, to perform a public fundraising. Funds are required for scaling the team and marketing, and we need to make sure that those projects keep to the roadmap. We are putting our resources / network available to the projects that fundraise on the ADAFi Launchpad.

As DeFi ecosystem, we need to not only support projects financially, but also from marketing and development perspective, while protecting our community

Q4: How can you exactly use Referral Program and Address Milestones to motivates your platform’s growth and user involvement? What is the procedure for joining this program, and what are the terms and conditions? What is the maximum number of guests we can invite?

Waton: One of the most important things of the ADA Finance ecosystem is to not only motivate userbase growth, but also reward the user activity. They go hand in hand.

Users will need to deposit 50 ADAFi, locked for 12 months, to a smart contract, which then generates a referral link for the user to utilise to grow his network, to start benefiting of the address milestones their referrals successfully reach.

Referrals are confirmed only when they activate the referral link aswel and gives a 10% kickback of the commissions the referrers (affiliates) receive.

There is no minimum of guests you can refer. The more the better and as direct referrals puts you in Tier 1, giving the highest commission possible of the address milestones.

To ensure we do the best efforts possible for the community to understand all the benefits the referral program and address milestone bring, we wrote it out more detailed in our ADAFi DeFi 101 blog series:
https://adafinance.medium.com/ada-finance-defi-101-referral-program-and-address-milestones-fe439a5d4474

Q5: ADA Finance has chosen to take the innovative route of publishing its code to a public repository, becoming the first project built on Cardano to do so. What is the strategy of publishing your code in a public repository? With this strategy, will the project be transparent?

Waton: Publishing the code in a public repository makes it easier for projects to bring on-chain staking on the Cardano blockchain.
With cross-chain with Cardano coming with token bridges, we want to ensure that those projects can bring transparent staking aswel, on-chain.

Transparency is key, that is what DeFi stands for. On-chain performance of the ecosystem.
Bringing our code to a public repository helps other projects to bring the transparency the blockchain actually offers.

Contributing to Cardano ecosystem is something prioritize, as with the B2G and real world solutions Cardano blockchain is focussing on.
DeFi is, as said previously, a real world solution aswel (RealFi according to John IOHK, who im in meeting with currently).

Telegram Live AMA Begins:

Q6: Let’s talk about ADAFi Swap, you mentioned that ADAFi Swap offers margin trading that takes margin from peer-to-peer lending offers on ADA Finance. Is ADAFi Swap friendly for beginners, or is it only for professional traders? what are the main features of ADAFi Swap different from other similar projects?

Waton: What we want to do is educate the community with tutorial videos how to use the ADAFi Swap.
We got in contact with a video maker today, and with the swap release we will have the tutorials ready.

Further, we are looking to give public access to the swap on testnet. This will happen on avalanche first for obvious reasons.

Every DeFi feature on ADA Finance will have educational tutorials.

Q7: 💚💚 I have read that by claiming our DAO titles we can increase passive earnings. So will these DAO’s always be available on the platform? Or will they be special dates to perform these activities?

Waton: DAO Titles will be available to be claimed at any time, after completing the required 6months of the minimum amount of tokens.
We are not considering to put a limited timeframe on the DAO program.

Q8: It is known that in DeFi there are many ways to obtain passive rewards, but the vast majority are unattractive because they offer very little profit, but now that ADA Finance will offer “more rewarding passive rewards”, could you tell us how attractive they will be?

Waton: We have staking that leads into the DAO program.
This is an incentive to get the maximum APR (20%) and tap into the passive earnings from the DeFi fee distributions.

Affiliate / referral and address milestones motivate userbase growth of the ADAFi ecosystem and rewards users, and their network, for their activity.
Activity / address milestones have DeFi features involved aswel, so there are continuous fees that are being accumulated for distribution to referral program and DAO program.

Q9: In the DAO ADA Finance program there are 3 levels, namely Counselor, Minister and Ambassador.
can you explain each upgrade it?
and how many ADAFI tokens are at stake to become an ambassador?

Waton:

I think this picture answers the questions about the ADAFi DAO Program

Q10: 📍Why do we need 50 ADAFIs to launch the ADAFI Token Referral program? What is the difference between the kickback and the 3 rake levels?

📍I have read on the ADAFi Launchpad that users will have the advantage of investing based on the amount of ADAFI Tokens. How does the token level provide an advantage in obtaining early access tokens for projects to be launched?

Waton: The 50 ADAFI tokens are required to avoid abuse of the reward system.
The referral program is offering a passive earning opportunity on the activity of the user’s network.
The difference is: a referral needs to activate the referral program aswel, to count as an active referral, which entitles him to receive a 10% kickback on the comission his affiliates receive for me reaching address milestones.

Q11: 🚦In your docs, I could see that users are able to report malicious token duplicates and get a reward in ADAFI tokens for their contributions to the protection of traders, nevertheless, would you mind explaining how easy/hard it is for users to identify token duplicates? Where do they report malicious codes to? How do they receive their rewards for contribution?

Waton: To get listed, projects will need to fill in an application form.
However, in the future, we want this to be operated by the DAO. It is not in the papers as we dont want to put the attention on it, until we have it integrated int he DAO program

There could be malicious projects that pass the DAO voting filter, which will be reported to the platform.
The ADA Finance team will review and upon finding out that a token is malicious / a fake token, the user will receive an airdrop of ADAFi tokens.
The amount is not determined as we want to provide the reward in $ value of ADAFI Tokens.

Q12: Do you have competitive advantages or different products against ADA Finance, MELD and Cardano’s #1 exchange brand SundaeSwap platforms? What are your competitive advantages over your competitors?

Waton: They are branded as they are partnered with IOHK.
We are in close contact with IOHK as we are contributing to the Cardano Ecosystem with the Haskell Academy program and our staking smartcontract in a public repository.

A partnership with IOHK directly could be in the making, we are looking how we can help eachother a hand.

Q13: How easy to upgrade or / from downgrade any level of DAO Programs?

Waton: upgrade DAO -> if you meet the minimum amount of tokens for a minimum amount of time, you can simply claim the level you want.

Downgrading -> Upon claiming the DAO title, the required tokens will be locked for a period of time.
Once that period is over, users can downgrade as they please, but again will be locked to that DAO level tier’s lockup.

Q14: Can you tell us about ADA Finance products and ADAFi Ecosystem? I noticed that ADA Finance has developed Avalanche and Cardano in parallel, so is Cardano blockchain ready for DeFi, how will you develop the project on an unready Cardano blockchain?

Waton: We are developing in parallel on both Cardano and Avalanche at the same time.
I am confident, in the communication with IOHK, that they are working on the scalability of the Cardano blockchain.

The users can already operate the ADAFi Ecosystem on Avalanche and can decide themself if they want to operate on Cardano.

Within the ADAFi Ecosystem, users stay in control of their assets and choose which network / blockchain they operate the ecosystem on.

Q15: Can you highlight a few key aspects of “ADAFinance” that distinguish it from the competition? What competitive advantage does “ADAFinance” provide you with the confidence that you will outperform competitors?

Waton: Peer-to-peer lending that feeds the margin request on ADAFi Swap.

This is a unique feature within the blockchain industry!

Staking that leads into DAO.
From APR (up to 20%), to staking rewards + platform fee distribution
That is something that hasnt been developed either.

Combining referral program with address milestones is something that puts us ahead of the competiton, as we actively motivate and reward network growth and user activity

-End-