Recap of AMA with CryptoKudasaiJP
This is a recap of the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with CryptoKudasaiJP(telegram group with over 12,000 Japanese participants) that took place on 1/12/2021. This AMA was conducted in both English and Japanese. This article is the English version.
Overview of AMA
Speakers: Rachel(OpenLeverage’s global marketing manager)
Moderator: Lagoon (https://twitter.com/wonderlagoon)
Translation: Neko man (https://twitter.com/kasoutuu)
Date: 10/8/2021 12:00(UTC)
Venue: CryptoKudasaiJP Telegram Group(https://t.me/KudasaiJP)
Main part
Q: Would you mind introducing yourself, telling us about your background and the team working on OpenLeverage?
Sure. My name is Rachel, and I have been OpenLeverage’s global marketing manager since early 2021.
I came from a traditional finance background and started my crypto life back in 2018. I have been working with start-ups and scale-ups in the fintech and venture fields for the past few years.
The founding team came from traditional finance and crypto backgrounds. They are experienced entrepreneurs and specialists with many years of experience in derivatives trading, risk management, and blockchain-based financial systems. They have worked with major institutions, including HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Louis Dreyfus.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
It’s reassuring to have a finance and blockchain expert on the team who has worked with global financial institutions!
Q: Can you tell us about your OpenLeverage project? What problems does OpenLeverage solve that existing competitors haven’t and what is its competitive advantage?
OpenLeverage is a permissionless margin trading protocol with aggregated DEX Liquidity, enabling traders to be long or short any trading pair on DEXs efficiently and securely.
The idea of the project was born from the perceived potential and limitations of trading cryptocurrencies at the time.
We saw a lot of defi growth intertwined with the permissionless nature of finance. Despite this, some of the fastest-growing tokens cannot be leveraged, longed, or shorted, while the top five swap-based DEXs have deep liquidity but do not provide margin trading options.
We wanted to enhance the trading experience for the user.
We envisioned building a permissionless lending and margin trading protocol with aggregated DEX liquidity, which would enable traders to long and short any trading pair on DEXs efficiently and securely.
These are some features that make OpenLeverage the most scalable margin trading protocol:
1/ Anyone can create lending pools for any trading pair available on a DEX, with default interest rate and risk parameters, which the community can change via the governance process;
2/ Lenders can earn higher yields by depositing assets into the lending pools, earning interest from borrowed assets, receiving OLE rewards, or receiving rewards by re-staking their LTokens to join other projects’ reward programs;
3/ Traders can borrow and trade all with one click in a single transaction;
4/ Projects can integrate with the OpenLeverage protocol to facilitate leverage trading on specific trading pairs by integrating LToken;
5/ Liquidators can trigger liquidations to earn rewards based on gas prices if the trade’s collateral ratio falls below the market limit.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
It is strong to be able to leverage long and short on a number of tokens while taking advantage of the high liquidity of the DEX like Uniswap.
Q: Did your team build technologies or protocols that are specific to this project? Or are there any notable technologies the team is applying?
Of course! We are on the Kovan network, and you can check out our testnet:
https://kovan.openleverage.finance/app
OpenLeverage allows you to create margin trading pairs connecting to the pool either on Uniswap V2 or V3. It automatically chooses the pool with the best liquidity to mitigate the liquidity risk during margin trading.
We introduced the OnDemand Oracle, a TWAP based protection mechanism to protect users’ positions from price manipulation and flash loan attacks.
When the price of a pair becomes highly volatile, the Time-Weighted-Average-Price (TWAP) will force the attacker to hold the price for some time to make the TWAP valid for trading.
(https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/protocol-overview/ondemand-oracle)
For lenders to understand the market they are getting into, we added a “Market Risk” section which illustrates DEX’s market volatility, trading activities, and liquidity’s stability over the past 45 days.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
I used the testnet, the UI was easy to use, very cool! And the risk of lending was also clearly stated, which I liked.
Trade Interface
Lending risk
Q: Can you briefly share OpenLeverage’s top milestones, upcoming target milestones, and roadmap?
We have opened up Kovan Testnet to let users demo trades, and overall feedback and stats from more than 500 users have been positive. Over 31,000 unique addresses have accessed the Testnet, with over 82,000 transactions processed from 126 markets, with more than 1,100 active positions.
OpenLeverage was invited to present at the Uniswap Community Call in September to discuss how OpenLeverage should better integrate to benefit both communities.
*Community calls: Video streaming content from the development team to inform users about topics. Here, the uniswap team introduced openleverage to uniswap users.
As participants in the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) Blockchain Program in 2021/2022, industry leaders, including Josh Felker, Ash Fontana, and Jeff Enslin, mentored us.
We have integrated with EPNS to provide real-time notifications on price movements and liquidations.
Within the immediate 3 to 6 months, OpenLeverage intends to launch our product, integrate with Uniswap V2 and V3, and have a multi-chain deployment including a Layer-2 solution.
There are plans to integrate with more DEXs to support more token pairs. Native $OLE tokens and OpenLeverage DAO will launch to boost protocol usage with decentralized governance.
From 2022 onwards, we have planned extensions and enhancements to the protocol, with priorities including GameFi social trading and NFT, tranche lending with smart vault, and limit order for margin trading.
Concurrently, we want to promote a positive user experience — users want to have a better overview of the market and have a better method for entering the market.
Our ultimate objective is to build a decentralized crypto securities service to retail and institutional clients, providing decentralized lending, derivatives trading, and asset management infrastructure, which integrates with the global DeFi ecosystem.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
Theoretically, the possibility of leveraging long or short all of the liquid tokens on Uniswap is awesome.
Q: Can you give an overview of your Tokenomics and the utility of OpenLeverage Token?
This is the most asked question, haha.
💜Firstly, I need to highlight that there’s no $OLE token sale and that $OLE will NOT be launched with the mainnet. It will be launched separately.
$OLE is the native token that facilitates governance and incentivizes usage of the OpenLeverage protocol. Users can mine $OLE through borrowing/trading, lending, liquidating positions, farming.
Holders of $OLE tokens are encouraged to lock $OLE in exchange into time-weighted vote escrowed token xOLE.
These staked tokens represent voting rights, eligibility to share generated fees, and has other protocol privileges. We will provide full details of the tokenomics before the OLE token launch. Please stay tuned for further announcements.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
Oh, I’m glad to see that OLE tokens are distributed as a way to give back to users who use them. There are many benefits to staking tokens for a long time, such as governance and fee rewards. You welcome long-term holders.
📚 Here is our starter guide with tutorials.
Testnet setup tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/testnet-setup
Wallet setup tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/wallet-setup
Create market tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/create-market
Margin trade tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/margin-trade
Liquidation tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/liquiadtion
Lend to earn tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/lending
Notification setup tutorial: https://docs.openleverage.finance/main/product/notification-1
💜 If you still need any help, please move to our Discord channel.https://discord.gg/openleverage
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
The documentation is well maintained and the testnet is easily accessible.
Q: How does the team source revenue to sustain its operations?
OpenLeverage operates like other defi — it earns transaction fees. Under current team plans, there will be two types of fees when users make margin trades — the DEX transaction fee that users usually pay for when making trades in Uniswap, Sushiswap, etc.
Another would be the OpenLeverage transaction fee, which would be 0.3%. Of course, we would set various tranches due to user assets amount and subsidize with $OLE tokens.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
The fees that users pay to OpenLeverage are going to be subsidized in the form of OLE tokens, which I appreciate.
Q: There have been many incidents of hacks recently. How are you handling security?
We take security very seriously. 🔒
We understand that these are people’s assets and have followed secure development best practices throughout our protocol development.
Our security review process includes a full security audit from Certik, and another comprehensive audit by Peckshield is currently underway.
We have also completed an automated test suite with Truffle.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
Certik and Peckshield are both well-known auditing companies.
Q: Who are your current investors?
We have closed an oversubscribed $1.8 million seed investment round led by Signum Capital and LD Capital.
The seed round also saw participation from other notable investors, including FBG Capital, Continue Capital, and YBB Foundation.
We are now open in our Private Round and engaging in discussion with top-tier investors and KOLs.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
I personally like Signum Capital, which has invested in DeFi, Acala, Ren, etc., and seems to have a good eye.
Q: Have you made any agreements with companies, projects, or notable developers?
We have been mentored by industry leaders, including Josh Felker, Ash Fontana, and Jeff Enslin, at the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) Blockchain Program in 2021/2022.
And we have integrated with EPNS to provide real-time notifications on price movements and liquidations.
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
Creative Destruction Lab is an incubation program that IDO’s NuCypher and Covalent have graduated from on Coinlist.
Q: Do you have any news/updates about OpenLeverage that you would like to share with us?
You can take a look at the article Ambcrypto has written, which will help you learn more about us:
https://ambcrypto.com/openleverage-a-new-possibility-of-decentralized-derivatives
(Comment from KudasaiJP)
I received the article in advance, so I’ll just say the main points
OpenLeverage is superior to its competitor dydx in the following two points.
1) Large number of trading pairs
Theoretically, it can handle all tokens that support Uniswap.
2) Less slippage
Since Uniswap has deep liquidity, it can be used to reduce slippage, making it harder for prices to jump and be liquidated.
Important information❗️
📈 Total Distribution of $OLE Token 100Million → 1Billion.
Learn more ➡️
https://openleverage.medium.com/a-note-of-total-distribution-of-ole-token-33655d6a5ebd
💜🇯🇵🌸We are hiring Japanese Ambassadors (part-time) who could produce written, videos, or good at BD.
The ambassador needs to be creative and energetic about hosting events, communicate and engage with the community on a daily basis, as well as brand localization. (Knowing how to manage discord using bots would be great, having crypto community managing experiences would be preferred).
➡️ Apply Now: https://forms.gle/mDqEx5rZh9YRxbKr5
Question from Community
At every CryptoKudasaiJP AMA, quite a few community questions are asked. Since it is not possible to introduce all of them, I would like to pick up some of them.
Q: Who has the right to add or change pairs and tokens on OpenLeverage? Is it possible to create a new pair or token? If we can, how it can be done?
Any accounts with a decentralized wallet address can create a new trading pair between the tokens, it must the same pair that already existed on Dex.
If the pair has not yet been found, the creator needs to first create the pair on DEX before creating the market.
Q: I saw in your white paper that you have an insurance fund for lenders. Can you elaborate on this fund? And how will users benefit from now on?
A portion of the OpenLeverage fees are collected for an insurance pool, in the event that lenders lose money during extreme fluctuation, these funds could be applied to restore the funds in the impacted pool.
Therefore, it can protect the lenders.
Q: what's the difference between margin trading and perp trading? How to calculate the margin for each open position on OpenLeverage? Will the option price appear negative?
Perp trading does not require any trading of the underlying asset, whereas margin trade does buy or sell the underlying asset with borrowed funds.
Margin trades rely on and enhance DEX volume and liquidity, whereas perpetual trading has to build separated liquidity and order books to enable trading, which is quite costly and slow to setup.
For those fast-growing tokens listed on DEX, you would want to utilize the existing liquidity to have an instant market for leveraged trading.
Q: It turns out that $OLE is a native token. Does it only function as a payment currency in your ecosystem, or does it also play a role in governance? Where can I buy $OLE tokens? Now that you’ve noticed that the token is an Ethereum-based token, please tell us how you manage the huge transaction fees for this network. Have you considered integration?
As I mentioned above.
OLE is the governance token for the protocol, holders can participate in the OpenLevrage DAO. It has a similar mechanism with Curve token, anyone who stakes OLE, would have the rights to share the protocol fees and token rewards, plus voting power.
The token launch would be in a period after the product launch, and then would be listed on Cex and Dex. The token and the product will be migrated to layer 2 and other high-efficiency/low-cost public chains.
Q: Many platforms notify us when our transaction is approaching the liquidation point and ask if we want to increase the margin size? Does OpenLeverage have such a feature to notify users?
✅Yes, we do have a notification service for our users through emails, and we are also partnering with projects like EPNS, to explore more channels( such as APP push) to notify users.
OpenLeverage Social Link
Official Website — https://openleverage.finance/
Testnet dApp — https://kovan.openleverage.finance/app
Telegram — https://t.me/openleverage
Discord — http://discord.gg/WGZMHQW68G
Twitter — https://twitter.com/OpenLeverage
Reddit — https://reddit.com/r/OpenLeverage
Medium — https://medium.com/@OpenLeverage
Github — https://github.com/jimmy-openlev/openleverage
About CryptoKudasaiJP
CryptoKudasaiJP is a Japanese Blockchain KOLs community and Investment group dedicated to helping mainly blockchain startups accelerate their growth and exposure in the industry.
We have been helping projects penetrate into Japanese marketing.
