AMA Recap GreatDrop with SIFCHAIN
Hello GreatDrop community,
On 24th November, at 04:00 AM UTC (11:00 WIB), we just successfully hosted our 15th AMA’s with SIFCHAIN, a decentralized exchange, combines the best elements of liquidity pools and order books for optimal order execution.
With our guest from SIFCHAIN Team:
- Odin Borson, SIFCHAIN Team
Many of you might have participated or many of not, So here we are up with the AMA transcript for those who missed the AMA session.
Introduction Questions Asked By GreatDrop Team
Q1: Can you please introduce yourself and SIFCHAIN to our community?
We try to keep it focused on the team as opposed to individual members, but it’s no secret that a lot of our credibility lies with the fact that we have so many members from the Thorchain team, including its early architect. This gives us a lot of credibility and experience with cross-chain software and AMM token design.
Jazear was not just involved in early architecture on Thorchain but helped with the development of Cosmos’s official Ethereum <> Cosmos bridge for the Interchain Foundation and the Polkadot <> Ethereum bridge for Web 3 so we are experts in cross-chain transactions.
Beyond that, our team has a lot of experience with other crypto projects including a YC-backed crypto startup and multiple crypto exchanges.
Purely on the development side, we have over a dozen engineers, most of whom have prior blockchain experience on other major chains. They’re supported by strong business development and marketing experience over many major famous cryptocurrency projects by our operations team.
Sifchain is the Omni-chain decentralized exchange (DEX), unlocking liquidity from otherwise siloed chains to free people from egregious fees and inefficient trades. Sifchain will target 20–25 blockchains (such as Ethereum and Stellar) for cross-chain integration. It will also simplify the process of blockchain integration, lowering the development process for the open-source community so that additional cross-chain integrations will be cost minimized in terms of money and developer resources.
SIFCHAIN’s goal is for new blockchains to consider cross-chain integration as essential as a wallet or block explorer. Liquidity from all cryptocurrencies can then be accessed on-chain, allowing the coordinated deployment of capital from all cryptocurrencies by DAOs.
The future of SIFCHAIN is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and for SifDAO and other DAOs to self-sustain, they need access to massive capital. We believe that building cross-chain liquidity will be fundamental to the future of the blockchain industry: an expectation, not a feature.
SIFCHAIN is built on the Cosmos SDK and is compatible with other Cosmos Network blockchains like Kava, Akash, and Terra via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. As such, it is 100 times more efficient than Ethereum-based DEXes like Uniswap in terms of both trading fees and transaction speed.
As a decentralized exchange, SIFCHAIN combines the best elements of liquidity pools and order books for optimal order execution. While decentralized exchanges are currently dominated by liquidity pool algorithms optimized for token swaps, SIFCHAIN will rethink the formulas used for liquidity pool algorithms from the first principles of complexity theory to implement adaptive AMMs suitable to limit orders and token swaps alike.
Traders will be able to place limit orders that are executed against the liquidity pool as the market price fluctuates. Sifchain prevents validator front-running through a commitment-reveal scheme for order placement.
SIFCHAIN allows traders to use margin on their trades by borrowing from the liquidity pool. Interest is set based on market demand and liquidity supply. This increases returns for liquidity providers in two ways — it provides interest as a second revenue stream in addition to swap fees and increases the size of swaps, and thus the size of swap fees.
Q2: What kind of achievement SIFCHAIN has made so far and what target Sifchain want to achieve in the next year?
We’ve already got our testnet, Monkey Bars up and running. We were expecting 10–20 validators but ended up with over 150 signing up!
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1323806752324739072?s=20
Monkey Bars allows users to move liquidity from Ethereum to SIFCHAIN via our Ethereum <> SIFCHAIN bridge (the first Cosmos SDK testnet to support this).
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1322277967020486656?s=20
We have also built out an innovative testing infrastructure that lets our engineers deploy a new testnet for every single feature they develop. This lets us test our work against an environment similar to production so we can more rapidly ship features than nearly any other cryptocurrency project
We are making heavy investments in security and DevOps. We will continue to add tests and other infrastructure support over the coming weeks. Some of our code is undergoing an audit and we’ll soon get other key components audited as well. We’re going to open up a bug bounty program so that white hat hackers can verify our security.
When we feel comfortable that the code is safe, we’ll initiate the testnet!
We’ll also be releasing a UI for the block explorer and swap mechanics so that fuzzies (non-developers) can also use SIFCHAIN. A beta for the block explorer is up now.
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1329212137625948160?s=21
After mainnet, we’ll move more aggressively to add margin trading, limit orders, and bridges (we’re targeting 4 pegs per month) for Q1 2021.
Q3: What’s the status of your token offering and investments, as well as ways for people to be a part of Sifchain as an investor and/or trader?
Wow, we’ve been getting that question a lot. We’re pretty excited to share but haven’t announced any details yet. We’ve been planning to announce it in a week or two, maybe we’ll need to push that date up given all of the attention around it!
Q4: Why SIFCHAIN choose to be built on Cosmos SDK?
We picked Cosmos SDK because we predict Cosmos Network usage will increase substantially given the launch of IBC, its high development engagement among major cap tokens, and the migration of development from Ethereum to Cosmos (because of Ethermint, lower transaction fees, architecture issues, and Cosmos’s high developer engagement).
This usage will attract liquidity from other token foundations. Pegged tokens will be supported by those other token foundations as a favorable alternative to people actually selling their tokens. This is because the dev tools built on Cosmos Network can be used by their token holders. It’s substantially better for them than people selling their token for a Cosmos Network token.
Ethereum is currently home to the largest collection of decentralized finance (DeFi) app ecosystem in the world. However, it is starting to show its wear as a dated technology that is in dire need of upgrades. The Ethereum Foundation plans to slowly release fixes with Ethereum 2.0 but those changes are not scheduled to take full effect until 2022 or later.
In the meantime, Ethereum DeFi apps continue to charge exorbitant fees that limit participation to large spenders and whales. While the profits in recent DeFi successes like Curve pool are impressive, Ethereum’s transaction fees make it prohibitively expensive for users. These transaction fees range from 1% to 7% for transactions of $1-$40. These fees are charged per trade, where multiple transactions are needed for each product in a multi-protocol compostable trade.
Meanwhile, the Cosmos Network is reaching an inflection point for its growth. At Cosmos SDK chains are 100x more efficient than Ethereum blockchains in terms of TPS and block space.
The Cosmos Hub is just one blockchain in the Cosmos Network. The Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) can connect any Cosmos SDK blockchain to any other one. These applications include successful DeFi components like Thorchain’s cross-chain DEX, Kava’s CDP, e-money’s token fiat currency platform, or Terra’s $100M+ stablecoin. They each get their own blockchain with their own unique tokenomics model that supports a token with $10M-$100M in market cap. The Cosmos Network also supports non-DeFi projects that have their own token models, like Althea’s mesh network of internet routers or Persistence’s enterprise blockchain product.
As transactions increase among Cosmos Network tokens, demand for liquidity will rise. The Cosmos Network can support a geometrically larger amount of economic activity than Ethereum while attracting a wider customer base with lower transaction fees. This makes it an optimal location for processing a massive chunk of on-chain, cross-chain commerce.
Cosmos can support DEXes for swapping assets, but it can also support derivatives like shorts, futures, leverage, perpetual swaps, tokenized interest, liquidity pools, identity management, automated market making, and other core aspects of a highly sophisticated centralized market.
In order to support secondary asset types like shorts and futures, the Cosmos Network would need to support the trading of synthetic versions of the assets in question. This is why we want to create a large number of pegged tokens on Cosmos Network.
5. Can you give an overview of the SIFCHAIN tokenomics?
Sure, the best place to learn about Sifchain’s token economics is at the economic paper:
https://sifchain.finance/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Token-Economics-of-Sifchain-edited-2.0.pdf
Questions Asked on Twitter For SIFCHAIN Team
Q1 from @davidliefi
While many new project using Ethereum chain and BSC, Sifchain comes with Omni chain that notabenelly didn’t have many appeal in crypto space. What special from Omni chain that being your motivation to make SIFCHAIN project?
SIFCHAIN is omni-chain, meaning it is intended to support all chains. It is not built on the omni blockchain that used to be the main support for Tether.
Q2 from @y1sus_afp
What kind of responsibilities will SifDAO inherit in principle to the users who own the platform? Will this always be the case, or will the total control later be in the hands of the users? What role will Rowan play in SifDAO?
Sifdao will end up inheriting all of the Sifchain core team’s responsibilities, including but not limited to software development, testing and quality assurance, product management, design, dev ops / IT, economic design, research, marketing, business development, legal, hiring, human resources, finance, partnerships, and public relations.
Wherever possible, the team’s responsibilities will be communicated to the DAO for the purposes of independently supporting the team’s efforts. Over time, the DAO will inherit all of the team’s responsibilities and will be entirely responsible for SIFCHAIN’s continued management.
Rowan is the governance token we will use to vote on changes in Sifdao
More here:
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1323162320382517248?s=20
Q3 from @untillthemoon
We know that DEX has very serious problem with the expensiveness of gas fees, and omni-chain is more expensive than Ethereum-chain. As The world’s first omni-chain decentralized exchange, how does SIFCHAIN solve this problem?
Hahaha again, SIFCHAIN is not built on the Omni blockchain that hosted tether.
Because SIFCHAIN is built on Cosmos SDK, it is 100x more efficient than SIFCHAIN inherently. Tendermint is the consensus algorithm for SIFCHAIN (and all Cosmos SDK chains) and it simply processes transactions at about $0.01 from our benchmarks whereas the average Ethereum transaction is $1-$10 in fees.
All tokens that trade on SIFCHAIN will trade at this speed.
Q4 from @Kvindvr
Being the first decentralized omni chain exchange in the world, it must be hard to spread knowledge about omni DEX to the community. What is the tool that you implementing to educate the community and expand important information about SIFCHAIN?🙂
That would be you, my dear AMA participants!
The SIFCHAIN core team and community need to work hand in hand to ensure that Sifchain’s mainnet is well-tested and well-supported and that the full vision of the protocol is carried out beyond mainnet. If Sifchain’s mission appeals to you, we urge you to stay in contact by joining our Telegram, following us on Twitter, joining our Discord, and subscribing to our Newsletter.
https://t.me/sifchain
https://twitter.com/sifchain
https://t.co/7FUCNU0mNj?amp=1
https://sifchain.finance/#newsletter
If you feel called to contribute more, we encourage you to start by reviewing the code we’ve open-sourced at https://github.com/Sifchain. You can always address outstanding Github Issues https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/issues and speed up time to completion. We’ll be attributing rewards for some development help over Gitcoin. Until we can get our Gitcoin account set up, you should just feel free to review the issues filed in https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/issues and if you fix one and we accept your pull request, you will receive $250 or more via USDC.
If you’re looking for a way to contribute to SIFCHAIN while earning income, we will provide opportunities to do that. If you want to invest in Sifchain’s success fund a bug or feature reward for a new issue or small feature. In special cases, the Sifchain core team may even invest alongside you!
Another way to contribute is with code reviews. Look at our developer documentation https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/tree/develop/docs and our pull requests https://github.com/Sifchain/sifnode/pulls. This is a great place to review what’s coming to the protocol. You can identify ways to improve the protocol and submit PRs of your own. The SIFCHAIN core team doesn’t guarantee it will accept your PRs without substantial revision, or that it won’t leave your PR without being able to review it in-depth, but it intends to put as much effort into cultivating community contribution as it can.
Yet another thing you can do is maintain a SIFCHAIN testnet node. We have a strong community of testnet operators who serve as the first user of all of SIFCHAIN’s code. By running and maintaining a Sifnode, you help the community test and operate at scale.
Beyond that, you can write community articles for SIFCHAIN. Here’s one a community member just released for the Russian community!
Of course, there is still more way to help we haven’t thought of. One developer told us he’s been working on Prometheus + Grafana integration for benchmarking. Other developers have already helped with building faucets and other critical infrastructure we need, or just answering questions on Discord and Telegram
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1327419675672682496?s=20
We’ve been deeply grateful for all of the support we’ve seen from the community but know there’s still a lot more to go. An unfinished article we want to write describes how we ultimately see Sifdao and Sifcore working to make SIFCHAIN a premier cryptocurrency protocol. It heavily cites research on Teal Organizations that prioritize self-management.
“The Teal paradigm refers to the next stage in the evolution of human consciousness.[1] When applied to organizations, this paradigm views the organization as an independent force with its own purpose, and not merely as a vehicle for achieving management’s objectives. Teal organizations are characterized by self-organization and self-management. The hierarchical “predict and control” pyramid of Orange is replaced with a decentralized structure consisting of small teams that take responsibility for their own governance and for how they interact with other parts of the organization. Assigned positions and job descriptions are replaced with a multiplicity of roles, often self-selected and fluid. People’s actions are guided not by orders from someone up the chain of command but by ‘listening’ to the organization’s purpose. Unlike the highly static nature of Amber, Orange and Green organizations, the organizational structure in Teal is characterized by rapid change and adaptation, as adjustments are continuously made to better serve the organization’s purpose.”
https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Teal_Organizations
If you see any way you can help SIFCHAIN, please reach out so we can work together!
Help us spread the word so we can all bask in Sif’s blessings together.
Q5 from @QuyenCao11
How secure is SIFCHAIN? How has SIFCHAIN developed technology and security to build SIFCHAIN into a truly secure and reliable platform?
We have a very strong focus on security. Our engineers pride themselves on creating a thorough test suite for every feature. We then have test engineers who enhance each test suite with a larger battery of standard tests (unit, integration, etc.) as well as more complicated end-to-end tests or testing harnesses that can spin up the critical infrastructure for mocks (for example, standing up a service that should be running in the background adjacent to a major few feature).
Then, we’ve got auditors on top of that and an internal red team focused on attacking the network. Before mainnet, we’ll launch an external red team in the form of bounties.
Questions asked by our GreatDrop community members during live Session to SIFCHAIN Team
Q1 from @wachinchaaa
At this point, do you think you need exchanges as a Binance to keep growing? Or is it better to forget those things and focus on other activities?
We see CEXes like Binance as important partners for DeFi projects.🙂
Q2 from @Wirjaatmadja
Usually, the project only tells about their strengths. Can you tell us honestly about the weaknesses of your project? And what are your plans to solve it?
We spend a lot of time admiring Sif.
She’s so beautiful.
That’s not really a weakness though because our team is built from her blessings
Q3 from @joky098
SIFCHAIN will support cross-chain transactions for 20–25 of the top blockchains, is ETH included among them?
Yes! Ethereum will be the first blockchain we connect to at launch!
https://twitter.com/sifchain/status/1322277967020486656?s=20
Q4 from @kuhlmangregoria
What SIFCHAIN features might be of interest to larger traders? What is the strategy to increase liquidity? Maybe a CEX listing?
We will certainly do a CEX listing. We will also have liquidity partnerships and trading volume partnerships so that we can get a larger volume.
Q5 from @kherrera22
SIFCHAIN supports cross-chain transactions for blockchains such as Bitcoin, BinanceChain, Polkadot, and EOS. What strategy did you employ to get these projects to trust and believe in your idea?
We don’t need them to help directly since their code is open source. That said, we have gotten major token ecosystems to take us seriously by having a strong crew of elite developers who they respect. We’ve seen a lot of interest from token foundations to have us build cross-chain pegs to us next.
Here are some important links of SIFCHAIN:
Website: https://sifchain.finance/
Medium: https://medium.com/sifchain-finance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sifchain
Discord: https://discord.gg/3gQsRvjsRx
Litepaper: https://bit.ly/SifChainLitepaper
