Recap: #WenDEX AMA with AllianceBlock Co-Founders Rachid Ajaja and Matthijs de Vries
The last few weeks have been all hands on deck as we finalized the testing and preparation for the much-anticipated launch of the AllianceBlock DEX. However, on Tuesday 31st May at 4 PM CET, our Co-Founders Rachid Ajaja and Matthijs de Vries took to Telegram for an AMA session. Almost immediately after opening the session, they landed the surprise news that the DEX was already live and open to users!
If you haven’t yet been to check the DEX, here’s the link to it: https://abdex.io/
Of course, #WenDEX wasn’t the only question that came up in the AMA, which as usual, turned out to be an interactive and engaging session with the #NoMercy community. You can read the full text over on Telegram, or here, we recap with an abridged version of everything Rachid and Matthijs covered on Tuesday.
Matthijs: Hey everyone, hope everyone here is doing well.
Rachid: Hello everyone, been a while since we last did this kind of AMA, really happy to be here with you guys
Rachid: This is the agenda for today:
- Bug bounty
- Incentive Program with Bonq
- DEX:
1. Our goal of launching now
2. Our AMM
3. Compliance
4. Privacy
- Roadmap and Stage Launch
- Chain Support
Matthijs: So I think let’s start with the most important question today: #WenDEX?
Rachid: The team has been working really hard and the last days were very challenging because of all the testing and taking into account the edge cases, we promised our community that we will release in May, but we will have some bugs, we hope you will be able to report them.
This phase is a soft launch.
Matthijs: But most importantly… The DEX is live (URL will follow after the AMA).
Matthijs: Now, for the bug bounty, we have already had a running bug bounty program for the last 4–6 months — in the next 2 weeks we will decide on the rewards and pay them out.
Rachid: Hats off to the team and all the amazing work they have been doing, now we will count on your support to get as many bugs as possible in order to make the DEX as perfect as possible.
Matthijs: Now… that’s not the end of the bug bounty program for the DEX! As Rachid said on the frontend there might still be some issues, UX wise, UI wise, so we will extend the bug bounty program by another 2 months — please participate, get some reports in, and get rewarded in ALBT 🙂
Matthijs: We have put in countless and countless hours of testing — both on the Smart Contract level and frontend level, our first priority is always making sure that all funds are SAFU.
Matthijs: The UI is redone from scratch — it’s not a Uniswap clone like before, really in line with for example LMaaS and the new Bridge UI.
Matthijs: And this is just phase 0!
Rachid: Indeed, we will be working on enhancing the UI and having a good user experience, this is why we need your feedback. Now let s move to 1. Incentive Program with Bonq.
Rachid: As you know this is pretty innovative to be able to give rewards in stablecoins. We have all seen what happen to UST and we believe that Bonq has the right value proposition, it doesn’t mint tokens and they have a very good mechanism. You have seen probably the White Paper, if not we can send it to you.
Rachid: The Bonq incentive mechanism will take place in two phases:
- pre-launch
Bonq protocol will be live most probably during Q4 and in order to be able to provide incentives to attract liquidity providers, we will give the opportunity to LPs to provide liquidity through our DEX and stake the LP tokens in a locked contract. (LPs will receive the LM reward as well as the staking reward for the locking period).
-post-launch
as soon as Bonq is live, LPs will be able to claim their reward and they will automatically receive BEUR.
Rachid: We do believe that this type of incentive is the way going forward because of two reasons:
1. no pressure on the token because they will not go into circulation
2. the incentive is a stable coin and hence no volatility
Matthijs: So, this is what will happen in the coming week:
- Today, the DEX is Live 🔥
- However, the first Liquidity Pools we create together with our partner EnergyWeb will be visible in the DEX tomorrow — so right now there is no liquidity, so no option to add liquidity or swap tokens, but you are invited to take a look in the refreshing layout before the LP launch tomorrow. (Editor note — please note that the liquidity pools have been launched since the AMA and are now live.)
- Next week we will launch the LM program through LMaaS for the LP with the intermediate BEUR token as rewards, which can be easily swapped for BEUR once Bonq is live.
Rachid: We are also working currently with our AI and Quant researcher on a new mechanism of optimal reward distribution that will incentivize LPs based on their reputation. The reputation here is computed for the time they have stayed on the pool, the amount they have provided, and if they have not transferred or sold their reward. This means that reward will never be the only function of the share of the pool, an LP will be able to gain more APY through time and if the LP withdraw the liquidity or transfer / sell the reward he will see his APY decrease. We are in the exploratory phase and we see that our algorithm behaving very well.
Rachid: We are not just releasing a DEX but a new way for the crypto community to participate in DeFi while being as fair as possible without putting risk on the projects that are doing LM.
Question: Which tokens/pools are you going to incentivize with BEUR rewards?
Rachid: The first pool will be EWT-ALBT, it will have a huge incentive and double (EWT and ALBT), then we will have EWT-USDC.
There will be an allocation to incentivize all the pools later on but the rate will be lower than the main liquidity pools. Thanks to our LMaaS we will be able to provide multiple rewards at once
Question: Can we use our $ALBT on the DEX? Will the ALBT token be used for fees on the DEX?
Rachid: Yes, it will start a bit later, to take fees on ALBT, but not at the soft launch phase.
Matthijs: Back in 2020 we launched our Liquidity Mining program, it was successful, especially once we were supporting multiple DEXes and networks. Then quickly afterward we realized that this could be useful for other projects as well, so with LMaaS (now DeFi Terminal) — we helped out other DeFi projects with increasing liquidity or TVL for their token. 15 clients later, with a revolutionized bridge, and support for lots of networks — we saw the struggle for IL when providing liquidity in LM programs. With our DEX we aim to reduce exposure to IL, making it more interesting to participate in LM campaigns, further maturing the DeFi industry. So now we have worked and tested hard on creating a DEX, that is completely integrated with DeFi Terminal (LMaaS), so that we can start having all the liquidity from DeFi Terminal in the DEX, helping get volume and liquidity in the DEX, and at the same time helping DeFi projects get more liquidity by lowering exposure to IL for their users.
Rachid: 2. Our AMM:
We have shared already a lot of materials on our AMM and we show how it is different from the current state of the DEX market.
The smallest the weight, the lower the IL; however, in order to get low IL and low slippage we need to have big liquidity in the pool. This is why we are starting with a weight of 25% which allow us to have lower IL than Uniswap (not a huge difference) and at max same slippage as Uniswap. However, the more we will attract liquidity, the more we will decrease the weight and the lowest the IL will be while not having an impact on the slippage.
Matthijs: And coming back to the core values of AllianceBlock — helping TradFi/CeFi get compliant access to DeFi, we will see the integration of TIDV so that we can have compliant liquidity pools, which can lead to an influx of funds from traditional financial industries.
Matthijs: Remember, compliance with the AllianceBlock DEX is optional — we will always offer pools that you can participate in without having to verify your identity
Rachid: Indeed, I want to add, that not all of the DeFi crowd believe in regulation; some see it as completely against DeFi philosophy. This is why later on we will have 3 categories of pools:
Category 1: regulated financial institutions: this is only for institutions that need to be subject to heavy regulation
Category 2: KYC’ed pool for both retail and institutions where you have a compliant liquidity pool
Category 3: open pool like we have on the market today.
Users will be able to have their NFT where the property Identity_verified: YES or NO. If YES they will automatically have access to these pools
Question: When can we expect SSLP?
Rachid: Actually, will be in the next few weeks. We have completely re-developed the SSLP protocol on top of our NFT protocol and we have also developed an on-chain order book for SSLP. This will open new opportunities in the space. We will give more details about this soon.
Rachid: this is the short/mid-term roadmap of our DEX:
phase 0: pre-launch of Bonq: incentivization program
phase 1: SSLP and on-chain order book
phase 2: post-launch of Bonq
phase 3: adding more pairs
phase 4: deployment on Polygon and Avalanche
phase 5: Dynamic weight allocation
phase 6: including analytics of the pools
phase 7: release of the DeFi strategy layer
phase 8: adding more chains including BSC, Moonbeam,
phase 9: deployment on Polkadot parachains that support ink! including Peaq Network and Astar
Question: Why isn’t ETH on the roadmap?
Rachid: Ethereum is in the roadmap but a bit later. We are exploring ZKSync and Mina protocol. In the current state of the DEX, the gas fees will be very high on Ethereum — that’s why we are exploring new architecture that includes ZK in order to solve this problem.
Matthijs: Btw, #WenDEX ???? It’s now: https://abdex.io/
Question: For EWT & ALBT Pool, on which Chain will it be? And when will it start?
Matthijs: Energy Web Chain mainnet
Question: Do we have to bridge ALBT to EWT then?
Rachid: Yes, exactly, through the alliancebridge.io
Question: How is AllianceBlock going to integrate into Polkadot with ink! Moonriver is EVM compatible so that makes sense but can AllianceBlock be on Polkadot or Kusama?
Rachid: We will be on Polkadot as soon as ink! is live on Mainnet. Most probably we will go with Astar for Testnet then Tainnet, as well as Peaq network.
Question: It says no mobile support, when are we likely to have the DEX available on mobile browser?
Matthijs: Working on this in parallel, will update you soon on when exactly, but it’s coming along already quite nicely
Rachid: Maybe some of you guys ask why Energy Web Chain first. This is the reason:
EWC is a fast and inexpensive EVM-compatible blockchain. Launching there allows us to have cheaper gas fees for the complex calculations that our AMM algorithm performs.
There is currently no reputable, professional DEX on EWC. We are taking advantage of this untapped potential to drive adoption from their strong community, as well as from their ecosystem of institutional and energy partners.
EWC is enterprise-focused. It is already home to a number of enterprise-run blockchain projects, such as Crowdfund for Solar, which leverages DeFi to accelerate clean and affordable energy access for all in Sub-Saharan Africa.
EWC’s validators are reputable companies that utilize and hold large amounts of EWT. The DEX would offer their validators a reputable DEX to use for their transactions, as well as a compliant DEX once we deploy our compliance layer.
Question: What happens to the DEX when you are forced to liquidate the locked ALBT??
Rachid: We are actually taking this into account, we will have only 30% of the ALBT locked that will be converted to BEUR, and we are starting at a low price which means that the probability of liquidation is unlikely
Question: Can we have the roadmap in a blog post?
Matthijs: Yes, one is coming soon.
Rachid: We will have multiple blogs coming and we will spend a lot of time educating DeFi users
Question: When AllianceBlock meetup?
Matthijs: Let me know when you are around Utrecht (NL) 😉
Question: Can we enter the EWT-ALBT pool with only ALBT (SSLP) and profit from the rewards of this pool? How does this work exactly (is this only UI and your ALBT will be split to 50/50 EWT-ALBT? What happens to your SSLP and amount of ALBT when EWT or ALBT price changes?
Rachid: Yes but this will be done later as per the roadmap above. The cool thing is that you will have an NFT representing your share, and you can have child NFTs representing a small position of your total share. you can then put these NFTs as collateral to borrow against them or sell them especially if they are locked
Rachid: Huge thanks guys, very much looking forward to having your feedback guys. Remember, more the bugs we have the better it is.
Matthijs: Alright, that it’s for today (maybe a few more questions 😄 ) — do make sure to check out the DEX at https://abdex.io and have a look. Keep an eye on the announcement channel tomorrow for when the LPs are added and make sure to report bugs when you see them, all feedback/bugs are 100% welcome, we really need to have the BEST DEX out there
Question: Tomorrow when there’s liquidity can I add EWT and swap for ALBT? Energy web tokens can easily be purchased on Kraken
Matthijs: Yes, exactly!
Question: As a business development professional myself, I’m curious if there are any pipeline updates from the team on LMaaS, TVID, etc? I know sharing specific names isn’t wise, but curious if the community could get insight into month-over-month or quarterly growth on pipeline generated, sales qualified opportunities, deals closed, etc?
Matthijs: We are planning to do a text-based AMA with our business development team somewhere in the coming months, I guess you specifically might want to participate in that one 😄
Rachid: was huge to have you guys, we missed these types of AMAs, now let’s make this DEX a huge success. Every person here will have a huge role to achieve this.
Question: Can we bridge ALBT from BSC to use on EWC?
Rachid: Yes, you can bridge from BSC to EWC.
Matthijs: Thanks to all of you guys, stay tuned!🙏
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is bridging the gap between decentralized finance and traditional finance, by remedying issues that exist in both spheres and linking them more closely together. They see the future of finance as an integrated system in which the best of both worlds can work together to increase capital flows and technological innovation.
Building this future by bridging traditional finance with compliant, data-driven access to new decentralized markets, DeFi projects and ecosystem-scaling tools such as funding and interoperability. As such, they are building a next-generation financial infrastructure that aims to provide regulated financial entities around the world with the tools they need to seamlessly access the DeFi space.
You can also find us on:
Telegram · Twitter · Instagram · Website · LinkedIn · YouTube · Medium
