Centaur AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Hello, everyone!😁
We are glad to meet here
James Hong (Co-Founder of Centaur)
Mark Harris (Co-Founder of Centaur)
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Hi I’m Mark, I’m the Co-founder of Centaur and I lead the business development team in UK. I have over a decade of experience in the FinTech space mainly managing payments, forex and bridging loans. Look forward to taking on any questions that the Cryptodiffer community might have. Thank you.
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
Hi everyone I’m James, co-founder of Centaur. I am a serial entrepreneur that started in the Maritime industry a good number of years ago but have since transitioned into deep tech and fintech. By leveraging on the networks I’ve established over the years across Southeast-Asia, I spearhead the integration of blockchain technologies into emerging industries to drive digital transformation and digital banking solutions. At Centaur, I manage most of the business development efforts for the Asian region together with our Singapore team.
CryptoDiffer team
Awesome, you both already answered my first question.
Q2: Can you briefly tell us what is Centaur in 3-5 sentences?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Yes definitely, Centaur is working towards being the bridge between decentralized and traditional finance by tapping on the strengths of both aspects. We are hoping to create unique solutions that expand the current use cases of DeFi, while remaining transparent and accountable in our approach and protecting the interests of our community and our investors. One of our first steps will be to resolve the over-collaterised loans situation that is currently prevalent in the market as this restricts liquidity and prevents the market from being fully efficient.
CryptoDiffer team
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved and about your upcoming
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
On the technical side, we have successfully deployed our liquidity pools on Ethereum testnet and Binance Smart Chain testnet. This liquidity pools use zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) technologies to ensure there is transactional privacy. We have also launched our own Centaur Chain testnet based on the Cosmos SDK and we’re looking to do a main net launch by Q1 2021. One of the collaborations we are working on is the Elrond eGLD liquidity mining program, where eGLD holders can stake their eGLD for 2 weeks on the Elrond mainnet and earn CNTR (ERC20) tokens on Ethereum. This program will be a pilot test for our future solutions, which utilize our liquidity pool and cross-chain capabilities. Beyond that, we will be launching our staking program in mid-October, which will allow CNTR holders to stake their tokens for rewards.
CryptoDiffer team
Awesome, a lot of updates to come out!
Thank you for great answers!
I think it is time to start community questions round!
Cryptodiffer Community
How is the CNTR token used? How to keep motivated to hold CNTR tokens for a long term?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
Hi! CNTR will be used as gas on our Centaur Chain main net and also to support our community and ecosystem contributors via staking rewards, oracle rewards and as collateral for our lending and other DeFi solutions.
Cryptodiffer Community
Centaur was formerly known as ProDefi. Why the change of name? And why have you decided to use an hybrid approach for your lending platform?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Good question, we have decided to rebrand to Centaur as the Greek mythological creature accurately reflects the core ethos of the project. We are a hybrid project that seeks to combine the best part of Cefi and Defi, and Centaur is a creature that has both the power of a horse and the intelligence of a human. For the second part of hte question, we have chosen to do a hybrid approach because we feel that accountability is something that is preventing a the mass adoption of the crypto and we believe that this is something that needs to be addressed for real-world adoption.
Cryptodiffer Community
I see many prominent partners who have collaborated with Centaur like Cosmos SDK, eGLD, so what goals will you achieve with them?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
We’re working with strong protocol partners such as Elrond to bring DeFi solutions over to their blockchain and integrate them with our larger DeFi ecosystem. By deploying our liquidity pools and oracle networks on as many platforms as possible, we will be able to interconnect multiple DeFi ecosystems and networks and work towards increased adoption of DeFi and digital banking solutions.
Cryptodiffer Community
In terms of bridging decentralized finance and traditional finance, the challenge is that you will be faced with Regulations. So, How does Centaur deal with the regulations?
At the moment, What’s the ”biggest” challenge you face currently in terms of becoming a successful project or company?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
The biggest challenge currently is ensuring that the solutions we are pushing out remain compliant with jurisdictions around the world especially with the uncertainty surrounding how many countries are choosing to regulate cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain. The regulatory challenge is one that is faced by all DeFi projects. Fortunately, our semi-centralised approach as well as our financial institution partners around the world guarantees that we have a leg up over our competitors in the space.
Cryptodiffer Community
Projects that rebrand aims to offer unique, innovative and creative solutions. So, what solutions is Centaur offering?
Regarding CNTR Public sale, why limit to only 500 tickets? Are you indirectly chasing people away from participating in your public sale?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Regarding the public sale, the team had certainly had this consideration on ticket size, but ultimately we want our public sale participants to have a sense of involvement in the project’s growth and we believe lowering the ticket size would dilute participant’s interest. We also want to only raise what we need and not open up more tickets just because we can. Hope this gives you a good insight on our public sale.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why do liquidity pools use zero knowledge proofs (ZKP)? How is this privacy protocol different from other privacy infrastructures?
Which countries does Centaur particularly care about and how will you take your first steps to integrate blockchain technologies into emerging industries?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
We use ZKP in our liquidity pools to add a layer of privacy for transactions to and from the liquidity pools. (Do you want everyone to know your wallet balance?)
Our privacy protocol implementation uses RingCT to achieve zero-knowledge. There are other privacy infrustructures out there using various different methodologies to achieve zero-knowledge, but we have experimented and came to the conclusion that this implementation has the best balance between security, speed and gas fees. (On-chain ZKP proofs/verification uses a lot of gas!)
Cryptodiffer Community
Many New users find it complex to use new platform, How will You try to provide Smooth & Less Complex User Interface?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
User interface design and a good user experience is key to our solutions development process. We have placed a significant emphasis on those aspects in hopes to increase the adoption of cryptocurrencies for users who may not be part of the blockchain space yet. One such example is the development of our wallet, which emphasises on a username/password structure as opposed to a 24 word seed generation. Although the seed is still generated on the back-end and stored locally after encryption for security, this process is transparent to the users unless explicitly requested.
Cryptodiffer Community
One of the major challenges militating against DeFi mass adoption is barrier to entry. Most DeFi solutions are only accessible to those with high level of understanding of blockchain technology. Could you tell us Centaur approach to addressing this issue?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
We aim to encourage user adoption through ease of use. This can be accomplished by good UI/UX. The ideal aim is to have front-end users interact with the platform without any blockchain knowledge because the blockchain magic happens at the back without them knowing.
Cryptodiffer Community
As Staking is Becoming Popular, How can Anyone stake CNTR Coin? & What benefits they will get?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
We’ll be launching a staking program for CNTR (ERC20) on Ethereum after our public sale. This will allow our community members to stake their CNTR for rewards of up to 60% APR. Over time, we will upgrade the liquidity pool to accept other tokens such as USDT and enable those options in our DeFi solutions.
Cryptodiffer Community
What is your solution to solve the problem of overcollateralized loan? Keen to share more details about it?
What are the use cases you are eager to share today?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
We intend to resolve the over-collateralization by accessing the lenders through traditional credit reports that are available to us via our wide network of traditional financial players, we will however keep the interest decision and the liquidity pool decentralised. As users on our platform gains credibility on our platform, we can then slowly steer towards their on-chain reputation for future borrowing.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why did you decide to hold your Public sale in form of lottery? Don’t you think this would discourage a lot of people about the project right from onset since the chance of winning in a lottery is very slim?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
The lottery format was selected as it is the most fair for all participants. The other options we considered were the possibility of using a FCFS structure but that would lead to a gas war and bot spamming, which would remove a significant portion of our community. The other common alternatives are auctions and their respective gimmicks but that would result in a very large raise from the public sale and potentially overvalue the project. We have worked out our finances very clearly and carefully and we know exactly how much funds we will need, with no intention to just raise as much as we can from the current hype.
Cryptodiffer Community
Centaur Network supports the Cross-chain transactions through the Centaur Liquidity Pool,
Can you explain how this Liquidity Pool works?
Do we need any fees to do some token transactions on Centaur Liquidity Pool?
And what is the additional requirement for use another features on this Centaur platform?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
On a high level, we are able to support cross-chain transactions by deploying the Centaur Liquidity Pools onto other chains and using the ZKP along with our Centaur Chain as the settlement layer.
Utilizing the Centaur liquidity pool will only incur platform fees (otherwise known as gas).
Cryptodiffer Community
Q1. Why would loan approval and issuance go through a centralized KYC and credit review process? Isn’t this against what DeFi actually stands for?
Q2. How do you aim to mitigate the risks of loan default which is constantly increasing among borrowers?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Centaur firmly believes in the ethos of decentralization. However, a purely decentralized approach to lending ultimately restricts lending to very niche use cases such as over-collateralised lending, which in turns allows borrowers to either short crypto-assets or trade them on margin. As the current industry is still in the nascent stage, other use cases such as unsecured lending remain impossible. By approaching the problem from a semi-decentralised angle, settlement of transactions can be performed in a decentralized manner on the blockchain whereas the credit review and KYC can be conducted on a centralized manner. This allows us to tap on the strengths of DeFi – transparency and security – while allowing us to build upon the existing financial infrastructure. Eventually, as the industry matures and more transactions are performed on-chain, we expect identity checks and credit reviews to be conducted on-chain, fulfilling the ultimate aim of decentralization.
Cryptodiffer Community
What oracles will Centaur use to get accurate data? How will Centaur prevent oracles from providing false information?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
There are two common types of oracles, off-chain data feeds (market data) and cross-chain data feeds. For the former, there are a large number of established oracle solutions right now and we have already initiated discussions with a few of them. More information will be published in the coming weeks regarding the partners. Beyond that, the cross-chain data feeds will be deployed by our team initially after significant research and development but we also have plans to work with partners to set up nodes to manage them. In all situations, the data feeds will definitely have to come from a network of oracles as opposed to just one or two trusted sources to ensure data integrity.
Cryptodiffer Community
I missed the Presale and I’m interested in investing in the Crowdsale, what are the details of this round, and what cryptocurrencies would be supported for investment?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Thank you for your interest in our project, you can get more information about our public sale in this post (https://medium.com/centaur/instructional-guide-to-centaurs-upcoming-public-sale-ebc5bcb43c5d). We hope to see your participation.
Cryptodiffer Community
Does Centaur have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of tokens and attract investors to participate in investments?
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
There is a fixed limit on the total supply of CNTR (6,000,000,000) and the burning of tokens is included in the initial ERC20 contract we deployed for CNTR. Although we do not have plans for such programs at present, the possibility for it definitely exists in future. More importantly, we believe in distributing these tokens to strong community members or ecosystem partners to drive more value to the network and our solutions, as opposed to just burning the tokens or buying them back to drive the price up.
Cryptodiffer Community
In the DEFI space, there are many sectors where the revolution has taken place. Compound in the crypto loan sector, Uniswap in the decentralized exchange sector, Synthetix in the tokenized asset sector. In which sector will DEFI revolutionize Centaur?
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
The Centaur Platform aims to establish itself as a full ecosystem for all DeFi use-case, we are able to facilitate cross-chain transactions without oracles having to pay high gas fees for providing cross-chain data. This will allow the consolidation of the major chains without barriers.
Co-Founder of Centaur, Mark Harris
Thank you to the Community! Great questions!
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Thank you
For your time;)
Great answers today
Thank you everyone for your questions!
Co-Founder of Centaur, James Hong
Thanks everyone, it was a great pleasure being here!
