Equilibrium AMA Recap

31 Aug 202000:08

AMA

Equilibrium AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello Alex, thank you for taking your time today!
Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with:
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community and briefly tell us what Equilibrium is?

Alex Melikhov

I guess some part of your community already knows me. For newcomers, I’m Alex, the Founder and CEO of Equilibrium, the leading cross-chain DeFi project. I'm an engineer in applied mathematics by training. Before blockchain, I was focusing on fintech — mostly payment systems and gateways. I have always been on the tech and architectural side of things.
My current team has been working together since 2017 and we were building on Ethereum those days. In 2018, we kicked off the development on EOS. In April 2019 we launched the first decentralized EOS-based stablecoin as the first product of the Equilibrium’s product line, called EOSDT.
Today EOSDT is the most liquid decentralized stablecoin and the biggest DeFi project on EOS, with over $14 million of total value locked in our smart contracts, and over 1,000 user positions generated.
Now we are developing on Polkadot to obtain true cross-chain interoperability and to turn Equilibrium into a full-fledged DeFi hub.
Equilibrium is a one-stop-shop for DeFi users — it is comprised of a comprehensive lending platform and a professional-grade cross-chain DEX. Think of it as a place where you can make use of all functionality that DeFi primitives can offer on Ethereum, but in a cross-chain and risk-free manner

Cryptodiffer Team

Great, thank you for an answer!
Q2: What milestones you have achieved so far and what are your upcoming plans?

Alex Melikhov

We’ve launched our core business logic on Polkadot on our public testnet in November 2020. This paved the way for users to earn passive income on their assets by way of bailouts, securing loans, or borrowing Equilibrium’s USD-pegged stablecoin against baskets of multi-asset collateral. At the same time, we conducted a token generation event on the mainnet that saw our newly minted EQ tokens released into the market.
We also booked Quantstamp, one of the most qualified cybersecurity auditors in the space, to make sure our Polkadot-based technology is secure and free of vulnerabilities. They have already completed the first half of Equilibrium’s security audit.
We have completed development according to a grant from the Web3 Foundation to build handy developer tools that facilitate other DeFi projects migrating to the Polkadot ecosystem.
Looking to the future, we will enable transfers of our EQ tokens alongside upcoming exchange listings and the launch of our ETH bridge. Since our substrate will be bridged with Ethereum, we are expecting some amount of EQ tokens to be ported there. We are planning to launch the Uniswap liquidity pool then.
We will launch liquidity farming alongside our main products on the mainnet this year. Liquidity farming will reward people in EQ tokens for actively using Equilibrium's products.
We are planning to integrate the BTC bridge as well. Also, we have a Parachain Lease Offering coming up.

Cryptodiffer Team

let's talk a bit more about Parachain Lease Offering:
Q3: Can you tell us more about your upcoming PLO?

Alex Melikhov

Sure! We are going to raise DOT as a means to secure parachain slots in two consecutive risk-free phases. Phase 1 will be a token swap, Phase 2 will be the crowdloan (the auctions on Polkadot).
During Phase 1 users will be able to swap their DOT tokens for our EQ tokens. The swap is free of risk since every participant gets the right to swap EQ back for DOT for free at the initial swap rate after the end of the parachain lease.
During the auction in Phase 2, users can contribute DOT directly to the crowdloan module to receive staking interest in EQ tokens within the parachain lease period.
Feel free to read more about our PLO: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt/what-you-need-to-know-about-equilibriums-upcoming-parachain-lease-offering-505cd9287782
Also, register for the PLO whitelist here https://equilibrium.io/plo/whitelist and automatically get a 1% bonus on your contribution to the PLO.

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers!
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the next step Equilibrium will takes to makes defi better in global usage!?Does Equilibrium support any Staking or mining program?

Alex Melikhov

Great question. Our primary goal is to make DeFi more stable and safe place overall. For this purpose we have worked out a more balanced economy model behind our product line. It includes bailout mechanics that is designed to replace auctioning and to mitigate risks of forced actions / significant slippage in the distressed markets. In simple terms bailouts will introduce liquidity settled in advance to secure loans in the system

Equilibrium offers a wide range of staking and liquidity mining opportunities. We have introduced out liquidity farming program on our latest community call. https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt/what-we-covered-during-equilibriums-second-community-call-246af37beda1

Cryptodiffer Community

During this First quarter Equilibrium will integrate the use of the parachains of Polkadot on your ecosystem, so can you tell us Which role will have this parachains once they be fully integrated?

Alex Melikhov

On Polkadot, Parachains are the means to communicate across the ecosystem. Example: Polkadot will enable cross-chain interoperability, and for this, it is building bridges to other major blockchain protocols outside of Polkadot (BTW, so is Equilibrium). Once the parachains are in place, other projects on the Polkadot substrate will be able to use these bridges to work across different blockchain protocols.

Cryptodiffer Community

Equilibrium share so many features related with other DeFi projects, like lending Protocol and Stablecoin interoperability, so can you tell me what are your competitive advantages over similar projects?

And what are the present and future goals of Equilibrium?

Alex Melikhov

Other than the fact that we focus on cross-chain functionality from the outset, there are three core components that set Equilibrium apart from other DeFi projects:

1) a unique risk algorithm
This monitors the overall system liquidity in real-time across blockchains & corrects it to maintain liquidity.

2) programmatic interest rate
Our flexible interest rate adjusts system solvency and lets borrowers choose their own balance between risk and collateralization.

3) bailouts are a proactive solution to bad debt
On Equilibrium, bad debt is liquidated proactively instead of using forced auctions. In this way, we avoid the problem that MakerDao experienced in March 2020 in an adverse market.

Cryptodiffer Community

As The 1st interoperable money market on Polkadot that combines pooled lending with synthetic asset generation and trading, what is the biggest problem occured did Equilibrium solve in the entire of DeFi space?

Alex Melikhov

Actually, I would immodestly say we solve several key problems. One is that we use the bailout mechanism instead of forced auctions (as just explained).
Second, as you rightly note, we are offering all main DeFi use cases in a one-stop-shop - which ends the market fragmentation that is plaguing DeFi.
Third, our cross-chain enablement on Polkadot allows us to offer maximum liquidity pools across all main crypto assets (until this, digital assets have been isolated on individual blockchains).

Cryptodiffer Community

Who are Equilibrium real competitors then? How can you capture the most value from this nascent market for data governance, CeFi-DeFi integration, among others? How will that benefit $EQ tokenholders?

Alex Melikhov

I think the best way for you to visualize how we play out compared to our competition is to take a look at this table.

As you can see, we offer all the advantages that our competitors have, and more. Our offer is more than the sum of its parts, because we add something now one else has in this combination: Cross-chain enablement.
In addition, there’s our unique programmatic interest rate - which offers the user a lot of flexibility in determining their own interest rates (ours are not fixed), and we have a very low c-ratio to start with.

In the context of all this, our EQ token can be used for bailout and collateral liquidity. All of these functionalities rival classical finance while adding many more benefits and value for EQ token holders.
Thanks everyone for your attention and questions! Follow us and stay tuned!

Telegram chat: https://t.me/equilibrium_eosdt_official
Telegram announcement channel: https://t.me/equilibrium_news_feed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EquilibriumDeFi
Medium: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt

Feel free to register for the PLO whitelist here https://equilibrium.io/plo/whitelist