XFai AMA Recap

02 Sep 202015:08

AMA

XFai AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:

Taulant Rambaja - Chief Scientist at XFai
Welcome Taulant, thank you for taking your time today!

Taulant Rambaja

great to be here!

Cryptodiffer Team

🙌🙌🙌
Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with!

Taulant Rambaja

awesome

Cryptodiffer Team

Let`s start with the introduction!
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Taulant Rambaja

Sure. I'm Taulant, the Chief Scientist at XFAI. I deal with everything cryptoeconomics and information theory related. I came up with the DLO (obviously in collaboration with the team) and I work day to day on getting the code out and polished. I've been in the crypto space professionally since 2013, and privately since 2011

Cryptodiffer Team

thank you for an introduction!
Now let's take some time and speak about the project you are working on!

Q2: Can you introduce XFai to us?

Taulant Rambaja

XFAI builds tooling to make DeFi accessible and highly liquid for users. We concentrate on fixing so called variance problems which users encounter day to day on DeFi. We are starting with our first product which is the DLO (DEX Liquidity Oracle) which aims to remove the barriers to trading efficiently on AMMs such as Uniswap, and make on-chain trading both more efficient nd more profitable than CEX (Centralized Exchange) trading. VIA the DLO small and mid-cap tokens will have the possibility to amass liquidity on-chain and therefore get access to other DeFi lego bricks such as lending protcols, margin, etc, which they today can't access due to sitting on CEXs.

Cryptodiffer Team

Awesome!
thank you for a detailed answer!
The last question from my team before we move on to community round of questions!

Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?

Taulant Rambaja

We have started our successful LGE (Liquidity Generation Event), which is a new more better form of farming and token distribution, Friday last week. We have gathered ~10M TVL in total between our USDT and USDC pools so far (which you can see on https://farm.xfai.com/). We are currently getting about 300k USD in farmig a day coming in, which is more than many farming events get into their pools in total. The farming will continue for another 6 months, with the first stage of the LGE ending soon.

We have also published our in-house framework to our graph neural network based next product which anyone can see on our github.

Expect a Flash Mintable ERC20 standard token to be published together with a blog post this week!

Cryptodiffer Community

Q1. XFai says it's actually one of the very few projects that can achieve impermanent gain, can you further explain what this statement means?

Q2. Also, I don't really know much about your two products which are Potentializer and the DLO (DEX Liquidity Oracle), can you please delve more on them and why they were developed?

Taulant Rambaja

Impermanent gain is something we haven't seen anyone else discuss so far but it is extremly important to the whole AMM space. Impermanent loss (or as some call it now divergence loss) happens when the *price* of the token moves (either up or down), while keeping the liquidity in the pools the same. Impermanent gain happens to prior LPs when the price moves far less, but the liquidity increases instead. That way the net value of your prior LP increases more than the impermanent loss. This happens due to how uniswap and others issue ever decreasing LP amounts as more liquidity comes in. This is why in our LGE we focus on keeping the price fairly stable, that way your APY isn;t there to make up for the impermanent loss but is rather pure profit (https://www.dextools.io/app/uniswap/pair-explorer/0xf8d99cf7046dedcb1dc8cfc309aa96946c9b9db2).

Cryptodiffer Community

What benefits does the Liquidity Generation Event (LGE) offer to new users? where can we start with Xfai?

Taulant Rambaja

APY is real, rather than there to make up for covering impermanent loss. Because of very high TVL (10m atm) and few tokens being in the hands of speculators, as well as due to how farmers buy up supply on uniswap via our one click interaction, you experience as an LP very little to no IL. This means that longterm investors in XFAI are farming rather than hodling, which in turn creates a virtuous cycle of creating more liquidity and more price stability.
2. See our video, I think it expains it pretty well https://vimeo.com/501103481

Cryptodiffer Community

Q. What solution has XFai come up with to help address the issue of DeFi Bot most especially that of uniswap?

Taulant Rambaja

Several strategies.
1. We seeded the pool 2 hours early with dust. Bots that didn't know about us got stuck.
2. An hour before the LGE we seeded with 4.63M TVL, which created very deep pools and therefore required millions from the bots to push up the price for a pumo and dump.
3. We work with a Market Maker who in real time identified pump attacks and sold against it the hour before the LGE.
4. The farming price at which users get the tokens via the 1 click transaction (+ the allowance transaction) was the moving average of the last hour, which gets rid of short term pumps. This was by far the best decision. This approach only works with our stable price approach of a target between 0.1-0.2 usd.
5. Flash loan arbitragers are long on XFIT so they are going XFIT-USDT-USDC-XFIT and are accumulating a position in XFIT instead of the opposite of what is normally happening.
6. Our two only pools are USDT and USDC, which leads to people not panick selling or panich removing liquidity during a sharp downturn. Uniswpa loast ~15% TVL yesterday, our pools only lost ~2.5, and we already made up for that.

Cryptodiffer Community

🙋
I saw in medium ama_article,
Xfai LGE offers various incentives for experienced liquidity miners ..
So
Aren't there incentives for new miners in Xfai ?
Should Xfai miners be experienced in mining?

Taulant Rambaja

The 1 cick interface (+1 allowance transaction) is the easiest farming interface out there atm.

Cryptodiffer Community

One of the big problems with low cap tokens is The ability to buy or sell low cap and mid-cap tokens at a fair price is a major problem that these tokens are having. But XFai implemented an ANTI-SLIP mechanism to curb that. Do you really think the ANTI-SLIP mechanism will be really profitable in increasing capitalization? And it would be nice if more explanation about how the mechanism works is given.

Taulant Rambaja

If you are referring to the DLO, we think we will kill darkpools as the DLO replaces darkpools alltogether.

If you are referring to anti-slippage during the LGE we have seen that every transaction with tnough gas fee got through to farm. We are even seeing transactions coming through days after from the mempool. Because of our approach those transactions haven't failed, and users experienced no slippage.

Cryptodiffer Community

In your ama_article, XFai currently have a Gas Reimbursement program. Did Xfai recently developed a technology that can save users lots of money in gas fees?

Taulant Rambaja

For farming yes. Turns our it's a bit difficult to explain to people as its very different from what people are used to. Stay tuned for a blog post on our medium page explaining it step by step how it is better. In short, you pay for 1 farming transaction which is full automatic (+1 allowance tx), and evrything else is done for you. Regardless of your tx size you will get in as there is no slippage and therefore transactions can't fail.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is the role of DLO in DEX liquidity pools? How does it provide liquidity and increase transaction volume and return on investment?
How does autonomous liquidity management work on smart contracts? How do you ensure interoperability?

Taulant Rambaja

The video mentioned above explains it, but in short the DLO adds and removes liqudity on the fly on behalf of the user (a bit similar to Yearn strategies). To do that the DLO has an internal target liquidity (what we cal a synthetic curve) based on CEX orderbooks. This way arbitragers and large traders can;t take advantage of lets say uniswap and take liquidity out of uniswap and send it to lets say Binance. This is a death spiral for the smaller tokens. Essentially all the money made today by CEXs would be made by the users on-chain instead.

Cryptodiffer Community

Really one of the great causes of problems in DeFi, are its oracles, so many prefer to associate with many oracles to minimize risks, but it will be that with XFai with its oracle and Synthetic curve, all kinds of problems and limitations can be avoided. data transmission?

Taulant Rambaja

The only thing we do in terms of oracle is observe the CEX orderbooks and construct a synthetic curve, which then gets send to the DLO contract as an update (this is the oracle part). The DLO then manages liquidity. Normal Oracles such as Chainlink or Dia don't manage liquidity. Essentially the price and liquidity of a token gets updates, rather than just data. We therefore don't compete directly with Chainlink or Dia.

Cryptodiffer Community

The human resource is one of the greatest asset of an organisation. Kindly enlighten us on the experience of your key team member and previous projects that they have handled that gives us the impression that this project is being handled by reliable and experienced personnels ?

I'm curious, how does this your project work so that later it can become a very large project? Should there be cooperation with one of the biggest markets such as blockchain or other markets? Thank you

Taulant Rambaja

We've managed quite a few people in previous projects, and I have a couple patents under my name in the US and EU. Other team members also have patents to their name.

As you can see our Audit report also reflects our ability in this case. https://omniscia.io/xfai-amplify-contracts

The most important part for us is though that *we purposefully don;t want to grow the dev team beyond max 7 people* and we plan on keeping the team all to the backend / smart contracts.

Cryptodiffer Community

What are the criterias or requirements to become a xfai investor?
What are the benefits of being a partner within your project?

Taulant Rambaja

Investor: Long term outlook in XFAI. Farming makes the most sense.

Partner: Example small to mid-cap token, or a token which hase a large delta between CEX liquidity and DEX liquidity (some top 10 DeFi tokens qualify as well actually). Lending protocols ad Crypto Credit Card / Wallet providers are also good partners. Progressive CEXs could also be good partners (we are already in talks witch all of the above)

Cryptodiffer Community

🧵🧵🧵🧵
What is the advantage of using DeFi oracle instead of triggering 3rd party contracts? How does DLO provide price feeds?
How exactly does your system that allows small limit token holders to earn a token return on autopilot?

Taulant Rambaja

The other points are answered in the previous rpelies and in the video but "What is the advantage of using DeFi oracle instead of triggering 3rd party contracts?" is explained as follows.
3rd party contracts such as Makers, Aave, etc don't onboard oracle price feeds from chainlink, dia, etc for small cap tokens from CEXs because orderbooks are extremly simple to manipulate. As a result those tokens never get onboarded to the rest of the DeFi ecosystem and never benefit from the ecosystem. The CEXs essentialy firewall them from the broader Ethereum ecosystem to squeez them dry of liquidity. By managing liquidity instead directly on-chain, the liquidity itself can be onboarded to the 3rd party protocols, such Aave now allowing certain uniswap LP tokens to be onboarded as lending collateral. (This way someone long on a token will never want to exit the token at all, instead just use lending protocols to get liquid). It's like buying a house to both live in it as well as use it as collateral for lower interest rates.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create #XFAI platform? Why did you choose the name #XFAI? Does it have special meaning and is there any story behind this name?

Taulant Rambaja

Our team has been involved in crypto and wallstreet for a long time. Personally I've saved more ICO projects than I can count (I generally get called when things go sideways and things need fixing). A lot of the insights we got from working on these problems have led to this architecture. This is also why our pitch is DeFi tooling in general, and not just a particular product. The only other team that I know of with this kind of genral tooking approach is Gnosis (big fan).

Cryptodiffer Community

Many projects use liquidity generators to increase their capitalization quickly, but really with XFai it will not be necessary to associate or create liquidity generators, but rather the same autonomous smart contract can generate the required liquidity?

Taulant Rambaja

Exactly. The liquidity adds primarily to liquidity, not to price, at least during stage 1 of the LGE.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hi Taulant, On a personal note, what is your (or your team's) greatest motivation in pursuing XFAI projects?

Wha is XFAI'S edge over other competitors?

Taulant Rambaja

As an abstract answer, our edge is our information theoretical view of things, rather than a market or development view of problems. We redefine problems rather tan try and work solutions into pre-defined problems. I know this sounds cheesy but I've seen time and time again how big a difference that makes.

Cryptodiffer Community

NFT is considered the next trend of the crypto industry after DeFi. Can XFai share your opinion about NFT? Where do you see the future evolution of NFT features and capabilities over the next few years?

Taulant Rambaja

NFTs backed up by something real such as exclusive VIP access, etc we can totally see making sense. NFT for memes is high-art style money laundering and tax evasion (then again there are banks lending against that very same art, so who knows where that will go).

NFTs representing smart contract access or rent control make a lot of sense and are very cool. Bonding curves for combinatorics and making non-fungible assets price-discoverable make a lot of sense.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is XFai's support in allowing traders to take profitable positions during times of high variance?
How do you manage to protect investors against high variable days and to secure their portfolios?

Taulant Rambaja

Regaridng the DLO: High variance is only a problem is liquidity is not updated and managed in real time accordingly. Small traders (ie non-whales or wallstreet institutions) simply can't do that, they don't have the tooling or expertese. The DLO does that for them.

Cryptodiffer Community

Do you have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of Token & attract Investors to invest?

Taulant Rambaja

Yup, and we are super proud of it. All future XFAI products generate profits denominated in other coins (whatever is being traded/managed). We use a portion of those profits to buy XFIT on AMMs (such a the two pools generated during our LGE now), and instead of burning the bought XFIT, we provide it as liquidity together with the other token, and *then* burn the LP token. This creates both an upwards price pressure as well as a liquidity buffer. Therefore LPs don't get exposed to Impermanent Loss, and it starts to make a ton of sense for lending protcols such as aave, compound, etc to list the XFIT LPs as collateral. The value proposition is that if you are long on XFAI, you will never actually have to sell XFIT to realize your profit. The DLO aims to help other tokens do the same.

Cryptodiffer Community

Does your project open a presale, is it possible that the next roadmap will have a pre sale, if so, where should I participate?

Taulant Rambaja

presale already done, raised 3.8m in 12h. You can still participate in the IDO or if you are long on XFAI just participate in farming at https://farm.xfai.com/
Our goal is to never have to list on CEXs, never have to pay ridiculouse exchange listing fees (which are ripoffs and take money from development). We already have deeper liquidity in our pools than the majority of mid-cap tokens. If exchanges wish to list us, they will have to trail the on-chain price feed, which we are ok with.

Cryptodiffer Community

I understand that Wall Street and Nasdaq experts and great experts in crypto and blockchain who have come together to develop XFai, being so, what is really the goal that you are looking to overcome XFai? could it really revolutionize the financial world of DeFi that we know today?

Taulant Rambaja

Fix the variance management problem for small holders. Turbocharge liquidity for all new projects so that they don't fail simply due to CEXs. Turbocharge the DeFi ecosystem.

Cryptodiffer Community

You point out on your website that "Low rates are achieved by creating an efficient chain market", but do you really mean that the ETH chain does not have an efficient market? And is that why it has such high rates?

Taulant Rambaja

Based on our internal data, it's definitely not efficient. We will likely make a longer publication about that down the line. Gasfees are high due to many reaosns, but primarily due to frontrunning bots and bad mempool management.

Cryptodiffer Community

💥 XFai💥 say that it allows holders of small capitalization tokens to obtain returns that provide liquidity and increase their position in those projects, but gas is now a problem that they offer to solve these problems so that the small investor has profits and does not remain caught?

Taulant Rambaja

The gas situation is changing quickly and we keep our options open fow now until we deploy the DLO. Keep an eye out for our anouncements. We believe that CEXs will have to change as otherwise they won't be able to compete with on-chain solutions very soon.

Cryptodiffer Community

Smart contracts are susceptible to failure and many projects fall victim to this, costing users money and the project discrediting. How reliable and secure is your smart contract? Have you tested it through any of the parties?

Taulant Rambaja

Our LGE smart contract has been audited https://omniscia.io/xfai-amplify-contracts/static-analysis/XPriceOracle , but obviosuly that is not a guarantee. We are working on various ways how to increase security coverage even further for the DLO before the launch this year.

Cryptodiffer Community

As Community is the core of a project,
While you build your project, do you take into account the community feedbacks and demands?

Taulant Rambaja

Yes absolutely. In fact we postponed our LGE by one week because of the requests by the community to do more bot protection. We succeeded and are very proud of that.

Cryptodiffer Community

In our Crypto Space, I think DeFi, Staking and Yield Farming are trending topics right now.
So, did you make this project only for the short term because of these trending topics? or have you a long term plan for this #XFai project?

Taulant Rambaja

I think farming and liquidity pools in general are trending because that is what makes on-chain price discovery *potentially* more efficient than CEXs. Blockchain AMMs AMMs can't compete on speed of execution with CEXs, but they can instead compete with liquidity management. Hence DEXs prior to Uniswap/Bancor could not compete as they simply copied the CEX orderbook paradigm. This liquidity based competitive advantage is driving projects to optimize for on-chain liquidity generation. Unfortunately most projects are still trying to drive up the price, instead of driving up liquidity of their tokens.

Cryptodiffer Community

Currently a lot of crypto investors use phones to work, so does XFAI have a plan to develop a platform on IOS or ANDROID?

Taulant Rambaja

Not yet, but we are keeping our options open. Crypto credit card providers are interested in using the DLO + Lending protocols for providing effiient payment mechanisms for small cap tokens, so that would be mobile some time in the future.

Cryptodiffer Community

Hi, I'm Toluwalogo, a computer science graduate. You said you've been in the Crypto space personally since 2011. What was it that drove your early adoption?

Taulant Rambaja

I started working with BTC for the first time when the then only code dev of BTC gave a presentation at the CIA. That got me thinking, that was afaik also what drove Satoshi out of the forums.

Cryptodiffer Community

I've seen a lot of defi projects pop up recently, and die from a lack of liquidity and confidence in the dev. question how do you convince investors because of this problem?

Taulant Rambaja

We generated 10m in liquidity so far, with the price moveemnt within our tagret for the farming. In terms of devs, we're pretty tough haha. We also need to keep our options open in terms of which products to release first and in what form, as the DeFi space chages insanely fast.

Cryptodiffer Community

Do you agree that, adoption and utility are key factors to a project's survival and success in the Crypto Currency world?
And what are going to be done in $XFai project to drive global adoption of project amidst crypto regulations, legislation, and competition?

Taulant Rambaja

I think in terms of adoption and regulation crypto can maybe be compared to Uber and Airbnb. They are obviously illegal in most countries, but they grew on purpose faster than the regulation could keep up with, with the goal of caputin enough local stakeholders to push their own agenda. I think the same thing is happening with crypto. Just look at the Coinbase IPO. If Coinbase launched today with the setup they had back then, they would all be in jail. But instead they grew so quickly that the regulation formed around them.

Cryptodiffer Community

XFAI develops many products, which is an advantage when it can meet almost the needs of users. However, does developing many products make management difficult? How do you ensure the quality of all XFAI products?

Taulant Rambaja

Have the products be atomic, self contained, GPL, and finite in scope. Essentially the UNIX philosophy. I think most projects are making a big development and security mistake by adding more and more features to the same product.

Cryptodiffer Community

With the restrictions that the US has on us joining a lot of IDO's, will there be open sales like with Xfit for us to participate in? Also, will we have advantages holding Xfit for future IDO's? Thank you

Taulant Rambaja

The IDOs follow the regulatory rules enforced by the platforms holding the IDOs on our behalf.

Cryptodiffer Community

What areas did you focus on to make XFAI respected and adopted project all over the world, do you have experienced members in your team for the effective use of tools such as marketing, media, promotion, social networks?

Taulant Rambaja

I gotta give a big shout out to the media team. I'm definitely not a marketing person, they are doing an amazing job.

Cryptodiffer Community

Basically, when the price of token is seriously Dump, projects can lose their community in cypto space. So, what is your plan to make a product oriented community who will support #XFAi longterm?

Taulant Rambaja

The vast majrity of the token holders are farmers, liquidity is deep and our primary goal. Dumping is hard in our case, but obviousy not impossible. Most of the best projects I know of out there (eg aave, gnosis, polkadot, etc) all experienced dumps, while today you can't even see on their charts the initial pumps anymore. We're in this for the long run.

Cryptodiffer Community

What is more important for you, token value or technology development?
Which one do you prioritize for the sake of the development of xfai Finance project and why?

Taulant Rambaja

Liquidity and technology.

Cryptodiffer Community

I read that XFIT is a "buy and make" token. How different is this from the normal buyback and burn tokens we know? And how beneficial will this ‘Buy and Make’ strategy be to XFIT holders?

Taulant Rambaja

buyback and burn increases the price, but doesn't help with supply. So now you have a higher price level, with not enough liquidity to back it up. Whoever exits first (dumps) at that higher price level will make the most returns, hence a stupid race condition. Not to mention that if your do buyback and burn on AMMs such as uniswap you screw over the LPs with impermanent loss. The LPs then exit and the projects goes into a downward spiral. Buy and make mitigates all those issues.

thanks for everybodies questions! great AMA community! Very insightul questions!

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you very much Taulant! I do really appreciate all the great answers!