AMA Recap: ProtoFi (27 Sep 2021)
ProtoFi is audited and KYC’ed and has just launched.
Meet the ProtoFi protocol, an answer for a sustainable solution in the current DeFi, token distribution and token farming paradigm: The first community-driven, user-owned AMM on the Polygon network giving every investor the chance to become a shareholder combined with healthy tokenomics and innovative features.
Telegram: https://t.me/ProtoFi
Website: https://protofi.app/
Docs: https://protofi.gitbook.io/protofi-docs/
Team: https://protofi.gitbook.io/protofi-docs/team/team
Q1. Let’s kick start with an introduction of you and your team, which are your past experiences and roles?
Dayton Miller: We wrote a particular section about it on our gitbook (the team section you can find here: https://protofi.gitbook.io/protofi-docs/team/team). I think it is not so common to find this kind of team’s background in a defi project nowadays.
Basically, we were born as a team of 3 persons, all of us friends in real life.
I have been in crypto basically all my adult life, being what you could call an early adopter. I started to mine bitcoin when it was still feasible to do with a couple of computers with decent specs (and a block reward of 50!), which is ages ago In “real life” I’m an entrepreneur, mostly active in the real estate sector. I’m thrilled of having the opportunity to blend entrepreneurship and crypto all in one package by co-founding ProtoFi.
ZaoFi, is protofi’s co-founder and a commodities options trader, focused mainly on Oil and working for a multi-billion physical company. Bachelor’s degree in economy, master’s degree in finance and bla bla. Fell in love with crypto in 2017 and started to trade bitcoin options on Deribit during his spare time
Last but not least there is our dev. @ProtofiDev is the one that has made everything possible. He has worked in the past with Zao as a machine learning specialist to create strategies for the company where Zao works Proprietary trading business. He is an incredibly talented developer and codes in a lot of different languages that u can read about in the docs cause we generally don’t understand too much when he starts talking about this kind of things
Q2. If someone doesn’t know Protofi yet, why should invest in it instead of the other thousands of farms?
Dayton Miller: Let’s start from the first truth. Except for 1 thing, which is the way the ecosystem works, and it will work, and the emissions will change over time… we did not invent the new space shuttle to go on Mars.
I think there are 2 ways to build a company. Create something people need or improve something that already exists.
So taking something from Uranium (but audited by Certik and checked during a coding work of 3–4 months), lockup period from panther, a most secure moneypot (called Fission in our protocol) inspired from pancake. An elastic emission supply based on the ratio between the MC and TVL that adjust once per day … and this time will not weight on the native farms also… but just on the non-native farms…
A dynamic way to reduce deposit fees when deposit into pools and farms is no more convenient for a yield farmer. Dunno why the other project keeps the stupid 4% or whatever deposit fee without lowering it when it is obvious no one is gonna be staking in it anymore.
Q3. ProtoFi has 2 tokens — Proton and Electron. The interaction of these two is quite compelling so please tell us more about that in particular.
PROTO https://protofi.gitbook.io/protofi-docs/tokenomics/proton-token
ELCT https://protofi.gitbook.io/protofi-docs/tokenomics/electron-token
ZaoFi: Well proton is the native token of ProtoFi, and can be freely be bought or sold. Electron on the other hand, represents a share of the protocol and allows users to become owners and receive daily dividends. It s a bit like ICE vs BlueICE with the only difference that our blue ice, which is electron, can only be farmed through our native pools.
Dayton Miller: In regards to electron…with electron you are basically the owner of ProtoFi. You gain everything that the protocol generates. You are a shareholder. Consider that of the swap fees 100% goes to the electron stakers of the deposit fee 50% goes to electron stakers and 25% for buyback and burn to sustain the Proton price in bad moments. Our gain is “only” the 25% coming from the initial deposit fees. Then nothing. We think, to give almost everything to investors, is the only way to succeed. at least this is what history taught us so far.
Q4. KYC is done? Is there any audit?
Dayton Miller: KYC has been done with Rugdoc
And for the audit…We have a completed audit with Certik!
https://www.certik.org/projects/protofi
https://rugdoc.io/project/protofi/
Q5. What is the topic of the partnership with Iron Finance?
Dayton Miller: Iron is the nucleus of the protocol as we decided to give you full trust.
First of all, we created a ICE-PROTON LP where you can farm Proton and at the moment it gives you a 5.8% daily return. (DPR). Second, we will give you, for the first time, a use case to their Stablecoin as, our Fission protocol, that pays the fees to electron stakeholders, will pay out the dividends in IRON, your stablecoin.
Remember that the only way to earn Electron is by buying Proton and staking it together with USDC and MATIC, in our Nucleus Section.
Q6. Electron seems like a hard-to-get token and gives an additional use case for Proton, which is always good. Also, as a side note, you are giving our IRON token a great use case and I’d love to see more projects adopt IRON the same way. thanks for this idea and hint to our community to reach out to projects who could adopt IRON for profit distribution. So, even if explained in details in your docs, can you try to tell us how the tokenomics and protocol works?
ZaoFi: The tokenomics is made by all the features of the protocol.
So how you can see from the first pic, in few words all of our features are explained and you can go into details in our docs of course. From the second picture you can see the straight forwards mechanism with non-native (so basically, usdc , usdt , btc , etc) you can farm Proton. Just by means of Proton Lps so proton-usdc and Proton-matic, in nucleus section, you can farm Electron. As said above, with Electron you are basically the owner of the protocol → exactly like a company share with its dividends. These dividends, instead of being paid in usd or Eur, are paid in $IRON.
COMMUNITY QUESTIONS SEGMENT
Q1 from spence#3141.
Have you ever considered a 0% deposit fee on all pools? The devs will gain by participating in the pools themselves. In a decentralized protocol, why should any one person have a coded benefit over the rest?
ZaoFI: that’s the final aim, we are gonna slowly decreasing the deposit fees towards zero.
Q2 from N1HERE#2929.
How do you plan to promote the use of the exchange and get more volume?
ZaoFi: we are working hardly to make new partnerships and have a nice budget for marketing reasons.
Q3 from Isaac Rivas#4201.
Security question: how will you consider adding a timelock or multisig to the contract addresses. having a single address of the owner creates centralization power on the protocol, the team has been very public with all the updates but this will give a bit more of trust there.
ZaoFi: insurance came for us basically from CERTIK and KYC and some risk label rugdoc .. and i dunno what else to do.
ProtofiMainDev: Ok so I’ll be a bit talkative here but I think it is worth it:
- Our tokenomics, in particular the Quantum Supply mechanism, demand us to be VERY flexible, therefore we need to intervene straight away at a daily bases, for example, tomorrow we are probably going to reduce emissions and boost the native pools.
Given the previous reason that I explained:
- Timelock doesn’t let us intervene as fast as we want you: do you really would like for us to set a timelock of like 1hr?
- Multisig: we are considering that, but we have to find a trusted third party to sign very fast our changes to the masterchef, for the quantum supply mechanism
Therefore, we are considering multisig, but it’s not that simple, as it is difficult to find a fast and trusted third party to sign transactions
Q4 from DodusExodus#6614.
Electron is profitshare token now, do you plan to move toward governance utility down the line or keep it as benevolent dictatorship?
ZaoFi: ahahah love it, no.. DAO is one of the first things we d like to do with electron.
Q5 from amaziz#9697.
Are you planning to expand to other chains?
ZaoFi: yes, first thing in our roadmap if things go well.
Q6 from zefr#2305.
Ultimately, for the Fission to provide long term value for electron holders, the protocol must be able to generate consistent fees (accounting for growth). The docs don’t go into great detail about the marketing and future fee-collection cases, I’d love to know more about what you guys have brainstormed to bring in a healthy level of consistent dividends to ELCT holders.
ZaoFi: So basically the idea is → deposit first
Partnership then and when and if, i hope yes, we are super mega big, swap fees.
Q7 from N1HERE#2929.
Is there any strategy to earn yield with the non native token while they are staked? like in aave or in the ironlend?
ZaoFi: with no native i didn’t do a strategy in the docs like i did for natives “strategies and simulation “ section, but i have my own spreadsheet as investor, one day i ll share it.
Q8 from LethalDrEvil#8248.
At a high level, how does the anti-whale feature work? Does the “transaction monitoring system” prevent whales from depositing over a certain amount, or just merely notifies the devs and/or community that a large amount was deposited?
ZaoFi: You cannot swap in a single TX more than X% of the marketcap.
ProtofiMainDev: Antiwhale prevents huge transactions that could dump the price straight away, the more we go on in time, the more we will lower the antiwhale setting
