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The largest Russian-speaking crypto media interviewed our CMO Nick Avramov. Below we provide a translation into English.
In October, the Symbiosis Finance multi-chain liquidity protocol raised $2 million from Blockchain.com Ventures, Amber Group, Spartan, Avalanche and others.
Currently, the protocol is still in the testing phase, but the SIS token is already being traded on OKEx, Bybit and Gate.io.
In December, we spoke to Symbiosis Finance co-founder and CMO Nick Avramov. He talked about the project team, the features of Symbiosis Finance cross-chain swaps and the upcoming launch of the protocol.
Question: Hello Nick. Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get into the crypto industry?
Nick Avramov: Hello! In 2016, when I graduated from the Graduate School of Management at Saint Petersburg State University my teacher advised me to write a master's thesis on blockchain.
I remember the first time I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and started to understand how cryptography based on elliptic curves works. Later, I published a part of my master's thesis on Medium.
In 2017, I worked for a company that brokered traffic on Facebook and Google. It was the year of the ICO. I started looking for blockchain marketing projects and got a job in one of them as a community manager.
A few months later, I realized that the crypto industry was more interesting than advertising and I fully immersed myself in it: I participated in roadshows of several cryptocurrency projects in China and also worked in the Digital Horizon Venture Fund.
Question: When and how did the idea for Symbiosis Finance come about?
Nick Avramov: In September 2020, although there was no name yet, we were just exploring the problem of liquidity fragmentation in blockchains. In January 2021, we started working on the project's code base, and in the summer we started looking for investors.
Question: How did you get the support of Blockchain.com and other major market players at an early stage?
Nick Avramov: We went the classic venture route. In June 2021, we started writing cold letters on LinkedIn, gave presentations, showed investors the repositories and the project development plan. We did what they teach in business school.
Blockchain.com played a big role in attracting investment. We got some positive responses, but it was the support of Peter Smith and Sam Harrison that made the difference. We are very grateful to them for that.
Question: And who is behind the word "we"? Can you tell us something about the Symbiosis Finance team?
Nick Avramov: The team is really great. The core developers of the protocol have known each other for almost five years. Among them are people from Zerion and a number of other projects.
The former team leader from Yandex and the Japanese conglomerate Rakuten is responsible for security. The head of the repeater network development team previously led open source projects at the Russian division of IBM.
Question: What are you working on right now?
Nick Avramov: The main priority is the launch of Mainnet in January 2022. We have recently released a mobile SDK and will soon start integrating wallets.
Question: How is Symbiosis Finance different from the ThorChain protocol?
Nick Avramov: Unlike ThorChain, we use the classic AMM pool model. This approach eliminates the need to stake a native token, in the case of ThorChain it's RUNE. Symbiosis Finance's liquidity providers independently assess the risks of the volatility of the pairs in the pool.
We focus on the transfer of tokens in networks with growing DeFi ecosystems, while ThorChain focuses on the transfer of native blockchain tokens.
Question: Does Symbiosis Finance work with EVM-incompatible blockchains?
Nick Avramov: The protocol supports blockchains with smart contracts that enable generation of EdDSA/ECDSA keys, such as Solana and Near. The complexity of the integration depends on the virtual machines of such blockchains.
AMM logic cannot be executed in networks like Bitcoin. However, while they support time-locked hash contracts (HTLC), Symbiosis Finance creates a cross-chain bridge to exchange native assets.
Question: Tell us about the specifics of the protocol's liquidity pools.
Nick Avramov: Symbiosis Finance uses pools with stablecoins: in the case of an exchange between PancakeSwap and Uniswap, BUSD and USDC.
The protocol looks for the most profitable way to exchange on decentralized exchanges - using the 1INCH liquidity aggregator on EVM networks and its own solution on blockchains without EVM support.
With this approach, you do not need to install any special software. The exchange can be done with one click via MetaMask.
Question: How do you solve the problem of uneven exchanges that cause the balance of an asset to increase in one network and decrease in another?
Nick Avramov: We equalize the pools and create incentives for arbitrageurs to equalize prices when there is high demand for a particular direction of exchange.
For example, while users often trade Tether from Ethereum in BINANCE Smart Chain, arbitrageurs do the opposite at a premium.
Question: Tell us a bit about the relay network. How can you run a node in it?
Nick Avramov: This is a separate network whose nodes track events on blockchains and then sign and send transactions to Symbiosis Finance users.
We will roll it out in stages. The early version will have 15 nodes that are synchronized via a smart contract on the Ethereum network. Then we will gradually increase the number of nodes and transfer the logic of the relay network to a sidechain.
To run a node, you need to stake SIS tokens. The amount of the stake depends on the stake of the other participants, but cannot be less than 50,000 SIS.
Question: Do you plan to transfer control of the protocol to the DAO?
Nick Avramov: Yes, but not immediately: such a transition would complicate the process of decision-making to update the protocol. That is more our long-term goal.
Everything has a price, including decentralization. At the moment, Symbiosis Finance has to develop and move very quickly: the market is very active and competition is increasing.
Question: How do you see the future of Symbiosis Finance?
Nick Avramov: We want to make Symbiosis Finance the standard for cross-chain communication. We can say that this is the cherished dream of our team.
I hope that in the future, third-party projects will use our work and develop additional services based on the protocol.
