Hi Folks!
UniLend Finance announced a partnership with Stafi Protocol and they have an AMA session on January 8 to discuss this collaboration among other UniLend's initiatives and features. The AMA session was held on the Stafi TG channel (https://t.me/stafi_protocol) and Chardresh Aharwar, UniLend's founder and CEO, Vishal Kothari, UniLend's community lead and Ayush Garg, UniLend's marketing ops lead, participated in this session. Here is the recap of this event.
Segment 1: Introduction and basic questions
Stafi:
Let me introduce myself, I am Sara, from StaFi core team. I am very honored to have this opportunity to talk with @ChandreshAharwar, the CEO of UniLend, and @VishalBlockchain, the community lead of UniLend , about the exciting synergyies between UniLend and StaFi.
Chandresh Aharwar:
Thanks Sara for Inviting us. Feels great to be a part of this community today. Great to see the awesome progress stafi is making continuosly
Vishal Kothari:
Thanks Sara, Feeling great to be with you at StaFi Community.
Stafi:
Q1. Can you please give us a brief overview of UniLend?
Chandresh Aharwar:
Sure! Before we get started I would like to give a shout out to my team for their relentless work, recently we launched UniLend Initium V1, the Alpha release of our protocol. We worked straight through the holiday season to make sure that we executed on our roadmap! https://app.unilend.finance/ In simple Terms, you can imagine UniLend = Aave + Uniswap. UniLend is a comprehensive DeFi protocol with the mission to unlock the true potential of decentralized finance. Essentially, UniLend Finance will offer every DeFi capability imaginable for any ERC20 asset, including the $40B+ of assets which are currently excluded from DeFi. UniLend is like a combination of Uniswap, Compound and Aave. This is one way to think of our protocol. In addition to an intuitive UI, UniLend will also have a robust governance model powered by UFT (UniLend Fiance Token), and this is just the beginning.
Stafi:
Q2. It’s great to hear that your team is so focused and congratulations on the launch of your protocol’s Alpha release. How about we expound on what you stated, that this is just the beginning. Maybe we can share a little about our partnership’s future and your goals coming up?
Vishal Kothari:
Thank you for your positive words, I would be happy to share. I think everyone should be excited for our upcoming roadmap goals and the partnership between UniLend and StaFi. Like stated above, we’ve recently launched Initium, the Alpha release of our protocol. It was very successful, we already have our early access program community members testing the protocol and we’ve received a lot of great feedback. Soon we’ll add further features to the Alpha and add more testers in phases. In addition, Q1 of this year has officially kicked off, so we also have new releases on the horizon. Specifically, the next big release will be the Beta release of our protocol. There are many additional milestones coming up very soon, such as liquidity mining/staking features to be added to the mix. In regards to our partnership, it seems that you guys have made really great headway into the development of your ERC20 bridge. Great to see! We can’t wait to see how that shapes up, mainly because it’ll enable us to synergistically collaborate. StaFi will then be able to convert the substrate version of their rToken to an ERC20 rToken version, which will ultimately enable FIS and rTokens to launch on our protocol. It’s so exciting to think that a whole new slew of token functionality will be enabled via StaFi and soon DeFi capabilities for these derivatives will be empowered by our protocol. These are exciting times. We’re excited to unlock the full DeFi potential of staked assets together! I’m sure many of your community members are already aware of the details of our collaboration, but for those who aren’t, there’s a useful article here for those who want to learn more: https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement
Again this is just the beginning, many more collaborations and unique protocol functionality are yet to be announced.
Stafi:
Q3. This all sounds so exciting! One question about security - how can users be sure they are safe while using such a new protocol?
Vishal Kothari:
Great question. I would say we are much more secure than other money market protocols. For instance, current protocols are dependent on other DEXs like Uniswap etc. for liquidations (which is a major concern for adding illiquidity & more volatile assets). Nobody has any sort of control on these DEXs, whereas in the case of UniLend, we are deriving the lending/borrowing capacity of assets based on the liquidity available on our trading platform. Hence, we are not dependent on any other protocol for liquidation & everything is handled within the UniLend ecosystem. The problem we are solving is quite large and it requires a complete ecosystem to be built for catering to such a problem. Progress on this front is going strong. Maximum security is a key priority of UniLend Finance, we are picking up where key DeFi protocols like Uniswap left off and continuing the development of the decentralized finance revolution. Also like our roadmap suggests, during Q1 of 2021, we will have proper audits in place from a variety of the best industry players to make sure our protocol is safe for the users.
Stafi:
Great. Next question. Q4. You brought up the roadmap and it got me thinking about the future of your protocol again. What else do users have to look forward to further down the road in 2021?
Vishal Kothari:
Though our Alpha was a monumental event in our journey, there is so much more in store for 2021. Above we stated that Q1 has many exciting roadmap milestones on the horizon, including our Mainnet release coming in Q1. Additionally, Fusion Farming should also go live during the first quarter. This is an innovative feature which will allow UniLend liquidity providers to attain two different tokens at once by providing liquidity. Again, this is just the first quarter of 2021. In the future, UniLend will implement community governance, the UniLend Ecosystem Fund, launch onto multiple chains, layer 2 implementation for a superior user experience, and even metatransactions. We’ll also bootstrap new projects in the UniLend ecosystem with full DeFi functionality right from their token launch. Empowering brand new tokens with comprehensive DeFi functionality is a concept completely new to the crypto space, and something which is extremely valuable to new tokens looking to establish a user base and solid use cases for their token. Therefore, we anticipate that listing on UniLend (in addition to traditional platforms such as Uniswap) will be standard procedure for new token launches. In fact, we recently launched a poll on Twitter regarding this, and the crypto community echoed our sentiment strongly. You can see the full roadmap outlining our plans up until Q3 of 2021 here: https://unilend.medium.com/presenting-unilends-roadmap-gearing-up-for-alpha-launch-in-december-2020-89ff10805bcd 
These are all things that we can confidently say we can fulfil based on the dates shown via our roadmap, though there are many other items we are also working on/researching in the background.
Stafi:
Q5. Ok, great answers so far. Above you stated you’re picking up from where Uniswap left off? I heard your team has great comparison articles in regards to this, could you expand on this topic and let us know where we can find these articles?
Vishal Kothari:
Yes, to clarify, we have the utmost respect for Uniswap and the other leading protocols for being trailblazers in the DeFi space. That said, we believe that our comprehensive DeFi functionality and permissionless listing model will facilitate the evolution of DeFi and bring the next wave of users into the DeFi space. Our community has requested further clarification on UniLend’s strengths as a DeFi protocol, which is why we launched our DeFi Dissected article series. The goal with the series is to show the cryptosphere why we will be a major contender, with more to offer than our competitors. UniLend is a unique protocol, built from the ground up, that is capable of truly revolutionizing DeFi. I would encourage everyone to follow us on our UniLend Medium (https://unilend.medium.com/) to stay up to date on our collaborations and to take a look at the DeFi Dissected article series for themselves. Two of the most recent articles within this series were for comparing UniLend with Aave and Uniswap, here are the links to get you started: Comparison with Uniswap : https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-unilend-finance-taking-the-uniswap-defi-revolution-to-the-next-level-b576ce915350
Comparison with Aave : https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-brief-comparison-of-unilend-and-aave-2e7726c1e7ee 
We also have another release in the DeFi Dissected series coming soon, so be on the lookout for that as well.
Stafi:
Last one. Q6. StaFi has reached cooperation with UniLend to integrate rToken into the UniLend platform. So Could you tell us more about the user scenarios of integration rToken in UniLend? When more and more rTokens will be listed on UniLend, are there any related plans?
Vishal Kothari:
This is the most anticipated question, yes, people will be able to bring the aforementioned rTokens onto the UniLend Ecosystem and take advantage of the many DeFi capabilities of our platform. Users who bring their rTokens onto UniLend will be able to use them to trade for other tokens, or add liquidity to our liquidity pools as well. If someone adds liquidity to rToken liquidity pools on UniLend, they will get double benefits by receiving staking rewards whilst collecting the 0.3% automated market maker (AMM) fees for being liquidity providers. Additionally, UniLend also features borrowing and lending. This means that people can bring their rTokens onto UniLend and use them as collateral to borrow assets. Alternatively, holders can also lend their rTokens out to others on UniLend and collect on interest rates. As soon as our product is live, rTokens will be listed on UniLend. If anyone wants to see how it will look, we are going to start listing test tokens on Initium (Alpha). Link : https://app.unilend.finance/ 
Ayush Garg: The community is super lit. We would like everyone who find UniLend interesting and want to stay updated to join our announcement channel.: https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement
Segment 2: Live Questions
Q1. Can you explain in more detail how Unilend’s Launchpad will work? Thank you.
Chandresh Aharwar:
Great Question. Even though, we haven't shared much details about this, but I will give you high level idea. With Launchpad, users will be able to participate in the projects launching on our platform without any friction. Everyone will get equal opportunity & $UFT holders will be at advantage in the complete scenario of project sale. Projects launching on our lauchpad, will be open for lending/borrowing immediately & will enjoy yield farming of $UFT & project launching with decent apr. Their are so many more things happening in this area, which I will save for later announcement :sunglasses: Q2. Which one of these aspects important for you?
A-Increasing Token Price&Value
B-Empowering Platform Development
C-Building Community Trust
D-Expanding Partnership Globally
Vishal Kothari:
All aspects mentioned by you are on a higher priority by us. We have launched our project keeping a long-term scenario in mind. So yes everything will be streamlined on a time-frame taking all communities together with us and expanding the UniLend Ecosystem. This will go definitely in parallel with our platform which is continuously evolving. These will lead us to have a great price discovery for sure.
Stafi:
Great! Thanks for @ChandreshAharwar, @VishalBlockchain, @ayushgrg to be with us in this AMA tonight. And we're really appreciated for the participant to join us AMA tonight with UniLend, thanks to Chandresh, Vishal, Ayush.
Ayush Garg:
We have seen some great questions here and want to answer each one of you in great detail. But due time constraint we need to stop here. No worries, you are welcomed to join our community and ask us more about the project, we would love to hear from you.
https://t.me/UniLendFinance. It was a great AMA! Loved the energy and depth of knowledge of the community!
Vishal Kothari:
Thanks for bringing us to your great community Sara!
