Hi Folks!
UniLend Finance participated in an AMA session on March 29th on the IM Community TG channel (https://t.me/imcommunityitw) and Vishal Kotahri, UniLend's community lead and Ayush Garg, UniLend's marketing & ops leading were in this session. Below a recap of this event.
Segment 1: Introduction and basic questions
ImCommunity:
Welcome everyone. Today Im Community will host AMA with UniLend Finance. Today our guest is: @ayushgrg @VishalBlockchain from UniLend Finance. Please introduce yourself a bit.
Vishal Kothari:
Hey, I am Vishal Kothari - Community Lead at UniLend Finance. I have started my career from Computer Education in 1998 and exploring around various IT related businesses and services finally realised the best thing technology has given us is the Cryptocurrency as I was studying and researching about cryptocurrencies since 2014. I have been guiding projects on marketing front & community growth from more than an year & have been an early part of UniLend Team from start of the project.
Ayush Garg:
I am a Computer Science graduate with experience working at companies like Uber and Box8. I have been part of the Crypto space since early 2017. I have also worked with the startup Oasis — Initiated by IIM Ahmedabad and Rajasthan Government. I have been part of UniLend’s team since the launch as a lead in Marketing and Operations.
ImCommunity:
Q1. What is UniLend for our audience members who don’t already know? Can you please give us a brief overview? And while you're making introductions, can you please also introduce yourself and tell us what inspired this concept?
Vishal Kothari:
Sure! Before we get started I would like to thank the IM community and team for inviting us to talk about our tech stack. We imagine that this conversation will have some interesting information that everyone will want to hear. In regards to your question, UniLend is a comprehensive DeFi protocol with the mission to unlock the true potential of decentralized finance. The concept for UniLend came from the simple idea of allowing every token to access DeFi. Essentially, UniLend Finance will offer every DeFi capability imaginable for any ERC20 asset, including the $29B+ of assets which are currently excluded from DeFi. I have heard people say UniLend is like a combination of Uniswap and Aave. That’s one way to think of our protocol. In addition to an intuitive UI, our team has recently introduced our Permissionless Flash Loan product, which is launching on March 30th. I’m sure we’ll highlight our products a little today so stay tuned! We encourage everyone to look over our links to better familiarize themselves with any further questions they may have about UniLend Finance.
Website: https://unilend.finance
App: https://app.unilend.finance
Litepaper: https://unilend.finance/docs/unilend_lightpaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/UniLendFinance
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UniLend_Finance
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/UniLend
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unilend-finance
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UniLendFinanceOfficial
Medium: https://unilend.medium.com
ImCommunity:
Q2. What kinds of challenges or hurdles have you run into along the way? Also can you expand on some of the major updates that UniLend is bringing to the table in the short-term?
Vishal Kothari:
I think everyone should be excited about our new flash loans product and the many updates that are coming in the short-term. Since the launch of Initium V1, our alpha release, we have been working tirelessly on several large endeavours. Of course we’re working heavily on our flagship product for lending and borrowing, we’ve made considerable headway on this and we’re on track with these developments. Though we also were multitasking by working in stealth on flash loans. Our flash loan product is going to change everything. This isn’t just another flash loan product to add to the market though. Our iteration is very competitive being that it will be nearly 3x more gas and cost efficient than the current leading solution. In addition, our flash loan product will be permissionless, which means we’ll be tapping into a much larger and unexplored market. https://unilend.medium.com/unilends-flash-loans-are-3x-more-cost-efficient-than-other-popular-protocols-like-aave-b42e6c6e8789
For those here that are unaware, last year Aave made over 2B in market income through their flash loan product. Their product currently only supports 20 to 30 assets though our product, which is quickly approaching, will support the 6000+ assets left out. You all can probably easily see that we’ll be doing something cutting edge and at a much higher scale. In addition, we released a paper recently highlighting the technical aspects of our flash loan product. Also we noticed many people talking about the airdrop and token burn mechanism that’s built into our flash loan product. Can you believe that 30% of the fees that come from using our flash loans will actually be used to market-buy UFT and burn it? That’s correct UFT will slowly become a deflationary asset. Moreover, we have a staking mechanism built into our flash loan product which will give added utility to UFT. We’ve also noticed UFT holders silently stacking more of our governance token once they found out that 70% of the fees from using our flash loan product will be distributed as staking rewards! We haven’t really run into any problems along the way, just the normal everyday things that arise with a quickly innovating team. Everyone probably already noticed from our recent deep dive into flash loans blog, that we have also been working on our UI. We have some snapshots of our product, and it’s really coming together nicely. https://unilend.medium.com/deep-diving-into-unilend-flash-loans-5eed69e75c7e Furthermore, UniLend will also have a robust governance model powered by UFT (UniLend Fiance Token), Liquidity Mining/Staking, Fusion Farming and a UniLend Ecosystem Fund for upcoming IDOs. Of course these are just a few of the updates coming in the near future.
ImCommunity:
Q3. This all sounds really exciting. One question about security - how can users be sure they are safe while using your protocol? Is it audited?
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 illiquid &/or 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 catering to it requires a complete ecosystem. Progress on this front is going strong. Maximum security is a key priority of UniLend Finance. We’re picking up where key DeFi protocols like Uniswap left off and continuing the development of the decentralized finance revolution. Also we recently completed an extensive audit with Certik, they vigorously audited our smart contracts and we can now say we’ve passed inspection. We know that some of you may not know who Certik is, they’re best-in-class within our industry and for various other technology spaces. Their team heils from academia to enterprise to ensure the correctness and security of blockchain projects. Our community can now rest assured that they’re in safe hands. Everyone please stay tuned to our announcement channel, this is where you can find our team updates. https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement
ImCommunity:
Q4. Okay, so the community is safe., that’s great to hear. I’m sure everyone was excited to hear the audit went well. So UniLend has made some really big announcements already in 2021. What would you say is the single most important development to come out this year?
Vishal Kothari:
Though our Alpha was a monumental event in our journey, there is so much more in store for 2021. We don’t believe that any of our updates are necessarily more important than the others. Each and every update we bring to the table is hard hitting and valuable for the future of DeFi. Bootstrapping existing projects into the UniLend ecosystem with full DeFi functionality will really bring new opportunities into existence. Empowering new hot 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. Since the beginning we’ve continuously made strong partnerships in the space. For example, we’ve partnered with projects like Base Protocol to equip rebase tokens with further DeFi capabilities. Recently we also paired up with Fantom Finance to bring synthetic assets into our ecosystem. Towards the beginning of the year UniLend also partnered with Mirror Protocol, which will lead to UniLend listing the world’s major synthetic stocks like the FAANG for lending and borrowing. UniLend will be the first protocol to launch many of these DeFi functionalities and capabilities. Recently we also announced that UniLend’s flash loans will be the first ever flash loan product to deploy to the BINANCE Smart Chain. This cross-chain expansion should open many doors that haven’t even come into existence yet. It’s wild to think any BNB, BUSD and BEP-20 token holder will now be able to utilize their assets for decentralized trading, lending, borrowing, flash loans, yield farming and much more using UniLend. This is entirely revolutionary! To clarify, UniLend’s flash loan product will initially launch on the Ethereum mainchain. Though many of the updates we’ve talked about today will come very soon if not already launched and fully functional. It’s obvious that it’s hard to choose between the partnerships and the technical headway we’ve announced since the beginning of the year. If our communities want to continue staying in the know, they can join our daily conversations in our Telegram community. Telegram: https://t.me/UniLendFinance
ImCommunity:
Q5. Awesome, I can tell your team has been working very hard. So let’s talk about UFT, how will your guys' token play into all the buzz that’s surmounting?
Vishal Kothari:
This is a really great question. There are so many points we can bring up. We’ll try to keep this short and concise though. The most recent UFT update was within our flash loans announcements. $UFT will be the first token that users can stake liquidity for to enable flash loans. This is a major utility for UFT, which will create a great demand for our token. Furthermore, UFT is our governance token. This functionality is coming next quarter, so in other words, governance is coming soon to UniLend Finance. In addition, UFT will be tied into our ecosystem through the UniLend Ecosystem Fund, Meta Transactions and many collaborations we’ve already announced and for partnerships still yet to be disclosed. Also, through various partnerships, UFT holders will gain access to other platforms for yield maximizing opportunities and cross-chain DeFi strategies. We think holding UFT will give access to many utilities not yet imagined.
Segment 2: Live Questions
Q1. Are you planning to promote your project in countries / regions where English is not good? Do you have a local community for them to better understand your project?
Vishal Kothari:
Great question. Yes we already announced our 3 regional communities.
1. Indonesia ????: https://t.me/UniLend_Indonesia
2. Vietnam ????: https://t.me/UniLend_Vietnam
3. Nigeria ???? : https://t.me/UniLend_Nigeria
Also we are bringing more regional communities so the users from different geographic can have ease of communication with the team through the regional community.
Q2. In the most projects especially defi those ones offering yield farming are driven up by hype and scarcity, so when the hype dies the project dies. What's the key to sustaining Your Project?
Ayush Garg:
This is a very good question. A lot of projects are giving stacking and Yield Farming opportunities but they are burning through their pockets to maintain higher APY. We on the other hand, made a viable business model, where the pool liquidity will be used in flash loans, which an earning project. Aave earned $1.7 million last week just from that. We have a better rate, low gas fee flash loan, with liquidity of virtually any erc 20 token. We can easily surpass Aave's revenue in few weeks from Launch. So actual 1-1.5 mil we will be generating from our pools. That's a very good APR for stakers and the business will exist as long as we have volatility in crypto markets.
Q3. Would you be happy to look back at UNILEND history and performance up to this point compared to the day you started this project?
Vishal Kothari:
Great question. So this is started with the concept of bringing every token to the DeFi as not more than 30+ tokens from top 100 is supported by the leading platforms and we at unilend believe in inclusiveness of the ecosystem and in a permission less manner. So we have started with welcoming every ERC20 token to AMM - Automated Money Markets and now we are aiming towards welcoming every token to it ;) Again you can go through our journey at our medium blog : https://unilend.medium.com/
Q4. Token burning is beneficial to any project because it can control the number of tokens in circulation and provide investors with greater incentives. Does your great project have a plan for token burning?
Vishal Kothari:
Yes we have developed our own burn mechanism which will initially benefit all the $UFT holders for sure.
You can go through advanced token burn mechanism: https://unilend.medium.com/uft-token-burn-30-of-protocol-flash-loans-fees-will-be-used-to-acquire-burn-uft-upon-our-bdc382b6e4a5
Q5. What is the team’s orientation and development plan for 2021 in the Defi region, why do you think Defi, this immature term, has a future? What results do you expect to achieve?
Ayush Garg:
We have our plans for 2021 charted here. We are going live on mainnet tomorrow with our Flash Loans and Staking. Then comes our Flagship product, Lending and Borrowing. https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement/78. I dont agree with it that Defi is a immature term. We always had money markets, equity markets etc and we have real world transaction of all the functionalities in regular finance. With the total market of crypto currency reaching 2 trillion dollars, it is natural that we witness the financial environment maturing. But the nature at core should be decentralisation and inclusive.
Q6. In how many ways or what are the ways your project generate revenue? What is the revenue model? How it can be beneficial for both investors and for project itself?
Ayush Garg:
This is a good one. We are going to generate revenue for the liquidity pools via our Flash Loans, Lending and Borrowing Fee, Swap Fee etc. Out of all the fee collected,major part will be distributed among the stakers and liquidity providers, and some part we will use to buy back UFT (creating additional demand) and burning them (reducing overall supply). These events will add much more value to UFT token in future, along with used as currency and governance.
Q7. Can you list 1-3 killer features of Your Project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Vishal Kothari:
Yes for sure. 1. Inclusion of every token
2. We are permission-less
3. We dont compete but we add value to the current DeFi ecosystem
You can go through our blog: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-unilend-finance-taking-the-uniswap-defi-revolution-to-the-next-level-b576ce915350. Also our major comparisons at our DeFi Dissect series at our announcement channel https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement
Q8. The goal of the DeFi is to create a new financial system that eliminates subjectivity, bias, and inefficiency by relying on programmable terms. Does your project support this vision and how does it participate in the DEFI space?
Ayush Garg:
This is what why we are here. We want it to be very simple so each everyone can participate in defi fluidly. Out project is open source, anyone can start their on own version with our protocol. A lot of centralised exchanges have integrated our products too because we have product which is very compatible.
Q9. Can you share your fundraising situation and how your private and public offering tokens are distributed? And what are the plans for the next IEO? What should we prepare if we want to participate?
Ayush Garg:
Please go through our tokenomics here:
https://medium.com/@UniLend/announcing-the-unilend-uft-public-sale-interest-form-is-now-live-17e0cc6d7ad7
Q10. Many new projects develop well at first, but then fail to achieve good results. How will you manage and develop your project to gain a position in the market and become a good project in the blockchain industry?
Vishal Kothari:
Development is not a challenge for us making assured to you all here as our 2 co-founders are leading developers so we are well equipped on that front.
Also gaining good position for sure you can check at coinmarketcap or coingecko for our current ranking amongst 7000+ projects listed on each platform we are doing great. Our marketing team is also great as our CEO Chandresh Aharwar is from the Marketing background and handled Matic Network for marketing for months as he was VP Marketing and strategy of this great Top 100 project. You can go through our team at our website: https://unilend.finance
Ayush Garg:
Our community is the major stake holder in our project and we listen to all the feedback which comes our way. We have also launched our Alpha with early access to the community, and we got 33k interests, which is huge.
ImCommunity:
Thanks for the useful information from @ayushgrg @VishalBlockchain.Thank for coming here today.
Vishal Kothari:
Thanks to you as well feeling great to be your guests.
Ayush Garg:
Thank you for inviting us.
