AMA Recap with Coin98
Last Friday July 30th, Cryptofish did an AMA with Coin98 on their telegram channel. Here’s a recap of all the questions and answers:
Could you please tell me just a little more about the team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced teams?
Myself, I’m a software engineer with experience working at Google and a CEX. I’ve also been an early contributor to several Avalanche projects such as Snowball, Pandaswap and Sherpa Cash.
My co-founder, 0xmurloc, is a full-stack developer, but his specialty is product management. Most recently he was a Senior Product Manager at Grab. We also have several people we’ve hired through the community, for example, we hired a young student from France who’s creating a new bonding curve contract. That’s the kind of people we’re looking to hire.
I think out of all the Avalanche projects, we have a highly technical team, and we value talent very very greatly!
What is your biggest problem when building your project? Has anyone done this project model before?
Avalanche is a very small ecosystem right now, and mainly filled with DEXes. Pangolin is currently the #1 DEX and every other DEX has failed to capture significant share. When we launched, many believed we will fail like all the others. But we knew the community was upset with Pangolin because they have developed very slowly (no new features in 5 months) and not listened to the community. Our motivation for creating Trader Joe was because we shared the frustrations of the community — we know they wanted a DEX that was building fast and that’s what we do best.
The Trader Joe project has good growth potential, but the crypto space is not in one of its best moments. Can you explain to community members why they should invest in the project and participate in its long-term development? What makes you feel confident about the survival and sustainable success of your project in the near future?
Avalanche has many DEXes, but we knew the community wanted a DEX that was building fast and doing different things. So we took a much different approach.
First, we built a DEX that is different with new features that people want to see; they are simple things like a new UI, candlestick chart and better farming incentives, like double reward farming.
Secondly, we believe business development and marketing is very very key. We have great relations with pretty much every project on Avalanche and we work together behind the scenes to help drive more liquidity to Trader Joe.
As for marketing, we realize that because Avalanche is so small, we need to spend alot of money to drive new users onto Avalanche as well — this is why we have allocated a large portion of our tokens to a community treasury so we can spend big. It also helps that we have friends who are well connected — such as with Coin98 🙂
To summarize — we’re very confident because 1) we know we have a great team that builds fast, 2) we are very responsive to our community and 3) we are very active in marketing and developing key partnerships.
Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and maintain the activities of the project / company. What is the way to create profits / revenue of Trader Joe ? What is the income model?
Our token model follows the Sushiswap model, so like SUSHI and xSUSHI, we have JOE and xJOE. xJOE holders receive 0.05% of trades as a fee. When lending is released, we will make sure xJOE token holders receive a percentage of interest and closed liquidations. And then with any other DeFi products we release, we will make sure the xJOE holders will receive revenue. The JOE token will always have value!
Smart contracts are vulnerable to bugs, and even recently three big new DeFi projects were victims of this, costing users funds. How efficient and secured is your smart contract, and did JOE ever audit it via any external party?
100%. We take security very seriously. In addition to writing lots of robust unit tests for all our contracts, we are also almost about to be finished being audited by HashEx. Our lending will also be 100% audited as well.
Lending is a long-waited feature on Trader Joe as well as the whole Avalanche Defi ecosystem. I would ask how collateral assets for lending will be decided?
We’ll be using Chainlink oracles to secure price feeds. So the collateral will need to attain to a few criteria, mainly 1) lots of liquidity (i.e. in the tens of millions) and 2) multiple sources of liquidity.
Many new projects initially developed well but were suddenly abandoned. How will you manage your project to get your position on the market and become the best project in the blockchain world?
Yes this is a very common and sad occurrence. We’re currently the #2 DEX already after a month launching and we’re very competitive people, so let’s say we’re not going anywhere 🙂
Our next step to becoming the best project on Avalanche is: 1) launching lending and 2) developing key partnerships to give us the recognition of a big project.
What is the strongest advantage that you think will make this team lead the market? in contrast, what weaknesses do you have and how does the team plan to overcome them?
Definitely our strongest advantage is that we have a very experienced team that acts professionally and works fast. We’ve also been complimented on our branding and marketing which we take very seriously. Currently, our biggest weakness is probably lack of team members! So at the moment we’re quite stretched, but we will be adding new team members very soon!
While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands?
Absolutely! We listen to our community everyday and we take everything into consideration. My co-founder, 0xmurloc, is a product manager, so he takes user feedback very seriously. We’re all about creating a great user experience for our product and this is one compliment we’ve received most from our users.
1-Increasing Token price. 2- make Token Valuable. 3-Building Community Trust. From 3 aspects above, I want to ask, which one is the most important for you? If all above are important for you, which one that will you do first?
2 & 3, followed by 1. 2 — we will do this by optimizing for trading volume and TVL since our JOE token will receive a share of all trading volume. 3 — building community trust is important, we listen to them everyday and once lending is launched we will transition to a DAO and the treasury will be mult-sig. 1 — this is also important, but optimizing for token price early on is a mistake as it can conflict with optimizing for trading volume and TVL.
How does Trader Joe plan on utilizing the new Avalanche Ethereum bridge? Also, How does Trade Joe plan on preventing plateauing on development such as other DEX’s? What drives the innovation at Trader Joe?
The new bridge will bring in lots of new liquidity, as we hear there will be big players coming onto Avalanche soon, such as Aave! We want to use our treasury funds wisely by incentivizing new comers to Trader Joe — we have a few ideas for this.
We think there’s many things to build everyday, from big killer features such as lending and leveraged trading to making small improvements, like refining the user experience. So to answer that part — I think we will have lots of things to do to never plateau 🙂
Our goal is to become an innovated DeFi-focused platform. We love DeFi and we all read quite a lot about other protocols and their research. So future innovation will be about taking what we think is relevant in DeFi, such as capital efficiency, derivatives, doing research on them, and trying to implement them in our own ways.
