STONE FORTRESS AMA RECAP -04132021
Dear STONE community,
Recent several days have witnessed great progress of STONE, which comes with challenges as well. Building a transparent and collaborative culture within our community is what we set as our original intention. Therefore, we hosted an AMA session on STONE. FORTRESS at 08:00 PM GMT+8 today, along with an announcement on future plans of incentivizing Alpha test miners. Below is the recap of today’s AMA recap.
Q1. What can we further do with STN tokens other than just holding or trading? Are there any plans for STN staking? Do we have any roadmap for this?
STONE is the most secure and innovative yield platform for liquid staking assets and cross-chain assets. STN plays a central role in it to govern and incentivize the platform. There are a lot of missing pieces to build liquid staking assets and cross-chain assets, including cross-chain transfer, trading marketplace, and lending marketplace. STN will play on all those fronts. Imagine when Stone becomes the anchor of all assets across chains for defi, STN will be the payment token.
In addition, when liquid staking assets are issued and supported on Stone, STN will be the “insurance” or “deposit” to ensure underlying assets are safe for users. In the long term, Stone will be governed by users and hence STN will be the key instrument for community governance.
STN staking is on the way, as we explained in our beta product plan. STN staking and STN/ETH LP farming will be the initial features to introduce, and we will announce the incentive rewards for the users. Beta product is to incentivize users to bring liquidity for STN and also test out more liquid staked assets, such as stETH, aETH, rDOT. And you may also see STONE’s first attempt to try on multiple blockchains to harness better yield.
Q2. Do the team think they lost their momentum after the distribution of the alpha rewards which disappointed everyone. What are the plans that the team has to regain its momentum going forward?
We are sad to hear that some community members feel that their expectations are not met in this bull run during alpha test. Yes, the market has gone crazy and STONE did not provide the best APY and high gas costs of Ethereum hit all of us. We are aware of these challenges and have learned quite a number of lessons. To share some of our learnings:
1. As explained in STONE’s vision, STONE is not aiming for high unsustainable APY with high risk. STONE deploys strategies that are secure and provide long-term rock solid yield. We are not going to change that. We will still implement a step-by-step cautious approach for new features. We believe it is for the best of the overall defi space.
2. Let’s take a long term view on this, the yield farming reserve in STONE is super high (initially we plan 55% of Token Supply for Yield Farming Reserve), which means we can design a lot of innovative products with STN incentives for the long term. All of our community members will be able to farm STN in various ways (including vaults, staking, etc). With a preset rewarding strategy, the community can easily know APY beforehand!
3. Beta products will bring more fun to our community with new vaults, cross-chain farming, etc. and we are about to complete a web3 grant for Polkadot. You can expect more progress on Polkadot as well!
4. You can expect more community campaigns in the coming months, where contributing members will be rewarded with STN. Maybe in a less crazy market, the rock solid yield of STONE will be more attractive than other protocols (sustainability matters)
5. There used to be some concerns from the community that we arbitraged the funds deposited in the vault to make extra profits, we actually distribute all earned profits to all vault participants 100%, which can be verified by on-chain information.
6. To further engage all our alpha participants, we have decided to award all registered addresses in the alpha test for the 2x booster program for the upcoming STN staking and STN/ETH LP staking programs, thus all earlier participants who have then joined the alpha phase will be getting STN rewards as per their staking and additional 100% rewards will be released to the users at the end of staking program concluded for 100% release.
Last but not least, we have also released the BETA roadmap, please feel free to check the post, and of course, we will update if there are any new updates.
In addition to that, we are developing some NFTs together with some super cool NFT community. we will reward some lucky alpha users with stone NFTs! The details will be announced once those NFTs are developed. A small hint, it’s ‘love’ from STONE.
Q3. What is the current progress of stone And what the team is doing to see the bright future
We have shared our beta product plan, which is well on track. To summarize what you can expect in the coming weeks:
1. STN staking and STN/ ETH LP farming to reward token holders and also launch Uniswap pool
2. New liquid staking vaults to include new assets such as aETH, rDOT, rSOL etc.
3. The largest liquid staking asset trading market place for users to trade them on STONE.
4. Cross-chain capability to deploy stone on BSC and others. 5. Layer 2 solution to reduce gas fee (currently discussing with celer network and also in-house development of ZKsync).
In addition, we strongly believe liquid staking market will be the next focus of the whole ecosystem. LIDO, the liquid ETH2.0 protocol has been receiving the lead investment from Paradigm for the valuation over 450 mil USD, and we do see continuous institution interest flowing into the liquid staking sector, and for STONE, we are positioned at the anchor asset aggregation for those liquid staking tokens, which we are on the right track for the next market momentum. again, currently the liquid staking market is still growing, and the whole market cap for staked POS assets are over 150 billion USD according to stakingrewards.com, and again we are just at the starting point to unlock those asset potential, and POS bearing protocol rewards, which are average at 15% APY as the base rewards, which can add to the current yield market as well.
Q4. When can we expect ankrETH staking? Will the awards be the same as the alpha participants?
aETH will be enabled in the beta product. We launched rETH first to understand the challenges of implementing a liquid staking asset marketplace and we have learned that the space is still nascent with a lot of technical improvements and user education required.
Therefore we decide to launch aETH only in beta so that users understand the one-way path from ETH to aETH, and the liquidity requirement for the right trading price of aETH/ETH. In terms of rewards, we will first launch STN staking and STN/ ETH LP farming to test out predetermined APY (as opposed to alpha base). In this way, you will see the APY before participating in the staking.
As points out, we have discussed with Stafi re the unpegging issue between rETH and ETH (which means though 1 rETH is equivalent to 1 ETH, due to lack of liquidity, now the 1:1 ratio does not hold, therefore, we do suggest you stay with STONE which we will provide base STN rewards, and in addition, we are also working with Stafi to distribute additional FIS as rewards to the pool participants. We do envisage the overall liquidity of rETH will be gradually recovered by Stafi, but as of now, to avoid being any haircuts, suggest be patient. Stay tuned for more updates.
Q5. 1. As a child, my parents told me not to mess with greedy people. Do you think this is true? 2. If a person is greedy, then there can be no question of any risk control. In this case, there can be no talk of any Solid Yield. Isn’t that logical?
We have been dealing very carefully with the funds’ safety and soundness, when we identify the issues from the lack of liquidity from dForce, we have immediately reached to the team and work out the solution, we do not want to compare ourselves with other protocol who faced the same situation (there are some protocols simply shutting down all withdrawal functions for all users ) we take the initiative to resolve and get back the liquidity as soon as and as much as we can.
STONE’s logic goes like this:
1. Rewards from farming strategies come with risks and stone only goes with low risks strategies, high risk high rewards, low risk medium rewards.
2. There are 55% of tokens for yield farming, these are all for farmers and let’s look at future yield farming and how to best reward users.
3. STONE has a lot of risk control that’s why it is perceived as conservative and thank god funds are all safe in alpha test and also hopefully for the future.
Q6. There were a lot of technical problems in alpha testing. It started with the UX / UI of your website (where it was impossible to do anything without deleting all cookies), non-gas-optimized smart contracts ( contract was written so badly that it did not accept cents and transactions returned and people lost commission, many commission …), then a muddy story with liquidity Dforce. People were nervous when making deposits and withdrawing funds. (For example, I had to sweat a lot to withdraw money, I had to install a new browser and metamask). But you know about it. The question is- were these risks worth 35% APY ? How do you think ? If the market has a lot of farming with APY more than 100% on stablecoins (sxp, Alchemix , sigma, etc. ). Good farming, reliable. Are your actions fair in this situation?
Good question and all you are saying are fair points. Yes, there are technical improvements during alpha and high gas fees to eat up users’ profit. The liquidity story with DForce is true though because you can check on the blockchain, nothing can be hidden. That’s why we really appreciate all the alpha testers (to share a behind the scene story, the team initially wanted to only allow 5 million of TVL for alpha test, in that way the APY would be much higher, however, we saw so many users excited and decided to allow all users. The TVL exceeded expectations by 10x...)
We don’t think any platform can claim high APY all the time (APY is too fluid and shall be calculated in the long run). What has been done is done and unfortunately no perfect solutions. Again, alpha users are appreciated by the team and hence a few things can be expected: 1. There might be some NFT tokens to be distributed (or lucky drew) to alpha uses only 2. In beta product, alpha users will get a booster for STN staking 3. Think of the long term, there is a bit portion of STNs reserved for yield farming (the team didn’t plan Stone for only six months but 5 years!)
Q7. 1. When people asked about APY alpha testing, your admin said, I quote “Yes STN rewards will be comparatively high when compared to others. Also it matters how long you’re participating in farming”. Don’t you think it was a deliberate lie to get a big TVL before listing? 2. In your WP, says 3 million Stn for community contributors. The question is — where will they go? Or did you also lie to the WP? Isn’t alpha testing rewarding the community for their support? If you are going to spend them in the future, then I want to upset you, until you settle the issue with alpha testing, then you will not have any community (no, I lied a little, there will be a community of haters).
1. There’s definitely no lie but could be a mismatch in expectation with the community. There could be a survivor’s bias here, the community is quoting some high APY protocols but we shall look at the space overall.
2. The 3 million STN for community contributors are still in a wallet and untouched. If you reach the WP carefully, it says these are for future members who helped to grow stone. The rewards for alpha miners are from yield farming reserves, not the community contributors. And all these funds will be given out to the community in the long term. Community members who are willing to help the project with the following aspects — security, tech development, communications, as being part of the team to help grow STONE. We welcome any members who are willing to contribute and DM us for discussion of the roles.
Q8. Stonedefi — only one project that has offended testers on bullrun market. Question. What chance do you think your Stone Golem has to become a meme in all crypto space, meaning boundless greed? Or do you already have complete rebranding in mind?
TBH we do not want to debate on this, while the community has been witnessing other protocol which has resulted in the significant loss of users’ principals, and again we have reserved 55% of token supply for the yield farming incentive, if we consider only for the project itself, we will allocate much smaller allocation of yield farming incentive. This is not the end of the whole program, we will continue releasing more reward mechanisms for the community.
Q9. Please provide general information about the safety of funds and if funds are decentralized from the team. Additionally, please advise how funds will be insured. Other projects are using external solutions such as Tidal Finance or offering incentivized insurance pools via native staked tokens to insure funds. For example, Wing Finance is using this approach.
Great question! There’s a strict restriction of the fund flow in STONE. In the technical design of STONE, the funds in the stone vaults can only be deployed to specific locations i.e. strategy locations, such as compound or DForce. That means no one can move the money out of the vaults without the pre-agreed locations. This mechanism is the same as YFI. We have reached an agreement with Tidal finance for future insurance. This is what we are working towards as well. To have funds covered by insurance.
We are forming partnerships with other decentralized insurance protocols to enter into coverage partnerships for users’ funds, and we are thinking of not only partnering with one insurance protocol but with 2–3 to diversify the risks born by other protocols as well.
Q10. Do you have plans for issuing STN on other blockchain, for example, on BSC?
As we have answered in previous questions and also in our beta product plan, since Stone is a cross-chain yield aggregation platform, we are indeed working on launching it on different blockchains, including BSC. Stay tuned to our updates please!
Q11. You didn’t announce the awards before alpha testing. But haven’t you heard of unspoken standards of crypto industry? People should be rewarded for early risk and loyalty to project. All projects do this. This is called — crypto ethics. Have you heard of such a concept? thanks for the answer
Sorry we are not aware of such unspoken standards in the crypto industry, again Let’s take a long term view on this, the yield farming reserve in STONE is super high ( we have planed 55% of Token Supply for Yield Farming Reserve), which means we can design a lot of innovative products with STN incentives for the long term. All of our community members will be able to farm STN in various ways (including vaults, staking, etc).
Really thank you for being with us. We will try to make beta product much more exciting (with predetermined APY display!). Keep in mind, alpha users will get 2x reward booster in beta and a chance to get stone-exclusive NFT!
For more details find us here:
Website: https://www.stonedefi.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DefiStone
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/stonedefiannouncements
Chat with us:
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