Hello everyone, today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from MCDEX. The AMA took place on September 12 and our guests were. Gareth (Head of business development) and Vikas (Head of marketing).
The total reward pool was $500 and it was splitted into three parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarize some of the most interesting points for you.
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Mary | Satoshi Club: Hello, Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce that our guests today are from MC DEX! Welcome to Satoshi Club @daochemist @dogfather007
Gareth| MCDEX: Hey guys! Thanks for having us! Very excited to do this!
Vikas | MCDEX: Thank you, happy to be here. Excited.
D. | Satoshi Club: Before we start please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your project and how you got involved in crypto world?
Gareth| MCDEX: Sure! I’m Gareth Mensah, I’m the Head of Business Development for MCDEX, I’m based in Medellin, Colombia, I’m a software developer originally, been in crypto for 3+ years and I’ve recently joined MCDEX to help them build the infrastructure for trading derivatives. Vikas is our Head of Marketing, he’s runs our social media channels, he’s everywhere 24/7, even when he sleeps, he’s based out of India, but he just went out to walk his dog.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Do you have experience in trading derivatives?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, a little, prior to joining MCDEX I used to trade perpetuals, options, binary options and leveraged positions. Wasn’t too good at it, but I understood why they mattered, they help make markets more efficient.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Btw, i know that some people are calling MC Dex DeFi version of Bitmex. Then, which of you is Arthur Hayes?
Gareth| MCDEX: Lol, yes we get that a lot, we keep that a secret for now though. But that’s a good way to look at it, a decentralized Bitmex.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, since they require KYC we need more freedom.
Gareth| MCDEX: Exactly. There are lot of benefits by providing a decentralized infrastructure, as you mentioned permissionlessness and also transparency.
Q1 from BTT username JonahAp
MCDX V2 is based on mai2 protocol on the Ethereum blockchain can you explain what the mai2 protocol does and How it works?
Gareth| MCDEX: The Mai protocol is a set of smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum mainnet. Mai in chinese stands for “buy” and “sell”, and those set of smart contracts power the MCDEX platform. So all the derivatives we provide on the platform are created using the Mai Protocol, currently we offer perpetual contracts with up to 10x leverage, we also offer a TRUMP option for the 2020 US election. For the perps we are the first DEX to offer the ETH-PERP. We recently added LINK-PERP, SNX-PERP, COMP-PERP and LEND-PERP.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Does your protocol differs from protocols which another DeFi projects use?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes it does. With the Mai protocol we can technically expand our offering of perpetual contracts to any ERC-20 compatible asset. As well, we have a hybrid model, with both an order book for traders, and an AMM for on-chain liquidity.
D. | Satoshi Club: Btw can you tell us about “perpetual contracts” what is this? asking for a friend.
Gareth| MCDEX: Lol, sure. A perpetual contract is a leverage position with no expirations. If you’re familiar with futures, it’s a similar concept, except there are no expiration date, you can hold that position as long as you want.
Vikas | MCDEX: Say you have $100 and ETH is worth $100, you can go on uniswap and get one ETH. With MCDEX with that $100 you can buy a ETH-PERP contract worth up to 10 ETH.
Q2 from BTT username let098765
Can you please elaborate more about the AMM or Automated Market Maker? How does it works in MCDEX network especially in Eth- Perp contract? Why did you choose to focus Ethereum contract rather than BTC or Usdt?
Gareth| MCDEX: So an Automated Market Maker is a new concept introduced by Uniswap, where instead of trading with an order book, where you place buy orders, and sell orders, and one trader is looking to match his/her trade with another trader, with an AMM a trader can trade against a smart contract that holds a pool of tokens and use a simple algorithm to decide the price at which to make the trade.
What’s interesting about this is that the AMM represents on-chain liquidity, i.e it’s a smart contract that can interact with other smart contracts, so developers can build new services and experiences on top of it.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, interesting system) we can’t see order book.
Gareth| MCDEX: That’s why we provide both, an order book for traders, something they are familiar with and an AMM to build new financial products.
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, you have order book? As we used to see on CEXs.
Gareth| MCDEX: Yep, we have a hybrid model, with both. You can decide which one you want to trade against.
D. | Satoshi Club: So your DEX is more for experienced traders I assume?
Gareth| MCDEX: It does require some trading knowledge, but our interface is pretty straightforward, so if traders are used to order book, they will find our exchange very familiar.
For the second part of the question, why start with ETH-PERP Because we are strong believers in DeFi, both in the growth of the space and its ethos at the heart of that ecosystem is ETH. But we have added other contracts like LINK, SNX, LEND and COMP that again, we believe are at the heart of DeFi and we are looking to add a BTC contract eventually.
Mary | Satoshi Club: That would be great😉
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, many traders have told us so. One thing we can mention, is because we are decentralized, we need a price feed, and we get this from the ChainLink oracle. so we’re working closely with the ChainLink team, and each of our contract gets its index price from the ChainLink network.
Mary | Satoshi Club: I know that you listen to the community.
Gareth| MCDEX: Exactly. We are looking to add more contracts, but we do need reliable price feeds before we can list them.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Btw, did you make your contracts audited?
Gareth| MCDEX: Great question. Yes, we have two audits, one from Open Zeppelin, one from Consensus. Security is a major priority for us, so we can talk more about our security model. This include audits, and also best practices, including have backup oracles, to make sure that if there’s a discrepancy between them we get notified right await.
Q3 from Telegram user @Termuxnih
Does MCDEX already have copy trading? in order to make it easier for people to copy
Gareth| MCDEX: We are coming with MCFUND, which will allow for copy trading. The goal behind this is to make it easier for users to jump into derivative trading.
So, yep, more experienced traders will be incentivized to share their derivative trading, and less experiences traders can add funds to a pool, and that pool will copy trade the experienced traders. So, it will be providing a very simple and safer way to get started.
Don’t want to put a date on it, but I invite your users to join our telegram and discord to stay up to date: https://discord.gg/ https://t.me/Mcdex
D. | Satoshi Club: This is good less risky for newbies.
Gareth| MCDEX: Exactly! once you make that first step, I think derivatives become less “complex” or “scary” and their utility becomes obvious, that’s something we believe will help the entire defi market mature.
Q4 from Telegram user @tungvodoi206
How to become a business partner of MCDEX? What are the benefits of being a business partner?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, we have two programs in that regard. One is an affiliate program where if you’re a trader or part of a trading community and invite traders to join our community and use our platform, then we can provide incentives and reward for that.
The other program we have is the ambassador program, wich is for our most active users, that want to contribute in various to growing our ecosystem, similarly we provide incentivises, and the tasks range from creating content to faciliating an integration or partnership. We call our ambassadors High Rollers, and we have some really folks in that group! https://mcdex.io/affiliate/#/login https://mcdex.io/homepage/ambassador.html
Q5 from Telegram user @Aleurich
What is the difference between trading with Order Book and AMM? Which is more advisable to avoid the high costs of ethereum network commissions?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, another brilliant Q! So, we recommand trading with the order book for now, both because it is cheaper and also because it is more intuitive for many traders, it’s a similar experience than with centralized exchange.
We have an $MCB governance token, which is a reward for providing liquidity to our AMMs, so this is a way to boostrap liquidity to our AMMs, and eventually this will make trading with the AMM more advantageous. However, the AMM smart contract is complex, so the transaction price can be high. Especially with the gas fees having gone up a lot recently, So we are researching and working actively on a L2 solution, to alliviate those high transaction fees.
Mary | Satoshi Club: it’s pure pain.
Gareth| MCDEX: Yep, it’s the price of DeFi success. So many DEX are also looking into L2 solutions, ZKP, optimistic rollups, etc. Again, we should have an announcement on that soon! stay tune. 😎
D. | Satoshi Club: So you can do ETH fees less expensive? in the future.
Gareth| MCDEX: Exactly, and it should be happening soon too. Our tech team works fast and they have looked at every L2 solutions, we’ve talked to the leading teams in that space, and settled on a solution that makes sense for us.
Mary | Satoshi Club: What functions does MCB token has? For what we can use it?
Gareth| MCDEX: Exactly, and it should be happening soon too. Our tech team works fast and they have looked at every L2 solutions, we’ve talked to the leading teams in that space, and settled on a solution that makes sense for us.
Mary | Satoshi Club: What functions does MCB token has? For what we can use it?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, before I answer that, we have our roadmap availabe on on mcdex.io: https://mcdex.io/references/#/en-US/white-paper?id=_5-road-map
So, there we list the plan for the MCB token, but long story short, currently the $MCB governance token has two utilities: first, is as a reward for users that provide liquidity to our AMMs. Second, is as a way to vote/create proposals for the direction of the MCDEX platform. But if you read our roadmap, you will see that we have a much more ambition goal, we plan for MCDEX to become a DAO ran by the $MCB token holders.
D. | Satoshi Club: I assume you need to hold a very large amount of tokens to make some decision?
Gareth| MCDEX: We plan for the $MCB to recieve a share of the trading fees and also to be used as collateral. For creating proposals, yes, for voting on them, no.
https://vote.mcdex.io/mainnet/proposal/12
This is an example of a proposal; you can see you can vote with a very small amount of token.
Mary | Satoshi Club: Your plans are great, sure you will fulfill them👍
Gareth| MCDEX: Thank you, yes, our plans are very ambitious, we think big, and we aim to deliver on that vision!
Derivatives are huge, both in traditional finance and in crypto, derivative trading is MUCH bigger than spot trading, so it’s very important to have this permissionless and transparent infrastructure for it, and just as important to make it easy for traders to become familiar with them.
Q6 from Telegram user @yzmoney
Since the launch of the system till now, how much volume has been handled by the system? how’s the response of the community to the platform? Have you thought about migrating to other platform or layer 2 solution?
Gareth| MCDEX: Last but not least! So recently the trading volume has ranged between 1 and 2 million of daily trading. I think the high gas fees have had impact on our trading volume. So, we have been looking at both L2 solutions on top of Ethereum, and other blockchains as well.
We’ve had conversations with the leading teams, and Liu our technical co-founder has posted the research on this:’ https://forum.mcdex.io/t/research-on-l2-solution/85
You can read more here, it has been a focus for our tech team, You can also jump on our discord to follow the discussion on that topic: https://discord.gg/
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE QUESTIONS
The chat was open for 80 seconds; a lot of questions were posted by Satoshi Club community. Our guests chose some of them.
Q1 from Telegram User @JoxesXIII
I’m worried about newbies in this ecosystem: despite all the news from MCDEX, will there be any academy or education to have a good experience at MXDEX?
Gareth| MCDEX: I like this concept of an academy, ideally we would like our community to give us feedback on how they learn best, and if someone or a group is interested in becoming ambassador and creating such an academy or content, that would great!
Q2 from Telegram User @jobel4
In your Ambassador program why do we need 100MCB in our wallet to qualify? Is this really required?
Gareth| MCDEX: That was the initial requirement, we want ambassadors to have skin in the game, so ideally they need to both have $MCB tokens and knowledge of the platform, but it’s on a case by case basis. This is the link for the ambassador program: https://mcdex.io/homepage/ambassador.html
Q3 from Telegram User @CElllIFE
Can MCDEX be used to make profits with DeFi?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes. This is not financial advise, but as @dogfather007 mentioned earlier, with leverage, say a trader has $100 and ETH is $100, on a spot market you can buy one ETH, but say you’re bullish, you could go on a derivative exchange like MCDEX, which offers up to 10X leverage and instead by a contract that represents 10 ETH. so if ETH goes up by 10%, in scenario 1, you made $10, but in scenario 2, you made $100.
This is called capital efficiency and different derivatives provide high efficiency that spot trading, and this is why institutions use them.
Q4 from Telegram User @Jackluckysomuch
What make MCDEX different than other?
Gareth| MCDEX: Great Q! Yes, derivatives are coming to DeFi, currently it is a bit like Game of Thrones, different projects competing and watching each other. We believe we have the right model, i.e our hybrid model approach, an order book that traders like and are very familiar with, but progressively we believe the AMM will become really key, as it represent on-chain liquidity that other developers can build new services and exchanges. So MCDEX is not just an exchange, it’s an ecosystem, and we provide the infrastructure or money legos for any kind of derivative.
Q5 from Telegram User @tungvodoi206
How is your global ambassador program different from other projects? What’s its biggest attraction?
Gareth| MCDEX: Easy one! We provide $MCB tokens as rewards, we’re a fun group, many of our high rollers are experienced VCs, traders and developers, and they believe in our vision. So we’re more fun than other ambassador groups, and we got a cooler name!
Q6 from Telegram User @VladBondd
If a hacker maliciously manipulates external data, how can you verify the reliability of the data?
Gareth| MCDEX: Glad you ask! In our security model there is the potential for price manipulation. As mentioned earlier we use ChainLink price feed for all our contracts, and their network is battle tested by hundreds of other projects. But just in case, we also added secondary oracles, and we compare the prices from all of them, and if there is too of a delta, we get notified and we can halt trading acivity until it has been resolved.
Q7 from Telegram User @Car1a
What is the uniqueness feature of #MCDEX that cannot be found in other project that’s been released before?
Gareth| MCDEX: Yes, that has to be our Mai protocol. We can create perpetuals for any ERC-20, and we are actually about to release the version 3 of the Mai protocol, which will enable anyone to create any perp based on any ERC-20. This will be like listing a new token on Uniswap. It’s going to be lit. 🚀
Q8 from Telegram User @RachmanMahesa
Will MCDEX Exchange in the future compete or be the best compared to Binance DEX?
Gareth| MCDEX: So, crypto is always a mix of friendly competition and collaboration. We’re very close to the Binance team, we’ve had great conversations with them, and we like their technology. So, I will leave this here, but it could happen in the future that we end up working closely together.
Q9 from Telegram User @TVT6VI
How MCDEX will build liquidity as it paramount for any new exchange?
Gareth| MCDEX: I will answer the last part about liquidity. We incentive users to provide liqudiity to our AMMs in exchange of weekly rewards of $MCB token. The APY is very high, and you can provide ETH, LINK, SNX, COMP or LEND to the respective AMMs, anybody who interested you can start here: https://mcdex.io/liquidity/ETH-PERP
Q10 from Telegram User @radmaxco
What are the criteria for using MCDEX?
Gareth| MCDEX: So you can use any web3 wallet, metamask, trust wallet, etc. Only requirement is an ETH address.
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about MCDEX. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 300$ were distributed among winners. Here you can check list of winners https://t.me/Satoshi_club/282440
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