Self-education is one of the ways to success and in Satoshi Club we give this opportunity to everyone. Discover projects, learn and earn! And today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Reef DeFi. The AMA took place on September 29 and our guest was Denko Mancheski, CEO of Reef .
The total reward pool was 500$ and has been splitted in 3 parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to summarise the most interesting points for you.
Part 1 — introduction and questions from the Telegram&Bitcointalk community
Mary | Satoshi Club: Good afternoon, Satoshi Club! Today we have a guest Reef DeFi:grinning: @denkomanceski we are glad to see you here!
Denko Mancheski: Hello everyone. Glad to be here as well!
D. | Satoshi Club: hello all! @denkomanceski hello! and welcome to Satoshi club!
Mary | Satoshi Club: Please tell us about yourself and how you started working with Reef DeFi?
Serg | Satoshi Club: Welcome to Satoshi Club 🙂
Denko Mancheski: My name is Denko, I am CEO of Reef. I have a tech background myself. Started development in early high school with C++ and then worked in the commercial world for healthcare platforms providers as well as ERP system providers. 5.5 years ago I got into crypto and started blockchain development myself. My first experience was with NXT (then turned into Ardor), and I have also been doing a lot of Solidity (Ethereum), Steem and some EOS. Since I am based on Slovenia, the development community is not so big, so I’ve been working with familiar people. 2 years ago we teamed up and worked on multiple blockchain as well analytics projects together. In January this year we decided to focus on DeFi and started building Reef.
Mary | Satoshi Club: far-sighted decision:grinning: defi is on fire now)
D. | Satoshi Club: how big is your team?
Denko Mancheski: We are over 12 people. Half of the team is the development team. We are expanding as we speak 🚀
Mary | Satoshi Club: Why you choose financial industry for your project?
Denko Mancheski: Finance is my second biggest passion after technology. I have been involved in many projects (from accounting to stock market) professionally, so DeFi was natural for me personally. Besides professionally, I mostly read on finance (value investing mostly)
D. | Satoshi Club: crypto is perfectly fit with finance )
Denko Mancheski: Crypto fintech is the best :100:
Mary | Satoshi Club: what would you recommend to read the beginner?)
Denko Mancheski: I think one should start with basic financial literacy and learn about how to spend (or how not to) their money, what is compounding, what is asset and what is liability, etc.. then progress towards basic accounting and proper mindset for what money are and what is the best way to manage long-term
this one is super useful, might have to watch it more than once though
Mary | Satoshi Club: I definitely would, thank you)
Q1 from bitcointalk user george.bend
Reef enables trading with access to liquidity from both CEXes and DEXes. I didn’t read your technical paper, but please explain how this happens? I will have an account connected to both cexes and dexes?
Denko Mancheski: Basically DEXes are integrated through the Reef smart contracts, and we have mechanism to determine in which dex you will get the best rates.
CEXes on the other side are integrated through prime brokers. This might require KYC after certain amounts
Mary | Satoshi Club: What does it mean prime brokers?
Denko Mancheski: An example for a prime broker is Changelly. Its basically a company which is in the background integrated with all the CEXes and you can use their APIs to get quotes + to request a transfer (you send them the amount + the recipient address, and they send you the rate + the receiver address)
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, you will partner with prime brokers projects, right? Or already did this partnerships?
Denko Mancheski: We already started discussing with some potential partners (we will have multiple prime broker integrations in the background). The access to CEXes is coming in Q1 2021
Mary | Satoshi Club: Great, hope to hear about new Reef’s partnerships soon)
D. | Satoshi Club: and btw, please, tell us why your litepaper isn’t available on your site? it’s not ready yet?
Denko Mancheski: We decided to turn the litepaper directly into a whitepaper because I wanted to add more technical things. The litepaper might still be a good read for a not so tech-savvy person, so I will reconsider publishing it this week
Q2 from bitcointalk user JonahAp
One of the major components of Reef protocol is the machine learning and AI powered DeFi yield engine… One of your aim is to simplify the use of DeFi protocols for all users.. How does this Reef yield Engine help in realizing this goal in ensuring less complexities in the use of DeFi protocols?
Denko Mancheski: The Reef yield engine is powered by our analytics engine which in the background is using different statistical models and machine learning. The engine aims to maximize your yield by routing your funds to the highest yielding pools. The problem is that farming protocols and instances have different risk levels. We derive risk levels based on multiple metrics, from social media traction, to on-chain traffic. This way, the users have a better understanding of how they allocate their funds, and can adjust based on their risk tolerance. We will publish our methodology on how the model is grading different DeFi activities on our blog. Basically less complexities come not from just UI/UX point of view but also from decision making. This way the users are able to get onboarded faster since there is less resistance (both on learning how to use things, but also from decision-making)
D. | Satoshi Club: sounds complicated )
Denko Mancheski: Yeah, its a bunch of data and math in the background, but the UI is super simple and the user doesnt have to do anything except to define their risk level and the amount of exposure they want
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, in simple words, you plan to gather all available information, both technical and from social media and analyse it.
Denko Mancheski: Yeah, and turn it into an actionable product (not just charts that users cant nor should know how to interpret)
D. | Satoshi Club: yes, im sure i will understand it better when im trying to do all those things )
Denko Mancheski: Yeah, its just a few sliders and buttons for the user 😀
Mary | Satoshi Club: By the way, when i will be able to try?)
Denko Mancheski: October🤞
Mary | Satoshi Club: Wow, i am preparing for sliders)))
D. | Satoshi Club: and buttons
Mary | Satoshi Club: It’s too much for me:joy: just sliders)))
Q3 from Telegram user @tryharder
Lately, many projects are using the Polkadot ecosystem. Please explain what benefits it will bring to you and why other ecosystems are not fit for your purpose
Denko Mancheski: Polkadot’s interoperability layer allows us to communicate with all the blockchains and still achieve high throughput. Additionally, we inherit their security model, which means we get to be highly resilient, can do forkless upgrades while still being able to maintain stable on-chain governance. We are fully compatible with Ethereum and the current DeFi ecosystem, but we believe in order to innovate and take the landscape to the next level, we have to take it cross-chain, and through Polkadot we are able to achieve that. One very important thing here: We are fully compatible with Ethereum and the current DeFi landscape.. the users are there and its important for us to support it from day 1.
D. | Satoshi Club: there are not many working products on Polka so far as far as i know, ofc)
Denko Mancheski: This is another advantage for us, because we want to be THE gateway to participate in polkadot projects.. and by first supporting ethereum and adding the other ecosystems, the users will not have to jump elsewhere
Mary | Satoshi Club: It was your first decision to built on Polkadot? Or you had doubts?
Denko Mancheski: We tried tendermint in the past, so Cosmos was also another candidate, but Polkadot’s parachain communication (XCMP) and bridging mechanism, combined with the possibility to run solidity code on parachains such as Plasm, use native Ethereum addresses and huge ecosystem support (Web3, Parity) were the reasons why we chose to build on Polkadot
Mary | Satoshi Club: Which assets do you plan to add? Who will decide?
Denko Mancheski: We dont add assets ourselves, the assets come from the building blocks (eg: AMMs). The initial version will have the biggest AMMs as well as lending protocols on Ethereum, and right after this one, we will be adding the rest of the polkadot (there are few projects there getting ready)
D. | Satoshi Club: do you think Polka will overtake Ethereum? Eventually 😉
Mary | Satoshi Club: I hope, without this huge :fuelpump: prices🤦
Denko Mancheski: No, I think Polkadot’s role is to unite the ecosystems, so the users will not have to ever choose sides again. Different blockchains are better for different things
D. | Satoshi Club: yeah, that’s a good point
Denko Mancheski: Right now the analogy to the fragmentation would be this: “Imagine you are only able to open facebook from chrome, and twitter only from safari”
So this needs to be fixed so people wont have to care what is where
Q4 from Telegram Username @stekbyte
The site says that Reef will allow to create a global synthetic order book, which means infinite liquidity at best rates. But will users need to register additional accounts to complete trading operations if centralized exchanges are the liquidity provider?
Denko Mancheski: Nope, as I mentioned above the integration to centralized exchanges goes through prime brokers. Certain prime brokers might require KYC, but Reef’s infrastructure will never store it (nor it will ever flow through any of our infrastructure). The whole point is to not have to register 5 accounts on different exchanges and do 5 times KYC nor interact with an order book (just like how Robinhood does it)
Mary | Satoshi Club: So, 100k$ without KYC headache?)
Denko Mancheski: 100k$ would probably not even require CEX liquidity
Mary | Satoshi Club: Oops:joy: And did you officially registered you project?)
Denko Mancheski: Officially registered it? You mean if the user will have to register themselves? You will always be able to use Reef just with just a metamask wallet
Mary | Satoshi Club: No, Reef DeFi is an official enterprise somewhere?) Or it exists just in crypto)
Denko Mancheski: Ah, you mean the entity. Yeah it exists of course
Mary | Satoshi Club: Which country?)
Denko Mancheski: The legal structure is quite complex, the token issuer is in BVI (British Virgin Islands), while the operating entity in Singapore
D. | Satoshi Club: decentralization 😉
Denko Mancheski: These are the current best practices
Mary | Satoshi Club: Nice structure :grinning: do you take any responsibility on users funds if something will go wrong? Second headache – hackers)
Denko Mancheski: Terms and conditions will be published and will be a part of the onboarding. Currently still in progress. Auditing – both internal and external should be sufficient 🤞
Mary | Satoshi Club: Understand, hope for the best 😃
Q5 from Telegram Username @adnan673
Could you please elaborate more about your tokenomics (portions to be sold in private / public sale) & about the planned unlocks after them? What’s the total supply?
Denko Mancheski: Official press release is coming very soon, but yeah, we have private round as well as public (mechanism/date TBD). The private round is split into multiple and has lockup periods. The total supply is 20B tokens, the supply at TGE will be ~6%
D. | Satoshi Club: do you have burning mechanism? planning to burn some of your tokens?)
Denko Mancheski: We do have a mechanism, but as of right now, we wont plan to burn any of the tokens
Mary | Satoshi Club: Do you already have whitelist?:wink:
Denko Mancheski: Not yet. Will be announced soon
D. | Satoshi Club: looking forward for it! we with Madam love to spend our money on new crypto, right? ) @madamlobster
Mary | Satoshi Club: Yes, this is my passion 😂
Q6 from Telegram Username @yadav_199
While going through your project I found many times you have mentioned fragmented liquidity? Can you explain this term fragmented liquidity? And who are your initial pool liquidity providers?
Denko Mancheski: Fragmented liquidity happens on multiple levels. One of them being certain amount A (bids and asks) of SOME_COIN is on exchange X, while amount B is on exchange P. If you want to buy more than A or more than B, he needs to go to both of these exchanges. The issue is that if he first buys the A, the B will move since the market makers will readjust. If there is a aggregation and the users orders are routed to these 2 exchanges simultaneously he will be able to fill his full amount with the least slippage (assuming his amount is less than A + B).We have certain partners regarding the initial pool liquidity providers. Some of them are also part of the private sale
Mary | Satoshi Club: Can you tell us their names?)
Denko Mancheski: I cant (yet) share the names of the liquidity providers since we are still in the process of finalizing everything. Regarding who is part of the private sale, we already have published few interviews with some of them on our medium blog. https://medium.com/@reefdefi
Mary | Satoshi Club: Oh, i saw some of them))) nice interviews :smiley: Hope to hear more names and more about your partnerships soon) and now, as i know you already partnered with Bluzelle and Chainlink, right?)
Denko Mancheski: Yeah, we already partnered with Bluzelle, Chainlink, Plasm, etc.. the nature of the project is all about composing and integrating, so more partnerships are coming soon.
Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community
Q1 from Telegram user @Nickkiii
Tell us more about your partnership Chainlink, why are you excited to work with them and what are you both going to be working on?
Denko Mancheski: We need oracles both on ethereum as well as polkadot side of things, so Chainlink was the right way to go. They have the resources that we need + the experience in this landscape
Q2 from Telegram user @cengizhantekin
“Trade at best price”, “earn the best return of staking…” How do you assure the “BESTs”, what mechanism of your system provides all these features?
Denko Mancheski: Through our Analytics Engine, we scan the whole landscape and we determine the best allocation based on the user’s risk levels. Then, we route your funds to the appropriate protocols.
Q3 from Telegram user @ndbetting
The ReefDeFi project is being powered by the Polkadot blockchain. Why not on Ethereum blockchain instead and do you believe that the Ethereum 2.0 will launch successfully?
Denko Mancheski: Mentioned above why we choose Polkadot over Ethereum
Q4 from Telegram user @Sicxa
Which area does Reef focus on at the moment? (DeFi, Dapps,Stake, Yield Farming..)
Denko Mancheski: Through our basket engine, based on your risk levels, you will be able to participate on all of those activities with a single click
Q5 from Telegram user @xitrump
Please explain to me about The Reef Intelligence Engine, how does it work and it roles?
Denko Mancheski: I mentioned in the previous round. We collect a lot of data and we do a lot of statistical modelling and machine learning. Thie engine is powering the risk strategy. In the future we will be adding more strategies as well as allow 3rd party to publish theirs (they have to be voted)
Q6 from Telegram user @Brucedt
What makes $REEF is better compared to other Crypto?Are there any unique mechanisms?
Denko Mancheski: We provide a way for the average retail user to access to the whole landscape with very low technical barrier of entry. Our retail investor is our best customer, and since we will be the first ones to give access to the users to multiple ecosystems, we believe we will manage to get quite high market share
Q7 from Telegram user @CelllIFE
How will Reef Finance ensure the safety of users’ funds?
Denko Mancheski: We are 100% non-custodial. We are not holding users’ funds. Its all happening on the blockchain. We are in a process of getting audited by multiple top-tier firms
Q8 from Telegram user @Fadang
What will Reef Finance do to build a thriving community that truly cares and supports the project for the long term, not just for a temporary profit?
Denko Mancheski: We have experience with establishing mechanisms to validate which things are interesting for the users and which are not. Initially we are launching based on what we think is very necessary atm, but in the future the product will be shaped based on what the users want and need. We believe the community is the most important aspect of the project, and the users spreading positive feedback about the project is our no #1 priority
Q9 from Telegram user @Gutike95
really why call this project “REEF”? What is the meaning of this word related to the project?
Denko Mancheski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reef The idea for the name came from the fact that most of the ocean animals are meeting around the Reef. In our case, since we are a DeFi operating system which is aggregating both liquidity as wel las DeFi activities, we believe that the name Reef has a great analogy with our product!
Q10 from Telegram user @KeymerS
It is known that Dex platforms are really complex to use, how much more will you manipulate a platform that combines CEX and DEX and integrates all the chains? or does it really have a practical and simple interface?
Denko Mancheski: Our core goal is low technical barrier of entry. Reef abstracts away the complexities of using order books and learning how different DeFi protocols work. Just like Robinhood app gives access to the average user to the traditional financial landscape (derivatives, option chains, etc..), Reef gives access to the DeFi landscape and tokens and additionally augments the decision making process based on user’s risk levels.
Part 3 – Quiz Results
In the final part we tested your knowledge in terms of Reef. They’ve prepared 4 questions for this part. The total reward pool for quiz was 300$.
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