June chapter closes, but we will remember this month for new incredible achievements! The last day of this month SatoshiClub has completed with an unusual project and the largest prize fund in the history of SatoshiClub. Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from STONK. The AMA took place on June 30 and our guest was noke.

The total reward pool was 7ETH (~1500$) 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

Irina Kravchuk: Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of our AMA series

noke: Everyone grab your popcorn

Irina Kravchuk: 🖖 Hi and welcome

Serg: Hi! Glad to have you here 🙂

Irina Kravchuk: It’s showtime 🕶

Serg: You had some difficult times in the past days: good and bad news. We hope we will clarify everything in this AMA

noke: Indeed, the last few days have been quite crazy.

Irina Kravchuk: Thanks for joining @nokeman . A lesser project wouldn’t have come to avoid attention.

Serg: we can start with a question related to that 🙂 if you are ready

noke: Sure thing, drop it here – I’m ready for any question 🙂

Serg: but only after you tell us a bit about yourself. And the a history behind the project

we want to know the background 🙂

noke: Ah so the history and background of STONK

Serg: If you are comfortable, you can say about yourself as well 🙂

noke: Well I’ll start with myself – I’m from New Zealand, and I have a background in cyber security & informatics olympiads.

Serg: white hacker? 🙂

noke: You could say that, but most of my time has been involved in participating in capture the flag competitions (CTFs), fun little competitions where you essentially hack things for points on a leaderboard.

Irina Kravchuk: Were you good?

noke: Yes, I’ve achieved quite a few top leaderboard placings/prizes with my team in and outside of the country, although I can’t release specifics here due to the anonymity aspect of the project. We are completely happy to offer personal & legal details for professional negotiations if needed though.

As for blockchain/cryptocurrency – we’ve mostly been lurkers in the space – and it has only been recently when we started considering starting a project.

Irina Kravchuk: Interesting. What made you consider starting a project on blockchain?

After this, we can start with the questions from the community if you’re ready. We have plenty of them:grinning:

noke: It was most definitely the recent release of the balancer protocol by the balancer labs that edged us towards creating a project. Their protocol opened huge doors for many, many potential use cases, especially regarding their liquidity balancer pools & how their exchange optimized routing/trading through them.

Of course – I also just wanted to make a token named STONK. These two things combined pushed me over the edge to create this project 🙂

Sure thing, we can start with the questions now.

Q1 from Telgram user @GoldRocket27

You were recently hacked, but you reacted quickly. What steps are you taking to strengthen your protection? How much attention will you pay to the issue of protection in the future?

noke: Thanks @GoldRocket27, a good question. The hack was regarding the FoT (fee on transfer) function on our old token. To put it simply, FoT burn tokens are non-standard ERC20 tokens that destroy a percentage of your amount on transfer. This, combined with the balancer pool’s gulp function, created an opportunity for an attack vector via flash loan to completely drain all liquidity from our balancer pool.

Irina Kravchuk: Were you aware of this vulnerability? I mean as a potential threat?

noke: No, we were not aware that our deflationary aspect could be exploited this hard, as the gas/capital required to do so as we initially calculated would have been immense and impractical.

We did know, however, that the deflationary/FoT aspect would create arbitrage opportunities with our token at the expense of liquidity providers, partially due to the balancer pool’s gulp function.

None of us expected an attack of this scale via a flash loan though – the balancer labs were equally as surprised when the attack happened on this edge case.

So right after the attack happened – it was very confusing for all of us.

Irina Kravchuk: You worked over the working program I guess to solve this:grinning:

noke: Yes –

Initially we did not know what had happened, we didn’t know whether it was a bug with the balancer UI.

However, as the minutes passed

– and as the clock ticked.

And as we looked at the transactions on Etherscan.

We realised exactly what happened – and it was a complete attack on the balancer pool – draining around 30K of funds.

We knew that this was regarding our token’s non-standard ERC20 fee on transfer function, so we instantly began a 1:1 snapshot token swap to a token that was a standard ERC20, fully compatible with the balancer pool.

The timeline went something like this – at around 6-8AM, the attack happened.

(GMT+12)

At around 8-9AM, we pushed forward the call to begin the 1-1 token swap for the new smart contract.

At 12AM, the snapshot for the token swap began. We captured around 508 holders in total.

At 12AM-4PM, we began airdropping the new, patched/fully compatible token all holders, one by one, checking for any malicious addresses in the process – especially ones involved in the flash loan attack.

During this entire period we were in full deep contact with coingecko, hotbit, & any other website that already supported STONK.

At around 5-6PM, coingecko was updated.

At around 7PM, our trustwallet logo was updated.

At around 7:15PM, 20-30K of liquidity was added back to uniswap, and trading resumed.

HOTBIT was in contact this whole time, and at 8PM, we were listed officially, on schedule, with HOTBIT, with trading beginning on the exchange.

Essentially – everything was all back to normal, with the FoT removed, completely resolving/fixing the issue.

Serg: Extremely fast I would say

Irina Kravchuk: Stonk saga

noke: You could say that – a crazy day it was. Now we’re back on track with our plan.

Serg: It’s a story for your grandchildren 😄

Irina Kravchuk: I’m sure you didn’t like the hacking part, but you guys handled it really well. Congrats

noke: One more thing to note – the balancer protocol has been audited multiple times extensively – and this edge case was present in their documentation quite publicly – none of us however, expected this flash loan attack.
This new token is now fully compatible with their protocol, and there should be no more issues.

Q2 from Telgram user @nandhas

Liquidity is paramount to the growth of DeFi. Many DApps require reliable pools of liquidity to function. What is the function of $STONK token in providing liquidity?

noke: So first of all – before we can answer this question fully. What exactly is STONK? and what does it do?

Once we know this, we can know how STONK will support and provide liquidity.

So essentially while we were looking at the balancer protocol, we knew that there were many undiscovered use cases present, almost everywhere we looked.

One of those use cases – opened an opportunity for a new type of token. A token that almost acts like an exchange traded fund, or an index fund, a token that can be pegged to many assets at one time.

So how does STONK achieve this? Quite simply, through taking advantage of how the balancer DEX routes different transactions through multiple liquidity pools to find an optimum slippage rate/price, constantly rebalancing pools and creating price pressure on all involved tokens in the process.

So lets say you want to swap ETH -> COMP.

The protocol will find a way to route your transaction through multiple pools on the balancer exchange, to achieve the best slippage/price.

Serg: So, basically it will help us find the most convenient price

noke: Yes – one second

So this is where STONK comes in – we want to create a set of route-optimized pools that will redirect this transaction THROUGH pools that INCLUDE STONK, rebalancing the pool and enacting price pressure on STONK in the process.

STONK will essentially sit in a multitude of reward & route optimized liquidity pools, and it will soak in balancing pressure from every single trade that involves a DeFi token.

This is how it will be pegged, essentially, to a basket of DeFi.

It’s a new kind of token, and a new kind of fund, and it discovers an undiscovered use case present in DEX liquidity pools.

So – how will STONK provide liquidity?

What are sort of incentives to provide liquidity in STONK balancer pools?

First of all, of course, we have to create the most optimized balancer pools possible for the highest ROI.

Rewards can come in the form of swap fees from trading volume from optimized routing, and they can also come in the form of BAL tokens, provided by balancer labs.

STONK will essentially calculate & create a set of these optimized balancer pools for DeFi, attracting outside liquidity providers, and therefore providing liquidity & supporting projects in the process.

Yes, there are actually some calculations up on https://pools.fyi, although those take into account impermanent loss/is relatively generalized for all pools. We will provide ROI reports soon once we deploy the first set of STONK DeFi pools.

Q3 from Telgram user @harl324

Could you elaborate more on the concept of balancer pool? How is it innovative compared to the crypto space?

noke: The balancer pool is a new kind of liquidity pool released by balancer labs. It will be utilized by DEX exchanges, namely the balancer exchange, to route transactions through it to find the most optimal price and the lowest slippage/fees. Essentially, it’s an optimized way to do decentralized trading. Balancer pools will just provide the liquidity in the process.

Q4 from Telgram user @ineed688btc

STONK’s white paper is quite tricky for me and for any non-technical user, which is not helpful for investors who don’t have a lot of technical background! Do you have simple and basic information about the STONK project that would help to better understand STONK for those users?

noke: Well first of all haha – STONK’s whitepaper isn’t out yet – it is in full development though. We want it perfect before release. I’ll assume he’s talking about the information page on our website.

Yes, mostly – we do have some information on our medium https://medium.com/@stonkdev – although a lot of it will need to be updated.

Irina Kravchuk: The recap of our AMA will help with this 😊

noke: Yes, we do plan to have simple/basic information for new people so they can quickly grasp the concept of STONK. We also hope this AMA will help with this. Indeed 🙂

Serg: It helped already 🙂 I already understood a lot

Q5 from Bitcointalk user elissa

Stonk is an ETF token of DeFi tokens. Please explain why you need a STONK wrapper around it. You can just directly buy something like that on Balancer. Am I right? Please correct me if I am not. Thank you!

It might be related to other answers as well

noke: Yes, this was covered rather extensively previously

I’ll answer the part for why a “STONK wrapper” is needed though

There’s many index funds all around the world, many ETFs that are pegged to a basket of assets

For example, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Index

STONK will be somewhat similar to this, but instead pegged to a basket of DeFi.

Through a unique method via the balancer protocol.

Q6 from Telgram user @Laitarouth1009

I can’t see your Roadmap and Team members on your Stonk website, so please tell us, what is your Strategy,Aim and what are your team doing in helping the mass adoption of Stonk?

noke: Our strategy right now involves achieving a set of “credibility goals” that will legitimize STONK as a project. This includes – a code audit (although this will have to be updated to reflect the new contract), a listing on a notable CEX (paging HOTBIT), a listing of our token on CMC (in progress), and a whitepaper release.

Once these are achieved, we plan to perform a huge expansion, contacting many different organizations.

Serg: I would add also: Your speed with dealing with the issue of the hack. It will add to the credibility goal

Irina Kravchuk: For sure it will

noke: Haha indeed it will – we really hope it will be remembered.

Marketing & branding is also extremely important to us. We chose STONK as it holds huge untapped viral potential.

I mean come on guys, STONK…

This is one of the best memes relevant to trading out there – and we’ve basically reserved it on coingecko, an exchange, and more platforms to come.

Serg: Thank you for your very good answers! Before we open the chat, could you provide 4 short key-points to remember from our conversation?

noke: Key point 1. STONK is a new kind of asset – one that utilizes balancer DEX liquidity pools to peg itself to a basket of DeFi. You could say it’s similar to an ETF, we like to call it a balancer traded fund.

Key point 2. Our token is named STONK.

Key point 3. STONK also supports DeFi as a whole by attracting liquidity to its reward-optimized pools.

Key point 4. STONK will have an aggressive marketing strategy that will make full use of it’s viral potential.

Serg: These are good key points. Thanks!

Part 2 — live questions from the Telegram community

Serg: 1200-1300 questions in 80 seconds! That is the record 🙂

Q1 from Telgram user @Guandog

Why did you decide to be called STONK, and what does that head mean in what appears to be a multidimensional plane?

noke: We decided to be called STONK, firstly because we love memes, and secondly because of it’s huge viral marketing potential. The head represents the very popular STONK meme, and it appears in a multidimensional plane on our website as a reference to outrun/vaporwave aesthetics, an aesthetic that we love a lot.

Q2 from Telgram user @Otunba_mufasa

Currently going to CEX, what are your plans for DEX?

noke: Our first CEX was Hotbit – and it was crucial to achieve this so our project could gain credibility. CEX listings are crucial to gain a place on coinmarketcap – something which is essential to validate your project. We like to call these “credibility goals”. Once we achieve enough of these, we will start targeting more notable DEXs such as Kyber & Loopring, delivering a reputable first impression. DEXs will play a huge part on STONK’s role as a token.

Q3 from Telgram user @baobao265

Community support is an extremely important factor for all projects, so what made you decide to choose Satoshi Club Community to host AMA and what do you expect the most from this AMA?

noke: We like to keep our portfolio of listings/marketing interactions very high quality. We’ve been contacted by many other AMA services. Satoshi Club, however, stuck out to us as a group with grounded reputation, and we knew that we couldn’t let this opportunity slide. AMAs are also essential in providing understandable information for new people – we hope this AMA can achieve that.

Q4 from Telgram user @BasedWolf

What are some of the biggest challenges for stonk and what is the driving philosophy moving forward?

noke: Stonk plans to be as transparent & forward-thinking as possible. We’re open to any criticism and change – we hope the past few days have reinforced this. Our driving philosophy involves being always focused on the main project with fun sprinkled along the side, appreciating & laughing at all kinds of memes/content that come out of our community. We hope this attitude will bring momentum to keep our project moving forward.

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Q5 from Telgram user @Lahiru94

Who are the biggest competitors of STONK? And how does the team plans to overtake it’s competitors?

noke: STONK currently doesn’t really have any competitors that fully understand/are able to take advantage of this concept. We do have one distantly similar cousin, called Statera, although we’re not too sure what their use case exactly is. STONK as of now, is truly & unironically one of a kind.

Q6 from Telgram user @erven12

I have read an Article about
“DECENTRALIZED LIQUIDITY IS THE BACKBONE OF DEFI”
Is Stonk Agree with this?

noke: Yes, fully. STONK intends to take advantage of this in every way possible.

Q7 from Telgram user @baobao265

Do you think the DeFi trend is only short-term and only a reason to attract investors?

noke: No, DeFi is essential to blockchain. It keeps capital & value floating in and around our ecosystem. It has played a huge role so far, and it will continue to play a huge role. Without DeFi, we wouldn’t have DEXs, lending, etc, things that are all extremely useful & needed to further legitimize the space.

Q8 from Telgram user @CallmeUS

Which property of STONK do you think will have the greatest impact on social adaptation ?

noke: memes

Q9 from Telgram user @CallmeUS

How far have you gotten in the fundraising?

noke: I assume this is regarding STONK’s launch/presale. STONK’s presale price was around 1ETH = 150-200K STONKs, and we raised around 60-70 thousand dollars from presale, which all went towards uniswap liquidity. We then locked 42% of this liquidity in a payable un-withdrawable smart contract, simply for trust. We also airdropped hundreds of STONK packages consisting of 30K-50K tokens. To further add to the distribution, we also provided rewards for adding liquidity.

Q10 from Telgram user @ppghdsh

What makes STONK future-proof in the DeFi space and will your new STONK token act as an advantage or disadvantage in achieving your main goals?

noke: STONK will always be future proof, since it will always have an ever changing set of balancer liquidity pools that attract external liquidity providers. If a new project comes, we can just mint another liquidity pool. If an old project goes, it’ll simply have little trading volume, and capital/liquidity in that pool can be migrated elsewhere.

Irina Kravchuk: You’ve had a typing marathon. Thank you for your time and great answers

noke: haha yep – that was a marathon, thanks a lot guys 🙂

PART 3 – Quiz Results

As usual, for the third part, Satoshi Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about STONK. A link to a Quiz form were sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer.

1. How many tokens in total are in $STONK’s kickstarter origin pool?

D. 8

2. How will $STONK primarily support DeFi projects?

C. By acting as a key liquidity provider for them via a portfolio of multiple optimized ROI balancer pools.

3.Where does $STONK’s core value as a token lie?

A. As a balancer traded fund (BTF) for DeFi via soaking balancing pressure from all $STONK DeFi balancer pools.

4. What incentivizes liquidity providers in $STONK’s DeFi balancer pools?

C. BAL governance token rewards & swap fee rewards from volume in the same balancer pool.

For more information and future AMAs, join our Social Media channels:

English Telegram group: https://t.me/Satoshi_club
Russian Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_ru

Spanish Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_spanish
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/satoshi_club_channel
Twitter: https://twitter.com/realsatoshiclub
Website: https://esatoshi.club/

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STONK Community: https://t.me/stonkdev