DamoTalks #40 Recap: Conversation with Minterest, Learn About the Minterest Protocol
Introduction:
DamoTalks #40
Guest: Kyn, COO of @Minterest
Host: Jane — Event Operation of TokenDamo
Live Assistant: Lin Lin
Live time: January 26, 2022, 4 P.M. UTC+8
Q1: Welcome to the 40th episode of DamoTalks. Please introduce yourself first. What is your main responsibility at Minterest?
Hey! It is lovely to be here. My name is Kyn, and I am the COO of Minterest. I am responsible for ensuring that Minterest’s strategy is successfully executed. That means everything we do from product development, marketing, business development, fundraising, accounting, to even user support are ultimately under my purview.
Before Minterest I was the CBDO at TomoChain, Vietnam’s largest public blockchain, where I supported a number of major partnerships, including one with the Vietnam government to launch university diplomas on the blockchain.
As for my educational background, I graduated university with dual degrees in both Industrial Engineering and Economics from Georgia Tech and later earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
Professionally I spent roughly 15 years in and around Video Game Development across multiple environments: arcade, mobile, PC, and console. In 2014, I entered the blockchain space as an investor and later started working in it professionally.
Q2: Thank you for introducing yourself, can you tell us about Minterest? What is it for? What kind of specific problems can it solve?
Roughly 90% of crypto assets are sitting idle in wallets. Minterest allows these assets to be put to work through the basic foundations of banking, which are lending and borrowing. So Minterest is a truly innovative lending protocol that seeks to provide the DeFi space with the highest long-term yield in the space compared to the biggest players in the space like Compound and Aave.
Building on Moonbeam (in the Polkadot ecosystem) allows Minterest to be an early player in Polkadot with backing from major investors who also invest in Polkadot.
Q3: How will you guarantee that we are getting the highest long-term yield in DeFi with the ever-expanding and changing DeFi landscape. Thank you!
By design, Minterest can capture more financial value than competitors. It then uses that value to buy back its own token, MNT, on market and distributes it to Minterest users who stake MNT in the governance process. This ensures the fairest approach to DeFi we’ve seen to date.
Minterest’s ability to capture more value comes partly from one of its core innovations, its auto liquidation engine. Traditionally about 40% of the value of lending protocols is lost due to liquidations by third parties. Minterest is its own liquidator and is able to capture this value as a result.
The second innovation is its buyback engine, as hinted at above. Minterest is designed to be a major purchaser of its own token, MNT. The more liquidity on Minterest, the greater the fees it can collect, which leads to its ability to buy back more MNT tokens on-market, hence driving up the APY value for MNT stakes. It’s a flywheel engine.
The third innovation is with the Minterest NFTs. These are not simply beautiful-looking NFTs, they have a real use case that increases APY up to 50% for liquidity providers who hold them. There are only 3000 NFTs, and the only way to earn them is to participate in the Minterest public offering, held between February 8–11. Top net buyers will earn themselves an NFT. The higher the rank on the leaderboard, the greater the APY potential of the NFT earned.
Q4: Hey, What are the security protocols in place to ensure the safety of funds and sanctity of the smart contracts?
Good question. Minterest is being designed to be as secure as we can possibly make it. Our goal is for liquidity providers to have peace of mind when they come to Minterest.
We have an extensive rolling security audit program that is inculcated as a standard part of the development process to validate our approach to making Minterest safe and secure. And we’re only working with the top security audit firms in the space, with our first audit happening as we speak.
Additionally, we have an in-house team of data scientists and modelers to help us understand the economic side of Minterest’s functions. We take into account externalities, such as black swan events and potential economic exploits when using other Minterest in conjunction with other protocols.
Finally, Minterest will have reserves set aside to deal with worst-case scenarios. This can be thought of as an insurance fund.
Q5: Hello! What was your inspiration behind this project? Why do you have a passion for this space?
Blockchain’s ability to connect the world together is really an extension of what was called “globalization” two decades ago. The ability for sovereign governments to work together for the common good of humanity is a challenge due to their own individual needs to protocol the welfare of their countries and people. Blockchain, however, is permissionless and country-agnostic. It has the ability to revolutionize the way humanity can work together by reducing points of friction and providing true ownership of assets.
Minterest focuses on the financial ecosystem developing in the blockchain. It is an inevitability for the advancement of our industry that the core banking functions we see in the traditional space will develop and evolve in blockchain as well. These fundamental building blocks are foundational layers and our team is ecstatic to be developing such solutions at an early stage in the history of blockchain.
Q6: How many team members are you working with, including the community?
The Minterest team’s core office is in Tallinn, Estonia. We staff over 40 people, with two-thirds local, and one-third remote. In terms of the community, we have just started an ambassador program with 5 core community members participating. We are looking to expand on it in the near future.
For some background, I was once a community mod in a popular blockchain group. Eventually, I was hired directly into the team. So I understand the importance that community can play. At Minterest we’re always looking for ambitious community members to work with us.
Q7: Recently, Minterest has been quite busy with updating all the tiers of APY boosting NFT, and even opened a gallery for the display of NFT. Gradually, more and more people are looking forward to the benefits of APY boosting NFT. For those who just recently joined the community, could you explain what APY boosting NFT is, and what kinds of benefits are offered to the users?
The Minterest NFTs are a core part of the Minterest protocol. The NFTs encourage long-term participation by liquidity providers (LPs) on Minterest. And, as I mentioned above, the only way to earn them is to participate in the upcoming public offering via an LBP on February 8–11th. We’ll have a leaderboard for net buys. Based on the user placement an appropriate NFT will be earned.
Coming back to how the NFTs works. Liquidity Providers include both lenders and borrowers. For the simple act of lending and borrowing, LPs earn a steady emissions rate of MNT tokens block by block. If the LP also holds an NFT, these returns are augmented, increasing the number of MNT earned from 20% to 50% depending on the rarity of the NFT.
This image illustrates how holding an NFT boosts MNT rewards for liquidity providers. And the Table shows the different levels (i.e. Rarities) of Minterest NFTs
Now, this additional MNT earned can also be staked in the governance process which provides more MNT that comes in as part of the buyback engine. So the NFTs can result in some crazy returns because of both the emissions and the buyback. So for a large whale, that can be hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of additional earnings per year.
There are 3000 NFTs across 12 levels of rarity. The greater the rarity, the greater the APY boost and the lifespan of those NFTs.
There is only 1 Satoshi, and he provides a crazy 50% boost! Read more about the functionality here: https://minterest.com/blog/inside-nft-lottery
We also wanted to put a face to these NFTs and thought it was appropriate to highlight the Top 100 Blockchain veterans in the space. The team went through multiple rounds of feedback with a community of trusted advisors and investors to finalize this list.
And then we found some of the most incredible artists to create fascinating portraits with a beautiful minimalist approach. You can also check out the entire gallery on our website here: https://minterest.com/nft-gallery
The only way to earn these NFTs is by participating in the Minterest LBP on February 8–11. We will have a leaderboard where the top net buyers of the MNT token will be ranked and earn one of these NFTs.
Q8: Frankly speaking, it is quite uncommon for DeFi protocols to publish their own NFT. What are some of the backgrounds that led Minterest to publish its own NFT? And what are some of the distinguishing factors of Minterest NFTs from other NFTs?
You’re right. it is unusual for DeFi protocol to issue NFTs. As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t want to create just pretty pictures. We wanted these NFTs to have real use cases that would drive LPs to choose Minterest, and for the long term. And I described that above
The other aspect for the NFTs we designed is to be keycards, unlocking exclusive access to Minterest. Holding an NFT will also allow users early access to the Minterest protocol when we do our private launch.
Only NFT holders will be able to access Minter at that time and to be able to pre-mine the MNT token. Since fewer users will be able to participate, we expect the returns will be for those who do, to be much greater.
Q9: Minterest’s community allocation event, which ended in November last year, has now been postponed to January 24th, 2022. Have there been any changes in the community allocation event since then? Also, if the community allocation event resumes in the future, can the users get the opportunity to gain APY Boost NFT again?
To start with, we are currently running a Community Allocation Event to allow for anyone to receive an allocation of up to 500 USDC in MNT tokens.
Anyone interested only needs to go to Minterest.com and click the “Whitelist Now” button at the top.
To provide more context, the Community Allocation Event (CAE) is an extension to the Minterest LBP, our core public offering event held on February 8–11. The challenge for retail investors is it can be gas-intensive since the event is held on Ethereum and it can also be difficult to understand when to purchase tokens. That’s why we decided to hold a community event to make it easier for our retail community members to participate in the LBP with Minterest representing their interest.
We did launch the Community Allocation Event in November and decided to pause it for multiple reasons, one of which was we wanted to educate our community better and the other is we under anticipated the need for mobile support. So we delayed the event and chose to refund all participants by default, but gave them an opt-in form to fill out in case they wanted Minterest to hold their deposit until we resumed the Community Allocation Event in January. Over 50% opted-in for us to keep their deposit! It was a phenomenal trust event. The entire team was honored
As of January 10th, a new Community Allocation Event has started. The terms are the same as before, in that we accept a deposit of up to 500 USDC and then represent the depositor during the upcoming LBP, which is the primary public offering event. Since the LBP is a reverse auction and the price of the token changes throughout the 3 day period of February 8–11, we will provide depositors with the lowest average price in the LBP itself.
So to reiterate, anyone interested in participating in the Community Allocation Event should go to Minterest.com. From there, check out everything related to the public offering at minterest.com/nextlevel. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask our friendly mods in our communities on Telegram and Discord :)
The thing we haven’t publicized about the way we represent our community from the Community Allocation Event in the LBP is we will likely be subsidizing them because the average price will be much higher than the lowest average price.
Q10: What plans do Minterest have these days? Can you share with us?
We have a basic roadmap ahead.
(1) Public Offering: Right now we are in the middle of the public allocation event, which will end on February the 11th after the LBP.
(2) Protocol Launch: We are on track to deliver the private launch of Minterest in late March 2022, which will coincide with TGE and the listing of the MNT token. The Public Launch will be sometime in April or May, with new features being added regularly to improve the user experience.
(3) Security Audit: Minterest is going through its first security audit which should be completed early next month. Based on feedback we will be making the necessary updates and then will start our second security audit. As mentioned earlier, this going to be a rolling process.
(4) Integrations: Throughout Q2 we’ll be focusing on a number of integrations into other protocols, including more listings on Minterest itself.
A more detailed roadmap is being prepared by our team. For the moment, the best way to get information is to read through our extensive Gitbook: https://minterest.gitbook.io/the-minterest-lending-protocol-whitepaper-v1.0/introducing-defi-2.0/introducing-minterest
For more information please follow us on our socials too:
Website: Minterest.com
Twitter: Twitter.com/Minterest
Whitepaper: https://minterest.com/whitepaper
Technical Paper: https://minterest.com/technical-paper
You can also find TokenDamo on ✔
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TokenDamo
Telegram: https://t.me/tokendamo
Website: www.damolabs.com
