AMA Recap - Composable Finance.
The session of AMA ( Ask Me Anything ) with Composable Finance was conducted on 3rd August 2021 at 5:30 PM IST (12:00PM UTC) and lasted for 1.5 hours.
AMA at @CrytoPlayers started with a brief introduction by Rob Z (Project Lead at Composable Finance). Here are some highlights of the AMA.
INTRODUCTION
Rob Z
I’m Rob, the Composable Finance Project Lead. My background has been digital delivery for the last 15 years, across banks, fintechs, payment platforms, worked for amazon and in 2017 built a blockchain bank. Our team is quite spread out across the world internationally, from NYC, to Romania, Africa, to here in London. We have a team of around 15–20 developers working on Composable Finance, with a focus a couple of departments including solidity, ethereum and polkadot.
We started Composable in Jan/Feb 2021, and is phased across multiple strategies pillars. We’ve launched the first component of our platform 3 weeks ago which is a stable coin strategy vault and hit $60m TVL in a number of hours.We work closely with Trail of Bits to audit all components of our platform and this is paramount to ensure the security of the platform and funds before launching into the public.
ADMIN ROUND
Jonty|Host
What Composable project is about? How it works, Give a detailed introduction.
Rob Z
Composable Finance is a cross-chain and cross-layer interoperability platform. It serves as a hyper-liquidity infrastructure layer for DeFi assets, powered by Layer 2 Ethereum and Polkadot. At the start of this journey, we noticed there is a lack of interoperability between multiple blockchains and layers creates fragmentation and disparity in the ecosystem. We as developers are quite restricted in what we can build with siloed infrastructures/blockchains, and users are forced to navigate complicated and lengthy processes if they want to utilize multiple chains or layers. So Composable is working on a suite of different products to establish cross-chain and cross-layer interoperability that will reduce the barriers for DeFi developers and remove the unnecessary complexity for the users. Our development roadmap has two phases. In the first phase, we will focus on multi-layer (L2/L2) interoperability, bridging the gap between different Ethereum Layer 2 implementations and sidechains. In the second phase, we will launch our para chain, Picasso (which we also just announced last week). It has been developed over several months to enable a complete DeFi ecosystem on Polkadot.
The easiest way to put this, with our Picasso para chain, we have the intention of becoming the AWS (amazon web services) of parachains. Where DApps, projects or protocols, who want the power of a para chain or cross-layer infrastructure solutions (ie loan/finance DApps), but don't have the infrastructure/dev capability or funds to build one, can deploy on our Picasso para chain and have the full power of our infrastructure.
Wrapped around this is the de-fi applicability, where staking will earn users rewards across all aspects of the Composable ecosystem.
Jonty|Host
What is the token Usecase? And how will it be useful for the ecosystem?
Rob Z
Our token, the LAYR token (which will be created at TGE in the near future), is titled to represent the ability to move/transact and operate through the various layers of the blockchain. On the launch of our Composable Vault Strategy at Composable. finance, you’ll see staking APYs are already via our LAYR token. But more strategically, the use case for LAYR tokens will be much deeper and interconnected.
Other use cases include:
- Staking for cross-layer system validation
- Incentivization/rewards in our smart liquidity engine
- Governance for the cross-layer stable coin
- Staking for validating the para chain
- Governance for para chain
- and much more.
Jonty|Host
Each project has interesting stories before it is created. So can you tell people about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop unique project like Composable?
Rob Z
Our CEO Cosmin was a lead developer at Nakamo. to, which is a portfolio of Advanced Blockchain AG, one of the first publicly listed blockchain companies in Germany. Cosmin alongside the company’s a technical thought leader/product manager 0xBrainjar came up with the idea of Composable Finance and was spun off into its own entity, project, platform. The motivation was to create something new and useful for the community to address how we are restricted in what we can build with siloed infrastructures/blockchains, and users are forced to navigate complicated and lengthy processes if they want to utilize multiple chains or layers. We think cross-layer actions ie swaps between layers, movement of assets, cross-layer function calls are a must in the DeFi ecosystem to have a truly decentralised ecosystem, and it is something we have solved and slowly rolling out in strategic phases. We know a lot of other projects or protocols are also trying to solve this, but one of our focuses on top of cross-layer swaps in our solution for manage liquidity on respective layers (via our smart liquidity engine) We also have Composable Labs, where we can trial and error new technologies on test net and proof of concepts to gather data on how liquidity moves across layers and across chains. With successful PoC’s, we can then bring them into our core platform and roll that out to the public.
Jonty|Host
Could you please provide some progress on your Roadmap and what results Composable has achieved so far? And any upcoming plans for Composable?
Rob Z
As mentioned, Composable is an infrastructure platform for users and DApp developers with a pretty significant roadmap. If I was to split our roadmap into 3 components at a high level and chat about each individualy
- Vault Strategies
- L2 infrastructure platform
- Polkadot para chain. 1. Vault Strategies — 🚀
As mentioned, we launched our vault strategies (which you can see at composable.finance) last month. We hit our initial cap of $15m in 5 hours, then we lifted it to $50m the following week and hit that in 2 hours.
Our vault strategy can also be used as a launch pad for other projects to create a vault, have users stake, earn rewards for their own parachain auction — so if you are aware of any projects that would like to use composable strategies for very high APYs in preparation for their own parachain auction bid, feel free to message me too!
We announced our first partner who will be using our parachain last week too — https://composablefi.medium.com/composables-parachain-auction-launchpad-opening-our-parachain-vault-strategy-to-other-protocols-b33b7f4039a.
2. L2 infrastructure platform
This is our secret sauce to our cross layer infrastructure platform, where we are building the final components, testing, auditing and gathering data through a proof of concept to fine tune the system. This will be launching in the coming months.
3. Polkadot parachain — in progress We have announced our parachain and continue to build and enhance it to become the AWS of parachains as mentioned. So all in all, we are tracking well against our milestones and roadmap with item 2 nearing completion and 3 announced and continue to refine the platform.
TWITTER ROUND
@Fren
I am eager to know about the composable launchpad strategies. How the projects are selected and what kind of help does the composable team provide to the adopted project. Any examples of launchpad projects are very welcomed.
Rob Z
As we are an infrastructure project, we really built a platform for fellow DApps, projects and protocols to use and give their users great APY’s, while allowing them to also secure funding for their polkadot/kusama parachain auction bid. We assess projects on an individual basis, with the main criteria to serve and enhance the web3.0 ecosystem and DeFi- which is what both Advanced Blockchain / Nakamto and Composable Finance are all about. Mangata as an example, our first project to use our launch pad, is a a decentralized exchange protocol for bridging Ethereum liquidity into Polkadot. All projects that use our parachain launchpad will have direct access to our Yield Farming Strategies. Protocols and community members can even suggest their own which we will investigate, build and test these and if beneficial for all, ship them to production. We even created a forum for new strategies just recently actually — https://forum.composable.finance/ If you have any great ideas, feel free to post them and you will be rewarded for any strategies that you come up with that we ship. We have built most of our strategies on Harvest, as this is the most secure yield farm. We are always in development of multiple strategies across other protocols which will be released soon.
@AnhQuang12
The risk related to the lending platform is the smart contract risk. So has the smart contract been audited? Is there any safety mechanism to prevent over minting (to prevent any foul play/hacks)? How does ComposableFin apply for a witness node or deploy/manage a smart contract?
Rob Z
Security is paramount to us and no cost can be spared here. At Composable, we work closely with both Trail of Bits (the leading blockchain auditing firm) and Stella Labs. They not only review our smart contracts, but also review our entire code base across the system, as well as security and penetration testing of normal components — including web services/aws/backend platforms etc. All our audits can be found at our github too — https://github.com/ComposableFi
@Meinlyreol
Many projects on a daily basis promise great utilities and functionalities, but they end up throwing the carpet days after the presale, how do you really know that your project will not throw the carpet? What guarantee do investors have?
Rob Z
For us, building the technology is the focus. We have been in stealth for some time, and only really starting to build the community now. We have always been a ship first, market/promote later kind of company, rather than just creating hype and shipping a sub-par product or failing to ship. Advanced Blockchain’s portfolio includes being one of the earliest investors in Polkadot, and has continued to push web3.0 development since with Composable Finance being it’s flagship web 3.0 infrastructure project. Even now, whilst the LAYR token is of upmost importance in running the eco system, we have not conducted our TGE (token generation event) and dont feel the need to do so until the necessary components are all in place — highlighting that its not the primary concern/focus at the mooment.
@Shanthi
How is the #ComposableFinance development process going thus far? Can you elaborate on your existing benefits and problems, as well as your market expansion objectives, anticipated uses, and when your product will be commercially available?
Rob Z
It’s going amazing so far. I wake up most days wanting to jump straight into work and work with the team on all the exciting stuff we are building. We’ve built a great team and ways of working, where we can collaborate in different parts of the world and timezones. We actually only met face to face 2 weeks ago at ethcc for the first time which was an amazing experience and further team building. We’ve hit all of the milestones on our roadmap so far, and progressing well against all the remaining ones. The existing benefits, I’ve touched on above and just summarising:
- our vault strategies launch pad will give both users as well as protocols/projects the best APYs through our existing strategies + all the new ones we are building
- our platform can be used as a defi staking platform as we currently launched as part of the first phase
- and with our layer 2 solution and our Picasso parachain, we can become the aws of parachains — where Dapps can deploy our on our parachains like microservices on aws and connect and be actually interoperable across chains. Our LAYR token will be used throughout the platform and across all aspects of the eco system and potentially on other chains too. The only problem we have, is trying to do too many cool things at once! 😅 Cosmin and 0xbrainjar have all these amazing ideas to revolutionize L2 transfers (but the problem is, they have these ideas DAILY haha). there are many problems we are trying to solve, so as project lead, ensuring focus is always a fun job lol. Our vault strategy can actually be used currently, for those who stake their stable coins, they will earn a great APY as well as LAYR tokens as rewards, so if you are keeping your stable coins safe in a wallet that is doing nothing, composable.finance will earn you APY on these too! But to find out more about platform and composable, feel free to join our discord or telegram!
https://discord.gg/pFZn2GCn65
https://t.me/joinchat/uAGCJk_Cjc9iYTky
and as project lead, i’m also mr composable twitter haha
https://twitter.com/ComposableFin.
COMMUNITY ROUND
Tuệ Nhi
Almost 80% investors have just focused on price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us on motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in long term?
Rob Z
Agree!! Also the reason we did not have a public sale. A lot of our investors were strategic investors from the blockchain / VC world, that saw that we are solving a real problem with in the defi space and will continue to support us as we will the de-fi ecosystem.
Akira
How Important is Creation of Composable Labs for the growth of Project?
What role will Community have in this labs??
How many total devs are currently working for Composable?
Rob Z
Composable Labs is a critical component for us. Even in the de-fi space, and big players such as Polygon are still trying to figure out things. We build Composable Labs to test solutions for real world problems, and sometimes they dont work, sometimes they help us improve on our existing platform, etc but they give us data. Data allows us to analyse what is happening across the blockchains, how users interact, what happens to liqudity here and there and how long things take. All these bits of data help us come up with new ideas and solutions, and Composable Labs helps us to build and test these. The community can suggest new ideas/features/concepts across our telegram/discord or even our latest forum (which we will be showing some love soon) — https://docs.composable.finance/getting-started/welcome
Chan Xong Húp
Staking programme is very important for any project, Can i stake your token? Do you have any plan of starting staking programme?
Rob Z
Absolutely, staking is super critical in the defi world. You can already participate in the staking as we have lifted the cap on our vaults when we hit $50m on composable.finance. As mentioned above, we’ve built some great strategies to earn you high APY’s, with many more strategies coming in the coming weeks.
🇪🇬Crypto boy🇪🇬
Community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?$
Rob Z
Yes and 100% agree. As mentioned, we were more of an infrastructure project with a focus on building the platform (and in stealth for a while). Now that we have, we are actively expanding the community — including doing AMA’s! Looking to also do some interviews/youtube etc to show the world about Composable Finance. We have developers / teams members and speak over 10 languages combined, so that’s a good starting point and we’ll slowly ramp these up (we have been busy with building fortunately/unfortunately).
কেল্টু মাস্তান 0033
Where can I buy your tokens now. What are your current contracts,, and how can I buy them and what are the benefits???
Rob Z
Right now you can earn LAYR tokens by staking on our platform with stable coins. We aren’t too focused on being on exchanges at the moment until our infrastructure platform is up and running. They will be used for a multitude of purposes> Other use cases include:
- Staking for cross layer system validation
- Incentivization / rewards in our smart liquidity engine
- Governance for the cross layer stable coin
- Staking for validating the parachain
- Governance for parachain
- and much more..
The AMA recorded many great questions from the Crypto Players India community, as well as meticulous answers from our guests Rob Z from Composable. AMA Concluded at 7pm IST.
