ADA Finance — Cross-Dual-Chain DeFi Ecosystem on Avalanche and Cardano.
Waton | ADA Finance: Hey OIG Community. I only hear great things about you guys!
I am Christof Waton, Founder and CEO of ADA Finance. I am holding crypto since 2014 and started my professional career in 2017 as co-founder of MLC, which is actually just like the OIG group 🙂
2018 started the enterprise / corporate working in a liquidity framework and centralized exchange up till 2020.
Wrote out my first DeFi ecosystem for YFDAI, introducing redistribution of passive earning fees -> which became a huge success
I enhanced that a bit for Howdoo, where unfortunately there was a lack of development progress
April this year, I started writing on the P2P Finance, later rebranded to ADA Finance, whitepaper
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Great background and introduction @cryptowaton! Always a pleasure to see someone with such experience and pedigree like yourself take charge of a project. And ADA Finance is definitely one that is looking to solve a unique challenge within the DeFi space today.
Can you tell us a little about the team behind ADA Finance?
Waton | ADA Finance: The toughest part of any startup, by what people say, is getting the team together. I can now confirm that that saying is absolutely true. Even now there are some positions open (SEO manager for example)
Laurynas Antanavičius — CTO
I started the project by writing out the whitepaper and DeFi Ecosystem. Once I had it written out, I presented it to Laurynas who did not have to think twice to become the CTO. As we have history working together, we know from each other what we are capable of and up to this point, I am still 100% happy with my choice!
As Laurynas on Monday had 7 in-house developers directly under him
- 1 Haskell
- 1 dev ops
- 1 solidity
- 2 frontend
- 1 ui/ux
- 1 backend
it became tough for him to keep up so we hired a product owner and 2 additional solidity developers for avalanche development, making the solidity devs count on 3 now.
Mate Tokay — CBDO
From the business development side, I needed a person who can review my work and strategy planning. Of all the people I came across my professional career (4y) in crypto, only Mate Tokay, Co-founder bitcoin.com was the person that could keep up and bring valid input / feedback. As Mate got to understand the vision more, he agreed to come back from retirement to join us in the CBDO position.
CMO
This is the most toughest role to fill. The talent pool in the crypto industry is very small and finding a CMO that has the knowledge of crypto / blockchain / fundraising / growth strategy / … etc etc, is tough.
Currently we have a head of marketing, who we can’t name yet for at least 2 months, but this man has tons of experience. Started this week (actually next week), has his introduction meetings with his department done and already started structuring. This guy, can move mountains from marketing side!
Business development side we have.. 3 full-timers along with 1 hourly based (designer), and 2 strategic partners that help us. We are scaling the marketing department now with an additional designer, video maker, long-form content writer and SEO manager.
Total team:
in-house 14
There are currently 4 Haskell contractors as well so there are actually 21 people on the payroll at this stage.
Scaling the teams is the most important thing.. there is funds available, scale the teams 1st and make sure the machine starts producing!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Incredible talent pool you are all working with! It’s clear you have a great collection of individuals that have a broad range of scope and depth. And yes! Believe me, I know the challenge with the Marketing side. There are ton’s of “Crypto Marketers,” and very little true off-chain experience working in traditional digital marketing.
Thank you for laying out your team! We always believe that a strong team can overcome most challenges presented in this space. So it’s clear you’ve brought together the Avengers of DeFi.
What made you decide upon Cardano and Avalanche as the two blockchains to focus and provide interoperable support on?
Waton | ADA Finance: Well, the hiring process takes time. But the most important thing is that the team can rely on each other to be efficient
Initially, we were building only on Cardano with the Haskell contractors. Being in the industry for a while and understanding the scaling of a new ecosystem (Cardano Ecosystem) will take time and would not be DeFi ready if they release it -> either way the blockchain wouldn’t be ready for DeFi or they would need to delay the PAB release for smart contracts to be deployed to the main net.
Since the fundraising was ongoing and I am aware of the potential struggles, it is my responsibility to the investors, partners, community, and team to make sure the path we take would not harm anyone.
A former ‘helper’ wanted us to drop Cardano development and start developing on Solana… however, after the exit of his influence, I had the time to review things properly and decided to do cross-dual-chain development and soon to be cross- multichain. The future is:
Users stay in control of their assets and choose on which blockchain they operate our ecosystem on.
We came out with Avalanche, aside Cardano development, as Avalanche currently has the best financial dApp development infrastructure and from DeFi perspective they have great volume.
Personally, I consider Avalanche as #1 for DeFi at this stage, but that can change in the future of course.
I refuse to turn my back to or drop, Cardano as I believe in functional programming to resolve many issues the blockchain industry has right now. Therefore, we have agreed with BitDegree to start a Haskell Academy program, to help the Cardano Ecosystem and educate Haskell developers to become Cardano Blockchain Developers.
Saigon 💎 | OIG:
Incredible stuff! We are seeing a lot of projects approach us wanting to build on AVAX as well so it’s quite clear the winds have been blowing there for some time. Excellent foresight to have zeroed in on that as the target.
Can you explain a bit about the traditional DeFi applications that you will be bringing to these networks?
Waton | ADA Finance: From traditional DeFi applications we are bringing ADAFi Swap and ADAFi Launchpad as products.
Traditional passive earning features:
- staking
- liquidity farming
- Farming (LP staking)
Innovations that we bring:
We have a progressive staking model to motivate users to engage long term in staking.
To incentivize staking even more, users that stake for minimum 6months can claim their DAO title and receive passive earnings from the platform fees.
Peer-to-peer lending that feeds the margin requests on our swap
An affiliate / referral campaign and address milestones, to motivate userbase growth and user activity
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Yes!! These are features that we hope to touch on a bit more in-depth with you.
The idea for the ADAFi Launchpad is very interesting, can you tell us about the types of projects you are looking to onboard? When will this be live?
Waton | ADA Finance: The question with Cardano is: ‘When PAB’
Tough to estimate a timeline on Cardano currently as long as the PAB hasn’t been released. But, we have news upcoming that should motivate the community that our Haskell development jumps to the next level.
Projects to launch:
This will depend on the momentum of the market. What is desired by the investors and we see the best potential outcome for the contributors on our launchpad.
We will work together with our partners to launch and incubate projects on our launchpad, but to stay in line with the vision of Cardano, we want to do real world solution projects by priority.
Avalanche:
We are focussing first on the Swap. The reason for that is that we are in the final steps of signing with 2 liquidity providers, getting 100m TVL on day 1 confirmed. The launchpad, therefore, comes on the 2nd place.
For the launchpad, we of course perform the due diligence, as any launchpad should do, and we have an investment protection model which works as insurance against rugpulls.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Perfect, so there is no rush right now to onboard projects but rather the selection process will be quite detailed and dependent on vision and alignment.
We are very excited about this Avalanche Swap! There is always a need for quality and dependent swapping mechanisms cross-chain.
Passive Yields is a big concept for earning rewards within the ADAFi ecosystem, can you explain the types of user rewards that a user can access?
Waton | ADA Finance: Many!
I call ADA Finance a financial / passive earnings playground.
Lets dig in
Progressive staking model:
< 90 days 15% APR
> 90 days 20% APR = max
Liquidity Farming
Provide liquidity to the swap (amm protocol) and receive your share of the trading fees.
Farming (liquidity staking)
Stake the liquidity points, to receive your share of a fixed reward pool.
Peer-to-peer lending
Lending assets feeds the margin requests (borrowers) on the ADAFi Swap. This we allow up to 2% daily!
DAO:
Stake the minimum required tokens, for minimum 6 months, to claim your DAO Title.
We have Counselor (25,000), Minister (50,000) Ambassador (100,000)
DAO Title gives access to staking fee distribution, margin liquidation fee distribution, launchpad revenue, and realised lending profits
DAO Title gives access to staking fee distribution, margin liquidation fee distribution, launchpad revenue, and realised lending profits
DAO title owners still receive their staking reward, on top of the additional passive earnings that the DAO program gives access to.
we have a referral program and address milestones
This is explained in our ADAFi DeFi 101 series here:
Our next blog release will be very shortly, which elaborates the staking, into DAO, into referral passive earnings.
Keep an eye out in our socials!
https://twitter.com/adafinance
@ada_finance
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing features, really enjoy the governance structure. This is extremely well thought out and the rights for each Title seems very fair for the amount of tokens required!
Can you talk about the utility of the $ADAFI token?
Waton | ADA Finance: The utility of the ADAFI Token is to access the passive earning features.
As we have a DAO program and referral program, the early adopters and contributors to the growth and activity of the ecosystem need to get the rewards from somewhere.
There are fees involved to access the passive earning features. (staking has a deposit and withdrawal fee),
50 tokens are required for the affiliate/referral link, to start building your network and start passive earning from the activity of your network.
Min amount tokens required in staking to claim the DAO title
Lending accrued interests can be paid in the ADAFI Token.
ADAFI tokens are required to determine your Tier level to contribute/invest in our launchpad.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Gotcha! Thank you for that clarification!
Can you discuss the Public Sale coming up? When and where will it happen?
Waton | ADA Finance: We are deciding with Vent the final date.
We have a verbal agreement with a 2nd launchpad and got to hear 16th would be their preferred date.
We are in a final stage with a 3rd launchpad, but since there is a person that is branded to put sticks in our wheels, we will not talk about which launchpad it is upfront.
What we all know is that the more successful you become, the more enemies/pirates / terrorists will cross your path. Therefore, we don’t release news upfront.
However, I take it as a compliment and as a motivation that we are on the right track 🙂 💪
Saigon 💎 | OIG: haha love it. Well we eagerly await news on the public sale as we have a very engaged community that would love to get their hands on $ADAFI!
What do you have on your roadmap that you are most excited about?
Waton | ADA Finance: The most excited for me personally is the peer-to-peer lending that feeds the margin requests.
Bringing derivatives on-chain with a true decentralized price feed (Charli3) will take away the questions around manipulated liquidations of centralized entities.
Its a big elephant in the room.
I had the experience on Kucoin in April this year, the famous 11k $ btc drop in minutes, and nearly got liquidated while the asset price on another top exchange was more than 1000$ higher.
I worked as CBDO at a liquidity framework for 3 years, therefore understanding how it works. Arbitraging bots down as well, at the same time?
No significant btc inflow to exchanges (easily trackable), btc liquidity reserves critical on centralized exchanges.
So where did that drop come from? 😉
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Yes! I remember that, so many traders’ months of profits were wiped within a minute by an outlier wick. Glad to see that function is being looked into and prevented in the future!
Well @cryptowaton we’ve come to the community questions time where we received a ton of responses for ADA Finance on Twitter.
Community Twitter Questions
Twitter Question 1)
Waton | ADA Finance: We don't develop on ethereum but on Avalanche (which is solidity still) and Cardano.
Developing on Solidity makes it easy to fork to other blockchains, making ADA Finance a cross-multichain DeFi Ecosystem.
Is the network congested to many times-> operate from a different blockchain / network.
Are network fees getting to high -> operate from a different network.
ADA Finance offers the users the freedom to choose on which network / blockchain they operate our DeFi ecosystem on.
Polygon, Solana come in mind as first forks of our DeFi Ecosystem.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: This is a breathe of fresh air for a lot of users on congested chains, were we are getting gouged by ridiculous fees!
Twitter Question 2)
Waton | ADA Finance:
1 picture for all the answers to this question
Twitter Question 3)
Waton | ADA Finance: The referral program is to motivate the userbase growth
The address milestones provide a commission to the referrers (affiliates) with 3 levels. This not only motivates you, to build your network and start earning a passive income from the activity of your network, but it also motivates your network to do the same, meaning your 3 affiliate /referral levels can scale through the roof, very easily!
If you refer 10 people, who all refer 10 people, who all refer 10 people -> you are getting passive income on the user activity of those 1000 people! Therefore, early adopters are the biggest winners. You help growing the user base, our address milestones and passive earning opportunities do the rest for you!
An easy writeup on how it works and how you can achieve a passive earning by the affiliate / referral program can be found here:
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Whoa… That really compounds. What a great way to address the boostrap issue within a new protocol. Amazing adoption technique Walton!
Well @cryptowaton we’ve about come to an end here at the OIG AMA Series. Thank you for this highly engaging interview.
Are there any final words you would like to leave with our community today?
Waton | ADA Finance: To lead up to our public sale, we will conduct more AMAs and are going to give away whitelisting access for the public sale to our community.
Join our community to participate in the AMAs (with rewards ofc) and to stay up to date with the latest news / discuss it with the rest!
👉@ada_finance 👈
Other than that, I thank you for your time @SaigonXIII . I love the work the OIG community performs, not only hosting us here but also the Twitter support.
You are an amazing crew!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Thank you very much for your time @cryptowaton ! We truly appreciate all that you are doing. We are excited to be following this journey from the start. We look forward to watching ADA Finance grow!
Well OIG thank you again for coming out to support! We will be back today with the second of our AMA series!
Please thank @cryptowaton and we’ll be back soon!!
As always stay blessed! ✨🐣
ADA Finance:
Website: https://adafinance.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ADAFinance
Telegram: https://t.me/ada_finance
