Starfish Discord AMA Recap — 09 June, 2022
Gm fam, We felt really happy to conduct this Co-AMA with Astar Network to deliver an overview and the updates of Starfish Finance to the whole Astar community. We have recorded the AMA and summarised useful information for those who couldn’t make it to the live!
Toga from Astar Network and Mars Captain & Mercury Major from Starfish Finance are the representatives for both parties participating in the Co-AMA. They’ll be called ‘Toga’, ‘Mars’ & ‘Mercury’ in the transcript.
Transcript:
What is Starfish Finance?
Mars: Starfish Finance is a DeFi x NFT-Fi headquarters on Astar Network. The architecture of Starfish Finance is built with three pillars:
- DEX enables multi-token pools with multiple leading stablecoins liquidity pools (e.g. aUSD, USDT, USDC)
- Boosting cross-chain liquidity efficiency with Celer Bridge
- Money Market unlocking NFT liquidity potentials (e.g. lending and borrowing services, NFT derivatives)
Can you talk more about Starfish’s DEX? How is it different from other DEXs on Astar Network?
Mars: Starfish Finance is a hybrid of DeFi and NFT-Fi. The DeFi half of Starfish Finance enables swapping, adding/removing liquidity, creating personal pools, yield-farming and SEAN token staking. Our DEX is built, modified and optimised on the basis of Balancer V2.
This fundamental will bring us 2 points: 1) it enables multi-asset pool with different weighted ratio of assets, along with customisable trading fee rates for each pool, which the pool creator can determine it (trading fee rates), as the Balancer model allows up to 8 crypto assets in one pool, this multi-asset format will resemble a mini-index fund. 2) Another benefit is that it optimises the multi-routing for swapping and solves the slippage problem at a large scale. This characteristic distinguishes Starfish from common Uniswap based 50–50 pool models.
Another edge of Starfish finance is our user-friendly UX and beautiful UI design. We want to make DeFi easy and accessible for our users, whether you are a DeFi veteran, or a newbie fresh-off-the-boat, you will befriend Starfish, other than dealing with it as a problem to solve.
Finally, the starfish team is very active in cross-ecosystem collaborations, our team constantly onboard tokens from both Astar network and other chains to enlarge the Astar ecosystem, thus creating a bigger cake for the entire Polkadot ecosystem.
What’s the yield-farming going to look like in Starfish? Any incentives?
Mars: Since the users need to provide liquidity and stake their LP to farm yield, Starfish users will earn their share of trading fees in addition to the $SEAN token as incentives. Also, we’ll be launching double reward farms where users may expect to receive additional reward in $ASTR, $DOT, $aUSD and other tokens relating to our future partnerships.
Can you tell us about $SEAN staking?
Mars: We believe staking provides scope and depth of utility to the SEAN Token. We’ll be having 3 types of staking mechanisms.
- Stake SEAN to earn SEAN: Limited time (40 days) reward offer to early supporters
- Stake SEAN into cSEAN: Earn Stablecoin rewards by sharing revenue generated on the platform
- Stake SEAN into sSEAN: Unlock the ability to participate in Seabed Launch: Token Offering and NFT Auction platform
Wen IDO? Any Token Utilities?
Mars: We’re working closely with several major IDO platforms for our token launch. We will reveal more on that as we progress in the next couple of weeks. We wish to maximise our impact and visibility in the crypto world even though the market conditions are not the most favourable at the moment. This is the reason why we are careful with our announcements because we don’t want to disappoint our community and supporters.
In terms of utilities, by holding and staking $SEAN token, users can enjoy different perks including, but are not limited to:
- Earn protocol trading fees
- Boost yield farming rewards
- Use as collateral to mint Astar/Polkadot-native stablecoin
- Join NFT auctions upon liquidation events
- Vote and exercise governance right in StarfishDAO
What is NFT-Fi? What can we expect to do on Starfish?
Mars: The first thing our NFT-Fi will do is NFT-based lending and borrowing. Imagine this, in a bear market you’re in need of liquidity, but you don’t wish to sell your CloneX or BAYC. You can deposit your valuable NFT on Starfish Finance and get instant liquidity.
With the technical support from our partner Celer Network, We’ll support not only Astar NFTs but also bluechip ones from Ethereum with Celer’s interchain messaging. In the near future, we will expand our lists of supporting networks — our community can expect Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, Flow and more!
Furthermore, Starfish will continue to build effective pricing mechanisms, secured custody solutions, together with insurance plans as we perfect the NFT-Fi side of Starfish Finance.
Any future plan for the community? What’s your vision on that?
Mars: First of all, we are here to sincerely welcome everyone to join our community, and to vibe with us. Furthermore, the ideal status of our community is somewhere people have a sense of belonging, feel proud of being a member, and eventually get involved and contribute to the community. In that sense, we have set up a framework draft of a council, called ‘the aquarium’. The aquarium is a community governed council that covers different sectors across product advisory, art, technology, marketing, community operation, and etc.
Ultimately we want to gather interesting souls and form a unique Starfish-native culture, and in return create a positive feedback loop for the entire Astar network, and beyond (like the Polkadot ecosystem). We are early in this journey, but we’ll stick to it firmly, and we are happy to have all of you with us. LFG!
Q&A Session:
Toga: Why do you call yourself starfish?
Mars: Based on our experience and observation, we think that the threshold of DeFi is still high for beginners. We don’t want our identity to look very corporate and distant — we want to be degen and friendly. That’s why we call ourselves Starfish, we want to be our community’s friend, not like a corporate imposing something onto the community.
On the other hand, our logo is inspired by an asterisk (*) with the intention of showing inclusivity and connectivity. Hence the birth of our mascot, SEAN the starfish, led us to the name of ‘Starfish’.
Toga: What’s the reason behind weighted pools?
Mars: Weighted Pools allow users to choose their levels of exposure to certain assets while still maintaining the ability to provide liquidity. The higher a token’s weight in a pool, the less impermanent loss it will experience in the event of a price surge.
And we want to use a model that addresses better the impermanent loss issue compared to the common Uniswap V2 50–50 pools. In a weighted pool, impermanent Loss is the difference in value between holding a set of assets and providing liquidity for the same assets.
For pools that heavily weigh one token over another, there will be far less impermanent loss, but this doesn’t come for free; very asymmetric pools do have higher slippage when making trades due to the fact that one side has much less liquidity. 80/20 pools have emerged as a happy medium when balancing liquidity an Impermanent Loss mitigation.
Toga: Will conduct vampire attack to other Astar projects?
Mars: To be very honest with you, we’ve thought about it in our beginning stage. But we’ve dropped this idea as Starfish is born friendly. We want to be friends with fellow fishes in the ocean. And I believe a certain part of our community has invested in other Astar projects as well. So if we do the vampire attack on those projects, it’ll definitely hurt our community and backfire as well.
On the other hand, we don’t find it very valuable to do such an attack within the same ecosystem. Instead we want to explore further opportunities in cross-chain liquidity solutions, which we think is a promising angle for the future of DeFi.
Community: How will you calculate the price for collateralised NFTs?
Mercury: We partner with leading oracle solutions in order to work on a comprehensive price aggregator for the NFT lending & borrowing. Right now the floor price of NFT collection is still the main factor in the current industry landscape. And we’ll keep innovating and developing the solutions on NFT price oracle.
Toga: Will you have an ambassador program in Starfish Finance similar to what Astar Network or other Astar projects do?
Mercury: If this is an absolute yes-or-no question, my answer is no. But I think the spirit of having such ambassadors has already fused into our community council program where everyone has the sense of belonging, feel proud of being a part and eventually help each other out. We want our members to contribute to the community instead of taking orders to work for the starfish team. We’re still at the early stage of that but we have faith in it.
About Starfish Finance
Starfish Finance is incubated by the Astar Builders program. We are building the next generation DeFi x NFT-Fi headquarters on Astar Network within the Polkadot ecosystem. Through gamification of user experience, Starfish Finance offers stablecoin swap and NFT-Fi on top of an enhanced Balancer AMM model to deepen the liquidity of crypto or NFT trading and financing.
