Hakka Finance AMA Recap: March 2022
Last Tuesday, Hakka Finance held its 3rd AMA (Ask Me Anything) for this year. It happens every 15th of the month, usually on Twitter, but this time we did it on our Discord Stage.
A total of 180+ people joined us to discuss about the launch of the borrow feature of iGain IRS — which enabled anyone to borrow stable coins with fixed interest rate. This is made possible by buying a Long token with your loan, hedging the borrow interest rate should it fluctuate.
Days before the AMA, we encouraged everyone to submit their questions in advance, and once their question is picked, they will get an OAT NFT powered by Project Galaxy. This NFT gives you a special privilege, like the one on this Trading Competition that we have launched last month.
Here are just some of the questions that were picked from the HakkaFam Community and was answered during the AMA:
1. What is the difference between borrowing on iGain IRS compared to other lending platforms? How to predict the APY?
Technical differences and explaining how iGain IRS is a superior solution would be too long to uncover during this AMA, but here are some things to keep in mind:
First, we have created iGain IRS because we are not satisfied with the current state of DeFi platforms. Borrowing on Aave doesn’t enable you to obtain limited borrowing costs as rates have been historically fluctuating from low one digit to high two digit %! In traditional finance, this would have been something unacceptable. With iGain IRS, we are empowering borrowers to hedge against this risk.
Second, if your question was about fixed interest rate DeFi protocols, we have written an in-depth article on the current competitive landscape and why iGain IRS is the best as of now.
But long story short, one of our differences is that you can hedge and keep rates stable without needing any principal. All your capital can maximize efficiency by focusing on interest rates. — It is related to demand and supply on Aave. If the gap is large enough and the term is close to maturity, there’s an opportunity for arbitrage. Based on our user feedback, we have decided to include soon a new chart on the platform that is more intuitive to find arbitrage opportunities. This chart would include price, not just APYs.
2. You released the iGain series in Polygon. Do you plan to expand your services in other L2 in the future?
We’re now planning to have Yearn on iGain IRS. The initial plan was to launch it on Fantom. But since Yearn launched on Arbitrum, we’re considering Arbitrum as well. But the decision has not been made yet. That is going to happen when we launch the iGain IRS on Yearn, most likely in Q2.
3. How long do you think it will take for ordinary people to begin using DeFi? As they begin to use DeFi, what will you do in order for Hakka Finance to be chosen?
This should not be taken as financial advice, but as opinions from Ethereum believers. We think mainstream status can only happen after the merge of other Ethereum features to make it more scalable, likely this decade. The merge is just the first step. After that, sharding is coming; ZK rollup, etc.
4. What are your engineers most focused on right now?
Our engineers are currently working on iGain IRS — one click borrowing, UX improvement, Referral, Yearn.
5. Which types of financial services are provided by Hakka Finance?
Our DeFi ecosystem includes:
- iGain IRS — a platform to hedge against DeFi interest rates fluctuation
- iGain IG — a platform to hedge against DeFi impermanent loss
- Hakka Intelligence — a prediction platform, enabling users to bet on future metrics, like token prices, etc, and make money from it
- 3F Mutual — a decentralized insurance platform against DeFi systemic risk
- Farming & DAO — we offer liquidity farming programs on our main website and we enable people to decide what Hakka Finance does in every business decision via DAO voting power.
6. In which wallets and exchanges we can buy, sell, and hold HAKKA tokens?
Wallets: imToken, Trust Wallet
Exchanges: 1inch, Uniswap, Balancer (Mainnet), PancakeSwap, 1inch (Binance Smart Chain) Quickswap (Polygon)
7. Are there plans to connect to the platform of other blockchains like AVAX, LUNA, and FANTOM?
No plans for AVAX and Luna, but FANTOM or Arbitrum are very likely. It will probably be Arbitrum.
8. In a downturn of the market, what plans do you have for holders of HAKKA tokens that do not want to sell?
HAKKA is a governance token, not really a speculative tool. So, holders should be insensitive to short or medium term market fluctuations. What they should care about is their voting power and how they can contribute for the growth of the Hakka Finance ecosystem, which will add long term value. And in fact, Hakka Finance empowers its users to make money in various ways by using its products (lending on iGain IRS, hedging against impermanent loss, making bets on Hakka Intelligence, liquidity farming), not simply holding a token and expecting it to go to the moon the next day.
9. Many projects have problems with UX/UI and this turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
We are aware of the critical issue of making platforms as user-friendly as possible. So, we are conducting continuous user interviews to collect their feedback and include them into our development roadmap.
To incentivize users to speak to us, we offer them a Galaxy OAT that has more value than others: https://galaxy.eco/hakkafinance/campaign/GCgYeUU3EW
10. Do you have any plans for OAT NFT holders in future?
Yes! The more OATs you own, the more benefits and privileges you will get in future campaigns. We want to leverage the power of Galaxy and we are preparing something big for you in Q2.
11. How do you ensure the security of the project?
We run regular audits on our smart contracts; all of them is available on Github: https://github.com/hakkafinance/audit-reports.
12. What is the Hakka Roadmap and what goals does it want to achieve?
Our CEO, Lucien, has written an entire article dedicated to our 2022 Roadmap. Check it out here: https://medium.com/hakkafinance/hakka-finance-2022-roadmap-7bb902ba01de.
13. Do you have a plan for community members to join your project? People like graphic artists, painters, or musicians?
Yes! An ambassador program to help us spread the word about Hakka Finance is on the way!
14. Any plans to expand iGain IRS to Compound? Update on timeline for Polygon staking? Thoughts about using treasury funds to grow revenues? What are the biggest challenges to be able to provide longer term fixed borrowing and lending rates that are truly stable (5-30 years)?
- The main concern on expanding on Compound is that it’s only on mainnet, with potentially high gas fees. But we are going to launch on Yearn.
- Maybe June. — We are currently using our Balancer token to farm. But we are not using ETH at the moment.
- We encourage people to make proposals on our forum.
- The first issue is liquidity. If you want to create it very long term, there are insufficient arbitrageurs to make the market efficient. So, the market would diverge a lot because uncertainty is too high over that kind of long term.
15. Recently, the Polygon platform is showing weakness and downtime. Does the team have plan for another backup platform?
We are currently on 3 networks. In case polygon is down, mainnet is available at relatively low fees at the moment! But regarding iGain IRS we’re staying on Polygon.
16. Could you tell us about what problem Hakka Finance is solving for the future of crypto?
The vision Hakka Finance aims to stick to is not merely the future of crypto, but the future of finance itself. History of finance has gone through several transformational phases: individual moneylenders, then traditional with the emergence of capitalism.
On the span of this decade, we want to be actors of the next transformation via decentralization and accessibility of finance to everyone, empowering them with full sovereignty, privacy, and voting power over what Hakka Finance does. So, what we are pushing for is the figurative and the literal decentralization of finance.
17. Any plan in the roadmap to integrate AI/ML & on-chain data with products, mainly iGain IRS? With these, the platform can predict spontaneous market dumps & pumps, and then automatically switch between shorts and longs to mitigate the user’s loss. Sounds interesting!
No such plan at the moment! However, our Forum is open for any ideas and we highly recommend HAKKA holders to submit a proposal here: https://forum.hakka.finance.
iGain IRS: https://bit.ly/3qbc840
Instructions: https://bit.ly/3q7CfZF
