On June 14, HydraDX and PolkaWarriors together organized an AMA to introduce Basilisk - The canary network of HydraDX and reveal HydraDX’s upcoming plan to participate in the upcoming Parachain auction.
Basilisk is a liquidity bootstrapping protocol designed to operate as a parachain in Kusama, the Substrate canary network from the Polkadot family.
This AMA was held in PolkaWarriors Global Telegram Group with the participation of Jakub Gregus - CoFounder of HydraDX. Many interesting questions about their products, Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool, token BSX and their upcoming plan were answered by Jakub Gregus.
Below is a summary of the outstanding questions and answers from the AMA session.
1. Liquidity, Transaction fees and slippage are always important factors in Finance services. How does Basilisk solve the above problem to attract users?
Jakub Gregus:
Basilisk will be the go-to place for new Kusama & Polkadot native projects and testbed for new application specific AMMs. Transaction fees are low thanks to Kusama & Substrate native scalability, slippage is reduced by our novel feature - order matching, which is matching txs in mempool and clearing them before they'll touch AMM. So transactions going in opposite directions e.g. KSM => renBTC and renBTC => KSM will be matched and not affected by slippage (only potential leftovers bigger than 1 part of transaction). We are working hard to make Basilisk as the center of Kusama defi summer, by layered incentives, which means users will be getting from 2-4 incentives streams based on their contributions. This can attract a lot of liquidity from other ecosystems, due to low fees it will be great for ordinary users who can’t afford paying such crazy fees as on Ethereum.
2. What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market? In contrast, what is your weakness? How do you plan to overcome it?
Jakub Gregus:
What we see as our advantage is a deep understanding of DeFi and crypto markets in general based on our personal experiences, which is validated by older projects re-iterating to same conclusions or kind of similar solutions, but devil is in details! Maybe the biggest advantage is the right mix between academic - practical - community approach. You can’t see many projects with tokenomics in favor of the community like you can see in the case of Basilisk or HydraDX unfortunately. Our biggest weakness is sometimes lack of marketing approach, because we don't like paid marketing due to misalignment of incentives with all other issues tied with it, but we are getting to a point where info about is shared very widely and organic, that's where you can help us a lot.
3. Can Basilisk list the salient features of Basilisk that set it apart from its competitors? What competitive advantage does Basilisk's platform have that you feel most confident in?
Jakub Gregus:
Based on our hands-on experiences with Liquidity Bootstrapping pools on Balancer (https://medium.com/balancer-protocol/balancer-facilitates-record-high-liquidity-bootstrapping-pool-for-hydradx-f08b6b0a3aee) we chose to implement them within Substrate framework and Polkadot & Kusama ecosystem with some advantages over older implementation which will create better experience for users and developers. Projects/communities can also bootstrap liquidity of their token with KSM which they can use later for slot renewal. So we are helping other projects with reaching their long term plans in a more capital efficient way. They can also find useful other features like AMM for swapping highly correlated assets (similar to Curve), or other mentioned above e.g. “payment in any currency” module improving UX for whole ecosystem, native support for NFTs, different price discovery mechanisms for them like candle & dutch auctions, order matching for 0 slippage trading and others.
4. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for investors to hold $Basilisk in the long term? What plans do you have to help drive demand and scarcity for the token?
Jakub Gregus:
Motivation can be betting on one of the best communities and teams in Polkadot and DeFi in general. Investors & community will have control over the governance of such an important & useful network in Kusama and get reasonable share on value which will create Basilisk and its network by trading and gas fees.
BSX is capped
5. What kind of partnerships with different projects/platforms/protocols can we expect from Basilisk in the future? Could you give us some examples of how other projects can leverage Basilisk?
Jakub Gregus:
You can see upcoming partnerships from various areas like prediction markets, stablecoins, staking derivatives, algorithmic currencies, money markets, smart contract platforms,etc...
Except for launchpad features (LBP), projects which are requiring payments in their native currencies can adopt our “payment in any currency” module which allows their users to choose any currency (supported by Basilisk) e.g. USDT for paying fees on targeted chains. All these partnerships will unfold in the next days and weeks.
6. Can you tell me about your listing plans? Especially the ones involving major exchanges, CEX and DEX. What types of Partnerships are you looking for and what values would they bring?
Jakub Gregus:
We are not actively seeking listings, but there are few Tier 1 exchanges interested in listing BSX & HDX. Centralized exchanges are important as FIAT gateways but they are also introducing a lot of risks, like counterparty risk, user data leaks, risk of centralization of power,etc. HydraDX and Basilisk are positioned to be go-to DEX solutions for project founders and their communities. We were diligently working on novel features making our DEXs competitive and scalable enough for any user.
We are looking for any partners who care about the success of Web 3.0 and who are trying to make the current DeFi or dapp ecosystem more capital efficient or more usable.
7. Why did you choose Kusama and the Polkadot network? What are your plans for your project in the future? What do you think about the NFT market?
Jakub Gregus:
There are many reasons like:
Providing most advanced Blockchain SDK - Substrate, which allows to optimized both systems to serve defi use cases and their users, rather than dealing with different trade offs most advanced on-chain governance and upgradeability shared security from multi billion $ networks one of the most distributed base layers, in terms of ownership, which is huge issue with all current PoS networks
Biggest and greatest communities after Bitcoin and Ethereum have high modularity and a lot of infrastructure like bridges provided and maintained by other great teams, so we can focus on our core products.
In the live questions sections, Jakub Gregus did answer several short questions from the Polka Warriors community.
1. Can you tell us more about the BASILISK CROWDLOAN program? As a small investor, how can I join and with what is the minimum amount of assets (KSM)?
Jakub Gregus:
Minimum contribution is 0.1 KSM, I hope it’s ok for you.
2. What is the structure of this project , is it decentralised or an open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?
Jakub Gregus:
You can find most of our code open sourced here https://github.com/galacticcouncil
you can read more about how to contribute here https://hydradx.substack.com/p/incentivized-testnet-reward-scheme or here https://docs.hydradx.io/new_deal/
every smaller or bigger contribution is highly appreciated and welcomed. If it will be useful for our community reasonable rewarded as well
3. What is the ambition Basilisk wants to achieve in 2021?
Jakub Gregus:
Become sustainable Kusama parachain with wide range of solutions for price discovery and exchange of all type of assets
4. Is Basilisk available for the global people or It’s limited for some areas? If it’s globally available are you guys planning to introduce it globally?
Jakub Gregus:
No limitations, we are in a permissionless place right? Global distribution is done via bottom up approach via local communities, rather than push through marketing agencies
5. While you build your project, do you take into account community feedback and demands?While you build your project, do you take into account community feedback and demands?
Jakub Gregus:
Sure, you can see here https://hydradx.substack.com/p/first-governance-vote how we were consireding community voice in our Gas rebates for people who were sufferring from high eth fees during our LBP
So just come to our channels and start to engage with the community. Any meaningful proposal is always considered.
