On June 21, Equilibrium and PolkaWarriors together organized an AMA to introduce Genshiro - The canary network of Equilibrium and talk more about Equilibrium’s strategy in the parachain auction.
Genshiro is the future parachain of the Kusama network and it shares the same experimental spirit of Kusama. Genshiro will be a testing site for future products of Equilibrium before they deploy them on Polkadot
This AMA was held in PolkaWarriors Global Telegram Group with the participation of Alex Melikhov - CEO of Equilibrium. Many interesting questions about their products and their upcoming plan were answered by Alex.
Below is a summary of the outstanding questions and answers from the AMA session.
1. What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create the Genshiro project? Why did you choose the name Genshiro? Does it have special meaning and is there any story behind this name?
Alex:
Great question. I’ve already shared some details on my background above. Just to wrap it up: I’m the CEO and founder at Equilibrium and Genshiro. I'm an engineer in applied mathematics by training with a financial background and have been involved in crypto since 2016. The current team behind Equilibrium has been working together since 2017. Our significant developments:
- Oxygen/Nitrogen - repo/lending platform on Ethereum
- EOSDT - major decentralized stablecoin on EOS
- Equilibrium - DeFi conglomerate on Polkadot
- Genshiro - DeFi one-stop shop on Kusama
We are launching Genshiro on Kusama because it shares the same experimental spirit that informs our development. We think it will bring a lot of value to the Kusama community as it will become a DeFi one-stop-shop that will bring more experiments and more liquidity in the ecosystem.
As I said “Genshiro” comes from the Japanese word for a nuclear reactor — we are inspired by stories of early scientists working to harness technology to unleash a new kind of energy in the world. Blockchain-enabled financial technology is a relatively new phenomenon that deserves fuller attention and exploration, quite like the advent of nuclear energy.
2. What are the key features of Genshiro? What are the benefits of holding $GENS token?
Alex:
Genshiro represents a cross-chain DeFi one-stop shop complete with a lending platform and cross-chain DEX.
Genshiro offers a lower minimum collateralization ratio (just 100%) that introduces way more flexibility for leveraging and margin trading.
Genshiro is more generally accessible than Polkadot's platform because it will support numerous ERC-20 tokens from day one. Generally speaking we will be less selective in picking assets for our Kusama-based product line rather than for Polkadot, where only low-volatile and popular cryptocurrencies will be added.
Another innovative element here is Genshiro’s governance model. It works by letting users stake GENS (Genshiro’s Kusama-based utility token) to propose and vote on new system parameters. The longer a user’s funds have been staked, the more weight their vote gets on the proposal. As GENS will be widely distributed once we launch our Kusama parachain. So the governance will be truly decentralized shortly
GENS is a utility token of Genshiro. Token use cases include voting for validators, paying transaction fees, paying interest rates, and serving as liquidity for bailouts and collateral (when GENS becomes a more established asset).
3. What is the $GENS token used for? How can I get a $GENS token? What are the benefits of holding a $GENS token?
Alex:
As I mentioned, GENS is a utility token of Genshiro. The total GENS supply on Kusama is 1.2 billion tokens.
The Kusama-based GENS token will serve many roles within Genshiro:
- a reward for validators/collators running blockchain nodes and performing parallel work.
- a means to pay transaction/interest fees
- bailout and collateral liquidity in Kusama-based liquidity pools (when the tokens obtain value)
- a governance token that lets holders express their opinions about the state of the system and enforce governance decisions via referendums
Don’t hesitate to check our GENS tokenomics: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/docs/genshiro-tokenomics.pdf and if you still have any questions join out Telegram communities to get your answers:
https://t.me/equilibrium_eosdt_official - Equilibrium
https://t.me/genshiro_official - Genshiro
Right now there several ways to get GENS tokens:
It’s listed on Kucoin, BKEX, DODOex.
- You can participate in our Genshiro crowdloan, stake KSM for our parachain and get up to 1,500 GENS per 1 KSM
- Join our ambassador program and get GENS as rewards: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt/join-genshiros-ambassador-program-a9db8641fc26
4. On moving forward through your roadmap, what are your most important next priorities/Milestones? Does Your Project have enough fundamentals (Funds, Community, ect) to achieve those milestones?
Alex:
At the moment, we are mainly focusing on the parachain auction on Kusama which has already started. That is why we launched our crowdloan: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/en/plo
At the same time, we expect more GENS listings on exchanges. It has already been listed on Kucoin, BKEX and DODOex
Once we become a parachain on Kusama, we will launch our core products on the mainnet. It’s important to bootstrap liquidity after the launch and we have arrangements with several solid teams who are interested in providing liquidity into our liquidity pools once we launch our products. Thanks to our liquidity mining program, liquidity provision will be a good opportunity to earn GENS for everyone
As you guys know, we have also implemented a Substrate-based version of the Curve protocol. Genshiro will become a home for Curve on Kusama once we get the parachain slot
We are also in talks with multiple partners regarding our further business cooperation. These include liquidity providers, trading companies, and wallets. Stay tuned to our announcement channel for further updates: https://t.me/equilibrium_news_feed
5. Can you tell us more about the GENSHIRO CROWDLOAN program? As a small investor, how can I participate and with what is the minimum and maximum amount of assets (KSM)? How long will KSM be locked down?
Alex:
By becoming a parachain, Genshiro will be connected to a vibrant universe of parachain projects on Kusama. This empowers our technology to harness all advantages of the multi-chain environment and to offer all the functionality of a DeFi one-stop-shop to a wider audience.
As for our Kusama Crowdloan strategy, we intend to win eight six-week leasing periods for our Kusama parachain slot. Participants will be able to stake KSM to our parachain and earn rewards in GENS tokens during the parachain lease period.
There is no max or min stake amount. Users will be able to get their KSM back after the end of the parachain lease period.
We will distribute 240 million GENS tokens (20% of the total supply) as rewards to incentivize KSM holders to vote for Genshiro to receive a parachain slot.
Users will get up to 1,500 GENS for every KSM they contribute, but there are opportunities to earn additional bonuses such as a bonus for early participation (up to 20%) and there is an option for scaling your early participation bonus for winning the slot (up to 40%). Here you can find all details about these bonuses: https://medium.com/equilibrium-eosdt/genshiros-kusama-crowdloan-goes-live-on-june-15-ae36611b09b7
How to participate?
You can vote for Genshiro via our website: https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/en/plo
or via PLO platforms by Okex, Kucoin and Kraken. Here are the links:
- OKEx https://www.okex.com/earn/slotauction
- Kucoin https://pool-x.io/polkadot?currency=KSM&round=1
- Kraken https://www.kraken.com/learn/parachain-auctions
6. Why did you choose Kusama and Polkadot networks? What do you think about the NFT market? Can you tell us more about NFT CATS? What role do they play in Genshiro's growth?
Alex:
We’ve been watching the Polkadot ecosystem for quite a long time. We were just waiting for the right moment to jump on the development.
Polkadot sits at the forefront of blockchain evolution, providing tools to solve high resource cost, scaling, decentralized governance, and cross-chain interoperability issues. We considered several options when deciding to scale beyond EOS: Algorand, Cosmos, TON, but picked Polkadot as the most promising and widely welcome among the broad crypto community. As I mentioned before, Kusama shares the same experimental spirit that informs our development. Genshiro will be a testing site for our future products before we deploy them on Polkadot
Also we presented a cute collection of NFT cats. Each NFT bears the image of a cat pertaining to a different cryptocurrency — BTC, ETH, DOT, KSM, GENS, and EQ. They are available on Rarible, auctions are live until tomorrow. All the money raised will go toward covering our operational costs and will fund our bid for the Kusama parachain auction. Furthermore NFT owners will get additional benefits:
- higher staking rewards in Genshiro’s crowdloan
- a discount on interest rates for borrowing
- reduced trading fees on our Genshiro and Equilibrium platforms
Learn more about our NFT cats here https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/en/nftcats
In the live questions section, Alex did answer several short questions from the PolkaWarriors community.
1. Explain a bit more how GENS token will work in the ecosystem
Alex:
I have extensively covered this in our AMA. Just to summarize:
- governance token - stakeholders vote for system parameters
- platform currency - borrowers pay interest in GENS and everyone pays for blockchain transactions in GENS
- system liquidity - GENS can be staked into the bailout pool and used as collateral to take out loans from the system
2. What are the ways for your project to generate revenue in the long run? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
Alex:
The system earns from interest paid by borrowers and from trading fees paid by traders. Also the launch of Curve on Genshiro should be beneficial for the ecosystem as it will facilitate liquidity and GENS utilization. Our partnerships include collaboration with the Curve team, some major ecosystem players as Reef finance, Chainlink, BAND protocol, Kylin and others
3. NFT is a very hot trend now, do you pretend to catch up with this trend or still follow and focus on your original roadmap? create values, not create TREND !Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is it like this? If not can u tell us, What makes it different from other projects?NFT is a very hot trend now, do you pretend to catch up with this trend or still follow and focus on your original roadmap? create values, not create TREND !
Alex:
We have created an awesome collection of cat NFTs and are selling them to fund our parachain slot bid. The collection is available on Rarible and current bids are at ~180K USD. You can learn more about our cats here https://genshiro.equilibrium.io/en/nftcats
NFT holders will get discounts on commission fees and also enjoy higher staking rates at our crowdloan.
Though we don’t have other plans on NFT development in the coming perspective
4. I am a professional vulnerability finder on the web, do you think Your system is secure enough from hackers? Does your project have a program that rewards individual vulnerability detection of the system?
Alex:
Yes, we will announce a bounty program once we launch things in production soon. So far the system is audited by Quantstamp and we are confident about its consistency
5. Is GENS available for the global people or It’s limited to some area? If it’s globally available are you guys planning to introduce it globally?
Alex:
GENS are globally available on KuCoin, DODOex, and BKEX. More exchange listings are coming soon
6. What is Genshiro's ambition to achieve in 2021?
Alex:
We are aiming to become a major DeFi platform on Kusama and Polkadot that will have a significant impact on the overall ecosystem
7. Great user experience is important to all customers, what solutions does Genshiro have to improve user experience?
Alex:
We are working hard on user interfaces, customer journeys, and user flows. You can learn advantages of our approach by playing with our Equilibrium testnet at https://app.equilibrium.io/ Feel free to join our telegram groups if you have any suggestions on UX improvements:
https://t.me/equilibrium_eosdt_official
https://t.me/genshiro_official
