Centaur -Cryptoverse AMA

8 min readOct 11, 2020

Date : 1st October 2020

Guest - Mark Harris : Co-founder

Sean : Co-founder

Q: Please briefly introduce yourselves and #Centaur to our community?

A: Mark Harris : Hi, I’m Mark, I’m the Co-founder of Centaur and I lead the business development team in UK. I have over a decade of experience in the FinTech space mainly managing payments, forex and bridging loans.

Sean : Hey everyone, I’m Sean from the Centaur team and I lead the crypto-operations along with the rest of the Singapore office! Looking forward to your questions!

Q: When lenders decide to invest their funds in Centaur’s liquidity pools, is there a single currency requirement or can they invest in any stable currency?

A: Great question! In the long run, we plan to integrate all currencies across multiple protocols and we’ve already designed a version of our LP which is compatible with ETH and all ERC20 tokens. However the first launched version is going to support only CNTR initially.

Q: What are the current problem do you see revolving around #DeFi? What advantages does #Centaur provide over the other #Defi platform?

A: I think one of the current problem is the legacy chains in the market had many issues in enabling efficient DeFi solution, Centuar is trying to resolve this problem by combining the strengths of traditional finance (fail-safe layer) with decentalisation (transparency/accountability).

This allows us to create new use cases such as unsecured lending solutions and increase real world adoption for numerous different sectors and pillars in #DeFi.

Q: Decentralized Oracles are the hot topic along with DeFi, what details can you tell us about this technology within Centaur?

A: Oh! There are two primary types of oracles, off-chain data feeds and cross-chain communications. We believe that the market data provision has been addressed by a few of the other projects but cross-chain communications has not really been explored much. By feeding data from our LPs to the Centaur Chain as a settlement layer, and embedding on-chain consensus on the protocol, we hope to provide and support cross-chain transactions in a manner that is decentralized while ensuring the provided data is accurate.

Oracle transactions identified on the Centaur Chain will also be executed natively as opposed to the current implementations requiring smart contracts, this means that such transactions will not require gas payments, among other benefits.

Q: How does Centaur plan to remove the existing barriers to the interaction of traditional finance users with a decentralized economy? How to close the gap between cryptocurrency and real users?

A: High barriers to entry has been regarded as one of the problem when it comes to adoption, most wallets that we see in the market is not particularly user-friendly to the commoners. Hence while providing a high-throughput platform with maximum efficiency, we are also focusing a lot on intuitive user interface for our solutions like our liquidity pool

Centaur | Liquidity

The bridge between decentralized and traditional finance.

liquidity.cntr.finance

and the upcoming wallet launch end of this year. We also have MOUs signed with many traditional fintech players in the UK/EU region which would give the general mass market a sense of reliability and allow us to carry out our solutions effectively.

Q: How is the CNTR token used? How to keep motivated to hold CNTR tokens for the long term?

A: The CNTR token will be used primarily for gas payments on the Centaur Chain. Apart from that, it will be used for community and ecosystem rewards such as block producing, staking rewards and oracle rewards. These tokens can also be used as collateral for DeFi solutions built on our platform.

Q: What are the advantages of Digital Payments at Centaur? And what specific role does zero-knowledge have on the platform?

A: Digital payments, when combined with the use of zero-knowledge proofs, will be obfuscated if routed through the liquidity pools. This means that the senders and receivers of such transactions cannot be traced and creates an aspect of privacy!

Q: When developers implement their chosen smart contract, they encounter a connectivity problem. Their smart contract is unable to connect with key external resources like off-chain data. How did you deal with that problem?What if a smart contract requires data OFF the blockchain?

A: This is an oracle problem. We can solve this problem by using a combination of having multiple sources of data providers, and having a simple consensus between oracles that feed the data onto our chain to prevent malicious actors. By doing so, we can ensure that off-chain datas are accurately and timely fed into our chain.

Q: Why there was a need of Rebranding to Centaur? How do You combine the Benefits for CEFI & DEFI?

A: We have decided to rebrand to Centaur as the Greek mythological creature accurately reflects the core ethos of the project. We are a hybrid project that seeks to combine the best part of Cefi and Defi, and Centaur is a creature that has both the power of a horse and the intelligence of a human. For the second part of the question, we have chosen to do a hybrid approach because we feel that accountability is something that is preventing a the mass adoption of the crypto and we believe that this is something that needs to be addressed for real-world adoption.

Q: How do you plan to solve Over- Collaterlization? How will you try to provide smooth & less complex user Interface for users?

A: We seek to resolve this problem by doing KYC and referencing the loanable limit to traditional credit records that are currently available in the market. When users slowly built their on-chain credit profile, we can steer away from the traditional records. Such records will resolve the over collateralization issue, the default rate of the individual will also be carefully considered through actuarial calculations. The core decisions like interest rates will still be decentralised and decided by the community.

Q: Centaur, which countries are you considering to expand into and what is motivating you to choose them?

A: Due to the increasingly regulated nature of the fintech and blockchain industry, we are planning to expand into different countries in phases so as to remain compliant with the regulations. Fortunately, Centaur is working with numerous partners in the traditional financial industry. As such, for the initial phase, we will expand into those jurisdictions where our partners are based in. Eventually, we aim to expand globally.

Q: What does it mean that the Protocol is in Agnostic?

Is it possible to work on multiple protocols? Won’t it cause compatibility issues?

A: This means that the solutions can be deployed on multiple protocols at once, primarily due to compatibility in source code. This reduces the time taken to build and customize solutions and allows us to focus on optimization.

Q: I saw, Your privacy Protocol implementation uses RingCT, Can You talk about its benefits?

A: There are many implementations of privacy available, but we have to choose an implementation that is feasible by finding the balance between security and cost of gas. Other implementations using SNARK/STARK have absurd gas fees that make them unfeasible for public adoption (imagine paying more in gas than the actual amount you are transacting).

Q: What are your views on what is the driving force behind the acceleration of the development of DeFi at the moment?

A: The DeFi angle is not new in the market, in fact it has been the core reason why Bitcoin was ever invested. However, technology in blockchain has not been advanced to a stage where DeFi can be effectively carried out. Currently,we still see high gas fees as a problem when all these solutions are built upon Ethereum, but people start to see the possible solution that will come out from DeFi and are excited about it. Eventually, we will need to bring in the regulators to work together and this is where Centaur’s strength will really bring the DeFi space to the next level.

Q: For all you is offering, it is built on ETH blockchain which is annoyingly slow and cannot scale, why have you chosen the ETH blockchain over other Comparatively faster and Scalable chains and do you have plans for mainnet to Migrate your own Chain

A: We chose to deploy on Ethereum first because it would allow us to be cross-compatible with the rest of the DeFi ecosystem since most solutions are still built on this protocol. However, after we have launched the main net, the cross chain platform will be integrated and CNTR will exist on multiple platforms.

Q: Why would loan approval and issuance go through a centralized KYC and credit review process? Isn’t this against what DeFi actually stands for?

A: Defi in its current form only allows for over-collateralised loans. By adopting a semi-decentralized approach where the KYC and credit review is centralized while the settlement and processing of loans are conducted onchain, we can harness the strengths of centralization (fail-safe layer) with decentralization (transparency/accountability). This allows us to expand into use cases beyond over-collateralized loans — such as un- or under-secured lending. Eventually, when the number of transactions onchain achieve a certain level of maturity, we expect the KYC and credit review process to take place onchain in a decentralized manner.

Q: Why did you decide to hold your Public sale in form of lottery? Don’t you think this would discourage a lot of people about the project right from onset since the chance of winning in a lottery is very slim?

A: The lottery format was selected as it is the most fair for all participants. The other options we considered were the possibility of using a FCFS structure but that would lead to a gas war and bot spamming, which would remove a significant portion of our community. The other common alternatives are auctions and their respective gimmicks but that would result in a very large raise from the public sale and potentially overvalue the project. We have worked out our finances very clearly and carefully and we know exactly how much funds we will need, with no intention to just raise as much as we can from the current hype.