KAVA Labs-Cryptoverse AMA Recap
Date — 8TH Jan 2020
Guest: Aaron Choi — Head of Business Development Asia for Kava Labs.
Q: Please briefly introduce yourselves and KAVA to our community?
I’m Aaron Head of Business Development Asia for Kava. I’ve been doing crypto for a while now. Before I ran my own exchange called GJ and before that I was the VP of international at BTCC
Kava is building a protocol for DeFi built on the cosmos/tendermint consensus.
We started earlier last year with our testnet and now over the past half year have launched our mainnet and have completed our IEO on Binance.
We hope to launch our CDP product on testnet very soon. we’ll be able to bring the future of cross-chain DeFi to the masses soon!.
Q:What are the biggest challenges for Kava for building a secure and successful cross blockchain DeFi Platform?How did the name Kava come from? Is there any Inspiration?
A:The biggest challenge for us is that what we are trying to do specifically hasn’t been done yet. We have great confidence in our teams technical ability to solve these problems as well as trust in the Cosmos/tendermint team to be able to work through the potential situations with us. Building new technology is hard but we will get it done!
Kava was an easy good sounding name that has meanings in a lot of different languages and cultures. It could mean an herbal beverage or coffee or a stimulant or even a hippopotamus.
For us we like the simpleness of the name. And the domain was also available. Huge win!
Q:Kava has its own stable cryptocurrency which is USDX .. But What is main reason behind launching stable coin in Kava ecosystem ? Where we can use USDX & explain some utilities of USDX too?
A:Through our CDP platform we will be creating USDX as the stablecoin that will be loaned out in return for the crypto collateral received. We wouldn’t be able to use another stablecoin as issuance would have no bearing on collateral received. This would have been impossible to manage financially. We had to create it to link to the kava CDP economy.
Right now USDX has not launched yet as our CDP is not live but we are actively working with partners to establish channels for usage. High on the list is also to work with exchanges and other related businesses to grow liquidity on USDX.
USDX is an algorithimically-stable purely cryptoasset-backed stablecoin, Not too many of those out there yet.
Q:Defi is on top in google trend which types of revolution KAVA wants to bring in defi?
How KAVA is better than big defi projects like maker compound etc?
A:We pride ourselves in really putting interoperability first. Our choice to work with Cosmos reflects this. As their first DeFi company/dapp in their ecosystem we believe Cosmos has a lot to offer here.
The fact is right now DeFi is huge majority ETH focused. But we believe that crypto and DeFi shouldn’t just be for eth and token holders. The rest of crypto absolutely wants and needs DeFi products too.
We look to Maker and Compound as they have been doing DeFi for a long time. Maker basically has defined this space. But we feel that there are a lot of crypto users that don’t want to touch ETH for whatever reason. Kava will be able to provide those users with similar DeFi applications.
Also for Kava because we’ve chosen tendermint, we have our own security consensus. We don’t need to piggyback on some other validation group for security.That’s one issue with the ethereum ecosystem. We wanted to bypass that
Q:How Cross Chain platform helps leverage crypto assets? What’s the mechanism behind it? What growth KAVA sees with this technology in the DeFi ecosystem?
A:Simply, if you hold assets such as btc xrp atom or bnb you will be able to eventually collateralise these assets and receive some amount of USDX in return. The collateral is locked and kept safe by the validators in our ecosystem. To unlock your collateral you will need to repay the loan of USDX.
The USDX is backed by the assets locked up as collateral. By accepting crosschain collateral, the risk to the value backing USDX fluctuating in huge volatility is reduced, making USDX safer than a single asset backed crypto.
We see a large potential for this as a lot of the industry is still dominated by traders, retail or professional. The loan industry for crypto particularly for decentralized loans is quite small still
Q5: How kava generate revenue in the market? what is role of defi in kava?
Kava is on BEP2, why you prefer that as compare to ethereum or waves? any plan to move on other blockchain or own blockchain?
A:Kava will generate revenue through our CDP platform as users need to open and close out their CDPs. We are also exploring to create proprietary trading products in the future to help traders trustlessly leverage their capital.
Also since we are building Kava as a protocol, we hope to provide strong infrastructure for other developers to build on top of us.We have our token as BEP2 as well as our mainnet KAVA
BEP2 is mainly to be able to work more closely with Binance. And because both tokens are on tendermint consensus, the tech integrations are easier to do
Q:How does the LEVERAGE WORK? I READ THAT AM ABLE TO Leverage assets with Kava’s cross-chain CDP PLATFORM, PLEASE EXPLAIN ABOUT THE CROSS CHAIN CDP PLATFORM
Comparatively how does KAVA outperform similar projects, what’s your competitive advantage against other projects and how do you plan to outplay other DeFi based projects?
A:The leverage would work like so.
You would open up a CDP, deposit collateral, and receive USDX.
you could then use that USDX to buy more crypto to use as collateral, by opening another CDP or adding to your existing CDP position, and thus receiving more USDX.
Of course you won’t be able to do this infinitely because of a “discount rate” to the rate of USDX received. Nor do we heavily advocate to do so
Q:Those who hold KAVA but not enough to become a Validator can consider becoming a Delegator. So what is the difference between Validator and Delegator? How can they make a profit from Kava?
A:If you can’t validate, you could delegate your KAVA to a validator who will be able to pass on the staking rewards to you minus their commissions. When you delegate, you still hold custody of your KAVA
Q:How do you plan to convince other developers to switch to KAVA
AS A DEVELOPER?
A:We are working to grow our ecosystem and also working with Cosmos as well here. We definitely want to get more developers on board. If you’re interested you can reach out to me. We’re still in the early stages of getting our protocol ready for external devs to build directly on top. We’re also looking for teams that can build interfaces for things like our CDP protocol too
Q: Will KAVA have APIs and other tools to integrate with other platforms?
A:We will eventually! Our product and dev team are working hard to provide these to all the teams out there that want to make Kava great!
Q: What are the important achievements Kava has achieved so far? And what will Kava do to maintain its position?
A:There are still so many things we need and want to do. Our mainnet launch was a big milestone. Our future milestones include our CDP launch, and providing the pathways for all the different cross-chain assets as collateral, and also listing KAVA and USDX on all the different services where our users want them!
Q: From 1 to 10 how satisfactory do you think your IEO has been? did you meet all the goals?
Your website says you have more than 100 validators. I would like to ask if all validators have the same consensus power and what requirements (computer, internet speed) do I need?
How is Kava working to be somehow or another friendly to companies and institutions?
A:We believe the IEO went very well. Binance has been super supportive and helpful to us during that time. We raised the hard cap we needed.
Not all validators are the same. if you look at the blockchain explorer actually we don’t have 100 fully online. We are still working with a lot of them behind the scenes to get them fully online.
But anyone can be a validator at the moment. It will only get more harder from here!
For more information on becoming a validator,you can contact me. The requirements aren’t that high. But it will require some technical know-how to set things up
Q: Can you briefly explain what’s the top three milestones that KAVA team aims to execute before the end of the year?
Whom do you see as KAVA biggest competitor in this space?
A:As previously said. Top milestones are CDP online, getting other collateral types of cdp online (particularly BTC), and also growing our ecosystem of affiliated dapps/companies for cosmos based DeFi building on Kava.
biggest competitor I’m not sure since we’re all working to build DeFi. But we definitely look up to Maker as well as keep up to date on polka-dot updates as these will also make waves in DeFi for now.
I foresee that 2020 will be the year where ETH will lose some dominance for DeFi as other protocols start building better support.
Q:Kava project is works on DeFi ( Decentralized Finance ) But whats the benefits of Decentralized Financial system ? What are the possibilities of DeFi over Centralized Finance system ?
A:Not everything is more efficient when things are decentralized, but some things are better such as censorship resistance, trustlessness in transactions and business relationships, finality in payments.
Q: how will resource providers benefit from the Kava business model?
A:Everyone has a part to play in our ecosystem. Validators can choose to take a cut of staking rewards as commissions. Third party developers can choose to implement fees in their dapps etc. Lots of way to grow in our ecosystem
Q:I’ve noticed that investors can either make investment activity in the secondary market or join the #KAVA staking program, could you please explain how the #KAVA staking program works.
A:Yes everyone can buy kava on binance or mxc. We are constantly looking for other venues to list KAVA too.
For staking, we reward validators that provide the security for our chain. They have the ability to win block rewards. For delegators these are users that are not validators but provide their voting power to delegators. They also receive staking rewards minus commissions taken by the validator.
Stay in touch!
- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kava_labs
- Join the conversation on Telegram: https://t.me/kavalabs
- Checkout our code: https://github.com/kava-labs
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