AMA With AlgoBlocks’s CEO — Joseph Kim (Recap)
On 4th April 2022, Krystal hosted an AMA session with AlgoBlocks’s CEO, Mr. Joseph Kim.
Krystal is proud to be one of the partners to launch the AlgoBlocks token (ALGOBLK). Click here to register your interest!
Here’s a recap of the key points that were mentioned during this session:
- Section 1: Introduction
- Section 2: Answering questions from community members
- About AlgoBlocks
Section 1: Introduction
Background of AlgoBlocks’s CEO — Joseph Kim:
Coming from background in both crypto and alternative investments, Joseph and AlgoBlocks team are building a solution to enable anyone to use DeFi products seamlessly, easily and intuitively to trade and increase their crypto wealth.
One of the strong drivers for Joseph and his team to create AlgoBlocks is the scalability issue of DeFi projects due to the pain points that the everyday crypto user faces. AlgoBlocks aim to reduce this friction for usage and adoption. By providing a seamless interface with a smooth middleware that connects with other DeFi projects, AlgoBlocks’s goal is to contribute to the growth of the overall DeFi market.
What is AlgoBlocks?
There are 4 key points that Joseph has pointed out about AlgoBlocks:
Firstly, Algoblocks helps simplify and streamline the experience of interacting with DeFi products to make trades.
Secondly, they will provide unlimited pre-programmed strategies and workflows at user’s disposal.
Thirdly, Algoblocks also provide a dashboard to consolidate your positions and tokens from various DEXes and products into one unified view — in which users can also interact with their positions.
Lastly, Algoblocks are built on a sophisticated tech stack that enables liquidity aggregation, faster trading and better pricing.
Edge over competitors
The breadth of the DeFi products on hand, the range of activities that are supported and the highly streamlined user flows to trade with DeFi products that can be templated and automated are what sets AlgoBlocks apart from the other products in the market.
What are the main features of AlgoBlocks?
One of the core goals of AlgoBlocks is to provide an avenue to discover, invest, manage and automate DeFi investments with personalised signals and strategies in one place.
The platform will embrace cross-chain services to bring various blockchains in one platform. It aims to support a flexible integration with the largest number of supported products in the market.
As an all-in-one DeFi management platform, AlgoBlocks aims to simplify the process of interacting with multiple DeFi protocols across different blockchains. Here are the summary of product features that AlgoBlocks will offer to DeFi users:
- All In one DeFi Dashboard, connect the wallet to view your DeFi portfolio.
- Intelligent and personalised signals system.
- Curated one-click investment option or DIY your own pre-programmed trade.
- Marketplace, visit the marketplace to find curated DeFi Investment recommendations.
- Swap Assets, access multiple DEXes on a single page.
- Comprehensive Dapp and DEX search engine, from DEXes to NFTs.
- DeFi education portal with a gamified system to encourage DeFi newbies to learn DeFi concepts and earn NFTs.
What is the role of $ALGOBLK in Algoblocks?
Initially, the $ALGOBLK token will be used to pay trading fees, deployment of trading strategies (later stage), staking and rewards. Voting ( community users will be voting on which strategies to be deployed based on their performance).
Reduce Trading Fees: Get 25% off trading fees by paying with $ALGOBLK tokens
Stake to Trade Free: Stake 1:1 value tokens to trade commission free up to the staked amount and also earn inflation interest
Stake to get platform benefits: Stake $ALGOBLK to get auto stablecoin switching service
Stake to keep user’s strategy private: Keep your AlgoBlocks private by staking at least USD 300+ worth of ALGOBLK tokens
The ultimate goal in the future will enable ALGOBLK to be used as an “Universal Gas Token”. Essentially, users can use the $ALGOBLK token to pay for transactions on any chain given. AlgoBlocks team will handle having the right gas tokens at the back end.
E.g. You wont need a purse full of MATIC, BNB or ETH separately all the time to interact with different chains. AlgoBlocks save you from all that hassle.
News & Upcoming events
AlgoBlocks successfully raised $1.9 Mil in its strategic and private funding, thanks to the addition of investors Draper Dragon and Kyber Ventures.
The total funding goal is to reach $2.3 Mil through raising an additional $400K in the public round through 2 market leading launchpads, Poolz and KrystalGO.
Community and socials growing rapidly, followers grew more than 100K+ on telegram and 50K on Twitter within 3 months.
April 07, 2022: Public round fundraising with Poolz and KrystalGO Launchpads
April 12, 2022 (12:00 UTC): listing on MEXC and BitMart
Section 2: Answering questions from community members
First question is from @cryptosoya: “What are your top priorities in 2022? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year? Which part of the project are you most focused on right now?”
Joseph Kim: “Our key focus is to find a strong product market fit and scale our business to attain a very impressive growth rate and a MAU of at least 10,000. Right now, we are absolutely focused on building our product to push to our users to get feedback. It’s all about quick launch, iterations and pivots to race to get to product market fit as soon as possible.”
The second question is from @sasachan818: “Smart contracts are prone to bugs, and even large new DeFi projects fell victim to this, costing users money. How effective and secure are your smart contracts? Have you ever tested this through any security agencies?”
Joseph Kim: “Just to be clear. Whilst it may be true that some smart contracts have bugs from a technical perspective, others may be faulty not because of the way it was coded but by the fact that it did not incorporate business logic. Our smart contracts are coded with both the integrity of security and business logic in mind. We have also audited our contracts with a reputable smart contract security audit vendor called smart state and made over 3 audits. We also plan to diversify our security audit vendors and conduct audits and penetration testing on a regular basis.”
The third question is from @gemdiggers: “Do you have plans to expand to other networks like Polygon, solana, Polkadot, etc? The integration of a bridge in different chains is very useful for investors and their assets in terms of cost reduction in rate.”
Joseph Kim: “We plan to expand to other networks such as Polygon in the near future. Any EVM compatible chain will be an easier bet to expand coverage and there will be other considerations such as the size of respective ecosystems, on whether to expand coverage to that chain or not. We will also try to enable bridging as a fully automated or seamless experience for users — our team is working on how this can be best enabled for our users from a technological perspective.”
The next question is from @ja170529: “Can you please describe briefly what has been your greatest achievement so far? How would you describe 2022 for Algoblocks? Did you have any difficulties with regard to the continuing pandemic and the considerable ups and downs that the market has had and is having?”
Joseph Kim: “My greatest achievement and also greatest pain point for AlgoBlocks is talent. I am glad to have a strong, experienced core team who has helped AlgoBlocks come this far in terms of product development, investment traction. One of the largest challenges is also attracting talent to help AlgoBlocks get to the next milestone without any hiccups.”
The last question is from @chainuncle: “How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries/regions where English is not spoken well? Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand your project?”
Joseph Kim: “Currently our main social channels are all conducted in English but we do have interesting organic reach to places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Turkey, Russia and other countries without doing any marketing. We will first engage influencers and also our array of investors to have access to geographically diverse communities. We will also have to hire community managers who will also be in charge of managing those communities for continued communication and support. Our decision to cover which region will primarily be based on a deep dive analysis of where the traffic or engagement is coming from — for our existing social channels.”
Conclusion
And that’s it for the main points that were covered during the session. We hope to see you at our next AMA!
If you would like to follow the entire thread, you can check out our Telegram channel.
For more information on Algoblock’s IDO, you can check out our post here.
About Algoblocks
In recent years distributed ledger technologies have led to a blooming DeFi space and increased disruption of the traditional financial institutions. Part of this disruption is through an increased interest rate of a considerable higher return on the invested virtual assets either through staking or yield farming or through services that can only exist within the blockchain realm, such as Flash Loans, Automated Market Making pools, etc.
Even though the DeFi space offers a universe of different products or services, we observed a low number of users compared to the total number of blockchain users. For example, if we compare the number of users active on the centralised crypto exchanges such as CoinBase or Binance, the numbers are well beyond 50 Million active users; however, the numbers dwell in comparison to around 3 Million users within the DeFi space.
Based on our research and discovery, we found that even simple tasks like bridging and staking are intimidating for most crypto users. Currently, most of the products are trying to remove this friction in the DeFi experience through aggregation. Aggregating multiple DeFi products or services doesn’t lower the entry barrier or eliminate the need to have the technical knowledge to know how to use them.
