0xMichelangelo and Pedro, BizDev and Head of Community respectively, of Elk Finance, dropped by to talk to TheDev100x about the exciting stuff they have been working on and to take some questions from the community. To celebrate the AMA, five members from our community who took part in the question-and-answer segment at the end were selected to win $50 worth of $ELK each, totaling $250.
If you would like more information about Elk Finance, please visit their website at https://elk.finance/index.html and their Twitter at https://twitter.com/elk_finance.
TheDevil100x: Welcome @everyone to our AMA with Elk Finance!
0xMichelangelo: Glad to be here! Thanks for having us. We are super excited to be reaching out to the Cronos community!
TheDevil100x: I’d like to introduce @Michelangelodaturtle and @voteforpedr0 from Elk Finance. Welcome team! Thank you for spending your time with our community today
Pedro: Hola!
0xMichelangelo: hello 🙂
TheDevil100x: How are you two doing today?
Pedro: Thanks for having us. I’m fighting off some virus. Thankfully was a negative test for COVID 🙏 @TheDevil100x hope you get well soon yourself
TheDevil100x: Thank you, likewise!
0xMichelangelo: I’m doing well, thanks Have been looking forward to this!
TheDevil100x: That makes two of us! I’ve had an eye on your project, can’t wait to talk about it and share it with our community… so…with that said, please tell us about yourselves, and your roles with Elk, and what Elk is and is trying to accomplish?
Pedro: Thanks! I’m the head of community for Elk and work with our team to ensure we have great communication and engagement across all of our channels. We have a variety of languages we support (I speak spanish-hablo espanol), so I help to coordinate those as well. My background is in investment management and financial planning…. dirty, dirty TradFi 😉 I escaped the finance world and have found my way to crypto, which is much better and is truly the future in many ways 🙂
0xMichelangelo: I am a Bizdev, so I work with different projects and reach out to see how we can assist or if there are any problems we can help them solve. My background is in mostly Business Administration as it related to the gaming industry. I love to find ways that ELK can help a project expand, or improve the user experience of a platform.
Pedro: ELK as a project is really trying to connect the fragmented crypto universe and create a truly integrated cross-chain future. Really a gateway for DeFi to be interoperable regardless of chain
TheDevil100x: Wow, impressive backgrounds, great communication is key, and having the Spanish speaking community properly covered is vital these days. I’ve done a bunch of research on Elk Finance myself, but for those that haven’t, please tell us more about what you do today, and what you will do in the future?
Pedro: Right now we are a DEX with farms as most are familiar with. A uniswap fork, security borrowed from that code. And then we have a proprietary bridging system that has been custom built by our crack development team. This bridge connects (currently) 14 blockchains, and growing. The only cost is the first transaction for gas, so it’s quite affordable
TheDevil100x: Wow, 14 blockchains. Your engineering team doesn’t sleep, do they?
Pedro: I wish they would! Because they suddenly say, hey guys—we’re stealth launching 2 chains today. And then it’s a mad rush in the community 🤣
0xMichelangelo: We have a lot we are working on, Moose NFT’s being one, we will launch as a layer 3 blockchain, we will be able to take a platform and get them to every chain we support, with some utility for our Moose NFT included in there. Moose NFT is currently on 5 chains, they will come to Cronos, so keep an eye out 🙂
TheDevil100x: Woah, thats a lot! Let me pause for a second and ask about what Pedro brought up….And then I want to ask you about Moose NFT!
0xMichelangelo: definitely!
TheDevil100x: On the subject of the cross-chain bridge…. does this mean that, today, users can use your bridge to transfer their value to all 14 chains? I know theres a massive demand for an easy to use and affordable bridge solution to get onto CRC-20 / Cronos
Pedro: Si! Yes!
0xMichelangelo: That is correct! User’s can use the ELKNET and bridge ELK from any of our supported chains right now
TheDevil100x: Ok, this is big news to me! We’ll need to get something written up about this for our website!
Pedro: Not only can you bridge to/from Cronos, but if you don’t have CRO for gas, the bridge lets you swap for gas before you arrive…ensuring you can make txs afterward. It’s beautiful
TheDevil100x: The barriers to users bridging their assets over to Cronos are coming down!
Pedro: Cronos is so hot right now though, as you all know… so there is a 1 ELK fee to prevent bots—still the best price in the land—and sometimes RPCs are busy, but it usually takes about 7 seconds from one chain to the next. Most of the time my funds are already there before I can switch the network in my Metamask and refresh the page
0xMichelangelo: Yes we also have a ELK RPC for Cronos that you can find in our documents 🙂
TheDevil100x: So @Michelangelodaturtle you mentioned Moose NFT, tell us more please!
Pedro: https://cronos-rpc.elk.finance —built by the Elk team for the Cronos community. It’s a great RPC for quick transactions on the network
0xMichelangelo: Well our Moose NFT’s are currently on Avalanche, Polygon, Fantom, and Huobi ECO, and xDai. They will be coming to all chains we support, because they tie in to our bridge offering in the future.
Platforms will need to stake a moose NFT in order to mint their own token to be used, and we will set them up on every supported chain.
0xMichelangelo: In the meantime they also reduce your time to gain IL protection by half in our yield farms.
TheDevil100x: IL protection? Please tell me that’s what I think it is 😋
Pedro: It is >:)
TheDevil100x: How does that work? We all hate IL, I even tend to stick to single asset staking at times because of it
Pedro: Right. It’s a real risk for being an LP…which is why most DEXes will give you rewards as incentive for it. Those rewards can (usually, but not always) make up for the IL experienced. But in reality most people get hit with IL… and it’s the worst when it’s a mooning token you knew you should’ve just hodled
TheDevil100x: Yeah, it seems like most AMM’s/farms cause your deposits to just maintain, and not grow, due to that IL, at times. If you have a solution to protect from that, thats massive.
Pedro: Yep. So the smart contract takes a snapshot of your token values when you deposit into the farm. Then when you withdraw, it does another calculation to see the difference between the current value vs. the hypothetical value of just having held those tokens in your wallet. Whether that is up OR down, Elk farms will reward you extra ELK to cover the price divergence
0xMichelangelo: What we have is insurance, Each day you gain 2.5% protection as you stake your liquidity in the farm. And 5% a day if you have a moose NFT on that chain! Each cycle is 42 days, so after 40 you are usually covered 100%
TheDevil100x: 🤯 this concept is entirely new to me
Pedro: The best part, is that we do not discount for the farm rewards you are also receiving. Those will cover some of the IL naturally… but the IL Protection will not take that into account…just the raw price deviation. So I have my favorite long term holds in a farm, super comfy that they won’t be diluted in a bad LP
TheDevil100x: That sounds ludicrous, but with your IL protection, is so assuring
Pedro: And I can ape into a high risk/high reward token with a high farm APR without worrying about volatility. It’s nice to sleep at night 🙂
TheDevil100x: I’m impressed, and if it works like you say it does, I feel like you are going to start an entirely new trend. Props to your engineering team
Pedro: Enjoying the first mover advantage for now! Although Bancor has something similar on Mainnet, to be fair
TheDevil100x: Love the transparency, didn’t know that myself So..I see something about a stable coin? What is that?
Pedro: CHFT
0xMichelangelo: It is pegged to the Swiss Franc, which is one of the most stable fiat currencies. It will be minted as native to each chain it is on.
Pedro: Too many stablecoins tied to the inflationary US Dollar, imo
0xMichelangelo: It will allow us to do a whole host of offerings to partners in the future, with cross-chain utility. But that is still being developed fully so we can’t give it all away yet 🙂
Pedro: Generally will be an over-collateralized stablecoin with whitelisted crypto as collateral. Some great use cases for it and our bridging system, as well as with cross-chain DeFi interoperability. Cross-chain swaps/lending/etc.
TheDevil100x: There seems to be massive utility there, with the bridging mechanism. And stablecoins growing in popularity in general. I can’t wait to learn more!
I noticed something really impressive today…your ELK/wCRO pair has nearly $1million dollars of 24hr volume. That’s massive gentleman.
Pedro: VERY COMFY as an LP in that pair right now 🤑
TheDevil100x: With that said… What can you share with us, as far as new usecases, or utility for the ELK token?
Pedro: Also 186% farming APR on top of those juicy swap fees 😉 …with the IL protection as CRO is mooning. Well the longer term roadmap includes a de-facto blockchain run by the Elk Net. With an SDK for developers to create interesting use cases… really we don’t know all of the potential possibilities. We’re also discussing a DAO, powered by ELK. Protocol Controlled Liquidity, which would be directed by that governance
0xMichelangelo: We can improve the user experience of so many projects, such as NFT marketplaces, other Dex’s really any project that wants to reach out into communities on our 14 supported chains. If you have a coin that can go anywhere, it can be integrated anywhere and cut out a multitude of steps that are usually taken to transfer value. So keep an eye out for that in the future among Cronos projects
Pedro: Certain projects will be able to leverage the power of a Moose NFT to mint a proxy token for their project that would be transferrable to any of our 14+ chains instantly. They won’t need to fragment liquidity in order to have a presence on any chain. Centralized Exchanges (CEXes) could leverage the ElkNet to have an instant offramp to any chain at super low cost
0xMichelangelo: Right all of this will be when we allow the delegation of Moose to paranodes. Which is not too far off 🙂
TheDevil100x: I have to say, I’m super impressed. And I am excited to see where Elk Finance goes in the future. The Elk net could be massive for ELK tokens, and being an intermediary for all the different chains out there…. the importance can’t be understated. The future seems to be one of many chains, all beautifully handled behind the scenes, so that users don’t need to know all the fine technical details.
I don’t wan’t to take all the questions away from the community, I could ask 50 more! Why don’t we open up the chat, and take some community questions, sound good?
Pedro: Vamos!
TheDevil100x: Si mon!
0xMichelangelo: Sounds great!
TheDevil100x: Ok, so before I open up the chat, I am going to put a 30 second slow mode on, and give 1.5 to 2 minutes for the community to ask questions. Please end your questions with an emoji 🦌
That will ensure real humans are asking! Ready everyone?
Community Questions
Community Question #1
J. Marin: Could you tell us how many people make up the Elk Finance team? I’m curious to know how developers do to meet such hard work with a big community and great partners around the world?🦌
0xMichelangelo: We are over 20 on the team now, we have developers, bizdevs, a marketing team with graphics designers and social media managers. It is quite an experience working with people from all over the world.
I think we all have our own story, but many of us have met through projects in different crypto communities. For example I came to know about ELK through our COO Thundercat. We also have a host of people in the community that keep us connected and finding more great team members
Community Question #2
Andy: yo también hablo español. Pudieras decirnos de donde salen los tokens Elk que protegen contra el IL? gracias🦌
Pedro: Mucho gusto 🙂 Los tokens están asignados por los tokenomics. Hay una cuenta específicamente para ILP, y condiciones para reclamar…para proteger el valor de ELK. 10 millón de son guardados para la programa de ILP
(english)
“Where do the Elk tokens for IL protection come from?”
The tokens are allocated based on the tokenomics. There’s a specific account for ILP, with conditions to claim in order to protect the value of ELK. There are 10 million tokens set aside for the ILP program. Buena pregunta
https://docs.elk.finance/features/impermanent-loss-protection
Community Question #3
jack downey: Community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?
0xMichelangelo: I completely agree with you @Downey123 and we have some great events in our community! We have community events we call “ELK Season” Where we have daily and weekly fun tasks to compete and earn prizes.
Our last ELK season just finished up a few weeks ago! So keep an ear out for another. We had a host of great art competitions and saw great work from our community
Community Question #4
🌺Rain: ⚡️Which do you think is more important:
A. Community
B. Investors
C. Token Price
If all of the above is important to you, which should come first?
- Investors
- Community
- Token price
Now, investors are usually also the community, so that’s complicated 🙂
Token price is important to investors and the community, but isn’t everything—a good investor base and community is critical to survive bear markets and dips
Investors are the life blood of any project, as we do depend on basic economics at the end of the day
Community Question #5
FAMOUS CRYPTO: Perhaps the contract can query the wallet and provide/swap “from the start chain” a nominal single tx amount of end chain token?
There should be a fee, however small. Ideally in ELK. Nothing is free is this world… So my question is: how does the asset actually move over? Is there a deflationary element/mechanism to each cross-chain tx?
Pedro: You’re right, nothing is free in this world. Right now most of the gas is subsidized by the ELK community fund. However, small fees will be implemented to keep good functionality and to provide a deflationary aspect to the token. Small amounts of ELK can be burned with each bridge transaction… now extrapolate that to 14…20…30 blockchains and constant transactions! A very nominal amount of ELK will be charged in the future for those reasons
TheDevil100x: Perfect! I’d like to shamefully plug our directory as well, you can find Elk Finance here: https://thecronicle.com/cronos-projects/elk-finance/ Going to open up that chat again, Elk team please feel free to hang out, we love having you here 🙂
0xMichelangelo: CRONICLE!!!! Loved being on! Thank you again for having us!
Pedro: Thanks again everyone! If you have a question we couldn’t get to, please hit us up here or on our channels!
TheDevil100x: It was a pleasure chatting with you, you are already doing really big things, but I wish more success to your futures!Thanks for your time 🙂