OpenDAO AMA with Moresh Kokane, Sean Qian, and Logan Fulcher at t.me/amaroom
Eric: Let's start! Glad u guys took the time to have an AMA with us. @Kwandokun @loganopendao @moreshk please introduce yourselves to the AMA room community
Sean: Thanks for having us @ERCSU , great to be here. I’ll kick off with a quick intro: Hey everyone, I’m Sean, co-founder, and operations lead at OpenDAO.
Moresh: Great to be here @ERCSU, I am Moresh, and am Sean's partner and take care of the technology architecture.
Logan: I’m Logan! I’m the lead community manager here at OpenDAO! And of course, a pleasure to be here.
Eric: Hello guys. How did u all found your way into crypto?
Sean: Haha, this is a funny one. My first foray into crypto was unsuccessful, to say the least. A friend was talking to me about bitcoin …when it was $14 and I chickened out of buying any coz I had no idea.
Eric: oof! haha
Sean: Fast forward a few years, I started building an STO company with Moresh. Which is when I had my proper start in the industry.
Moresh: My background is in engineering and computer sciences, so I have an academic interest in how distributed systems work for some time. We ran a real estate equity crowdfunding venture before this, and crypto was seen as the next big step for widening distribution.
Eric: @moreshk the nerdiest path — the best path
Moresh: :)
Logan: I bought my first Bitcoin through an old game card collecting site back in 2014 and never looked back. My regret was not buying more…
Eric: nice. so @Kwandokun what is OpenDAO?
Logan: I didn’t get into cryptocurrency beyond a ‘nerdy novelty’ until 2017 when I started getting into investing/trading on a more professional basis.
Sean: OpenDAO is a collective effort to bring real-world assets on-chain so that they can use in DeFi in a meaningful manner.
Simply put, our mission is to bridge the trillions of dollars of real-world assets, such as listed shares, real estate, etc, and make them useful on-chain.
We have 3 main components to the system:
1 — Cash Box: this is our mechanism to deal with off-chain enforcement and provide on-chain liquidity against real-world assets
2 — oUSD: A stablecoin which is minted by locking up real-world assets as collateral
3 — the OPM: Our money market, which is a fork of Compound, which allows lenders and borrowers to utilize real-world assets as collateral
Eric: Interesting. so what will be the first assets u guys are supporting?
Sean: I’ll let @moreshk answer this one
Moresh: thanks @Kwandokun, so we are doing a range of assets that include a mix of both on-chain and offchain assets. Our primary criteria are can we achieve enforcement in the event of a default in a seamless and unstoppable manner.
Eric: Any info on what offchain, real-world assets you guys are looking at?
Moresh: Yes
we are doing listed shares, receivables, and real estate
Eric: yeah the hard part is enforcement and then the oracle/valuing of it.
Moresh: We already have a poc for all of them
Eric: interesting choices
Moresh: the reason for listed shares is its inherent underlying liquidity and clear pricing.
Eric: so what makes OpenDAO different from Centrifuge, DMM, Persistence, and other money market blockchain projects?
Moresh: So there are a few other players as well who are looking at real-world assets
Centrifuge, DMM, Maker, AAVE
I would say the key difference we have is the mechanism by which we go about achieving on-chain liquidity for offchain assets, which makes programmatic enforcement possible whenever you deal with real-world assets. There is a human element involved, it is fine to say we have bailment or trust us, and I don't think a perfect trustless solution is feasible. Trust minimization can be achieved, and that is what we focus on. There are other tactical differences as well.
Eric: great approach.
Moresh: for instance, we have a Maker DAI style stable coin, which has a basket of collateral. but the pegging mechanism is far simpler unlike that of DAI and emulates Synthetix sUSD model, except, the collateral is a basket of on-chain and offchain assets instead of SNX.
Eric: Hmm. very interesting
Moresh: the whitepaper goes into a lot of detail on this
Eric: So is there a flagship token? what does it do?
Moresh: there is a governance token called OPEN, that will have admin control over everything. OPEN token holders will own the system, determine new collateral, new upgrades, improvements, etc, and there is oUSD which is the stable coin.
Eric: is this erc20? how many supplies?
Sean: Yep all erc-20
The total supply of OPEN is fixed at 100M, with 50% of that going directly to community incentives such as liquidity providers for our cash boxes, lending on the OPM, etc.
Eric: Tell us about the team @Kwandokun how big is it? where u all located?
Sean: So we have a pretty distributed team, and it’s been like that for quite a while. Moresh and I have been working together for years now on a couple of different projects, and we’re based in Melbourne. We have a team of smart contract developers all over the world, some here, and in India. Logan is based in Japan!
There are 8 of us so far, though we’re growing quickly. Will be 10 in a week or so.
Eric: awesome. whats the timeline in terms of the TGE and the product going live?
Sean: So the OPM has been live for a while already. Users can go to opm.opendao.io
Lend DAI, receive an interest return against real-world collateral, and earn OPEN rewards as part of our beta
Eric: oh. that's great
Sean: the Cash Box is going live in a couple of weeks, and we’ll have a beta program for that as well. We’re aiming to have a crowd sale later in October, again via the Cash Box system.
Eric: how will the sale be conducted?
Sean: We’ll be utilizing our Cash Box system to facilitate the crowd sale, which Logan just shared
Eric: Nice. I will OPEN the floor for community questions. Please start replying only after 2 minutes or so.
Community AMA
Q: DeFi Is trend now. Some consider it a great bubble. Can you share your opinion with us about DeFi? What do you think will be the next trend after the DeFi hype? Do you have any plans to go to DeFi?
A: Having survived the crypto winter with our last STO project, we’ve seen both bull and bear runs in crypto. DeFi is here to stay, and will only grow because it is solving real problems and creating real wealth. Sure there’ll be shitcoins and opportunists, but the difference now is that real products are being built and value created — instead of just raising millions on the back of a whitepaper like the ICO boom.
Q: How does OpenDao provide on-chain liquidity against real-world assets?
A: We have written in detail on this topic, part 3 of the whitepaper has all of it. You can also look at https://medium.com/opendao/opendao-universal-real-world-asset-enforcement-and-liquidation-protocol-def108090140
But in a nutshell, we have a layer which can be best described as a lubricant, incentivized actors that front cash (stable coins) against the offchain asset, and they get rewarded for that. This mechanism achieves on-chain liquidity for the offchain asset.
Q: There is a project known as OpenDefi from oropocket..
both your project looks completely the same.
A: We have come across this team recently as well. All we know is we’ve been working on our systems for well over a year now. Either way, there’ll be many competitors in the space always, it’s all about execution and good architecture, which we believe we have of both.
Q: What problems did you notice with AMMs such as Uniswap, Balancer, Bancor, etc. and what solution is OpenDao providing to these problems?
A: We are not a competitor to other AMMs
but you may find this interesting
https://medium.com/opendao/decentralized-order-books-based-exchange-with-price-support-for-capital-efficient-public-launch-6c5c9c08079d
Our cashbox can be used to build decentralized order books.
Q: What kind of unique features does OPENDAO have over its competitors on the market? How do you plan to increase the demand of $OPENDAO tokens in the future?
A: OpenDAO stands on the shoulders of giants when it comes to some pieces of tech. At the same time, we have developed novel new solutions to effectively utilize real-world assets in DeFi via our Cash Box Liquidity Protocol, oUSD stablecoin, and OPM money market.
Q: Can anyone who owns the tokenized shares or ownership shares collateralize and borrow oUSD miner? What are the privileges of the oUSD miner?
A: in short yes provided those assets are accepted collateral on the system, the OPEN token holders vote on which assets to accept.
Q: What kind of unique features does OpenDao have over its competitors on the market? How do you plan to increase the demand for OpenDao tokens in the future?
A: This needs a detailed response, as there is another question around a similar-sounding project that @Kwandokun has already answered.
Instead of saying how we are compared to project x, I will frame it as a more abstract response so that it does not become a different answer for project y compare or project z compare and so on.
there are 3 classes of comparative projects:
1) projects which are reputable and have been doing something around real-world assets already
2) projects that are new but they are either garbage or we have not understood what they are doing really
3) projects that are new and have interesting ideas that we can learn from
For 1, the good projects already doing something in real-world assets are Maker, Centrifuge, DMM, AAVE, contrasting with each needs a detailed analysis on its own and we share some similarities but have our own take
but the most important difference in my opinion is our take on how to do achieve onchain liquidity for offchain assets (cashbox). There are several other tactical differences but they vary based on each project.
For 2, man there are heaps of them
We try to keep abreast of them but every week there is a metoo and most of them are cashgrabs or so poorly thought out that it becomes a waste of time to compare with them. In general, with regards to these, I would prefer the questions to be “how are you addressing this issue?” rather than “how are you better than X”. It is however worth comparing in detail with the class 1 projects. But class 2 is a waste of time, there is a 3rd grouping where there are new projects with interesting ideas and we always keep an eye on them. They may not be direct competitors even but they have interesting ideas that can be leveraged.
Personally, I am keenly following union.finance which is dealing with unsecured lending using reputation. Aragon recently introduced a model for measuring offchain events https://aragon.org/blog/snapshot where we find good ideas we leverage them and will incorporate it in our roadmap. All in all this field is very small right now so it would be inappropriate to call one project competitor of another, the way I see it we are opening up a new paradigm.
There is enough for everybody, especially the good projects.
Q: To truly get people to use a blockchain project, there must be incentives. What incentives are available for me in using OPENDAO?
A: Firstly, I think the key to adoption is a useful product which allows someone to achieve their financial goals. But yes, incentives are also important, which is why 50% of the total OPEN supply is being used for just that. LPs, lenders, borrowers, will all be rewarded OPEN tokens for participating across our ecosystem whilst at the same time earning a high and stable interest rate or being an LP to quality underlying real-world assets such as real estate.
Q: You are Bridging Real-World Assets to DeFi, what criteria is applied in selecting assets to incorporate into your ecosystem, how do you cater to abrupt changes in the price of these assets #opendao
A: Good question. Different assets will have different mechanisms for valuations and enforcement. For example, shares can be called upon by APIs and their pricing is very easy to find on any stockbroking platform. For real estate, there are standardized ways to do valuations, and being a stable asset class, doesn’t fluctuate all that often, unlike crypto. We have articles on this on our medium.com/opendao for more details.
In general, though our role is to work with 3rd parties like realt.co or roji.co, others who are already handling the offchain side and have the fund set up, etc. and we become the background protocol where these tokens can be collateralized.
Q: Does DeFi really have unlimited, unauthorized liquidity? What theories will OPENDAO take to take advantage of this power? How do you work to keep liquidity both strong and stable?
A: It is a function of incentives, one good thing about the current food coin boom has been the simplicity of UX and how they have incentivized liquidity. Personally, I am a fan of curve locks in their LPs whereby they stake their positions and earn Curve
Q: As a $DAO project, how can we participate in governance specifically? What are the entry barriers and benefits?
A: Eventually all control of OpenDAO will be handed over to OPEN token holders. For now, OPEN can only be earned via participating in our beta program, where participants are rewarded in OPEN. 50% of OPEN is distributed via community incentives as we want as wide a distribution of holders as possible. OPEN holders will ultimately own and govern OpenDAO and determine which assets can be accepted on the system, fees, etc.
Q: How does OpenDAO manage to build stocks, bonds, and real estate investment vehicles on blockchain technology on principles that are both reliable and transparent?
A: there are 2 aspects to it. One of which is already covered in some of the answers above which is we will work with existing tokenized funds or funds (to whom we will provide tokenization capabilities) and the enforcement, price discovery, etc rests in their hands. But beyond that we have a few other things cooking, to eliminate that layer in due course
Q: Most investors just focus on the price of the token in the short term instead of the real value. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for investors to hold the token for the long term?#opendao
A: Whilst yes there’ll always be short-time investors, the smart ones will stick with us long term once they realize the opportunity in the market size we’re tackling. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world and dwarfs crypto. We believe we won’t see the height of OPEN till a few years down the track, and those who remain with us long term will be rewarded for their vision.
Closing Remarks
Eric: Ok. and that's a wrap!
Logan: It was a pleasure everyone! Happy holding!
Eric: @Kwandokun @loganopendao @moreshk please invite people to your tg and twitter
Logan: Telegram: https://t.me/opendao
Twitter: https://twitter.com/opendaoprotocol
Discord:https://discord.com/channels/738203878792626227/747986134424092772
Website: https://opendao.io/
Be a Liquidity Provider: cashbox.opendao.io
Lend on the OPM: opm.opendao.io
