Eric Su: Welcome @ericdefiyield glad you can make it. Please introduce yourself to the group.
Eric White: Hello everyone, I am Eric, Chairman for reBASE, a project that STS Capital Group is helping to start. I’m a general partner in STS and it has a portfolio of projects and IP in the commodities and digital commodities arena.
Today we will talk about the plans for reBASE, and maybe some other portfolio projects, and I would like everyone to come away inspired by our development efforts and plans
Eric Su: Okay, So tell us about your background and how you came to the crypto world.
Eric White: I have been in the crypto world since 2011 — around the same time as STS was first formed and started actually! I have a background in computer science and finance, and having dealt with the ramifications of the Great Financial Crisis, being exposed to cryptocurrency was natural and seen as a solution.
Eric Su: So tell us about Rebase, what is it?
Eric White: Rebase is what we are calling a social capital system.
It is a token that increases or decreases how much of it you own, to stay in line with market conditions or ‘equilibrium’. It can function like a stablecoin, when equilibrium is reached. But while equilibrium is not reached, it can VASTLY increase the amount of Rebase that you own, or occassionally decrease.
One of the great things about this token is that it is a crypto asset that is able to leverage all of this new decade’s advances in decentralized finance (DeFi) technology, and the reason this is important is because it helps us create the “adaptive supply”.
Eric Su: So the project is open about it being a fork of ampleforth, what would be the key differences between the two?
Eric White: Yes, when I looked at the code for Ampleforth I was as inspired as when I first looked at the code for Bitcoin.
One thing you need to know about me is that I pretty much skip white papers and documentation, and look directly at the codebase to see how something is implemented, and then use the documentation to help understand the purpose of what they were trying to do.
One thing that is amazing about the crypto space is the commitment to open source and the licensing or “copyleft” movement. Ampleforth uses the MIT and GNU licenses that encourages forking and derivatives, as long as attribution is made.
Lets talk about the differences between our project and theirs:
Ampleforth introduces a concept called “rebasing”, which is a very common term especially in software engineering, but they create a context that refers to the action of updating the supply of the token. When I write it now, it actually is the same concept as in other areas of software engineering, when it comes to updating a cryptographic state, as seen in the “git” protocol.
Ampleforth has a daily rebase that updates the supply for everyone.
REBASE has a daily supply update, as well as a second daily supply update called the stimulus. The stimulus doesn’t update the supply for everyone, it increases the supply for a different group of holders everyday! This helps our vision of ensuring that everyone has a fair experience and why we call it a social capital system. It is an ideal egalitarian approach that distributes supply without taking from others. Something that other monetary/economic systems have been unable to do.
There are several other differences
Eric Su: Do go on
Eric White: Ampleforth has a “geyser”, which tries to incentivize people to stake their tokens, in exchange for more tokens slowly over time. We see this a lot in the DeFi space, and its been called “yield farming”.
We improve on that concept with a more robust staking system simply called a Farm. or f∆RM. as you can see we have a theme and branding style guideline. reB∆SE has a f∆RM.
Ampleforth’s geyser incentivizes only one liquidity pool that people stake into. The AMPL-ETH pool on Uniswap. And they pay people more AMPL for doing so, this is done at the discretion of the centralized Ampleforth team, for limited time periods and at arbitrary quantities. This causes trepidation and confidence issues for geyser users, who need continual reassurance of the Ampleforth’s team commitment to the incentive.
Our f∆RM incentivizes many liquidity pools, and is decentralized and autonomous, able to mint more of an asset that exists on a time-based bonding curve, for everything that people stake.
In our f∆RM, the staking itself ideally has options for different lengths of time for staking. Where yield farmers can choose stricter staking conditions in exchange for more of the minted bonding curve asset.
Eric Su: That sounds awesome. Is the code for this ready or only specced out for now? Will it also be copy left?
Eric White: The goal of the geyser and the farm are the same: to help supply keep up with demand, even if the rebasing has increased the supply by orders of magnitude! but as we can see, the flaws of geyser v1.0 are now visible to all as it cannot sustain the supply increases when demand drops.
Some people on our team had tried to point this out to Ampleforth teams, and help in a variety of ways, but this was not a priority of their team. So we launch reB∆SE and the f∆RM.
We also use the same open source copy-left licenses as Ampleforth. At this point in time these are still in development as the farm is a very ambitious set of smart contracts and it needs to be audited by multiple independent parties, which is scheduled. This occurs for practically any major revision to this code. It is a business decision at this stage to not have this available for inspection, but when nearing launch the code and the audits will be available publicly. And when deployed on the Ethereum blockchain the code is visible there too!
Eric Su: Very undersandable. So tell us about the team. How big is it and whats the make up?
Eric White: The team on rebase is currently 5 people and we expect that to expand to 8 over the next two weeks. Not counting advisors. That would be 4–5 engineers, and two business development and growth personnel, along with one executive role on the security and strategy side. In addition to advisors and the expertise of a few funds
Eric Su: Nice! And as i understand they will reveal themselves in the future?
Eric White: Yes! often times they are only — or already — on github, visible as part of the organization. But as we roll out the upgraded website instead of just the landing page, we can have a more robust team/about page, or mention them in announcement threads etc.
When we launch the app this may be less of a priority and it really comes down to the design team at that point in time.
Eric Su: Awesome, so let’s proceed to the community questions.
Community AMA
Q: The problem with some stablecoins, like fiat currencies against the dollar, is that when the demand for money falls, the value of the stablecoin decouples from the fiat currency. How would Rebase avoid this situation?
A: Rebase becomes a stablecoin when it reaches an equilibrium with supply and demand, an equilibrium that it manages itself. It does not start off as a stablecoin and instead does things to help reach that outcome.
Q: DeFi Yield farming is driving adoption because it brings crypto back to the promise of democratizing finance. What are your thoughts on this? What are Rebase liquidity mining plans?
A: The f∆RM is a key component of this, when people stake their share of a liquidity pool (that contains some rebase tokens in it) into the farm they are liquidity mining, as they earn a time-based bonded curve asset. Very similar to Compound if you are familiar with it! so it is a combination of AMPL+Stimulus+Upgraded GEYSER+Compound.
Q: Can you talk more about your current biggest challenges and what is the strategy in place to deal with them? What is the progress of business development and what are some of your commercial partnerships?
A: Current biggest challenges are mainly community management, we have a very aggressive roadmap and timeline and there is a balance of making sure the right people are doing the right things. We have many fun initiatives for the community to help it grow! For one, our daily rebase is 30 minutes after Ampleforth’s rebase, which has been proven to be hit for Ampleforth daily community engagement. For people in other parts of the world, our daily stimulus occurs at a different time of day.
Q: In the bad situation of the Covid-19 epidemic, every industry was heavily affected. Does it affect on the growth of #Rebase team? What are your plans to turn challenges into opportunities for #REBASE DEVELOPMENT
A: The tech sector has been very resilient. In tech hubs there have been a decrease in networking opportunities, but our existing network and the introductions from our professional communities allow the rebase project to leverage key networks in other markets, across Asia, The Americas, Europe and Africa.
Q: reB∆SE aspires to be a stablecoin. But how? Stablecoins are backed to ab asset to be stable to its value, what is needed in reBASE to reach that aspiration? And, what is $reBASE utility meanwhile?
A: There are categories of stablecoins. Asset backed is just one style. Rebase aims to more accurately seek equilibrium over time, and adjust in periods of time when the economy within and around it is expanding or contracting. I would recommend reading the white paper for more, I wrote it! And also Ampleforth’s white paper to understand the “rebasing” action and concept more in depth.
Q: In what areas are you focusing on most for late 2020? Any plan to get new partners?
A: The plans are to release the farm and really work on that, one thing we’ve learned from prior projects is that partners are not under our control nor are they necessarily competent, and the crypto projects that invigorate their communities with partnership announcements are often in trouble for having partnerships with no substance. So, yes, but we want to encourage our community to not wait for those, and take a more proactive approach in the success of this project.
The outpouring of support has been coming from our rapidly growing community that is interested in this product and digital asset existing! We are going to greatly leverage that, very soon. Watch for these symbols in your crypto communities and social networks: 🌱∆.
Q: Do you consider DAI a competitor? How can Rebase be better than other decentralized stablecoins? What would be its 3 features that make it unique and technologically superior?
A: We don’t consider DAI a competitor. Rebase incentives market dominance in more attractive ways than other decentralized stablecoins.
1. DAI relies on slight increases in demand to make it seem more profitable to deposit collateral, mint new DAI, and sell that DAI for a few cents profit, 1% or 2%. With DAI, MakerDao, these are multiple expensive onchain transactions, for extremely small opportunity. With Rebase, a single rebasing transaction updates the total supply for everyone, when this is positive, it expands in total value, making the market position very clear that it is growing, and there is no limit. With DAI, you have to occassionally vote to increase the limit of all how many new DAI can be made, even before the arbitrageurs start to play. The market follows the path of least resistance.
2. Productive capital is built into Rebase. DAI is just DAI and nothing else. Third parties add all of the utility. Rebase incentivizes growth by its use of the “Farm”, yield farming smart contracts that lock the supply of Rebase.
3. The Stimulus! Every day, Rebase gives some new rebase to random groups of people! This ensures that all areas of the economy grow. Not just for people that add collateral to MakerDao to make more DAI.
Q: I see that Rebase is presently implemented as ERC20 token on Ethereum. Why not launch on Tron or Cosmos? Do you plan to lauch mainnet?
A: I’ve seen similar suggestions for 4 years, with concerns about Ethereum’s scalability, and yet here we are. No we do not.
One interesting thing to note is that Ampleforth mentions settlement on multiple blockchains or distributed ledgers, so that is something we can watch.
As our code is using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), it is already cross compatible with other EVM networks, such as Tron. So if there were liquidity pools and DeFi assets to stake, it is something that should be easy to cross-deploy on.
Q: Rebase is powered by oracles, which determine the supply changes at 2:30 UTC, daily. Is this Oracle solution a resistant solution that you know will not have a single point of failure? That we know is going to be so robust that we can maintain our trustless properties as a DeFi platform?
A: Our oracle make up will be with Trellor, Chainlink, and one we launch. This is more than Ampleforth does currently, so that’s another difference or improvement — but I should make it clear that we aren’t here to disparage or really compete with their project — only complement on the education of the rebasing concept — , they can easily add another oracle too!
To continue answering your question, multiple oracles removes a single point of failure.
Q: How do miners and validators promote liquidity pools (LPs) organized by the Community?
A: Miners and validators are not involved in this project, it is an erc20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, and potentially other EVM-compatible distributed ledgers.
The built in incentivizes promote liquidity pools, LPs are third party systems like Uniswap, Balancer, and others, and REBASE users that use liquidity pools earn slippage fees already. We add an incentive for them not to exit the liquidity pool, so they can earn even more!
We have a graphic to show this, its a little academic but I’ll add it
Q: What problems did you face when trying to implement your product in working businesses? Is it hard to explain to non-crypto people what Rebase is and what are the advantages of using it are?
A: Right now it is a niche product for the DeFi space, and the DeFi space is growing by orders of magnitude every quarter, so it is not a challenge. Here is our ten second pitch:
reB∆SE has rebasings, plural, daily.
If you like #YieldFarming, reB∆SE has a Farm.
If you like #DeFi, the Farm has bonding curves.
Some people like that the project is to debut with a “low marketcap”. Other people don’t know what any of those words mean yet. That’s okay.
Q: How would the selection process work for the beneficiaries of a positive reB∆SE, when only a few account holders would be selected, how transparent would the selection process be?
A: I should mention first that we use “proxy contracts” specifically to allow experimentation and ease of upgrading if we choose a different algorithm for the token later on.
In our upcoming audit, we are using the last two hexadecimal combinations of one of the last 128 blocks to determine which addresses get the stimulus. This creates 256 combinations of the TYPE of address that gets the stimulus, if the last two characters of the address matches the last two characters of the chosen block. We have multiple ways to ensure this is not gamed, especially now that it is acceptable to use oracles. But if we need to change it we can upgrade in a variety of ways with ease.
Q: How does governance work on Rebase? What if the smart contract needs to be changed?
A: Proxy contract allows for easily upgrading the smart contracts, if unexpected behavior occurs. Governance is a feature of the f∆RM and it helps choose which liquidity pools are eligible to be incentivized (similar to how MakerDao needs to choose assets that are eligible for collateral).
Q: Why is the rebasing functionality disabled in the initial version of reB∆SE and when do you plan to included it?
A:This is just an option. Our audits on our upgraded token can take longer than we can predict, as a good audit relies on independent third party companies. Some people want to see tokens in their wallet as a record that they contributed to something, instead of waiting for the fully featured token. In the DeFi space we have seen this with BZRX, but this isn’t set in stone. With our great community so far, there may be patience to have a clean launch, with just the rebasing token.
Q: reBASE claims “decentralization” but the word can be relative (eg Entities can be divided into vertices they still control & claim). Can you offer verifiable evidence that proves that reBASE is decentralized, unreliable & without a dominant party in control? how big role third parties such as Trellor and Chainlink in reBASE’s platform?
A: This is a great and nuanced question! Yes there are degrees of decentralized. We are using multiple oracles to help with that, and the stimulus is functioning autonomously and verifiable onchain. The f∆RM will be the primary decentralized autonomous organization in the way that it mints assets people want, in exchange for staking their share of liquidity pools.
That’s all the time I have questions! I hope this inspired the community to want to be a part of a project that my organization is building.
If you want to talk about reB∆SE here are the guidelines:
Project name: reB∆SE, but if you are on mobile and its hard to do a ∆, you can just say reBASE, or Rebase. If you want it to be easier to search, type reBASE (∆) with the delta symbol in paranthesis
Token ticker symbol: REBASE <- all caps
The action of rebasing: rebasing, rebase
Closing Remarks
Eric Su: Thanks @ericdefiyield @farmerjohn_rebase. Please invite people to your TG and twitter accounts.
John: Thank you for joining our AMA! Please join the our telegram groups or discord channel!
announcements: t.me/rebaseofficial
chat: t.me/rebasechat
discord: https://discord.gg/jBg5ZAz
and our twitter account! yes, that’s new and is growing followers
