January 17, 2021
AMA Session between Reef Finance and Avalanche
This article captures the details of the Ask Me Anything (AMA) session hosted by Nicolas Lemaitre from the Avalanche Team as quite a number of questions were thrown to Denko Macheski — CEO Reef Finance, all related to Avalanche & Reef Finance
The conversation went thus:
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: Welcome Denko Manceski! Before we dive into the questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to the Avalanche community, and share some background on your journey to co-founding Reef?
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance: Thanks for having me here. My name is Denko, I am the CEO of Reef Finance. I have a tech background myself. Started programming in early high school with C++ and did algorithmic competitions for a few years. Then I decided to start building commercial software and I joined an ERP provider where I built modules that are still used to this day (warehousing, accounting, etc.). After that, I joined one of the biggest healthcare platform providers in Europe (200m+ valuation now). Worked there for over 2.5 years and I led a team where we worked on a complex modeling tool for healthcare data. Around 6 years ago I got into crypto and started blockchain development myself. My first experience was with the NXT blockchain which turned into Ardor. Of course, I did a lot of solidity throughout this time. I also did some Bitshares, Steem as well as EOS. Since I am based in Slovenia, the development community is not so big, so I’ve been working with familiar people. 2.5 years ago we teamed up and worked on multiple blockchains as well as analytics projects together. In January this year, we decided to focus on DeFi and started building Reef. The best way to learn about me is through an interview we published recently.I think it also contains certain ideas that others might find useful: https://reefdefi.medium.com/denko-mancheski-ceo-of-reef-finance-founder-q-a-dbc3d9f03bf7Here is a bit on the origin story and how Reef’s idea was formed: https://medium.com/reef-finance/reef-origin-story-5a16a4f346a8
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: That’s quite impressive, thanks for sharing! Q1 From @Sadu0ne on Twitter — The NFT world is spreading like wildfire and in the Q3 of Reef Roadmap, I noticed NFT Baskets. How is Reef Finance planning to enable NFT trading, storage, or yielding? @denkomanceski
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance:Thats a great question. We believe that the most successful NFT landscape will be gaming, but the issue is that not many mainstream games currently have issued items on the blockchain. So we are building a P2P mechanism to trade Steam items. We will inject these functionalities in the Reef wallet which has multi-ecosystem support for multiple blockchains. This will allow us to create a basket through which people can get exposed to items from games like Dota, CSGO, etc. This would be the easiest way for DeFi users to get exposed to this ecosystem, besides this, we will be working with other projects and introduce baskets for other types of NFTs. We are already working with big traders in the steam ecosystem
Kevin Sekniqi | Avalanche: hat sounds very interesting! Can you elaborate more on what Stream items are in this case?
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance: The steam items are also known as skins — those are basically assets that can be used inside the game, for example, they also have their own market. Our analytics engine will pick the best exposure for you based on your risk levels, just like we do with DeFi.
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: Next question: From @EricaSboom — What is the structure of Reef Finance? Is it a decentralized open-source protocol that anyone can contribute to? How do you plan to manage? @denkomanceski
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance:It is a hybrid project basically — its fully non-custodial. Our analytics engine is a centralized component because atm its impossible to deploy it on any kind of decentralized infrastructure and achieve the processing power that we need. The basket engine, the revenue sterams and the rest of the components are fully decentralized and we will open sourcing certain parts very soon. Also some things that are not possible to decentralize are distributed (eg: the wallet which helps users cross bridges seamlessly)
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: A question for @sekniqi and @denkomanceski this time: From @ShironaDejeuner — With Reef introducing DeFi fiat input gateways and later on a debit card, and AVAX offering faster-than-Visa transactions and access to digitalized assets, do you think adventurous power users may move away from banks soon? Swapping that fiat under your mattress with a pen drive.
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance:I believe the traditional financial industry will be based on multi-layered defi infrastructure soon, especially with the rise of stablecoins. I think this landscape is fintech 2.0, so definitely, banks will become like physical libraries
Kevin Sekniqi | Avalanche:I tend to stay away from any predictions over what’s going to happen, but I do think that there’s huge value in self-custodied financial products. The speed of innovation of crypto when it comes to new financial products that provide users more financial freedom is far higher than that of mainstream finance. That alone, is worth quite a bit, so I do think we’ll see more and more usage out of decentralized ecosystems over centralized ones.
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: From @haonguyen3800 — The partnership with Avalanche will allow Reef platform users to access the DeFi solutions at Avalanche. Will this partnership bring any direct benefit to $Reef holders or #AVAX holders? @denkomanceski @kevinsekniqi
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance: Definitely. Reef users will be able to seamlessly access Avalanche’s DeFi products, while Avalanche users are able to make better decisions based on their risk levels — and can also use Reef as a discovery mechanism to find out which financial primitives offer the most lucrative returns on avalanche
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche: Last question: From @Usha5513 — What future plans do you have for the $REEF token, are you planning any staking or farming in the long run? And what do long term token holders Stand to gain? @denkomanceski
Denko Manceski | Reef Finance: We are planning to release staking and farming very soon. Regarding the token holders’ benefits, it would be best for them to figure out by checking out how our tokenomics work and how the ecosystem is tied together with the token
Nicolas Lemaitre | Avalanche:Thank you for answering these questions from Twitter @kevinsekniqi & @denkomanceski.
For More Information about Avalanche:
Website: https://www.avalabs.org/
Telegram: https://t.me/avalancheavax
Twitter: https://twitter.com/avalancheavax
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/avax/
For More Information about Reef Finance:
Website: https://reef.finance/
Telegram : https://t.me/reefdefi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/reefdefi
Medium: https://medium.com/reef-finance