Please find below our weekly recap, survey question results and the live community Q&A session that followed. If you missed it we hope to see you there next time!
We are very pleased to have concluded our first ever weekly office hour.
Please find below our weekly recap, survey question results and the live community Q&A session that followed. If you missed it we hope to see you there next time!
Weekly Recap
Central Exchange (CEX) listing
We are progressing further in listing on a leading CEX, with legal housekeeping as a next step. In the meantime, we are in talks with several Tier 2 CEX’s about listing. Please bear in mind that our discussions with CEX’s will not affect our decision to start the Token Generation Event (TGE) on September 15th.
Marketing
We are working with a number of media channels to increase brand awareness and make Integral a well known name. We are now working with a few Chinese community channels to increase our exposure there.
Also if you missed it you can catch an interview with Professor JEY and Dylan Love from Token Metrics here (Please register an account to watch this 30-min in-depth interview).
We’ll have more interviews coming out overthe next few weeks. So stay tuned!
Hiring
We are please to announce and welcome some new members to the team! During the summer, we’ve hired 3 engineers (2 SC and 1 full-stack), 1 Director of Marketing, and 1 Community Manager. We’ve started working together, and you’ll see their hard work very soon!
Product
Our engineering team has been working hard on improving Integral’s performance under new EIP1559 environment.
Also, we are working with one of the top design agencies for a website/dapp revamp. It’s still pretty early and will take some time to implement it but we are very excited to share this with our community in the future.
Q&A
Listing & Tokens
Why does listing take so long?
We were mainly focused on building out the Comparator upgrade from June to July. We started the listing conversations in August and are doing our best to be very compliant. Industry-wide, exchanges on their end have added listing requirements over the course of 2021. To meet the last leg of these requirements we engaged 3 law firms and the process is taking much longer than we had expected. But we are getting there.
Could there be another delay listing?
Regardless of the developments with listing on CEX, we’ve decided to start the TGE on September 15th, meaning if you have been with our community as an investor, farmer, or other earning participant, your vesting & claiming $ITGR will begin. On the CEX-side, the timeline is still unfinalized but we are getting closer to finalization. We have all the reason to believe we will meet our leading exchange’s requirement for the go-ahead. We are working with our law firms and exchange contacts to meet the target date as best as we can.
What is the plan for the TGE? LBP, launchpad, fair launch etc?
We are thinking about doing a initial DEX offering before the token generation event starts, like a batch auction style. There will not be a lot of $ITGR put into this auction, just to provide some initial liquidity to the pool. It’s planned to allow people who join the community in the summer to have an opportunity to acquire our tokens.
Will the tokens unlock starting from initial listing date or from 15/9?
They will begin being unlocked from the 15th September. We’ve got the token releasing and staking contract ready and audited!
Are the participants of the hero contest still eligible to claim their rewards?
Absolutely. These records has been hard-coded into the token claiming smart contracts, and you’ll see the balance of $ITGR after we launch the claiming page.
The public seed happened in April/May and TGE was planned for June but delayed quite a bit. Will the Integral team reward public seed investors for their patience?
We understand that any delay is borrowed time from all $ITGR stakeholders and we must be mindful of the pain of illiquidity and waiting. Thus every $ITGR holder will automatically earn 10% APY in $ITGR (3-year vested) to your current stakes, starting effective now (2021–06–14) until the listing day. This applies to all holders, EXCEPT the team and advisory.
Strategy, Vision & Competition
What is the long term vision for Integral?
We are first to the time-weighted average price (TWAP) execution primitive on-chain. This is where the bulk of the Coinbase volume (in Q2 2021, 68% of Coinbase’s trading volume.) currently consists of. We intend to occupy this niche and build it to its potential.
Why is TWAP so important for the big orders from high-net-worth individuals and institutions?
Imagine you are Elon Musk, and you want to buy ETH (Etherium), a lot of ETH. However, submitting such big orders directly on a decentralized exchange (DEX) like Uniswap will drive up the price. For a $200mil trade, you’ll lose $18mil because of this price impact. So instead, you will go to centralized exchanges, where they split your large orders and execute them over a long period of time. In fact, 68% of Coinbase’s trading volume come from such trades.
Integral is the world’s 1st DeFi primitive that efficiently executes such large orders, and capture the large client trading volume for DeFi. The AMM-based DEX executes your orders with the oracle’s average price over a period of time, which creates the same effect of splitting orders and execute them minute by minute. This practice helps Integral secure the best price.
In fact, for a $1mil trade, Integral offers the best price 97% of the time compared to Binance!
Who do you see as Integral’s main competitors in the market?
We occupy the niche of TWAP execution. There are no other players in this track, so it’s quite blue ocean and it will be even more exceedingly so once we launch our 1-day to 1-week execution window products.
Curve.fi seems good enough to handle major stable coin exchanges. I don’t know if the trade volume is too big to be well-handle by curve in the future. At that moment, will integral be qualified to take control of curve’s market, and what methods or algorithms will be used?
We currently quote better than Curve most of the time. We can take market share from them as soon as we are integrated with leading aggregators. Another route is through branding. We are trying to carve out a clean niche for ourselves so that direct consumers develop a cue/habit to come to our website to execute larger orders.
Product
What is the prepaid gas fee and how do we optimize for minimum added fees aside from avoiding peak transaction hours?
The prepaid gas fee is an added ETH amount sent along with your Integral deposit/withdraw/trade txn. It prepays for the second stage of execution once your order has passed 5 mins of delay in the Integral queue. Regarding further gas optimization, this is a topic our developer team is digging into further especially in light of EIP-1559 which does make gas calculations different than before. Since March 29, our developers have brought the original prepay fee from 0.2 down to the ~0.01–0.02 ETH range.
I’ve played around with the Comparator a lot and Integral wasn’t always the best for the price. Earlier on the main page it was written that in 66% of cases, the Integral Comparator is superior to other DEX’s and aggregators. Is it possible hypothetically to increase this number to 99–100%? And if so, is it possible to achieve such a result even with total value locked (TVL), which has fallen sharply compared to all time highs? And will this also require increasing the depth of liquidity that will start farming programs again?
It is theoretically possible to have superior depth at 90%+ of the time, for the largest trade sizes, especially for pairs that have lighter market makers support in the space. We hope that would push other leading DEX/aggregators to be better at quoting and depth to the benefit of everyone in DeFi. Since we are a capital-efficient AMM (Automatic Market Maker), our intent is to keep TVL only high enough to keep the system sustainable for the Integral trade levels we’ve observed in the past 2–3 months. Farming has been ongoing, designed to maintain TVL at these levels. We outlined this in our data-driven farming design blog post.
Do you have plans to add atomic swaps?
Not for now. Our main focus will be further developing our mechanisms (including delay) to serve the trader niche that needs TWAP execution style.
Are there plans to integrate with DEX aggregators to drive more volume through the Integral platform? Also, are there plans to eventually roll out on a Layer 2 as well?
Aggregator integration will boost our volume instantly, and we are in talks with the leading aggregators (the ones on our Comparator). However, because we are non-atomic, it takes extra engineering + UX changes from their side to plug into their system. It is not hard, but everyone is extremely busy pursuing higher priorities and integration with us is not a high priority for them. But we are talking to them every month to update them on our progress.
Will liquidity farming rates increase from now and after launch? Might be early but any plans made yet for a LP farming collaboration with other farms?
The reason for cutting farming rewards is that for the current product usage don’t really need a very big TVL at this point, and we don’t want to release tokens too quickly just to keep this vanity metric. Other DEX may need to have tons of liquidity to reduce price impact, but that’s not applicable for us. If you go onto the app.integral.link, you can see that the current implied liquidity is 3 trillion.
It’s like when you are using Integral, you will be enjoying the same level of price impact that a 3T pool can offer you.
Operation
How big is the Integral Team now?
We now have 15 key team members and we are looking to grow in the future with the Integral name and product.
What impact do you expect that the crypto related provisions contained in the US Infrastructure bill to have on Integral, $ITGR, Integral team/community and perhaps DeFi more broadly?
Long term positive since this means defi is gaining more traction in mainstream. Also this would attract more talents to work in defi with more regulatory framework and certainty — being early in the defi gives integral a unique advantage to do more good work and create even more new things/primitives.
Do you have plans for any partnerships in the future?
Sure. We have already closed a few co-marketing deals with other projects and we are looking for the right time to make it public.
What other coins are you looking to list? Are there any special requirements to be on Integral?
We are currently looking at other tokens depending on whether they meet our requirements: 1) the token should be block traded a lot (has a sustainable daily flow). 2) it has a good liquidity pool on uniswap (because we require their oracle).
Why is LINK-ETH at 0% LP rewards and how do you plan to incentivize TVL for those kind of pairs?
We have a pool balance mechanism: LP can earn $ITGR if they provide liquidity to an asset pool that is: the proportion of a single asset exceeding 80% of pool composition. The pool’s TVL is bigger than $2mm (except LINK-ETH pool, whose minimum TVL is $1mm)
Are there future plans to do Integral multi-chain? Would it be possible to expand to Cardano or Solana for example? This way, the success of Integral would not depend on the success of Ethereum?
I think for the question of multi-chain/multi-coin it still depends on if there are demands on block trades on those chains. These are very cool projects, and we’ve been watching them for a long time. But I think L2/rollup has higher priority on our roadmap.
One last questions we had that was very heart-warming: Hi Professor! I have one not so much technical question. How you are doing in those hard covid-19 times? Did the pandemic affect your work on the final exchange?
We are doing fine, because we never leave our room!
A special thanks to the community for there time and feedback and we look forward to hearing from you next week.
（edited by @Skipper）
Follow us and keep up-to-date
To join in on The Professors Office Hour next week please join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/f7rjp6wa
Website: https://integral.link/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/integralhq
Substack: https://blog.integral.link/
Telegram: https://t.me/integralresistance
Gitcoin: https://github.com/ProfessorJEY/Integral-Smart-Contracts/
