Professor JEY Office Hour Recap (Week 5)

We are very pleased to have concluded our 5th 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

TGE

We would like to thank the community for your support during the TGE. 70% of the whitelisted wallets participated in the auction on DODO, which is quite similar to our public seed round's participation rate. Not all people used up the $1,000 USDC allocation, and that's why we were 5% away from the 100%. So overall we are very happy with the result.

Business Development

For the rest of the year, we have two big milestones to look forward to:

The "major" CEX listing. We are getting closer and closer to this each week. Although, due to a NDA (non disclosure agreement) we still cannot reveal which one or exactly when. But it's coming and we are close, so stay tuned!

Launching our 2nd product. We are actively acquiring institutional users for Integral and TWAP, our 2nd product. OTC desk or CEX with OTC services is a very high priority for our business development. So if you happen to know someone who's doing this, please let us know!

Product Development

Our development team has finished the SC (smart contract) and design for our new TWAP product and has been monitoring the token-related SC since the TGE. Right now, the Integral balance on the upper-right-corner can display dynamic APY based on token price and we've built an API for circulating supply. We have submitted this to Coingecko/CMC and we will keep the community updated on this matter.

Hiring

We are now looking at hiring a senior SC developer. By referring candidates to us, you could receive a 10k USDC referral fee (T&C applied). If you have a friend who is good at SC and is looking for a job, please ask him/her to apply here:

https://integral-link.breezy.hr/p/e35172d765d1-smart-contract-engineer

Marketing

We realize this is a hot issue with the community and we want to let you all know that this is also one of our primary focuses right now.

Within 3 days of the TGE and Uniswap listing, additional listings of $ITGR trading pairs appeared on 1inch, Gate.io, Bitmart, Lbank, , MEXC, Hotbit, ZT and AOFEX. We expect many more to come and help increase liquidity and distribution of the $ITGR token.

On September 13th we released the 1st of several explainer videos, titled: “What is Integral? The Integral Protocol”. This video provided a visual introduction to the Integral value proposition.

Over the past month, Integral has been listed on major token metrics websites such as CoinGecko, Coinmarketcap, Messari, Nomics and LunarCRUSH. We’ve also grown our Twitter follower base to 10,000+ strong, a 37% increase in the past 2 weeks!

To wrap up on the marketing update, our marketing director Crypto Ryno has just published a blog to recap and outline our plans for Q4. We found Ryno through our summer hiring, who has over 9 years of experience in this space. If you are interested in Ryno and his plan, you can read more about it here:https://integral.link/blog/integral-protocol-itgr-marketing-update

Q&A

Vesting and liquidity farming

We've seen a large sell-off since launch and we have to assume that it primarily comes from the liquidity farming. So that's a lot of free tokens being dumped into the market. Even with a three years vesting they still are managing to claim a lot of $ITGR. Can we expect this to continue for the next three years?

I can't say for sure that farmers are selling. But what I can tell you is that, we have cut the emission rate of liquidity farming reward substantially. The first week it was 5% of the total supply (29/3/2021), now it's 0.05% per week.

You can find the historical number for the farming reward here.

We will continue monitoring the LP farming, and will not rule out another cut in the future.

We are seeing the people who invested in Integral have now sold their claimed $ITGR. Now the $ITGR price has fallen below the public seed price. How can you solve this price movement? I think maybe you allow the people who have 3 years vesting $ITGR to restake through high APY. This advantage may motivate people to buy and stake more $ITGR. For example ‘snowball’ on avalanche.

We are not sure a"restake" option would be the best path for Integral at this point in time. Currently, if you have $ITGR at 3 year vesting, and you have claimed the unlocked tokens, you can stake it to earn 45% APY.

For more information please visit: https://docs.integral.link/token/listing-and-staking

Is the 3-year vesting period fixed or can this be reduced at some point in the future through a vote?

It's possible. As a DAO owns the protocol and a change could be undertaken depending on the support.

Marketing

Will there be additional rewards for $ITGR liquidity providers, sponsors of GITCOIN GRANT events and active discord users?

We are planning a couple of campaigns before the Tier-1 CEX listing. And for more information on some upcoming plans please check out our marketing update.

I know that very few people were able to fully master what is written in the Integral’s white paper. Are there any plans to somehow convey this in simple language to the retail investor what was published?

Yes, as Crypto_Ryno said in the Marketing Update, we are making "additional marketing content including educational materials, infographics, and articles are also being developed around key issues in DeFi, being solved by Integral."

At the moment, on the Internet, in particular on YouTube, you can't hear about Integral from anywhere. Is there any plans for an extensive marketing campaign in the near future, to which everyone will learn more about Integral?

Since the TGE we have made two explainer videos (English & Chinese). Further to this reviews have begun to appear on Youtube by influencers. We are also working with some people to make more content to help get the Integral name out there.For current media updates please see out media and reviews discord channels and also check out Ryno’s recent Marketing update.

Regardless of if we are in a bull or bear market, what do you hope to accomplish during this downtime in the market where the sense of urgency may not be as prominent?

People will continue to trade regardless of the price. This especially applies to our target audience, whales and crypto native funds

Product

To reach out to a maximum number of traders, Integral might be collaborating with aggregators such as 1inch. Apparently Integral tried but it hasn't gone through yet. As 1inch is in a leading position, they might have more to lose than to win in the end. Did you approach smaller aggregators which would have more incentive to collaborate in order to catch up with 1 inch (for example o3 Swap) ?

We've talked to almost all aggregators out there. 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.

As we all know, Uniswap is constantly updating their project as well, bringing in a lot of new features. What if they come up with a similar solution in the near term ? Integral’s ‘holy grail’ would be lost by then, and as they’ve gained more fame in the market, would you think of it as a big threat to Integral and do you have any counter moves?

We will likely launch first, and we welcome more players to popularize and legitimize the big trend of TWAP on-chain. It's perhaps the biggest frontier for DEX’s for the year ahead of us. It has room for many players.

Is there and idea to use the significance of proposing NFTs or a native token airdrop to increase the popularity and attention of $ITGR in the market? As you can see, NFTs are very popular, no matter whether they are valuable or not, it does not only represent money, but also represents us. A symbol of Integral support and confidence, it can be published on XDAI or POLYGON and awarded to users, holders and liquidity providers of Integral products. I have always supported Integral on Gitcoin and participated in the whitelist of Integral. I still hold $ITGR and are using the Integral platform for transactions. I hope I can have an NFT, and then tell my friends, hey friends, look at this one. How cool is NFT, this is awarded to me by Integral, come on! Try it!

Yes we are now evaluating the possibility of this, and we hope to update community before the Tier-1 CEX listing. But I also want to use this opportunity to share some of our thoughts when making decisions on marketing.

Everyone knows that tokens are the best marketing tool in this space. However, releasing liquid tokens for marketing purposes will increase circulating supply, hence increasing sell pressure. So one of our jobs is to balance this. For instance, we need to evaluate the effectiveness of an airdrop, see if it can actually increases token holders and if it's vulnerable for bots' harvesting (we certainly don't want that).

We are always searching for effective ways to give out tokens. If you find some great platforms/tools, please do let me know!