Professor JEY Office Hour Recap (Week 7)

We are very pleased to have concluded our 7th weekly office hour.

Please find below our 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

Product Development

Our team is hard at work on our flagship OTC (Over The Counter) product. We have finished the smart contracts and currently we are doing the back-end and UI re-skin. The OTC product is expected in Q4 2021.

We've also built an API for you to check the circulating supply of ITGR. You can bookmark it if you are interested.

Marketing

Due to the nature of the OTC product we have shifted to some key account sales models: we will generate leads and convert them to real users. So in the next 2 months, our job in marketing will be to find as many sales leads as possible and onboard them one by one.

Also there will be some regular marketing for the OTC product, like explainer videos, a new website and a possible NFT airdrop so keep an eye on our announcements!We are also happy to sponsor The Defiant Podcast for the next couple of months. Compared with other formats, podcasts tend to attract more high-end audiences and we hope it will bring some of the potential users to us.One last thing on marketing and operational side, Coingecko has now updated the circulating supply on the page. The number is still 1mil more than the actual number, but we are making progress with them.

CEX and Listing

We are pleased to announce $ITGR has been listed on Bitmart and Gate.io, and we have just finished running a campaign with them.

Additionally, we are also still moving closer to listing on a tier-1 exchange. More news on this will be announced once it is finalized.

Spread the word

As we mentioned earlier, our main focus in the next few months will be generating enough leads for OTC product. If you know someone who's done a 500k trade on-chain, please kindly share this survey to him, and we'll invite him directly into our beta tester group. https://3ecq2uc8dhw.typeform.com/to/Arda7JV4

Q&A

DAO

Does the team have anything planned for $ITGR usage? Right now, one can only stake the token (at quite challenging lockups) - when will the fees be distributed to $ITGR holder?

Currently all the trading fees have gone to the integral community treasury, which belongs to the DAO. Integral has traded approx. $441M worth of volume since its inception and collected around 500k in fees. These fees will go to Project DAO's treasury. The DAO can decide when and how to distribute these funds once we have implemented snapshot voting and DAO structure. The team will not touch the funds in the treasury.

When is snapshot voting and the DAO structure going to be implemented?

We are targeting 2022H1, after there are enough token holders. Currently there are less 1000 - you can check $ITGR’s etherscan page. A lot of people are still yet to claim.

Can you elaborate more on the Integral DAO? Is there a timeline on when we will be able to vote on proposals, manage the treasury, etc - when can we expect DAO infrastructure for ITGR?

Unfortunately the team has not finalized the plan on this yet and we will need to do more discussion/design after the OTC is launched. Currently, I think the DAO structure that Compound uses makes most sense to us: https://compound.finance/governance

Marketing

We need more big investors to see the real worth of ITGR? Are you working on it? I mean what are you doing for taking them inside the crypto-sphere? Most big investors have doubts about blockchain - how will we tell them about it?

I guess "big investors" mean funds from trad-fi and silicon valley VCs? Well honestly I don't think we are the best people to educate the market, because there are many companies out there which have more funds/people to do this. For example Crypto.com sponsored so many football teams to boost awareness, and it's not the best idea for us to outspend them on marketing. We will focus on the product and serving whales/native funds in our crypto space.

It seems that our marketing efforts are not sufficient in terms of advertising, what are the planned studies on this subject?

So we won't be spending a lot of money on advertising. Given the users we are looking for are so limited, we will find and convert them in a more traditional sales model. We will sponsor more high-end gatherings, demo sessions and conferences - where we know that whales/crypto funds will go and be exposed to the Integral brand.

Product

Could you please explain what exactly is OTC?

Over the Counter or OTC is a trade between two parties with one usually being a ‘desk’. Technically, it is just another way of trading assets such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, and currencies. With OTC, trading happens via a broker-dealer network, guaranteeing more privacy for traders.

OTC trading also deals with larger volume transaction when compared to exchanges. Essentially, OTC is for institutions and whales. So let's say you want to sell 5 million of sushi to USDC. It's really costly to do so on DeFi currently due to price impact. Therefore, you have to go to CEX's OTC desk (e.g. coinbase) or standalone OTC desk (e.g. Wintermute) to execute such a trade.

Integral OTC is going to bring all of this to DeFi.

It seems like Integral isn't getting much usage, both by LPs and traders. Any plans to help grow this?

That's actually a good question. Integral has built all the technical elements that we need to become a successful trading platform. We've got concentrated liquidity, TWAP, and mean-0 impermanent loss. To improve the product usage, we will need to find a new user scenario for this technology. That's the fundamental reason that we are building Integral OTC.

How do you see yourself compared to DYDX?

We both have different and unique selling points. They sell decentralized perpetuals, and we sell decentralized OTC.

Can you explain what does Integral do to implement to avoid Impermanent Loss? Because this is the first I have heard about Integral and because of this and I am not sure if the fundamentals have changed?

Actually it's quite simple to explain -

We don't pay arbitragers to fix the price info because we use the Uniswap oracle; and

We have a 5-min trade delay, which makes it much more difficult to MEV/sandwich/front-run our trades. And such attacks are the fundamental reasons for impermanent loss.

How does Integral protect users from a sandwich attack? If a user submits a order at t+3, an attacker can submit a same order before the user, plus an opposite order after the user. All three are submitted at t+3 and become eligible at t+8. If my understanding is correct, all three will be executed in same execution batch, but the slippage will depend on the order (attacker, user, attacker) and will be determined by the AMM curve. Is it still risk free profit for the attacker?

The protocol is NOT designed to protect from MEV, or in this case a sandwich attack. This needs to be handled in the flashbot like manner (or maybe something else). Integral is subject to such a attack. If someone submits orders right before and after you it is possible that they can still sandwich attack you.

However, it is harder to be attacked on Integral because:

Our curve is much less sensitive than Uniswap it may also take a lot more liquidity to pull this off; and

There is a chance that the Oracle epoch will elapse and that will reset the curve and your sandwich attack would fail.

What our 5-min TWAP is protecting, is CEX/DEX latency arbitrage, and they are different from sandwich attacks. Latency arbitrage is that external price has already moved, and the arbitrager comes to AMM and trades to the external price. In particular for this type of arbitrage the arber would be able to only submit one single order to the AMM (along with some external order potentially) to complete the arb, whereas a sandwich attack always involves (at least) 2 orders into the same AMM pool.

Staking and L2

Is there any consideration to giving early investors automated staking without having to claim? The extortionate gas fees make it non-viable to claim right now.

We are currently very aware of the high gas costs associated with the ethereum network the difficulty it is causing our users. So, we are currently researching alternative L2 solutions for token distribution/staking. We will start L2 migration after OTC is launched, and gas fee for claiming/staking will be reduced substantially.