Professor JEY Office Hour Recap (Week 9 & 10)

We are very pleased to have concluded our 10th weekly office hour.

Please find below our recap of week 9 & 10, 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

Marketing & Business Development

As planned, on October 29th, we successfully sponsored an exclusive NFT party in Las Vegas. The event gave us a lot of sales leads, 2-300 contact details (mostly whales), and we are currently conversing with them one by one.

After the conversion, the eligible whales were invited to join the DeFi Trader Club. There are currently ~30 members in the group, all handpicked by the team.

We are going to work with these highly frequent traders to polish up the product and test product-market-fit. Some members in the group have shared valuable suggestions with us, ranging from product features to branding messages. Kudos to them!

Additionally, we have just pitched Integral TWAP to Nansen's alpha group, which is predominantly larger traders with a membership cost of 30k per year. The reception was positive, and we hope to form some good connections we can incorporate into our DeFi Traders Club.

Our marketing team is also working on producing more explanatory content for our TWAP product, such as informative tweets, documentation, and videos, which will be ready before TWAP goes live.

In conclusion, our marketing strategy will be hybrid over the next few months. Online, we will talk to more whale hubs similar to Nansen. Offline, we will continue to discover exclusive opportunities like the NFT party to get leads.

We have also designed a program called the ‘DeFi Trader Alliance,’ where we'll work with standalone OTC desks, aggregators, and liquidity protocols to increase the adoption rate of Integral TWAP.

Our business development team is growing, and we just made a hire this week! They will play a very important role in the ongoing sales process.

Research

The research team has spent the past two weeks talking to whales in the DeFi Trader Club about their suggestions on product iterations. They are also helping the product team with empirical analysis, such as average market volatility for ETH-USDC in 30 minutes, which will be used as a reference for the slippage tolerance for TWAP.

Product

The product team has finished building TWAP, and it now has a testnet version on Kovan. We have been learning opinions from the whales in the DeFi Trader Club to make our product fit into their daily workflow, which has caused a slight delay in the release of TWAP.

The audits are also taking time, but so far no big issues, just some minor suggestions.

Another exciting piece of news is that the product team is about to finish The Graph for Integral. For those unfamiliar, The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum. It will allow us to build things like Dune dashboards and integrate live dashboards to monitor liquidity pools and trades on Integral.

We are also working on a non-wallet-connect APR display, so future users won't have to connect their wallet to view the current APR.

Q&A

Marketing & Community

*When will the promised tier-1 listing take place? Why didn't it take place in October as promised?*

I have to apologize that we have fallen behind on our schedule. It’s been a turbulent policy environment for crypto exchanges. Some exchanges we've been talking to are facing challenges, which has increased the time for decision-making.

While we build TWAP, we'll wait for exchanges to signal and re-start the talks. We continue to believe that a good product is the foundation for our token.

*Can you share some insights on the current team structure and how many people are working on Integral?*

Currently, we have 15 people: 2 for marketing, 3 for research, 2 for business development, and 6 for development. Two more engineers will join us in December and January.

*Does the team have plans for $ITGR token use cases such as voting, fee reduction for token holders, or farming?*

We are monitoring the number of $ITGR holders and will start DAO migration once the distribution is less concentrated. Then $ITGR can be used for voting.

Regarding fee reduction, trading fees for Integral TWAP will be 10bps. We will test if this fee is competitive and can attract sustainable demand. Then we may consider fee reduction for holders.

*In the passage from L1 to L2, will the community have any costs to bear when transferring funds?*

Unfortunately, there will be a cost for token holders to make the migration. However, L2 for trading won't happen too soon, not until we receive feedback indicating that gas is a significant frictional cost for using Integral.

Product

*When is the Integral dApp planned for release?*

We plan to release it in December 2021. However, it depends on the Kovan testnet results. If there is uncertainty about product-market-fit, we may extend the development period.

*Is there a roadmap for the development of the project, including L2 or later products like perps, options, or synthetics?*

Yes, we are researching them actively. The research team is working on preventing MEV attacks and cross-chain swaps, but there’s nothing concrete to share yet.

TVL & Liquidity

*There are concerns about the thin liquidity of $ITGR on CEX and Uniswap. Are there plans to increase $ITGR liquidity?*

The fundamental reason is that not enough people hold $ITGR, which results in fewer liquidity providers on Uniswap. We hope to fix this with the PMF-achieved TWAP.

*Is there a plan to incentivize liquidity pools?*

We plan to incentivize liquidity provision after TWAP launches by increasing farming rewards. We are also considering concentrating rewards on frequently traded pools.

*Will Integral consider partnering with Tokemak or OlympusDAO Pro to build up a treasury for longevity?*

Integral has unique features that make liquidity management different from other DEXs. Whale orders fluctuate day by day, and static liquidity supply wouldn’t make sense in this case. We need time to evaluate this partnership level.

L2 & Staking

*Can you explain how mean-zero impermanent loss works?*

The real reason for mean-zero impermanent loss is that the trader doesn't get the spot price. They get the 5-min TWAP price, which will be extended to 30 minutes in Integral TWAP.

*Will Integral consider offering unlimited staking without a lock, allowing withdrawal at any time?*

Yearn can do this better than us. We will submit proposals when the time is right.

Closing Remarks

Recently, we were criticized for not taking care of our early supporters. But the responsible way to treat the community is to keep building and iterating until PMF is achieved. That’s how everyone will be happy.

As the holidays approach, on behalf of the team, I want to thank the community for supporting us through this journey.