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, again, kudos to them!
Additionally, We have just pitched Integral TWAP to Nansen’s alpha group which is predominantly larger traders taking a 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 contents for our TWAP product. Such as informative tweets, documentation (below) and videos etc. which will be ready before TWAP goes live.
So in conclusion, our marketing strategy will be pretty hybrid over the next few months. Online-wise, we’ll talk to more whale hubs similar to Nansen. Offline-wise, we’ll continue to discover exclusive opportunities like the NFT party, to get leads.
We have also designed a program called ‘DeFi Trader Alliance’, which we’ll work with standalone OTC desk, aggregator & liquidity protocol to increase the adoption rate of Integral TWAP.
And our business development team is growing to assist with this and we just made a hire this week! They’ll 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 doing empirical analysis, such as average market volatility for ETH-USDC in 30 minutes, which will be used as reference for the slippage tolerance for TWAP.
Product
The product team have finished building TWAP, and it now has a testnet version on Kovan. As previously mentioned, we’ve been learning opinions from the whales in the DeFi Trader Club to make our product fit into their daily workflow and this 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. This is how the finished product looks:
Another exiting news is that the product team is also about to finish The Graph for Integral!For those of you who are not familiar with The Graph, it’s an indexing protocol for querying networks like Ethereum. With it, we can build things like: Dune dashboard, Fork Uniswap and integrate The Graph on it. We have seen that there are some requests on a live dashboard to monitor the liquidity pool and trades on Integral and The Graph will pave the way to integrate these utility tools.
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?
First of all, I have to apologize that we have fallen behind on our schedule. It’s been a turbulent policy environment for crypto exchanges. Some crypto exchanges that we’ve been talking to are currently facing quite challenges, which increases the time for decision-making.
While we are building TWAP, we’ll wait for the exchanges to signal and to 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 currently working on Integral?
Currently we have 15 people: 2 for marketing, 3 for research, 2 for business development & 6 for developments. There will be two more engineers joining us in December and January.
Does the team have any plans for $ITGR token use cases such as voting, fee reduction for token holders, farming etc ?
We are currently monitoring the number of holders of $ITGR and will start the DAO migration once there are enough (currently it’s quite concentrated). Then $ITGR can be used to vote then.
Regarding fee reduction, trading fees for Integral TWAP will be 10bps and we hope to test if the fee is actually competitive and can attract sustainable demand. Then we’ll think about events like fee reduction for holders.
In the passage from L1 to L2 will we, the community, have any costs to bear in order to transfer our funds from the old to the new?
The migration will start from token emissions so you won’t have to spend too much gas on claiming $ITGR. Unfortunately, there will be a cost for token holders to make the migration.
On the other hand, L2 for trading won’t happen too soon, at least not until we get genuine feedback from users, such as: “gas is a big frictional cost to use Integral.”
Product
When is the integral dapp planned for release?
We plan to release it in Dec 2021. But it depends on the kovan testnet results. If there is some uncertainty on whether it’s a product-market-fit, we don’t rule out possibility to extend the development period.
Is there a roadmap in the development of the project, on L2, our later products that commented as perps, options, synthetics, etc?
Yes we are researching on them actively. The research team is actually working on prevention of MEV attacks and cross-chain swap. But currently there’s nothing too much to be shared.
TVL & Liquidity
There are some concerns on the thin liquidity of $ITGR on both CEX and Uniswap. Are there any further plans to increase $ITGR liquidity?
I think the fundamental reason for that is there are not enough people holding $ITGR which results in not many liquidity providers of $ITGR on Uniswap.
Several factors are contributing to this situation and we believe that the most important one is that the current product is not competitive enough and we hope to fix this with the PMF-achieved TWAP.
Product market fit doesn’t fall from the sky and it requires a lot of BD talk, pitch sessions, 1 on 1 chats with whales, writing tweets, etc. Luckily, we are very pleased to see a positive initial reception from our go-to audience and we’ll keep working on this.
Is there a plan to incentivize the liquidity pools? I was thinking if there is no liquidity, you won’t be able to support whale transactions?
Currently, I think sustainable trade flow and highly-frequent traders’ appreciation on our value prop (demand side) is more important than liquidity (the supply side).
But we do have plans for incentivizing liquidity provision after TWAP launches, such as increasing farming reward. We are also considering closing some pools to concentrate rewards to some of the more frequently traded pools.
Incentivizing people to LP is only a short term play. Will Integral consider looking at Tokemak and OlympusDAO Pro to start owning your liquidity as well as building up a treasury for longevity?
I agree that liquidity projects like Tokenmak will be a game changer to DeFi. However, Integral does possess some unique features that makes our relationship with liquidity a bit different than other DEX:
Liquidity doesn’t affect orders’ price impact on our platform.
Unlike retail-level orders, the amount of whale orders fluctuate day by day. Sometimes there’s not a single >500k trade on-chain in a single day (excluding bots), while there are many during big liquidation days.
These fact requires us to be able to manage pools dynamically and swiftly. Markets and demand from whales are always changing and a static liquidity supply will make no sense in this case.
Therefore, we need to have some more time thinking about this level of partnership. It surely is nice to have extra liquidity – but if the liquidity is not properly managed, it’ll be a waste of farming rewards instead of adding value to the protocol.
L2 & Staking
Can you explain how mean zero impermanent loss works? If I deposit an equal amount of eth and usdc for example into a pool, and the price changes over next month, how can I not take a loss here?
Let’s say there’s a newly created ETH-USDC pool and you deposit 1 ETH and 4000 USDC (1:1) into the pool.
24 hours later, 1ETH becomes 3900 USDC, so the hold value of your LP token is now 7900 USDC.
At that time, someone sells 0.5 ETH to the pool. If the price they get is Uniswap price (1ETH=3900 USDC), the pool will end up with 1.5 ETH and 2050 USDC.
However, on Integral, we offer 5 min twap prices, so he actually gets less USDC out of the pool (it makes sense, as some people are willing to get less price impact at the expense of price volatility). So let’s say the 5min twap price is 1ETH=3895 USDC. So now the pool has, 1.5 ETH * 3900+ (4000 – 0.5*3895) = 7902.5 USDC, which is your pool value.
So the real reason for mean-zero IL is due to the fact 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.
I want to clarify about the staking of tokens for 0.5 and 3 years. Have you considered an option to make unlimited staking without a lock, with the ability to withdraw a deposit at any time?
I think yearn can do this better than us and we’ll submit proposals when the time is appropriate taking into consideration – product, tokenomics, brand etc.
Closing Remarks
Recently, we were criticized for not taking care of our early supporters. But trust me, the truly responsible way to treat the community is to keep building & iterating until PMF is achieved. That’s how everyone will be happy. We’ll keep working to deliver a killer product and make you all proud.
As the holidays are approaching, on behalf of the team, I want to thank the community, who have supported us through this journey.
If you would like to help Integral grow faster, the most important thing you can do is refer to us a great designer. Currently we’re looking to hire a Design Lead to assist with branding and content creation. Any assistance on sourcing the best possible candidates for this position would be greatly appreciated. If your candidate referral is eventually hired for this role, we’ll gladly send you 5,000 ITGR as a reward!
