OKX AMA With Bifrost Finance
On 20th April, OKX Blockdream Ventures staged a AMA with Bifrost, A web3 derivative protocol that provides decentralized cross-chain liquidity for staked assets on Polkadot. We had the great team Thibault — Head of Strategy to share the progress and updates from Bifrost.
Pls see the Recap of great talk！
Host: @TPPCH Welome！Would you say hi to our community, some intro of your backgrounds, and What is your role in Bifrost？
Thibault | Bifrost: Sure thing, my name is Thibault — I am Swiss. I have over six years experience working in financial markets under my belt, leading business development initiatives for a Swiss boutique currency overlay company (30bn in currency overlay assets). After getting into crypto in 2017, I moved to Beijing just before COVID struck, dedicating myself to DeFi and joining Bifrost as head of strategy.
Host: Thanks for the intro.! Great to have you today. We may take a quick veiw of the past of Bifrost！
Host: Let’s move to the next part, What‘s happening in Bifrost！
Question 1: Bifrost Collator mainnet has recently gone live last month and we have already seen the first phase of 16 active Collators being successfully selected. Can we start by talking about what Collator is and what it means for Bifrost to go live?
Thibault | Bifrost: sure. so very briefly about what a collator is :
Collators maintain parachains by collecting parachain transactions from users and producing state transition proofs for Relay Chain validators. In other words, collators maintain parachains by aggregating parachain transactions into parachain block candidates and producing state transition proofs for validators based on those blocks.
Collators maintain a full node for the Relay Chain and a full node for their particular parachain; meaning they retain all necessary information to be able to author new blocks and execute transactions in much the same way as miners do on current PoW blockchains. Under normal circumstances, they will collate and execute transactions to create an unsealed block and provide it, together with a proof of state transition, to one or more validators responsible for proposing a parachain block.
I think more importantly how this relates to Bifrost is more important. Going live for Collator set is to open a decentralized way to participate in Bifrost network maintenance for Community, and adding more utility for BNC holders, with BNC staking mechanism.
Host: Awesome！ Now we can see that The Collator has been expanded to 32 collators, beautiful!
Question 2: In this launch, you not only participate in the block as an active Collator, but also stake your BNC to Collator to earn reward, so please Thibault briefly introduce to our audience how to participate in this Collator and BNC staking
Thibault | Bifrost: firstly i’d like to mention in terms of a nice bit of juicy milestones, $BNC staking has exceeded 2.5M, an increase of 26% in last weeks, accounting for 22% of the total $BNC circulation.
If you are interested in Collator running, you guys can make sure you have stable conditions to run a node by following our guide :https://wiki.bifrost.finance/node/run-a-collator-node
There are no limited slots for Collator candidates, but only Active Collator can receive commision and release Staking rewards to its delegators. For being an Active one, you need to have enough delegation to be involved in the top 32 ranks. The active Collator set well maintain 32 slots for a few months, and then expand to 64 slots.
now If you are a staker like i assume the most of the folks in the community, you can do BNC staking by following the tutorial: https://wiki.bifrost.finance/staking/bifrost-staking-tutorial
For stakers/delegators, you can stake any Collators you want, but you can only receive rewards from active Collators, and the more delegations a Collator has, the less rewards it can split to its delegators. So please make sure you have your own strategy to keep your delegations generating rewards for you.
About the metrics of BNC staking rewards, you can refer to: https://wiki.bifrost.finance/node/bifrost-collator-mainnet#reward-calculation
currently The highest APR for staking is around 36% on Bifrost APP: https://bifrost.app/collator
for users interested in bnc staking please view the following video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmBkyVNw5H8
Host: Interesting! Stake to earn
Question 3: Apart from Collator, we know that Bifrost has been providing Polkadot&Kusama parachain slot auction liquidity protocol SALP,
so please tell us how Crowdloan users can release their assets locked in Polkadot& Kusma parachain through SALP? Also, are there any new upgrades to SALP in the future?
Thibault | Bifrost: firstly for users who are not familiar, For kusama and Polkadot Crowdloan participants, our slot auction liquidity protocol (SALP) offers the opportunity to participate in Crowdloan without lockup, and to receive the reward of bidding on backed projects without losing staked DOT/KSM liquidity- thus solving the opportunity costs associated with staking.
to date for some juicy stats again, 9 Polkadot Parachains and 11 Kusama Parachains have been successfully bid on, with a total of 1,774,509 vsDOT and 174,667 vsKSM minted.
very briefly without going into too much detail:
The SALP separate two tokens for ones underlying KSM or DOT contribution:
1. vsToken (vsksm or vsdot)
vsToken is a fungible token, mint 1 KSM/DOT get 1vsKSM/DOT, and vsToken can be traded and transferred at any time just like ordinary tokens.
2. vsBond
vsBond is a semi-fungible token, Mint 1 KSM/DOT get 1vsBond, and vsBond represents to the lease period of different parachains, so different Parachains got different vsBond.
So now — how to use this vsToken and vsBond?
1. Circulation: The vsToken can be traded in AMM (like ZENLINK, a cross chain dex on Polkadot ) and vsBond circulates in a pending order market.
you can also Go to https://bifrost.app/swap for vsToken trading.
2. Redemption: When a parachain retires, the same amount of vsToken and vsBond can fully redeem their corresponding underlying token.
Since Bifrost went live on the Kusama parachain on October 21, 2021, it has minted a total of $137M in derivatives, provided $11.04M in liquidity, held 81,297 addresses in the chain, and completed 333,921 signed transactions.
Currently, Bifrost has accumulated around $73m on Slot Auction liquidity, vsDOT and vsKSM. You are experience it in the following Polkadot/Kusama slot auctions. https://bifrost.app/vcrowdloan
Since Bifrost went live on the Kusama parachain on October 21, 2021, it has minted a total of $137M in derivatives, provided $11.04M in liquidity, held 81,297 addresses in the chain, and completed 333,921 signed transactions.
Currently, Bifrost has accumulated around $73m on Slot Auction liquidity, vsDOT and vsKSM. You are experience it in the following Polkadot/Kusama slot auctions. https://bifrost.app/vcrowdloan
now regarding upgrades and developments>
We are launching SALP 2.0 soon, the main function we will provide is a new facet to liquidity bonds.
As I introduced, vsBond is the redemption certificate for locked DOTs and vsBond represents the time when the redemption certificate is opened for redemption. By combining vsDOT with vsBond at maturity, the DOT can be redeemed 1:1, while vsBond has a different discount due to its different maturity, which represents the discounted gain paid for the liquidity provider. This creates a vsDOT bond market that satisfies both the arbitrage needs of the liquidity provider and the liquidity needs of the community users.
Here is the article to introduce more details: https://medium.com/bifrost-finance/how-bifrost-is-building-a-cross-chain-stakefi-ecosystem-69b524032727
Host: Great, I knew your team has worked on that since 2019, you ‘ve made a great contribution to Polkadot actions, expecting to see the booming Liquidity on SALP
Question 4: What parachain projects or non-Polkadot eco-projects does Bifrost currently work with? What exactly are the scope of such partnerships?
Thibault | Bifrost: We are currently working with a few parachain projects on both the SALP front, as well as our upcoming staking liquidity protocol (SLP).
most recently, we have announced the availability of the Bifrost native token, BNC, on Moonriver. Bifrost’s token can now be used as xcBNC (an XC-20 representation of BNC) across the Moonriver ecosystem, and the MOVR token is now available on Bifrost.
The connection between these two growing parachains is made possible by XCM, native cross-consensus messaging, which continues to enable rich inter-parachain integrations across the broader Kusama ecosystem.
Furthermore, non-polkadot we are working with the DeFi protocol Curve on Moonbeam network, but still technically involved in the Polkadot ecosystem. In the near future, vToken will launch on the Curve pool.
We actually think the Polkadot ecosystem will expand to more chains without a centralized bridge. As you’ve seen recently, many big-institutions-backed bridges occurred risk issues, and billions of dollars were hacked in centralized bridge solutions. So we trust the future is a system of horizontal cross-chain architecture like Polkadot.
Host: Thank you for that part! If anyone is interested in a potential partnership, pls talk to Thibault.
Question 5: With Q1 just ending, what are Bifrost’s plans for Q2 in 2022?
Thibault | Bifrost: sure thing, firstly regarding our roadmap u can have a quick look — https://trello.com/b/6AhHWicZ/bifrost-roadmap-2022
Q2 is going to be a historical quarter for Bifrost. As mentioned our main focus — SLP (Staking liquidity protocol) will launch in Q2, which is Bifrost main product finally releasing and the ecosystem and community and projects will hopefully benefit massively from our initiatives.
The easiest way to understand Bifrost is to see it as a derivative issuer that provides liquidity for all pledged assets, issuing corresponding shadow assets during the bonding period of the original assets. At the same time, the shadow asset is a fungible Token can be circulated in different DEXs, pools, protocols and cross-chains.
As such we will focus on our SLP and deliver on our mission to provide standardized cross-chain interest-bearing derivatives for Polkadot relay chains, parachains, and heterogeneous chains bridged with Polkadot.
Furthermore, by aggregating over 80% of PoS consensus chains’ staking liquidity through cross-chain derivatives, our protocol lowers users’ staking threshold, increases multi-chain staking ratio, and improves the ecosystems application interest base, by creating a three-way positive cycle for the StakeFi ecosystem by empowering users, multi-chains, and ecosystem applications.
we will also continue to look to partner with corresponding parachain projects to increase utility of our native token (BNC)
I’m sure the community is asking, so let me be clear — Bifrost Native Coin (BNC), currently listed at Gate.io, MEXC, Kraken (not US,CAD,JPY,AUD)- and officially listed tomorrow on Kucoin. We are in discussion and review with Binance, Huobi, Crypto, Bitfinex, Coinone, FTX. please check out further info on BNC on the following :https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/bifrost-native-coin
Host: Sounds good! 2022 will be another miracle year in crypto, I believed Bifrost will have a big progress with solid work
Question 6: You mentioned your upcoming Polkadot crowdloan, can you provide more details about this, auction start, rewards etc?
Thibault | Bifrost: yes sure, this is the big news of today’s AMA too.
firstly for some context- deploying as a parachain on Polkadot will allow Bifrost to tap into the full interoperability, scalability, and security of the Polkadot Network so that we can continue our mission of providing decentralized cross-chain staking liquidity derivatives for Polkadot relay chains, parachains, and heterogeneous chains bridged with Polkadot .
Bifrost Polkadot Crowdloan Starts friday 4/22 10am UTC . There is no specific end time, it mainly depends on when Bifrost has bid on the Polkadot parachain
now in terms of crowdloan details:
Bifrost will give out a total of 3,600,000 BNCs (4.5% of total BNCs) in the Polkadot Crowdloan with a bonus ratio of 1 DOT : 10+ BNCs.
In addition, users who vote between 4/22 and 4/30 will receive a 20% early bird bonus (1DOT : 12 BNC). If inviting friends, both the inviter and the invitee will receive a 15% invitation bonus. Under the condition of voting with SALP, users will also receive 1 DOT : 0.1 BNC channel bonus. Note: Early Bird Bonus, Invite Bonus and Channel Bonus will be included in the 3.6 Million BNC Bonus.
The Last Winner event will open on April 22 at 10am in UTC with an initial prize pool of 5,000 BNCs and the last participant at the end of each countdown will receive all the prizes in the pool. 5 DOTs and above will be eligible to participate in The Last Winner and in addition to the initial prize pool, Bifrost will add an additional 5% to the prize pool based on the number of BNCs received by contributors. The more DOTs a contributor contributes, the larger the pool will be. To participate, please visit on Friday 04.22 https://crowdloan.bifrost.app/
Host: Big News！Keep Following！
Thank you Thibault, We had a deeper understanding of the Bifrost!
We will keep following your updates https://twitter.com/bifrost_finance
All the best on your Auction!
About OKX Blockdream Ventures
OKX Blockdream Ventures is an investment institution under the worldwide top trading platform OKX.com, which focuses on exploring the best blockchain projects on a global scale, supporting the most cutting-edge blockchain technology innovation, promoting the healthy development of the global blockchain industry, and focusing on long-term structural value investment. The initial capital of OKX Blockdream Ventures is $100 million.
About Bifrost
Bifrost is a web3 derivatives protocol that provides decentralized cross-chain liquidity for staked assets. By leveraging on the cross-consensus message (XCM) it can provide cross-chain liquid staking services for multiple chains.
Bifrost’s mission is to provide standardized cross-chain interest-bearing derivatives for Polkadot relay chains, parachains, and heterogeneous chains bridged with Polkadot. Furthermore, by aggregating over 80% of PoS consensus chains’ staking liquidity through cross-chain derivatives, our protocol lowers users’ staking threshold, increases multi-chain staking ratio, and improves the ecosystems application interest base, by creating a three-way positive cycle for the StakeFi ecosystem by empowering users, multi-chains, and ecosystem applications.
Bifrost has raised over USD 2M from top-tier venture capital firms by the likes of NGC, SNZ, DFG, CMS and other institutions. In addition to being an early receiver of a Web3 Foundation Grant, Bifrost is also a member of the Substrate Builders Program and the Web3 Bootcamp.
