The First AMA of Bifrost-Staking + DeFi New Model

Hello everyone, welcome to Bifrost’s first online AMA, I am the host of this AMA, Bunny ~

After 5 months of development preparation, Bifrost gradually entered the public’s vision. It has gone from the initial concept to the launch of the testnet today, and it continues to surprise everyone. The first AMA sharing guest is Bifrost co-founder & core developer Lurpis to take you through the wonderful world of Bifrost. This session is divided into two parts, the host asks questions and the audience free questions and answers.

So please ask Lurpis to give you a brief introduction to Bifrost.

Hello everyone, I ’m Lurpis from Bifrost

Bifrost is a cross-chain network that provides staking liquidity. Users can convert PoS currency to Bifrost vToken through the Bifrost transfer bridge at any time to get staking income and liquidity. For example, users can exchange EOS into vEOS. While receiving EOS Staking income, they can also sell vEOS at any time and redeem it into EOS. At the same time, vEOS can also be used in DeFi, Dapp, DEX and other scenarios, such as using vEOS as When the collateral is borrowed, its staking income can offset part of the interest and realize low-interest borrowing. At present, there are some other equally excellent parachain projects in the Polkadot ecosystem. For example, there are currently Acala which is a stable currency in the Polkadot ecosystem, and Darwin which is a game ecology. These are possible expansions of vToken usage scenarios.

So, what role does vToken play in staking? How does it provide liquidity for staking?

First of all, vToken is a general asset used to provide staking liquidity. For example, when the user directly stakes, the KSM in the staking state cannot be traded. If you intend to sell KSM, you need to wait at least 7 days for redemption. Back in time, if you encounter a short-term market plunge during the period, you can only helplessly watch the asset depreciate, and through Bifrost staking, you can get vKSM according to the exchange rate. In addition, vKSM can freely transfer, trade, play Dapp, and even act as a collateral for DeFi, or lend it to others, to get the dual benefits of staking and lending.

Got that, in simple terms, the original currency for staking can still continue to accept the benefits of staking, and the replaced vtoken can continue to participate in market activities for transactions or investments instead of the original currency. So how to get vToken? How is it obtained?

There are basically two ways to get vToken,

(1) Exchange the contract through Bifrost and use Token to directly convert to vToken according to the exchange rate at the time.

(2) Because it is a general asset agreement to buy through the trading market, users can go to the supported exchanges to buy vToken directly, and they can also get staking income. At the same time, in order to lower the threshold, we will also provide flash-like trading functions.

Bifrost-app is expected to be launched in beta on 15th April. Users can receive KSM and DOT tokens of Bifrost testnet through Telegram BOT, and then experience the functions of exchange, transaction, and income in Bifrost-app.

After knowing how to get vToken, can you tell us about the benefits of vToken? Where does the income come from? Where will its value be reflected?

In terms of income, it is also divided into two parts. The first part of the guaranteed income depends on the Staking rules of the public chain. If the annual nomination rate of KSM is 20%, then vKSM will also be at least 20% of the annualized income. The second Part of the income comes from the bidding for the voting rights of Bifrost Staking Pool. Different nodes are willing to pay a higher premium to purchase the nomination rights, then the corresponding user’s Staking income will even exceed the 20% income set by KSM.

At the same time, Bifrost Staking Pool’s nomination bid will make small nodes with high service but low votes have the opportunity to compete with giant whale nodes, making the PoS network more decentralized and safer.

After listening to your explanation of vToken, I feel that vToken does give Staking a better liquidity experience, and hope that vToken can have more application scenarios. So, I mentioned that Bifrost is a parachain of Polkadot. Can you simply talk about what a parachain?

Parachains are actually applications on Polkadot relays, but they are all public chains with independent services. However, unlike ordinary public chains, data between parachains can be communicated. A special parachain is called Transfer bridge, the role of the transfer bridge is to bridge other blockchains into the Polkadot network, so that parachains and other public chains can also achieve intercommunication. Just like Bifrost is doing an EOS transfer bridge, it is hoped that EOS can be bridged into the Polkadot ecosystem to get EOS Staking liquidity, while allowing EOS users to experience other parachain applications in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Thank you for your explanations. Recently, we have also seen that some friends have been looking forward to the mainnet of Polkadot. Can you simply talk to you about the mainnet of Polkadot?

Polkadot’s mainnet is expected to be in June 2020, but before the Polkadot mainnet, the pre-production network Kusama has been released in advance. Kusama is an open network with a time period four times faster than that of Polkadot, and will be independent of the wave. The card will continue to run forever, and most of Polkadot’s logic will be verified on Kusama. For the team that wants to connect to Polkadot Eco, Kusama is a good choice. Bifrost will also access the Kusama network in advance before connecting to Polkadot to support vKSM exchange.

The seventh question, for the procedure of slot auctions before the mainnet launch of Polkadot, Lurpis will give you a brief introduction. Here I also want to know what efforts Bifrost has made for this?

After the Polkadot mainnet goes online, it is expected to open the auction of parachain slot once every six months. As far as we know, the number of slots at the beginning is not very much. The parachain team that needs slots to lock the dot to participate in the auction of slot 6–24 months’ use right. At the same time, Bifrost will launch the first parachain IPO (initial parachain offer) plan before the parachain auction, also known as IPO. If you hold DOT in your hand, you can participate in this IPO. The locking time depends on the usage time of the parachain slot. After the parachain slot expires, you will get your DOT back, and you will only lose the DOT Staking cost and holding during this period. The opportunity cost of DOT.

We all know that Bifrost recently received funding from the WEB3 Foundation. Can you briefly talk about the current cooperation with WEB3 and Polkadot?

As the first Substrate Hackathon award-winning project, Bifrost first appeared in the public’s field of vision. It is also a funded project of the Web3 Foundation Grant. At the same time, because Bifrost needs to use Substrate and Polkadot relay chain to complete the business logic, it is closer to Polkadot ecological coordination, of course. As a Polkadot parachain, Bifrost will first support vToken of Polkadot related assets, such as vDOT and vKSM. If other parachains have staking liquidity requirements, we are also very happy to have cooperation.

After listening to your thoughts, we are also looking forward to the development of Bifrost, so can you talk about the current progress of the Bifrost project?

Bifrost released the POC-2 Testnet on March 21 of this year (2020). In just one week, the number of participating nodes reached 25, distributed in many places around the world. In the POC-2 test network, we verified the stability of Bifrost-node. Gender, POA governance, vToken exchange rate adjustment and other logics. At the same time, during the test network, we have started the establishment of the user community and the establishment of market cooperation.

Last question, what is Bifrost ’s future roadmap?

In the following time, we will continue to improve the development of the POC-2 testnet, and plan to cross-chain the EOS Jungle testnet into the Bifrost test network, and plan to officially launch the Bifrost Asgard pre-production network on May 1. It will be The Chaos network, which will be open permanently like Kusama, teams who want to access Bifrost can verify the business logic in the Bifrost Asgard network in advance. On May 30th, we plan to conduct an IPO preview in the Kusama network to test Bifrost’s entire IPO business process. It is expected that on June 30, Bifrost will become the Kusama parachain, providing real KSM exchange. In short, we will try our best to keep the Bifrost mainnet online rhythm and Polkadot mainnet online process in line with each other, and strive to become the first batch to access the Polkadot mainnet.

The above is the questioning session of this AMA. Thank you very much for your listening and participation, so that we can introduce the application and mode of Bifrost in detail. Looking forward to the next AMA, Bifrost will bring more exciting event ~