AMA with Polkastarter team (7th October 2020)
This AMA took place on the official Telegram channel of Polkastarter team.
I have summarised all the questions and answers here for people who missed the AMA and want to learn more about the Polkastarter project. This is an amazing project which was recently listed on Uniswap and has a great potential to revolutionise the decentralised exchangers space in the crypto currency world.
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Question: How likely it is for Polkastarter to get accepted as one of the parachain on the Polkadot network or have you already reserved a position for yourself in the polkadot ecosystem?
Answer: Hi Explorer, Polkastarter doesn’t necessarily need a Parachain to work. We are currently in discussions with several companies, who will be doing the IPO (Initial Parachain Offering) and will use them to deploy Polkastarter initially. As we continue to grow, we might apply to get our own Parachain, but it’s not necessary.
Question: Any plans to get interviewed by some of the big crypto influencers ?
Answer: Yes, we are already in touch with many of them and have scheduled several interviews. From our perspective it makes the most sense to publish them, when we are closer to releasing our MVP.
Question : Who’s your competition?
Answer: It is always good to be able to benchmark something with a reference and we had done a simple chart to help everyone understand where we stand relative to our competition. Uniswap, Bounce and Primablock are what we see as competition now. you can think of us as a next generation cross chain DEX for fundraising.
Question: Planning for more exchanges?
Answer: Just within the first 24 hours after listing on Uniswap my Inbox exploded with requests from various exchanges, blockchain companies etc. We are trying to choose very carefully, which exchanges we work with, but the answer is, yes, more are on the horizon and we’ll update the community as we know more.
Question: Is there any upcoming partnerships?
Answer: We are in constant discussion with many blockchain companies and are looking for partnerships, which compliment what we are doing with Polkastarter. Therefore it takes sometimes a bit longer to announce them, as we are going through a rigid process. But I don’t think you’ll need to wait long for our first technical partnership announcement.
Question: What can we look forward to in the nearest future?
Answer: There are many news coming in the near future. the most exciting will be the arrival of our MVP within this Quarter. Tiago, our CTO, is putting a lot of time to deliver the it within the deadline…. beyond that, we hope to bring in more exchanges relevant to where are communities are growing fastest so you have access. Along with that, are going to be some exciting partnerships.
Question: Any airdrop coming for the community in the upcoming future ?
Answer: We are not planning any airdrops. I think we are building an exciting product, which will benefit the communiy as a whole. Owning POLS will bring in various benefits and we will make those clearer through a variey of articles over the upcoming weeks, while we are getting closer to our launch.
One of the big reason of the token demand is also because we are quite restrictive with the token supply. so there are no airdrops todate… or planned.
Question: How is it coming along in terms of coding and development? As there is no available information on github etc.
Answer: This question had been asked, and it is a reasonable one. We definitely plan to make the codes available later. there will also be audits in place so we get some qualified pairs of eyes on it.
Question: What are the predicted fees vs. Uniswaps (0.3%), and how will these be distributed to LPs on Polkastarter?
Answer: Great question. We are currently finalising all these details in terms of fees, staking rewards, liquidity mining and will announce them before our product launch.
Question: Why is the first release of Polkastarter being done on Ethereum and not Polkadot? If ultimate plan is to develop on Polkadot, then what’s the point of doing it first on Ethereum?
Answer: Another great question and one we’ve been asked many times. Ethereum is still the most used L1 platform/network and almost every user has a ERC-20 wallet. Polkadot is still in the process of the IPO (As explained above), so we would have to wait for that whole process to finish, before we can migrate over. Therefore we decided to launch as quickly as possible on Ethereum, so we can already bring the benefits of Polkastarter to everyone. It allows us as well to optimise the product over the following weeks and month to make it absolutely perfect while we continue to add features and functionality.
Question: Alright, Daniel, my questions is that, is POLS an offshoot of Polkadot?
Answer: Polkastarter will be build on the Polkadot ecosystem, but we are not an offshoot/fork of it. Polkastarter MVP will be first build on the Ethereum ecosystem in Phase 1 (Q4) and when we deploy onto Polkadot ecosystem in the early part of 2021, you will see it being more full featured and cross chain as well.
Additionally many Polkadot projects will be fundraising over the following months and we are aiming to be the No1 platform for them to do so.
Echoing that what Daniel had just said, there are around 250+ Polkadot projects now. and not all of them have completed their fundraising. It is our ambition to be ready by then so we they can start enjoying the new features we are putting together.
Question: Hey everyone, serious general question. I’m genuinely looking to start working in the crypto space and get my foot in the door, does anyone who is currently working in the space have any advice? Also how can I best optimise my linkedin to attract work in that area?
Answer: Always great to meet people who want to BUIDL. The great thing, that there are so many free online resources. We would obviously recommend to become proficient with Substrate, which we believe will become the new standard for most projects to develop on in the near future.
Question: What for experience does the team have with blockchain tech?
Answer: Our CTO has extensive development experience and has been working in blockchain for several years. He actually owned his first Bitcoin in 2014, so he’s been very interested in this space for a long time. Additionally, our main blockchain developer has over 3 years experience and we couldn’t be happier with his input.
take a look at this also. it gives you an idea the evolution of Fundraising solutions. from ICO > IEO > IDO > …. Polkastarter.
Question: How does Polkastarter intend to increase the value, utility and liquidity of $POLS token. thus producing a natural increase in price of the token?
Answer: I think it would be too much to go into detail, but there are many benefits to holding POLS tokens and they are all outlined in our whitepaper. We will have staking, which will bring various benefits, including exclusive access to the most popular token pools.
Question: Will POLS be available to stake in Mantra DAO platform soon?
Answer: You are trying to sneak in a smart question. we have a partnership with MANTRA DAO and their staking platform had recently been launched… so this is part of an active and on-going dialogue. when we have something solid, we promise you will be first to know.
Question(s):
Could you unpack the ways in which Polkastarter will improve upon current IDOs on Mesa/Balancer/Uniswap?
With Polkadot, you will only be limited to the number of changes that also have parachains with Polkadot, correct?
What is meant by “anti-scam” features?
Answers:
3 in 1.. let me start with the last one. For our MVP, Anti-scam features prevent users from buying the wrong token. These include smart contract verification, smart contract information, token import alert and high slippage alerts. All of these mechanisms work together to make users aware that they might be buying at an unfair price.
We are currently brainstorming additional ways and include the community in this process as well
Our MVP will start with Fixed Price Swaps, so any Pool will be able to set the exact price of their token and know exactly, if the token pool is sold in full, how much they will get in return. They will be able to set parameters, like maximum amount of investment per user, make it private via password or whitelisting and a few other features. All this is currently not possible. While we are adding more features, including auctions etc, we will continue to separate ourselves.
Question: How likely it is for Polkastarter to get accepted as one of the parachain on the Polkadot network or have you already reserved a position for yourself in the polkadot ecosystem?
Answer: At the moment, we can realised the full vision of Polkastarter without the need of being a parachain. this means that we will be working with a parachain candidate, and we are in several conversations already. just some added info, parachain candidates need to participate in an auction to secure that… of course, things are developing so fast in our space so opportunities may come and we may become a little more ambitious and join that auction.
Question: There is a high gas fee issue in Ethereum network and uniswap suffers from it as a result. How well can Polkastarter handle the gas fee issues?
Answer: I’ve been following Polkadot’s progress since early 2018 and have been at the last 2 Web3 Conferences in Berlin, where the whole ecosystem came together to discuss their ideas, look into the future and I was really enamoured by it.
With the recent popularity of DEX’s, especially Uniswap, and the many times mentioned problems they have, it was the perfect opportunity to come up with a better solution. Polkadot will be ready for Polkastarter in Q1 2021 and we will be able to use many of their features, one of them will be far cheaper transaction fees.
Question: Regulation is getting addressed around DeFi, at least recently in EU, and might restrict access to services which arent compliant with their anti-aml/ctf process. Can you please let us know more about POL KYC integration?
While we strongly believe, that every project should be permissionless, we need to accept the facts, that regulations will play a bigger and bigger part. Therefore we decided to give projects the opportunity to KYC and whitelist users in order to be compliant with their local regulations. We are currently in discussions with several providers and will update the community, once we have made a decision.
Question: What will be your marketing strategy to increase citation on various social media platforms, like twitter, youtube etc.?
we have been doing a lot of outreach prior to the TGE and still actively doing do. due to our relatively small raise, we are trying to be very efficient and effective in our marketing activities. (i) community building wil be important for us because all of you who hold POLS will also become active users of our cross chain DEX in the future. we hope to grow more local language TG communities, (ii) working with media channels to develop informative articles to educate about and promote Polkastarter, (iii) influencing influencers is also what we try to do (a lot more work because they ask a lot more questions).
We have a strong marketing plan and will continue to make sure, that Polkastarter will be known throughout the world. We are aiming to establish a few more local Telegram channels over the coming weeks, adding to the ones we already have in Vietnam, Turkey and Indonesia.
Same question.. happens
Question: Your comparison chart with Uniswap, Primablock and Bounce shows that you offer many features which are not in other competing platforms. So, I’d like to know, how many of those features (Governance models, fixed pools, whitelisted pools ) are already implemented in the product and how many are just a theory or ideas which have not yet been conceptualised?
Answer: These features are the foundation of Polkastarter, which will make us the next generation solution. it is already in the roadmap and being implemented (in 3 phases) as we chat here.
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