Crypto Society AMA with UMEE recap 15th August 2021
Bilo
It is our pleasure to welcome you with us today. I would also like to welcome you here on behalf of our entire community.
@bond_dog_51 @ming0duan
Brent — Umee 🌊
Thanks @Bilo_2000 — really great to be here :)
Ming Duan
Thank you Crypto Society for having us today!
Brent — Umee 🌊
Crypto Society is the only society we care about :)
Bilo
[ HEART ]
Let’s start with an introduction. Could you please tell us a bit about yourselves and your involvement in the project. Could we begin with a brief history of yourselves and your careers that led you to where you are today?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Certainly
I’m Brent, the founder of Umee
We’re building a cross chain defi protocol between Cosmos, Ethereum, and many other protocols
Prior to Umee, I was the head of strategy at Tendermint — we’re we built all things Cosmos
At Tendermint I handled strategic investments, incubation, and ecosystem grants for many projects that wanted to build on the Cosmos SDK.
a major project I brought in was the Cosmos hub dex
Bilo
Many hats 👀
Brent — Umee 🌊
Now called gravity dex
I have also been a strong proponent of IBC — interblockchain communication protocol. and have been figuring out how to expand it to other ecosystems
Bilo
Yes ofc — that’s very impressive
Brent — Umee 🌊
Prior to Tendermint, I was an early employee at ConsenSys. I joined in 2016 when there was still only about 30 people.
I helped build the company to close to 1200 people in the early days
and saw a lot of the ups and downs of Ethereum
Prior to Crypto I traded bonds — I specialized in MBS projects, which are very sensitive to interest rates and exhibited a phenomenon called negative convexity
Umee is in many ways an amalgamation of Eth DeFi, Cosmos Proof of stake, as well as many concepts from the Bond world :)
Bilo
[ Thinking GIF]
Brent — Umee 🌊
😇😂😅
Bilo
[In reply to Brent — Umee 🌊]
Thanks for the detailed explanation and intro. I am very impressed Sir!!!
For those unfamiliar with UMEE, how would you describe UMEE if you were talking to someone unfamiliar with digital assets?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Of course — Umee is a cross chain defi hub
A protocol that will build out a suite of cross chain defi primitives that will interact with the broader money lego’s ecosystem.
DeFi summer was awesome — we wish to build out various tools to integrate with the broader money lego’s ecosystem. and we are gradually building out all the pieces.
The initial blockchains we will work with are Cosmos and Ethereum
The three main pillars of tools will initially be:
-cross chain defi rates — determining term structure of interest rates for time value of crypto
-interchain leverage — leveraging assets on one blockchain to borrow on another
-multi-chain staking — liquid staking products on multiple blockchains.
Bilo
You just answered my next question 😄
Brent — Umee 🌊
[ THANK YOU GIF ]
Bilo
Why did you choose Cosmos and Ethereum?(to start)?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Cosmos is a powerful self-sovereign architecture that future blockchains should be built on. Interoperability is key in the cosmos space and I think that it is solid infrastructure that new chains can use to launch.
People think about Cosmos in terms of sort of an Eth 1.5 type platform. Prior to Eth 2.0, an Eth 1.5 would have roll ups, data availability, and sharded execution environments. Cosmos is essentially that and more. IBC is also such a powerful protocol for connecting between different networks.
I also interacted a lot with the Paradigm folks. Paradigm led Tendermint’s series A round and are a huge proponent of Cosmos.
Bilo
Excellent! Thank you
Brent — Umee 🌊
They take the viewpoint that in terms of dimensionality, Bitcoin is super rigid and has limited dimensionality, Ethereum has a lot of Dimensionality, but is based on a homogenous consensus
But Cosmos sits nicely in the middle
Regarding Ethereum, I have been a long time proponent. I’ve been in Ethereum since the beginning and am deeply grateful for the solid development that has been happening in that ecosystem throughout the years.
Ethereum is still the most solid base layer protocol and it is the most productive crypto assets.
Crypto assets exhibit characteristics of currency, store of values, inflation hedges, structured products and plain old inflationary assets due to proof of stake.
It just makes sense to initially work towards our Cosmos<>Ethereum bridge
Bilo
That’s fantastic — I totally get the reasoning behind your decision and thank you once again for the detailed explanation.
Brent — Umee 🌊
[ OH YES GIF ]
Bilo
Could you explain us your broader vision of interoperability between blockchain networks? How it differs from classic borrowing and lending products?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We’ll be focusing on two main interoperability protocols.
IBC — interblockchain communication protocol. https://github.com/cosmos/ibc
Essentially a module within the state machine of one blockchain that relays message to a state machine within another blockchain
Acts as a transport authorization and ordering platform that separates our the application side of the protocol from the low level communication side.
Designed to be as standardized as possible.
IBC will connect between all fast finality networks.
Also we will use Gravity Bridge — a two way peg between cosmos and eth.
Connecting between a probabilistic finality blockchain like Eth and a Fast finality blockchain like Cosmos.
Cosmos<>Eth via gravity bridge will look very much like that Eth 1.5 vision
These protocols will allow cross chain borrowing and lending
New dimensions to how we borrow and lend via leveraging different assets across blockchains.
Bilo
Brent, you sound like a brilliant man. Please tell me you’re like 80 years old or something and that’s why you’ve acquired all this knowledge or I my feel intellectually inadequate and an underachiever 🥺
Brent — Umee 🌊
[ AWW SHUCKS -shy Gif]
I got a lot of help bro
So many people more brilliant than me helping me on all this stuff.
Bilo
Humility is the biggest sign of greatness
Brent — Umee 🌊
I’m grateful for my team, and our partners — team effort lol
Bilo
Yields are disconnected across crypto-systems (Cross Chain Interest Rates). Could you let us know how you intend to “fix” this problem at Umee? How you are going to determine cross-chain interest rates, taking into account market volatile conditions?
Brent — Umee 🌊
In the real world, rates always tell a story — this is a saying from the bond world
If there is a war, if there is political strife, if there is economic meltdown — the interest rates will react and give information on how the world perceives risk and reward.
Bilo
Yes very true
Brent — Umee 🌊
Crypto is no different
All rates in crypto also tell a story and give indication of what the ecosystem is feeling. if you can read rates well, you can kind of get a pulse of the sentiment of the crypto ecosystem.
Right now crypto yields are disconnected, what this means as that there are defi rates, there are proof of stake yields, there are wild degen yield farming yields, there are network incentive yields, and they don’t talk to each other.
So there is not a really good way of translating opportunity costs between these rate environments.
Umee hopes to create connective tissue that allows these rates to have a common interface to operate from.
Bilo
A lot of this is highly speculative too making it more challenging
Brent — Umee 🌊
Volatile conditions are key — for sure — in the early days, we saw that speculation influenced innovation
Though these days innovation has been highly driving speculation
Bilo
That would be a first wouldn’t it?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Healthy volatility is good — what is important is to watch out for systemic failures — that is bad volatility. But the point is that crypto will become more and more efficient in terms of market condition
perhaps — lol, we kind of just sit around and spend time look at rates protocols. we figured it might be cool to connect the two and see if people like to use the platform :)
Bilo
❤️
Could you explain your “asset collateralization” strategy? Over-collaterization? and what kind of collateral you will accept? (Multi-Chain Staking) BTC (wrapped), ETH, stablecoins, “big caps” coins? How you going to tackle high crypto volatility? Do you intend to support future CBDC currencies as collateral?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Happy to answer questions about this. We are putting together risk frameworks for analyzing a lot of these collateralization strategies. also decentralized governance will play a big role in this.
Initially we will support Cosmos IBC Assets
there is close to 50bn of value in the Cosmos ecosystem, and the Umee protocol was designed to support Cosmos native assets. Of course the other side will be ethereum assets, and we are already familiar with the quality assets on that side.
It would behove us to look at CBDC’s of course
Ethereum assets also be the main focus
Bilo
Speaking of Ethereum, Could you let us know how you are going to manage the high gas on Ethereum. Do you plan to use any layer 2 scaling solutions, side chain architecture etc…
Brent — Umee 🌊
Major assets in Ethereum will play a huge role and Umee will be the common interoperability platform between them
That is a good question.
We are actively exploring sidechain architecture, layer 2 scaling solutions, tools in the roll up space, zk, op, validium, as well as alternative base layer protocols.
Umee network can directly connect with layer two protocols
We are also exploring things in the rust environment: CosmWasm, Solana, Polkadot
EVM side has great stuff like Polygon, Fantom, xdai, Avalanche — and we have also seen some nice updates with Ethermint :)
scaling solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum are always on our radar
and we are fans of the Matterlabs team :)
Bilo
Circling back to the gravity bridge, kindly tell us more about it and why is it so important?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Gravity bridge is based on the evolution of Peggy
Peggy was our two way peg between Cosmos and Ethereum that the ecosystem has been working on for the last 5 years.
many teams have built and implemented versions of Peggy
and we have been iterating through this protocol for a while.
The Gravity Bridge module will be implemented onto the Cosmos hub and will be used as a bridge for many types of assets between Cosmos and Ethereum.
Bilo
Thanks Brent — Excellent explanations as usual
Brent — Umee 🌊
Gravity bridge is the most decentralized cross chain bridge in this space.
A lot of other bridges are based more on proof of authority models.
Bilo
What will the UMEE token be used for?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Gravity Bridge is based off of Tendermint BFT proof of stake — been developed over 5 years
Bilo
Thanks
Brent — Umee 🌊
Umee tokens will be used for governance and staking.
Bilo
Do users have to KYC in order to use UMEE?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Umee will be a decentralized network. I would say that we’re not really pushing the boundaries beyond what major defi protocols like compound, aave, maker dao, uniswap, sushiswap are doing.
We will be creating an open finance network that should be available to the whole open source community
Bilo
Are there mechanisms in place to reward people or communities for adding value to the ecosystem?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Good question — we will have many programs in place
Cross chain liquidity mining — network incentives.
The Umee token will exist as a Cosmos IBC token
The Umee token can also exist as an ERC20 token on Ethereum
What this does is allow the ability for cross chain network incentives.
Community is the most important thing in defi.
Bilo
👀
Brent — Umee 🌊
We want to continue to support the community and figure out ways of being involved.
We will have community incentive programs
we’re launching testnet next week
Bilo
👀
Brent — Umee 🌊
Following that there will be announcements of community incentive programs.
Also major bug bounty program :)
Bilo
[ WOW GIF ]
Brent — Umee 🌊
https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain/status/1419669283211292681?s=20
Bilo
I will quickly go learn how to code so I can participate 🥸
Brent — Umee 🌊
https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain/status/1425496302855536649?s=20
[ WAVES GIF ]
Please join — the water is nice and warm :D
Bilo
How do you intend to resolve the money-safety related issues? How do you intend to protect investor’s money? Do you plan to insure staked/deposited funds?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Bug bounty and security auditing firms will be key to ensuring the success of this protocol. Security is the most important thing which is why we’re committing $1mm to the bug bounty. We are also talking with several security auditing firms out there who will help look at the software from different angles.
Bilo
I see that you have Coinbase ventures as a strategic investor and partner. Congratulations on that — that’s huge!!! How did you manage to get them on board? Is there a cool story behind this?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We’ve been long term supports of Coinbase throughout the years — they are the most solid exchange and we are grateful for their involvement in Umee.
Bilo
+
Brent — Umee 🌊
We’ve known several folks from Coinbase since the beginning and we really believe in their vision.
also fun fact about me. I graduated college the same year as Fred Ehrsam — he was my college classmate.
Brent — Umee 🌊
He did a lot to promote btc in the very early days :)
Bilo
What do you look for in strategic partnerships? Are there any partnerships in the works that you would like to tell us about?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We are grateful for strategic partnership opportunities out there
Validators for sure are such an important part of this ecosystem. there are some grate ones out there and we wish to mutual support each other’s missions.
Oracle service providers are important partners
You kind of already know the big ones — Chainlink and Band protocol are providing very solid oracle services throughout
wallets and exchanges are also major components in this ecosystem.
Defi projects — we intend to integrate with a lot of DeFi protocols and are actively figuring out the right ways to work together.
Also base layer protocols to bridge with. like John Adler always says, we live in a multichain world
We want to be part of the multi-chain cross chain future
Bilo
We have lots to discuss then… 😊
Brent — Umee 🌊
[ YEAH-GIF ]
Bilo
Very excited to hear all this
Brent — Umee 🌊
Feeling is mutual 😀
Bilo
Since we here at CS dabble in marketing and adoption for several projects, What is your strategy for marketing and for quick mass adoption? Have you already planned any marketing campaign?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We would love to get your advice — we find it extremely important to bootstrap communities in this ecosystem
We understand the importance of marketing and having a robust community. we would appreciate any suggestions from your end.
Umee will be a decentralized protocol and it will be community driven.
and that is why the name is Umee — Bringing DeFi to U and Me :)
Bilo
We will most certainly be honoured to be able to have this convo with you. ❤️
Brent — Umee 🌊
Honour is mutual ❤️
Bilo
Could you give us some overview about your financing, institutional investors and advisors involved?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We have some solid supports of this project
We’re grateful for support from Polychain -our lead
Coinbase is also great
Bilo
That speaks volumes just by itself! congratulations mate!
Brent — Umee 🌊
ConsenSys and Tendermint — both previous companies I worked at are investors
Ideo colab — very solid VC
Bilo
Could you please give us a quick overview about the tokenomy? Will it be inflationary/deflationary in nature? and what investment opportunities will you offer to the public?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Alameda — from the FTX ecosystem
Bilo
👀
Big shout out
Brent — Umee 🌊
Brian Kelly capital management — lol CNBC
Bilo
[ HUGE -GIF ]
Brent — Umee 🌊
Yes — token will be a Cosmos based token that can exists as an ERC20 as well.
Can participate in Proof of stake on Cosmos as well as ERC 20 functionality on Ethereum
So proof of stake is inflationary
Regarding public sale, we want Umee to be as community driven as possible. we are figuring out the best ways to achieve the goal and will have more details in the near future
Bilo
I have so many more questions to ask as this is extremely interesting and revolutionary but will try to wrap it up with a few more questions as I know how busy you are and to allow the community to ask some questions.
Brent — Umee 🌊
[ YAY_GIF ]
Bilo
We are having this AMA with you knowing that we are early and are very proud to have been able to identify your project as a high quality project. Can you share your pitchdeck with us here today?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Yes for sure
I’ll send a version after the AMA :)
Bilo
Ok great thanks
Is there any exclusive breaking news about UMEE that you could share with us here today?
[ PRETTY PLEASE-GIF ]
[BREAKING NEWS- GIF ]
I hope
Hahaha
Brent — Umee 🌊
We are fans of chainlink and might want to be link marines.
Bilo
[ AWESOME! GIF ]
Brent — Umee 🌊
Hopefully they can be a part of the Umee army as well :)
Bilo
That’s awesome.
Thanks for sharing that
Do you wish to let us know anything else that was not covered in the questions above?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We’re looking forward to building out this protocol — just really grateful for your awesome questions
[ THANX DUDE -GIF ]
Bilo
Thank you for your time in answering our questions here today. We are all very appreciative of your time and of the answers you have provided.
With this, we will open up the chat for those who wish to personally thank you for your time with us here today and for those who wish to ask their own questions.
Great Question
What are your marketing strategies and how will you have a global expansion and adoption for your project where English is not spoken? What are your next upcoming priorities? What is in your roadmap ?
Ming Duan
Thank you for your question! We aim to build a global community and we already have active supporters from different countries. If anyone is interested in helping out, feel free to reach out to me or Brent!
Mr Watson
Many new projects have started to develop well but are not long-term. Why should we trust and invest in your long-term projects?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We’re here to stay — both Tendermint and ConsenSys, who are my previous companies are investors.
We’re long term builders — not planning to go anywhere any time soon.
🇨🇷🇾🇵🇹🇴 🇩🇴🇨🇹🇴🇷
Q. Can you provide me with a link where I can stay a little more informed about the news to follow up and thus be aware of the various updates of your project?
Ming Duan
Join our discord and follow us on Twitter! https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain
I Am Coming
Is this platform suitable for Crypto beginners? Or does it only appeal to professional users?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Great for beginners — will be good for folks who want to initially try IBC transfers.
UI/UX should be pretty smooth and abstract the complicated stuff. From a beginner crypto user perspective, it should be as simple as transferring tokens from one blockchain to another.
Crystal
It is important for the platform to have initial liquidity to enable the option products to have more accurate pricing and better profitability. So, what’s your plan to solve the low liquidity issues? How do you plan to encourage user that providing liquidity will be profitable for them?
Ming Duan
Our priority is build the most robust and functional cross chain lending borrowing protocol that ppl want to use. Having said that, Tendermint the creator of cosmos, Consensys and all our strategic investors will be bootstrapping our initial liquidity. Also we’ll be rolling out LM incentives :)
Osas
DeFi space is already very crowded, why should investors be excited about your Defi platform ?
Brent — Umee 🌊
This is a unique cross chain defi protocol. right now, cross chain is limited. and most cross chain bridges are fairly centralized POA type bridges.
Umee will offer a more decentralized infrastructure plus many new types of defi primitives.
be on the lookout for more news on our cross chain defi rates.
⚡HULK⚡
Q. Could you please send some links about your project so we can know more clearly about your project?
Ming Duan
Join our discord and follow us on Twitter! https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain
Thank You🥰🥰
Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contracts and how can I buy them and what are the benefits?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Be on the lookout for more information on the token. as mentioned, we are figuring out the right ways of encouraging community adoption. more news to come!
A
Where can I buy your token right now did you list your tokens anywhere and where?
Ming Duan
We haven’t launched our token yet. Stay tuned!
Join our discord and follow us on twitter! https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain
WAJIB
What is the most important feature in your ecosystem you are most proud of and confident about you think anyone investing in Your project should know?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We are building a cross chain defi hub — we will build a whole ecosystem of products.
We hope to be a base layer defi protocol that other protocols can build on top of.
Frank
Is it true your project really support staking program? if yes, how does your stake work system look like, what are the requirements for users if they want to stake on your platform?
Ming Duan
It will work similar to staking on cosmos — there will be validators and staking functions for users to stake
🇨🇷🇾🇵🇹🇴 🇩🇴🇨🇹🇴🇷
Which one of these aspects is important for you?
1-Increasing Token Price & Value
2-Empowering Platform Development
3-Building Community Trust
4-Expanding Partnership Globally
📌In what order❓❓
Brent — Umee 🌊
3241 most important to least important
Red444
NFT is getting more popular now a days. It looks NFT has bright future. So do you guys have any plan to include NFT to your project?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Absolutely! be on the lookout!
Tom Hiddleston
How do you intend to communicate your understanding of the project to People in other nations who do not speak English as well?
Ming Duan
We’ll have to count on community ambassadors and activists from all over the world to help us!
Thank You🥰🥰
Do you have Whitepaper if yes please share it with us and secondly do you have plans for pre-sale? Where can we join it?
Ming Duan
This is our whitepaper: http://bit.ly/UmeeWhitePaper
Hazel Davis
I’m a developer, and I’m interested in contributing to your project alongside earning, Do you have any Bug Bounty to check for vulnerabilities?
Ming Duan
Yes we do! https://twitter.com/Umee_CrossChain/status/1425496302855536649?s=20
HELEN
As it is known, there are a lot of scammers in the market, think of me as a simple trader, how can you get me Your Token? How can you make me believe in Your project?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Believe in a cross chain defi hub — Umee is designed to be universal.
We are a solid team with solid infrastructure for building out a lot of these primitives.
We’ve been in this industry since the beginning and don’t intend to stop any time soon.
Mr Wagner
🧨🧨🧨🧨
During the build of your project, do you take into account any of the community feedbacks or demands to further expand the new ideas for the project???
🧨🧨🧨🧨🧨
Ming Duan
For sure! Reach out on TG or Discord and let’s chat!
Frank
Is it true your project really support staking program? if yes, how does your stake work system look like, what are the requirements for users if they want to stake on your platform?
Brent — Umee 🌊
It will function just as a Cosmos based network. Tendermint BFT based proof of stake consensus protocol
Pick your favourite validator and participate in proof of stake :)
Hello_C3
✅Southeast Asia is a very vibrant school and there are a lot of development projects here, so do you have any plans to grow in Southeast Asia??
Ming Duan
We have some active community members from that region. If you are interested in getting involved, feel free to reach out to us!
KOTHA
What makes your project better than ahead of other similar betting project? what are the advantages for early investors?
Ming Duan
Team, backers, tech, vision, community!
A
As at this moment, which community are focusing on, what’s your area of interest. Can every one access Your project?
Brent — Umee 🌊
We want to support the entire open source community!
Mr Watson
Many new projects have started to develop well but are not long-term. Why should we trust and invest in your long-term projects?
Ming Duan
Founder’s profile can always tell you a lot :) All of Umee’s founding team members have been in the space for 5+ years
🌀Jerry🌀
Many of the big developments are migrating to BSC. Are you planning to migrate BSC ecosystem?
Ming Duan
It’s on our roadmap for sure
Ming Duan
Yes!
BALAM
How well experienced are your team and regarding your background how do you assure for the sustainable of project in long term and you will not abandon?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Myself — previous head of strategy at Tendermint, and previous early employee at ConsenSys.
Head of product has similar background to me in Tendermint and ConsenSys.
Lead engineer was one of the earliest developers of the Cosmos sdk — top engineer in Cosmos
Lead Ethereum engineer wrote some of the original Patricia Merkle tree libraries in Ethereum — can show the commits on github
We’re long term supports and we’re here to stay
Kona Kona
During these days a lot of project are just copying between them and they forgot the Innovations, so can you tell us what is the special or unique thing that Your project is only able to provide?
Brent — Umee 🌊
Best most innovative bridges.
IBC and Gravity bridge.
These are the most decentralized bridging solutions
Avijit Sengupta
Security always a big problem of every project. It is also one of the first aspects that investor need to consider before investing on any project. How strong Your project security?
Ming Duan
We signed on top auditing firms. We also set aside a $1m bug bounty program
Thank you guys for your great questions. If we missed any, feel free to reach out to us on TG or Discord!
LB
Thank you so much for this AMA and taking the time to answer much more questions than expected @bond_dog_51 and @ming0duan 😳🙏
Such a big fan and very thankful to have had you in our humble group ❤️🥰
Relevant Links
UMEE Website : https://umee.cc
UMEE Telegram: https://t.me/umeecrosschain
UMEE Twitter: https://twitter.com/Umee_crosschain
UMEE Medium: https://medium.com/umeeblog
Crypto Society Chat: https://t.me/cryptosocietyy
Crypto Society Announcements: https://t.me/CryptoSocietyyy
Crypto Society Twitter : https://twitter.com/cryptosocietytg
