Unbound x Gain Associates | AMA Recap
On the 30th of August, Unbound held an AMA session with the Gain Associates telegram community. Founder and CEO of Unbound Finance, Tarun Jaswani, and CMO Pratik Oswal, spent an ample amount of time responding to various questions and queries of the enthusiastic community members.
Unbound Finance is developing a decentralized, cross-chain protocol that uses the liquidity of AMMs to improve the efficiency of the Defi space by minting synthetic assets such as the UND stablecoin and uETH, using the liquidity pool token (LPTs) as collateral. We’re excited to reveal the Sandbox Mainnet Launch on Ethereum and more soon, after the recent launch of our Polygon and Harmony Testnets. Here are some of the more intriguing topics from our conversation with the Gain Associates community :
Q1. What did you do before crypto and did you have any other previous venture in crypto? What is your role at Unbound Finance?
A1. Tarun: I was building an AD Network for VR apps and working closely with companies like Unity, Steam, Etc. I discovered Blockchain in 2016–2017 and went all in. I established a family office, attended conferences and traveled the whole world understanding how each community was treating this technology. Being a coder helped me look under the hood and figure the next fundamental shift. I started building Unbound early last year, once I realized that AMMs will be zero to one innovation in this space. I am the founder & CEO of Unbound Finance.
Pratik: I was working for 4 years with Stanford University’s Highwire Press post which I was leading, an ed-tech startup. In the crypto space, I have been a blogger and the Chief Technical Analyst at a leading Crypto Media House. I have written over 200 articles on project reviews and have been a strategic advisor and investor in over 50 projects. I am the CMO at Unbound Finance.
Q2. How can the protocol work without a deadline for the payment of loans? How does this feature work in the protocol?
A2. This is one of the most important features of our protocol, as important as no liquidation. There is no deadline for the repayment of borrowed funds, just pay the loan anytime and unlock the LPTs. We do charge upfront minting fees that acts as the stability fees for the ecosystem. There are two ways of generating revenue for a protocol like ours. Here I would like to give you an example of Disney wherein either you charge at each ride or cumulative fees at the entrance which is about the average. We have chosen the latter since this can act as a stability fee that could be changed as per the demand of UND. The underlying asset (LPTs) acts as a yield generating asset that would need locking and unlocking, an action that will generate a fee each time for Unbound.
Q3. What is the project about in a few simple sentences? For how long have you been working on Unbound Finance? How many people are on the team?
A3. Unbound Finance is a decentralized, non-custodial platform that is building a derivative layer over the existing AMMs and aggregates these AMMs intending to increase the overall capital efficiency of the Defi space. Liquidity providers can compound their earnings by leveraging their LP tokens to mint UND (decentralized, cross-chain, stablecoin soft pegged to the US dollar) and uETH. The protocol is characterized by several unique features, some of which include:
Get Liquidity Without Removing Assets From Liquidity Pool: Users can keep their liquidity on a DEX in a liquidity pool and still have additional stablecoins to trade on different AMMs. For example, if a user has $10,000 locked in the $USDT-$USDC pool on Uniswap, that user can lock up their LPTs on Unbound and mint stable coins ($UND) worth $8,000 on BSC to trade on PancakeSwap while the users liquidity is still on Uniswap thereby, enjoying the benefits of fee on Uniswap and having enough liquidity to trade on PancakeSwap. This way Unbound will be able to move liquidity from AMMs across different chains to PancakeSwap and vice versa without physically removing liquidity. Similarly, we support different AMMs across Ethereum, Polygon, BSC, Harmony and many others are in the process like OKEx chain, Klaytn, HECO Chain, Solana, etc.
Debt-Free Borrowing: The protocol charges no interest on loans taken out by the liquidity providers. To redeem their loan, they simply repay the amount of UND or uETH they borrowed to retrieve their collateral (i.e. their LP tokens).
Liquidation-free Collateralization: Unbound completely nixes the liquidation engine seen with more collateralized lending platforms. As a result, users do not need to concern themselves with the potential liquidation of their collateral. Instead, Unbound uses SAFU, an emergency insurance fund, to secure the collateralized assets of borrowers during the so-called ‘black swan’ events.
Perpetual Borrowing: At Unbound, loans have no fixed repayment deadline. Users can unlock their collateralized assets any time by paying back the outstanding debt — without any restrictions.
The UND Stablecoin: Unbound Finance’s first flagship product is the cross-chain, decentralized stablecoin known as UND. It is an ERC-20 token soft-pegged to the US dollar and backed by user deposits.
We have 20 members in our team
Q4. Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
A4. We have raised funds through a series of Angels like
- Naval Ravikant — Founder of Angelist
- Sandeep Nailwal — Co-founder and COO of Polygon,
- Maxim Blagov — Co-founder and CEO of Enjin,
- Thanh Le — Founder of Coin98,
- Stefan George — Co-founder and CTO of Gnosis,
- Ninor Mansor — Partner at Arrington XRP Capital,
- Loi Luu — Founder & CEO of Kyber Network,
- Amrit Kumar — President at Zilliqa,
- Sahil Dewan — Co-founder of Harmony,
- Long Vuong — Founder and CEO of TomoChain,
- Jack Herrick — Founder of Wikihow,
- Daniel Stockhaus — Co-founder of Polkastarter
- Julien Bouteloup — Founder of Stake Capital and Curve Finance Core Team Member
- Barek Sekandari — COO of Fantom
- Thomas Bailey — General Partner of Bitriver
and some major VCs like Pantera, XRP Arrington Capital, Hashed, CMS, Hash key, etc. We will be using these funds for market-making, adding liquidity to multiple DEXs on multiple chains, team expansion, auditing, strategic partnerships, etc.
Q5.What is the token use case and how does it capture the value of the ecosystem you are building?
A5. $UND is our first synthetic asset which is a decentralized cross-chain stable coin. We will be having our next synthetic asset as $uETH which will be a synthetic asset minted by locking LPTs which have ETH on one side. $UNB will be the governance token for Unbound. Holders of UNB will be active members of the DAO and will be able to vote on all protocol changes, whitelist pools for UND minting and set Loan to Value ratio (LTV) for various asset pairs. As seen on multiple governance tokens like UNI, SUSHI, BAL, CRV, QUICK, etc. the higher the TVL gets locked in our system, the higher will be the price of UNB.
We will be launching UNB pools with all our partners and users adding liquidity to UNB pools will be rewarded.
Q6. What stage is the project at? What should we expect in the future?
A6. We have our testnets live and running for 6 months.
Ethereum : https://zeta.unbound.finance/
Binance Smart Chain : https://bsctestnet.unbound.finance/
Polygon : https://polygon-testnet.unbound.finance/
Harmony : https://harmony-testnet.unbound.finance/
Uniswap V3 : https://v3.unbound.finance/
We have more than 5000 testnet users. We request and invite all community members to use our testnet and share their feedback with us. You can request our test tokens from the faucets in the testnet.
Faucet:
Ethereum: https://testnet.unbound.finance/faucet
BSC: https://bsctestnet.unbound.finance/faucet
Polygon: https://polygon-testnet.unbound.finance/faucet
Harmony: https://faucet.pops.one/
For a detailed roadmap, you can visit: https://unboundfinance.medium.com/unbound-finance-roadmap-6acaf40f878e
Q7. Blockchain is fantastic, but users must have complete faith in your project for their funds to be moved. We’re curious as to which protocols will support this stablecoin. Do you have any updates on this?
A7. We understand that trust is extremely important in this space and so is security. For users to gain trust, we have taken all necessary measures to create a bleeding-edge tech that is secure.
Our first security audit and threat modeling exercise (STRIDE) was done by Peter Kacherginsky, a principal blockchain security researcher with a major crypto exchange and incident responder who helped us in identifying the threats such as flash loan attacks in our platform’s infrastructure and successfully executed our first audit.
The second audit was completed with Securing, who reproduced the flash loan attack threat as pointed out by Peter Kacherginsky during the first audit. We resolved the issue by adding a block limit lock mechanism and implementing a new oracle structure.
In terms of partnerships, we already have the founders of some of the top-tier projects invested with us. We have already signed partnerships with Polygon, Harmony, Zilliqa, Curve, Swissborg, Coin 98, Tomochain, Frontier, Polkastarter, DAOMaker, DFYN, KSM Starter, Kyber, Enjin’s Efinity, Gnosis, MEXC and many other projects.
Connect With Us
If you would like to be a part of our ambassador programs or help us in any way, reach out to us at partners@unbound.finance
To stay in the loop and know more about us, check out our social media links :
Website |Twitter |Telegram |Whitepaper |Instagram|Polygon Testnet|Zeta Testnet|BSC Testnet |Harmony Testnet
