On thursday August 20th, we hosted the first ever AMA inside of the Status public channel #status with the Kyber Network team. Sunny Jain, who is Head of Product for Kyber Network and Shane Hong, the Marketing Manager for Kyber Network joined us to answer some great questions from the community.

This marks the first AMA inside of Status with many more to come for those who enjoy engaging with project teams in a secure, private, pseudonymous platform for communication. With Status, anyone can ask the hard hitting questions while maintaining privacy.

The AMA was broken into 2 parts:

Part 1 - questions for Sunny and Shane from the Status community
Part 2 - questions from Sunny and Shane for the community to respond to

The Kyber Team issued a KNC prize to their selection of the best questions and answers. Here is a recap of how it all went down. Oh and we got a nice surprise of a brand new free Kyber Network sticker pack half way through :)

Don't forget to check out KyberDAO in Status – over $400,000 has been distributed as rewards to voters so far!

The Status App lets you stake, vote, and manage your @KyberDAO all on mobile.https://t.co/4koRuion4o
— Status (@ethstatus) July 28, 2020

Part 1 - Questions from the community:

Question 1 from Yaroslav@stateofus.eth:

What separates Uniswap from Kyber Swap than staking/governance which Uniswap will also have soon when it releases its own token? What makes Kyber better than Uniswap?

Sunny: First a little bit about me. I am Head of Product at Kyber Network. My expertise is in product management and UI/UX. Prior to Kybeer, I have worked at Lazada and Apple (launching payments in ASIA pacific), Now I lead the team building KyberSwap, Kyber Network's cutting-edge, non-custodial token swap platform.

KyberSwap is a non-custodial exchange that allows you to swap tokens, It is built on top of the Kyber Network liquidity protocol. Here are few cool things about KyberSwap:

Fast and simple token swaps
Fully on-chain, secured by Ethereum
80+ ERC20 tokens
Non-custodial Limit Orders
Easy portfolio management
Fiat on-ramp
Price Alerts
Privacy Mode
Live Chat Support
ENS and WalletConnect

For those who are new, Follow this to get Started: https://medium.com/kyberswap/getting-started-on-ethereum-with-kyberswap-60b3951bd74

Now Uniswap and Kyberswap

Main point of difference is how APR at Kyber and AMM at Uniswap are compared

Kyber’s Automated Price Reserve (APR) vs Automated Market Maker (AMM):

1/4 : Kyber APR is highly suited for token teams that want to list their tokens and individuals who want to utilise their large token holdings.
2/4: For the same price range and inventory, Kyber’s APR can provide a lot more liquidity, better slippage, and has the ability to serve more volume than other platforms like the AMM.
3/4: Many of the top token teams have already set up APRs, including Synthetix, Melon, DAOstack, and Gnosis.
4/4: APR allows Reserve managers to: a) Provide liquidity for over 100 integrated platforms b) Market make for profit on each trade c) Save funds and resources by efficiently utilizing token inventory

There is a trade off though

Trade-off: need to reset parameters and rebalance when the price goes out of range.

More info is available here

https://blog.kyber.network/kyber-automated-price-reserve-apr-capital-efficient-low-slippage-market-making-97886db6498d

Shane: First of all I'm glad to be here! Status has an awesome community! A short bio:

As Kyber Network's Marketing Manager, I lead the branding and communication efforts of the most popular protocol in decentralized finance (DeFi), and manage our community of over 190K users and developers. With experience managing both B2C and B2B global marketing campaigns, my job is to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of Kyber Network.

Re: uniswap and Kyber - I think uniswap is great as well gives its ability to allow any token to be listed and used in DeFi. Kyber also bridges some tokens from uniswap pools as part of our aggregation to get good rates!

For details on how we bridge tokens from uniswap do read this: https://link.medium.com/MfEEBAOE68

Another thing I want to highlight is the difference between Kyber Network and KyberSwap:

Kyber Network is a blockchain-based liquidity protocol that aggregates liquidity from a wide range of reserves, powering instant and secure token exchange in decentralized applications. Developers can use Kyber to build innovative dapps. KyberSwap is just one of 100+ dapps using Kyber Network :)

Kyber Network was started in 2017. After witnessing many security breaches in the blockchain space that resulted in millions of users’ funds being lost, Kyber’s founders developed a decentralized exchange protocol as they couldn't find any convenient solution for the average user to swap tokens securely. There was also no easy way for DApps to gain access to decentralized liquidity and a wide variety of tokens back then. Kyber Network was created to address these problems.

Question 2: From Puzzled Clear woodpecker:

“What makes you feel confident about the survival and success of Kyber Network when we are in such a very harsh competitive market like the Blockchain industry?”

Shane: Kyber is currently the most used and integrated protocol in decentralized finance (DeFi) according to Binance and the most popular DEX protocol according to CoinGecko. We have facilitated over US$1 billion worth of fully on-chain transactions since our inception. Kyber supports over 80 different tokens, and helps power over 100 integrated projects including popular wallets Status, Trust, and the HTC Exodus smartphone, as well as DeFi platforms KyberSwap, Nuo, Fulcrum, DeFi Saver, InstaDApp, Set Protocol, Melon, and many others.

We also successfully launched our Katalyst protocol upgrade and KyberDAO recently. This is not an easy feat and is testament to the team’s DeFi competency and expertise. Given our track record, I am very confident in my team members’ ability to achieve our future objectives

In addition, Kyber’s on-chain liquidity protocol has many unique advantages:)

Fully On-chain, Transparent, and Trustless txns
Liquidity Aggregation: Trade is spread across multiple reserves to get the best rates
Seamless Integration: Straightforward integration with DApps, as interaction with off-chain components is not needed. it is open source and permissionless, any developer can integrate it into their DApp without the team’s approval.
Customizable Spread: DApps can set their own custom spread on token trades to suit different business models
Capital Efficiency: Reserves can support better liquidity and lower slippage with less token inventory required compared to other platforms.
Passionate dev community: similar to Status, we have a very vibrant and passionate developer community who have built many innovative projects with Kyber and are willing to help each other and share tips. This is hard to replicate.

Question 3 from Buzzing Basic Ivorygull:

“What is KyberDAO’s staking mechanism and how will I be able to stake my tokens?”

Sunny: Kyber DAO is next step towards decentralization and let KNC holder to govern the protocol.

Over 57M KNC (US$90M) have been staked, with over 4000 staking addresses and 2580 voters in Epoch 1. This makes the KyberDAO one of the most popular active DAOs to date, with the highest on-chain voter participation.

Coming to staking, Its been a hot topic recently. At Kyber, we did many iterations to provide the simplest way to stake KNC. There are 3 steps and you can do it right here on status app (via Dapp browser)

3 steps to stake KNC on Status:

Open kyber.org in dap.ps
Connect your wallet and allow Status to access the KyberDAO dapp
Stake KNC

FYI: While staking, There is only one button on the pop up. So chances of making any mistake is minimal. We've not received any issues related to the KNC staking process so far.

One button strategy is followed through out the Kyber.org platform.

Few points to notice are:

You need to stake in the current Epoch to vote in the next Epoch, and claim rewards in the following one. Over $400,000 have been distributed as rewards to voters so far! Read this for more info: https://blog.kyber.network/kyberdao-staking-and-voting-overview-70be71ee58f0

Let me repeat : over 400k USD have been distributed so far :)

And we started on 7th July

Question 4 from Faroff Radiant Thrush:

“Could you please shortly explain about the top milestones and objectives that $KNC is aiming to execute before the end of year 2020?”

Shane: So one of the major milestones we hit recently was having over 5million KNC since inception. In case you didn't know, KNC is a deflationary governance token where staking rewards and burns come from actual network growth.

Sunny: Glad you asked for 2020. Because it's so hard to think beyond few months. This market is so dynamic and innovative.

At current market rate, it's around 8M USD+

Shane: With the launch of the KyberDAO (another major milestone) KNC holders get to decide the burn rate, the rewards to voters, and rebates to reserves. These are in turned derived from network fees collected through trading activities on Kyber network

Only KNC holders are able to vote on important proposals, and only voters will receive ETH rewards for helping to improve the protocol. When network usage increases, more KNC is burned, more rewards are given to voters, and more rebates are given to reserves. You can read more about KNC here: https://kyber.network/about/knc

Re: future plans

For ‘Takers’/DApps: Kyber is the most integrated protocol in DeFi for now. But we will not rest on our laurels and aim to continuously increase the number of DApp integrations. Our KyberSwap team also has more features lined up for our retail traders.

For ‘Makers’/ liquidity providers: We will enhance liquidity on Kyber through our Fed Price Reserves (FPRs) and various exciting initiatives. This involves working closely with professional market makers and the Chicago DeFi Alliance (Kyber is a member) to build the necessary infrastructure to streamline the on-chain market making process.

There will be more robust market making tools: Apart from optimising the FPR reserve type, we are committed to providing the necessary knowledge, advice, and tools required for professional market makers to leverage Kyber to effectively and profitably market make on-chain.

We are also exploring the possibility of permissionless reserves and liquidity contributions, similar to uniswap.

For the KyberDAO: We want to increase the range of staking options and further optimise the KyberDAO UI to provide a seamless decentralized governance experience for all KNC holders. Currently you can stake directly through kyber.org using your Status app, but you can also stake through 3rd-party pools that will vote on your behalf

For more seamless liquidity for DeFi: gas prices are crazy high right now and this affects ALL Ethereum dapps. We are researching both existing and new Layer 2 scaling solutions, though this is still at an early stage. There are many challenges, such as ensuring seamless composability with existing Ethereum dapps and liquidity on the L2. But we hope to work with the Ethereum ecosystem to find a viable solution.

Question 5 from Positive Soupy Prairiedog:

Finally, in your opinion, what is the biggest threat to defi (e.g. security, liquidity, adoption and so on) and how do you plan to overcome these obstacles?

Sunny: We did a DeFi survey recently with Argent, Kleros, Maker, Ren, Synthetix, and Uniswap. Our DeFi usage survey results. 467 participants. Average age 31.

For the qn: what holds DeFi back?

Education/marketing followed by
Security concerns
UI/UX (39%)
Lack of Education for beginners
Liquidity

These were often cited as key issues

At Kyber, we have taken steps to address these issues. For example, we regularly educate our users on the benefits of decentralized technologies over centralized ones, our smart contracts have undergone multiple audits, and our protocol aggregates liquidity from multiple on-chain sources to give better rates and liquidity to our takers (DApps and end users).

In addition, our in-house token swap DApp KyberSwap.com is known for its great user interface and experience, and we continue to iterate and ensure our technical documentation is easily understood and used by developers. https://developer.kyber.network/

We do not restrict any project from integrating our technology to embed decentralized token swaps in their platform or for other liquidity needs. For projects that we work with e.g. Status we try to find points of synergy so that our close collaboration will further amplify the security and value we bring to our users and the DeFi ecosystem.

Sunny: At KyberSwap we focuses a lot on education. Carefully choose the words that even people from non crypto world can understand.

Part 2 - Questions from Kyber Network to the Status Community

Sunny and Shane prepared 3 questions of their own and then selected the best answers for a KNC prize. Here are the questions and selected answers.

Question # 1: What is your source of crypto info, and who are your favourite crypto influencers? On Youtube or Twitter etc.

Response from heyflex.eth

Twitter/ newsletters twitter : degenspartan and bankless to keep it simple, youtube my boy chicocrypto, also the defiant

Question #2: What are your favourite DeFi DApps?

Response from Big Funny Ghostshrimp

kyber, uniswap, makerdao, yfi, yam, bancor

Question #3: What features would you like to see on KyberSwap.com?

Response from Fluffy Plum Carp
Will it be able to swap crypto to fiat eventually with kyber? Not sure ive read about it.

Henrystats