AMA with the Pangolin Team - June 16
Pangolin AMA June 16th
Q: Gate.io says PNG trading is not available in the US?
A: CEXs have regulatory oversite. Gate asks Pangolin for documented Legal Advice, Pangolin team is finalizing the paperwork from our legal consultants.
Q: How many software developers are in the team?
A: Leo, Brandon, and Hari all have engineering backgrounds. We have existing community devs helping out. Currently recruiting more full time developers. There are very talented people in our community.
Q: What does Pangolin Team of Trader Joe?
A: Trader Joe has a strong team and innovative ideas. We have a working history with founder CryptoFish, so any criticism and jabs at Pangolin are all in good fun and friendly competition. We embrace new projects building, even competing DEXs, and think its great for the ecosystem to have strong projects.
Q: Will you bring innovation before trade joe steals all the volume?
A: We have a lot of ideas for innovation: staking, UX redesign, partner integration (ex: BenQi), pool incentivization. Innovation is key for us, Need to balance innovation with partnerships. We need to find a good balance between speed and safety as well, since testing and audits take time. As a large project, we have the responsibility to deliver safe code.
Q: Being listed Gate.io is good move, at the same time leveraging pool rewards was also another giant step. Is this a strategy to prevent the sell pressure and keep people in png pools?
The community has given strong feedback that we should reward PNG pairs over AVAX pairs, so we moved in that direction. Strategically, it makes sense as well because we want to encourage liquidity in the PNG pools. Rewards is definitely one of the many levers we can use to benefit the project
Q: If we were to experience a prolonged bear market where PNG price - aka your salaries were to decrease substantially, how prepared is the team to stay the course in making Pangolin a long-term success?
A: The team is intrisically motivated to make Pangolin and Avalanche DeFi a success. The current team has supported the Pangolin ecosystem for free even before being officially onboarded. These are the types of people we want to work with and is the type of motivation needed to continue pushing forward in all market conditions.
Q: How do you envision the pangolin DEX after 15 years?
A: DeFi be mainstream and UX will improve tremendously. Mobile, VR, etc will be a lot better. DeFi is removing the middleman and lets people access financial services without barriers. Even just one year later will be a huge difference.
Q: What is the long term strategy of the team and project, are we going to see new partnerships, solutions and new investing channels? Do you have plans for price and volatility shocks, what if another 3 years of bear market starts?
A: Long term strategy - we want Pangolin to be a top 100 token. Partnerships are critical. AvaLabs has been extremely supportive in introducing partners to Pangolin. Crypto is by nature volatile right now. Reminder that the team is not allowed to engage in direct price talk.
Q: What do u think about DeFi future?
A: 81 billion in DeFi vs 26 trillion in Traditional Finance, so there is a lot of room to grow. Pure defi and peripheral companies and projects will be necessary, if you believe DeFi is the future of finance. Blockchain was the first iteration, DeFi is the second, the third iteration will be coming.
Q: Are you willing to move the UI in a direction that would look radically different from Uni/Sushi and if so, are there sufficient development resources and budget for major undertakings like that?
A: UX designs are in progress. There are a lot of new features we want to add. We need to be careful about how quickly we add developers to the team, because adding too quickly can actually delay progress. We are currently engaged with a UX design company to rework the front end.
Q: Have you ever considered branching out to other blockchains?
A: Two sides to this - 1) moving the PNG token to another blockchain and 2) moving the actual DEX app (code and contracts) to another blockchain. Having our token cross chain is a good idea - would create more demand and introduce it to more users. Moving the DEX cross chain we need to consider partnerships and bootstrapping liquidity. Since it is a large engineering effort, we would need to make sure its worth it.
Q: We need more developers
A: Brandon has been covering most of the short term road map, as well as the other ad-hoc fixes and improvements. We need to hire devs who are here for the right reasons. We prefer adding people to the team who are interested in Pangolin intrinsically.
Q: Is Pangolin an AvaLabs "Teachers Pet"?
A: AvaLabs incubated the Pangolin project. Connor and Dhruba from AvaLabs have spent many hours building out the Pangolin app and infrastructure. Being the largest project comes with certain responsibilities. Its beneficial for both AvaLabs and Pangolin to work together moving forward.
Q: What are the top 3 things that would make Pangolin a success?
A: We already have some advantages: first DEX with a large amount of liquidity. We have a great L1 (Avalanche) to build on. Short term, its important how we integrate with other projects. Partnering with other projects is key, both Native and External projects.
Q: Which DeFi is our biggest competitor?
A: Assuming we are talking Layer 1 networks, ETH is the most innovative network. Innovation attracts the best builders. Avalanche also attracts a high class of builders. BSC is more for "cash grabs" than innovation. ETH2 might be a good competitor.
Q: Are there plans to make the PNG token have utility?
A: DEX utility comes from swap fees. DeFi tokens have many types of utility. Governance in itself can be utility, and is a powerful tool in makign decentralized projects possible.
Q: How can protect the ecosystem against whales to prevent manipulation?
A: There is a narrative that whales are bad, but its not always the case. Without whales providing liquidity we would not have an effective DEX. Whales are providing a valuable service and we just need to make sure they are benefiting the project and community.
Q: What is the strategy to reach out to participants in Traditional Finance?
A: There is a lot we can learn from traditional finance. We need to offer instruments for traditional finance to come across (ex: derivatives). We can also help educate people who have not used DeFi to make the transition as easy as possible.
Q: Should we remove pool rewards from pairs with low volume?
A: Rewards have multiple purposes. 1) Bootstrapping liquidity for swaps and volume 2) Rewards for being benefitial to pangolin 3) Rewards for using pangolin in general. The first one is the most sustainable. There are also strategic reasons for certain pools, for example deep liquidity in USDT and DAI pools are required for lending protocols like BenQi.
About Pangolin Exchange
Pangolin Exchange is a community-driven decentralized exchange (DEX) with fast-settlement, low fees, and a democratic process. Built on the Avalanche Network. Pangolin brings you the best trading opportunities to find and maximize your yield.
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