BSCDaily.com hosts ChargeDeFi: #BSC #ChargeDeFi #BSCDaily #Charge
BSCDaily Admin: Hello and welcome. How are you today? 😀
Denan Charge: Good.. thank you. Although it’s a bit cold in the Netherlands. Seems like everytime I go into an AMA it freezes outside 🙂
BSCDaily Admin: I would love to visit the Netherlands someday. Ready for our AMA?
Denan Charge: Yes, I am 🙂
And just so we get this out of the way: I’m no financial advisor, Only invest what you can afford, DYOR and be smart about investing in DeFi.
Q1: Please first introduce your team as well as your past experience.
Denan Charge: I’ve been in crypto for quite some time now but branched into DeFi at the start of 2021. BSC was one of the first chains to improve on the high gas fees on Ethereum, so I decided to dive into BSC and the options that DeFi gave me.
After several months I came into contact with people who had a similar background as me (Tech/Telecom/Product development) and we decided to set up a team. At first, we mostly worked on other projects. Improving their website, auditing code or writing new smart contracts. But halfway through 2021, we decided to start working on our own project.
Our core team consists of 3 experienced devs, a tech CEO that works for fortune 500 companies.. and me.
My background is more in product management/product development, having over 24 years of experience in that particular field.
After our initial launch a few weeks ago we have dramatically expanded our team with 2 extra solidity devs, 1 front-end dev, a UX specialist, 5 marketeers/social media people and a mod team of 6 people. This allowed us to have better 24/7 coverage on our channels. Not just monitoring the channels, but also support.
Having a good mod team is crucial in DeFi 🙂
(note: feel free to ask any followup questions if you want me to clarify or dive deeper into an answer)
BSCDaily Admin: I’m amazed by your experience in the product management field. So what kind of product have you typically managed in the last 24 years? crypto-related?
Denan Charge: I’m “old” .. but most of our core team are experienced/older.
Mostly tech. New technology, new services. I can’t really expand upon the details. As, like most teams in DeFi, we prefer to stay anonymous. My particular field of interest doesn’t have that many experienced people in the Netherlands.
Sometimes it was software development, sometimes in the telecom sector.
I do have a lot of experience with high security/high availability services. So cryptography and privacy are important fields of knowledge.
BSCDaily Admin: Alright, and I suppose because of this, your team consists of people globally
Denan Charge: Yes, our core team covers the globe. From Asia to the US. We’re all doxed internally though. So no “unknown devs” in the core team.
Q2: What is ChargeDeFi? Why did you decide to build ChargeDeFi?
Denan Charge: Good question 🙂 After being involved in several BSC projects we decided that we wanted to branch out ourselves and incorporate the lessons we learned. Algorithmic Stablecoin systems have always caught my interest as they could provide a form of passive daily income.
We worked on a similar project before this. But we had our own ideas about how to best manage these types of protocols.
Algostables ‘print money’. They usually consist of a value token, a share token and a bond token. As long as the value token, in our case “Static”, stays above a certain price the ecosystem expands ($1.01). Minting more tokens that are distributed over shareholders.
Generally, all AlgoStables suffer the same fate sooner or later:
Investor interest dwindles for a short period, or large holders exit the project. The main value token dips below a certain price point, making the ecosystem less interesting for investors. The expansions halt, shareholders get no income and the price dips lower. This causes the so-called ‘death spiral’ that every AlgoStable has reached in their lifetime.
(except Tomb.finance so far) 🙂
We decided to introduce a new mechanic, rebasing the supply of static below peg.
(in essence an elastic supply)
It works like a reset button. If the price of Static drops below a certain threshold the entire supply rebases. Burning away tokens until the price of Static is at 1$ again. It takes several epochs (8 hours) until the price is back at $1.0. But with continued buy pressure, the system can start expanding again.
Shareholders who stake “Charge” in our boardroom get part of that expansion.
BSCDaily Admin: So you’re saying most (if not all) AlgoStables projects suffer from price loss and “death spiral” since they do not implement the “rebase” strategy like ChargeDeFi, right?
Denan Charge: Some have tried to implement taxes when selling below its ‘peg’ value. Others have tried reflecting those taxes to holders who keep their token.
But every method so far has failed. When we pick a token that’s pegged to $1.0 we know from experience that when it dips below 0.7 or 0.6 the incentive to push it back up is gone.
It needs too much external cash flowing in.
So.. protocols that don’t have a rebase .. and reach that pricepoint. Usually die.
A rebase is the only way for a system to restart after liquidity leaves a project.
At the moment we’re in a rebase situation where the liquidity is shrinking. And you see the price rise slowly over time as tokens are burned.
We’ve seen several projects using rescue funds or buyback options.
In the end they all get played by investors who use those funds as a way to make a profit.
Q3: What about your Token (Static, Charge and 1 more I believe)? Can you tell us more about your tokenomics and some of its use cases?
Denan Charge: Sure 🙂
At the moment we are still building our ecosystem as we’ve just launched.
We have 3 tokens in ChargeDeFi:
– Static – pegged to $1.0 BUSD
– Charge – the share token
– Pulse – the bond token.
As long as static is above $1.01 the system expands. This is distributed over shareholders who stake in our boardroom. For the entire system to keep ‘printing’ money we aim to have $Static at a price of $1.5 or higher.
As the printing would stop when it goes below $1.01. And the higher the price the higher the amount the ecosystem prints and distributes over shareholders.
It is our experience that, as long as investors reinvest at least 60% of their earnings into Charge, the system will keep expanding.
Static also that rebase mechanic. And I’ll copy/paste a bit from our documentation:
If $Static drops below $0.8, or if $Static is below its $1.0 peg for more than 6 Epochs (8 hours per epoch) $Static rebases. Lowering the number of tokens in circulation until the value of $Static is at $1.0 again. This impacts *all* tokens in circulation, also those in liquidity pools.
Example: ·
– There is 100,000 $Static in circulation worth $1.0 (value =$100,000)
– The price of $Static drops to $0.75 per $Static (value =$75,000)
– The ecosystem rebases back to peg
– There is now 75,000 $Static in circulation worth $1.0 (value = $75,000)
A rebase creates an elastic supply below peg and enables a reboot of the ecosystem after a price dip. Paying out shareholders each 8 hours when it goes above peg again and slowly accumulating daily income for investors.
Q4: Does your token get audited? And how can we buy it?
Denan Charge: Yes, we have used Certik to audit all our contracts. It’s a public audit that can be checked at Certik.
But.. full transparency: we did have a security incident this weekend with one of our new vaults. We launched them after the Certik audit.
In contrast to our normal operational process, we decided to ‘fork’ the grim vaults from grim.finance.
Those vaults had been audited by another party but it turned out that that audit was ‘bad’.
(This is by no means a shift of responsibility though)
This cost us a lot as it turned out that the grim.finance vaults had a lot of security issues that had been overseen in the audit. The vaults were exploited and some of our tokens were drained. We warned grim.finance and tomb.finance early in the morning after looking at the code in the vaults. But their vaults also got drained 10 hours later.
I’m guessing most people saw the news on grim somewhere online.
We have compensated all users who lost tokens:
– All lost “Charge” tokens will be returned to investors in a special pool during the next 30 days.
– All investors who lost tokens received an extra $50 BUSD per token lost. This has been done.
In the future, we won’t trust external audits and will always use Certik / Peckshield to audit the code of new features. This was our mistake and we learned from it. 100% security is never possible. So you need to have a process in place that quickly works on the issue while also working on compensation.
A full incident report can be found on our medium btw (https://chargedefi.medium.com)
If we make a mistake we need to compensate the people who are affected.
We also did our best to reach out (in secret comms) to other affected projects but not everyone could secure their vaults in time.
And that is how you differentiate between an honestly trustworthy project and the others
Q5: What plans do you have for the future? What more does ChargeDeFi have in store for us?
Denan Charge: After the initial launch, we’re making the UI better, helping investors use strategies that benefit the protocol.
We’ve seen that not everyone understands AlgoStablecoins and treat it as a normal ‘farm’. To help them we’re adding tooltips and popups on our site, as well as “smart reinvestment” buttons that guide users to reinvesting a large portion so the protocol keeps expanding.
The first big use-case is also in the works.
We’re working on “money legos”. In essence, this will be a graphical interface that will allow users to stack transactions cross-chain using multiple protocols.
They can combine these ‘building blocks’ like lego blocks to create their own investment strategies and execute them. All through their web browser.
To give an example:
Harvest from farm at project A, split it into 30/70%, invest the 30% into a stablecoin pool at project B, invest the other 60% in a high risk pool in project A, Sell the remaining 10% at 1inch for BUSD, etc.
We’ve added extra frontend and backend developers to our team to build this and are currently in the design phase. This will also be a use-case for Static as it will use static to fuel these interactions.
Just be aware that this is quite a complex project and it will take some time to deliver 🙂
Even with all the extra developers.
Q6: How are you different from and better than other leveraged yield farming aggregators?
Denan Charge: That’s a hard question to answer to be honest.
As we’re not really a leveraged yield farm in the traditional sense.
Our boardroom is fed by the expansion of the protocol. And we have our own farms that yield tokens, as well as auto compounding vaults on beefy.finance.
At the moment we’re in a downcycle as we are still recovering from this weekend and the market conditions. But even at this moment there are several options to get between 1 and 2% daily.
The higher the price of $Static above 1.01, the higher the rewards. We’ve seen rewards up to 9% daily before we hit this last weekend.
And we’re now building back up again.
Q7: Where can we find out more about ChargeDeFi?
Denan Charge: We’ve had users who created a consistent daily income of $1k each 8 hours. Even while reinvesting 60%.
But I’ve seen ‘whales’ who also reinvested 60%.. but had a factor 40 more.
As long as the price of Static is above $1.01.. we all benefit.
Website: https://www.chargedefi.fi
Medium: https://chargedefi.medium.com
Documentation: https://docs.chargedefi.fi
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChargeDeFi
Telegram: https://t.me/chargedefi
Note: our gitbook was just released a few days ago.
It contains a LOT of information on ChargeDeFi and how it works. And we advise everyone to read it *before* investing!
BSCDaily Admin: With this we are now at the end of our AMA session with ChargeDeFi 🔥🔥🔥
Time for wrapping up, any last words you would like to say to our community?
Denan Charge: Thanks for this AMA and I hope people take some time to check out our project. We’re currently ‘rebasing” back to $1 and will soon hit the price again where the system expands.
But.. always invest with a plan. And take daily earnings while reinvesting a large portion!
BSCDaily Admin: Thank you Denan for being here with us and talking about ChargeDeFi.
We wish you the best and Merry Christmas 🥂
Denan Charge: Cheers! Same to you!