Ask Me Anything with Swarm.Markets at ICO Speaks: Summary
July 9-th held an Ask Me Anything session at ICO Speaks telegram chat. From the Swarm.Markets there were:
💻 TImo Lehes, Co-Founder of Swarm Markets
@timolehes
💻Philipp Pieper, Co-Founder of Swarm Markets
@PieperCoin
Hello everyone! I’m Timo, one of the founders of Swarm Markets. My background is as a tech entrepreneur and investor in tech companies. I ran an early-stage VC fund with institutional investors.
Got involved in crypto in 2016. I am the Co-Founder of Swarm Network which developed the SRC20 protocol for issuing security tokens, and now helped found Swarm Markets.
Hi everyone! Thanks for having us. Philipp here, another founder of Swarm Markets.
I’ve been a serial entrepreneur since starting my first start-up in 2000, but I also held positions at Deutsche Bank and Allianz Group. I’ve had several successful exits and taken a company public in the US.
Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent and Chia Networks, got me into crypto around 2015 and I’ve founded several startups in the space and made crypto investments along with Timo since then.
Let’s get started!
Q:What does Swarm Market aim to solve or improve in its respective industry?
A: Overall vision is to expand the crypto and DeFi markets by bringing these innovations into a reg licensed structure, so that institutions and family offices can engage in this market.
Today, a lot of investors and traders are sitting on the sidelines due to regulatory uncertainty and failure to meet compliance requirements by many existing platforms.
Something we learned from our experience working on security token issuance in previous projects is that there was an unresolved issue with finding liquidity and compliant markets for digital assets.
We saw that this was holding back the entire industry and was keeping a lot of issuers from tokenizing.
The Swarm Markets concept emerged partly as a response to that experience — a platform where one can instantly have a highly liquid market to trade on or provide liquidity for.
And this can apply to digital assets that we issue as compliant tokens under our banking license, but Swarm Markets is also open to other digital assets that have been issued elsewhere.
Q:What’s the marketing plan for mass adoption of the product once it’s ready?
A: The product is ready. Right now we are focused on the token sale in order to build a community around the platform and raise awareness in the DeFi sector.
We are also connecting with institutions to make sure they understand the benefits of joining the platform. That part is easy as there is a lot of pent up demand from financial institutions who see the profits coming from DeFi and want to deploy their assets for their piece of the action.
The great thing about DeFi is that the use case is profit. We don’t have to convince people that our platform is useful. Low fees and high staking returns speak for themselves.
We announced a Launch Liquidity Program happening right now to seed the platform with liquidity. It’s important that there are assets in the system when users arrive to trade.
At the moment, we have over 500 people that have pledged over $30 million, so we are confident users will find profitable conditions when trading opens.
We also have a bonus program for people who join our community.
We are giving away 2 million SMT for people who join our Telegram group and follow us on social media.
You can sign up here: www.https://swarm.markets/communityboost
Q:Are there any direct competitors to Swarm Markets?
A: We are in a league of our own because of our regulatory status. It has been an overnight success 2 years in the making.
We are licensed and we have retained many of the benefits of DeFi, such as self custody and composability. This is unique.
1/ There is no other DeFi platform where a hedge fund or a bank can stake liquidity—they must trade on a compliant platform if they want to put their billions of dollars in assets into DeFi. That situation isn’t all that different from regular traders either though.
2/ We can add new elements to the DeFi game, as the concept of networked liquidity + smart contract based transactions + self-custody can be extended to other assets than what is in DeFi today.
Crypto headlines have been packed with stories about regulators in countries across the globe shutting down crypto exchanges. It’s getting to the point where the risk of dealing with an unregulated exchange is preventing a lot of people from deploying all the assets they’d like to put into crypto.
Right now, Swarm Markets is the only place that’s sheltered from that kind of instability and provides confidence to existing actors and new entrants
Q: What kind of Token is SMT and how can token holders benefit?
A: The token is a payment token. The technical benefit for us is that it facilitates simplified transactions and makes the whole platform easier and cheaper to operate.
SMT has two main advantages for token holders:
You can earn money and save money.
1/ Liquidity providers get weekly rewards in SMT and there are additional loyalty rewards for those that hold SMT in the very same wallet they use on the platform. The higher the ratio of SMT to assets staked on the platform, the more you get each week.
2/ Traders get a discount when they pay the protocol fees in SMT, which cuts our protocol fees down even further by 50%
Q:What are the SMT tokenomics?
A: Sure – here are the key facts about $SMT:
250 million SMT in fixed total supply
No pre-mined team allocation: we want this sale to really to be for and about potential users and supporters of Swarm Markets.
The initial circulating supply is 10.3M SMT
Initial Market Cap on Launch $1.03M
Launchpool price: $0.10, capped participation based on staking
Vesting Schedule: 20% on TGE, then 20% per quarter. 12 Months in total
TGE is 1 Aug 2021 SMT is an ERC20 payment token
The token sale funds are exclusively allocated for developing the token economy and ecosystem through exchange listings, market making, AMM liquidity etc.
SMT sale funds are not used to fund operations, team or product development.
We have a token sale in 2 parts:
July 12 – 19 — pre-sale with Launchpool
July 21 – 28 — a public auction using the new Gnosis Auction protocol
Launchpool is a great way to get the SMT token out to a community with a wide range of crypto investors who typically invest for the long term.
There’s a very limited amount of tokens allocated for Launchpool for only $0.10 per SMT
After the Launchpool pre-sale, we will have a batch auction for SMT tokens. We are partnering with Gnosis to conduct the auction because their batch auction fits in with the whole Fair Launch perspective and is very resistant to any manipulation.
The purpose of this auction is to establish a market price for the token prior to listings. The final price is determined by the bids made by buyers, so it’s the community that tells us what the price is and not the other way around.
The floor price for the auction is $0.10, but we expect bids to be higher as people will want to make sure they don’t miss the chance to get SMT by bidding low.
This will lead towards the TGE on Aug 1st 2021. At this point, 20% sold tokens will be distributed.
Sign up for the auction on our website: swarm.markets/token-sale
Also, you can sign up for Launchpool here: https://app.launchpool.xyz/projects/swarm-markets/
Q: How is the product development progressing/is there a demo ready? What’s coming next?
A: We are ready to launch our AMM! Development is complete and we are currently onboarding the first liquidity providers now.
The first version of the platform is going live shortly, starting with early liquidity providers and then opening up to the public: Most likely this will coincide with the first SMT token liquidity release, around August 1st.
The platform will feature at first standard AMM functionality:
– Asset swaps
– liquidity provision into pools
– fee discounts for SMT
– rewards for liquidity providers and traders, etc.
On the tech side, more new features will roll out within Q3 following the public launch.
On the asset side, we are starting with all the crypto heavy hitters: BTC, ETH, DAI, and (of course) SMT.
But new markets will be added that extend to other assets soon after launch and that include assets that are entirely new to crypto.
That last part is really exciting. Those new products that we are going to be bringing to the platform in the weeks and months after launch.
We have been working with asset custodians to bring tokens backed by real assets to the platform. I can’t say what will come first, but yield bearing staking products, commodities, and some derivatives are all in the pipeline post-launch.
Q: What’s the USP of Swarm Markets and the catalyst that can drive the project towards success?
A: We are the only DeFi platform — or crypto exchange for that matter — where institutions like banks and hedge funds can transact with full confidence that they are interacting with a regulated entity.
That in itself is a magnet for potentially billions of euros worth of capital.
It’s important to realize how much capital that is and how SMT can benefit from that, not just the platform.
Publicly-traded companies and funds investing public money can compliantly trade on Swarm Markets because our regulatory status makes us the only venue where they can access the high returns of DeFi and earn from staking.
That’s one of many scenarios that make us unique and position us for both a successful platform and a successful token.
Q: Can you share more details about the staking program for early adopters?
A: As we said above, we have rewards program for people who commit to providing liquidity before the launch.
DeFi pros know it’s already advantageous to be the first in a pool, but we thought we’d give an added bonus for the very first people who stake assets.
It works like this:
🔶 Earn SWM by adding liquidity to the platform and maintaining it until at least August 1st.
We allocated 1.5 million SMT for these early adopters and that’s on top of the built in rewards that liquidity providers get anyway.
🔶 The first $1M provided in liquidity shares 500,000 SMT!
🔶 The next $4M provided in liquidity shares an additional 500,000 SMT!
🔶 The subsequent $15M provided in liquidity shares an additional 500,000 SMT!
We are onboarding the first users now and there is still time to sign up:
Q: Where is Swarm Markets going to be listed?
A: It will be possible to swap SMT in pools together with BTC, ETH, and DAI on the Swarm Markets platform directly after the token sale is concluded. If you’ve onboarded for the auction, it’s a few clicks away.
There will be trading on other exchanges as well.
Swarm Markets does not enforce any trading restrictions on SMT outside our platform. That means anyone with SMT is free to create a pool on Uniswap or some other DEX and start making a market from the get-go.
Swarm Markets has an interest in making SMT tradable for as many people as possible, so we are also talking to some CeFi exchanges to get SMT listed there too. We will give updates as soon as those listings are finalized.
Q: Where does the project name come from? What does it mean for you and why did you choose that name for your project??
A: We live in times where technology enables individuals to come together in swarms to express collective behavior, which is decentralized, self-organized, networked and adaptive. With Swarm Markets we aim to support these swarms in their expression of collective financial behavior.
Q:How secure is your platform to use? Have you done audits of smart contract? What security measures are adopted from bugs of smart contracts and hacking?
A: All of our smart contracts are audited by pessimistic.io and will continue to be audited on an ongoing basis. You can read the results of our audits here:
Q:How can we be part of the success story of this project, how can the community support you?
A: Networked liquidity is one of the most revolutionary concepts that will change the financial markets. You can participate in the providing liquidity and $SMT is core to the platform.
Q:Security and privacy are the most important issues. Can Your project users be confident about security?
A: Great question. Swarm Markets uses a self-custody model: your assets never leave your own wallet. Our governance, processes, and conduct are also closely monitored by Germany’s financial regulator BaFin. Lastly, you can check all out smart contracts here:
Q:Any plans for the current hottest topic NFT?
A: Lets see…… nothing to announce (yet) 😉
Q: The blockchain industry is growing by the day, what makes Swarm.Markets stand out against other projects and companies competing in the space.
A: Our regulatory status allows us to add new assets to the blockchain and work with other partners to unlock new user groups. It’s all about value added to bring new things to the ecosystem and make it more seamless.
Q: What is your project mission and vision? What biggest milestones have you achieved so far? What is your project mission and vision? What biggest milestones have you achieved so far?
ICOSpeaks hosted an AMA Session with the Swarm.Markets Team. That’s all for today.
Thanks to all users who participated.
Thanks, Swarm.Markets for being with us
Thanks, all and see you soon😉
Cheers 🥂
Take a look at our other ama sessions
