BTSE AMA Highlights: A Conversation with Troy Tsui, CEO of Swim Protocol, on Jan 13th, 2021
BTSE Moderator: Everyone, please welcome to today’s AMA event.
Without further due, please welcome today’s guest, @troytsui !
Please start off with an introduction of yourself and your team 🙂
Troy Tsui:
Hi everyone!
My name is Troy, Swim Protocol’s CEO and Founder, the team comes from a variety of backgrounds such as FTX, Alameda, Coinbase Ventures, Cosmos, and Google. I’ve worked with many of the team members in college or prior jobs. Our CTO was a software engineer at Alameda/FTX and most members of the software development team have experiences within the cryptocurrency space!
• • •
BTSE Moderator:
Please to have you to join us today!
In 1 or 2 sentences, can you introduce what your project does?
Troy Tsui:
Swim connects the multi-chain world with multi-chain liquidity pools. For users Swim provides a simple way to transfer tokens across chains via multi-token liquidity pools and Solana’s Wormhole. No more delays, centralized bridges, or wrapped assets. For protocols Swim aims to enable multi-chain composability.
BTSE Moderator: What is the main problem that the core team at Swim is targeting to solve?
Troy Tsui:
Making bridging easy.
Right now its difficult with retail users needing to:
1. learn several bridge interfaces
2. interact with a variety of different wrapped assets
3. fear of losing funds when some mysterious step of the bridging methods gets “stuck”
Swim aim to eliminate all of these — with a simpler intuitive experience enabling a broader set of retail to join the multichain world beyond just the DeFi savvy.
BTSE Moderator: Nice, good to have team like yours to provide better and easier utility to the rest of us.
Swim is quite an interesting name for a project.
Why is it called Swim? Is there’s any background story to the name?
Troy Tsui:
Swim connects the multichain world with liquidity “pools”. Enabling users to “swim” across our “pools” from chain to chain
BTSE Moderator: Ah haha, I see. Let us go and talk about the solution at Swim. There are many cross-chain products out there, what sets Swim aside from the others?
Troy Tsui:
1. Swim will be the first native to native asset bridge to Solana
2. Swim is built on wormhole — its level of decentralization is from a set of the Solana Guardians making the capital at stake for these set of nodes magnitudes higher than many of the nodes in the current bridge environment
3. Are design puts mass retail adoption as our first priority. Beyond function but to a good UX enabling the floodgates to open so most users
4. Our design is also tailored towards integrations looking to bring multichain composability to DeFi protocols on any chain in Swim’s ecosystem
BTSE Moderator: What makes you feel confident about the survival & sustainable success of Swim in the near future?
I appreciate everyone’s patience while our guest prepares for his answer 🙂 🙏
Troy Tsui:
A rush of new chains have been and will be coming out with a variety of value adds to the space. The space is exploding in a tremendous pace and there will be more and more participants looking to enter. Swim is well positioned to bring this technology to the masses
• • •
Swim’s Token Utility
BTSE Moderator: Awesome, the space is growing very fast. It will be great to able to get into new chains quick.
I know that Swim has not announced anything yet.
However, would there be any teaser on Swim’s tokenomics today?
Troy Tsui:
Swim’s tokenomics model is broken down into these few major components:
Mining Reserve (30%)
Ecosystem & Partnership (35%)
Team Tokens (20%)
Seed (5%)
Liquidity Provision (10%)
Team & seed tokens are locked for 1 year and unlocked linearly for 3 years afterwards.
BTSE Moderator: If you might, please share any benefits to the user for holding the token.
Troy Tsui:
Holders of $SWIM will receive a portion of the Swim’s revenue through a buy and burn of fees (currently set to 0.01% of the trading fees with 0.03% going to LP holders). As Swim expands $SWIM holders will benefit from the protocol’s various expansions. Long term holders will have an opportunity to participate in governance discussions and votes to shape the direction of the protocol
BTSE Moderator: Awesome 🙂
1 more question before we go to our live questions…
What are the major benefits of using Swim as an average user?
Troy Tsui:
One major benefit of Swim is to consolidate markets for protocols to the native asset and provide users with a native asset route. This promotes deeper liquidity when bridging for both protocols and users alike. Another benefit is that Swim manages all the complexity of going cross-chain under the hood. Instead of learning a new wrapping or bridging solution and hopping between various steps every time (which we have seen be a roadblock for adoption) users will be able to go through Swim’s UI!
• • •
Q&A Session
BTSE Moderator: Alright, thank you for your thoughtful answers so far.
We’ll be opening up the floor for live questions to be asked.
Please pick 5 unique users and reply to their question to answer them in any order that you want.
Halifan Iya ( @Halifan_Iya ):
I wonder if you have plans to create the NFT support and special NFT’s for your project in the future and what do you think about NFT’s?
Troy Tsui:
Yes! More and more NFTs are starting to take a place in our virtual identities. Stay tuned for updates about Swim’s line of NFTs and how Swim Protocol looks to integrate the profile picture paradigm of current NFTs with DeFi perks
Mariella Skrony Doge ( @SkronyDog ):
How many team members do you have? Do they have enough experience in the blockchain field? Do they have any experience on working in crypto and non-crypto project?
Troy Tsui:
We have 10 current core members of the Swim team. We come from a diverse background from tradfi, big tech, as well as crypto native as DeFi farmers and builders.
Troy Tsui, CEO
Quantitative Trader at Alameda Research
Quantitative Trader at SIG
Arv, CTO
Software Engineer at FTX
Software Engineer at Alameda Research
Ruari Donnelly, COO
Chief of Staff at FTX
Chief of Staff at Alameda Research
Teddy Pornprinya, Head of Business Development
Associate at Coinbase Ventures & Corporate Development
Analyst at DC Advisory
Lan Gu, Head of Product
Quantitative Trader at Alameda Research
Quantitative Trader at Flow Traders
Katherine Worden, Director of Special Projects
Experience in Securities, Financial, and Cyber Fraud Unit at U.S. Attorney’s Office
Contracts Compliance at Building Engines
W, Software Engineer
Contributor to Cosmos/Lisk ecosystem
Ricky Chen, Software Engineer
Software Engineer at Roblox
Software Engineer at Exabeam
Software Engineer at Webroot
Andreas Morhammer, Software Engineer
CEO & Technical Co-Founder at SafeContracts
Andrew Huang, Software Engineer
Software at Google
Carlo Easley ( @CarloEasley ):
Have you being audited ? Have not heard you talk about that security of funds is what every investor craves for and plans to escape incase of insecurity if funds, scams and rug pulls ? How strongly built are your security put in place?
Troy Tsui:
Yup, we’ve been audited by Kudelski the auditor of Solana and Kudelski. The official audit report is available on our website https://swim.io/audits/kudelski.pdf
In the initial phases we’ll be looking into 1) protocol insurance 2) active automated monitoring of suspicious pool behavior
Son SOI ( @anhngutrua ):
There are many projects that only last for a while and then die on the road, making new investors afraid. Question: How can Swim Protocol survive, continue to grow and how does Swim Protocol convince investors that it is very promising?
Troy Tsui:
I’m extremely proud of many aspects about swim
1) team composition comes from serious builders and people who genuinely love the space
2) investors are some of the most well known and connected in the space
3) integrations with blue chip DeFi protocols across various ecosystems
Hunsale MMM 474 ( @Tatekei ):
Staking program is very important for any project,?? Can I stake your token,? Do you have any plan of starting staking program,??
Troy Tsui:
Yes!
Are tokennomics is designed after curve and sushix both extremely successful models in the space.
You’ll be able to stake LP tokens in our pool to earn pool tx fees
You’ll be able to stake SWIM tokens to earn protocol collect fees through a buy and burn
BTSEJ ( CEO Of BTSE):
@troytsui It was great meeting you and the team in Lisbon. Well done on a solid project, we’re big fans 👏 👍
Troy Tsui:
It was great meeting you too! 👋👋😁
BTSE Moderator:
Next up we will have the team to answer some of the select questions from Twitter.
@Tomie_chana
What is the uniqueness of Swim Protocol that cannot be found in other projects that’s been released so far? And how the demand of Swim Protocol will increase in the future? or what steps would you take to increase the demand?
Troy Tsui:
1) Native Solana asset avenue. Right now Swim is the ONLY native asset route to Solana. There’s no other way to move assets on chain to Solana without going through wrapped assets
2) Multi-chain design with composability in mind. While there are some other bridge options out there Swim is proud to have centered it’s design around multi-chain composability. This means being able to call smart contracts in Ethereum, Swim, Solana back to back as you would with complex compositions all in one ecosystem
3) High throughput design. Our bridge was design to both give you native assets and function days of extremely high traffic (like the day 1 Billion dollars moved to Arbitrum) Many of the bridge designs out there are either wrapped assets or weren’t designed to prioritize days of extremely high stress.
Demand for Swim will increase as we integrate with different protocols in the multi-chain ecosystem, providing users with added utility when participating in DeFi on different chains.
BTSE Moderator:
2nd question.
@Collak_17
How does @SwimProtocol ensure low fees especially on swaps between ETH chain?
Troy Tsui:
Our trading fee structure is 4bps of the total trade: 3bps to the LP holders and 1bp to the treasury, which is a similar design to other stableswaps. Unfortunately, when it comes to fees based on the respective ecosystem, we must adhere to existing gas fees. We do however do the complexity of pool math on Solana the fastest and cheapest chain
BTSE Moderator:
3rd question
@donaldarthurh
Is there any plan for @SwimProtocol to add #Fantom and #Aurora in the future?
Troy Tsui:
Yes, we are looking to expand every ecosystem down the line. We will initially support Ethereum, Solana, and BSC then will quickly expand to Polygon, Luna, and Terra
BTSE Moderator:
4th question
@MintNftz
Will there ever be limitations to partnering with #Swimprotocol in the future when it becomes more popular ?
Troy Tsui:
No, there will not be any limitations when partnering with us. In fact, our design was created to enable multi-chain composability. Other protocols should be able to easily plug into our API, making it easy to partner with others in the multi-chain ecosystem.
BTSE Moderator:
Last and the 5th question
@EvandaEscobar
Q. What roles are NFTs going to play in the @SwimProtocol ecosystem?
Troy Tsui:
Yes, of course! We are constantly in discussions with other borrow/lending, derivatives, yield aggregators/price aggregators, and wallets from the various chains/ecosystems
BTSE Moderator:
Alright! Thank you @troytsui very honored for you to take your time to answer these questions.
Winners will be contacted later, please check in on our TG and Twitter later on.
We have two more questions from our AMA.
Please share with us any future plans you have in place, any new exciting partnerships, listings or events?
Troy Tsui:
Investors announcement going soon!
Integration list coming soon!
We’re gearing up to launch the MVP version of our protocol very very soon
stay tuned with our progress
https://twitter.com/SwimProtocol
discord.gg/SwimProtocol
BTSE Moderator:
For today’s closing remark, please share with us how the community could find more information about your project.
Troy Tsui:
website: https://swim.io/
twitter: https://twitter.com/SwimProtocol
discord: discord.gg/SwimProtocol
telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/Mnc1WjrKcq8yYTM1
BTSE Moderator:
Again, I can’t thank you enough for your time today to offer us insight of your project.
Good luck!!!
Troy Tsui:
thanks for tuning in guys! I’m glad there were so many of you guys actively interested about Swim! if there are any other questions we’d be happy to answer them — please ask in our discord!
