Editor's Note: This article comes fromBabbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)Editor's Note: This article comes from
Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)
Babbitt Information (ID: bitcoin8btc)
, Author: Nick Sawinyh, Compiler: Screen, published with permission.
This article is DeFiprime's interview with Guillaume, the founder of the fixed-rate lending agreement 88mph. Guillaume talked to us about 88mph's background story, community building, DeFi structured products, etc., and introduced how to avoid risks in lending.
The fixed-rate lending agreement corresponds to the concept of "fixed income" or "structured products" in traditional finance. It is a new field in DeFi, and there are currently few competitors (the projects that have launched tokens include Saffron and Barnbridge in addition to MPH88).
Hello! What is your background? what are you doing recently?
Hello everyone, I am Guillaume Palayer (alias McFly), and I have been involved in various DApp and DAO projects with Zefram Lou since the end of 2017. He is the co-founder of our Dev shop (baconlabs.dev).
For the past ten years, I've been a product developer working in different industries: e-commerce, banking, insurance and asset management, also taught at design schools and business schools, was an early member of Metacartel and Raidguild, and was a Co-founder of Nutrita.app. I love building products and communities.
Since October 2019, we have focused on 88mph.app, an Ethereum-based protocol that allows users to lend crypto assets at a fixed rate or buy floating rate bonds. Through lending and purchasing operations, users can obtain MPH tokens and system rewards in the early stage.https://88mph.app/Share the background story of 88mph
We started researching MVP in October 2019, when the DeFi field had not exploded and there was little attention. We want to build a product that provides regular and passive income, we want it to be genuinely useful, and even better as a cool thing if possible. Looking back, that was an idea on paper. So we started drafting some contracts around the concept of swap rates. Its user experience is not friendly, and it is not easy to expand. So, we decided to explore another direction. The first mainnet version was launched in April 2020, which is https://88mph.app/v0. This version uses a peer-to-peer method to provide early fixed interest rates. At that time, we also referred to future-fwded-money and linked to the movie Back to the Future to explain the meaning of 88mph, which is the speed required for time travel.
As you can imagine, upfront interest is a terrible idea. So when we launch the current version at the end of November 2020, we will no longer continue to advance this function, and only keep
this brand. Our core team has 2 members, Zefram and me. We guided everything on our own and funded our first audit by selling a white label version of betoken.fund. Betoken is our first DeFi project, started at the end of 2017. After that, we work as a duo in baconlabs.dev, which we created in early 2020. From mid-January 2021, 88mph has its own legal entity."What was the process like building the 88mph?"Feedback from the April 2020 release of V0 sped up the whole thing, but this version was underwhelming. So we started working on a new version in June, when we did our first security audit funded by Aave. But in the summer of 2020, we were distracted by other things (labeling our on-chain asset management technology for self-bootstrapping (betoken.fund)), so we delayed the v1 launch.
In addition, last summer's famous
DeFi Cambrian Explosion
Good thing for us. This incident greatly inspired us: what to do to launch and build a community-driven protocol fairly, and we started working on v2 in September 2020, which is the core of the current 88mph version.
The vision and mission of 88mph is: to provide operational products on the first day of the main network, to realize the socialization of income and governance rights through native tokens, and to try to eliminate all common nonsense around token economics.
In the next few years, our core business will closely follow this vision and mission, focusing on smart contracts and financial risk management (the latter will be detailed in the next issue). As we all know, security auditing is not a panacea, but it is very important for raising the team's awareness of best practices, namely writing high-quality smart contracts and better handling human factor risks. We partner with PeckShield, Quantstamp, and Certik, auditors who help us secure our codebase, and will soon have new partners helping us with security and economic audits.
Speaking of code, 88mph is a great example of how “products can’t exist without the permissionless composability of the DeFi ecosystem”. Our success relies on other protocols like Aave, Compound, Harvest, Yearn, Curve, The Graph you name it. And the most interesting part is that 88mph is currently being used by other protocols as a base layer to build cool stuff (Debasonomics, Mushrooms Finance, Dollar Protocol, etc.).
To successfully launch a protocol on the mainnet, you have to work hard on community building. Experience since 2017 has taught us that the best way to do this is through an organic strategy - community and partnerships. If you're reading this while trying to launch something on Ethereum or elsewhere, it's advisable not to start with paid channels, but take an organic approach to validating your idea. With an organic approach, the scale may be limited, but it's enough to start anything. Organic means making friends in the DeFi ecosystem and trying to create synergies that are beneficial to both parties, and that's the trick! So far, it's worked out for us. Of course, all of the above cannot be done with just two people, so a supportive community needs to be built around the product. I receive daily DMs from community members asking if I need to know about other teams, and they also provide valuable feedback on our products. The power of the community is very powerful, so we must treat it as well as the product itself.
What is your business model?
From day 1, 88mph distributes 100% of its income to the community, from:
88mph Protocol Fee: 10% deducted from interest when depositor withdraws money.
Yield Farming Rewards: Tokens mined from protocols (COMP, FARM, etc.) that 88mph is connected to
In addition, there are two more points that guarantee the sustainability of 88mph. Whenever new deposits in the fixed-rate bond pool are minted into MPH, an additional 10% of MPH will be generated and stored in the developer fund. These MPH will be used for future development and maintenance agreements.https://www.coingecko.com/buzz/2020-coingecko-yearly-crypto-report）。
The Governance Vault also receives MPH tokens back from some depositors when they withdraw their deposits. These MPH will be used to decide: (modify) protocol parameters, how to use the assets stored in the treasury, to create new incentives, achieve capitalization, and ultimately drive growth.
Our primary growth will come from cross-integration with various protocols looking for fixed yields to underpin their products, and iterations on our bonds and upcoming structured products.
When it comes to business models, Coingecko does a good job analyzing how we differ from our competitors in the fixed rate agreement space (
What is your position on the current regulatory landscape?
DeFi will disrupt many intermediary industries, and we must work with regulators to achieve this goal as soon as possible. Fantasizing that in a utopian world, Wall Street and its institutions and regulatory entities will be wiped out by anonymous DeFi developers. This idea is cute but naive, because it violates the basic laws of financial historical development and human civilization. Therefore, we are currently working with law firms to obtain regulatory direction from FINMA regarding MPH tokens. While it may be a small thing, it is the first step in a long compliance journey.
What are your goals for the future?
In addition to the routine work of adding new pools and protocols on top of existing ones, we are actively researching ways to de-risk MPH88 and strengthen liquidity by unlocking new use cases.
Regarding the part of "resolving risks", let's imagine that the current fund pool effect, superposition of withdrawal period, floating rate bonds and MPH incentives cannot resolve protocol risks. In the near future, several other mechanisms can be explored to achieve this goal. At present Recommendations for the assessment include:
Insurance funds funded by fiscal or similar security modules, according to the development of agreement activities, become the ultimate buyers of insurance products like Cover and other insurance products covering special financial risks
Partnering with another protocol to create credit default swaps"We will issue an ERC20 zero coupon bond, which represents 88mph's first step in structured products."What are your thoughts on the future of the DeFi market?
