Investment is a very professional thing, but many novices often trade rashly without recognizing the risks and doing enough research.
The encryption circle is not bad for assets, but for a participatory method, a sufficiently low threshold and a sufficiently high level of trust.
The emergence of decentralized fund platforms may be able to solve this problem.
The COOK Protocol is one of the pioneers. The team has a background in technology, finance, and encryption, and has a deep understanding of what to do.
Kun, the Chief Strategy Officer of the COOK Protocol, pointed out when he was a guest in the Odaily Chaohua community that this platform will target two groups of people, one is fund managers and the other is investors.
"Fund managers are free to create their own funds and use trading tools for asset allocation. Investors can choose suitable funds for follow-up investment according to their own risk preferences and investment philosophy. The entire Cook Protocol platform will be implemented through smart contracts to ensure Safety of funds and transparency of profit and risk data.”
The execution idea is also very clear.
After half a year of hard work, Kun revealed that at present, product prototypes and related contracts are almost completed, and some have already entered the audit process. By the end of March and early April, the COOK token will be listed on Uniswap for liquidity mining on Ethereum. In April, the index fund product Cook Index will be launched on Ethereum and the Huobi Heco chain. In the second stage, the COOK protocol will start to focus on the development of the ecology, build investment tools that fund managers need to use, and combine more advanced high-quality investment strategies for investors to invest in.
secondary title
Creativity and Positioning
OdailyQ: When you first join the group, you need to make a short self-introduction.
Kun：Hello everyone, I am Kun, Chief Strategy Officer of COOK Protocol. Graduated from Stanford University, he has 8 years of experience as a technical product manager in United Technologies Group, a top 100 global company. Proficient in 6 languages, in order of fluency, they are Chinese, Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese and French. Entered the blockchain industry around 17 years ago.
OdailyQ1: Could you please tell us about the original intention of the COOK protocol design and the problems it wants to solve?
Kun：To put it simply, Cook Protocol is a cross-chain decentralized asset management service protocol, or it can also be called a decentralized fund market protocol.
On this platform, there are two main roles, one is the fund manager and the other is the investor. Fund managers are free to create their own funds, using trading tools for asset allocation. Investors can choose suitable funds for co-investment according to their own risk preferences and investment philosophy. The entire Cook Protocol platform will be implemented through smart contracts to ensure the safety of funds and the transparency of profit and risk data.
Its significance is that ordinary investors can follow the investment fund strategy on it to achieve higher investment returns. Professional investors can contribute strategies on it and transform their investment experience and ability into greater value.
Many people have asked why it was named the Cook Agreement and whether it has any meaning. In fact, the name of the Cook Agreement comes from Captain Cook, the famous British navigator who discovered Australia and the Pacific Islands.
The modern financial system originated from the great geographical discovery in Europe and the age of great voyages. Because ocean voyages require a huge amount of funds, the captains of Western European countries have raised funds from citizens in the form of public fundraising. If they succeed in going out to sea, they will bring spices, silk, porcelain, gold, and silver that are scarce in Europe, thereby earning huge amounts of money. wealth. And the citizens who made the initial investment can often get a return of hundreds or even thousands of times.
This form of fundraising was gradually institutionalized, and after being standardized, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange was formed, the world's first stock exchange, which is also the starting point of the modern traditional financial system.
In the Cook Agreement, each fund manager can be compared to a captain, and each investor is equivalent to the citizens who invested on the streets of Amsterdam back then. Through the Cook Agreement, we hope that the captain can travel, explore, and trade in the DeFi ocean, and get rich rewards income and returns to investors. We also firmly believe that DeFi will develop rapidly from a form of public private placement to a new financial system in the future, just like the Amsterdam Stock Exchange back then.
OdailyQ2: It sounds a bit like a revenue aggregation product, so what is the difference between us and platforms like YFI?
Kun：At present, there are mainly two types of DeFi projects, one is the underlying financial infrastructure, such as Uniswap, Compound, and AAVE. The other type is higher-level financial protocols built on top of these infrastructures, such as the revenue aggregator YFI.
Compared with the underlying financial infrastructure, the Cook Protocol belongs to the top-level DeFi Lego, and is an asset management service agreement built on top of these infrastructures.
Compared with the revenue aggregator, the Cook Agreement mainly has the following differences:
Cook Protocol is a cross-chain asset management platform. In addition to Ethereum, it will also be deployed on HECO, BSC, Polkadot and other public chains to help everyone manage assets on different public chains.
The Cook Agreement will support access to more underlying infrastructure including decentralized exchanges, lending, mining, derivatives, and insurance platforms, allowing fund managers to have more asset allocation options.
In addition, income aggregators generally implement open source passive strategies defined in advance. The Cook Protocol not only supports passive strategies, but also allows fund managers to actively conduct transactions, such as ambushing potential tokens or grabbing top mines based on knowledge in advance.
DeFi is a key target of hacker attacks. We will support insurance for funds to protect the interests of investors in extreme cases.
OdailyQ3: There is also a platform called robo-advisor, which also helps investors make comprehensive investments. How are we different from them?
Kun：The main purpose of robo-advisors is to build models based on algorithms and data to provide financial advice to customers. It has some characteristics of low cost, no emotion, and large scale.
But at the same time, a robo-advisor can only serve as an investment advisor rather than a decision maker, because his data and algorithms have considerable limitations, and he can only give some relatively narrow suggestions.
For example, it is difficult for a robo-advisor to predict the 3.12 market, because it is difficult for him to judge some major events that have an important impact on the market outside of the data, such as the global outbreak of the epidemic.
In addition, one of the theoretical foundations of robo-advisors is that people are rational and their behavior can be predicted. However, the reality is that in many cases people's investment decisions are irrational and difficult to predict.
secondary title
Product play
OdailyQ4: In fact, we have roughly understood from your introduction. What is the development progress and launch plan of our platform?
Kun：At present, the development of the platform is very smooth. First of all, the smart contract of liquidity mining has been developed and passed the security audit of Certik, a world-renowned audit institution. The demonstration website of the Cook Protocol is also close to completion.
And our first product: Cook Index, an index fund product, has also been developed and is undergoing an audit of the smart contract code.
At the end of March and early April, we will go to Uniswap and carry out liquidity mining on Ethereum. In April, we will list Cook Index on the Ethereum chain and Huobi Heco chain. The first phase will focus on strategies officially developed by Cook.
The second stage will start to focus on the development of the ecology, building the investment tools that fund managers need to use, so as to combine more advanced high-quality investment strategies for investors to follow.
OdailyQ5: Can you introduce to us the funds that you can directly invest in next?
Kun：As mentioned in the previous question, our current product development direction is mainly index fund products. Next, market capitalization-weighted indices for some mainstream currencies, as well as HECO indices for HECO DeFi products will be launched.
Another is the yield-optimized index (yield optimization index). This is a very unique product. In addition to using the characteristics of the index to capture the growth of the overall market, it can also carry out yield-farming income mining at the same time to increase income. We are very much looking forward to this product bringing low risk and more benefits to investors. high yield.
OdailyQ6: How are investors' funds kept, decentralized custody?
Kun：Yes, there are different types of strategies on the Cook agreement, including passive index types (officially launched by Cook) and active management types. An active fund is to hand over funds to fund managers for investment operations through decentralized custody. In addition, the funds are in the fund smart contract, and the fund manager only has the right to trade and has no withdrawal authority. In addition, the markets and currencies traded will also be restricted by smart contracts. These will ensure that fund managers will not have bad operations.
OdailyQ7: In addition, how do you reduce other risks that this type of investment platform may encounter (such as losses caused by market fluctuations, strategy failure, operational risk, credit risk, etc.)?
Kun：I think the risk is mainly divided into two aspects, one is the code level, the risk of being hacked. The other is financial security.
First of all, regarding the code level, we have relatively excellent technical teams, all of whom come from Silicon Valley companies such as Google, YouTube, and Dropbox, and have solid technical strength. We also make heavy use of industry-standard technical frameworks, such as OpenZeppelin. And we have done a lot of testing to reduce security risks. We use the industry's top audit institutions to audit our code.
Regarding the capital level, we have several methods to ensure that fund managers will not have bad operations. First of all, after the fund manager creates the fund, the ownership of the fund belongs to a decentralized autonomous organization, and the fund manager can only allocate funds through the previously set white list. And if the fund manager needs to change permissions, such as adding an investment whitelist, it needs to be implemented through on-chain governance. Second, fund managers must pledge COOK tokens when creating strategies. If they do evil, the pledged tokens will be confiscated. Third, the Cook Agreement will use insurance agreements to protect investors' rights and funds.
OdailyQ8: Suppose I open a fund, and users get equity token CK after subscription. Can this token be provided by a liquidity pool?
Kun：secondary title
market and advantages
OdailyQ9: What is the launch plan, distribution and unlocking plan of our platform token COOK?
Kun：Cook tokens will be listed on Uniswap at the end of March and early April, and liquidity mining will be opened (please pay attention to our WeChat official account before the announcement date).
Our unlocking mechanism adopts a very innovative time and price unlocking mechanism. The time-based unlocking mechanism will ensure that at least 1/12 of the tokens are unlocked every month, ensuring that investors will get all the tokens within one year.
If market demand leads to an increase in COOK token price, then the price-based unlocking mechanism will be triggered, releasing more tokens to meet market demand.
At the same time, in order to prevent the sudden surge of prices under extreme market conditions and cause too many COOK tokens to suddenly appear on the market, a maximum of 5% of COOK tokens will be released every week to prevent excessive price fluctuations, ensure a steady rise in currency prices, and shape consensus.
As an example, if there is no price movement for the first month, 1/12 of the tokens will be unlocked. If the price triples in the first month, then 15% of the tokens will be released according to the price unlock mechanism. If the price has tripled in the first week of launch, then at most 5% of the tokens will be released this week instead of 15%.
OdailyQ10: What do you think is the moat of our project?
Kun：General projects are open source code, so technical barriers are difficult to form a moat. What can form a moat is more the network effect brought by traffic and attention, which will bring higher income and liquidity.
In the short term, we have done some strategic financing and reached strategic partnerships with leading projects in the industry. At the same time, we will use IDO to increase the attention of the project. After going to Uniswap, we can cold start our project, and quickly build our ecology through liquidity mining.
In the long run, our products and the user groups and traffic they can bring are a relatively important moat. We will develop a cross-chain platform, and we will have layouts on HECO, BSC, OEC, and Ethereum, and take advantage of the advantages of major DeFi ecosystems to quickly form network effects.
Our team is also one of our moats. Our team has a solid technical background, most of whom graduated from famous schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon. They have a working background in a major Silicon Valley factory and experience and connections in the encryption industry, so our innovation is sustainable. In addition, the founding team is in Silicon Valley and has close contact with foreign DeFi circles, keeping up with the latest trends in DeFi.
OdailyQ11: What do you think of the current direction of DeFi? Many people think that it has reached the mid-term stage, and there are not a few projects that are fast-growing and fast-dead. Do you think the boom in DeFi construction can continue?
Kun：I think there will be bubbles in DeFi in the short term, because the direction and vision promised by many projects may not be realized with the current technology and infrastructure. This is like the Internet in the 90s, when you could only send text, and you had to wait a few minutes to send a picture, not to mention videos, smartphones, etc. Therefore, some of the application scenarios that we are now accustomed to have already landed were only imaginable and impossible to realize. For example, at that time, webvan, a company that wanted to realize the function of online grocery shopping, also raised 400-500 million US dollars. In the end, the idea surpassed the entire era, but it ended up in a mess.
And I think that when these technologies and infrastructure are realized, such as the real speed-up of Ethereum, I estimate that it can be realized within one or two years, then it is very likely that DeFi will really explode. The encrypted asset management track we are in is still in its infancy, but it will usher in a high-speed development by then. One possible phenomenon is that DeFi, traditional finance, and financial technology that empowers traditional finance will form two parallel universes for a period of time.
