Hi Folks,

UniLend Finance announced a partnership with Nord Finance and in order to discuss some details about this partnership as well as other UniLend's initiatives and features, Nord Finance invited Chardresh Aharwar, UniLend's founder and CEO and Vishal Kothari, UniLend's community lead to participate in an AMA session on February 9 on the Nord TG channel (https://t.me/nordfinance). Here is the recap of this event.

Segment 1: Introduction and basic questions

Nord Finance:
Dear #NordVikings, Please welcome @ChandreshAharwar CEO and Co-founder of Unilend Finance also @VishalBlockchain, community lead at Unilend Finance. Welcome brothers.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Thanks for Inviting bhai. You have built a great community.

Vishal Kothari:
Thank you Rahul to host us here in the great community of the Nord.

Nord Finance:
Please share a short intro about yourself before we start the Q & A.

Vishal Kothari:
Hey, I am Vishal Kothari - Community Lead at UniLend Finance. I have started my career from Computer Education in 1998 and jumping from various IT related businesses finally realised the best thing technology has given us is the Cryptocurrency as I was studying and researching about cryptocurrencies since 2014. I have been guiding projects on marketing front & community growth from more than an year & have been an early part of UniLend Team from start.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Many of you probably already know I have been actively contributing to the blockchain space since late 2016, including holding the lead Marketing & Strategy position at Matic Network before co-founding UniLend Finance. To follow the UniLend Journey, please feel free to join https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement.

Chandresh's #MaticNetwork story:
https://twitter.com/chandresh1091/status/1259145137881354240

Nord Finance:
Thanks for the intro guys, let's start with the questions.

Q1. Can you please give us a brief overview of UniLend?

Vishal Kothari:
Sure! Before we get started I would like to give a shout out to our team for their relentless work, recently we opened our Alpha, Initium V1, to our entire community for testing. We’re making excellent headway on our roadmap and we’re excited to hear feedback about Initium V1. In regards to your question, UniLend is a comprehensive DeFi protocol with the mission to unlock the true potential of decentralized finance. Essentially, UniLend Finance will offer every DeFi capability imaginable for any ERC20 asset, including the $30B+ of assets which are currently excluded from DeFi. I have heard people say UniLend is like a combination of Uniswap, Compound and Aave. This is one way to think of our protocol. In addition to an intuitive UI, UniLend will also have a robust governance model powered by UFT (UniLend Fiance Token), and this is just the beginning.

Chandresh Aharwar:
https://app.unilend.finance/ This is on ropsten currently.

Nord Finance:
Q2. It’s great to hear that your team is so focused and congratulations on the launch of your protocol’s Alpha release! How about we expound on what you stated, that this is just the beginning. Maybe you can share a little about the partnerships you’ve recently released information about?

Vishal Kothari:
I would be happy to share. I think everyone should be excited for our upcoming roadmap goals and the many collaborations with the projects we’re working with. Like stated above, we’ve recently launched our Initium community testing event. We believe we’ll receive great feedback, since our early access program community testing initiative was very successful. In addition, Q1 of this year has officially kicked off, so expect to see new releases on the horizon. Specifically, the next big release will be the Beta release of our protocol. There are many additional milestones coming soon after, such as liquidity mining/staking features to be added to the mix. In regards to our partnerships, everyone probably noticed that we recently strategically partnered with Mirror Finance to enable decentralized lending and borrowing of synthetic stocks via UniLend. Yes, we’ll be the first protocol to offer this type of functionality. Get ready to lend and borrow the world’s major stocks (including the FAANG tech giant stocks). Also, we’ve recently entered into another cutting edge partnership with Nord Finance, who’ll be integrating UniLend Finance into the Nord Advisory portion of their tech stack. This will enable new DeFi investing strategies for the DeFi community. Nord Finance’s community will be introduced to the innovative features of our protocol, thus helping to further enhance our future growth as well. Again this is just the beginning, many more collaborations and unique protocol functionalities are yet to be announced and we are really excited about our upcoming functionalities.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Recent collaboration with Fantom. We will be listing 16 synthetics assets more:
https://twitter.com/UniLend_Finance/status/1357372918741803013

Our partners keep growing everyday with the UniLend Ecosystem.

Nord Finance:
That's great to hear. Please read about NORD × UNILEND partnership here:
https://link.medium.com/Fi3ypzBRXcb

Nord Finance:
Q3. One question about security - how can users be sure they are safe while using such a new protocol?

Chandresh Aharwar:
We are building an ecosystem of Trading & Money Market, not dependant on liquidations for other Dexes. UniLend will be more secure & safe architecture wise than currently existing Money markets.

Vishal Kothari:
I would say we are much more secure than other money market protocols. For instance, current protocols are dependent on other DEXs like Uniswap etc. for liquidations (which is a major concern for adding illiquidity & more volatile assets) while we have our own liquidation process with liquidity in our own protocol. Nobody has any sort of control on these DEXs, whereas in the case of UniLend, we are deriving the lending/borrowing capacity of assets based on the liquidity available on our trading platform. Hence, we are not dependent on any other protocol for liquidation & everything is handled within the UniLend ecosystem. Maximum security is a key priority of UniLend Finance, we are picking up where key DeFi protocols like Uniswap left off and continuing the development of the decentralized finance revolution in a very secured way. Also like our roadmap suggests, during Q1 of 2021, we will have proper audits in place from a variety of the best industry players to make sure our protocol is safe for users of UniLend.

Nord Finance:
Q4. You brought up the roadmap and it got me thinking about the future of your protocol again. What else do users have to look forward to further down the road in 2021?

Vishal Kothari:
Though our Alpha was a monumental event in our journey, there is so much more in store for 2021. Above we stated that Q1 has many exciting roadmap milestones on the horizon, including our Mainnet release coming in Q1. Additionally, Fusion Farming should also go live during the first quarter. This is an innovative feature which will allow UniLend liquidity providers to attain two different tokens at once by providing liquidity. Again, this is just the first quarter of 2021. In the future, UniLend will implement community governance, the UniLend Ecosystem Fund, launch onto multiple chains, layer 2 implementation for a superior user experience, and even metatransactions. We’ll also bootstrap new projects in the UniLend ecosystem with full DeFi functionality right from their token launch. Empowering brand new tokens with comprehensive DeFi functionality is a concept completely new to the crypto space, and something which is extremely valuable to new tokens looking to establish a user base and solid use cases for their token. Therefore, we anticipate that listing on UniLend (in addition to traditional platforms such as Uniswap) will be standard procedure for new token launches. In fact, we recently launched a poll on Twitter regarding this, and the crypto community echoed our sentiment strongly. You can see the full roadmap outlining our plans up until Q3 of 2021 here: https://unilend.medium.com/presenting-unilends-roadmap-gearing-up-for-alpha-launch-in-december-2020-89ff10805bcd These are all things that we can confidently say we can fulfil based on the dates shown via our roadmap, though there are many other items we are also working on/researching in the background.

Nord Finance:
Q5. Above you stated you’re picking up from where Uniswap left off? I heard your team has great comparison articles in regards to this, could you expand on this topic and let us know where we can find these articles?

Vishal Kothari:
Yes, to clarify, we have the utmost respect for Uniswap and the other leading protocols for being trailblazers in the DeFi space. That said, we believe that our comprehensive DeFi functionality and permissionless listing model will facilitate the evolution of DeFi and bring the next wave of users into the DeFi space. Our community has requested further clarification on UniLend’s strengths as a DeFi protocol, which is why we launched our DeFi Dissected article series. The goal with the series is to show the cryptosphere why we will be a major contender, with more to offer than our competitors. UniLend is a unique protocol, built from the ground up, that is capable of truly revolutionizing DeFi. I would encourage everyone to follow us on our UniLend Medium (https://unilend.medium.com/) to stay up to date on our collaborations and to take a look at the DeFi Dissected article series for themselves. Two of the most recent articles within this series were for comparing UniLend with Aave and Uniswap, here are the links to get you started: Comparison with Uniswap : https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-unilend-finance-taking-the-uniswap-defi-revolution-to-the-next-level-b576ce915350
Comparison with Aave : https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-brief-comparison-of-unilend-and-aave-2e7726c1e7ee

Nord Finance:
Q6. I’m sure everyone wants to hear a little more about the collaboration between Nord Finance and UniLend. Maybe you could let everyone know the major developments between us?

Vishal Kothari:
I totally agree, our team is extremely excited for the future of our connection. We received a very enthusiastic response from our community when we released information about our strategic partnership, and congratulations to the Nord team that $NORD is trending on CoinGecko. Feel that really exciting time ahead for both the teams. UniLend wants to enable our users to take the bull by the horns, to empower them with cutting edge DeFi assistance technology. One game changing factor Nord Finance will bring to UniLend users is the integration of UniLend Finance into the Nord Advisory portion of their tech stack. This will allow for our protocol to be used in conjunction with Nord’s proprietary algorithm, which ultimately assists with users’ goal-oriented diversified portfolio management. Are you guys ready for robo-advisory led customized investment functionality? We imagine that joining forces with blockchain agnostic platforms for multi-chain interoperability like Nord Finance will be a very important factor in itself. Besides the fact that Nord Finance is making DeFi investing easier, they’re also developing new roads towards yield farming aggregation, fund management and loans against crypto-assets which could cultivate further collaboration down the road. The sky’s the limit in crypto and we’re ecstatic to be working hand in hand with Nord Finance.

Segment 2: Live Questions

Q1. Unilend welcomes every ERC20 token to DeFi, great project. I agree that every token should be part of DeFi such as OKB, CRO, MATIC which have a higher market cap. Do you have any plans to exploring addition of cross-chain support in the future such as Binance Chain, Monero, etc..?

Chandresh Aharwar:
We are totally focused on ethereum chain currently, becuase major liquidity is their currently. More than $37 Billion of assets are locked in DEFI on ethereum currently & with UniLend we beleive that can increase by substantial amount. We also plan to share more on our layer 2 strategy & other chains like Binance smart chain, but our current focus is launching Beta on ethereum currently.

Q2. Please mention 3 great features of UniLend , which makes it ahead of other projects?

Chandresh Aharwar:
I would say

• Permission less Lending/Borrowing
• One stop solution along with trading to serve all user requirements & many integrations making it more robust
• Permission-less uncollaterized loans supporting major assets through flash loans

Q3. Asia, Africa and other communities are Non-English speaking communities, how will YOUR PROJECT create global adoption to more local communities?

Vishal Kothari:
We are building up global and regional communities to support all our users to have ease of the communication with the team through the community and community managers and that's why we already have 2 regional communities announced so far
🇻🇳 Vietnam : https://t.me/UniLend_Vietnam
🇮🇩 Indonesia : https://t.me/UniLend_Indonesia

For more updates please feel free to join https://t.me/UniLendFinance

Q4. At this point, do you think you need exchanges as a binance to keep growing? Or is it better to forget those things and focus on other activities.?

Chandresh Aharwar:
I definetely think exchange listings like Binance can ease the expereince of $UFT traders & also help improve the volumes by lettting us reach out to larger audience. We totally understand this & will keep taking all efforts for our community. From the platform adoption perspective also, we have 4K+ erc20 addresses holding $UFT & it keeps increasing. We are taking all efforts to keep growing on this front too by presenting the possibilities of UniLend.

Q5. COVID-19 led to a series of lockdown that has had crippling effects on so many projects. What effect has it had on your hardworking team, the project itself and it's roadmap? Will the new wave have any negative effect on this project?

Chandresh Aharwar:
Our team actually was already very well connected, so remote working due to COVID has worked wonders for us. Infact I feel that our team is performing better in remote scenario with flexible working hours. We haven't missed any deadlines yet & already launched alpha as promised & our progress is on trcak for future deliverables too. Things will keep heating up from hear on with such an amazing team on our side, giving their 100%.

Nord Finance:
Thanks for your time @ChandreshAharwar and @VishalBlockchain. It was amazing hosting you guys here. See y'all around. NORD × UNILEND

Vishal Kothari:
Thanks Rahul.