Router Protocol AMA Recap with Razor Network
On the 12th of March, 2021, the Co-founders of Router Protocol,Ramani Ramanchandran and Priyeshu Garg were live on the Razor Network Community Telegram group, to provide the community with insights on Router Protocol, details on their recently launched GalaxyFarm & upcoming developments, and also attend to their questions and queries.
In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into two segments; the first segment, gives full account of the questions asked by the moderator of this session, while the second segment gives account of the questions asked by Telegram community members.
SEGMENT 1
Divij — Good evening Razor Network Community. Let us Welcome Ramani Ramanchandran and Priyeshu Garg from Router Protocol for today’s AMA.
Ramani —
Indeed, I got into crypto few years ago while making markets for private securities such as Airbnb, Uber etc. I created technology on a bitcoin sidechain (pre-Ethereum) where these could be traded. Previously I was in Finance and Product Management, across the US, Europe and SE Asia. Since then, I have been building and learning in the ocean that is crypto! We have built a range of products on the research, exchange, asset management, derivatives side of things.
Priyeshu —
Hi I’m Priyeshu Garg. I handle content and strategy at Router Protocol. My journey to crypto started in 2012 where I was introduced to Bitcoin when it was at almost 50$, at that time I didn’t focus much on it and then later it came back into my life again in the cryptography class at university. Thereon I started writing articles for Bitcoin (mind you, even Vitalik Buterin started as a Bitcoin writer!), further I began writing for reputed magazines in the crypto industry and then I pivoted to fundraising for projects. After that I became a Giga farmer once the YFI journey started and then I envisioned the future problems there will be due to liquidity fragmentation and hence the Router was born since Ram also faced such problems and we decided to join hands together.
Divij — Amazing. Can you briefly describe how does Router Protocol work?
Ramani —
Currently, the liquidity is fragmented across different Blockchains and there is no chain that acts as a superhighway to allow transition from one chain to another. Router fixes this by offering a superhighway to distributed liquidity islands.
Clearly, it is going to be a multi-blockchain universe, and platforms and infrastructures will expand in scope and nature and complexity, like a nation growing fast, into various cities and towns on the chain. The router is building the infra that connects these chains
Divij — We’ve been hearing about Dfyn Exchange a lot since the launch of GalaxyFarm. Can you explain what Dfyn is and how does it work?
Priyeshu —
We started off with a layer-2 Matic Based exchange on Matic Network which offers a gasless AMM experience. The exchange is live and has over $2 million worth of liquidity at Dfyn. Dfyn’s Galaxy farm offers a unique Stake-1 Farm-Many approach where users can stake Razor and farm Razor, Route, Matic, Easy, OM.
It just so happens that our team built Dfyn first, but we are not really competing with any venue on any chain. What we are focused on is ultimately building the bridges and the highways between the venues.
Ramani —
Dfyn is a venue, a city. Router is the connecting infra. Dfyn provides trading and swapping like traditional exchange and in the future like lending venues. There will be a node of Dfyns as well as other third party venues that Router will plug into. A bit like the hub and spoke model.
Divij — Firstly, Congratulations on Launching GalaxyFarm and achieving 2.5 Million TVL within a day of launch. What was the idea behind GalaxyFarm and how does it work?
Ramani —
The idea was to get a few different projects to port over to an L2 Dex at the same time, and let each community benefit from all the other communities. Given the nature of blockchain where the sum of 1+1 is greater than 2, this has been a grand success.
Preiyeshu —
Galaxy Farm is a Layer-2 yield farm based on Dfyn.network, i.e. the projects and participants will have to add liquidity on the Dfyn.network to be able to participate in the L2 GalaxyFarm which will introduce gasless farming for this ecosystem. Projects from the Polygon and Ethereum ecosystem will be participating in GalaxyFarm to reward their communities in the cross-project farming experiment.
The project will run in cohorts and there will be a minimum of 3 cohorts. A project can be part of 1 or many cohorts. Assuming, there will be 6 projects in each cohort. Router and Polygon will be participating in each cohort, which leaves space for 4 projects in each cohort.
The special thing about these farms is that users will be able to stake just 1 LP pair and earn rewards of 6 different tokens at the same time.
For example, the user staking ROUTE will earn tokens of ROUTE, POLYGON and 4 other cohort participant projects at the same time. The rewards will be distributed in equal ratio. For example, 60$ rewards will mean 10$ of ROUTE and 10$ of POLYGON and so on.
Divij — How is GalaxyFarm different from any other LP Staking and Farming?
Ramani —
To our knowledge, there is nothing quite like Galaxy farm on Dfyn that brings it all together — L2 on a snappy, seamless UI, no lock-ins, liquidity also earning fees through liquidity provision on the AMM DEX Dfyn. Also these are great projects we are talking about, all top teams.
Lastly, there is the upside of plugging into the emerging Router liquidity aggregation infra across chains — imagine being able to seamlessly port between BSC and Matic for instance, we are not too far away from that. Also, there is the impending Dfyn token around the corner, which as you can expect from the current market for exchange tokens, is widely anticipated
Divij — Before we move on to the Community Round. Can you share some sneak peak of features being added in the next Cohort ?
Ramani —
More interesting projects for sure, and some competitions to incentivize various communities to increase participation and liquidity on Dfyn. Most of the dev work is around the crosschain bridge which we hope to have by Cohort 3 or 4, at which point it will get really interesting.
SEGMENT 2
Community Question 1 — What are the objectives and goals that you plan to achieve in the forthcoming future? Can you please tell us the motivation and benefits for investors to hold $Route in long term?
Ramani —
We believe Router liquidity aggregation will be an important component of the emerging multichain ecosystem. To that end, definitely a lot of the value created will aggregate at the token, which is Route.
Community Question 2 — Are you is a global project or local project? Can anybody anywhere use Your project without any restrictions?
###Preisyeshu —
It’s a global project like rest of DeFi ! No boundry.
Community Question 3 — DeFi, Staking and Yield Farming are hot topics right now in our Crypto Space, My question is, did you make this project only for the short term because of these hot topics? Do you have a long-term plan for this project?
Raamani —
We have been in crypto for a long time now, in fact we built the world’s first stablecoin DEX called Fordex, in collaboration with 0x, way back in 2018–19. However, we were a bit ahead of our times. So Defi is not something we stumbled into recently.
Community Question 4 — A big problem for many Defi projects seems to be that when you start farming, the price goes down because people are emptying to put liquidity into the farm. Will there be an incentive to retain and not just farm and dump?
Prieyeshu —
We will have single asset staking for our native token with better yields.
Community Question 5 — Most DeFi projects especially those ones offering yield farming are driven up by hype and scarcity, so when the hype dies the project dies. What’s the key to sustaining Your Project yield farming ?
Preiyeshu —
We are partnering with new projects which agree to distribute their tokens to dfyn stakers. It’s a win win for everyone and this way we can do yield farming without emptying our wallets.
Community Question 6 — With all the yield farming hype, a lot of tokens are offering rIdiculously high APY on liquidity staking. How does Galaxy compare, and why would an investor choose it over other yield farming opportunities?
Ramani —
L2 experience, ability to get into an emerging exchange on the ground floor, pedigree and experience of team and partners.
Community Question 7 — Is there any other benefit for those who will participate in your pre sales?
Ramani —
Router is done. Dfyn private sale is done, we will be announcing some public sales on a couple of platforms shortly
Community Question 8 — Assets on matic network now — but when i go over to dfyn exchange to swap out eth for matic (to stake router/matic), the price impact is showing 9% any ideas?
Ramani —
ROUTER/MATIC liquidity is still growing, try the Router USDC and Matic USDC pools, there will be less slippage, alternatively you can try to execute in smaller quantities. Easy enough given no gas costs and instant execution in fact you can even arb with other matic venues and even Uniswap sometimes.
Divij — That’s all Folks!! We would like to thank the Router Protocol team for an amazing AMA and wish them the very best for their future developments.
Ramani —
It has been a pleasure engaging with the Razor community and getting to know Divij and Hrishikesh and the team. Hopefully we will be working more closely as communities to build out what is surely an exciting time in decentralization.