KoffeeSwap AMA Recap | August 6
Check out the first AMA with the head developer of Koffeeswap!
The lead developer of KoffeeSwap, Koffee Barista answered community questions that users could send in via a form in an AMA on Friday, 6th of August 2021 at 17:00 UTC in the KoffeeSwap Telegram channel.
The contents of this AMA have been categorized for your convenience. If you would like to read the AMA in the original order, you may CLICK HERE to be redirected to the transcript in telegram.
Introduction
Tim (Community Mod)
First things first, Koffee Barista , please introduce yourself.
Koffee Barista
Hello! As many of you may know, I am the lead developer for KoffeeSwap. I am one of the two primary developers along with our infrastructure engineer.
I’ve been doing web development for over 10 years at this point, and have been involved in the Crypto space since 2017.
KoffeeShop
Tim
Thanks for the introduction. We’re going to start off with a pretty popular question. What exactly is KoffeeShop?
Koffee Barista
So many of you may have guessed what this is already. It’s supposed to be a token launchpad with pre-defined contracts and locked liquidity and other things baked in. I realize that the roadmap says this is a novel idea, and it was as far as we can tell when we drummed up the idea. But it looks like dxmint from the dxsale team went live in late may, so novel might not be the best description for it anymore.
Tim
That’s fair. Still seems like it could be a very useful idea. Anymore insight into how that would benefit people investing in KoffeeSwap?
Koffee Barista
Right, there would obviously be a fee to use the service as tokens would then be listed on our platform. We could very well have that fee be paid in KOFFEE and we can also offer traditional launchpad functionality like having KOFFEE holders have first access.
Tim
That sounds great! As that seems a little bit off for now, let’s move on to the next question.
Burn | Buy-Back
Tim
Do you have a burn program and if so do you have any details on it?
Koffee Barista
There is currently no burn program in place for the KOFFEE token. We have a fixed supply token so we’re trying to work on an economic model that doesn’t require a constant burn to help outpace minting. Obviously we do have excess tokens that can be burned if we feel that our total supply is too high.
Tim
What about the reserved tokens for liquidity?
Koffee Barista
I’ve seen the suggestions that we start buying back and burning instead of trying to add more liquidity to the pool. One of the items we will be working on in the near future once the August roadmap items are finished is automating the way exchange fees are collected. If anyone is unaware of how DEX fees typically work when using the Uniswap model, the DEX actually gets a liquidity position in the tokens which has to be “cashed” out at times. As soon as we have that automated model architected we can share more intimate details about how those processes will work.
Tim
Thanks for the detailed answers there.
Tim
Why is the company not buying back KOFFEE to help with the price?
Koffee Barista
Everything you see on KoffeeSwap has been self-funded by the team themselves and we have not collected any funding from KoffeeSwap at this time. We are fully covering the operating expenses of running the site at the moment. So the short answer is, that KoffeeSwap doesn’t have funds allocated for purchasing the KOFFEE token. That is going to be up to the investors out there.
Dex Wars
Tim
This next question is also a pretty popular one: How does KoffeeSwap plan to stay competitive with the other KCC DEXes?
Koffee Barista
That’s probably one of the biggest questions. Our whole ethos from the beginning has been to give traders the tools that they want. As someone who has spent countless hours trading on DEXs and talking to other traders, we wanted to eliminate some of the frustrations that come along with using a DEX compared to a CEX. This is probably pretty obvious when looking at our Pro interface, it’s clearly modeled after what you would find on a CEX.
We plan to continue with that model and continue to provide those features and analytics that traders look for when making decisions. The August roadmap is mostly focused on building out analytics and getting that data to the user in a convenient and user-friendly way. Trying to avoid having the trader move from site to site just to get all the information they need to make an informed decision.
Charts
Tim
Here’s an easy one. Could you add a 1 week interval to the chart timeframes?
Koffee Barista
That shouldn’t be too hard. The way our price history server works is that it generates all timeframes so that we don’t have to constantly parse all transactions. I will ask our infrastructure engineer what level of effort that would take. Off the top of my head, I would think we could convert the daily bars into weekly bars as a one time database job of some sort.
Staking | Premium Features | Liquidity
Tim
Will KoffeeSwap have an auto-compounding staking KOFFEE pool?
Koffee Barista
I’ve seen this one asked quite often and I am going to take some time to answer this one.
Short answer is no. Mostly because we don’t have any plans to ever offer single-asset staking of KOFFEE outside of what we offer for unlocking premium features.
We would much prefer to reward liquidity providers with the limited number of tokens we have. The DEX will not survive without liquidity so we feel that it is most important to reward our liquidity providers.
Tim
Will there ever be any other staking in the future?
Koffee Barista
For KOFFEE? It’s unlikely. Since the KOFFEE token is not used to secure a network like you would find in a proof-of-stake protocol or chain, we don’t need to have KOFFEE staked with validators in order to secure the network as we are a DEX operating on a network. I would imagine at some point there could be a change to KOFFEE also acting as a governance token, at which point there could be another use for staking KOFFEE.
Anyone participating during the testnet probably remembers that we had single-asset staking for KCS itself as we run one of the validators for the testnet and we would like to continue that into mainnet if we are allowed to do so. The KCC team has yet to release details about their mainnet validator program.
This is the main reason why the section of the site where you unlock premium features is called Staking. That is the same section where you would find validator KCS staking on the testnet.
Tim
Can the website picture be updated to show a picture of the exchange with premium features enabled?
Koffee Barista
I’m going to assume that is the one on koffeeswap.finance? We can update that! That page is mostly there as a placeholder for lost souls who somehow managed to reach it after seeing our docs.koffeeswap.finance site.
Tim
Here’s the question that most people are probably waiting for here…
Will you add KCS/KOFFEE, KOFFEE/USDT and KOFFEE/USDC brews?
Koffee Barista
How many times was this question asked? Just curious. I’ll start typing my reply in the mean time.
Tim
You’d be surprised, it was only on the submitted questions twice.
Koffee Barista
We are pretty big believers in sticking with the plans that we outlined and I know that came as a knock to the community. We do have to adapt on the fly and this is one of the reasons we went with the farming contracts that we did. Now that we have hit our milestone and seen the results we are much more confident in being able to make a pivot as necessary.
Once the current brew contracts near their end which is the KCS/USDT and KCS/USDC brews, we will in fact be launching KCS/KOFFEE, KOFFEE/USDC and KOFFEE/USDT. Our goal has always been to prioritize stablecoin liquidity and it seems we can do both, provide what the community wants and what the team’s desire has been.
Tim
What will happen to the current brews?
Koffee Barista
We will still provide some rewards for KCS/USDT and KCS/USDC as we need those to maintain accurate pricing info for KCS itself. Our primary focus is going to change to rewarding the KOFFEE pools though.
Tim
What if someone wants to make a transaction from stable coins to KCS? Will they be able to utilize the liquidity in the KOFFEE pools?
Koffee Barista
Of course! The DEX should be able to route the transactions automatically through the most liquid pairs, so a transaction may route from USDT -> KOFFEE -> KCS and will be mostly transparent to the trader.
Development | Metrics
Tim
What’s the current development status?
Koffee Barista
We are still actively working on KoffeeSwap even if it may not appear to be that way. Sometimes we spend time working on something and it just doesn’t work out how we would like, or there is some blocker preventing us from launching it. A good example of this is WalletConnect functionality. It was working on the testnet but not mainnet. It took us some time to finally realize that the bug preventing its functionality was not something with our code, but the fact that the mainnet KCC nodes return a chain ID of 1 instead of 321 and so it fails to connect to KCC. We may have to fork walletconnect’s client SDK if this is something that KCC does not plan to change.
Tim
Does the KoffeeSwap team monitor how many projects are launching on their platform vs the others?
Koffee Barista
The answer is yes. We have a graph node that we operate that lets us see how many pairs have been added to KoffeeSwap. And I can actually take a look right now to see what we are currently at.
There are currently 3974 pairs that have had liquidity provided to them at some point, and there have been over 492,217 transactions processed by our router contract.
As far as how we compare to other DEXs, we were greatly outpacing the others the last time I checked. The amount of projects launching on KCC has slowed down quite a bit over the recent weeks. That’s not going to stop us from continuing to work with the developers that do make their way to KCC.
Tim
We had someone ask if we can have a premium feature that automatically DCAs (Dollar Cost Averages).
Koffee Barista
That’s an interesting question. That sounds more like getting into the algorithmic trading bot territory. While building a grid bot of some sort would be interesting I’m not sure we can commit to something like that. While I personally have dabbled with that in the CEX world before, I’m not sure how much it differs for the DEX space.
Tim
Trading bots would be exciting! I would expect that we would see something else like limit orders as a precursor to that though no?
Koffee Barista
I’ve seen limit orders mentioned quite often around here. I don’t want to promise anything at this point, but it has caught the interest of the team. It’s something we are going to investigate after completing more of the August roadmap.
Audit | Roadmap
Tim
How secure is the KoffeeSwap platform and are there any audits of the smart contracts powering it?
Koffee Barista
I thought this question would be coming up sooner or later. At this time, the only contract we’re using that hasn’t been audited in the past is the one for the feature staking. Everything to do with the brews and the actual exchange itself has been audited multiple times in the past. I am confident in stating that the exchange is secure to use.
Tim
I thought there was some issue with the brew contracts that was delaying them because they needed to be modified by the team?
Koffee Barista
Yes and no, and this is what caused the biggest delays in getting the liquidity mining program up. After fixing the site performance and getting the premium feature platform ready we started working on liquidity mining. Our original plan was to use a modified MasterChef contract that worked with fixed supply tokens. That way we would be able to offer the same contract and interface that people seem to be most comfortable with in the current defi space.
We were successful, and had a working product, but during that time we were also trialing using just the old tried and true synthetix staking contract which you may have seen on Uniswap way in the past or on platforms like Pickle Finance, Avalanche (Pangolin), etc. And we honestly just liked how much more control we had with those contracts. Being able to adjust rewards on the fly and such seemed like a much better solution.
The downside is obviously that a different contract is required for each brew, but that’s not that big of an issue on this chain with how low the transaction fees are. Contract deployment on KCC is nowhere near as expensive as it is on ETH where using MasterChef is almost a necessity just to not burn all your funding on contract deployment.
Tim
Is the roadmap on track?
Koffee Barista
Yes, now I know we cut it real close on the liquidity mining deadline. Like literally the last day, but that’s not what we want to be known for!
We have slowly added some of the August roadmap items throughout the lifetime of the project. I personally think in my completely biased opinion that we offer the best trading experience of any DEX out there.
NFT
Tim
Could we ever expect NFTs to be a part of the KoffeeSwap ecosystem?
Koffee Barista
It’s something we jotted down on a Kanban board before we even launched, but haven’t had time to revisit that concept at this point. I’ve had a few conversations with people about it and it’s something we still don’t have a concrete answer for. Something about latte art NFTs to stay on brand, but I think that little tag line is as far as we’ve made it.
IDO/IFO Offerings
Tim
Will there be any IDO offerings or partnerships?
Koffee Barista
We do like to collaborate whenever it makes sense for both projects. It’s been a little tough here in the beginning of KCC. As you all know the vast majority of major projects have been DEXs which is a bit hard to collaborate. But when we do see a project that is worth partnering with we will absolutely take the opportunity. You may have noticed that we coordinated with KuStarter to have them on our default list as soon as they launched their liquidity. They offered something that KoffeeSwap just doesn’t have at this moment.
Tim
Are there any plans to attract other tokens to provide liquidity and allow us to farm their tokens by staking Koffee?
Koffee Barista
lol, I believe this is the initial farm offering concept?
I think it would have to be more liquidity token staking which I guess could be possible. Like if there was a project XYZ and there was staking of KOFFEE/XYZ LP tokens that rewarded XYZ in exchange for being in our list of third-party brews.
Kind of like hosted farms in a way. I think this goes along with my previous take on partnerships.
We would be happy to entertain partnership ideas with any serious projects on KCC
International
Tim
This is the last question: How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in countries where English is not spoken, do you have local communities to help them learn about your project?
Koffee Barista
That’s a tough one for us as we are clearly English speaking on the team. We would love to see some more unofficial communities pop up and I think that has been said in our channel before. We will absolutely support anyone who wants to run a community in another language and link to them. As far as I know, and Tim you would probably know better, none currently exist.
Tim
I don’t believe so.
Koffee Barista
What should someone do if they want to start one?
Tim
Just reach out to any of the moderators here in chat. We would be happy to assist!
Let me check to see if there were any late entries into the question pool before I unlock the channel.
There is one. Are there going to be wrapped stable coins on KoffeeSwap?
Koffee Barista
I’m not exactly sure what they mean by wrapped stable coins, but the KCC team recently updated their bridge with a bunch of new pegged tokens. We haven’t updated our default list to include any of them as we don’t currently have liquidity on any of them. We felt it would be disingenuous to list un-tradable tokens in our default list. We are interested in seeing where this plays out and if there is interest in supporting the tokens which are primarily liquid on a different chain. Is KCC in a position to be a one stop shop for all tokens? These are things we are always looking into.
Closing Statements
Tim
Fair enough. Do you want to make any closing comments before I open up the channel?
Koffee Barista
I just want to say thanks to the KoffeeSwap community. I see a lot of familiar faces that were around when we were just a plain jane looking swap on testnet and I greatly appreciate you sticking around!
I know that I may not be as active as I was during that time, but trust that I do read pretty much every message in the chat. I do love to answer tech questions, but Tim is also pretty technical so he tends to snipe the answers before me haha. The crunch from the time of the big hype wave to now has been intense. More than anyone on the team ever expected, so I personally haven’t been able to focus as much on community outreach myself. We are however in a much better position to react to the community’s requests now and will hopefully be able to increase community engagement. I’d like to think that this hour and a half long AMA shows that we are seriously committed to this project!! Thanks everyone for all the questions and showing your interest in the development of this project.
Tim
Thank you Koffee Barista for taking the time to interact with all of us here today!!
Transcription by Phillip
