Finn 0:42 Hello and welcome to The Ether. Today is Tuesday, February 15th 2022. This episode of The Ether is brought to you by WeFund. WeFund is a community crowdfunding cross-chain incubator on Terra and it's the first launchpad that implements a milestone funding release system to protect investors. All money raised for projects is deposited in Anchor Protocol and it's refundable, and all decisions are based on community voting power. WeFund is community focused and designed to be a user friendly experience for both project creators and investors. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the Telegram for more information. Links are in the show notes and check them out online at wefund.app. This episode of The Ether is also brought to you by Luart. Luart is the first gamified NFT platform built on the Terra network. Luart provides a seamless minting and trading experience all while earning you rewards just for being a user. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the community in the Discord server for the most up-to-date news and announcements regarding all the hot new NFT launches, platform upgrades, and new projects hitting the secondary marketplace. Are you ready to #PutYourHelmetOn and join the movement? Find out more luart.io. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. Today on The Ether we have the Orbital Command Neptune Finance Space hosted by Rebel Defi. Let's take a listen. Rebel Defi 2:03 Normally when we do these we have one of us... Oh no, there's Finn there. Oh, he's changed his profile pic. Hi, Finn. Thank you very much for taking care of this for us. Yeah, often if we record it with the Twitter recording and then Finn sort of tries to clean it up afterwards. He tells us how rubbish the Twitter recording is, so much better if he's able to do it for us from the beginning. Thanks for that. Okay, so... Oh, Guardians isn't... Are we expecting Guardians from the start or do you think he might drop in? Mat 2:33 Yeah, he's gonna join for sure. He's probably in between a soup and some medicine. He's at home, he's a bit sick, our friend. Rebel Defi 2:43 Oh, no. Well, I've had COVID twice. First time wasn't all that pleasureable. Second time wasn't too bad at all. But I think got some extra time off work for the privilege so it was okay. So we can just have a little bit of banter until he comes on. Are you guys, do you actually live close by or are you sort of working remotely? Mat 3:08 No, we have an office. We're in Canada, in Vancouver. And depending... It's pretty decentralized in a way that we can work from home or from here. But when you're in person it just gets the ideas thrown around a little bit faster, a little bit easier. So we try to come to the office as much as possible. Rebel Defi 3:27 100%. Yeah. And usually when we do these things, the sort of standard format is welcome you on as guests, and I'll throw out a few questions maybe for the first 20 minutes, half hour or so, and then invite audience members up to sort of share their questions or comments about what they've heard. And then sort of go for maybe 45 minutes to an hour ish. Usually sort of got a hard stop after the hour. Does that sound okay with you guys? Mat 3:59 Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. It's been a while since we wanted to connect a little bit with with our Discord people. So thanks for getting the ball rolling. We're just all way too busy, head in the code and trying to figure everything out. So we appreciate that kind of leverage there. Rebel Defi 4:15 Awesome. Awesome. And yeah, I mean, talking of Discord, I really enjoy your Discord, it's not full of just nonsense. There's quite a lot of intelligent people there, obviously, as well as yourselves, but it seems like quite a nice community. Mat 4:32 I appreciate that. Thanks. Rebel Defi 4:34 Okay, we've got Guardians in the house on the Neptune account. I've just invited Guardian up as a speaker. Are you guys on Apple phones or do you have Android? Speaker 2 4:47 I'm on Apple. Mat 4:48 I'm on Android. Rebel Defi 4:50 Because we sometimes have problems with... People with Android sometimes have problems and get booted out occasionally. Mat 4:59 Yeah, I don't know what you speak of, it didn't take me about 20 minutes just to get my Bluetooth headset working for this. No, no. Rebel Defi 5:06 You're certainly coming through loud and clear. And Guardian, maybe you could request to speak. Oh, he's dropped out. No! Wow, we've got Zirillian on the call. I'm going to invite Zirillian up. Rebel Defi 5:22 For people that aren't and the Neptune Discord, Zirillian is one of the sort of key members there answering loads of questions from newer members. So Zirillian... Mat 5:33 Zirillian is our unsung hero of the Discord. Thanks, man. Rebel Defi 5:38 Yeah, 100%. So I'm sure you'll have some sort of educated questions/comments that you can add into the discussion. Right, seeing as we're sort of just after eight o'clock, I think now would be a good time to start. Your host is Rebel Defi on the Orbital Command account. And we've got three members of the Neptune Finance team. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves. But yeah, would you like to just say who you are, and maybe then talk about how you came together? Mat 6:05 Yeah, I'm going to go first. I'm Mat, I've been in it and coding for both web and tooling and infrastructures for quite a long time, over 25 years now. So getting into DeFi was just the next challenge. It's just learning a lot of new stuff and getting the hands dirty into everything that is blockchain. It's super interesting. So good, big background that fits in well. And currently, I'm the lead off-chain software developer. DrCisco 6:35 And as for me, my name Cisco. I have a PhD in computer science. I've been also doing engineering for a while, mainly C++. And yeah, I'm now working on smart contracts on-chain stuff for Neptune. Rebel Defi 6:53 Thanks, guys. Guardian. Are you able... Yep, unmuted. Neptune Finance 6:57 Yeah, just to make sure you guys can hear me all right. Rebel Defi 6:59 Yep. Loud and clear. Neptune Finance 7:01 Great. My name is Keegan and I'm the project lead for Neptune Finance. I was the one who came up with the idea originally and brought the team together. Rebel Defi 7:08 Awesome. And that kind of segues into the next question. Did you guys know each other before Neptune? Or were you kind of brought together because of Neptune? Neptune Finance 7:19 Yeah, we actually knew each other before Neptune. Were actually all local to each other, here in Vancouver, Canada. And I helped these guys get into DeFi before we came up with the idea of Neptune. So we got into the Terra ecosystem pretty early kind of when Mirror Protocol was the only protocol that actually existed in Terra. And shortly after, Anchor came about. And as we played with Anchor and watch the crypto market dip in mid May during the black swan event, that's when we came up with the idea for Neptune Finance. We saw a lot of opportunity to take out loans in Anchor but there's definitely a better way to do it to automate the liquidation protection so you don't have to be constantly manually checking when you have to rebalance your loan. Rebel Defi 8:04 Yeah, 100% that can certainly be quite scary for newer members. I mean, I remember when I first came to Terra maybe a little bit after you guys, but certainly before the May crash, I wasn't really borrowing much on Anchor at all, just because I didn't fully understand what was going on. Which was a bit of a shame because in those days the APRs for borrowing were crazy. So certainly missed out a little bit there. Could I ask why you choose Terra? I mean, are you doing DeFi on other chains or what is it about Terra that sort of attracts you? Neptune Finance 8:44 Terra is actually our first exploration into DeFi. And I explored a lot of other blockchain before we stumbled upon Terra. And I think the most attractive aspects of Terra were definitely... Mirror was very unique at the time and really cool to play with. And then Anchor came along and this 20% interest rate was mind blowing, but most importantly, it was the UST stablecoin. The idea of this decentralized stablecoin that can't be controlled or seized by a government, that was extremely attractive. So we first started playing around with Terra when we saw this opportunity in Anchor. And for a while we none of us had any kind of Rust development experience. So, it was about a month of dabbling to see how feasible it was going to be to start developing Neptune Finance. And the experience we bring in terms of our coding background, picking up Rust was a very simple project. And we actually played around with the backends of blockchain as well. Mat was the one who started dabbling with that and picked it up immediately and then momentum really picked up from there. So it was a quick process into learning how to develop on Terra. Rebel Defi 9:56 Awesome, and I think it gives us a little bit of an insight into the product development lifecycle that... I mean, you only came up with the idea for Neptune towards the end of May and you're already so far along with your development. So I mean, it obviously is... Even though it's like, everyone keeps asking on the Discord, "Wen airdrop? Wen Neptune?" I mean, you've obviously been working for not that long and you're making some real good progress according to all the stuff you've been posting on Discord. So yeah, if anyone's not in the Neptune Finance Discord, and you're liking what you're hearing tonight, definitely check them out. And we'll share that Discord link from the Orbital Command Twitter account. I was just going over your Twitter account today. And there's some big words on the main page saying that Neptune is going to offer collateralized loan based, algorithmically balanced, automated yield farming, I think I sort of get it, but do you want to explain the words? Or explain the project, even? Sorry. Neptune Finance 11:04 it's quite the mouthful of a sentence we put up there. And it was an impressive eyecatcher. But to simplify it, is we leverage yield farming protocols. So there's a few of these kind of applications that exist across DeFi. And they do quite well for you to be able to leverage into an asset by using collateral or perhaps over leveraging to get into a particular asset. But what they lack, kind of like a lot of leveraged systems or collateralized systems in DeFi, is still a lot of manual interaction. You have to be constantly checking to be sure if your position is close to liquidation, you kind of have to have price alerts set up to make sure the collaterals that you're using aren't dropping in value. So the automated part of our system, what we're offering, is when Neptune leverages into an asset, our off-chain systems, which are constantly monitoring our smart contracts in our Neptune systems, are checking to see if the value of your collateral is fluctuating. So if it's ever dropping, we can quickly move the investments that we have, so all the money locked inside our investment, from the investment to start repaying the debt against collateral. So that means if in our system, you have 10, LUNA, and the value of that LUNA is constantly fluctuating, you won't actually be losing LUNA if the price of LUNA starts to come down. And typically, you would be liquidated in these leverage systems. So we kind of play to DeFi's characteristics in that we want to make sure we can move as quickly as the volatility can in the market and protect a user's position from liquidation. DrCisco 12:52 I could also add that we basically collect the rewards from borrowing as well as our investment strategies. And not only that we pay that and keep it all balanced, but we also compound back into the bAsset that was deposited with us. Rebel Defi 13:10 To be honest, that's one of the things I find most exciting about your project. And maybe I'm sort of skipping ahead a bit here, because I would like to return to some of the stuff Keegan was talking about, about how you sort of monitor prices of bLUNA and such. In fact, maybe we should start with that. Were you saying that the price monitoring software, is that is that off-chain or did I miss hear? Neptune Finance 13:34 Yeah, I'll actually hand off to Mat about that. He's been the one building the systems for it. Mat 13:38 Yeah, yeah, our first... It is off-chain. Oracle systems across all blockchains has to start there. We're gonna see hopefully better improvements over time with this, with Chainlink and then Band Protocol and stuff like that. But right now, we need to monitor and have oracles off-chain that feeds live price to our monitoring software. One issue with Tendermint Protocol in general, is that the voting system happens every 30 seconds. So you have a price update every 30 seconds, right, of LUNA. That price fluctuates way faster than that. And there's a whole concept behind monitoring what's happening on the markets, on very various DEX and markets to feed our contract a much more up to date price, which we'll call front-running the oracle, to be able to adjust the liquidation protection systems in place on-chain. And we just need to apply this everywhere on all the bAssets that we're going to be monitoring. Rebel Defi 14:35 Awesome. So just so I got this clear in my head, you're saying that your software can see price changes before the validators on the Terra network? Mat 14:48 Yeah actually they see it as fast as validators because validators are connected. All validators, 130 validators on the blockchain, on Terra actually are aware of the price the same way Neptune's off-chain software is. The thing is they vote for that price to save it, to add it to the chain once every 30 seconds, that's when the voting happens. That's what fixes the price of LUNA on-chain. And this is what is being used by the Anchor liquidation smart contract to get the price of the bAsset and then execute liquidations, or accept liquidation requests or not. So by doing this every block, basically we monitor multiple times per seconds. We do abuse our nodes, I won't lie, but it's just a good system, a good protection system. So we do feed that live price DEX and external markets that monitor the price of LUNA have what we call WebSocket connection. So they basically feed you, live, the price. And the same way validators are, except instead of voting like our validator do every 30 seconds, we feed that price to our smart contract on demand multiple times per second. Rebel Defi 16:02 Okay, so that can certainly then help protect, well, me or any other investors with depositing our bLUNA into Neptune. Neptune Finance 16:13 And I'll just quickly add on top of that. In conjunction with these off chain monitoring systems that feed prices live into the blockchain contracts, these off-chain sources are all coming from exchanges where a bulk of LUNA is actually going through the exchanges and fluctuating the price and it comes up with an average. And that's what's fed into the contracts. But we also take into consideration the price at what LUNA is trading at inside of the Terra ecosystem. So when we have to deleverage an asset and buy back LUNA or swap it around or... For Ethereum or any kind of bAsset that we're using, we have to check what kind of prices we can actually get for those assets inside of LPs in the Terra ecosystem. So not only are we using price feeds from external sources, we are also using prices in the Terra ecosystem. And we do a check across all these prices to see what LUNA is trading at so we can find the lowest possible price. And we use that lowest possible price to determine the leverage that we take. So at any point, we leverage down to the lowest possible price that LUNA is currently reporting at to be as safe as we can be. Rebel Defi 17:24 Awesome. I love this idea of like maximizing profits with maximum safety, kind of a win-win. And also what Cisco was saying, that the rewards that this system is going to kick out are not just in a random token. Well, I'm not saying the Neptune token will be random, but actually rewarding us in the assets that we deposit. I think that's gonna be really attractive to a lot of investors. And yeah, from your Discord I've noticed one thing that you spoke about is that you're focusing more on the project than your own Neptune token, the NEPT token. And I find that really interesting that rather than just launch a token as soon as your product launches, you're not going to do that. Can you just explain a little bit about why you've taken that decision? Neptune Finance 17:24 Yeah, a couple important points to touch on there. The first one, which you just mentioned about us compounding rewards back into what the users hold. So when we approached building Neptune Finance, we very much approach it from the perspective of a user, what's best for the user, what do users want most, and the assets that are going to be deposited into our system so that users can actually deposit through into our smart contracts are big assets like bLUNA, and bETH, eventually bSOL, and bAVAX, and all these different collateral types that will be used by Anchor. And typically someone who's holding, say LUNA, ultimately wants more LUNA. And when you jump into these smaller DeFi applications, and you deposit LUNA and you start farming, and you get farming rewards, those farming rewards are generally just dumped on the market for more LUNA. So people manually compounding that position. And that puts a lot of sell pressure on that particular farming reward. So we wanted to make this extremely easy for the user, and to maximize the interest rates that you can obtain. So by default, all of our farming positions will autocompound back into the original assets offered. So if you deposit LUNA, all the rewards from that leveraged position are going to be turned back into LUNA. And we do this as frequent as every 10 minutes so you're going to get the highest APY possible. Neptune Finance 19:43 And then that also played into when we launched our product and what we're doing with the token. So when we started creating the system, it was very obvious that our system isn't dependent on our token. The reward token doesn't have to be there to guarantee success of Neptune. We don't have to pump out a bunch of reward tokens to make sure the interest rates are high enough for there to be a lot of users in our platform. And I think that's really beneficial to our platform, it's definitely going to show that the technology at its core has use and it gives good interest rates. So it was a lot smaller of a decision for us to start developing the product first, putting a lot of work into that, which we have, and kind of put the token on the backburner. We've done all the research and the fundamentals of the token and get into tokenomics of... But we wanted to get the product done right first, and we wanted users to interact with the product first so they get a good feel for what Neptune Finance and its product line will actually be before they decided to jump in and invest into a token. There's a lot of scenes across DeFi, where projects launch a token first with a lot of hype, and then their product comes out and it's kind of a not a great product release. So ultimately, we want to nail a product release first so that users can make a more educated investment decision in coming into the Neptune token. Rebel Defi 21:13 Absolutely. And I mean, even if a project comes out with an amazing project, but is releasing the token at the same time, as you said at the start, if we're earning rewards in essentially a farm token, people will dump. And then that's going to put instant sell pressure on the token. So it's almost like yeah, regardless of how good the project is, I don't necessarily think that that's... Well, not that I'm a tokenomics expert, but I can see that there might be a real, good reason for delaying the token launch, like you said, just so we can see how epic Neptune's is going to be and then hopefully that will then inculcate some value into the token. So about the token as well then, maybe jump ahead a little bit. And I'm staking a little bit of LUNA to the Neptune Finance validator. And one of the reasons for that, I think it's quite nice to support the project but I'm probably thinking about myself a little bit more. You've offered a special airdrop for stakers to your validator. And I know you can't speak for other projects, but it kind of surprises me that other projects, or not many other projects run their own validators. So can you speak a little bit about why you took the decision to start a validator and whether you think it's been a worthwhile venture? Neptune Finance 22:33 Yeah, I'll actually hand off to Mat for that. He's been managing the validator since the beginning. Mat 22:38 Yeah. Yeah, I think a validator was important for us to get our hands in there, to have skin in the game. to have a deep understanding of everything that's happening on-chain, and to just participate, right. We're we're in for quite a long run. I think that our first line of products is just that, the first line of products. We have a lot of ideas that we keep up the sleeves right now. To have a validator means that you want to participate in making it work, making it work well. It's not easy to get in that top 130 when you just start. I remember when we just opened up and realized, oh, people can delegate without a Ledger, I think. And eventually TFL updated their Terra Station app right when I was done writing an extra software for users to be able to delegate, but that's another lost many hours story. Why are projects not creating a validator? I think it's mostly because it's not easy to start and get into that tough 130. I wish I knew more about why we're not at 200, 250, or 300. Like it was initially promised in the Terra docs documentation. I'm not sure exactly what happened to that, but we haven't seen any increase above 130 in quite a while. I think it would be nice to have more of that. I think it demonstrates trust and hope in the chain and it can only make it better. Rebel Defi 24:06 Yeah, I agree with those comments are 100%. I mean, yeah, we're in decentralized finance. So I think the more decentralized we can get, the better. We got a really interesting question on Twitter that came through just before the space and it was... See if I can find it here. I'll paraphrase, I can't remember exactly the exact wording but it was something to do with will the NEPT token airdrop for staking to the Neptune validator be as underwhelming as some other promised mega airdrops from other projects? Neptune Finance 24:47 Yeah, I actually saw that question too. I had to chuckle at that one. Yeah. Well, I'll touch on the airdrop with the validator. So one of the things we wanted to importantly do. When we launched a validator and we want to start participating in the network, we saw the success that Orion had with promising an airdrop, and we thought that was a pretty good marketing strategy for us to get our awareness out there, but also to give back to the people who support us through our validator. So, we wanted to do something similar, but we wanted to do it in a better way. So our airdrop, the accessibility to it is still active now. So people can still participate and start earning the airdrop. But the way that we've gone about it is issuing the airdrop based on a time wide scale, so that basically every second, every block, we are checking who has delegated to the Neptune Finance validator and how much they've delegated. And by tracking this data, we can actually promise an airdrop to every user who's currently and previously delegated to us. So with this system, people don't have to lock up their LUNA and keep it locked up there. Because in DeFi, it's really hard to guarantee timelines so we can't say when the airdrop's coming up, we wanted to make sure any user at any point could remove their LUNA and sell it or do whatever they wanted to do with it and still be applicable to earn the airdropp. Neptune Finance 26:17 So this system that we created is quite simple, but it's also quite effective. And it's definitely a more fair use case for issuing an airdrop. So no one has to be stressed about leaving their LUNA in our system. And it's also been great for us because it's encouraged a lot of people to delegate to us. And we take quite a small commission, but that commission is actually been really good for helping us move forward the development, all the funds from the validator have gone directly in towards development. We're building some public dashboards right now. And that's being paid for by the funds from the validator. But yeah, the validator's been really helpful in speeding up development by covering a lot of expenses. So we're really happy that we actually got in pretty early with the validator. And it was our first step into the Terra ecosystem, and we learned a lot from launching our validator quite fast. So it was a great learning experience. And we just want to make sure it's a good service we keep providing. Rebel Defi 27:17 Absolutely, I mean, by staking to your validator or any other validator, it's not like we're losing money. I mean, we're getting rewards from delegating. So the NEPT airdrop, that's totally on top of our standard staking rewards. So that's pretty cool. Neptune Finance 27:38 Yeah, exactly. And with the airdrop as well, a quick brief of what we're trying to do with our tokenomics. We're trying to target what is a consistent problem across DeFi, with these ridiculously high inflation rates, and a lot of protocols, kind of like DEXes, is a good example, they have to pump out a lot of reward tokens to incentivize liquidity because a DEX can't operate without enough depth in their pools. Whereas a platform like Neptune Finance, we don't rely on depth to be successful. We can have a very small amount of users and the platform would still work the same as if we have 100 million users. So what we're doing with the Neptune token is we are targeting a low inflation rate by issuing a large amount of the tokens at the beginning, so at our genesis. So typically, a lot of new projects will issue a token through a DEX offering or something similar, and they'll hand at about 5% of the supply, and then use another 20%-30% as reward tokens. So there's a lot of new tokens constantly coming on the market being dumped to maximize that person's personal position. So we're getting a lot out at the beginning and giving out less as rewards to help that inflation rate stay slow, so that ideally we would see a more consistent price increase in the Neptune target, there'll be less sell pressure on it overall. Rebel Defi 29:03 Wonderful. I mean, that's music to my ears as a, yeah, a DeFi user over the last 10 months. And so moving on a little bit, thinking about... I mean, it's very easy when you get into DeFi, just to... I mean, I still don't consider myself all that advanced, but it's very easy just to start talking about different strategies and stuff without considering kind of newer users coming into the ecosystem. Imagine I've just got my brother set up with a wallet, set him up to buy some UST and he's bought some LUNA, could you give him an elevator pitch as to why using Neptune might be a good investment strategy for him? Neptune Finance 29:47 Yeah, well, the opportunity that Neptune offers for LUNA holders is the potential gains you can get through leverage and the actual rate that we can maximize to leverage the platform. So the first two assets we'll be launching with is bLUNA and bETH, and any other asset that will be whitelisted on the Anchor Protocol in the near future, as well as Anchor Protocol V2, a new collateral type's coming out. But for now, it's just was bLUNA and bETH. And for a new user, it's a very simple user interface. You put LUNA in, you get LUNA out. So with our origin vault, it's a very simple yield farming strategy. In that we leverage your LUNA, and thanks to Anchor as new liquidation thresholds, we can leverage LUNA up to close to 80%. So 80% of the value that you've put into the Neptune vault, we can then leverage that and put it into an investment. So our first investment will be directly into Anchor's Earn. So you're earning 19.5% on that 80% leverage. So we can get some pretty good interest rates on that. So pretty good APY's, I won't quote them now. Neptune Finance 31:01 But for the actual user, all you do is you deposit LUNA, you track your positions, you get to see your profit increase, and then you pull out LUNA when you're ready to take it out. So it's an extremely simple user interface. When we start to offer other leveraged investment strategies, and we're actually going to start doing this pretty quickly, I can do a bit of an alpha leak here and say that we are currently working with Apollo DAO so that we can be offering leveraged investments into a lot of their LPs. And this is a good partnership between the both of us so we can share liquidity to Apollo, and ideally, we're sharing liquidity across the whole Terra ecosystem as we create new investment strategies. But for investment into LPs, it's kind of a high risk high reward strategy, because the reward tokens coming off these LP investments can actually be quite high, but you're also exposed to the volatility of that LP as well. But that means you're exposed to the volatility on both ends. So if the value of your LP goes up really fast, you're actually making incredible gains on your LUNA position. So thanks to our connection with Apollo DAO, that is something like more than 30 new LP investment strategies that we can offer through the Neptune Finance platform. But we're also going to make it pretty clear in our user interface what kind of risks that a user would be taking on before they get into it an investment strategy. Neptune Finance 32:23 We want the user to understand how their LUNA is being used, and what the potential risks could be by going into this investment strategy. We don't want to offer something up where users just may get excited about the APYs presented, and kind of just ape into a position for the fun of it, and then realize they have made losses because the crypto market went down and their investment went down with it. So we're going to be very clear with those kinds of investments. Rebel Defi 32:54 I think, yeah, that sort of transparency, I definitely appreciate that. And I mean, I can go a lot longer with questions. I've got tons more questions to ask. But I see we've got Dr. Doscoin, part of the Orbital Command team, he may have some questions for you guys. And I'm also noticing there's quite a lot of OGs from both Apollo and the Neptune Discords in. So if any of you guys have questions, you're more than welcome to come up to speak. Dr. Doscoin 33:27 Thanks, Rebel. And Neptune, just want to say thanks for jumping on as well and having a chat with us and helping us get a bit more clarity around what's happening on your front. I'm actually just about to jump onto a meeting with Zion and the other person we're talking about earlier, Mr. Rebel, so I've got to jump off this. But I'm sure some other people here will have some amazing questions for you. Rebel Defi 33:50 Awesome, and I'll tell you, listen, just before you go, maybe you could have done with Neptune and over the last couple of months to avoid that kind of liquidation drama that you went through. So yeah, I'll speak to you soon, Dr. Doscoin 34:03 Yes. [chuckle] See you, mate. Rebel Defi 34:04 Sorry for bringing that up. Dr. Doscoin 34:08 No, I'm all good. Thanks, Mate. Cheers Rebel Defi 34:10 Right, catch you later. Bye. Yeah, so I'm just looking at these profile pictures. We've got a little border collie. I know the guy behind the face. And I'm wondering because... Has a different name on Discord, also ending with G. I believe he is, or she is both Apollo OG and Neptune Finance OG. That's one thing I really loved about your Discord, guys, is that you were considering doing this OG thing and then you just thought, no, let's just chill out. I don't know, something weird about OG status on Discord for people that get there first without necessarily bringing all that much value with them. Question... Sorry. Neptune Finance 34:59 Just want to say, we've had a lot of good discussion in our Discord and it's been a great place to talk about some interesting concepts around DeFi. We don't do a lot of shilling about our own project, we keep up some announcements, but we just like having conversations between the devs and the users. Rebel Defi 35:12 Yeah, I've really enjoyed being a member over there. It's been kind of fairly straightforward to keep up with conversations. I don't the Discords that sort of... There's just so much chat that you kind of miss a lot of it. Just one thing that you were saying, Keegan, that kind of got me wondering, you're talking about depositing LUNA, does that mean we can come up with straight LUNA and deposit that as well as bLUNA? Or is it one or the other? Can you just speak on that just for a bit of clarity, please? Neptune Finance 35:43 Yeah. So that is something we want to build into our systems eventually, where we can automate the transitions of LUNA to bLUNA into our vaults through the deposit UI. But for now, we also offer a swap page inside of our platform. So we find the best path for swapping LUNA into bLUNA through our swapping utility. And it's kind of a better experience for the user to understand how their LUNA has been translated into bLUNA, because a lot of the time it's not a one to one ratio. So it could be a bit of a shocking experience if someone deposits LUNA into one of our vaults, and then it gets automatically swapped into bLUNA, and it could be slightly less than the LUNA they put in. That could be kind of frightening because you think you're just automatically lost some LUNA. So it's perhaps a bit better that the user swaps the bLUNA first, so they understand how these exchange rates are working. But at some point, we do want to offer automatically inputs of assets. So LUNA directly to bLUNA, ETH to bETH, or at some point we do deposits of UST and then that gets swapped into the asset that you want to leverage. Rebel Defi 36:55 Awesome, right? Yeah. Thanks for that clarification, then. We just had someone say they wanted to talk, I don't know if they've left or... Nope, that person disappeared. So as far as the origin vault is concerned then, that is going to be bLUNA and bETH, is that correct? Neptune Finance 37:17 That is correct. Just to talk about the origin vault a little bit, it was our first investment strategy that we came up. It was pretty obvious, everyone was doing it. They were leveraging on Anchor and putting their loan directly into Earn, it was a great way to make free money. And that's what we're gonna offer with our origin vault. But we're also quickly moving into other investment strategies. So we're going to be working with a lot of partner projects throughout the Terra ecosystems that we can leverage into their mechanics. And this is definitely a healthier thing for the Anchor Protocol. Because what we are offering to the Terra ecosystem is all the deposited assets that come into Neptune Finance get users collateral in the Anchor Protocol, which is going to help Anchor keep that 19.5% Earn stable. And if we are not putting those funds directly into the Earn through our origin vault, say they're going through Apollo DAO, or perhaps they've been leveraged into White Whale's arbitrage vaults, then we're spreading liquidity across Terra so it's good for the whole Terra ecosystem. And we're not milking Anchor's Earn for all that free money on the front side. But that opens it up for other users to use Earn instead and we're just supporting the back end of Anchor. Rebel Defi 38:30 And again, that's something I appreciate there. I mean, some people talk about parasitic protocols that kind of just sort of milk Anchor like you're saying by sticking everything into Earn, so it's nice you've got the sort of ethos of spreading UST around. I love that. If there's anyone in the call, when I see we're getting a few more people who have a question or a comment for the guys in Neptune, we would love to have you up. If not, I can just keep going with questions. Oh, we've got one. Okay, it's our man Zirillian. Sorry, I'm assuming you're a man, I'm not too sure. So yeah, Zirillian is one of the most active users on the Neptune Finance Discord. Zirillian, welcome, your up. Zirillian 39:22 Quick question for the team. Have you guys put any... I know you have put some thought but I was just wondering if you were any closer to deciding how you would launch your token, the NEPT token? Meaning are you going to go the White Whale route where you would do the liquidity bootstrapping pool, or like Prism or Mars that are doing Lockdrops. What are your thoughts on that? 'Cause that's obviously different releasing your token after the launch of the protocol. There's a lot of variability in terms of how your token performs depending on how you launch it. So I'm just curious there. Neptune Finance 40:05 Yeah, I can answer that. First I gotta say thanks for being a great support in our Discord for always answering the "wen it" questions. Zirillian 40:11 No problem at all. Neptune Finance 40:15 Yes, an advantage that we have in doing our token launch later is that we get to take some time and considering how we want to launch it. And we've had this discussion plenty of times throughout the team. And I think most recently, the method that we appreciated was White Whale's liquidity bootstrapped pair, or pool, LBP, where they were able to raise a significant amount of funds and also create a lot of depth for their LP. And this is a really good method for getting a large amount of tokens into the circulating supply of the ecosystem. So if you're trying to sell a token at a set price, if you want to get a lot of tokens out, you'd have to reduce that price significantly. Whereas an LBP allows you to get all those tokens out into the circulating supply and also have the protocol own that liquidity. So currently, that's the method we're going with, but we're still exploring other options out there. We know there's a new protocol coming out, or has launched, it's Atlo, which is a community owned DEX offering protocol. And we'd like to look into that and see what they're offering. So we're still exploring, but so far LBP is kind of the most tempting option to go for. Zirillian 41:39 Make sense, got it. Rebel Defi 41:41 Awesome question. Thanks for that Zirillian. I've done a little bit of research into Atlo, and kind of like what they have to offer. And one of the things they've said in their documentation is that they don't necessarily have a set way that the like to launch a token, it's really up to the discussion between the platform and the projects. And then whatever launch projects want to have, Atlo can help with that system. So yeah, that certainly sounds like it could be a nice partnership. And they've got a couple of nice projects already launching so Neptune would definitely raise their profile. There was a question that came through on your Discord just before this event started. And it was to do with potential employment within Neptune Finance. So I'm just wondering, is there any openings that you guys have, any particular types of people that you're looking for? Neptune Finance 42:40 We've currently just did a bit of hiring. We're missing a couple of crucial team members, and we just started a new lead of marketing this week. So they're getting their head down into work straightaway. So in the history of our development, we haven't been very active with our announcements or our marketing in any type of way. And that's because we've been solely focused on development. So now that we have someone who is dedicated to that, you can expect to hear a lot more about Neptune in the near future, especially as we get closer to launch. And at some point in the pretty near future, soon, we're going to likely need more developers. We got so many ideas that we can talk about, which is unfortunate. We want to keep those secret for now. But we will need more manpower to be able to execute on that. Rebel Defi 43:27 Or women power. There's just not enough women in crypto, we need more women in crypto. Okay, awesome. Awesome. With regards to that old chestnut "wen launch", I mean, I'm assuming it's in 2022. But is there any sort of further... Without wanting to put a date on it, is it... Neptune Finance 43:50 I'll hand off to Cisco about that, he's been responsible for getting our code to finalization and he's now been talking with auditors. Rebel Defi 43:57 Thank you. DrCisco 43:58 Yeah, we're currently looking at different auditors and trying to shop for the best that works for us, because we are really concerned with the security and we want to make sure the code is looked at really thoroughly, as well as a bunch of test, security tests, on our on-chain and off-chain software. And, yeah, hope that answers. Neptune Finance 44:32 So we're not going to commit to a date because that's the number one mistake you can make in DeFi. But we're close. And you can expect our announcement soon when we freeze our code. Well let everyone know. Rebel Defi 44:46 Wonderful. Right. So I'm reading between the lines, I'm thinking maybe Q2. So that sounds pretty awesome. Maybe. Yeah. [chuckle] Awesome. Right, guys, to be honest, I'm really sorry that we scheduled this... I think we scheduled our space before Cephii scheduled his. But they've stolen our audience tonight, normally we have a good 150 people on these things. So I will be shilling the shit out of this one once we are recording from TerraSpaces. Because you really have shared tons of alpha tonight. And even being sort of active in your Discord I didn't know about the Apollo tie up that you've got that sounds brilliant. If there is no more questions from the audience, and people are welcome to raise their hand, is there anything else you'd like to share before we close this thing down? Neptune Finance 45:37 I think we've covered all the alpha that we wanted to drop for now. Firstly, I didn't say anything I wasn't meant to because I'm excited. But I guess I just want to make sure that everyone's watching our Twitter and our Discord and watching out for announcements because there will be a bunch of it soon. Rebel Defi 45:55 Awesome, yeah, I mean, that's great to hear that you've got someone dedicated. Is it like a community manager type marketer or is it more like someone with a marketing background that you've got? Neptune Finance 46:03 They've got a marketing and a crypto background. They were actually responsible for creating a Bitcoin Foundation back in 2015, 2016. So they've got a bit of history in crypto, but they also have a good history in marketing as well. So we're pretty happy to have them onto the team. Rebel Defi 46:19 100%. That sounds like a great acquisition. So I mean, it's been awesome having all three of you on the Space tonight. Have you got anything else you'd like to ask about before we shut down? Neptune Finance 46:31 Nope, I think that's it. Thank you very much, guys. Rebel Defi 46:33 You're welcome. Thank you for stepping up. Yeah. So thank you very much, everyone for coming tonight. Mat 46:38 Thanks for joining everyone. Rebel Defi 46:40 Yeah, thanks for recording, Finn. Appreciate that. Finn 46:43 Thanks for hosting, Rebel. I will record you anytime, baby. Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was the Orbital Command Neptune Finance Space, hosted by Rebel Defi. Recorded on Tuesday, February 15th 2022. This episode of The Ether was brought to you by Talis. Talis Protocol is the NFT platform for independent artists on Terra. Talis helps to provide artists with the tools and resources needed to transition from traditional arts into the NFT world. With their V1 launch coming soon, Talis will be the place to see real world art reflected on Terra. Be sure to join their Telegram and follow Talis on Twitter for updates on their roadmap, validator, and other Tallis news. Find your next favorite artist on talis.art. This episode of The Ether was also brought to you by Orbital Command, a community validator on Terra dedicated to educating, expanding, and promoting the LUNAtic community. Follow Orbital Command on Twitter using the link in the show notes to receive regular threads on Terra protocols and yield strategies, news, resources, and Twitter Space discussions. You can also support their community efforts by considering them next time you're delegating or redelegating your LUNA. Find out more at orbitalcommand.io. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn. Thanks for listening.