KuCoin AMA With SolRazr — First Decentralized Developer Ecosystem for Solana Offering Launchpad, Accelerator and Developer Tools

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: November 16, 2021, 11:00-12:18 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Sreekanth Kalapur, Co-Founder of SolRazr, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

SolRazr is the first decentralized developer ecosystem for Solana, offering a launchpad, an accelerator and developer tools.

Official Website: https://solrazr.com

White Paper: https://solrazr.gitbook.io

Follow SolRazr on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

Sreekanth Kalapur — Co-Founder of SolRazr

Previously, Sreekanth was the VP of Engineering at Polymorph, which was acquired by Walmart Labs. He has 15+ years of experience building highly-scalable products and is an alumnus of BITS-Pilani.

Q: Can you briefly describe SolRazr and what are your mission and vision statements?

Sreekanth: SolRazr started with a simple idea of helping retail investors become part of the early growth phase of the projects. Along the way, we also realized that we have a bigger problem to solve around the developer infrastructure and tooling on Solana. So, in essence, SolRazr is designed to be the de-facto fundraising and developer platform for projects built on Solana, aiming to support the growth of DeFi, NFTs and web3 applications that can scale.

As for the vision, we are aiming to solve the following key problems:

1. Retail investors today face a growing challenge when it comes to supporting and becoming a part of the early growth phase of the next-gen ideas and projects built on the fastest growing network - Solana. SolRazr solves this problem by providing access to projects through fair and decentralized allocations.

2. For the projects and developers, SolRazr provides the ability to raise capital at lightning speeds in a truly decentralized manner, helping them forge strong communities for long-term support.

3. In addition to helping projects raise capital, SolRazr also provides access to a host of developer tools to help them build fast on Solana and go to market early.

Q: Each project has interesting stories before it is created, so can you tell the community about the story that gave you the motivation to build and develop a great project like yours?

Sreekanth: We, Vijay (Vijay Kalangi — also a co-founder of SolRazr) and I, have been passive investors in crypto since 2017, but we became serious about the use cases of crypto in 2020 when DeFi came into the foray.

We started with a simple yet powerful idea of building a fair and decentralized platform on Ethereum to help projects raise funds and help retail investors become part of it back in February. We quickly realized that it wouldn’t scale to our needs, and transaction costs are extremely high to support millions of retail investors. We quickly pivoted to building on Solana, and that’s how we became SolRazr.

As I said earlier, we also realized along the way that Solana doesn’t have enough developer support and tools. Building on Solana is much more complex than Ethereum too. Since we are already helping projects raise capital, we also decided to help them build faster on Solana with developer tools.

Q: Can you name your competitors? What are the main competitive advantages of SolRazr?

Sreekanth: From a Launchpad standpoint, Raydium and Solanium are probably our biggest competitors. The Solana ecosystem is still very early, and hundreds of projects are building on it every week. So there is a massive opportunity for us to take a big piece of the market share. We already have announced multiple IDOs and many are in the pipeline. We are aiming to be a top-tier launchpad on Solana soon.

In terms of competitive advantage:

1. Our allocation model is very unique and benefits the community, like no other launchpad. By leveraging NFTs, we make our allocations transferrable and tradable. We also have a fixed allocation pool for each tier, ensuring no cross-tier competition. And we also cap the chances (tickets) at 8 to keep the platform fair to everyone.

2. And we are more than a Launchpad. We are building a whole platform around developers by working closely with them from day 0 (incubation) to helping them build fast on Solana (developer tools) and go to market. We recently partnered with SuperTeamDAO and gave out a couple of grants as well. One of the grants we gave out was for a wagmi.bio tool built by a 16-year-old and Raj Gokal was impressed with it.

Q: How does SolRazr's staking help users?

Sreekanth: Staking is central to how our launchpad works.

1. Staking is the only way through which users can get allocations into the upcoming IDOs.

2. We have a tiered allocation system with dedicated weightage (which we will continue to revisit). Users can stake in the higher tiers to continue to gain access to a bigger portion of the pool. However, we are keeping it fair where even smaller token holders also benefit.

3. So far, more than 1.5M tokens (close to 25% of the circulating supply) have been staked for our first IDO. As you can imagine, this is quite an impressive number for our first IDO. We have many IDOs coming up - December is going to be LIT for us.

Additionally, based on community feedback, we have recently updated our allocation tiers as well. The new tiered system makes it fair and easy for anyone to stake SOLR and stand a chance to win allocations to the upcoming IDOs on SolRazr Launchpad.

Q: How are you supporting the Solana ecosystem?

Sreekanth: SolRazr believes in growing the developer ecosystem together on Solana.

To that effect, we partnered with SuperTeamDAO to help launch high-quality Solana projects. Please note that the focus is on helping developers build on Solana, not just SolRazr.

As part of this commitment, SolRazr and Akshay BD from SuperTeamDAO pledged a total of 1M SOLR. We believe this is one of the most significant pledges of its kind in the Solana ecosystem. At the time of the pledge, it was worth around $6M.

We firmly believe that this will go a long way in uncovering great talent from across the globe and nurturing a great community at the grassroots level. In fact, several projects have already received these grants. We meet weekly to review the applications and we are seeing some great ideas.

Q: SolRazr has several IDOs coming up shortly. Why did you choose to work with these projects?

Sreekanth: We want to provide the SolRazr community access to the best projects possible while supporting those with tremendous potential. We are betting big on metaverse, NFTs, gaming, DAO, and web3 narratives. Metaverse gaming has taken off, driven by Facebook’s recent rebrand to “Meta”. Hence our upcoming IDOs such as xHashtag, RaceFi, Synchrony, and several more reflect this strategy.

Let me quickly provide a brief about each project and what makes them a strong bet.

xHashtag is DAO for the #FutureOfWork that helps #Communities grow by engaging in #Play2Earn. It functions as a platform that connects individuals with Web3 projects, providing individuals with an earning opportunity for completing on-chain and off-chain microtasks and helping these projects to accelerate growth through rewards. We are planning to use xHashtag's platform in the future where possible.

Synchrony is a state-of-the-art decentralized asset management platform utilizing a sophisticated suite of analytics and machine learning algorithms. The core features powered by the platform are copy-trading and composable indices. A classic DeFi narrative built on Solana with great minds working on it. We are very excited to be working with them.

RaceFi is a complete NFT car racing ecosystem where you can participate in races or own parts of the game and profit. All ownable parts of the game are in the form of verifiably owned NFTs. Like I mentioned earlier, gaming is big and gaming + metaverse is going to be very common going forward. You will continue to see us bet massively on gaming projects going forward.

Q: What is the most ambitious goal of your project? What is the ultimate vision that your project is trying to achieve within the cryptocurrency market? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any upcoming updates?

Sreekanth: Although a generic question, I would like to answer this. Rarely do the projects get to talk about their BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals).

SolRazr's ultimate goal is to be the de-facto platform for developers and communities to come together and build an ecosystem around web3.

Q: Do your tokens have farming and staking usages, and if yes, what APR do you give to us?

Sreekanth: We are going to provide APY for staking our tokens soon. Please join our community, stake the tokens and wait for the updates.

Q: Raydium and Solanium seem to have some market share from a launchpad point of view. I hope Solrazr is not a latecomer in the market. How do you intend to capture the market to have a large market share and ensure a great number of users are interested in your project?

Sreekanth: Raydium is obviously considered a top-tier platform. While Solanium has an early start, we believe that SolRazr has a massive opportunity to launch multiple top-tier projects simply because there are so many brilliant minds building on Solana and there are very few quality launchpads out there.

Don't be surprised to see SolRazr going for the #1 spot in terms of launchpads on Solana soon.

Q: Please tell what exactly attracted SolRazr team on Solana Network? Why did you choose Solana over Ethereum and BSC? How do you think SolRazr contributes to the Solana Ecosystem?

Sreekanth: I already answered the last part of the question but want to answer the first part.

When we started, we built our platform on Ethereum. I don't think I need to explain why Ethereum is not a great choice, given how ridiculous the transaction costs are. And we didn't want to look into L2s, we wanted to build on L1 blockchains.

BSC was never a contender. Except for the lower fees, we didn't like the overall attention it was getting. Solana offers pretty much everything we need - speed and extremely cheap to transact. And more importantly, it's not easy for anyone to copy and build something on Solana. You will mostly see quality projects around.

Q: How many team members do you have? Do they have enough experience in the blockchain field? Do they have any experience working in crypto and non-crypto projects?

Sreekanth: We are an 8-member team. We have 4 who are hardcode devs (including me and Vijay). The other 4 focus on design and marketing.

We are planning to hire more developers and also for our BD unit.

Q: So many projects just like to speak about the "long-term vision and mission," but what are your short-term objectives? What are you focusing on right now?

Sreekanth: Good question. While we are building a developer ecosystem on Solana, our current focus is on making our launchpad extremely successful and a de-facto platform for projects to raise funds. Over the next few weeks, we are going to announce and launch multiple big IDOs.

In the background, however, we continue to work on building developer tools. You will start hearing about it soon. But for now, the focus is on the launchpad.

Q: On your website, you don't mention that you have done any internal or external audit of your smart contract, so can you give us details if you have done any audit before? And in case you haven't, would you plan to perform any review of your smart contract in the near future?

Sreekanth: This is not true. Right on the website's main page, you can see that our IDO contracts are audited by Kudelski.

Q: Marketing is a central element for every project so that everyone knows the potential that a project can bring is vital to achieving the goals set. What is your strategy to attract new users and investors to your platform and keep them long-term?

Sreekanth: From a marketing standpoint, the biggest and most important aspect is to continue to launch quality projects.

As we continue to do the same, everything will speak for itself. The biggest utility of our platform and its users is to bring top-tier projects. That's the best marketing we can do.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Sreekanth: We really love to have KuCoin as our partner and the support they continue to extend.

We really love the KuCoin community. We receive great love and support from you all and hope to continue to receive the same.

We have multiple big announcements to make about upcoming IDOs on our platform. So please join our community, participate in our staking program and get an opportunity to be part of the stellar projects we launch.

Telegram:https://t.me/solrazr_community

Stake SOLR: solrazr.com/staking

KuCoin and SolRazr have prepared a total of 700 SOLR to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 25 SOLR

2. AMA activity: 675 SOLR

Activity 1 — Quiz: 525 SOLR

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 105 SOLR

Participation Rewards: 45 SOLR

. . .

If you haven’t got a KuCoin account yet, you can sign up here!

Follow us on Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit.