KuCoin AMA with Aurigami (PLY) — Lend, Borrow and Earn on the Native Money Market on Aurora

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: April 29, 2022, 10:00-10:45 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with EY, co-founder of Aurigami, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Aurigami (PLY) is a decentralized, non-custodial, native money market on Aurora. Aurigami offers money market services such as deposit and collateralized lending, which enables users to effortlessly lend, borrow, and earn interests with their digital assets. Aurigami’s aspiration is to become the foundation of a thriving DeFI ecosystem by being the leading liquidity aggregator on Aurora. Aurigami currently supports 8 largest assets in the Aurora ecosystem. It is one of the leading protocols by TVL on Aurora with $800 million Liquidity.

Official Website: https://aurigami.finance/

Whitepaper: https://docs.aurigami.finance

Follow Aurigami on Twitter, Discord, Telegram

Guest:

EY — Co-founder of Aurigami

Q: Can you please introduce yourself and also explain what Aurigami is all about?

Ey: Quick intro of myself, before Aurigami, I was the Head of Digital Finance at a public-listed Fintech company spearheading blockchain initiatives such as the integration of crypto assets for payment.

Now let’s get into Aurigam. Aurigami (PLY) is a decentralized, non-custodial, native money market on Aurora. Aurigami offers money market services such as deposit and collateralized lending, which enables users to effortlessly lend, borrow, and earn interests with their digital assets.

Aurigami currently supports 8 largest assets in the Aurora ecosystem. It is one of the leading protocols by TVL on Aurora, with >$800m Liquidity.

Q: Can you tell us more about the vision and goals of Aurigami?

Ey: Aurigami’s aspiration is to become the foundation of a thriving DeFI ecosystem by being the leading liquidity aggregator on Aurora.

There’s 2 aspects to this. For end-users, Aurigami aims to offer a seamless experience for users to supply liquidity and interact with the Aurora ecosystem. For developers and other application builders, Aurigami wants to become a key building block for protocols to integrate and access liquidity.

Q: Can you share with us your team members and their backgrounds?

Ey: Aurigami is proud to have assembled a core team with diverse backgrounds who are united by their common passion for DeFI. There are currently 8 members on the team.

Other than myself, core members of the team include co-founder Lucas Huang, previously Tokenlon Team Lead at imToken and Kyber Network. And TN Lee, who’s the CEO of Pendle, as our advisor.

Aurigami’s Dev team consists of multiple Math and Informatic Olympiad winners who are deeply experienced in the blockchain. Most notably, the team contributed to a solution that led to a 2x improvement in gas consumption efficiency on Aurora, as featured here.

Q: Can you tell us what we can expect down the road?

Ey: With the integration of Wormhole onto Aurora, we are expecting an influx of UST liquidity into the Aurora ecosystem. We anticipate that the next big event on Aurigami is the listing of UST as a deposit asset. It is going to be huge as UST is one of the most circulated stablecoin.

Also, in the short term, we are focusing on creating utility for PLY, our governance token, such as LP staking. Also, our liquidity mining incentives will remain attractive to continue attracting liquidity and also to reward our early supporters. In the medium to long term, we will kickstart our Innovation Zone, which is listing long-tail assets on our platform and introducing more innovative features such as fixed-rate derivatives.

We are actively building our developer community and helping more projects integrate with us. Also, we will progressively decentralize our development and decision-making process and introduce community governance.

Q: How do you plan to attract liquidity from other chains to Aurigami?

Ey: As a native money market in Aurora, our success is directly tied to the vibrancy of the Aurora community. Aurora currently has close to $1.3 billion TVL, 13x more than 5 months ago. We believe that creating a seamless onboarding experience for new users will go a long way to help unlock the next 10x growth for the entire Aurora ecosystem.

This is where we feel that we can play a positive role by including essential features for first-time Aurora users within Aurigami. For example, integrating in-app bridges and gas faucets makes it convenient for users to bridge their assets over to the Aurora ecosystem through Aurigami.

Once users have bridged their assets over, our goal is then to entice them to keep their assets within Aurigami by offering innovative, yield-bearing products and features.

Q: Why did the team decide to name itself “Aurigami”?

Ey: Aurigami’s inspiration is from the Japanese word “Origami”, which is the art of paper folding. In Origami, the artist masterfully orchestrates the paper's movements to create an art piece that is more than the sum of its parts. It's fun, it's creative, and it's wholesomely rewarding.

At Aurigami, we want to do the same for your crypto assets, allowing you to maximize returns while at the same time making it a fun and interactive experience through gamification.

Q: How strong is your team? Many projects start with a good impression and later abandon the project. What makes your project different than others?

EY: Since the beginning, our team has been very conscious about putting a structure in place to ensure long term sustainability of the project. This can be seen how we designed our tokenomics and also the vesting schedule in place for investors and the team.

Papermill, which is our dual tokenomics, is designed specifically to align liquidity miners' interest and the long-term sustainability of Aurigami. Our tokenomics reward early participants generously while ensuring that the PLY circulating supply increases gradually and smoothly through a progressive locking mechanism that involves gamification and game theory.

Not only have we secured blue-chip VCs backing such as DragonFly Capital, Polychain Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Jump Crypto, we made sure that their vesting schedule matches our ambition and needs.

We have incredible confidence in our team. Our devs are proven in their technical capabilities as seen in their contribution towards optimizing the gas consumption efficiency in Aurora. This was acknowledged by the Aurora team in their publication, as featured here.

Q: Can you share your social media links so we can keep ourselves updated?

Ey: You can keep track of all our latest updates through the following platforms:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aurigami_PLY

Discord:

Telegram Announcement: https://t.co/wT05PqxCof

Medium: https://medium.com/aurigami

Both our Twitter and Discord are one of the largest within the Aurora ecosystem, with a vibrant and engaging community.

And we all know how much you guys love Telegram, so we're also currently in the midst of getting a Telegram group setup, so keep an eye out for that!

Q: Smart contracts are prone to failure, and many projects fall victim to it, costing user funds and discrediting projects. How reliable and secure are your smart contracts? Did you test it with either party?

Ey: Yes. We take security seriously, and we make sure our contracts are audited by some of the best security auditors before they go live.

We have published our contracts here, and our Audit report from WatchPug can be found here.

Q: Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and maintain the project/company. How have you been able to build a complete project, and what is the way to generate profit/revenue from the token? What is the income model?

Ey: You are right. Being able to capture value is super important to any protocol. Lending has been proven to be one of the strongest use cases for capturing value in Defi.

Currently, we have different reserve factors for assets that are supported on Aurigami. This represents the percentage of the borrower's interest that will go to Aurigami. For example, a reserve factor of 20% for ETH means that 20% of the interest paid by the Borrowers of ETH goes to Aurigami!

This interest revenue will be funneled to Aurigami's treasury, and PLY token holder can dictate the use of it.

Q: Your project name seems to be very interesting. Does it have any story behind it? Can you share with usus with the inspiration for approaching this name?

Ey: Aurigami’s inspiration is from the Japanese word “Origami”, which is the art of paper folding. With the emphasis on "folding" or "looping" within DeFi money markets and the name of the ecosystem in which we are operating in, that is, "Aurora", we felt that Aurigami was the perfect name to encapsulate these 2 things in a single word. Plus, it sounds fun and creative, just like how both Origami AND Aurigami are supposed to be!

At Aurigami, we want to help you maximize returns while, at the same time, making it a fun and interactive experience through gamification. DeFi can be fun!

KuCoin and Aurigami have prepared a total of 2,000 USDT to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 75 USDT

2. AMA activity: 1,925 USDT

Quiz: 1,750 USDT

Participation Rewards: 175 USDT

. . .

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