KuCoin AMA With Clearpool (CPOOL) — The First Decentralized Dynamic Marketplace for Unsecured Liquidity

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: December 29, 2021, 11:00-12:09 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Robert Alcorn, Co-Founder and CEO of Clearpool, in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Clearpool is a decentralized capital markets ecosystem where institutions can access uncollateralized liquidity. On the Clearpool app, institutional borrowers can make a proposal to be whitelisted by the Clearpool community - CPOOL token holders. Whitelisted borrowers can create and launch individual liquidity pools - smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. Whitelisting is achieved through a governance voting process, whereby CPOOL token holders assess the strength of a borrower's proposal and reach a consensus decision. LPs earn attractive rates of interest on Clearpool for supplying liquidity to a borrower pool and can manage counterparty risks effectively through the issuance of cpTokens - Clearpool LP tokens. Pool APYs are enhanced with additional CPOOL rewards, making Clearpool one of the most attractive venues for DeFi lenders.

Official Website: https://clearpool.finance

White Paper: https://docs.clearpool.finance/resources/documents

Follow Clearpool on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

Robert Alcorn — Co-Founder & CEO of Clearpool

Q: Please introduce yourself and the Clearpool team.

Rob: I am Robert Alcorn, Co-Founder and CEO of Clearpool. My background is in entrepreneurship and traditional financial markets, where I spent the last 12 years working mainly in credit markets as a broker, salesperson and most recently as a collateral trader. I have been involved in crypto since 2015 when I was researching blockchain for an automated wealth management project that I was working on. I first bought Bitcoin in 2016 and have been trading crypto ever since. I am from the UK, but I have also lived and worked in the US, The Middle East, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Clearpool was founded by myself and my friend and ex-colleague, Alessio Quaglini, the CEO of Hex Trust. We used to work together at a bank, and we shared an interest in blockchain and crypto. The idea came up in a conversation earlier this year. We realized we had something good and so I left my job as a trader and started building Clearpool. I recruited Jakob, our CCO, very early on and he became the third co-founder. Jakob’s background is in start-ups and fintech and he brings a lot of expertise to our team.

Our CTO Pavel and his team of developers are highly experienced blockchain developers, having worked on multiple Ethereum and DeFi projects previously, and also winners at several Ethereum hackathons such as ETH Waterloo. Vadim is our product owner, he is also very experienced in blockchain and crypto. We have some great advisors who we work closely with, including Alessio who I mentioned earlier and some of his senior team members at Hex Trust.

Q: Can you give a high-level introduction of Clearpool and what it intends to solve?

Rob: Clearpool is the first decentralized marketplace for unsecured institutional liquidity on the blockchain.

Institutional borrowers can open individual liquidity pools and attract liquidity directly from the DeFi ecosystem. Anybody can be a lender to these institutions, and get rewarded with higher APYs for lending unsecured.

Pool interest rates are dynamic and increase when the borrower utilizes more liquidity from the pool, rewarding LPs with higher yields when risk increases. Pool APYs are also enhanced with additional rewards paid in CPOOL - Clearpool’s governance token.

Clearpool was built to solve the problem of overcollateralization that exists in DeFi lending and borrowing. Institutions can now access uncollateralized liquidity through Clearpool's single borrower pools.

The single borrower pool concept also paves the way for a system of tokenized credit, which in turn provides the foundation for the development of decentralized risk management products, assisting DeFi lenders with risk mitigation and hedging solutions, which will also attract new lender profiles to the DeFi space.

Q: What’s your near-term roadmap for the product?

Rob: This week, we just released our testnet version. Everyone is welcome to test it!

You can go to https://app.clearpool.finance to check it out.

There is also a guide here that will help explain how to use it: https://clearpool.medium.com/clearpool-testnet-is-live-cc9f473e6567

We have made some big announcements since we launched CPOOL. Our partnerships with X-Margin, Parsiq and Lithium Finance have received very good feedback from the community. We recently announced that we would be bringing Clearpool to the Polygon ecosystem (as well as Ethereum). This is the first step on our journey to become a multichain project. We will make further announcements on this soon.

We have recently announced some of the institutions that will open the first borrower pools on Clearpool - Amber, Folkvang, Nibbio, FGB and Wintermute have been announced and once again there will be further announcements in the new year.

Following our MVP mainnet launch in the new year, we will be launching new features, including thematic pools and decentralized derivatives, so there is plenty to look forward to!

Q: Who are the target users of the borrowing feature?

Rob: As mentioned, the early borrowers on Clearpool will be crypto trading firms/market makers such as Amber, Wintermute and Folkvang. There are many others who we are currently onboarding, which will be announced soon.

In the short term, early growth will most likely come from within the wider crypto ecosystem; however, we have started to see some strong interest from more traditional institutions.

This is where the long-term vision for Clearpool is focused, ultimately any institution can open a pool on Clearpool and we want to be the bridge between DeFi and TradFi, not just on the borrowing side but also by attracting new lender profiles from TradFi to DeFi as well.

We have a lot of institutional investors committed to becoming lenders on Clearpool. Initially, it will be mainly crypto native institutions and family offices, but we also have some traditional institutions interested in becoming lenders. Ultimately we believe the big opportunity lies in getting more traditional lenders and we are already putting the necessary measures in place to achieve that.

But the best part is that you, the individual investors, will be able to participate in the same opportunities as the institutional lenders and get the same returns!

Q: What are the competing products, and what are the advantages of Clearpool?

Rob: I have to say, there is nothing really like Clearpool. There are some platforms where institutions can borrow unsecured, but it's done through multiple borrower pools, which is very different.

The advantage of Clearpool is that lenders can select exactly who they want to lend to through our single borrower pool structure. This makes it easier for them to manage the risk that they take. They also get higher interest rates when the borrower utilizes more of the liquidity in the pool, meaning that LPs get rewarded more when risk increases - the way it should be.

The cpTokens that LPs receive when they supply liquidity to a pool represent the creditworthiness of the borrower. They can be redeemed at any time or traded in a secondary market. They provide much more flexibility to LPs in terms of risk management. cpTokens accrue the interest from the pool on each block, and they can be staked to earn additional rewards paid in CPOOL.

As we said earlier - this will make Clearpool one of the most attractive venues for DeFi lending with huge lending APRs!

Q: $CPOOL is a DeFi token, but which other utilities does it have? Why should people hold it in the long term?

Rob: CPOOL is the utility and governance token for the Clearpool protocol. A little time after the mainnet launch, CPOOL holders will be able to vote on the whitelisting of new borrowers, a process that will qualify participants to earn additional CPOOL through an incentive reward scheme, which will be more lucrative for CPOOL stakers - a big incentive to stake and take part in voting.

Eventually, a full decentralized governance system will be introduced, allowing CPOOL holders to propose, vote, and implement future changes and upgrades to the protocol.

Pre-staking is currently available - on KuCoin, of course! Where the APR is 100%. We have extended this right up to when we will launch on the mainnet in the new year, so get some CPOOL staked if you haven't already!

A new staking program will be announced before the mainnet launch of the Clearpool v1.0 protocol, where long-term stakers will earn significantly higher rewards when they interact either as a voter or as an LP.

CPOOL staking will be a required action for borrowers, who must stake an amount of CPOOL to access the area of the protocol where they can make a proposal to be whitelisted. This will drive constant demand for CPOOL from borrowers.

As mentioned - liquidity providers earn additional CPOOL rewards, enhancing pool interest rates to attractive levels. Clearpool will announce a buyback program soon, where a share of protocol revenue will be used to buy CPOOL in the open market to sustain reward pools perpetually, again creating a long-lasting and constant demand for CPOOL.

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?

Rob: Thanks for checking out our website! Our token contract was audited by Pessimistic Security, who are also currently conducting an audit on our protocol smart contracts. We have also appointed CertiK to do the same, which is happening right now as we speak. It is our plan to have a third audit after we launch and add new features such as the thematic pools. Security is of paramount importance to our entire team, so thanks for bringing this up!

Q: Do you have any NFT plans and its integration ahead in the roadmap? Also, do you have any passive income options and incentivization rewards for a long-term holder?

Rob: Actually, we have already integrated NFTs into our project! Each borrower pool has an insurance pool, which is funded through a small share of the interest that is paid from the pool on every block. In the event of a default, this insurance pool becomes available to the LPs for that pool (hence the name insurance). The insurance pool can be purchased along with all of the pools cpTokens from the pool by a bidder. The winning bidder will receive an NFT, which represents ownership of the "debt" of the pool, and this carries with it a legal recourse against the defaulted borrower. The funds from the sale of the insurance pool will, of course, then be distributed proportionately to the pool LPs.

Q: Do you have a whitepaper? If yes, please share it with us. Secondly, do you have plans for the pre-sale? Now, where can we join it?

Rob: Yes, you can read our whitepaper, it's on the website, you can find it here: https://docs.clearpool.finance/resources/documents

We conducted a pre-sale earlier in the year, we were lucky to attract some really huge investors such as Sequoia Capital, Sino Global Capital, Arrington Capital, GBV, HashKey and many more, you can also see the full list on the website.

Q: Who are your partners?

Rob: Hex Trust - Asia's leading digital asset custodian, has been incubating Clearpool in the early stages and also helping with custody, transaction monitoring and regulatory/compliance.

X-Margin - Is providing the framework for a credit scoring mechanism so that lenders will be able to compare borrowers easily and see a real-time risk measure for each of the borrower pools.

PARSIQ - Clearpool will integrate PARSIQ’s blockchain monitoring tools to enable borrowers and lenders to be immediately notified once critical activities and events are triggered on the protocol.

Lithium Finance - Lithium’s Wisdom Nodes can be leveraged by Clearpool lenders for secondary market pricing of cpTokens and later for decentralized derivatives.

Our early borrowers will include Wintermute, Folkvang, Amber, FGB, Nibbio and more to be announced soon!

Q: What was the biggest milestone your project has? What is the plan for the future?

Rob: Our biggest milestone to date was definitely the launch of our testnet. It was very hotly anticipated by our community, and I am very happy to say that it was delivered on time!

This means we are on track to launch the mainnet version early in the new year, which will also be a huge milestone.

Following that launch on Ethereum, we will also be launching Clearpool on Polygon, as was recently announced.

We are also looking to build on other chains as well, an announcement coming soon on this!

Q: Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contracts and how can I buy them, and what are the benefits?

Rob: You can buy them right now on KuCoin, of course! And then stake them for 100% APR!

When we launch our mainnet version, if you are staking then you will have access to much greater opportunities on Clearpool, including much higher lending APRs and the ability to earn CPOOL rewards for voting.

Q: Is your project only for elite investors? How about others with small funds? Is it open to everyone?

Rob: Anybody can be a lender on Clearpool. The same huge APR opportunities will be there for all to enjoy!

Q: Can you share social links so that we can join the CPOOL community and be up to date on new projects and implementation.

Rob: Telegram: https://t.me/clearpoolofficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClearpoolFin

My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Rob8830

Our website: https://clearpool.finance

Medium: https://clearpool.medium.com

Please do join our community and stay up to date!

Please also check our testnet out! There is a bug bounty available for all to participate with great CPOOL prizes: https://clearpool.medium.com/clearpool-testnet-bug-bounty-program-c3b5d68f3e2d

KuCoin and Clearpool have prepared a total of 2,600 CPOOL to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 85 CPOOL

2. AMA activity: 2,515 CPOOL

Activity 1 — Quiz: 1,950 CPOOL

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 390 CPOOL

Participation Rewards: 175 CPOOL

. . .

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