Equilibrium Community Call Wrap-Up
Tags: Defi, Equilibrium, Community, Blockchain, English

We held the first edition of our community call on December 17th!

This call featured Director of Customer Success Leslie Czuma, CEO Alex Melikhov, and Senior Project Manager Peter Sergeev, who each shed light on Equilibrium’s latest updates, roadmap, and strategy. Over 60 people joined us for this inaugural call, asking more than 50 questions between the online question form and live chat. We are grateful to everyone who attended!

We will be hosting community calls on a monthly basis to keep our community members updated and get their feedback to improve our project. The next one will take place on January 21 at 1 PM GMT.

For those of you who didn’t join us live this time, the video replay is available right here. We’ve also recapped it for you in text format below.

Highlights of the call

The state of the Equilibrium union is strong. We’ve started our mainnet, our code has been audited by the cybersecurity pros at Quantstamp, and there’s no time like the present to get actively involved in our community. We’ve got a lot of positive momentum behind us as we head into 2021, and will be harnessing to meet exciting milestones ahead.

In particular, we’re planning bridges to major assets like BTC and ETH. We expect to unveil our ETH bridge in January, at which point Ethereum cryptocurrency will be fully compatible with our DeFi money market.

We’ll gain a BTC bridge in February as the result of a partnership with RenVM, an interoperable DeFi project that supports BTC, BCH, DOGE, ZCASH, and COSMOS. These currencies are just the first in a series of digital assets that we’ll be uniting across blockchains, making them available for use in our money markets. Simply put, Equilibrium users are going to have lots of options for bridging assets in the future.

We’re also perfecting our lending platform. The risk module at the heart of the lending platform transfers risk from borrowers to “bailsmen,” a user role that’s comparable to keepers in MakerDAO, except bailsmen provide liquidity in advance. This removes the need for auctions when borrower debt is liquidated. Our bailsman model is a sustainable and proactive solution to the classic DeFi problem of eliminating bad debt by auctions.

The risk module monitors relative levels of liquidity to raise or lower the interest rate accordingly for borrowers. We support portfolios of assets and can calculate interest rates on a per-portfolio basis: portfolios full of stablecoins will get lower interest rates than those containing volatile currencies.

We’re also going to be adding our own decentralized exchange to our lineup of services, making us a complete one-stop shop that includes every major DeFi use case in one interface. We want to end the fragmentation in DeFi because that’s what it will take to make the most of a lending product like ours, fully unlocking the DeFi market’s potential.

To that end, we’re also excited to announce our involvement in the Token Standard Initiative. You’re surely familiar with token standards like ERC-20 — now Equilibrium is taking over the development of standards for the Polkadot ecosystem, designing token structures that move smoothly across blockchains. This will enable every project on the Equilibrium substrate at the same time, and will set the stage for the further development of the entire ecosystem.

No one succeeds alone, so we are targeting major exchanges for listing our token. The top three exchanges have expressed positive reception for Polkadot-based projects in general, and we have even received positive feedback on our project from them in particular. But major exchanges mostly intend to gain their momentum from the Polkadot parachain launch, offering parachain advantages to their users after that. This will slightly delay the time it takes to see actual listings here.

We are also in talks with other exchanges and even have preliminary approval from several of them. Under our strategy, we will list on one of the top three exchanges before expanding to others — we expect this move will bring the most value to the Equilibrium community. We expect listings to be finalized in Q1, when parachain leasing auctions kick off.

This brings us to a key upcoming event — our next fundraising mechanic will be an initial parachain offering, taking place in Q1 2021. We’ll hold a candle auction on Polkadot for a two-year lease of our parachain slot. You can expect more information on this soon. We’ll walk you through how to bid DOT for EQ, earn interest on it, and use it for bailouts and collateralization.

We’re hiring, by the way! We’re seeking a business analyst, a social media marketing lead, and a community lead to manage and correspond with our Telegram community. Get in touch if you can refer us to the right person.

Our next community call is planned for January 21 at 1 PM GMT. More details will follow, hope to see you there!