On Nov 7, we had the pleasure of having Crust Network’s Global Branding Lead, Youan Zang along with our CEO, Denko Mancheski for a fun AMA with our community.
The AMA focused on Crust Network’s partnership with Reef Finance, their work, future plans and more.
SUMMARY
Reef Finance had started working in collaboration with Crust Network, a leading protocol for decentralized storage, a few months back.
Crust Network implements an incentive layer protocol for decentralized storage and is also capable of supporting a decentralized computing layer and building a decentralized cloud ecosystem.
INTRODUCTION
Admin: Hey Denko Mancheski & Youan Zang
Youan Zang: Hi
Denko Mancheski: Hi Everyone!
Q — Admin (to Denko Mancheski & Youan Zang): Before starting with the AMA, could you give us a short introduction about yourself?
A — Youan Zang: Sure. Hello everyone, I’m Youan, the representative of the market brand of Crust, I’m glad to meet you all.
A — Denko Mancheski: Sure, Reef community probably knows a bit about myself, but here is an expanded intro:
My name is Denko, I am the CEO of Reef. I have a tech background myself. Started development in early high school with C++ (did algorithmic competitions for few years), then moved into the enterprise world where I worked for 2 ERP providers (built some modules and some mobile apps which are still used to this day). Few years later I moved to one of the biggest healthcare platform providers in Europe. Worked there for over 2.5 years and the last 6 months I was leading a team (we were building a complex app for healthcare data modelling around the OpenEHR standard). 5.5 years ago, I got into crypto and started blockchain development myself. My first experience was with NXT (then turned into Ardor), and I have also been doing a lot of Solidity (Ethereum), Steem and some EOS. Since I am based on Slovenia, the development community is not so big, so I’ve been working with familiar people. 2 years ago, we teamed up and worked on multiple blockchain as well analytics projects together. In January, this year we decided to focus on DeFi and started building Reef.
Actually, it’s almost 6 years already. Time flies.
PROJECTS
Q — Admin: Great great! Thanks for the brief introduction.
(to Youan Zang) What exactly is Crust Network? Could you please tell us a little about it?
A — Youan Zang: Crust provides a decentralized storage network of Web3 ecosystem. It supports multiple storage layer protocols such as IPFS. It leverages TEE tech for storage work validation, and Polkadot’s Substrate tech framework for chain.
It aims to build a decentralized cloud ecosystem that values data privacy and ownership.
Q — Admin: Impressive, would love to know more about Crust.
(to Denko and Youan) What are the major milestones Crust Network & Reef Finance have achieved so far?
A — Youan Zang: We have most of our code open source on GitHub. We have published the TestNet (Maxwell CC2) and it can be viewed on different channels like subscan and telemetry. Our incentivized testnet, called Profit Ark, will launch in the next few weeks, and we’ll invite wider range of miners to join the testnet. The mainnet is planned to be launched by end of this year.
During the testnet we will have rewards of 300,000 CRU tokens for users that join as miners and users. You can ready more about it here — https://medium.com/crustnetwork/crust-profit-ark-incentivized-testnet-is-coming-19732363804a
A — Denko Mancheski: We actually just released an expanded version of our live roadmap here: http://reef.finance/roadmap
One can follow the major milestones.
We have been working on the tech since late January this year, and we plan to release the initial version of the product in Q4. Besides this we have finalized the fundraising and have already started expanding the team and ramping up the marketing activities. Currently we are in discussions with Tier 1 exchanges and having a code audit in process. When those things are done we will announce TGE + open source our Github. Approximately 2 weeks after TGE we will release the first version of the product.
Q — Admin: Generally, projects don’t announce their code publically at the beginning, love your approach of making the code public so soon.
Interesting, the fourth question is going to be exciting one for Reef
PARTNERSHIP
(to Denko) Please explain the partnership between Reef Finance & Crust Network. How can this partnership benefit both projects?
A — Denko Mancheski: Yeah sure! Reef has an important component which is called analytics engine. This collects a lot of data which we further process and extract metrics. Out of these metrics we derive risk levels. It’s a real-time system which requires a lot of storage and processing power.
Our long-term goal is to have all the components deployed on a fully decentralized network. Crust’s progress so far has been incredible, and we decided to port certain parts of our storage on their network. The long-term goal is to deploy the whole infrastructure on their decentralized cloud platform.
Q — Admin: Amazing, yeah agreed. Their progress is incredible. Good to know about your long-term goals.
Let’s move onto our final question before opening the floor for Community’s Questions.
(to Denko) Could you please explain how Reef and Crust team will deploy DeFi Products in Polkadot Ecosystem?
A — Denko Mancheski: Great question! Reef and Crust have completely different product offerings. Crust is on its way to become a parachain, while Reef’s goal is to deploy DeFi aggregation infrastructure to as many ecosystems as possible. This means Reef will be present on multiple parachains as well as different ecosystems.
Polkadot has the interoperability layer and the parachain communication (XCMP) mechanism, so these are the infrastructural layers which we will leverage to connect both of the projects. Additionally, certain parts of the data stored on Crust will be accessed directly by our analytics engine which is the processing unit which sources the intelligence on-chain.
Admin: Great. Thanks for answering all questions Youan Zang and Denko Mancheski. I’m opening the floor for Community’s Questions.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Q — Telegram User @vabetancourt4: Does Reef consider that it is well positioned in relation to the competition, how does it manage to keep itself updated to continue achieving its growth?
A — Denko Mancheski: Being a team that has both machine learning and blockchain expertise as well as many years in the crypto as well as the traditional startup world gives us a big edge. As I mentioned above, establishing feedback loops and rapid iteration on the product is one of our biggest advantage.
Q — Telegram User @jamegodd: Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to your project because it is a form of success for a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your in non-crypto space?
A — Denko Mancheski: Yes, this is one of our bigger goals. We will be integrating FIAT gateways immediately, so we will be able to start onboarding non-crypto users. Besides the easy onboarding, we will provide proper education so they get to understand how this landscape works and what are the risks around it.
Q — Telegram User @bluefacebaby07: Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for investors to hold Crust long term? Do you have any plans in terms of driving demand and scarcity of the token?
Denko Mancheski: Crust Tyler is back.
CEO of Crust Network joins the meeting to answer some questions.
A — Crust Tyler: In the Crust Network ecosystem, the CRU token can be used in a number of ways, including:
1. Staking to maintain the GPoS consensus of the Crust network
2. Used to guarantee the selected nodes
3. Serving as contract guarantee and commission for providing resource services
4. Serving as a transaction fee for using the network
5. Used to purchase resource services
6. Used for election and voting of on-chain governance mechanism, and vote on proposals
CRU is utilised by both “miners” (storage providers), storage users, and in staking. Similar to PoS, in GPoS, stakers are rewarded with CRU tokens.
We believe there is a great token utility in the Crust Network ecosystem, and look forward to it naturally evolving over time.
Q — Telegram User @AyD80: How Reef Finance makes it so much easier for anyone to access its platform?
A — Denko Mancheski: Reef abstracts away the complexities of using order books and learning how different DeFi protocols work. Just like Robinhood app gives access to the average user to the traditional financial landscape (derivatives, option chains, etc..), Reef gives access to the DeFi landscape and tokens and additionally augments the decision-making process based on user’s risk levels.
I think those answers cover pretty much all the questions asked about Reef. Really great questions. Happy to have a supportive and engaging community. Feel free to participate in all our activities (quizzes, giveaways, etc.) and follow up the announcements in https://t.me/reefannouncements
Q — Telegram User @GrainedDots: Baskets, will crust store the diversification mentioned?
A — Denko Mancheski: Initially only the data which powers the processing engine. Eventually we will be able to deploy docker-style components. At that point, the decentralized clouds will also host our algorithms
Q — Telegram User @IntelligentDetective: How do you think with Asia Market? Does Reef team have any plan approach Asia which the potential market in crypto, there have many great teams and investors want work and earn money from crypto?
A — Denko Mancheski: Yes. We are expanding our marketing activities in Asia as well. It’s an extremely important target audience for us since Asia started adopting DeFi really fast and the number of users that we can onboard is enormous
Q — Telegram User @kizzama: Are you planning to burn or buy back any tokens from the market in the future? Do you have such programs?
A — Denko Mancheski: Reef currently has 3 income streams: Basket engine, protocol fees and interest paid by power users who borrow tokens from the Reef pool in order to increase their voting power. All the 3 income streams are currently flowing in the Reef pool. In the future, through voting, we plan to introduce Reef Treasury which will be the recipient of the income streams, and the DAO can further decide how to allocate the funds (eg: grants, buybacks, etc.)
Q — Telegram User @thoatuy2507: How much is REEF spending on the project? Where can the income come from for community training, market expansion, project development and building solid foundations?
A — Denko Mancheski: The above answers about the income streams answers this question
Q — Telegram User @Mabuya1019: Many new projects initially developed well but were suddenly abandoned. How will you manage your project to get your position on the market and become the best project in the blockchain world?
A — Denko Mancheski: Reef being cross-chain gives us flexibility, which means we are able to shift our product and features based on where the users are (currently on Ethereum) and what the users want/need in the future. This gives us the option to pivot and iterate on the idea. We have experience with establishing feedback loops with our users to validate the product-market-fit and that’s what our main focus is after TGE
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
Q — Telegram User @araceley: How important is the community to you? And how can we collaborate or help you for the development of the project?
A — Denko Mancheski: The community is extremely important for us because you guys are all potential users of the product. Here is one of the many reasons why the community is important for us. Reef’s business model is B2C based. We provide a way for the retail user to access to the whole landscape with very low technical barrier of entry. Our retail investor is our best customer, and since we will be the first ones to give access to the users to multiple ecosystems, we believe we will manage to get quite high market share.
Q — Telegram User @saitan23: As I know a strong community is very important for every project. Do you plan to be a local or global project? What strategy will be used to expand the community?
A — Denko Mancheski: Currently we have a Crust Network global community, and we work with some media in Japan, Indonesia, the US and other regions to help spread the word about Crust.
We have received a lot of applications for our incentivized testnet from around the globe, which has been very interesting and exciting. This will be great for decentralisation if we can have storage providers in a number of regions, as upload/download will then be faster too.
We are mainly focused on recruiting miners at this stage, so that when the mainnet does go live, there will be adequate resources to handle the workload.
DEFI
Q — Telegram User @lakuda: Which area are you focusing on at the moment? (DeFi, Stake, Dapps) and what is your goals in this year?
A — Denko Mancheski: At the moment, we are focused on the important protocols in the ETH DeFi ecosystem. Right after the initial version, we are 100% focusing on polkadot and deployment on their parachains.
Q — Telegram User @Hakashima: DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain field. Can you share your opinion about DeFi with us?
A — Denko Mancheski: Imagine what the internet did to the computers in 2000.
Thats what DeFi does to traditional finance. Complete disruption and space for rapid innovation. You can check out this podcast I recorded with Bitcoin.com. Its 18 mins but there are lot of insights and opinions: https://podcast.bitcoin.com/e937-Denko-Mancheski-CEO-of-Reef-Finance
TOKEN
Q — Telegram User @araceley: Can you explain how is your Tokeneconomics Distribution? How many tokens will be minted? And How many tokens will be locked by the team?
A — Denko Mancheski: You can check out tokenomics here: https://reef.finance/tokenomics
Q — Telegram User @Spott: TRUST is quite very important. How can we trust $CRUST is not another scam out there?
A — Crust Tyler: You can check out Github and see that we have been building for around 2 years now. Also, we have received a number of grants, including a Web3 Foundation Grant.
Q — Telegram User @cuembexiu: As you know, many people judge a Project by the Token price. What do you have to say to investors? What’s the plan to increase the Token Demand?
A — Crust Tyler: Whilst some project focus on token price, we are more focused on building. We believe that by building a great product, over time the token holders should be rewarded. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about token price.
Q — Telegram User @Spott: Only 15% of $CRU were sold during sales period, what happens to the 85% of $CRUST?
A — Crust Tyler: Good question. You can find more specific details about the CRU token distribution in this article (https://medium.com/crustnetwork/crust-token-metrics-economics-84592efc6d1f). Basically, a lot of CRU will be distributed during the incentivized testnet, as mining rewards for the mainnet, in marketing and community building, as well as market making another essential activity.
Admin: Awesome, almost all questions have been answered now. Thanks for jumping in @CrustTyler. Appreciate it.
Those who would like to learn about Crust Network can join their Telegram Community https://t.me/CrustNetwork
Crust Tyler: Thanks.
We would like to thank everyone for their participation in our AMA. Please stay tuned for more such AMAs.
