All You Need to Know about Bella Protocol and Binance Launchpool
On Sept 6th, the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance introduced Binance Launchpool, a platform that users can securely farm new assets on, as part of an ongoing initiative to bring the DeFi experience to Binance.
Bella Protocol will be the first project to participate in Launchpool, where users will be able to stake their BNB, BUSD or ARPA tokens into three separate pools to farm BEL tokens over 30 days, starting from 2020/09/09 00:00 AM (UTC).
In addition, Binance will then list BEL at 6:00 AM (UTC) 2020/09/16 and open trading for BEL/BTC, BEL/BNB, BEL/BUSD and BEL/USDT. This happens in 7 days after the farming commences.
On Sept 9th, Bella Protocol's cofounders Felix and Yemu conducted the first AMA in its English community on Telegram after the announcement. They answered questions from the Bella community and gave an overview about Bella as well as Binance Launchpool. The AMA was moderated by Bella's global community manager, Thomas.
Below is a summary of the AMA.
Could you please introduce yourselves and Bella Protocol?
Felix: This is Felix, cofounder and CEO at Bella Protocol and ARPA. Been in crypto since 2018 and still hodling.
Yemu: And my name is Yemu, cofounder and CGO at Bella Protocol and ARPA. I bought my first BTC in 2016 @$500, sold them @$400. Prior to cofounding Bella & ARPA, I was the Head of Growth at Boro, a Money 20/20 fintech startup that raised over $10mil. Before that, I worked as an actuarial consultant at Fidelity Investments in Chicago. I am also an entrepreneur-in-residence at ZhenFund, one of China’s most prominent VCs.
Bella Protocol is an ecosystem project incubated by ARPA. ARPA is a layer 2 multiparty computation (MPC) network built on Ethereum. A branch of MPC cryptography is threshold signature scheme, which enables cross-chain interoperability and asset custody.
Bella Protocol is positioned as a strategic move of ARPA’s long-term DeFi blueprint, and it will attract its first batch of users from the global ARPA community.
Here’s a glimpse of ARPA’s global community:
- WeChat: 120 directly managed WeChat groups, totaling 40,000+ people
- Weibo: 52,000+ followers,100+ daily discussions, 54,000+ daily impressions
- Twitter: 20.2k followers
- Telegram ARPA Official Community (English): 15,700 members
Other language groups are Thai (500), Indonesian (1,300+), Russian (3,800+), Vietnamese (2,200+), Filipino (900+), Korean (4,000+), African (500+), Turkish (300+), Sri Lanka (600+). Totaling 13,000+ members
ARPA is listed on Binance, Huobi Global, Bithumb, Gate.io, Kucoin and many other exchanges, making it one of the most liquid, and accessible tokens in the space.
This will provide an excellent user base for the kickstart of Bella.
The Bella Protocol offers a suite of DeFi products for streamlined crypto banking experience.
The core concept of Bella product design is 1-Click. Bella automates everything possible, subsidizes gas fee, and caters to both new and experienced users either on-chain or via Bella custodian service.
The current product lineups include Bella Liquidity Mining, Flex Savings, One-Click Portal, and Lending. We can dive deeper into each product later.
We would like to lower user barrier by any means. Bella Flex Savings product is DeFi, and Bella One-Click is custodian service. But we have one goal in mind, to lead more people to join DeFi.
Why did Binance pick Bella as the first project for Binance Launchpool? What makes Bella stand out?
I think Binance chose us because we have good track record as a team of strong execution, and also because we address the pain points that they also see.
The Bella team has been DeFi trailblazers since November 2019, supporting liquidity in various DEXs and lending protocols.
The Bella product matrix aims to address user major pain points with a hybrid approach.
The followings guide our product development:
- DeFi is a trillion-dollar market fueled by the rise of stablecoins. Despite recent hype, current DeFi user penetration is merely 1% of crypto users
- DeFi user pain point: gas fee, user experience, understanding of smart contract
- DeFi user motivation: risk-adjusted high yield via liquidity mining
- The need for interoperability across emerging protocols for best yield
- Hybrid finance to combine DeFi and CeFi. Mobile is the next big thing
The core concept of Bella product design is 1-Click. Our products condense information into actionable plans, automate everything possible, and cater to both new and experienced users.
Now users can say goodbye to bouncing between protocols to farm for the best yield, and simply sit back and leave all the heavy-lifting to us. A majority of crypto holders cannot participate in DeFi due to high gas fee, slow speed, and poor user experience.
1-Click allows users to simply deposit and enjoy high yield from sophisticated arbitrage strategies, either on-chain or via our custodian service.
We expect 1-Click to be a game-changer, similar to Amazon’s 1-Click ordering system, and to bring 10x more users to the DeFi space.
What are the use cases of the BEL token?
Bella token (BEL) is essential in the whole Bella ecosystem, and will benefit even ARPA ecosystem & ARPA holders. Holders will benefit a lot from BEL.
- Fee Collection — Bella offers a suite of DeFi products ranging from hybrid yield farming tool, lending protocol, 1-click savings account, customized robo-advisor. A majority of transaction and service revenue of the network will be used to reward long-term stakers/liquidity providers.
- Discount — $BEL holders enjoy service fee discounts, similar to exchange platform token such as BNB. For example, custodian service for DeFi protocols and robo-advisors charge a percentage of the profit. That number decreases when paid with $BEL.
- Staking — As the total amount of $BEL in circulation increases in the first two years, staking helps $BEL holders to offset the inflation as well as to vote for network changes.
- Voting and Governance — Bella is an ever-evolving DeFi ecosystem. Users with staked $BEL can vote for potential product upgrades, new releases, and parameter fixes. We will also explore more use cases for BEL, along with finding more partners for the whole Bella ecosystem.
Basically our products charge a management fee (as we make money for investors) and then we use that fee to reward BEL stakers.
Investors can also choose to take BEL as interest, instead of their native investment token. For example, A invests 10k usdt in Flex Savings, and earned 1k usdt worth of interest. He/she can convert into USDT or leave as BEL for a small % of bonus.
How can we participate in the Binance Launchpool?
With Binance Launchpool, you can actually withdraw anytime and there's no lockup. The longer you stake, the more BEL you get, which is very user friendly.
Can use ARPA, BNB, and BUSD to farm BEL.
But please remember this is only the first promotion event we do with Binance. We are going to reward more to ARPA holders in the coming sessions.
Could you please share the future plans and timelines, especially for this month?
Most of our products will be released within the next 6 months. Please refer to the roadmap below:
Q3 2020
- 2nd Global Community Survey
- Listing on Binance
- $BEL Liquidity Mining
- $BEL Airdrop for $ARPA holders
Q4 2020
- Bella 1-click Protocol v1 Launch
- Bella Flex Savings v1 Launch
Q1 2021
- Bella Lending v1 Launch
Q1 2021
- Bella Lending v1 Launch
Q2 2021
- Bella DeFi Robo-advisor v1 Launch
Q3 2021
- User Growth Campaigns
- Other Additional Features
For this month:
1) Liquidity mining is going LIVE!! Use stablecoins, ARPA/USDC and BEL/USDC LP token to farm BEL token. The reward APY is going to be high.
2) Airdrop is still TBD, but most likely we will do it. You guys should stay tuned for announcement. There are a few things we need to sort out, but we will 100% reward ARPA holders!
The timing for airdrop is TBD, probably not this month.
Compared with the BNB and BUSD pools, why does the ARPA pool have a lower allocation proportion of BEL?
Lauchpool is a huge product release for Binance. We are happy to introduce Bella to Binance community and its users. We provide $BEL to $BUSD & $BNB holders. The APY for BUSD, BNB, ARPA holders if they participate in the Launchpool is pretty significant compared to risk-adjusted existing alternatives.
5% seems a lot, but we want the community to join this revolution. For our benefit, we gain traffic for our products from BNB community as well.
Soon we will launch liquidity mining with ARPA/USDC uniswap incentivized pool, which a bigger % of BEL reward goes to ARPA holders.
We actually designed LaunchPool product together with Binance Labs team. And we are also getting our product ready to be integrated by Binance Pool.
We have 40% token to be distributed as liquidity mining and user growth, and ARPA uniswap incentivized pool will start weeks after Launchpool, and ARPA liquidity providers will get a big chunk of the BEL reward pool.
I think in the longer term product integration is greatly important for Bella Flex Savings and One-Click products.
Please let us know about the token distribution of $BEL ?
DeFi so hot right now , so is it just the beginning or are we in the #defi bubble? What do you think about that ?
We need to look at both sides of the story.
There’s definitely a bubble when you look at the price performance. Coins are mooning again, sometimes shooting up 200x. Even though the peak of the bubble is yet to be reached.
When you look at the adoption and penetration as well as product maturity, we are still at the very early stage of the industry. In fact there’s a bubble in almost every industry when it’s at its infancy stage.
With bubbles forming, more people are attracted into the space due to high returns, and get to learn about the new ideas as they are in it. Some of them stay as the bubble dies down. During the entire cycle there will be builders and believers who continue to create, build and thrive.
We think that there will be at least 10–30x of the room for the stable coins, which is the force of this bull run.
We as a team grew out of the bear market and have been around for 2 years. We have the ability to maneuver through cycles and we are here to stay.
You say BELLA is one click DeFi solution and it will reduce gas prices. How will you solve this and how BELLA will effect ARPA?
We are gonna give two transaction options: a decentralized one, and the other is via our custodian service. We know the pain bouncing between different protocols and spending a lot on gas. We automate everything, so you only need one smart contract interaction to start liquidity mining. If people choose to use our custodian service, we can aggregate a number of transactions together.
For example, we can aggregate 100 orders together and find sometime in the day when the gas fee is low, then execute the orders in one smart contract transaction. If the gas fee of one single transaction is shared among all the users, it’s nearly zero and we can just subsidize it with our own capital. That’s why it’s called zero gas fee. It is not decentralized but i think it’s very convenient. Some people will exchange convenience for not decentralized, we respect both choices, so we offer two ways to accomplish the transaction.
Simply put, Bella taps into the DeFi user growth and funding part, and ARPA focuses on cross-chain asset part.
ARPA focuses on multiparty computation. One of the applications of MPC is threshold signature scheme (TSS). TSS can be used for decentralized cross-chain asset generation and custody, for example, cross-chain generation of BTC into ERC20 BTC. This is an important way to enrich the asset class on Ethereum network.
MPC threshold signature is useful for cross-chain DeFi asset lock, which we will pursue at ARPA in later this year and 2021. WBTC and RenBTC are gaining traction. I think we have a unique angle from miners who want to join DeFi. As you guys might know, WBTC is not popular in Asia. There are 40k ERC20 BTC now, and the demand is big while the market is under penetration.
It is gonna be really competitive to launch the ARPA version of cross chain BTC. But we need an alliance for it, not just on our own. And we need use cases in DeFi. Therefore Bella is a super important step for ARPA’s cross chain asset.
Bella fits in the overall blueprint by acquiring more users and assets. We do so by lowering the barrier to entry for normal users. These include lower the gas fees, providing friendly UI/UX, and better referral systems.
Can you give more info about airdrop?
As I said, we are most likely going to do airdrop to ARPA holders, and we are pushing as many exchange to support it as we can. The timing and ratio is TBD.
What's the APY if I do liquidity mining?
In Launchpool the APY is ~high double digits I assume. BEL token price is the dependable.
In Liquidity Mining, its gonna be higher at the beginning. We are launching in late september.
Please let us know about private token sale?
What are the exchanges that will support for $BEL?
We don’t know yet, but we have been in contact with lots of the major ones. We do expect to see a lot of automatic listings once BEL is listed on Binance.
Can we buy Bella before listing Binance?
You can farm BEL through Launchpool with BUSD, BNB or ARPA. It’s safe, secure and easy.
Can we also farm other tokens? Like CRV, SWRV, farm YFV ?
Yes! Bella is an aggregator. Users can invest in Bella Flex Savings (Q4 launch) and we will deploy into protocols like CRV, SWRV, FARM etc. We will convert into native token +extra BEL token incentive.
For Liquidity Mining in late September, one option is to stake yCRV, we will reward CRV and BEL tokens (both) to users!
When will be the complete platform launch?
We have several products:
1) Liquidity mining to launch in late September. Smart contracts are already audited by Peckshield.
2) Flex Savings to launch in October.
3) One-Click to launch in Q4, most likely late Nov.
Liquidity mining we could have launched earlier, but decided to not 100% overlapping with Binance Launchpool.
When can we expect for sale on mesa or there is no more sale?
We are still waiting on the greenlight and are in touch with mesa team. Exact time TBD. But if it happens, it will happen after the Binance listing.
First circulation needs to be within Binance, based on our agreement with Binance.
About Bella
Bella is a suite of open finance products including automated yield farming tools, lending protocol, 1-click savings account, customized robo-advisor, and more. We believe everyone deserves equal access to premium financial products and services with elegant design and smooth user experience.
Bella brings your familiar mobile banking into crypto with just one click. With Bella, you can just simply sit back, watch your asset grow, and leave all the heavy-lifting to secure, automated smart contracts.
Bella’s core team consists of serial entrepreneurs and blockchain veterans who have tremendous experience and proven track record in finance, cryptography, blockchain, and engineering.
For more information about Bella, or to join our team, please contact us at contact@bella.fi
Learn about Bella’s recent official news：
Medium: https://medium.com/@Bellaofficial
Twitter: @BellaProtocol
Telegram: https://t.me/bellaprotocol
Discord: https://discord.gg/JamMH5P
Announcement channel: https://t.me/BellaDefiAnnouncement
