Recap on 7/7 Bella Protocol Community AMA with Bella CEO Felix Xu
July 7th, Bella Protocol’s Co-Founder and CEO, Felix Xu conducted an AMA session in Bella’s English community on Telegram. Felix answered the most popular questions that the community had for the past few weeks and gave an overview of the latest Product Roadmaps. The AMA was moderated by Bella’s global community manager, Shenki.
Below is the list of the questions answered in the AMA:
- Can you recap on Bella’s product development since the beginning of this year?
- Where can I earn rewards if I hold BEL tokens? What other platforms/products can use BEL?
- Can you tell us more about Fund and Incubation details? And how can they benefit BEL holders?
- What is the current product roadmap? Are there any things we can look out for?
- Can you tell us about your vision and what do you see in the crypto market in 5 years?
- When do you release the Bella app? For security issues, do you have any plans for a bug bounty program for that?
- How many members are in your team? And how much experience are they having? What are the plans for expanding the team?
Can you recap on Bella’s product development since the beginning of this year?
Bella Flex Savings was launched in February 2021. And it gained good traction.
I highly recommend our community to check out https://fs.bella.fi/. It currently has approximately 25m USD in TVL and offers best-in-class APY for $WBTC, $USDT, $USDC, $ARPA, and more! Basically, we help users auto-reinvest $CRV into your principal token in Curve.fi, and on top of that, we give out extra $BEL rewards! $BEL reward can be vested immediately, 7 days, 14 days or over 30 days. The longer you vest, the higher multiplier you can get. 30 days give 60% extra $BEL.
Basically speaking, our Flex Savings product rewards long-term users and supporters of Bella Protocol. Flex Savings is audited by Peckshield and has functioned without flaws for the past 4 months. Flex Savings is integrated by leading info websites.
Bella Flex Saving | Stats, Charts and Guide
Total Value Locked USD: $21.3M Total $WBTC Locked: 197. Bella Flex Savings v2 is a smart-mining dapp where users can deposit stablecoins and supported tokens to earn attractive yields instantly.
Bella Protocol Protocol: TVL and Stats — DefiLlama
Bella | Review, Analytics | What is Bella
The extra $BEL reward will be long-term and we follow a stable emission schedule. As the first customer facing product, I think Flex Savings is not a bad start.
Where can I earn rewards if I hold BEL tokens? What other platforms/products can use BEL?
For a proud $BEL hodler, there are many places to earn rewards! Especially rewards from our ecosystem partners.
@ForTubeFi listed $BEL as a collateral. $BEL deposit earns 230% APY of $FOR
@Wault_Finance offers 150% APY of $WEX for $BEL/$BNB lp
@PancakeSwap LP earns 90% APY of $CAKE
@autofarmnetwork and @beefyfinance auto compounding
We are actively building out eco-partners on Ethereum and other blockchains such as Polygon. $BEL is already mapped on Matic.
To sum it up, we are developing more ecosystem partners for $BEL holders who want to earn more rewards in other tokens, not only in $BEL. Because the more we emit, the more selling pressure there will be on the token price. The ultimate goal is to get other projects’ tokens to support the Bella ecosystem.
Can you tell us more about Fund and Incubation details? And how can they benefit BEL holders?
Sure thing! As you guys might know, we have an ecosystem fund to support other projects in DeFi and NFTs. We recently invested in over 20 different projects, and we all asked them to integrate $BEL tokens into their products. Most of the products are going to launch within this year. In the near future, $BEL tokens will be able to be used in different protocols, for example, as an collateral in lending platforms or as an instrument to mine other tokens.
We are going to announce more details for the ecosystem fund within the next two weeks. This is also part of our vision to support all kinds of different startups that are similar to us within the next two years. Everything we do we will try our best to expand the use case for $BEL tokens.
Just to give some examples of our great portfolio projects:
My Neighbor Alice is a multiplayer builder game, introducing blockchain to millions of players. MNA will work with Bella in providing more use cases for$ BEL tokens in the ecosystem.
Litentry is a Cross-chain Identity Aggregator that’s built with substrate on Polkadot. Litentry and Bella will explore more possibilities of combining DID and credit lending, as well as crosschain interoperability.
Dora Factory is a DAO-as-a-Service Infrastructure for Decentralized Governance and Open Source Ventures. Dora will potentially enable governance infrastructure such as DAO for Bella ecosystem.
Monox is an innovative swap that uses one liquidity pool and groups deposited tokens into a virtual pair with the vUSD stablecoin. It is selected as one of the projects by Coinlist Seed Program. MonoX and Bella see many opportunities such as product and liquidity integration.
Chronicle is a community-driven NFT marketplace that focuses on premium IPs. Chronicle can bring premium NFTs to Bella ecosystem and potentially enable many exciting possibilities such as NFT lending and staking.
UFiT is a generic DeFi infra for custody, clearing, synthesis, and pledging/staking. UFit is dedicated to bring liquidity to existing assets as well as traditional assets to all blockchains, unlocking immense potential for asset classes in Bella ecosystem.
As you can see, this is only a fraction of the investments we have made over the past six months. There are nearly 25 different investments in total, and they are all going to support the $BEL token in their ecosystem. For the ecosystem fund, the current focus is mainly in the application layer, mostly in Defi and NFT projects. However, we are going to dive deeper into the infrastructure layer in the future. We will see if we can support some bigger projects, then they can use $BEL tokens even more in dapps within their ecosystem.
One thing our team observed over the past year is that you need to have a lot of friends in the DeFi ecosystem, and we support each other’s tokens. For example, for PancakeSwap, we supply $CAKE stakers with some $BEL tokens. In return, we will get a multiplier reward of $CAKE tokens for $BEL and $BNB LP payers. That is how we can expand our holders as well as our awareness of other famous DeFi projects. We can even participate in the product development of other projects in the early stage now. In return, they are going to give a lot of perks to $BEL token holders.
Now it’s summertime again. The DeFi summer is around the corner once again, which kind of reminds me of last year. But we’re going to do better this year because we have more friends now. I expect you can use $BEL tokens everywhere within the DeFi ecosystem.
What is the current product roadmap? Are there any things we can look out for?
Absolutely! In our last question, I shared some details about our ecosystem fund and our efforts to make external networks of the DeFi ecosystem. So now, I will focus more on the core product that our internal tech team is building.
There are some very tangible things that we can do. For example, we can port flex savings onto polygon and BSC (Binance Smart Chain). They are both our very good friends. I have known Sandeep at Matic for a very long time, and he has been very supportive. But we actually will not pursue that goal because we found something even more interesting and worth contributing some time to it.
We are building an active liquidity provision strategy for our users on Uniswap v3!
As you guys might know, Uniswap v3 was launched in early May. Since then, we have been focusing on Uniswap v3 instead of Uniswap v2, and Curve.fi. We believe Uniswap v3 is much more flexible than any other AMMs, which is a game-changer. It also gives an opportunity for active market-making strategies essentially crypto hedge fund that is built upon smart contracts.
You can think of us as a hedge fund manager. We develop statistical models to give a high confidence level that the price movements of $ETH and $WBTC will fall within the range we set. This is how we increase the capital efficiency to provide liquidity, and we earn very good APY for our users.
The vision we have at Bella protocol is to become a big crypto asset manager, which was exactly what we thought when we first started Bella protocol early last year. Now with the infrastructures like Uniswap v3 and Curve v2, we are one step closer to our goal. We can now express our own strategy instead of simply depositing users’ funds into some ordinary AMMs to earn passive rewards. That is why I think Uniswap v3 is awesome.
The current development status on the product is: firstly, we are going to make it centralized as a bot to trigger the smart contract to supply liquidity or to withdraw the liquidity and change the liquidity provision range that we have on Uniswap v3. We will backtest it for at least three to six months and see if the gamma strategy can be consistently profitable for us. If everything goes well, we will write the strategy into the smart contract and then deploy it as one of our Bella protocol’s products. It is still a long-term goal since we have to build a bot first and prove if the strategy itself is sustainable.
That is why I also want to ask our community to be patient and wait for us to build the strategy. We are working very hard on this product, and we see this one as a real game-changer for the current yield aggregators. Hopefully, we will be the first comer. I know there are several competitors like Visor and Charm, which you guys can check out. Their strategies are sort of beta testing and whitelisted. Thus not a normal user can participate.
The more I look into Uniswap v3, the more respect that I have for Mr. Hayden Adams because this product really revolutionized the current AMMs and CEXs.
Can you tell us about your vision and what do you see in the crypto market in 5 years?
Great question. It is just like a blink that how far we have gone. I still remember in early 2018 when I first started ARPA, then in early 2020 when we started Bella protocol. Both projects are like our babies. A lot of people asked me how do you endure the bear market and keep making progress while other projects just faded out. I think you have cut into the essence and see the intrinsic value of crypto and blockchain, and understand what essentially is the ideology behind the crypto and Bitcoin.
I wrote an article over the past a couple of months and expressed my idea:
Below is the summary:
Here we introduce the first concept: Blockchain is an infrastructure for added value in society.
The second concept: Code governance is a pathway back to the laws of nature.
The third concept: The boundary between virtual and real is gradually blurring, and the value of real rights will be redefined.
The fourth concept: Incomplete decentralization will lead to absolute centralization.
The fifth concept: Mutual prosperity on the asset end and the capital end.
The sixth concept: The stunning transformation from a narrow sense of cryptocurrencies to a broad definition of digital assets.
The seventh concept: Infrastructure and applications are spiraling upwards, low switching thresholds lead to constant innovation.
Eighth concept: To the masses! Viva la Meme!
Looking ahead: The fusion of humanism and machine rules
The blockchain world differs from the human world in many ways; it is a paranoid rule-driven trust machine. In theory, blockchain should be the underlying driver for all natively digital assets, encompassing financial activities, virtual assets, and even social and broader data and information flows.
Admittedly, the current performance of blockchain can only barely support limited applications such as DeFi, but applications and infrastructure are spiraling upwards.
The past fifty years of the Internet’s evolution have changed every aspect of human life. Blockchain, on the other hand, will be a portal for humans to move from human governance to code governance. A few decades ago, carbon-based lifeforms got their first glimpse into a silicon-based world with the advent of the computer. The world, its rules, and its religions were brand new. We believe that the curtain is slowly opening on a society where the philosophy of humanism is highly developed, and the rules are unambiguous.
I know this article might be a bit abstract for many people who are not very familiar with DeFi or not in the crypto space for at least three years. But it is an ideology and a movement for more decentralized and transparent fairness and everything we desire within human society. We can now achieve it in the blockchain world because the rules are fixed, and you cannot do evil. I have faith in this industry for the longer-term, and this article will bond everything we do within the decentralized paradise.
Many people think the crypto market is a financial market — it is, but it is much more than that. Another group of people thinks that crypto is a tech industry, but it is also more than that. It is actually a movement. Similar to the open-source movements in the early days and even socialism or some other human society ideologies. It is just enabled by cryptography, tech, and financials. In essence, it is a way people collaborate and how this society should function in the much longer future.
If you ask where are Bitcoin, Ethereum, ARPA, or BEL tokens going. I think they are going to the moon because we are here for the long term and we keep making our best efforts not only in the bull market but also in the bear market. Recently we hired five more teammates, every one of them is very talented. Expanding our team and doing some products that I have strong faith in. We are actively looking for new opportunities and looking to help other projects and build out our ecosystem.
This is my long term vision for crypto and the things that we do.
When do you release the Bella app? For security issues, do you have any plans for a bug bounty program for that?
We are not going to have a Bella app in the near term as we focus on DeFi and liquidity provision bot on Uniswap v3. Another reason for this is the regulation. Custodian asset managers are facing more regulation than before. I think the decentralized world has plenty of good stuff to pursue vs. an app.
How many members are in your team? And how much experience are they having? What are the plans for expanding the team?
There are 16 full-time team members and growing. Our recent hires are around the globe!
About Bella
Bella is a suite of open finance products, including automated yield farming tools, BEL Locker, and Flex Savings. We believe everyone deserves equal access to premium financial products and services with elegant design and a 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 Protocol is backed by Binance Labs and Arrington Capital as lead investors. Other investors include Alphabit, AlphaCoin Fund, Koi Ventures, Ledger Capital, Tensor, N7 labs, Quest Capital, HBTC Labs, and more.
Bella’s core team consists of serial entrepreneurs and blockchain veterans who have tremendous experience and a 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
WeChat: Scan the QR code to join
