AMA: Gem Chasers & Power Pool

Gemchasers
10 min readMay 5, 2021

Below is a full-recap of the AMA, for the gem chasers who couldn’t make it, or for anyone that’s interested. Feel free to have a read!

Telegram: https://t.me/GemChasers

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GemChaserz

Discord: https://discord.gg/WYtrWD9f2t

Alberto

Welcome to another AMA series at @gemchasers. Today we have with us PowerPool. @DrGovernance, welcome to our community. How are you doing?

Dr Governance

hey everyone! It’s a great pleasure to be here!

Dr Governance

Thanks Alberto for having me here

Alberto,

Thank you for being here

Alberto

Could we please start with an introduction of yourself, and your past experience with crypto?

Dr Governance

sure

Dr Governance

I’m known as DrGovernance, and also as DrGonzo in Discord. I’ve been in crypto for a couple years now, with previous experience in VC and product management.

Now I’m a part of the PowerPool elected Management Board and handle communications and community.

Alberto

Nice, how does your past experience relate to the project?

Dr Governance

I used to live in the US for several years, Silicon Valley to be more specific.

Dr Governance

I hold an MBA degree and have broad understanding of Venture Capital, Financial Management, and Crypto.

Dr Governance

And as one of the PowerPool’s main offering is Smart Portfolios, my experience fits perfectly.

Alberto

Thank you. Could you please give us an overview of PowerPool?

Dr Governance

with a great pleasure

Dr Governance

PowerPool is a decentralized protocol offering automatically managed token portfolios and smart indices.

What does it mean? PowerPool developed a set of products, forming an ecosystem:

Dr Governance

1) Portfolios based on AMM pools

2) (Dynamic Automated Market Maker pools) or DAMM pools

3) POWER AGENT (agent managing dynamic update of weights in pools and other parameters of the system)

4) ZAPs (the tool for reducing gas costs for end-users)

Dr Governance

It allowed us to introduce a set of DeFi centric investment products governed and developed by our community. Currently, we have long products — PIPT, YETI, ASSY. In a nutshell, each of them is an portfolio based on the AMM pool, giving exposure to a curated set of DeFi tokens.

To give you an example, PIPT started at $1 per token and is currently trading at $5.48. Pretty good, right?

Dr Governance

Additionally to that, we have YLA, and it’s a market-neutral product. This pool is based on five Yearn v1 vaults, where all these vaults are based on different stablecoins.

Dr Governance

Each of these Yearn vaults generates around 15%-30% APY, and holding YLA is the same as holding all 5 of these pools in a set proportion. Hence you have greatly diversified returns, while with our ZAP technology, it costs you 15$-20$ to mint YLA with USDC.

Dr Governance

FYI, direct joining all five yEarn pools could cost you around $700 in fees.

Dr Governance

To make YLA even more compelling, we added the CVP boost program, allowing users to stake their YLA plus CVP (users don’t provide liquidity, so there is no IL risk) and earn 55% APY on top of mentioned before 15–30%. All this, while your main holding is stablecoins.

Alberto

You mentioned that your pools are based on AMM. Why did you choose this route?

Dr Governance

That’s a good question. But let me start with what does Pool token means. For example, you want to invest in YETI (Yearn Ecosystem Index), when you supply funds in the pool, you receive a YETI token. This YETI token represents a share inside the pool.

Now, the AMM pool gives you a number of advantages over a basic pool.

Dr Governance

First, Aggregators such as 1inch use them to route orders. Pool token holders, for example, YETI holders, earn these fees.

Dr Governance

Second, Underlying assets utilization: ASSY has SUSHI inside it, so we can use it to stake at the Sushi bar, and ASSY holders will earn even more cashflows

Dr Governance

And lastly — Meta-governance.

Dr Governance

WWe were the first project to coin this term. $CVP holders can decide how pooled tokens (tokens inside all our portfolios) vote in their protocols. For example, we hold 1 million AAVE tokens, and they have a live governance vote. CVP holders decide how these tokens will vote. It gives CVP influence over the DeFi ecosystem as a whole.

Alberto

Nice. I agree, you guys were the first guys to provide meta governance

Alberto

Looks like AMM has lots of advantages, but some drawbacks as well?

Dr Governance

And another great one 🙃

Dr Governance

there is one main problem with AMM-based pools. As the ratio inside the pool stays constant, if token “A” price changes significantly in relation to other tokens, the pool sells a part of token A via arbitrageurs to keep the ratio.

Dr Governance

The opposite is right if the token “A” loses in price rapidly, the amount of the token inside the pool will increase.

Dr Governance

It’s called “Selling winners, Buying losers” problem

Dr Governance

now let me talk about DAMM and how it solves it

Dr Governance

dAMM — Dynamic Automated Market Maker

Dr Governance

It uses external data and signals such as Market Cap, TWAP, and more to rebalance wights inside the pool automatically. This allows for the creation of fully permissionless and adaptable portfolios.

Dr Governance

So instead of manual rebalancing every once in a while, portfolios constantly track key metrics and adjusts weights. That’s the future of portfolio management 🎱

Dr Governance

But!

Dr Governance

That’s no easy to do it on chain, so to allow this to happen, we had to developed a Power Agent. It’s a decentralized oracle with the ability to feed different on-chain data to our portfolios.

Dr Governance

Right now, only ASSY is based on DAMM, but PIPT redesign and relaunch is planned, and guys, that’s going to be the best index on the market.

Alberto

With the amount of features the AMM is handling. I would like to ask about your security measures. What are your plans regarding security?

Dr Governance

I’ll be frank with you, security is our top priority, but sometimes we have to suffer for it.

Dr Governance

Every bit of deployed tech is audited, and it takes time

Dr Governance

For example we have a feature called xCVP ready to be deployed for over a month, it will allow CVP holders to participate in cashflows generated by the protocol, by distributing the treasury to them (the treasury holds over 1 million in US dollars now)

Dr Governance

but due to auditors being fully booked, we are going to release it only in May

Dr Governance

But lets get back to security, all portfolios have a kill switch, stopping all transactions in a case of emergency, like a hack of a token from the portfolio composition.

Dr Governance

so it happened with Cover a while ago, they got exploited, the team quickly stopped swaps and withdrawals and we managed to save almsot all the capital inside the pool

Dr Governance

on top of that, the rewards pool holds only a limited supply of CVP at any given time to make sure that even in the worst-case scenario, the supply is safe

Dr Governance

And lastly, we have a live bounty program with handsome rewards for exploit reporters

Alberto

I remember the Cover hack, somewhat around the end of December last year. But I also remember how the killswitch performed, The price of the index was fine within a few days

Alberto

thank you for such deep explanation about your security measures

Alberto

How does Wintermute help you besides market-making?

Dr Governance

hah, you know about Wintermute 👀

Dr Governance

They are an outstanding partner with a broad network and great institutional connections, and an understanding of the market. We understand that Indecis is a great product not only for retail investors, but for institutions as well. And Wintermute advises us on building our future products to attract hundreds of millions in TVL!

Dr Governance

Moreover, you can’t overestimate warm intros from such people, and we are cooking something great together. You will hear this news when they break

Alberto

Nice! You announced BSC pools a while back; what is the status?

Dr Governance

I get this question alot 😂

Dr Governance

The thing is, the code is ready on our side, but we lack the official bridge for CVP.

Yes, we can use an unofficial one, but the safety of users’ funds is our top priority, as I mentioned before. Fingers crossed, the announcement will come shortly.

Alberto

I am eager to know more about it. Waiting for the announcement!

Alberto

The bull market is in its prime, but what are you doing to prepare for not-so-good market conditions?

Dr Governance

Yes sir!

Dr Governance

That’s what people talk about, what stage of the bull run are we in? Is it only the beginning?

Dr Governance

We understand that all markets, including crypto are cyclical and go through different stages tho.

Dr Governance

So far we have indexes, perfect products for the bull market.

Plus we have a smart portfolio of interest-bearing stablecoin based vaults (YLA) — a market-neutral product.

Dr Governance

however, we recognize that market conditions might change and we are actively preparing new products to address it, however I can’t disclose details as of now.

Dr Governance

[In reply to Alberto]

what do you think btw? What stage of the market are we in?

Alberto

I think we still have a few more stages left, but I cannot really tell. I hope this continues for a few more years :)

Dr Governance

[In reply to Alberto]

I think the same, we are still early

Alberto

Time will tell. Ok, so these are the questions from my side. But we have chosen 2 questions from the community. Are you ready to answer them?

Dr Governance

yep

Alberto

@QuinnJosephine4 asks: What is your long-term vision about the industry which you are working on? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace your project?

Dr Governance

okay, let me ask the industry part first, and competition part after

Dr Governance

I believe an average investor with no previous experience in crypto can’t analyze DeFi space. There are tons of projects popping up every day. Several updates are posted from each of them daily.

Dr Governance

But you see what is happening on coinlist? hundreds of thousands of new people want to buy Clover, a project they never heard about

Dr Governance

So

Dr Governance

A curated, automatically managed portfolio is the perfect way to start investing in crypto, and as mass adoption will come, our products are going to be in a great demand.

Dr Governance

as for competitors

Dr Governance

Tech is our key focus, and we have been demonstrating our capability to develop new and groundbreaking products.

To add to this, we have great partners such as Yearn Ecosystem on board, allowing us to achieve network effects.

Dr Governance

Do you know that you can invest in YLA in one click from the Yearn vaults page?

Dr Governance

To finish this topic, I think that the pie is constantly growing, and new projects coming to this space will only increase it, meaning we all can be more successful

Dr Governance

it was a great question by the way 🚀

Alberto

I invested on YLA a while ago. And provided liquidity in the pools as well.

Alberto

I agree, if you like this one then check the second

Alberto

@ValerieElash4 asks: What role does the community play in the powerpoolcvp? What have you done and will do to attract people to join powerpoolcvp and build a thriving community?

Dr Governance

Community makes projects strong and successful in crypto, and at PowerPool, we managed to attract some of the brightest crypto minds from the get-go.

Dr Governance

To give you and example, YETI & ASSY products were suggested by the community and executed by the team.

Dr Governance

We have an extremely active governance forum, and the vast majority of proposals came directly from the community.

Dr Governance

Currently, we are running a Creativity Contest. You can detail following this link — https://medium.com/powerpool/powerpool-creativity-contest-6f9f44c7e9eb

Dr Governance

Long story short, we’ve allocated $5,000 in CVP for 4 different categories:

Video, Infographics, Meme, Writing.

Dr Governance

Everybody has a shot, and to win, you need to submit your work via Twitter with the following text:

Hashtags: #PowerPoolContest $CVP #defi

Mentions: @PowerPoolCVP @PowerHouseCVP

Dr Governance

The contest is open until the 10th of May.

👀 the number of submissions is relatively low, so you have a good chance to get a piece of this pie.

Alberto

Wished I was more creative, otherwise I would have submitted something already! 😂

Dr Governance

hah, me too

Alberto

Thanks a lot, is there anything else you would like to tell us?

Dr Governance

ah yes

Dr Governance

We are actively looking for content contributors: Designers, MEME artists, copywriters. Please reach out to me via DMs on telegram or Twitter.

Dr Governance

https://twitter.com/drgovernance

Dr Governance

And guys, I’m preparing a treasure hunt competition

Dr Governance

We are going to run it in our Discord server next week, it’s a good idea to join our server if want to grab some extra CVP — https://discord.gg/SfcHc6v

Alberto

Thanks, would you mind leaving your socials here for us to check?

Dr Governance

Yes, one sec

Dr Governance

https://twitter.com/powerpoolcvp — to know all the most recent updates

https://medium.com/powerpool/ — to read about the project

Dr Governance

And I can’t recommend enough subscribing to our newsletter at https://powerpool.substack.com/, we are going to have a special giveaway for our readers soon as well. 💰

Alberto

Great. We have to wrap up now. But I want to thank you so much for being with us today to tell us more about what PowerPool is and the new stuff that is coming out!

Dr Governance

Thanks you @alb2001 and everybody for your time

Dr Governance

I wish you the best luck and feel free to find me to ask any questions you like.

P.S.

Forgot to mention or unofficial telegram group https://t.me/PowerPoolTrading

Dr Governance

there are a bunch of crypto OGs talking frequently

Alberto

You are welcome, I am already in the group

Alberto

End of AMA

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