Hurricane NFT <> KuCoin AMA Recap
Project Introduction
Hurricane NFT is (1) the 1st cross-chain NFT DEX based on Avalanche, through which users can trade NFTs on any chain and save a lot of time and cost for cross-chain NFT transactions;
(2) An NFT Defi Platform, which will focus on exploring NFT financial derivatives such as NFT fragmentation protocols, insurance, and options to make NFT a more credible investment target and realize the financialization of NFT.
It’s fully governed by DAO, and the governance token is $NHCT and glad to list $NHCT on Kucoin today, Initial Circulation is 10 million tokens.
Our team has rich experience in the development and operation of cross-chain DEX and DeFi projects. Hurricane NFT hopes to challenge Opensea from this perspective.
Questions from KuCoin
Q1: What was the inspiration behind starting Hurricane NFT?
Symington_Smith: BAYC has brought NFT to the mass market, Apecoin has refreshed the perception of NFT, and Opensea’s peak monthly transaction volume is almost 5 billion US dollars. The entire NFT ecosystem will see explosive growth.
With the prosperity of NFT projects, the market size also began to grow rapidly. In addition to ETH, NFT projects on public chains such as Avalanche, Solana, BSC, and Polygon have grown rapidly. If investors want to participate in this high-growth market, they may face many problems. First, the gas fee on Ethereum is too high, and Opensea transaction commissions and royalties are too high. Second, except for the top NFT projects, most NFT projects lack liquidity. Third, frequently switching NFT transactions between multiple blockchains will not only consume more gas fees and suffer slippage losses, but also be time-consuming and complex.
Hurricane NFT was born to solve the above problems.
Q2: What is Hurricane NFT solution to make NFT trading and defi easy?
Symington_Smith: Our team develops and operates HurricaneSwap, the 1st Cross-Chain Liquidity DEX based on Avalanche, which provides users with a high-performance, low slippage, low-cost and seamless cross-chain trading experience. Based on the powerful cross-chain technology, the Hurricane team combined NFT assets with DeFi liquidity, integrating the NFT trading market into the decentralized exchange and liquidity engine network. NFT enthusiasts, collectors, and ordinary users can use the self-reinforcing and innovative ecosystem and NFT cross-chain transactions to achieve constructive innovation.
Based on mature technology and our new ideas on NFT products, we have developed three core products for the Hurricane NFT project to solve the problems mentioned earlier.
NFT DeFi Derivatives:
Based on the EVM mechanism and Hurricane’s advantages in DeFi, such as cross-chain DEX and high TVL, Hurricane will try to explore the financialization of NFT.
Hurricane NFT will first try Lending Pool and Peer-to-Peer models to integrate NFT financial products to meet the needs of mainstream and niche markets. In the Hurricane NFT Market, buyers can use their own NFT Vouchers for future call and put option management. In addition, the Hurricane team will continue to explore NFT financial products and try to make NFT a credible financial investment product through multiple NFT DeFi derivatives such as NFT fragmentation protocols, NFT insurance, fixed interest, options, etc.
NFT Vouchers:
The NFT Voucher is the only proof for users to conduct cross-chain NFT transactions in the Hurricane NFT Market.
After the user successfully purchases NFT on other chains in the Hurricane NFT Market, he will get an NFT Voucher as the rights and interests of the NFT. If the collector wants to obtain the NFT he purchased, he can obtain the native NFT asset by burning the NFT Voucher. Collectors can also split their NFT Vouchers into multiple NFTs and trade them on the Hurricane NFT Market. This NFT fragmentation approach increases the sustainable liquidity of the NFT market and reduces transaction and trust costs on both sides.
NFT Market:
By aggregating the Roke Protocol, Hurricane NFT can help users buy NFT on other chains and marketplaces. For example, a user commits a request to buy some NFTs on Opensea, but he only has AVAX on Avalanche C-chain, the Hurricane NFT market will automatically swap their funds to WETH.e and bridge the funds to Ethereum, buy NFTs on Opensea, and finally bridge the NFT to the user.
This will make Hurricane NFT support NFT assets on multi-chains’ marketplace such as Ethereum, BSC, Solana, Fantom and Polygon, and significantly save time and cost for cross-chain NFT tradings.
Q3: What is unique about Hurricane NFT among Opensea’s competitors?
Symington_Smith: First of all, OpenSea supports multi-chain assets, not cross-chain. On OpenSea, Polygon users can only trade NFT assets on Polygon, but cannot trade NFT assets on Ethereum. For example, Polygon users cannot directly buy BAYC on Opensea, because BAYC is an NFT asset on Ethereum.
In the Hurricane NFT market, buyers can use the USDT of the Avalanche c-chain to trade the wrapped BAYC on Avalanche via the Hurricane NFT voucher system and all well-known NFT assets on other chains supported by Hurricane NFT. All of this benefits from the cross-chain bridge of Hurricane NFT and the stability and security of the voucher system.
Hurricane NFT is the only platform that can support the use of crypto assets on a specific chain to trade multi-chain NFT assets. Such a product model not only brings a convenient trading experience to traders, reduces transaction gas fees and slippage losses, but also allows all NFT assets to seamlessly connect with the market to improve liquidity.
What if Hurricane NFT can attract tens of billions of dollars of TVL of Avalanche to NFT assets? What if the 2 trillion dollars of the entire market? This will go far beyond OpenSea. Meanwhile, the prosperity of the NFT market is in stark contrast to the depression of NFT financial products. Although a small number of platforms currently provide NFT Defi products, there is much more room for improvement in trading experience, liquidity, product professionalism and richness. As NFTs become more financialized, they will also require new trading platforms, lending protocols, derivatives, etc.
The NFT fragmentation project Bobu of the Azuki community has gained popularity in the market, and the transaction volume is close to 1000ETH per day. Obviously, the demand for NFT financial products is expanding but not being met at all, which will be another blue ocean market of over 100 billion US dollars.
The DeFi has proved that the operability of fungible tokens brings in huge potential, as same as the NFT. Firstly, Hurricane NFT will focus on cross-chain swap of tradeable NFT and payment assets when collectors buy NFT with another token that is not accepted by NFT sellers (such as buying a 1 $ETH NFT but paying with 40 $AVAX), this is easy for Hurricane team to integrated because we created a DEX HurricaneSwap before and familiar with the whole dex architecture. And then, we will focus on the implementation of NFT-Fi, such as fragmentation and lending, etc.
The Defi lending & borrowing relies on derivation, liquidity, and price feed. However, the above is currently not adopted widely in NFT. This is the hardest part of designing NFT-Fi for Hurricane NFT. Fortunately, the DEX experience brings ideas to us. The fragmentation of NFT creates an interoperable derivation, and if the fragment token is added to the liquidity pool, we can solve the price feed and liquidity problem. This is only an initial idea, but the Hurricane team will continue processing it.
Finally yet importantly, unlike Opensea and other NFT platforms, Hurricane NFT is a project that is completely governed by the DAO without any early investors, or team incentives. By holding the DAO governance token $NHCT, you can obtain dividends of Hurricane NFT operating income and participate in the development of the project. I will talk more about tokenomics later.
Q4: Next, please talk about the Hurricane NFT team?
Symington_Smith: The formation of the Hurricane NFT team and the technical foundation of the product come from the huge support of the HurricaneSwap and Avalanche ecological communities.
The core members of HurricaneSwap, including me, I was Inertia Ventures CMO; James Lindesay, founder of Tokeneyes Capital; and Hunter Cheung, author of the Roke protocol, all work on the Hurricane NFT project, and Avalanche co-founder Ted Yin also provides consultants for the project.
The original support institutions of HurricaneSwap will also fully support the development of Hurricane NFT, including dozens of crypto capitals such as Avalanche, Kucoin, Benqi, LD Capital and several exchange capitals, like Huobi.
Avalanche features 3 built-in blockchains and provides a stable infrastructure for developers. Its market cap has reached the top 10 of all blockchain projects with a TVL of over tens of billion USD, which will bring a mature technical layer and lots of users and funds to the Hurricane NFT Market.
HurricaneSwap was launched on October 10, 2021, with $50 million TVL (Peak Value), 31,000+ $HCT holding addresses, 100,000+ Twitter followers, and 60,000+ community members. HurricaneSwap has a solid foundation in product, technology, market, etc.
This is a solid guarantee for Hurricane NFT’s development. 😎
Q5: What is the development plan for Hurricane NFT this year?
Symington_Smith: Here is the roadmap of Hurricane NFT. You can check for more details on our official site: https://www.hurricanenft.io
In the first half of this year, the most important thing for us is to launch the Hurricane NFT Market and some NFT DeFi services so that users can access our cross-chain NFT trading and enjoy the benefits brought by the NFT DeFi products. In terms of the governance token $NHCT, we will have $NHCT listed in top exchanges ASAP to allow more NFT investors to participate in the development of Hurricane NFT conveniently. In addition, we will put great efforts into expanding the size of DAO through cooperation with various NFT ecosystems and allow them to gain the benefits such as dividends of commissions from the growth the Hurricane NFT. Also, the $NHCT token will be utilized in governance proposal initialing and voting, as well as receiving the dividend of the NFT market trading fee.
In the second half of this year, we will upgrade the cross-chain part of the product to support more than 7 leading blockchains. The Roke Protocol for NFT market will implement on Avalanche C-chain and firstly support the EVM compatible base chain, leading the NFT cross-chain available, which will bring massive new users and transactions to Hurricane NFT. At the same time, we will invest in some well-known IPs and NFT projects to launch projects through the Hurricane NFT Market.
With a solid foundation laid in 2022, in our plans for 2023, we will provide a full version with all kinds of features of the Hurricane NFT Market and provides more and richer DeFi products, including NFT derivatives market, lending & borrowing, fragmentation, and basic price oracle, etc. We look forward to bringing Hurricane NFT trading volumes as close to Opensea as possible in 2023. I know this is a lofty goal, but the NFT market is a magical place and worth a shot!
Q6: Can you talk about the DAO governance and $NHCT token?
Symington_Smith: As mentioned earlier, unlike other NFT platforms, Hurricane NFT is a project that is completely governed by the DAO without any early investors, or team incentives. DAO is the most important part of Hurricane NFT, which brings a healthy development model to the project and an engine for the growth in users and trading volume.
The DAO community can participate in the development and operation of Hurricane NFT through proposal initial and voting. At the same time, DAO members can also obtain the benefits brought by the growth of the Hurricane NFT platform, including:
- Transaction fee discounts
- Dividends from platform transaction fees by staking $NHCT.
- Voting for the use of the promoting banners on the website
- Whitelist for new collection series that has an initial supply on Hurricane NFT.
- Yield farming with $HCT rewards by providing liquidity for $NHCT trading pairs.
In the future, we will develop more functions to allow the DAO community to participate more deeply in Hurricane NFT and grow together with the platform.
DAO is the core of Hurricane NFT.
Q7: Can you talk more about $NHCT tokenmetrics?
Symington_Smith: $NHCT (Hurricane NFT Token) is the governance token deployed on Avalanche issued by the Hurricane team for the cross-chain NFT market. There are no early investors, team incentives, farming gains, etc. Hurricane NFT will be a complete DAO project.
It comes from the community and serves the community. As a DAO community token, $NHCT can only be generated by burning $HCT, and its exchange ratio is a dynamic value based on the prices of $HCT and the time-weighted average price (TWAP) of $NHCT.
The max supply of $NHCT is capped at 12,000,000 $NHCT. Once the cap is reached, $NHCT generation will cease.
The generation of $NHCT is divided into two stages: the initial generation stage and the 2nd exchange stage.
The Initial Generation Stage is for the initial distribution of $NHCT. Only users who have locked sHCT in the locking contract (contract address: 0x0b6D1C3E60722123718FaF13bFc48270BD14E9A9) before block 11071850 (February 18 2022, 09:00 AM UTC) can participate in the initial generation. These users can mint an equal amount of $NHCT tokens by burning a specific amount of $HCT. The estimated generation from this stage will be less than 10 million $NHCT.
The 2nd exchange stage will be available on May 10 and the details will be announced later.
Q8: What is the initial circulation supply of $NHCT? Any burning plan?
Symington_Smith: The initial circulating supply of $NHCT is 10 million.
As we said earlier, Hurricane NFT will be a project entirely governed by DAO. The DAO community can initiate proposals about not just burning but anything at any time and vote for them. For me, burning is always good, and I believe that the DAO community will always make the right decision for the long-term development of Hurricane NFT.
The last one: What is the vision of Hurricane NFT? Would you like to go beyond OpenSea?
In the short term, we hope to quickly, provide users with innovative cross-chain NFT trading and DeFi product platforms to solve the current pain points of the entire NFT market.
In the medium term, we hope that through good tokenomics design and a fair DAO mechanism, Hurricane NFT will rapidly increase in users and volume and become a rising star in the NFT field.
Based on the healthy project model, future growth can be expected in the long run, and it is inevitable to challenge OpenSea.😎 WAGMI! LG!
Free Asking — Questions from Kucoin Community
Q1: Can you tell us more about the NFT Voucher system, and how to realize the cross-chain of NFT assets?
Symington_Smith: The NFT Voucher is a wrapped NFT token representing the source chain NFT which is locked in the contract. In other words, it’s a “proof of ownership.” Considering the Ethereum network has become expensive and slow, trading the Voucher on Avalanche rather than the source NFT on Ethereum is more efficient and cheap. The voucher could also receive the airdrop of the origin NFT on the source chain, as long as you burn the Voucher and redeem the source NFT. q
The Voucher relies on the Roke Protocol, which uses Relayer as the cross-chain execute node. E.g., when users commit a cross-chain buying request on AVAX, the Relayer will execute it on ETH, buy the NFT on other marketplaces, and lock it in the Voucher contract on ETH, and then the contract on AVAX will mint the NFT Voucher into the users’ address.
Avalanche users can purchase NFTs on other chains on the platform and obtain NFT Vouchers, which can be traded in Hurricane NFT Market with AVAX as the gas fee, saving a lot of time and cost, and can also be destroyed to obtain the NFTs on the source chain.
Q2: Seeing that Hurricane NFT will provide fragmented NFT Defi services, please can you give me more details?
Symington_Smith: Ok, fragmented NFT is very trending topic, let me explain more.
Fragmentation of NFT is an amazing idea, improving the liquidity of a single NFT and making borrowing & lending available. Hurricane NFT will fragmentize not only the native NFT on Avalanche but also the NFT Voucher. After we launched the fragment function, users could stake the NFT and receive fragment tokens (ERC20 standard), then it could choose:
1 — Add liquidity on HurricaneSwap, so others could buy the fragment token and benefit from the NFT price rising and trading fee reward.
2 — Redeem other NFT but in the same collection series. Differencing NFT in one collection require different fragment token to redeem; this may require users to fill up the price gap.
3 — Stake their fragment token for borrowing & lending, and receive the fee reward.
Q3: When can we use the Hurricane NFT platform? Can you talk more about some special features?
Symington_Smith: The basic NFT marketplace will launch in June this year, and this version will only include the NFT trading on Avalanche C-chain and basic off-chain voting governance. The full version will go live in the Q4 of 2022, including the NFT cross-chain redeem & bought, multi-assets supports, and a completed on-chain & off-chain governance.
The unique function of Hurricane NFT is cross-chain NFT buying & selling, and a built-in DEX brings multi-assets support that users could buy NFT with any DEX supported token.