Recap: HurricaneSwap AMA in Verso Community
On 25/11/2021 at 1:00 AM (UTC), HurricaneSwap attend an AMA in Verso community. The following is a summary of the entire AMA.
Host | Kiki
Good morning everyone, I am Kiki, the manager of Verso Chinese Community. Today we are honored to invite an influential guest–Symington W. Smith, the founder of HurricaneSwap, to be our guest at Verso Chinese Community.
Welcome, Symington W. Smith! 👏👏👏
Symington Smith
I know it is nine o’clock in the morning Beijing time now; thank you all for coming to our AMA so early!
Part I Introduction to HurricaneSwap
Host | Kiki:
Now the AMA officially starts~
Welcome again, Symington. Would you briefly introduce yourself? Please also briefly introduce what HurricaneSwap is about?
Symington Smith:
No problem! Hello again, everyone. I am Symington, the Founder of HurricaneSwap. I was born in the United States, but I am half Swiss half Chinese, so basically, I am half a Beijinger. Chinese is also my mother tongue.
For today’s AMA, I will also personally answer your questions in Chinese. I am honored to receive the invitation from the Verso community to participate in today’s AMA. I’m very excited to share HurricaneSwap with you all.
Regarding what exactly HurricaneSwap is, we have an official definition: HurricaneSwap is the first cross-chain LP DEX based on Avalanche.
Specifically speaking, with the innovative LP-Bridge mechanism (Roke Protocol), users can trade popular assets of other chains without leaving Avalanche. Taking advantage of Avalanche, HurricaneSwap provides users with a high-performance, low slippage, low cost, and seamless cross-chain trading experience.
Everyone is welcome to experience our product. Right now, we have the V1, and we will have the updated V2 soon.
Speaking of the V2, our [cross-chain function] will officially be available for everyone in this version. Since the testnet has been tested for a long time, many users have already experienced our testnet’s actual cross-chain speed and low cost.
By the way, our testnet is also a true cross-chain, a true cross-chain between the BSC testnet and the AVAX testnet, not a self-built network. You can also find the entrance on our page to experience it, and everyone is welcome to try it out.
The performance of our project has been relatively stable since the launch of V1 on 10.10, and we have been developing some new features. There are more than 40 million HCT tokens staked in our single-sided pool, which exceeds 50% of the circulation in the market. This shows that users are pretty optimistic about the development prospects of our project and are willing to wait for the project to grow.
At the same time, we have also gained excellent partners like Verso to explore more possibilities of AVAX with us.
Host | Kiki:
Very well, thank you very much for your recognition of Verso! Why did you choose to develop the project on Avalanche? Would you please share your original intention or where your inspiration came from?
Symington Smith:
I am thrilled that Kiki asked this question!
Avalanche is a chain that our team feels very optimistic about, which is the first and most important reason. We believe that Avalanche is designed for DeFi and has excellent potential.
The recent price increase of AVAX is also very obvious to all of us, and the founder of 3AC even publicly commented that Ethereum has no future, ALL IN AVAX! I don’t think Ethereum is already dead, but Avalanche is indeed a more suitable network for high-frequency trading.
I don’t know if you folks have paid attention to the apricot stage 5 upgrade. Because the price of AVAX has performed very well recently, the gas cost has increased for users. Avalanche responded much faster than Ethereum and immediately started using the batch processing mode. After that, everyone should see the decrease in gas cost again.
Professor Gun has placed a section of content at the top of his Twitter since 2018, saying that many scholars have forgotten that our profession is not to write essays but to change the world. When I saw this passage, I was very touched.
I’m still glad because we started contacting Avalanche Asia Fund for fundraising in July. At that time, many funds were not very optimistic about Avalanche or did not know Avalanche at all, but now Avalanche is one of the leading chains mentioned in the same breath as BSC. I was proud of our vision at the time, and I really felt that the market would recognize good technology, and it will also be reflected in the price.
All of this was only a few months ago. AVAX stayed below US$3 for a long time and even returned to US$9 after hitting an ATH of 60. Now I see a price of more than one hundred, and sometimes I feel a little trance. When we first joined Avalanche, we still needed to go around “preaching” everyone the advantages of Avalanche; but now, the benefits are evident to everyone. Otherwise, Verso wouldn’t have joined, right? We all have a common choice, and this choice now seems extensively wise.
Host | Kiki:
We are also optimistic about the development and prospects of the Avalanche ecosystem! The future belongs to DeFi, and cross-chain technology is the foundation and key to future industry development. As the first cross-chain DEX on Avalanche, what makes HurricaneSwap unique? What is your core competitiveness? Very well, thank you very much, Symington, for your answer.
Symington Smith:
I just mentioned how we define HurricaneSwap: The First Cross-Chain Liquidity DEX based on Avalanche. The first LP cross-chain protocol was developed based on Avalanche.
This contains our core competitiveness–LP-Bridge (and the first LP-Bridge in the entire market). I could share our product flow diagram with you:
The unique function of HurricaneSwap is the way we conduct cross-chain transactions, which we call “Roke Protocol,” which is our original cross-chain mechanism. Because our cross-chain is the rise and fall of the source chain assets rather than the token itself, so the entire cross-chain process will be much faster, which is just about 15 seconds.
At present, most cross-chain transactions on the market do not have a speed level of just seconds. Even if they do, they will rely heavily on the longest block synchronization time of the bilateral network, and HurricaneSwap will not have such a problem. Our synchronization speed is not affected by the limitations of the opposite network, even if it is Ethereum.
Another difference from other DEXs is that HurricaneSwap will establish a HurricaneStation on each source chain and create a transaction pool on Avalanche to implement cross-chain transactions. In other words, through Station, the liquidity of assets is transferred from the source chain to the Avalanche chain to realize the seamless transaction of multi-chain assets. This means that our efficiency across multiple chains will be very high to respond quickly to market changes and provide Avalanche users with the latest and most popular assets.
In addition, users do not need to perform complex operations like using a cross-chain bridge anymore because the transaction process in HurricaneSwap is much faster and more convenient. Currently, most DEXs do not support direct cross-chain assets transfer.
Finally, compared with other cross-chain DEX, the cross-chain transaction fee on HurricaneSwap is 2‰, which is the lowest in the market, which is also one of our competitiveness.
Host | Kiki:
Thanks for answering that. When it comes to trading, the security issue is a problem that all DEXs can never circumvent, and it is also one of the issues that users are most concerned about. Do you have any early warning plans in terms of safety?
Symington Smith:
I highly agree with you that security is an eternal topic, especially for DEX. I think everyone should still have an impression of the theft of O3 and other projects. Cross-chain swaps are easy to be attacked. The main reason is that most cross-chain exchanges require users to authorize them to [transfer] assets staked by users.
In my opinion, the most crucial difference between a cross-chain swap and a non-cross-chain swap is whether it will keep funds for LP. As long as the funds are kept in a centralized manner on behalf of users, there will be a risk of theft. I think the friends in our group should also be CEX users. You should know that there are many security technicians in centralized trading, but they still cannot avoid stolen tokens. Hackers and scientists are omnipotent.
However, with HurricaneSwap’s original Roke protocol, our LP cross-chain eliminates the need for users to authorize HurricaneSwap to transfer their funds. HurricaneSwap only has the authorization to stake and unlock the LP, and the returned LP can only return to the original address of the staking. This is to solve the hidden dangers from the source. In this case, we encountered the most extreme situation, that is, all the administrator accounts of HurricaneSwap were stolen (the HurricaneSwap administrator account adopts multi-signature model and its security precautions are also sufficient, only discussing extreme cases here), but there is still no way to cause users loss of assets. The users are always safe.
In addition to considering security issues in the mechanism design, we have also spent a lot of energy (and of course 💰) to do security audits. At least two security audit teams have audited every function and code of our current product.
You can see the security audit report of PeckShield and SlowMist here:
PeckShield: https://github.com/HurricaneSwap/AuditReport
In addition, our V2 is still undergoing final security audits by HashEX, and the security audit report will be announced very soon. I would also like to introduce these security audit agencies briefly. Chinese users should be familiar with SlowMist, all major security incidents of DeFi in the past were traced by SlowMist, and funds were also recovered.
PeckShield is the security auditor of the first version of Avalanche. PeckShield audits many large-scale projects. We also found PeckShield to conduct security audits through Ted Yin, the co-founder of Ava Labs.
HashEX is a Russian security audit company. They are the security auditors of TraderJoe, and they are also very familiar with DEXes on AVAX.
We should be one of the few in the market to find three top security audit institutions to complete security audit projects. Because our cross-chain approach is brand new and unique, we will be more careful about this. At the same time, we have been on the V1 testnet for three weeks and the V2 testnet for seven weeks. We have also found Immunefi to help us make bug bounty together, to accept attacking challenges of white hats from all over the world. https://immunefi.com/bounty/hurricaneswap/
Host | Kiki:
Okay, the last question is the one that everyone is most interested in. What is the longer-term vision of HurricaneSwap? What is the ultimate form of HurricaneSwap?
Symington Smith:
Speaking of plans, I think the most important thing for us, or any cross-chain DEX, is to involve new chains and continuously introduce new assets. I just mentioned the unique design of HurricaneStation, which allows us to quickly build our Station on each main chain, which is precisely what we will do shortly.
In addition, HurricaneSwap is a community-driven project, so we will make it a DAO. Achieving decentralization is not easy, but we will do our best. After we release V2, we will announce plans for DAO soon.
Avalanche is one of the few major leading chains with such a large main chain without relying on centralized exchanges. Because there is no centralized exchange, high-quality projects on AVAX can only rely on self-cultivation. HurricaneSwap exists to bring more high-quality assets to the AVAX ecosystem and plunder a large amount of gold and treasure from the coastline of other leading chains like a hurricane. When Steve Jobs first founded Apple, he hung a pirate flag on the wall of his office. [I would rather be a pirate than a navy soldier] is also the original spirit of the Macintosh that he called out. I think DeFi is more suitable for this kind of pirate spirit, more eclectic, and more aggressive. I also hope that we can bring more and better quality assets to AVAX.
Host | Kiki:
Okay, thank you, @Symington_Smith, very much for sharing! Mute has been turned off. You can ask questions if you want to know about HurricaneSwap or are unclear about the content just shared! Now let’s enter the free question-asking section.
Part II Live Questions
Community Question 1: Could you introduce your team to us?
Symington Smith：
Let me introduce our core team first. The most significant feature of our team is that we have known each other for a long time. James and I are classmates from Peking University, Hunter and Ted are high school classmates. Although we are working together on a project for the first time, we are very familiar with and trust each other, so the project went smoothly. Of course, I must thank Ted for the most. He pitched Avalanche to us at the earliest, which allowed us to be here.
Community Question 2: HurricaneSwap is the first cross-chain DEX based on Avalanche. Does Avalanche provide any financial and resource supports?
Symington Smith：
Now that Ted is mentioned, I will continue to talk about the Avalanche Ecosystem’s support for us.
In the introduction of partners on our official website homepage, we specifically listed a piece of the AVAX Ecosystem, which is enough to show how much we value Avalanche. It also indicates that they provided us with a lot of help.
Avalanche Asia Fund AVATAR is our earliest investor and our incubator. Our IDO is also carried out on Avalaunch. After going online, it has also cooperated with many projects, including Verso, Pangolin, BENQI, Lydia, etc.
I like the atmosphere of helping each other in the Avalanche ecosystem; just like today, we have an AMA in the Chinese community of Verso. Everyone is so enthusiastic. I appreciate it!
Community Question 3: Could you introduce the utility of hct tokens?
Symington Smith：
I saw that several friends wanted to ask about this, and I will answer it now.
HCT is the native token of HurricaneSwap. Does it seem that everyone will also describe it as, platform token? HCT was issued on the same day as our V1 mainnet, and the essential purpose is to serve as a certificate of rights for Hurricane users. You can see that 60% of the tokens are used for farming, and soon after the launch, we launched xHCT, which provides more gameplay and more benefits to HCT holders. I can also reveal that in the design of our DAO, HCT is also an essential part, and the burn mechanism will be added, such as voting for the listing (I think Chinese users are familiar).
We hope that the community can participate more in governance and project development, so the proportion of fee distribution (currently, we are buying back HCT with 1‰ of the transaction volume, and then we will buy back AVAX) will also be handed over to the community to vote.
Community Question 4: Hello guest, the number of users is the core competitiveness of dex products. For project user development, what marketing plans does the project have to let more people know HurricaneSwap and also retain existing users?
Symington Smith：
This issue is also what our operating and marketing teams are thinking about every day.
First of all, our token model strongly encourages users to hold and participate in project development for a long time. As I mentioned, 60% of our tokens are used for mining output to reward token holders.
Second, we are a cross-chain exchange, so we solve the fundamental demand of Avalanche users who want to trade more assets on other chains. We have high-quality assets that are not available in another dex on AVAX, which is our unique competitiveness, and it will also bring us natural traffic.
Thirdly, since we are a cross-chain exchange, we can acquire users from other chains and come to AVAX. This is also what interests him most in our earliest communication with Ted.
I can also share some real data with you all.
It has been 45 days since we went online. Our user activity and transactions have been great, and community user activity is also very high. Our marketing activities have always been vibrant, such as the recent Thanksgiving, we have special Thanksgiving token rewards. You can experience it if you are interested. https://hurricaneswap.medium.com/happy-thanksgiving-7342308d87fe
Community Question 5: would you please tell us which well-known institutions have participated in the investment of HurricaneSwap? What are the investment levels?
Symington Smith：
Let me answer the last question about investors.
Our investment institutions are also relatively large, and I will introduce you to several sections. The first one is the centralized exchange category. Because HurricaneSwap itself is a DEX, we have our trading venue, and however, in consideration of attracting more trading users, we gave priority to the investment in the centralized exchange. Huobi, Kucoin, gate.io, MEXC, and ZB, familiar to Chinese users, and ByBit, which is expected to overseas users (their investment institution is Mirana).
The second section is active investment institutions, which can bring us a lot of resources for cooperation, such as A&T. They are also investors in the new round of Avalanche, and finally are investment institutions related to the media community, such as DuckDao and BlockBeats.
Host | Kiki
Okay, thanks again, @Symington_Smith, for the great event! Thanks for the enthusiastic participation of the friends in the group! Please continue to pay attention to Verso and HurricaneSwap!Today’s AMA is over now, and a list of 5 friends who asked those high-quality questions will be announced in the group soon~
About Verso Finance
Verso is built for the regulated financial service industry and bridges the gap between traditional finance (CeFi) and DeFi by standardizing how financial products get distributed and connected to consumers via e-wallets, banks, and payment networks.
About HurricaneSwap
HurricaneSwap is the 1st cross-chain liquidity DEX based on Avalanche. With the innovative LP-Bridge mechanism (Roke Protocol), users can trade popular assets of other chains without leaving Avalanche. Taking advantage of Avalanche, HurricaneSwap provides users with a high-performance, low slippage, low cost, and seamless cross-chain trading experience.
