InsurAce.io and Tranchess AMA, with Danny Chong aka Tranchess King — Co Founder Tranchess, hosted by Dan Thomson, Director of Marketing & BD for InsurAce.io
The Tranchess AMA was held on 9th November 9am EST in the InsurAce Telegram group: t.me/insurace_protocol
Intro from Dan Thomson, Director of Marketing & BD, InsurAce.io
- Please introduce yourself and Tranchess
A: Hello InsurAce Community! This is Danny Chong, aka King, representing the team @Tranchess. I am excited to be with everyone here today.
And so — A quick introduction about myself — I’ve been in multiple roles within investment banks which spanned over the last 16+ years, including sales, trading and management of teams across Asia Pacific.
A quick intro also on the team @ Tranchess:
Huge part of our c suite comes from the financial sector — we have across investment bankers, asset managers, hedge fund PM and execution.
We also have team members hailing from tech giants such as Microsoft / Facebook/ Google. Our tech team is strong with cyber security as well as smart contract coding, which is always an important part for any DeFi protocol.
Once again, A Big Thank You to the InsurAce team for hosting us today.
2. Could you explain how the protocol works to offer enhanced yields?
A： Sure thing. The concept of Tranchess was first incepted in 2020 and was developed quickly into its current state — A Yield Enhancing Asset Tracker with Varied-Return solutions. Our seed investors include: Binance Labs, Three Arrows Capital and Spartans Group. Inspired by different tranches in a traditional fund set up that caters to investors with different risk appetite, Tranchess aims to provide a different risk/return matrix out of a single main fund.
The main fund Queen can track any crypto underlying and we have purposefully chosen BTC as the first crypto asset to track. Meanwhile, it also shares some of the popular DeFi features such as: Single-asset yield farming, borrowing & lending, trading, etc..
So to explain on the tokens in Tranchess a bit further — The main fund Queen currently tracks BTC and can be split into 0.5 token Bishop and 0.5 token Rook. Token Bishop purely earns yield and does not track BTC at all, while Token Rook earns smaller yield but is essentially a 2x leverage token for BTC.
The following diagram gives a better explanation of the flow.
I’ve used BTC as an example above but we have also just launched our 2nd underlying — ETH and will also move quickly to other fund underlying in the next couple of months.
Our governance token CHESS, is distributed as yield to users who stake Queen, Bishop, Rook on Tranchess, in the ratio of 3:4:2. Users who staked QBR, would start to earn Chess tokens immediately. There is no lock up for QBR staking and users can unstake anytime they wish to.
3. How could users maximise their returns via Tranchess?
A: That’s a good question.
Other than staking of Queen, Bishop and Rook, there’s also a need to see whether you are the correct boosting level to help you earn chess at a faster rate. The desired boost factor can be achieved with locking chess at the chosen quantity & optimal tenor. Once you are close to 3x Boosting, you would be getting the max optimal chess returns on Tranchess.
Users can simulate various combinations to achieve the best yield over here: https://www.tranchess.com/simulator
Tranchess is also offering 50% distribution of it’s protocol income on a weekly basis. Simply lock Chess to enjoy this sharing. Your share of distribution will depend on the amount of veChess you have versus the total veChess in the protocol. Again, you can simulate how to get more veChess using the simulator on top.
For more details on yield earning, please a look over at :
https://tranchess.medium.com/chess-more-chess-df12ceb9dff8
4. You’ve seen incredible growth in recent months including a listing on Binance and launching of your ETH fund. What do you think has been the main driver behind this growth?
We are humbled by the strong growth and it is not something that we’ve taken for granted. We believe that Tranchess offers a unique preposition that’s currently not being offered at this juncture on DeFi — A High Yielding Asset Tracker offering Varied Risk-Return solutions.
Tranchess cater to: Users who might just want to long either an underlying such as BTC or ETH for long term but would like to earn yield at the same time, USDC holders who prefers to be long stablecoin like token or it could be users who want to be holding leveraged positions on BTC/ETH.
Other than this, we believe our strong focus on security also helped with
users believing in us. Tranchess undertakes the highest standard in ensuring the security of its protocol. Top-notch global audit firms had been engaged to conduct smart contract audits for all our protocols. One round of comprehensive audit with with Certik & Peckshield had been done pre launch and we had again engaged Peckshield recently for audits on functionality upgrades. To further strengthen the protocol, we are also working with Immunefi, DeFi’s leading bug bounty platform, to uncover any vulnerabilities
One of Tranchess’s unique defense mechanism lies in its 30min TWAP (Time Weighted Average Price) method of trading the live prices of tokens. Many Defi Protocols have a reliance on trusted price feeds, and most protocols take a discrete tick price from the oracle’s price feed which is updated frequently. This is easily exploitable for oracle attacks, especially under extreme market fluctuation. The 30 mins TWAP window prevents any discrete outlier price from taking place and thereby eliminating such oracle attacks. Furthermore, to prevent extreme attack, Tranchess has a back-up oracle feed which will kick in if the primary price source cannot validate enough data point to make sure the prices we use are not tempered with.
Last month we also formed a collaboration with InsurAce. Our users can now buy cover with InsurAce for another extra layer of protection on all their assets withTranchess.
Users have also given feedback that they liked the development of Tranchess so far and are pleased to know the team is working hard round the clock to develop new offerings and pipelines.
5. There have been a series of high-profile hacks in recent months, is this something you are concerned about? How have you secured the protocol thus far?
A. As mentioned on top, we’ve always been doing due diligence to ensure the safety of
the protocol. Every time such hacks happen though, we still follow the discussions and ensure such compromises are not applicable to our protocol. Other than the above security/defenses measures taken, we’ve also recently increased our bug bounty with Immunefi to 200k USD and BSC had also added us to Priority One Bounty Program — Giving us an enhance protection on top of what we have with Immnunefi.
Also, for any new functionalities released, we also engage Audit firm like the likes of Peckshield to give us a proper 2nd layer check.
All in all, we are also glad that we have InsurAce online with us for users to look at covering their assets within Tranchess.
6. We have listed Tranchess on the InsurAce.io app with annual premiums of just 2.5% annually, how can we encourage Tranchess users to protect their assets staked with you?
A: That’s really a question more for the users to reply. 🙂
But maybe a quick marketing video of how InsurAce works and also in the event of hacks, what would be the likely timeline for claims — or maybe even how to claim damages would definitely encourage users to have a deeper look.
I don’t think users mind protecting their assets but maybe how it works and how it’s going to benefit them can be more clearly elaborated for them to understand the use of the product, at a convenient time
7. Is there anything you would like to ask us?
Would you please elaborate the vision and direction of InsurAce? The origins of the team and when did this all start ?
Dan:
Absolutely, we were founded by Oliver Xie who saw a gap in the market last year after the DeFi Summer and a series of hacks in DeFi that resulted in $120m lost funds. (That figure this year is over $3bn!)
The team is remote globally.
The main vision for the project is to make crypto and defi a safer space for everyone.
In the short term, that means more insurance products, more partnerships with protocols like Tranchess.
In the medium to long term we want to seamlessly integrate our services with protocols so that users are automatically covered, they might lose a few percentage points on their gains, but their risk will be completely irradicated.
