As a community-driven DeFi protocol, our monthly session is where we regularly do a recap of all the notable achievements and exciting activities that occur in the InsurAce ecosystem and also get valuable feedback from the community.
On the 6th of September 2022 we held our monthly AMA on our Twitter Space anchored by our CMO, Dan Thomson who updated the community about all our activities during the month of August.
This month’s edition was pretty special as we had Bumber Finance, CEO, Jonathan DeCarteret join us as our Guest Speaker. Having interacted at a few Industry events and innovative projects over the last few years, Bumper Finance have become one of our long-term partners.
Jonathan started by acknowledging the valuable contributions of InsurAce to the security and long-term viability of the DeFi industry. He then went ahead to speak at length about his opinion on the current state Crypto industry, the challenges his team has faced after raising $20M last year. He also took time to introduce some exciting features of the Bumper Finance platform.
Dan then concluded by teasing some of the plans the InsurAce team have put in place for the month of September. Which included several high profile Conferences across 3 different continents. A total of 445 listeners tuned in to participate actively, asking insightful questions and giving valuable suggestions.
In case you missed it, here is an abridged transcript of how it all went down.
Dan (CMO, InsurAce.io):
So, August has been a bit of a slightly quieter month, I guess, we can say that the whole market is waiting for the Ethereum Merge coming up in the next couple of weeks, which is very understandable. Given the 4-year wait for this landmark event, I think that the next few weeks will be particularly interesting.
At InsurAce we’re currently just heads down building. As usual, bringing out a few new products, some new stable coin products, and new, smart contract products coming out very, very soon. We’ve just increased our capacity.
New Product Listings.
We’ve just been listed on DeepDAO as a listing, the increased capacity basically pushing most of our Covered protocols up from around 800k to about 1.5 million, allowing for some extra sales to come in and for us to extend protection to the wider sector of the Crypto Economy.
And we hope to be able to continue that momentum by adding some new stable coin de-peg products like USDC, possibly to USDT or USD, maybe DAI as well.
And some more smart contract covers are coming up as well. Some also got some great protocols listed. For example; Wombat Exchange & Yeti finance.
Other than that, it’s just business as usual, over insurance just continues to build.
V2 Tokenomics:
We’ve also been building towards our V2 tokenomics. The V2 tokenomics is a huge upgrade to what we currently have.
They are a big push towards essentially improving the use cases for our token and increasing the value added to our token holders. Such that, they’ll have a profit sharing mechanism or buyback redistribution mechanism included. As well as higher use cases within the actual insurance app, in addition to the INSUR token use case for governance and rewards.
And don’t forget the upcoming INSURACE marketplace too. We look to have that as part of our v2 rollouts as well.
All of this is still coming up in the near future. So, you can say we’ve got some very exciting times ahead.
Sales & Coverage:
As you can all see from our On-chain data, InsurAce sales are up, which is great to see following our slowdown after the UST case. I think that the data policy wording has been all implemented now. So that’s great in terms of being able to offer products, again, in a much more cautious way than before I guess. But at the same time, I think it is best for us to remain focused on the long-term growth of the protocol.
Now we’re going to invite Jonathan from Bumper So that we can get cracking with the talk today.
Jonathan DeCarteret (CEO, Bumber Finance.)
My name is Jonathan DeCarteret. I’m the CEO of Bumper. And to give you a very short potted history, I’ve graduated with a degree in Artificial Intelligence. And I’ve spent the entire time building and exiting from a number of startups, most notably Switch, which was listed among 60 of the fastest growing companies in the UK. And since then, I have kind of progressed from FinTech into Tech and then exclusively into Crypto for the last five years or so. And for the last two and a half years, but feels like it’s going on 20 years now. I’ve been with Bumper exclusively.
Dan:
I know exactly. what that’s like. Just a few years in, and Cryptos aged me! But it’s all for the fun of it. So well, please describe what Bumper does.
Jonathan — Introducing Bumper Finance.
Essentially, Bumper has one objective, and it’s to deal with the volatility problem. And when you look at the existing kind of instruments and products that are out there in the market to allow you to kind of hedge for volatility, there’s only really two of them.
The first one is a Stop Loss, which is a circuit breaker that just pulls you out if the market drops, but if it subsequently pumps again, then you’re not going to benefit from that upside.
And the other one, which is quite more established and widely used is the Options desk. The nearly 50-year-old system, in our view, is arcane, overly complex, really intractable and flexible. And systemically, we think it just perpetuates that Volatility risk.
So, what Bumper has done was really look at the ecosystem that we’re faced with and recognize the fact that it is natively very high frequency, remarkably high liquidity, which requires freedom of money to move around. Then we ask the question, can we build a better mechanism that can deal with that volatility problem?
And now, having been kind of carefully nurturing the idea for over two and a half years, Bumper is coming close now to releasing a protocol that takes this radically innovative approach to the volatility problem.
Bumper’s Progress So Far.
We raised over $20 million last year. And that enabled us to pursue some highly engaged and intelligent data scientists, architects, UX/UI designers, in order to bring about what will be one of the most complex and complicated protocols to ever be put onto a blockchain.
To put that into context, the average number of smart contracts that a transaction interacts with is about 2.4 contracts. Bumper comprises over 120 smart contracts. And so, it is highly sophisticated, in what it does.
How Does Bumper Finance Work?
We’re always asked the question, well, how does this work? The best way to explain it and the way we explained it to some of the smartest VCs in the market was to start with a really simple illustration.
If I can just kind of take you back to the heady days when Bitcoin was peaking at $69,000. If you had the thesis that the market is quite toppy, that you think the price is going to come down, then you would use Bumper.
You would send your Bitcoin to the Bumper protocol, and you would set a floor that you want to protect. So let’s say you set a floor of $65,000. If the price as it did actually comes down, when you hit that floor $65,000, the Bumper protocol would automatically swap you into a stable coin USDC instance. So, if the market continues to drop, you can redeem your Bitcoin at that price at $65,000.
If the price pops back up about above $65,000, the opposite then applies. You’re swapped back into Bitcoin and profit from the benefit.
So, with that really simple applied analogy, Bumper doesn’t only give you all the downside protection but crucially, it gives you all the upside potential gains that the asset can have when the market rallies again.
When will Bumper Launch this product Officially?
The launch will be coming at the end of November, or maybe the very first week of December. We’re going to be launching just with ETH and USDC. So that means you can protect your Ethereum from market volatility. And people who want to generate your yield will be able to deposit USDC as well.
Dan: InsurAce Plans for September 2022.
Events & Conferences
We’ve got a few events coming up. We are going to be at Main net in New York as well as token 2049 in Singapore, and then DEF CON in Colombia, followed by ETH Lisbon and Solana breakpoint, which all ties back into our upcoming chain deployments on to the Aurora, Phantom, Moonbeam & Harmony chains.
Binance MVP-Program.
As you all probably know by now, we were listed among the 27 participants in Binance’s 5th edition of the Most Valuable Builder program. So, we’ve got some developments around that as well.
We’ve had some very useful talks from Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance and Ken Young, Head of Binance Labs. We’ve also had great discussions with top Devs and Execs at Galaxy digital, Chainlink.
As we work our way through the MVP program we’ve been working closely with plenty of other huge builders in this industry. Lots of CEOs, Developers and Founders coming in to participate in the program. The collaboration has been super useful for us, as gives us some great feedback on what we’re doing as well.
The MVB program will help us improve our products & services, increase our influence in the Binance ecosystem and improve the safety of the DeFi industry as a whole.
And hopefully, at the end, there might be some additional investment talks, which would be great for our protocol in the long-term. Details of that will be shared with the community, in due time.
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