On the 5th July 2022, Amulet’s core team took part in their bi-weekly Amu-Nation AMA 🧿
We’ve transcripted this blog for your reference. We’ve also included the audio if you prefer to listen in your own time.
This time, we covered:
📈How to cope with the fast pace of the crypto industry
🫂 Community Plans
🚀 Smart contract and stablecoin depeg cover options
⛓️ Solana, Cosmos and more chains
👀 More, so check it out below!
Transcript:
Rob – Amulet
Hey Jimmy, how are you? Can you hear me okay?
Jimmy – Amulet
Yep, hear me?
Rob – Amulet
Yeah perfectly I’m just gonna send the message to the main group. Awesome, I will get started because I know that there’s planes to catch and things like that. Is that okay with everyone in the chat?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah let’s go.
Rob – Amulet
Awesome. Okay, cool. So I’m gonna actually start off with the the questions on Twitter if that’s okay with you all? Umm just while we’ve got, well, we’ve got the whole team together. So we got a couple sent through, after after we posted about the ama yesterday, they’re quite generic, but I think I think it’s important to answer it start with and then we’ll move on to the questions we’ve got on Discord itself. So the first question that we’ve got today welcome, everyone, by the way, I shouldve said that before. But the crypto industry is a fast paced industry, how flexible is your project to the change that we’ve got that happens so quickly? And keep pace with the technology trends? What is your long term vision for forecasting the industry in which your project operates? So I guess it’s quite a general question. But while we’ve got Rupert I’m gonna open up to you if that’s okay.
Rupert – Amulet
Sure thing Sorry about the noise. But that’s the question actually ensure the way that we’re built enables us to be and to operate as a protocol. So whilst the initial product offerings are stablecoin depeg, smart contract, the opportunity for us is to grow with many, many more products in future, we have data assets, and we have a demand from other people to deliver other products, we’re going to go where that market is now, if you haven’t looked at our documentation, believe that the demand for that is in gamefi, NFT’s which we see as well. So that’s where we will be offering products in the future in the short term future. But after that, we are looking to all sorts of weird, there is no reason why we could go towards traditional products. Equally, there’s no reason why we can do more stuff in the metaspace. So it is never changing landscape. And the reason why Amulet is built how it is and to build everything on top.
Rob – Amulet
Yeah, absolutely. I think it is. There is some some some sound issues, but I think I think I was able to get the gist of what what you were saying that? I think maybe Shin Do you have anything to add with you? With it being a technology based question? Do you have anything from the tech side that you could potentially add to that?
Shin – Amulet
Right, yeah, I mean, so the question itself is more about like, the direction we’re going, but I mean, as we were saying that we are more like focus on one or two products we which we will want to build deep into but also I mean from the platform perspective, we are more like handling on one hand we are handling like taken assets from the user from Sakers. On the other side, we are to like basically facilitate or kind of like a governing the claim process. So that is I will say is a general process for like all future cover products. So this is what we are focusing on right now.
Rob – Amulet
Awesome, and anything to add little Jimmy maybe
Jimmy – Amulet
Sorry was on mute. Nope.captured it.
Rob – Amulet
That’s great. And so the next question we’ve got is actually one that I can answer but I think I’ll also it’s good while Rupert’s here because I don’t know how much we we can reveal right now. But we got a question here that says community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project success, which we all agree with in this in this group. Most projects are programmes that interact with their users, do we plan on having any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve their experience? So I can start by saying, absolutely, yes, we do. The process has started that, how much do we want to reveal about that yet? I know the planning is still gonna take a couple of weeks. But I don’t know whether where you want me to go from here, mentioning?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah. Sure. You said all the salient project that’s well underway, we are working on something that there will be a whole host of things that we can offer out to our community, but we want to run it so that it’s beneficial to the community, but equally beneficial to the board. So it’s got to be a, you know, a process that we’re going to throw something out there, we’re going to see if you guys like it, and if you guys do, then we will expand upon that. Making these kind of rewards. incentivize everybody to drive the project forward. But you should, you should definitely tell us and if there’s any examples of communities that are doing it, right, tell us those ones. And we’ll look at them and see if
Rob – Amulet
And another thing to add on top of it. And another thing to add on that is you’ll notice, with the announcements that will come this week, and next week, there’s going to be a real push on getting going into other communities and introducing them to amla that may not have seen as yet. We’ve got an external AMA, which I’ll be doing next week, which I’ll announce later this week. And another one happening in two weeks. So we hope to see a big rise in the community from from those efforts as well. And I’ll just add cool. So what I’ll do is move on to some of the questions that we actually have in the thread that I set up. Just give me one second. And so I’m gonna go with with question. I like it. I know we did we do touch about this a little bit. I think it’s it’s a it’s fairly, fairly simple. It’s let’s move forward to Yeah. How do you see amulet? So I think a lot of people know that we launch on the main net around September time, I think is available. You know, we’ve got ambitious ambitious plans. So one year is not a long time for us at all with the amount of that we want to do. I guess. Jimmy, do you do you? Do you have any insight in that at all? What you say? Or how you want someone to answer that question?
Jimmy – Amulet
Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, the bread and butter products, I think are like smart contract cover and stablecoin depeg. So I think like we’re going to expand in that way first. So I think we’ll have like a couple of like launch partners, but I think eventually want to be covering like a good chunk of the salon ecosystem. And then after that, or maybe concurrently we’ll be launching or stablecoin depeg cover and that should likely USDT USDC maybe USD and a couple of other or py, maybe a couple other like Solana native staples, as they as they come out. And you know, that’s that’s kind of just the beginning, though. I think eventually we want like the wallet integrations, we really want to expand into game phi. So we’re, we’re actively like looking for ways to like work together with project teams, and build our way into like more NFT cover and gamefi cover. Turn on my end. Rupert. Do you have anything?
Rupert – Amulet
though? I didn’t know. I was hoping Rob would actually say something. But it sounds like maybe you were trying to say so we will be you’re on mute.
Rob – Amulet
I was trying to say something initially introduced you had myself on mute. So I did say I was gonna say yeah, that all makes sense. I didn’t know whether now that your audio is better for you. But you wanted to add to that at all.
Rupert – Amulet
Would you do me a favour of reiterating the question just in case because I heard
Rob – Amulet
Abosultely, it was about where we see I’m yellow within the next 12 months
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, so I mean, Jimmy, yeah, hit it all out of the park there. And in that respect will be launched into a secondary chain within the next 12 months, we’ll have your first products out the gate. Personally, I like to see. So there’s a lot of stuff In cover protection that is critical bar none, within the next 12 months, that’s the goal that I’m working towards. And I’m fairly confident that we will get that, obviously, for the other different cover protocols that might be listening or reading the the notes from this, they might roll their eyes. But you know, that’s a weird, I mean, to be and, you know, we’re pretty ambitious in what we want to achieve. So the next world wants to beyond are going to be pretty important to us.
Rob – Amulet
And I guess there are touching on what Jimmy said about the Solana ecosystem. And there’s talking about different chains, I guess it’s quite good to move on to the question that way it asked about whether we plan to launch on cosmos?
Rupert – Amulet
Cosmos is an interesting one. I think at the moment, we’re probably not there. In our heads right now, I’d say look, it’s a really simple answer to that is that there’s not a huge amount of defi protocols that operate on Cosmos and the TVL, is actually relatively low, the, you know, the opportunity for us to ensure that TVL is is relatively low. So there has to be a business case around in order to develop out onto the new chains. That being said, if Cosmos grows, and they are thinking about, you know, whether or not multiprotocol on margins, and I start thinking about problems in the real world right now, than they might be in a better position to, to grow themselves. And that’s what we’ve been a bit bitchy about it. That’s that’s genuinely life. It they are, like fyfield, the cosmos ecosystem is, is looking to solve problems that are not here right now. And they’re looking to the problems that are further down the line, which is fine, we’ll get to those. And they will have a solution to all those. But we, you know, we need to work with people. And the problem you can say exist in web three right now.
Rob – Amulet
Cool, absolutely. Makes sense. Just just just for the best of time. And we still have a couple more questions I want to open up because we’ve got quite a few people here to see if anyone out does have a question. The next question we have is explained in plain language, what ways we want to cover this. So I’m there the talking about this, we know about the smart contract vulnerability, I guess, and obviously stablecoin Deepak, which has spoken a lot about over the last couple of weeks, who do you think’s got the best skills to be able to use plain language?
Rupert – Amulet
Jimmy did an awesome job. This earlier we had a call with with a partner firm we’re looking to work with. And Jimmy did an excellent job of explaining smart contracts. The risks involved with that. So I knew we had to take that from him.
Jimmy – Amulet
Yeah, sure.bSo well, if you’re a Solana user, let’s say you want to use solar wind. Alright, so the risk here is, let’s say I deposit $1,000 into solar and, and all of a sudden, they have a bug, or they have some sort of like exploit that’s like deployed against them. Now, what ends up happening is you could lose that $1,000 that you put in or maybe like some part of that, that $1,000. Right now, as it stands, there’s pretty much no, no coverage for users like on SOL. And they do have a small like contingency like cover fund, which they were inspired to create. But users who, who participate in that protocol might not be eligible for that cover fund. Right. So it’s really discretionary. From our perspective, if it is a hack will pay out, right. So that’s the the primary and like sole focus of that particular product or the smart contract,cover product. So, in short, if I had to summarise if you buy cover for protocol, protocol gets hacked, then we’ll pay out.
Rob – Amulet
Cool, I would say that was a plain language
Rupert – Amulet
to add onto that one. Rob, I actually Jimmy there was a bit that I was really keen on talking about was, how do these why would the smart contracts have been hacked? How did they get hacked? You know that that was that was you said earlier that I thought was really Here’s a caveat. If you’ve forgotten, I will reiterate.
Jimmy – Amulet
Yes, please, please do.
Rupert – Amulet
So it was it was really you’re talking about, oh, you know, it may not be malicious. But you know, bugs do get written in smart contracts. And the, you know, we’ve been around multiple events and talking to developers about this, you know, they’re under huge amounts of pressure in order to deliver a product. And, you know, they deliver it to the spec that they have been given now, in that process, there, there can be flows, there can be ways of doing things that the developer hasn’t even thought about doing. You know, Flash line attacks are a great example, right? Frontend attacks are another example of that, you know, whereby you’re not thinking about how people are going to attack you, you’re thinking about, how do I execute the smart contract that I’ve been produced? And so these are the things that come into play, when we’re looking at ensuring the issues in the contract. And actually, Jimmy just is a bit noisy behind me, can you go into a bit more about the team in terms of like how we ordered them?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it’s, it’s really a combination of a few things. And Shane could probably speak a lot better to this than than I can. But in short, it’s a combination of working with a couple of auditors. So personally working with them, looking at like some of their past audits. And then our team will also do line by line, code reviews, depending on what they see. And then that all gets condensed down into a risk score. And then that risk score is translated into risk premium. So you know, the whole process is really kind of designed to make sure that we understand the type of risk that we’re trying to, to cover. And to make sure that we’re able to support users, like in all defi ecosystems over the long term. So we want to make sure that we can price them appropriately and make sure that the protocol doesn’t, doesn’t blow up, because cover is one of those, one of those fields where it’s it’s pretty much you’re staring disaster in the face.
Rob – Amulet
Cool. Makes a lot of sense. Anything to add to that at all, Shin?
Shin – Amulet
Actually, I mean, these are really deep topic. I wouldn’t want to use a lot of time here. Right. I guess I just summarised a little bit on I mean, about the risk we are going to cover actually, I mean, the final final goal is we are going I mean, if we look into the individual product, I mean, definitely, the risk is fully based on that particular protocol. But if say we expand enough in cover enough landscape of Santa Ana, at least, if we get like enough cover buyers, for all that is more likely using a mutual cover concept for like each other. We are protecting each other. So I mean, just to speak of this in a different perspective.
Rob – Amulet
Okay, can can people still hear me?
Rupert – Amulet
Yeah, I can hear you. I don’t know what. Just tailed off,
Rob – Amulet
I quite like the the final pre submitted question. So well, well, we can I’m going to ask that. And I’m going to answer it first from my end, and then open it over to you if that’s okay. So the question is, most users only cared about immediate benefits rather than the real value of the project in the long term. How can your project convince users to invest in your platform for the long term? So I have a strong opinion on this because a bit of my background, I don’t for me, I’ve been in this industry before for quite a while, and I left the industry and I came back because I believe in the product and I believe in the product that amulet has, I believe that this is again labs and it’s my opinion. But I believe that the cover within the industry is a necessity and not just something you have to convince people to do. I think it will genuinely deter the hats from happening. I think people will start having more faith away from web three to allow them to join into everyday. So for me it’s more how can we portray the message from the marketing perspective in short term, so that people can just see the value long term without without being told any false lies focusing more than the fact that we believe as a team that this product is a necessity and not just what else is out there. And what other people do that it was more of an idea to me, this is a real functioning, a real a real functioning type of project project that’s needed for this for the industry. That’s my two cents on it. I’m gonna hand it over to you, Rupert, if that’s okay.
Rupert – Amulet
Sure, like you may lose it because I’m about to head out the door to the plane. But the in short for me the way that we do, we talked to institutional investors and the way we talk to an everyday investor is identical. Everybody wants the same thing. They want to understand longevity project, they want to understand your plan going forward, how are you going to attack the market? How are you going to be able to close deals, how are you going to be able to grow the numbers, these are all important things. And actually, the proof will be in the pudding with us now, we are under no illusion that we’re not a, a, you can’t, you’re not gonna get access to a cool club of NFTs you’re not going to be able to generate money by walking around like to step in, you know, we are something totally different. But one thing we are is extraordinarily undervalued at the sector in DeFI and we are going to be growing the two largest and most valuable section of DeFi and the reason I know this is because I look at the traditional market, I see how large cover and the size of the sector of the market that cover plays in chat by so it is inevitable that we are going to grow to that size and it is our job to keep adding on to that.
Jimmy – Amulet
Nothing to add, more so because I’m excited to see what everybody else has to wants to ask us. In the in the audience. So I’m gonna I’m gonna say no.
Rob – Amulet
Yeah. So well. Well, we’ve we’ve got that. That’s the that was the final pre given questions. So if anyone does have any questions in the chat right now, feel free to unmute yourself and ask away as well, you could type it into the general chat
Rupert – Amulet
Dont be shy, come on, ask away. Otherwise, we will just carry on and carry on talking about apes and my recent revelation on how much I really want an Ape. I went to NFT, NYC and a friend of mine who’s got a few, invited me along to their aches. And it’s suddenly all clicked to me. I remember the reasoning of having an Ape now. And yeah, I am. I’ve got the FOMO I want to buy one.
Rob – Amulet
We do have a question from MG. And I mean, it’s Can you briefly describe your team members in one or two sentences? And can you introduce what you projects are shortly? So? Well?
Rupert – Amulet
Sorry for missing that one off? MG that’s yeah, we often forget that word. Yeah, sometimes. Yeah. First time is a very brief introduction for me because I’m about to walk in our door. We’ve got project lead. I’ve been in crypto since about 2016. was when I bought my first assets. But what first started building my first protocol in 2017, which is all around crowd wisdom, pivoted into regulated assets and 2018 as we had to raise capital, and it was impossible during crypto winter. So we’re to regulate assets. Sold that one last year before joining Team emila and taking this forward. Yeah, Jimmy, why don’t you go next?
Jimmy – Amulet
Sure. So give me the product lead here. You know, background is as an actuary, so working with one of the world’s largest like actuarial consulting firms doing investment strategy, stochastic analysis like asset liability management. Before that, I spent some time on a at an investment bank on their cover and pension like solutions like institutional team and now working on building out like our internal processes and pricing our products and designing new ones.
Shin – Amulet
So, Shin here tech lead. So my background is software engineer building a lot of like financial applications as well as a few years in the IT security industry as well as multiple patent holders in AI, like facial recognition. So I just moved into crypto World Around years ago. So yeah, so that’s about me.
Rob – Amulet
Cool. Me I’m, I’m in marketing. I’ve been doing web, web two and web three marketing for maybe five, six years now being in the crypto industry first, because of I got introduced to it due to sports and food marketing, content wise. And then I fell in love with web three in general. So that’s what I’ll be doing. My eyes went into marketing through actually, I come from actually a legal and sales background. And then I ended up self teaching myself when I was in sales. And that got me into marketing career over the last six, seven years. And yeah, and that’s, that’s me, I guess, the best way with, with introducing what the products are shortly in one sentence, I always think are there and lo are there and what we actually say as the tagline of the providing simple, reliable cover for web today. For everyone in Web today. I think it’s a perfect sentence that it can do it. And we’ve added in the fact that as we mentioned earlier, we are focused on Solana and the rest based ecosystem. Cool. I’ll just see if anyone else has any any further questions that before I wrap up, I’ll give it 10 seconds cool, I don’t think there is say thanks, everyone, for for joining in. I really appreciate it and I will get the transcripts and audio within the next 24 hours for everyone as well as that’s coming up.
Rupert – Amulet
Thanks for jumping on as always really appreciate every one of these. We also appreciate the comments after on the blog posts and that sort of stuff. We will try and come back to every single question. And if there’s anything that you’re you’re dying for a an answer for Yeah, medium Rob DM Jimmy DM chin, we’re always happy to talk on the discord. Absolutely.
Rob – Amulet
Cool. Thanks very much, everyone.