Welcome to the CCN Q&A summit! Please tell us more about your team. How many people are behind the project, and when did you launch it?
We are a small team of 6 with 3 of us on the product side, 2 code ninjas, and 1 amazing designer. Our team has a strong background in project design, software engineering, and marketing in the FANNG and crypto space. We’ve been watching the Cronos ecosystem grow since day one and we have taken the leap of faith to join the #CROfam and build out Ferro this year. We want to bring in our expertise from our diverse backgrounds and build the best product experience for our users. Since our official launch in June 2022, we’ve been getting tremendous support from the community. Thank you everyone for that!
What void did you see in this crypto space, or more precisely on the Cronos Chain, prior to launching the Ferro Protocol?
The number of DeFi projects has been growing in the Cronos ecosystem. However, we felt that Cronos lacked a dominant StableSwap with deep liquidity, leading to high slippage when users make large volumes of stablecoin swaps. We saw the need for a cheaper and more efficient way to swap stablecoins and pegged assets, so we decided to build Ferro to solve this problem.
Why did you choose the Cronos chain to build on?
We are heavy users of Cronos ourselves and we wanted to help the chain to grow its ecosystem by building a product on Cronos.
As Cronos is EVM-compatible, we can streamline our development process as the developers on our team are experienced in Solidity. Having low gas fees, high throughput for scalability, and interoperability between Ethereum and Cosmos are also key considerations for us as a decentralized app. Being part of the #CROfam, Cronos has been receiving a lot of support from the http://Crypto.com ecosystem as well. All these technical advantages and a huge user base are what made us choose Cronos chain in the first place.
How do you feel about the current state of the market? What do you make of it, and in what way has it impacted your project?
The crypto winter certainly hasn’t been easy for all crypto users and projects, including Ferro. Our pace of development has slowed down after our launch in this state of the market. While we continue to explore new partnership opportunities to bring in new pools, we also want to be mindful of the protocols we are partnering with to ensure the balance between security and usability for our users.
But we also believe that this is a good test for us to evolve and improve with the market trend, as well as bolster our foundation before riding with the next wave of growth!
Ferro’s TVL is a little over $101.5M USD, which puts it in the top 10 TVL list (on the Cronos Chain). What were you able to do differently to remain sustainable, especially during this current market cycle?
Ferro was launched during this crypto winter, and stablecoins have been the asset to hold as people try to weather the storm. As a stableswap AMM, we can offer a low stableswap fee on the Cronos chain and provide additional utilities to these stablecoins during this current market cycle, which attracts users to join us on Ferro.
Adapting to market changes and understanding what users want is also key to our long-term success. We have been working closely with our partners to bring new liquidity pools and features to our users. Being able to respond to market needs is what makes us sustainable even during this season.
Will you be launching any NFTs soon?
We have been receiving this request from our FERies and it was repeatedly brought up on our server and during our AMA session earlier. Some FERies were even brainstorming what our NFTs could look like!
Right now, we don’t have a plan to launch NFTs as our team is working hard to deliver the features planned in our roadmap. But we are open to this idea given the initial community interest we’ve seen. Hey FERies, if you want to see a Ferro NFT, let us know by voting on our server.
As part of the boosted LP yield feature that we will be launching, we are also in talks with NFT partners for potential NFT staking on Ferro. More details will be released later so stay tuned!
Cronos has some formidable secondary NFT marketplaces for users to shop from, notably EbisusBay, or Minted Network for instance. Which platform will you launch your NFTs on?
We don’t plan to launch NFTs in the near future yet so we can’t say for sure which NFT marketplace we will go to. However, both of them are great marketplaces with leading NFT projects in Cronos listed on them! We’ll share more details if we do decide to launch our NFT collection in the future.
What does your team plan on accomplishing in the Cronos ecosystem as a whole?
We seek to provide Cronos users with a more effective way to access stablecoins and other highly correlated assets with lower fees, lower slippages, lower impermanent loss, and more utilization of pools.
By doing so, Ferro will also allow better composability between protocols in the Cronos ecosystem and benefit Cronos as a whole. For example, money market protocols can list their interest-bearing token on Ferro, while any lower liquidity stablecoins bridged from other chains can leverage the Meta Pool set up to bootstrap the liquidity.
Can you give us a quick rundown on the staking options that the Ferro Protocol offers users?
For sure. There are several ways users can stake and earn $FER as their staking rewards.
Become a liquidity provider and stake your LP tokens
If you have stablecoins sitting in your wallet, why not let them work harder for you by providing liquidity in our 2FER/3FER pools and staking your LP tokens? In this way, you can earn both swap fees from the pools and $FER rewards.
Stake your $FER for $xFER
$xFER token is the yield-bearing token of our protocol. Users can opt to convert $FER to $xFER at the prevailing exchange rate at any time. Our protocol directs a certain portion of the protocol revenues (e.g. swap fees) into the $FER:$xFER conversion contract, resulting in the continuous increase of $xFER over $FER over time. If you want to further boost the APR% on the $FER rewards, you can also lock your $xFER into our vaults.
Any chance we could see Ferro on a CEX (centralized exchange)?
$FER is already listed on a CEX and you can now visit http://Crypto.com exchange to trade $FER!
Where do you see your project 5 years from now?
Ferro being the top stableswap protocol on Cronos chain in terms of TVL and trade volume, offering the lowest swap fee and spread on more than 20 highly correlated asset pairings. By doing so, we plan to drive the next millions of users into the Cronos ecosystem and simplify the world adoption and transition to Web3.
