Thank you for your time today, and welcome to the CCN Q&A summit! We truly hope to cover as much as possible during this segment. Please tell us more about your team. Where is the team located? How many people are behind the project and when did you initially launch it?
Thank you for having us! We’re a team of crypto enthusiasts with years of experience in the industry located all across the globe. Tectonic was launched in December 2021 with the mission to build a decentralized money market platform for the masses. We are very passionate about building something great for this community.
How do you feel about the current state of the market? What do you make of it, and how has it impacted your project?
Inevitably we, like the rest of the industry, have seen softer demand and trading volumes amid the bear market. However, we are taking this time to focus on building – we have been working hard on several product feature releases as well as beefing up our marketing strategy. We are excited about our roadmap and look forward to sharing them with our community.
We have a vast audience of both seasoned and newbie blockchain readers and listeners, and it would be great to have you guys describe the ethos of your project, as well as its purpose in the Cronos ecosystem. Can you describe what Tectonic is, and what it’s planning on achieving?
Tectonic is a decentralized non-custodial algorithmic-based money market protocol that allows users to participate as liquidity suppliers or borrowers. Suppliers provide liquidity to the market and lend out their deposits to earn a passive income, while borrowers are able to borrow liquidity in an over-collateralized fashion. We also have a staking module which allows users to stake $TONIC to earn additional yields from the protocol revenue.
We aim to provide secure yet seamless cryptocurrency trading experiences for our users so that they can access multiple assets while earning yields.
In terms of lending and borrowing, how does this process work exactly? How much can a user borrow, and what are some of the characteristics of the borrowing and the lending aspect of Tectonic? Suppose a user wanted to borrow or lend let’s say $500. How would the lending aspect work? And how would the borrowing aspect work?
Currently, we have 8 different approved tokens that users can lend out or borrow. To lend out a token and earn interest, users have to select which of the 8 approved assets they want to supply, input their desired amount (e.g. $500 worth of that token), and confirm the transaction. Once the transaction is confirmed by the user’s wallet, they will begin earning interest. There are 2 uses for this supplied token: either just to lend out to others to earn interest, or to be used as collateral to borrow against.
To borrow on our platform, users first have to supply an asset. This asset can then be used as collateral to secure the borrowed amount. The maximum amount a user can borrow is determined by the collateral factor, which is outlined in our docs:
https://tectonic.gitbook.io/docs/protocol/money-market-parameters . For example, if a user has supplied $500 worth of USDC, he can borrow up to $400 (a collateral factor of 80%) of another token.
It is important for borrowers to closely monitor their loan-to-value (LTV) ratio to ensure that it falls within a healthy range. This is because the borrower could risk getting liquidated if the LTV reaches or exceeds his Liquidation Threshold.
For a step-by-step guide on how to lend or borrow on Tectonic, do refer to our Gitbook for more details 👇.
Supply:
https://tectonic.gitbook.io/docs/guides/supplying-assets-to-tectonic
Borrow:
https://tectonic.gitbook.io/docs/guides/borrowing-assets-from-tectonic
Why did you choose Cronos to build on as opposed to building on another chain? What were some of the key factors behind this decision?
What attracts us most about Cronos is its scalability and interoperability which enables fast yet cost efficient transactions and bridging with various IBC-enabled chains. We are also incubated by CronosLab so it was a natural choice for us to build on the Cronos Chain.
Can you stake or farm TONIC? Where can people stake, and what kind of incentives should we expect from these farming and staking pools?
Absolutely! Users can stake in our staking module located in the TONIC page. Through staking, users can share a portion of the protocol revenue and earn attractive yields.
Learn how to stake $TONIC in this tutorial video:
https://youtu.be/46tuFvMzwVw
To further incentivize long term believers in the project, we recently released Maturity Vaults with various locking periods ranging from 6 months, 12 months, 24 months, and 48 months. Users can lock their xTONIC (received after staking $TONIC) in their desired vault to earn additional yields. There is no limit on how many vaults users can deposit in nor how much xTONIC they can lock in each vault. The longer the locking period, the higher the APR.
NFTs seem to be a craze as of late, do you have any plans on launching any NFTs at some point and will your NFTs have utilities?
Building a NFT project is definitely not off the table for us, but before this can happen, we will need to hammer out a solid strategy for NFT utility and tokenomics. We will definitely keep this in mind for the future but at this stage, we are prioritizing building up our feature roadmap and $TONIC’s utility. While we do plan to venture into NFT ourselves at this stage, we are open to explore potential partnerships with other NFT projects on Cronos.
How is your team planning on popularizing your project? We’ve seen VVS listed on Huobi earlier in August, is your team planning on expanding and being listed on other exchanges?
In terms of how we plan on popularizing our project, we have been working on developing our marketing and partnership roadmap. This includes increasing communications to the community such as this conversation we’re having with your team right now!
For the time being we are not actively chasing exchange listings. We are focusing on building a better and more competitive product first so that we can have a bigger impact once we reach a larger audience through listings.
Do you currently have any active partnerships? If yes, can you tell us a bit more about them?
As mentioned, this is an area we are actively working on developing, and we are currently in discussions with several projects including those on the Cronos Chain. Our team will share more details when we are closer to finalization.
One of the criteria that valuable projects get measured by is their TVL. As of today, your project has a TVL of a little over 200+ millions of USD, a very impressive metric for the record. What are some of the strategies that your team is currently implementing to increase your TVL?
Thank you very much for your compliment. Our strategy is simple – making good products and putting our users first. Without Tectonians, this project will never be successful. That said, we are actively keeping up to date with what’s happening in the market and industry, as well as listening closely to our community members to ensure that we build something that will be loved by existing and new users alike. In terms of our roadmap, we recently shared our plans for the next few months including the launch of Maturity Lock Vaults, Reward Bounty, an Analytics dashboard, and Notification Centre.
Where do you see your project 5 years from now?
Looking back 5 years ago, DeFi did not even exist yet. This space is changing so rapidly that it is hard to make any prediction that far into the future. However, what we are sure of is that our team has been working as hard as we can to build this project on different fronts. And we believe that this is the best way to make this project thrive. With that, we are confident that we will be in a good place in five years and beyond.
