VVS Finance AMA

Introduction from Cronos Chain News Founder: “Today we have a special episode for you all. This project is the biggest one on the Cronos ecosystem. With a TVL that once peaked $1.1B USD (Q4 2021), it is known for its launchpad, and for its iconic Miner Mole NFTs. Our guest was able to allocate some time, specifically for this Q&A which we at Cronos Chain News are thankful for. With no further ado, please welcome: Very, Very Simple Finance, also known as VVS!”

Welcome to the CCN Q&A summit! We 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?

Thanks, CCN for reaching us, we are happy to share more information about VVS Finance. VVS was launched in Nov 2021, with the aim to provide the simplest DeFi venue for everyone. We are a medium-sized crypto-passionate team that has supporting members around the world to cover the clock, formed by experienced subject-matter experts (SME) in software development, UI/UX design, QA, product management and marketing. We believe in decentralization and we love building products that can make trading easier and our community happy.

We have a vast audience of both seasoned and newbie blockchain readers and listeners, and it would be great to have your team describe the ethos of your project, as well as its purpose in the Cronos ecosystem. Can you describe what VVS is, and what it’s planning on achieving?

One line to describe the key objective of VVS Finance — “Very Very Simple DeFi for Everyone”. VVS aims to be the simplest DeFi platform for users to swap tokens, provide liquidity, join Initial Exchange Offering (IDO) and earn yields. With this in mind, we designed and developed an easier-to-use and intuitive platform for seamless user experience, created tutorial videos to visualize DeFi for beginners and supported users’ inquiries at all times by our community managers. Apart from fundamental DeFi trading features, the team is also exploring new possibilities, such as our first Miner Moles NFT collection, NFT staking and our first gamification – VVSGotchi.

As of today, what are the services that VVS currently offers on its platform?

VVS Finance offers a wide variety of services with easy-to-use interface. Below are our core product features:

1. Bling Swap: Swap tokens at low fees and fast speed. Users can supply liquidity by providing a pair of assets, receive Liquidity Provider (LP) tokens as proof of ownership, and earn proportionate 0.2% transaction fees whenever the pair is traded.
2. Crystal Farms: Stake your LP tokens to receive VVS rewards. With boost farming, you can earn an even higher yield by depositing in xVVS vaults and staking NFTs.
3. Glitter Mines: Stake your tokens to receive even more VVS or partners’ tokens. Glitter Mines help you to generate low risk, maintenance-free passive income for your coffees.
4. Initial Gem Offering (IGO): Discover new projects in the nascent and fast-growing Cronos universe. Users can buy brand new tokens at a fixed initial offering price and join the ride!
5. xVVS: xVVS is VVS Finance’s yield-bearing governance token. Users can only get xVVS by staking VVS. Then, you can deposit your xVVS into our xVVS Vaults to earn extra VVS yields.
6. VVS Miner Mole NFT Collection: VVS Finance first NFT collection, which is a collection of 10,000 adorable and utility enabled PFPs. You can stake your miner moles to boost farms and play VVS Gotchi.
7. VVS Gotchi an gaming extension of VVS Miner Mole NFT collection for our users to engage with your moles, earn experience points (EXP) and further boost your farm rewards.

We’ve published a medium article of year-end review to summarize our team’s achievements and product releases in the past year. There are more exciting features to come this year, stay tuned to our next update!

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?

We are extremely honored to be one of the first projects building natively on the Cronos chain. Here are some of the reasons for launching VVS Finance on Cronos,

1. Low tx fee, high throughput: High gas fees on Ethereum have priced out the majority of retail users and made it a playfield for whales. We believe DeFi is for everyone and should have a very low barrier to entry. With less than $0.1 gas fee for simple transfer, hundreds tps, Cronos offers a sustainable layer for DeFi apps that tailor to the mass audience.
2. Fast finality: Built on Tendermint core, transactions on Cronos can achieve fast finality, with ~6 seconds block confirmation. This drastically improves the user experience, offering a similar experience as centralized finance application.
3. EVM compatibility: Cronos provides a fully compatible Web3 layer for interacting with existing EVM clients and tooling, which makes it super easy for us to build in a familiar environment.
4. IBC-enabled interoperability: Cronos mainnet will enable Cosmos IBC at launch, which means in the future, we will be able to interact with other Cosmos chains in the ecosystem and facilitate cross-chain liquidity among EVM chains and the Cosmos ecosystem.
5. Tremendous support from the Crypto.org and the Crypto.com ecosystem: We are so grateful for all the support from the Crypto.org team and Cronos Labs along the way. We are also excited to be able to access a mass retail audience that Crypto.com ecosystem offers, and work with our partners to provide an end-to-end seamless DeFi experience.

With the recent Cronos Mainnet Network Upgrade – Galileo, it scaled TPS (transactions per second) even further, optimized node storage with 30% less storage for full nodes, improved node performance, generalized reduction of node start-up time by ~50% and its new Cosmos functionalities paved the way for greater EVM/Cosmos interoperability. All these improvements provided a more solid foundation and unlocked more possibilities for VVS Finance to keep building and growing to another level.

A year ago, from this date, the market looked different. As you recall, we were in a bull run, and things looked a bit euphoric in the entire crypto space. How do you feel about the current state of the market, and in what ways has it impacted your project?

Our team is visioning the crypto industry from a long-term perspective. Where in markets, there are always highs and lows. Our team is focusing on building and enhancing our products and doing our best to provide better user experiences to our community. Humbly appreciated by our long-term supporters, VVS ambassadors and everyone who sees what the team is trying to accomplish, your feedback is the biggest motivation for us to keep pushing forward. There are always uncertainties in the future, however, these are also good opportunities for us to regroup, rethink and further optimize our products and features for the long run. VVS’s journey is determined by our routine efforts and community support, which we believe every step we take will become part of the long journey.

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 190+ millions of USD, an impressive metric especially in a bear market. What are some of the strategies that your team is currently implementing to maintain this consistency?

We cannot achieve this without the support and trust from our VVS community and molefam. VVS Finance was the first Automated Market Maker (AMM) Decentralized Exchange natively built on top of the Cronos blockchain with the aim of providing the simplest DeFi venue for everyone. We believe what makes VVS Finance stand out is its very low swap fee and its wide variety of services with easy-to-use interface. We aim to provide an all-around and one-stop DEX experience to our users with all the services and products they need on one Dapp. The team will continue to listen to our community’s comments, optimize our existing features, and build the best products in the Cronos ecosystem.

Let’s talk NFTs. What was the inspiration behind the Mole Miners NFT collection? Do they currently have any utilities?

Yes. Our aim is to make VVS Miner Moles a community-centric and utility-enabled NFT collection, and make sure every holder can benefit from the project even with different interests. Some of the utilities of VVS Miner Moles are NFT staking, farm boosting and VVSGotchi. By owning a VVS Miner Mole, you can gain farming boosting power by staking your NFTs to your preferred farms. Also, VVS Miner Moles is an entry ticket for entering VVSGotchi, where you can form your own teams, complete quests with your Miner Moles to earn EXP points and earn extra boosting power to generate more farming yields. VVS Miner Mole and VVSGotchi are definitely one of the most important projects in 2022 and we will constantly review the project to see what more enhancements we can add to this collection and gamification.

One of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen so far when discussing NFTs is the lack of real-life utilities, which some would say, if implemented it would bring more value to NFT. What do you make of it?

We understand the importance of NFTs utilities and agree that we should always expand the possibilities of NFTs. As a group of crypto enthusiasts, we believe the usage and potential of DeFi, NFTs, GameFi are enormous. Therefore, our team collaborates with Cronoslab to offer real-life perks to our molefam, for example: the Token2049, 2022. As VVS launched the VVS Miner Mole NFT, we constantly seek additional utilities to bring to the collection. Last year we launched boosted farming with NFT staking and developed VVS Gotchi, while we keep exploring in GameFi. All of these efforts were made to incentify our users to try, understand and step into the world of DeFi and NFT. With a larger, trusty and knowledgeable community, hopefully we can create even more real-life utilities in the future.

We did see some GameFi hints circulating on the web: VVS Gotchi, a wordplay with the nostalgic 90s handheld digital pet. Can you tell us more about it?

We had just launched our VVS Gotchi game about a month ago. It is an extension of our Miner Mole NFT project where you can feed, interact with and take your Miner Moles on quests! VVSgotchi allows you to go on quests with your Moles to earn Experience Points (EXP). Ultimately, the more points your Moles earn, the more rewards you earn on your VVS boosted farms! Our team has spent great effort to study, build and test, repeatedly, we eventually have this game launched as our final milestone in 2022. Our team is exploring what the best features we can add to the game. We target to introduce more fun elements into the game this year, in phases, to create more utilities for the NFTs and allow our users to better interact with their Miner Moles.   

As a platform that offers IGO (‘initial gem offering’ as you refer to it), what were some of your favorite projects that you’ve worked with under this category?

We selected every IGO project very cautiously and had deep conversations with the project teams before introducing them to our community. Each project has their own unique traits and purpose to fulfill the needs of different users, which also brings the entire ecosystem closer and helps each other to grow. We are very happy and honored that the IGOs we held previously had successfully completed, and we are maintaining a long-term supportive relationship with the projects. A bit cliche to say, but we treasured every partner. We are thrilled to introduce them to our community, connect with different protocols in the ecosystem, bring exciting new IGO opportunities to our molefam.

Where do you see your project in 2 years from now?

It has been an exciting and incredible ride so far for VVS Finance. In the last year, VVS Finance and the whole crypto market have been through a lot of ups and downs, and various unexpected incidents in the market. We truly appreciate our VVS community and molefam who stay with us through all the highs and lows. In the coming 2 years, VVS Finance will continue our commitment to build a Very Very Simple DeFi for Everyone, make DEX and yield farming more simple, secure and enjoyable. We will continue to improve our user interface and web performance to provide a better trading experience. Also, we will enhance our onboarding process for our existing and new VVS users to navigate in VVS and the DeFi world. Of course, our team is going to listen to our community, release more community-desired features and lead our community to the next bull run.