On August 18th 2021, our community had a chance to welcome Mr. David Lighton- Co-Founder of Lithium Finance to join in an AMA to give fruitful information about the key features and roadmap of Lithium Finance - the 𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 protocol to regularly price illiquid assets.
This AMA was held by CryptoFamily Group – the top crypto community in Vietnam, where investors and traders can obtain the latest news and signals from bot/ admins, as well as discuss and share investment experiences in the crypto space.
At this AMA, our guest directly greeted the community and provided detailed information on Lithium Finance as well as some key products and future plans.
Time: 09:00 PM (UTC + 7) on Saturday, August 18th , 2021
Venue: https://t.me/CryptoFamilyGroup
Airdrop 200 USDT for the best questions in the AMA.
Below are some main points of this AMA:
Question for Part 1- Project overview
Question 1: First, please make a brief introduction of Lithium Finance and the team's background.
Mr. David: Lithium Finance is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a distinctive point of convergence between blockchain, distributed wisdom and the economic & technical engine needed to pull the worlds of traditional finance and DeFi together, enabling tremendous growth and innovation at the interface.
And on our team, I’d like to use this opportunity to talk about my fellow co-founder, Steve Derezinski. Steve is a Senior Executive and MIT Blockchain Engineer & MBA, who has launched 80+ startups that have cumulatively raised over $250M to date. Steve and I share the same ethos, that bringing real-world assets into the world of decentralized finance — offering financial services with no intermediaries or guarantors — is the final frontier of crypto. Steve is great—
However, this vision of decentralized trust can't be realized without the right pricing oracle. Why would I buy private stock, if I don’t have a good idea of what it is worth? The market still hasn't seen a pricing mechanism that's able to price illiquid real-world assets effectively. This is the problem that brought us together.
On my own background, I am also the Founder and CEO of SendFriend, a FinTech startup using the blockchain to create faster, less expensive, and more inclusive international money transfers for immigrants in the US. Prior to founding SendFriend, I served as Special Assistant on the Haiti Desk in the World Bank following the devastating earthquake of 2010, and co-authored the Haiti National Financial Inclusion Strategy, a Central Bank-sponsored initiative to increase consumer account penetration from 25% to 50% of adults. I hold an MBA from MIT – Sloan School of Management and an M.A. and B.A. with honors from Johns Hopkins University.
Question 2: Could you share with us some of your investment partners and what value they have brought to the platform?.
Mr. David: The past few months have been an exciting journey for the team at Lithium Finance. From protocol design to fundraising, pre-IDO, and marketing, we won’t be able to be where we are today without the enormous support of all our investors. They have been backing Lithium not just financially but also in many other aspects. Our team has boarded several additional investors and raised an extra $2.6 million from them to ramp up our product rollout. That’s on top of the $5 million that we raised during the seed round co-led by Pantera and Hashed. Also We have onboarded FBG Capital, Coin98 Ventures, Shima Capital, PetRock Capital, Vessel Capital, Soul Capital, Gate.io, DuckDAO, AU21 Capital, ZBS Capital, Divergence Ventures, Autonomy Capital, Astronaut Capital, Ellipti, GAINS Associates, and more. You can find more information in our article here: https://medium.com/lithiumfinance/lithium-finance-takes-on-additional-investors-total-raise-reached-7-6m-878ef4f73bb7
Question 3: Please update some hot news or big event to attract more users in the coming time.
Mr. David: On big news, we successfully completed our dual IEO and IDO on Kucoin and Polkstarter respectively early this month. Thank you so much for all of your support. Currently we have a lot of updates on partnership. In terms of Wisdom Node, Hashed is the first one to join our ecosystem. For wisdom seekers, Credifi Finance, Beyond Finance and, Injective Protocol also joined us recently. And I can definitely tell you that more and more partnerships will be announced! Stay tuned.
Questions for Part 2 - Pre-collected questions from Twitter:
Question 1:Wealth managers are reaching out to learn more about tokenized real assets, what will happen to Lithium Finance regarding this continued monthly growth by NFTs, and how do they plan to catch this market that has become so popular in recent months? @Lidiamga
Mr. David: Well, NFTs have been somewhat of a revelation in the blockchain space and has quickly become one of the most talked about use cases of the technology. It has become a lucrative avenue for artists today as NFTs give you a way to sell work that there otherwise might not be much of a market for. The Gen Z definitely seems to have taken a liking to the concept, with everything from luxury collectibles like Gucci stickers, to autographed tweets, to digital artwork fetching millions of dollars gathering a lot of steam and attention in the space.
The concept certainly seems to have both promise and hype behind it, and Lithium’s product offerings will certainly help users make the most out of the opportunity represented by NFTs. Being a nascent industry and one that is brimming with activity, the Lithium protocol certainly can be a game-changer for investors in the space. Let’s say a potential buyer who wants to purchase a great NFT item. The market is hot, and the listing price has been skyrocketing. This potential buyer could have been wondering when the price would drop, even just a little. With the nature of NFTs- digitized ownership of artworks, luxury collectibles, music etc. involving many intangible factors and with imperfect information floating around, accurate speculation becomes nearly impossible. When NFTs sell, it is the product of an auction. However, crucial data, accounting for real-time market conditions and sentiment, the opinion of other professionals and buyers on the specific collectible and most importantly, the intangibility of artwork in general- are all missing from the equation. Lithium can comb through these responses using machine learning and data science to generate our best estimates from the raw data inputs.
Question 2: Can you articulate more on the case studies that Lithium Finance provides. What makes your project more innovative and useful platform than other competing platforms? @Candy120820
Mr. David: Our favorite case thus far is our experience with pricing the Coinbase IPO using the mechanism. Once the protocol gave us the answer of ~$80 billion, we believed that perhaps there were some issues, since the wall st analyst community had predicted the IPO price might be higher, more like $150 billion to $200 billion. In the end, the protocol had given us a good answer. This is our first success story with the protocol. We believe there will be more to come 🙂
For the second question, traditionally the only way to price a real-world asset is to hire expert appraisers who have been trained and hold credentials. The process is slow and expensive and therefore limited to few assets. With Lithium Finance and its powerful DMI mechanism, we will be able to source prices for any asset through a decentralized honest-rewarding protocol, all on-chain.
Question 3: Please give us some details of the metrics and the governance model of $LITH token. What is the role of it in the Lithium Finance ecosystem? What are your strategies to help drive the demand and increase the token value to make profits for long-term investors? @MiraaTrann
Mr. David: Within the $LITH ecosystem, you can earn $LITH by answering questions asked by wisdom seekers in a fashion deemed satisfactory or good by the protocol. Specifically, this means that you can generate token income over time by being a meaningful team contributor. Note that many social media sites work to establish reputations for their users, including those with “chat forum”-like capabilities such as Reddit and Quora.
At Lithium Finance, we take the idea of a reputation based market for knowledge to the next level by rewarding our best contributors with a handsome bounty of tokens. If you are among our most reliable contributors, there is a strong chance that you will earn tokens. Now we also have a pre-staking platform for you to simple staking (Stake LITH, earn LITH). Total rewards to be distributed per week will be around 3,150,000 LITH. Unstaking is available anytime one week before the mainnet launch, and there are no penalties for that. For more information, please have a look at our medium https://medium.com/lithiumfinance/lithium-finance-to-launch-pre-staking-rewards-program-on-5th-august-1008bca0688f
Question 4: ICould you give us some great achievements you have made so far, and the new features you've been working on? What do you see Lithium Finance in 1 year's time and afterwards? What are your top priorities for the next few months based on the roadmap? @BrutyTamela
Mr. David: Sure, as I mentioned in part one, currently we have a lot of updates specially on partnership. So basically there are two major stakeholders in the Lithium system: Wisdom Nodes and Wisdom Seekers. Those seeking answers to questions about the price of an asset will use LITH tokens — Lithium’s native token — to provide a bounty, and those with expertise in delivering answers will stake LITH to signal confidence in their answers. In terms of Wisdom Node, Hashed is the first one to join our ecosystem. For wisdom seekers, Credifi Finance, Beyond Finance and, InJective Protocol also joined us recently. And I can definitely tell you that more and more partnerships will be announced. Stay tuned.
Question 5: So in Lithium Finance assets are valued through DMI Mechanism where wisdom nodes provide results to price seekers. My question is what will happen when a large number of wisdom nodes gather and tampers the results? Does you have any solutions for this? @Aravind75154890
Mr. David: The DMI mechanism is aware that people will try to manipulate a result and accounts for attack vectors. Not every answer provided by a Wisdom Node gets counted towards the price that the Lithium protocol comes up with. The protocol has three robust layers of defense against bad players and malpractices designed to mess with the protocol. If a malicious actor decides to provide answers designed to manipulate, they might also decide to add a significant stake to their answer to maximize the impact. In this case, once the consensus answer or ground truth is uncovered, not only will the malicious actor’s reputation be slashed, so will all of their stake. In the case of an attempt to collude with a number of malicious actors, the amount of funds required to stake plus the lack of direct influence (due to the random down-selection) means all of these funds will get slashed and the resulting answers will not be impacted. Therefore, the best action is to both answer honestly and stake your confidence. We will soon be adding even more layers of protection against malpractice in the ecosystem.
PART 3: BEST LIVE QUESTIONS CRYPTOFAMILY GROUP
Question 1: Can you briefly describe your PARTNERSHIP so far and upcoming partnerships?
Mr. David: The partnership ecosystem is so interesting. We are building a multi-sided platform, of wisdom seekers — people or institutions looking for answers on the value of various assets and items, and wisdom nodes — people providing feedback on the the value of those assets.
To date, we have announced several partnerships with leading firms like Beyond Finance, Injective, #Hashed, and others. There will be more... I can promise we'll have at least one or two more really exciting announcements over the next few weeks so please stay tuned!
The other thing I'd say is that we may plan to reach out to our community to recruit more wisdom seekers and wisdom nodes. I wanted to flag this for all of you, in case you're interested, and we may even find a way for you to earn tokens by helping out. More to come on this, but great question !
Question 2: Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?
Mr. David: Thanks for this question. It's quite important.
As a community of honesty and integrity, we have to be very wary of scams, and of course there are too many in crypto. I would like to just share that we will release a product roadmap in due course, and there will also be announcements regarding TestNet and Mainnet. The product is under development and we made a fun announcement of our technology team last week.
We do our best to be transparent with the community. At the same time, we can't make announcements until they're ready 😉
Question 3: Do you have a global ambassadorial program or referral reward system? do i get any benefit from holding this long-term ?
Mr. David: Good question! I think you might be a great fit for our staking program!! Please see the details here, and we would very much welcome your participation. You can earn rewards 😉
https://medium.com/lithiumfinance/lithium-finance-to-launch-pre-staking-rewards-program-on-5th-august-1008bca0688f
Question 4: DeFi is one of the hottest topic in the blockchain space right now. Can you share your opinion about DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is Lithium Finance approach towards the DeFi sector?
Mr. David: This is a nice question, as well.
Well, let me just say that I'm passionate about DeFi and financial innovation that is inclusive and promotes transparency. DeFi is very much in that spirit.
However...DeFi, despite its staggering growth over the past 18 months, suffers from a lack of liquidity. Why? Well, not enough assets are traded on chain. We believe that a data oracle for private assets is fundamentally one of the missing links, to bring more assets and more liquidity into the DeFI ecosystem. Whether we will topple banks and traditional financial services in the longer term, I just can't say, but innovation always has the potential to be a catalyst for a better world, with better service for customers and better pricing!
Question 5: In the world cryptocurrency competition, features are of the utmost importance to attract investors and the community! Can you provide a list of killer features that scare your competitors over your project?
Mr. David: Well, this is one of my favorite questions...
I want to make something clear. A lack of transparency in the private asset markets makes it challenging to trade these assets. Indeed, if you are presented with the opportunity to invest in a private company, for example, you may not be allowed to negotiate the price.
It's clear that there is a huge information assymetry between buyers and sellers in the private asset market. So, what's our killer feature?
Well, there is no decentralized or centralized data repository for private asset valuations… data oracles in blockchain tend to look at public data and they don't generate the data sets themselves.
With Lithium, we are presenting the world's first decentralized data oracle for private assets, and we are using our own models and techniques to generate the data ourselves. We cannot wait for the future.
For all of the questions that have not been answered yet, guys feel free to search for more information or ask directly to them on the links provided below:
🔹https://twitter.com/lithiumfinance
🔹https://t.me/lithiumfinanceofficial
🔹https://t.me/lithiumfinanceannouncements
🔹https://t.me/lithiumfinancevn
🌍 Know more :https://lith.finance
