For a month or two, I am diving into the world of DeFi. YES! I'm late for the party, for sure. Missed all the opportunities that started more than a year ago. Missed the Uniswap drop last September/October which made quite a lot of users rich. Missed all the tokens that went from zero to the top 100 market cap. Missed everything. But rest assured, every day new opportunities are on the horizon :)
It's one of those new opportunities I'll write about in this post: StableQuant. In this post, you'll find my experiences gained and opinions developed over the last two weeks following this project from close range. Much of these opinions are based on being an active member of the StableQuant community. For details of the service itself, I'll direct you to articles and documentation sets. To spice up engagement, I opened an 'ASK EDJE' service!
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THE SERVICE
In Short: StableQuant is a service designed to provide the best possible swap fees for stable token holders. At the same time, the service is designed to provide the best possible APR for stable coin farmers whilst reducing the total risk for farmers to just a few percent. Part of the service is a new stable coin, named QUSD. The aim is for QUSD to become the most stable coin in the market. For those who like to know: QUSD belongs to the category of algorithmic stable coins.
In more Detail: I won't go into details of the service itself since it would be more like copy/paste from various sources while a rewrite using my own words will likely fail miserably. However, I'll provide you with the direct links to the documents that I think you shall read before even thinking of jumping into StableQuant as an investor, or farmer. When in need of a swap between eg USDT and USDC, I don't think you need to read anything, just hop over to StableQuant, and execute your swap.
I suggest to read following documents in presented order:
- Introduction to StableQuant - a Medium article published July 10, 2021
- Mechanics of QUSD, StableQuant's native Stablecoin - a Medium article published July 18, 2021
- Documentation set of StableQuant - the StableQuant Wiki
You may also like to jump into the community channels to get a feel for what it's all about.
ASK EDJE
To make life easy for you, with this post I opened the ASK EDJE service for any questions you may have regarding StableQuant. Just drop a comment down below and I'll provide you with answers to the best of my knowledge. Whenever I don't know the answer, I'll be hunting for it...That's a promise!
WHAT I LOVE
From everything that I've seen last few weeks, since the second day of launch, I can summarise what I love about the service and its eco-system, into the following four items:
- Service Design
- Community
- Team is Open and Responsive
- Professionalism of Team
Great Service Design
When I got the trigger from a trusted crypto enthusiast about the existence of StableQuant, the first thing I did was to read the available documentation. My starting point: The medium article 'Introduction to StableQuant', fresh from the press and published just a day before. Next: I connect my wallet to the StableQuant web service and read the documentation section in the services Wiki. Since I didn't know anything about stable swap services, I read up on this segment as well and through that learned about some successes and some major failures in this space.
Intrigued and all, I kept following the project that brought me a week later to the 2nd Medium publication by the team (source) explaining their native stable coin, QUSD.
By now, I can conclude: The team thought of everything to make this service last for a long long time. Super low fees for stable swappers, aiming at even more reduced fees when the contract revenues allow this. Super low risk for stable farmers (less than 3%). Various methods within the service contract to continuously buy the native token Quant of the market, which shall drive the Quant value. Capped supply of Quant, which shall drive the Quant value even more. Uncapped supply of the native stable coin QUSD to allow for maximum and unlimited usage and farming.
As I told you before, I'm new to DeFi. I must admit, I'm even newer to the stable coin segment. Hence, I don't really know what other (algorithmic) stable coins look like, how they are designed, and how StableQuant is better. You are allowed to bash my conclusions. They may be totally wrong. I dare you! But please, provide informative criticism since that helps me understand better and all those who will read this post and comments.
Community
Though the community has more than 1400 members, many of them are not active. But those being active, are coming across as specialists in crypto and have a deep understanding of the stable coin segment. The discussions in the community channel at Telegram, are mostly about specifics of the service with thoughts and suggestions to improve the service as a whole and the contract algorithms in specifics. Hardly any BS in this channel. No 'wen wen wen'. No hyping. No price discussions. Added to that, an active admin team consisting of various types of peeps, from spokesperson to marketing and the development lead. An admin team that is working and available around the clock (most of the time).
Team is Open & Responsive
Through the same community channel, I learned how open and responsive the team is. Many questions regarding the how and - foremost - about the why are answered on the spot. The knowledge of the none-dev admin's is high. Much higher than I'm used to in communities of other projects I've been with during my 1 to 2 months learning trip through DeFi. The team has shown over and over again they share a lot with the community including the immediate steps they plan to make. They even showed they are willing to make adjustments to the service/website and whatnot, upon valid suggestions. They informed the community already a few times, they record all valid suggestions and debate these in the background. I have no reason not to believe them since the team showed they take a professional approach so far. This brings me to the fourth 'What I Love' topic...
Professionalism of Team
Though the team is open to any suggestions, they are not just implementing them, even when they seem to be no-brainers. The way of work of the team is: Each change shall be monitored first before conclusions can be drawn. Added to that, the team doesn't want to make too many changes simultaneously to make sure the effects of changes can actually be determined, which shall give a wealth of information on how to improve the service even more.
That said, I didn't detect changes to the core of the service. The core of the service seems to be thought out well before being developed and launched. Initially launched with the stable coin swap service, a Quant liquidity pool, a Quant/BUSD as well as a mixed stable coin farm, within a week the team launched their native stable coin QUSD. The team claims that everything was already done and sorted out, which cannot be far from the truth.
The changes I've seen are more related to the information on the website, the messages in their Twitter channel and more of those kinda things.
Another reason why I believe the StableQuant team is highly professional is that they not only put tech first and don't want any hype, but they thought of how to market the StableQuant service without embarking on the marketing train. This Sunday, the contract will not lock a percentage of farm rewards anymore, which opens the gates to be onboarded by partner services, so the team says. What exactly will be coming our way, is not clear yet. But various talks points to the direction of partner farms and integration into partner swap routing protocols. The latter can be major since StableQuant swap service aims to be the least expensive swap service for stable coins, hence it shall be listed on top of each swap service adopting the best price offerings model for a swap request.
WHAT I KINDA DISLIKE
Obviously, any project can't be 100% all hunky-dory. Personally, I think two topics are bothering me up to a certain point.
- Full Anonymity of the Team
- Service Documentation
Full Anonymity of the Team
It was already mentioned in the first Medium article, the team decided to stay 100% anonymous. Essentially, such an approach should lead to a big Red Flag to even think of investing with monetary funds. But you have to know, though I consider myself an investor (a small one, but still), an investor with a strong focus on solid projects, I can be a gambler as well. That gambler side in me emerged soon after I connected with the community at Telegram and subsequently went in StableQuant with some of my funds.
Anyways...
It was the Telegram group, the users, the admin's, the discussions, that gave me more and more confidence that the reason for the team to wish to stay anonymous, has different reasons to those who plan rug pulls and whatnot. One of the Medium articles provides us a hint: The team doesn't want to market StableQuant based on their previous successes and reputation. Along the way, I got the understanding the team is known in the crypto space, is credible for what they did and do. However, I was not able to confirm this, other than the words by various of the knowledgable and active community members, including a Quant whale or two.
Through a recent Tweet, I was informed that the team experienced some rug pulls themselves. More details are not known to me, but as time progressed, I started to spend more time with the project, I became more active in the community and I pushed a bit more funds into Quant and its pools. I even transferred some Euro's (converted first into QUSD) into the stable coin farm. Just to try. By now, also these funds are converted into Quant and pushed into the associated liquidity pool to provide the necessary liquidity for the service to work.
The consistency of the information and answers provided in the community channels is super high. I couldn't detect any flaws. This increases my trust in the team, the services and its future. But still, the anonymity feels not 100% good.
Service Documentation
I do realise to provide detailed well-written documentation is time-consuming to write. I suppose this must be a secondary priority for the team. The services wiki shows only the basics. Added to that, some information provided in the Medium articles, or through Twitter, is not even part of the Wiki. However, in the community channel, a lot more information is provided, which is super in itself but doesn't make the time spend very efficient. That said, I've seen many users coming to the Telegram channel asking the basics of the basics that can be read in the first paragraph of the Wiki, or Medium articles. Maybe the team is well experienced in these kinda things and decided to concentrate on the community channel, rather than writing documentation that very few will read anyway. Maybe I shall ask the question, so you readers will know the answer. In case you are interested: Use the ASK EDJE service and I'll collect the definitive answer for you.
FINAL WORDS
We are very early in the project, just into the 3rd week since the launch of the StableQuant service. Anything can happen. But to me, the future looks promising. The team mentioned the other day (well, yesterday to be exact) they plan to come out with some good news later this week, before Sunday. According to design and plan, this Sunday the service will change behaviour allowing partner services to be onboarded (meaning: these changes are required by the partner services as mentioned in the community channel by the team, changes the team already addresses when designing the service before they even launched it). For sure, I'm looking very much forward to coming days/week and weeks, months, and even years after that :)
all images by edje unless stated otherwise
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