AMA RECAP: Level Finance x Wallstreetbets
Recently, Level Finance held an AMA with the Wallstreetbets community on Telegram. It was an exciting opportunity for the LEVEL team to engage other community members. Numerous exciting news such as the latest updates on our project’s progress and sneak peaks of upcoming announcements, were all covered in this AMA recap. Let’s dive into the details below.
The content has been edited slightly to improve grammar, informational quality and flow. The original Telegram AMA can be found here
Q&A SESSION SUMMARY
1. Who is the team behind LEVEL and what backgrounds do you have to make this project a success?
The LEVEL team currently consists of 25 people. Roughly half the core members are made up of seasoned developers in Solidity, Backend and Frontend, but we also have our own in-house designer, project manager, as well as a dedicated testing and audits team. The rest of the team is mostly crypto entrepreneurs that got into the industry pretty early (2011–2012) and stuck around through the last couple cycles.
I think we’re all really excited to develop a product that we would use ourselves, and with what’s been happening with centralized providers either being compromised externally, or losing their customers assets due to mis-management/outright theft — we felt pretty compelled to ship a product that not only rivals the user experience of some of these centralized systems but also offers users an opportunity to trade crypto without compromising their token’s security.
2. Can you tell us more about how LEVEL is developing? What utility do you bring to DeFi users?
LEVEL is the leading decentralized and non-custodial perpetual DEX on the BNB Chain. LEVEL is the leading decentralized and non-custodial perpetual DEX on the BNB Chain.
LEVEL provides spot and perpetual trading (up to 30x leverage), innovative risk management for liquidity providers, using original code designed from the ground up.
The LEVEL DEX also enables asset holders on the BNB Chain to become LPs and customize their risk/reward profile via Tranches . This underlying liquidity enables a marketplace for trading perpetual contracts and hedging risk on the LEVEL DEX.
- Fully permissionless, on-chain and non-custodial
- Real utility => Cash flow => Real yield
- - Zero price impact trades powered by Chainlink Oracles
- Innovative Liquidity and risk management solution for Level LPs
We’re a complete fair-launch project without premine or presales. Since Governance was established the LEVEL DAO has made all the major decisions up until this point. From the moment we started bootstrapping this project in 2022, we knew this was the natural direction the industry was going to head towards. We really believe in the future of non-custodial trading and LEVEL being a core part of it. Actually we believe in the project so much that we locked our team tokens for 4 years.
By the way, BTCVIX explained our liquidity pools as “mortgage-backed securities (MBS) style for different risk appetites (the secret sauce, Level is not a GMX fork!)”
Watch the video explaining how LEVEL liquidity pools, called Tranches, work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDCEm1lmeQ
3. Can you share some key milestones?
To highlight our tremendous success in less than 3 months since launching on December 26th, 2022, I’ll share some stats:
- Currently, we generate around $100,000 per day in fees from trading activity on our DEX — yes, every day! According to DefiLlama, only PancakeSwap is ahead of us on BNB Chain. These fees are distributed to our community: token holders, liquidity providers, traders and referrers! There are no taxes or lockups.
- $4.3B total trading volume, $100M per day on average.
- Close to $5M in protocol fees generated since launching.
- Nearly $4M in the DAO Treasury consisting of only finest assets such as BTC, ETH, BNB and stables.
- $25M liquidity in LEVEL Tranches. We’re becoming the largest liquidity center for derivatives trading on the BNB Chain
- Also, LEVEL launched as self-financed by the development team. 2 weeks after launching, LEVEL secured the first strategic investor. Right now, we have 4 investors already. Here’s the latest investor announcement.
- TLDR: https://app.level.finance/analytics/overview
4. Are you audited? If so by whom?
We’re extremely attentive about security and have our second audit ongoing with Quantstamp who are definitely one of the best-in-class crypto auditor and luckily our security partner. The first audit was done by Obelisk.
We also have an Immunefi bug bounty program running. We have multi-sigs and timelocks in place for all critical parts of our decentralized infrastructure. Chainlink and Pyth Network provide oracles for asset pricing to ensure protection against price manipulations.
We’re making sure it’s all air-tight. LEVEL is 100% on-chain and permissionless. All smart contracts are public, transparent and most importantly verifiable.
More info: https://docs.level.finance/security-and-contracts
5. What marketing campaigns are you currently running and what do you have lined up?
LEVEL is all about rewarding those who contribute to the platform, whether you’re a trader, liquidity provider, or just a loyal community member. We’ve got some juicy incentives to get you excited:
First up, our Loyalty Program dishes out 16,000 LVL per day to LEVEL DEX traders. The more you trade, the more LVL you’ll earn. And that’s not all. The fully on-chain Referral Program is another great way to earn some serious rewards. Just share your unique referral link with your friends and followers, and you’ll both be rewarded when they join LEVEL.
We’ve also got the Crew3 campaign up and running, offering LVL rewards for completing simple tasks. Plus, we’ve partnered with some big names in the industry to bring you featured articles, Twitter threads, upcoming trading competitions, new CEX listings, and very meaningful partnerships with AAA projects (including our recent collab with Pancakeswap). Actually, there’s never been a better time to get involved with LEVEL.
6. Since you are margin dex currently on BSC have you also considered cross-chain deployment?
Level is designed to be a multi-chain liquidity aggregator.We chose the launch on BNB first because we believe in the resilience of the BNB community, and we saw a real opportunity for us to become a systemic player within the ecosystem. Other perpetual dex’s, including some of our largest competitors, have tried and failed in the past (Gambit/GMX forks, OpenOcean, MCDEX, to name a few). We saw this as an opportunity to differentiate by building something durable on BNB and once established, begin deploying across other ecosystems. Likely within the next quarter, once we’re done with building “LEVEL 1.5” as well as the security upgrades for the 2nd audit with Quantstamp.
You can read more about roadmap topics in our Outlook 2023 article and the recent DAO proposal.
COMMUNITY QUESTION
1. The LEVEL protocol is positioning itself as a preeminent marketplace for decentralized liquidity. How do you see the protocol’s value proposition evolving over time as it competes with other decentralized liquidity providers, and what do you think are the most important factors for success in this market?
Sustainability. It’s over with the baseless farming protocols, which generate zero value for stakeholders. That started and ended during the last bullrun. Also: Security. Innovation. Integrity.
2. How much risk is associated with each of the Level Trading Pools?
LEVEL trading pools consist of only high-quality assets: BTC, ETH, BNB, and stables, so the risk profile is very attractive given the current APRs.
Source: https://app.level.finance/liquidity
3. There are a lot of incentives for the volume of transactions. LEVEL has enough equity capital, but what are some of the ways to ensure our long-term survival?
We give out LVL to incentivize trading activity on LEVEL, which is very similar to the way that (all) other DeFi protocols give out incentives for people providing liquidity or contributing to the system. What strategies users do to gain these incentives are up to their choices. If you check our analytics and statistics, you will see that the daily trading revenues are always more than the value of LVL rewards given our. So, since rewards < fees, the tokenomics are well in place and most importantly sustainable.
4. Do you have an ambassador program? How do I apply for this program?
We look forward to launching this during Q2. Join our Discord to keep up to date: discord.gg/levelfinance
5. Why is leverage only 30x? Can it be increased?Are you planning to add more tokens to trade? Where is the $LGO from the $LGO auctions coming from, if $LGO emission is fixed and received by $LVL stakers?
It could be increased. It seems like most trades are at or below 10x leverage.
Regarding more trading pairs. Fees/revenue growth can grow only marginally from adding more pairs. BTC and ETH are the dominant and most-liquid assets and that’s what attracts the big traders and drives trading volume. The same applies for many other DEXes and CEXes generally. But yes, we are planning for integration of more crypto assets, which is a small part of our growth strategy.
6. Right now the highest risk pool is 184% APR and the lowest risk pool is 94% APR, so people can choose based on their risk tolerance, right?
Most of it comes from protocol fees and not from inflationary token incentives. Here’s a breakdown.
Thank you to everyone who attended the Level x Wallstreetbets AMA! We can’t wait to share exciting updates over the coming weeks.
ABOUT LEVEL FINANCE
LEVEL is a decentralized and non-custodial perpetual exchange on BNB Chain with custom risk management and innovative LP solutions. Experience LEVEL’s advanced DeFi venue offers a great user experience, leverage trading, and real yield. Join LEVEL today and take control of your decentralized trading journey.
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