Shane Hong, marketing manager at Kyber Network, an on-chain liquidity protocol that enables the exchange and conversion of digital assets, recently shared his views and insights during a Dapp.com Developer Community AMA session.
Anton Buenavista and Simon, both senior developers at Kyber Network, were also present during the Dapp.com AMA session. They helped answer questions related to Kyber’s future plans and talked about the new features of a decentralized finance (DeFi) dApp.
Other topics of discussion included the implementation details of the Kyber Protocol and how to win $42,000 in prizes from the Kyber Virtual DeFi hackathon.
Shane revealed that he helps to manage Kyber Network’s global community of more than 165,000 followers who’re active on Telegram, Twitter, Medium, Reddit, WeChat, and Facebook.
When questioned about how the Kyber Network has been developed and what it does, Anton remarked:
“Kyber Network is a protocol that can be integrated into any application. Using this protocol, developers can build … payment flows and applications, including instant token swap services, token payments, and financial dApps.”
Anton, a former engineer at the Intel Corporation, explained that KyberSwap is an in-house developed swapping service that has been created on top of the Kyber protocol. It allows users to easily swap from one crypto token to another, Anton noted.
Shane explained that wallets such as Trust, Enjin, HTC Exodus, MEW can facilitate token swaps without actually having to leave the wallet environment. He further noted that vendors can accept payments in various tokens via their e-commerce platforms, and then receive the funds in their preferred token.
Going on to share more details regarding Kyber, Anton said that the protocol’s Ethereum implementation only supports ERC-20 compliant tokens. He also mentioned that there’s an EOS (Yoloswap) and TomoChain (Tomoswap) version of the Kyber protocol.
However, users can only trade EOS tokens if they’re using the EOS implementation and only TOMO tokens if they’re using the TomoChain implementation, Anton clarified. He said that developers are currently working on enhancing the protocol’s interoperability, so that users can perform cross-chain swaps from an EOS token to an Ethereum (ETH) token, and vice versa.
In response to a question about what “reserves” are, Anton said it is a term used to refer to liquidity providers that offer liquidity to the network.
He further noted:
“Reserves are just smart contracts that hold inventory and facilitate liquidity. Reserve Managers, those who own these reserves, provide liquidity to the network by contributing a diverse range of tokens. Reserve Managers are comprised of a wide range of parties, from project teams looking to list their tokens, to professional market makers with customized trading strategies, and even developers looking to build new reserve types. We currently offer 3 types of reserves, each with its own unique set of features on how you want to provide liquidity to the network.”
The reserves are needed in order to “trust” Kyber’s administrators. Explaining what users can do to pre-protect their reserves, Anton noted that it all depends on the type of reserve used.
For example, the Fed Price Reserve (FPR) is “our classic reserve,” Anton said.
He further explained:
“You can use the maxPerBlockImbalance and maxTotalImbalance parameters, as well as sanity rates, to stop further buys or sells of the token. It’s a bit technical to describe it all here, so you can just check out our developer portal.”
He went on to add:
“For our Automated Price Reserve (APR), you can set the maximum buy and sell the amount of the token of a single transaction, as well as the price range for which the reserve should operate in. And finally, you can always customize the standard Kyber reserve contract to add in your own protections and safeguards.”
Responding to a question about whether Kyber Network will offer support for blockchains other than Ethereum, Anton said:
“We are positioning Kyber to be a protocol that can be implemented on any smart contract enabled blockchain. Right now, the protocol is deployed in Ethereum, EOS, and TomoChain. We are hoping to deploy the protocol in other major blockchains.”
Currently, however, Kyber’s developers are busy completing the Waterloo project, which serves as a relay bridge between EOS and Ethereum, in order to enable cross-chain swaps in the foreseeable future. They also aim to improve liquidity within the Ethereum ecosystem itself, because the DeFi ecosystem is evolving rapidly with Ethereum-based protocols such as MakerDAO, among many others.
When asked whether Kyber will support non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Anton remarked: “We are not looking into NFTs at the moment but may do so in the future. Maybe someone can build something to use the Kyber protocol for NFT support.”
Shane noted:
“Apart from EOS and Tomo, where Kyber’s protocol is already deployed, we’ve also been researching on chains like Cosmos, Polkadot, Tezos, Binance Chain, but these are only in the research stage.”
He added:
“We regularly attend conferences and monitor the market to make sure we keep abreast of the latest technologies that developers are looking to build on.
Ethereum’s developer ecosystem is still the most vibrant, and initiatives such as WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin) are part of our ongoing efforts to bring more liquidity to Ethereum from other chains, and we look forward to working on more of such initiatives.”
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