AMA Recap of Crypto Legacy x Pollen by Roman Krywulycz
Pollen leverages a reputation based governance protocol and an incentivised liquidity model, to allow for full decentralization while creating a new class of yield bearing instruments.
Rosemary, [18.05.21 12:04]
Welcome Philip Verrien Roman Krywulycz
Roman
Hey Rosemary Alfred glad to be here
Alfred
Hi guys
Rosemary
It is a pleasure for us to be able to learn from a great project like Pollen DAO
Alfred
We welcome all those who join us in this prestigious AMA event with Pollen
How are you Roman & Verrien?
Roman
Doing well, thanks. Gracias! Feliz de estar aqui
Shall we dive in?
Alfred
Well, what do you think if we start with the AMA
Roman
Let’s do it
Alfred
Introduction Questions
Q1. Can you provide a brief introduction to the core team behind Pollen?
Roman
Certainly. I started my career on Wall Street at Nasdaq. After that, I was one of the first 10 employees at Celsius Network and built their CEL token model and the economics around their borrowing and lending platform. Been advising a number of projects since then before starting Pollen, a portfolio management DAO with Philip Verrien
Phil’s background is in technology in the banking sector, previously working at UBS and other companies in the industry
Keith Baumwald and I worked together at Celsius in the early days, and he was the original Chief Marketing Officer there. We are fortunate to have Keith on in a similar capacity with Pollen
For our development, we have Vadim Konstantinov, Ahmed Tawfeeq, and Adam Clarke who have built out the DAO and front-end UI
Benjamin Whitby is our compliance/regulatory advisor and is connected with other top projects such as Aave and Qredo
Rosemary
Great team
Alfred
Excellent team
Roman
Gracias. We’re very fortunate to have a number of key people, each with several years of professional experience in crypto with top projects before starting or joining Pollen
Alfred
and apparently they also handle Spanish well hahaha
Roman
Jaja un poco
Alfred
Next question
Q2. Can you talk a little about your prospects and how they will benefit from your products and services?
Roman
(My French is better than my Spanish! Though not of much help in this channel lol)
Rosemary
jajajaja
Alfred
Hahahaha
Rosemary
Most of us speak Spanish and English
Roman
Our core focus is to bring community-managed portfolios to everyone, and make it the next killer app in crypto. Instead a single portfolio manager who makes all the decisions, with Pollen anyone can participate in the investment decision-making process and be incentivized for their actions. If you have an idea for a trade/investment, you can create a proposal to add/remove an asset to the portfolio, represented by the PAI token, and any other POLLEN token holders can then vote on that proposal and decide if it should be accepted or not
Rosemary
I like that people can make their decisions
Roman
For participating and helping to manage the portfolio through various actions (proposing a new investment, voting on someone else’s investment proposal, or executing an approved proposal that the community voted in favor of), you earn rewards in the form of POLLEN token
Yes, everyone has a say
Alfred
Next question
Q3. What is that milestone in Pollen that you are most proud to achieve?
Roman
Our community is engaged, and on any given day we have dozens of people interacting with our test version of the app, despite there being no real stakes yet (since it’s on Ethereum Ropsten)/ real value tied to it yet. They just appreciate what we’ve built and are curious to learn more and experiment with it. We’ve also gotten valuable feedback from the community this way
Alfred
It is important to have a constant interaction on the part of the community, I like that they participate even though there is no linked value
Roman
100%. It’s all about the community at the end of the day. We’re very fortunate to have a real and engaged community who cares about our product/platform we are building, and that they see the value it will bring
After all, we are building a DAO to allow communities to manage their own portfolios together!
Alfred
Last question
Q4. What plans does Pollen have for this 2021?
Roman
In the coming weeks, we will be announcing the strategic investors we are thrilled to have onboard as well as our upcoming public sale (can’t share the venue yet, but I’m confident the community will respond well to who we end up selecting)
The mainnet itself will launch shortly thereafter, launching initially with PAI as the main community-governed portfolio. Later this year, we plan to roll out voter delegation to allow people to delegate their votes to other top-performing users who will be able to vote on investment decisions on their behalf and split the rewards between themselves and the delegatee. We also plan to expand beyond PAI to allow people to create their own custom portfolios as well, all of which will take advantage of the POLLEN token governance
Alfred
Wow
Rosemary
Amazing!
Alfred
Thank you for your answers, we just finished the segment of:
Introductory Questions
We go to the segment of:
Twitter Questions
Rosemary
I have one question
Certainly — before we jump into Twitter questions
Pollen DAO is a Global project? Available to everyone?
Do you currently have a Spanish-speaking community?
Rosemary
Sorry for interrupting Alfred haha
Roman
Correct. Anyone will be able to use Pollen as it is a decentralized app you can access via MetaMask. We will have some behind-the-scenes AML checks in place to prevent bad actors from accessing the platform, but otherwise anyone will be able to use Pollen, purchase POLLEN and PAI, and participate in on-chain governance of the portfolio
We are slowly starting to build up our reach into the Spanish community, and have a Spanish-speaking community manager who’s recently joined
Alfred
Oh, nice
Rosemary
Excellent I’m glad to hear this
@JosuhannyM
What safer and more transparent ways to govern and grow will Pollen use to collectively participate from afar in the noisy and volatile markets?
Roman
Great question. One main way we aim to improve governance/management of the portfolio is voter delegation, which I touched on briefly
As users interact with Pollen, they build up a reputation based on their voting history, executing investment proposals, and other activities. The DAO determine how rewards are distributed based on the outcome of decisions taken
In Pollen, any POLLEN to token holder can delegate their voting power to any other POLLEN token holder.
We’re designing a process called ‘Collective Delegation’ — this will be a dynamic pool of the best performers, so in the future, if you want to be a more passive user of Pollen you’ll be able to delegate your vote to other more active traders with a higher reputation
This helps both to scale reputation, and simplifies the delegation process while ensuring that voting power is always delegated to the most deserving
There are a number of ways to increase your reputation:
1. submitting a successfully accepted proposal to add or remove an asset
2. voting on a proposal whether to accept or reject
3. executing an order
4. performing state update tasks, e.g. updating proposals states, or minting rewards for the reward pool.
5. owning Pollen — user that hold PAI are rewarded POLLEN
All of these actions are performed on-chain, so the reputation is immutable/can’t be faked
Alfred
I find that “Collective Delegation” very interesting, an excellent idea
@alaskabbb
Regarding governance, you mention that average token holders will delegate their voting power to the person with the significant size of their own capital. But what kind of rewards will be for voting members as for these delegates? How can new users participate in governance too?
Roman
Anyone can participate in governance directly by simply voting on investment proposals themselves that they find attractive/agree with. Their voting power is their POLLEN token, so a new user could go and buy some POLLEN to get started. Voting will then earn them some more POLLEN tokens. So instead of yield farming where users provide liquidity for liquidity’s sake, here people earn rewards for their actual useful actions that they take to help manage the PAI portfolio
Alternatively, if a user chooses to delegate their votes, then they will split the rewards with the person they delegated to. So there is an incentive for people who want to be more passive and simply delegate to other top-performers, and for people to try to become the more active/top performers since they will effectively be earning extra rewards from everyone who delegates to them
We anticipate users will fall into one of the two buckets: active or passive, and there are appropriate incentives for both types of users
@Juan31SB
What is the chain that the PLN token uses? What allows the PLN token to be less volatile? Will it be available in a wide list of portfolios?
Roman
So first thing to get out the way quickly, we are in the process of changing our token names from PLN and STEM (which is what the Ropsten Alpha currently uses https://alpha.pollen.id/#/proposals), to PAI and POLLEN. So PAI will be the portfolio token, and POLLEN the governance token
1. Ethereum, though we are in the process of exploring cross-chain solutions/enabling Pollen DAO to work on multiple L2s/EVM compatible chains as users migrate there
2. With many people managing the PAI portfolio and with good decision-making being rewarded (not necessarily the highest gains, but rather the best returns relative to the risk taken on), we anticipate the portfolio to become a good mix of various types of assets/tokens, some of which are higher risk (newer token launches), and some of which have a more stabilizing effect (e.g. a yield strategy by holding aDAI)
Rosemary
What is the tokenomic of your token? Do you have a picture?
How is it distributed?
Roman
Before we jump to the live segment, want to make sure people have the appropriate links so people can join us and get involved in our community so they can stay up to date/get active in all things Pollen
Telegram chat: https://t.me/pollen_dao
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/pollenannouncements
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PollenDeFi
Discord (we do Alpha testing here every Sunday with our community): https://discord.gg/4j5bmc5u
Yes — we haven’t shared full details publicly yet, but I can share our minting schedule which has the allocation breakdown. As described, users will earn POLLEN tokens according to their actions in managing the PAI (and in the future other custom) portfolio(s). You can see how the majority of POLLEN (over 50%) is set to be distributed to the community in the form of governance rewards over a ~4 year period
@Cleitoclo
Pollen constantly mentions a competitiveness between DeFi and CeFi, but I don’t know how asset management is fundamental for this competitiveness, why is it necessary for DeFi to replace CeFi and what role does asset management play in these cases?
Roman
Great question
Asset management and indices/ETFs are a massive piece of the traditional finance world that don’t yet really exist in the world of DeFi. That’s what Pollen DAO is bringing to the market, as the big next shift in DeFi, moving first from lending solutions (Celsius, Aave, etc), to liquidity solutions (Uniswap, Balancer, etc) to now decentralized portfolio management solutions. Pollen will be the first to market in this next major chapter
So far, there are a few crypto asset management products on the market. TokenSet’s DPI (DeFi Pulse) index product is probably the most well-known. But they’re all basically just cut and paste copies of things that already exist in traditional finance, wherein a single asset manager creates the portfolio and collects the fees, and investors have little/no say in the composition of the portfolio, let alone a share in the management fees
Pollen fundamentally changes the script by allowing anyone with good ideas to participate in the investment decision-making process, and be rewarded for their efforts
@meml1997
A while ago I saw that you had two tokens; a native token PLN, and a governance token STEM. Now, you released a Medium talking about two new tokens; POLLEN and PAI. Can you clarify this a bit more for us? Does this mean you have now 4 tokens? What are the use cases for each one?
Roman
Ah, yes fair point. As I mentioned above, we are transitioning our token names to POLLEN (governance token) and PAI (Pollen Asset Index — which represents the portfolio). STEM and PLN will soon be no more, so we will have our website updated shortly to reflect the same information on all channels
So just 2 tokens!
In the future, once we allow anyone to create their own custom portfolios, then there will plenty of others. You can imagine e.g. a wsbPAI for the Wall Street Bets community, legacyPAI for you guys, etc. Whatever the community will come up with! But at the core of it all will be the POLLEN governance token
Alfred
We just finished the segment of:
Twitter Questions
Now we move on to the segment of:
Live Questions
Roman
OMG
Alfred
Roman, take the time you want to answer but please answer a minimum of 5 questions
Roman
Wow, lots of questions
@AlBianco
It strikes me that you mention that Pollen is an “elastic currency”. Could you tell us more about why it is called “elastic” and what is the importance in the Pollen ecosystem and for the users? How does this token prevent deflation and how does it protect holders?
Roman
So I’m assuming this question is relating to PAI (perhaps in some old articles it would have been referred to as PLN)
As people add new and remove assets from the portfolio, PAI is either minted or burned so that the supply of PAI is constantly expanding or contracting relative to the assets being added or removed. This way, we can ensure PAI is truly backed by the portfolio (i.e. that it is pegged to it), and the price of PAI only goes up or down and the value of the assets inside the portfolio go up or down, instead of it moving based on capital flows in or out of PAI
Another way to look at it is that PAI is fully collateralized by the portfolio of tokens locked inside the PAI smart contract
@Josuhanny_M
How do you plan to expand beyond PAI to allow people to also create their own custom wallets and in which they would leverage the governance of the POLLEN token?
Roman
Yes definitely. After our initial mainnet launch, we will look to carefully roll out to allow people to create their own custom asset pools/portfolios. We are exploring the best options for allowing communities to potentially set limits for selectable assets that are eligible to be included in a given custom portfolio (e.g. if someone wants to create a yield-based portfolio, or a portfolio focused on new token launches, an NFT-focused portfolio, etc)
But ultimately POLLEN holders will have the ultimate say beyond that. Again, this is something we are currently working on. We have a couple of PhD-level people working on this/getting the rewards system to be optimal
@LNirmala
What are the costs when making a transaction with the PLN Token? Would storing these tokens be a good idea? why ?
Roman
As of now, it would be an Ethereum transaction. We are optimistic that gas costs will come down in the future with EIP-1559, but we are also exploring other chains/L2s to help address this issue in the meantime
We also plan to allow for “gas-less transactions” where people will be able to pay for transactions (e.g. voting or executing a proposal) in POLLEN token instead of ETH, with the transaction going to a relayer
This would also create an added utility for POLLEN: performing actions on Pollen DAO, which as the platform/userbase grows should create a positive feedback loop for the token/holding the token
@Callista_E
The pollen site doesn’t mention about mining, why don’t you create a mining feature like other projects? or do you have your own way?
Roman
So POLLEN token is minted over 4 years (we might increase this time). People earn tokens by performing actions/useful activity, which is akin to mining in that you are doing work/spending gas to perform the action. You earn tokens as they are minted, relative to how many other users there are at that moment, and relative to your reputation points compared to other users
So in the beginning, there will be an opportunity to earn lots of POLLEN when there are fewer users. Over time, the rewards will become more distributed as the userbase grows, and in theory, the price follows suit. Again, similar to BTC’s emission curve
@Eberth
Is it possible for the ‘Collective Delegation’ to make a decision that in one way or another could affect passive users? How would you solve this hypothetical case?
Roman
Yes. By delegating your POLLEN to others, you can be a more passive user that’s still participating in governance and earning rewards as a result. You can think of this as similar to yield farming, but slightly “smarter”/ more useful
If you wanted to be even more passive, by simply holding PAI of course you are also benefitting from/exposed to the investment decisions of everyone else’s actions in managing the PAI portfolio. So instead of having to go out and buy e.g. 20 tokens directly and research them, simply holding gives you a diversified, actively managed exposure to the crypto ecosystem
@MarianM
I read that in Pollen users can delegate their voting rights to someone else, can you tell us more about this option? What are the benefits of delegating votes and what are the conditions we need to follow to do so? Also, what options do we have when delegating our votes?
Roman
We are working on this currently, but essentially there will be 2 options:
1. Delegating to a specific user (this piece is almost finalized already)
2. Delegating to a pool of users (e.g. the majority, or some other subset e.g. top 20 performers). This piece is still in the works
The benefits are earning passive yield by simply delegating, earned in the form of POLLEN
@Robert
How can I generate income with PollenDao? Apart from being able to participate in governance, what other real utility does your token have?
Roman
Aside from using it as an income-generating strategy through delegation, you’ll have real utility from Day 1 (which virtually no current DeFi “governance” tokens can claim): direct voting power in an easy user interface to manage the world’s first fully decentralized portfolio. Imagine if you could actually do something central to Uniswap with UNI where you really needed the token, or with AAVE on Aave. Neither are really central. POLLEN will be at the core from Day 1
Beyond that, any transaction on Pollen will be able to be paid for with POLLEN tokens, so as the userbase grows this will become more and more popular as well, as alluded to
@JairoM
partnership is important for every project. who are your project partners?? what´s the benefits you get from them?
Roman
We haven’t publicly announced yet…. but I can say we are working very closely with The Graph (in fact they gave us a grant many months ago), and a number of other top projects
Alfred
Roman, thank you very much for sharing your successful project with our community, we will be waiting for the news and milestones of your project!
Rosemary
Your answers were very specific and good, thanks Roman Krywulycz
Roman
Thanks Alfred Roll Rosemary and to the Crypto Legacy community for having me! Great questions all around. I’ll try to still answer a few more questions a bit later when I have a chance
In the meantime, it’s been a pleasure