Hello UTU Guardians,

Did you miss the AMA with DefiCliq Founder and CEO Shantanu Kumar held on May 28, 2021? Check out the full transcript below!

We’ve partnered with DefiCliq to launch our creditworthiness API to improve credit checks for under-collateralized loans: UTU and DefiCliq Partner to Improve Creditworthiness for Under-Collateralized Loans.

Shantanu talked about what the DefiCliq team is building and how we’ll work together. UTU CCO Mike Chan was the host.

Read on below!

Q1: Please begin by introducing yourself, your background, and how you got into crypto.

A1 [Shantanu]: Sure. So I am the CEO and founder of DefiCliq and as a CEO of a startup, I basically handle and monitor most departments of the project but my main expertise is Marketing and team management. I had started an e-commerce startup when I was in college which was a great hit and we had sales of +1m in just 2 years which kept growing with each passing day.

During that time, I came to know about cryptocurrency and blockchain from one of my friends. It was early 2017 and since then I have invested in lots of projects from different sectors.

R1: Very cool! We’ll get back to the ecommerce startup in a sec.

Q2: Please provide us with an overview of what DefiCliq is and why it’s awesome.

A2 [Shantanu]: DefiCliq is the first company to provide both collateralized and uncollateralized loans that, too in both p2p and traditional ways, with more features like DAO (off-chain governance), staking, interoperability in one place as a Polkadot Substrate Project, thus becoming a leading competitor in the fintech space.

Regarding competitors there is none directly which is focused on exactly what we are doing but talking about companies in individual sections, we have some like the companies which are having good user base in collateral(compound etc) and some are doing well in governance whether it’s off chain or on chain. 

Other fields where projects are doing great are yield farming and staking.

And since we provide all of them so basically we are trying to bring everyone’s users to our platform and provide them all what these projects are providing all together. This is how users will benefit when they won’t be required to move here and there as there are multiple things which need to be managed along with using multiple platforms. And then again use aggregators as well to look after you; what you are doing/have in every platform?. This is our B2C model.

But we also have a B2B model where we provide a staking platform for other projects. In this we currently have 2 blockchains available i.e. ethereum and BSC and we have also built it for polkadot tokens which will be live on the main net once parachain goes live. We are extremely excited about that.

R2 [Mike]: Cool, so it’s a one-stop shop for all kinds of DeFi offerings?

[Shantanu] Exactly.

[Mike] I think it’s clear how you’ll have multiple DeFi offerings like staking, lending, etc, and we’ll talk more about the lending part in a bit. 

Q3: Can you tell us more about how the DAO/governance product would work?

A3 [Shantanu]: Sure. The process has three significant steps: the creation of a policy, the voting process, and the voting result. Every CLIQ holder can propose a policy as part of our governance model with certain parameters as mandatory. The policy will then be submitted either as a pull request on Github in the Repository. After the proposal is submitted, our team will assess if the policy is complete (a.k.a. All parameters are submitted) and will launch the voting (a.k.a. Will approve the Pull Request). The vote will contain policy number, vote option, policy content hash, timestamp. And the result will be live on the DefiCliq platform and once the voting ends then the voting system turns off and the counter result will be displayed on our platform.

R3: Pretty cool this can all be managed on a single platform.

Q4: It looks like you’re building lots of features and components, from DeFi to DAO mgmt. What are you focusing on now and what’s on your roadmap for the next few months?

A4 [Shantanu]: If anyone has been following us since the beginning, then they will definitely agree that we have been building and releasing more than what we had promised on the whitepaper and the roadmap.

For example, on the whitepaper and roadmap we had not mentioned about staking for all other tokens rather it had only to be built for cliq but we built it not only for other erc20 tokens but also for other BSC and dot tokens. So it shows that we deliver many extra things from the roadmap.

Currently and in coming months our main focus is to bring as many partnerships as possible. This is done to increase the use case of our platform. Because the thing we are currently lacking is the use case of our platform which is not large atm.

We will also be working to add extra features to staking1.0 as we have received feedback on them so we will work on what our community wants.

We will also be launching a staking platform for other blockchains. Our mission here is to be one stop solution so we need to provide staking for all blockchains not only for 1 or 2

R4: I’m sure we will get some questions from the community about interoperability, which is a hot topic

[Shantanu] And we are also excited to bring UTU to our staking platform in future? BSC would be better imo, as UTU is on BSC now as well.

Q5: Can you talk about the partnership with UTU and how we’ll work together?

A5 [Shantanu]: The partnership with UTU is a step towards the mission to democratise the lending and borrowing space. It will be achieved by UTU’s creditworthiness API to improve credit checks and loan monitoring for under-collateralized loans.

The integration will help DefiCliq in achieving decentralisation quickly and efficiently by improving credit checks and loan monitoring for under-collateralized loans.

Talking about deficilq technology then UTU will also use DefiCliq staking platform to stake UTU token. We are extremely excited to work in the long run.

I along with the whole DefiCliq team is super excited to work with the team having the same vision.

R5: Yup, can’t wait to start building together!

At this point Mike opens the AMA for the entire group chat to ask their questions on the UTU Telegram.

Q6: We hear a lot about partnerships. These are of course excellent, driving adoption and expansion. But when will I be able to use my UTU tokens within defi for lending or collateralisation?? Is this something DefiCliq will be able to implement soon?

A6 [Shantanu]: Good question. We have not yet decided regarding UTU as a collateral or lending/borrowing asset on the DefiCliq platform. But DefiCliq and UTU are long term partners so once our platform is live then we will definitely have a discussion on this and if everything goes well then we will see that day for sure.

Q7: Can you tell us more about your interoperability initiatives? Are you building bridges between chains, which chains are you focusing on, and anything else?

A7 [Shantanu]: We are not building bridges, we provide staking services to tokens on different blockchains. Currently we have it for ethereum and BSC with polkadot launching in future.

Q8: What are the marketing techniques you will use?

A7 [Shantanu]: For marketing we have already worked with some big guys on twitter starting with thebirbnest and cryptobirb. Before the market crash there were some big accounts on twitter and telegram talking with DefiCliq but unfortunately market crashed like this so the marketing guys have given a pause to the marketing while other guys are heavily busy in bringing partnerships and increasing the use case of the platform which ultimately should be the main goal of ours.

Once the market becomes stable we will again start the marketing aggressively on different social media platforms. We are continuously in talk with guys for marketing. because of the market crash nothing seems to be working whether its marketing, partnership or building, the market seems to be less active right now.

Building the product has not been affected even a bit, we are working tirelessly as we were working previously.

Q9: Ah, I forgot to ask my follow-up question about your startup experience. What lessons did you learn from starting your ecommerce platform that influences how you operate DefiCliq?

A9 [Shantanu]: We can discuss more on this on call or in dm imo ??. The most important thing I learned is to make deals/partnerships as transparent, official and professional as possible. With everything mentioned on the paper 🙂 So now I follow that rule.

That marked the end of our AMA. Keep an eye out for more informative AMAs coming soon! 

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