On Thursday, October 21, we held our second Tranchess Townhall on our Telegram chat! As such, we had the delight in having our co-Founder Danny Chong, aka King, answer longstanding questions and address our next major feature release: Ethereum fund.
Overview
Throughout this AMA, King covered a wide variety of updates ranging from recent business developments to new hires in the team. More specifically on the recent business developments; The following topics were discussed:
1) Boosting Function
2) InsurAce partnership
3) Bug Bounty Increase to USD $200,000 with ImmuneFi
4) Priority One Program with BSC / ImmuneFi
5) Tranchess Fun Sticker Packs
6) Successful Rebalance
7) Tranchess Community Ambassadors
8) Peckshield Audit #2
9) MVB III August Winner
Should you be interested in reading the full original script, please find it in the pinned posts within our Telegram chat!
Transcript
King: It’s been 2 months since we had last spoken at our inaugural town hall but what an amazing 2 months this has been!! We are excited to be with the community here today, within our own TG group, to share with you just how much has been going on within these 2 months!!
I would like to take the opportunity today to also thank the whole of Tranchess team for working hard to produce ever awesome quality deliverables under extremely tight timelines. The quality of work I’ll leave it to you guys to judge but I am sure you agree largely with me….
Also to officially introduce the newest chess piece in our midst “Gambit”!. For those who are active on Discord — You would notice more and more the presence of Gambit over there. Gambit would increasingly look at the improvement and build-up of our Discord community. Thanks everyone for any suggestions on improvement as we make this organic growth happen!
We have been growing relatively fast such that a lot of people have forgotten that Tranchess is only 4 months old. There are still a lot of pipes to build, and we are constantly faced with deliberating the next best moves for the benefit of the community. Our motives and direction are always pivoted on prudent steps of ensuring security and longevity of the deliveries to the Tranchess Community. We are here to deliver you a protocol that will grow well & build to last over the years. All these steps take time to plan/develop, and we thank everyone for your continuous support and patience.
Growth Development
Let’s now have a quick review of some of the notable events that have gone through in the last 2 months since our previous townhall.
Boosting Function
Users can now lock their $CHESS to earn up to a 3x multiplied boost on their staked QUEEN, BISHOP, and ROOK.
For more information, please refer to our docs at: https://docs.tranchess.com/faq/vechess#when-does-boosting-start
On Oct 8, we announced our new insurance offering via our partnership with Insurace Protocol! InsurAce provides up to $5.6 million in coverage with the lowest available premium, a further indicator from external recognition of our protocol security and quality.
More info can be found at:
Bug Bounty increased to 200k with Immunefi
As our protocol and TVL rocketed upwards, ImmuneFi also increased their bug bounty by a massive amount to $200,000 USD! This is another indicator of trust and recognition in Tranchess’ security & prestige from an external protocol!
Priority One program with BSC / Immunefi
Alongside our ImmuneFi Bug Bounty increase, we were also recognized to join the Priority One Bug Bounty program with BSC and ImmuneFi. PriorityOne is the largest of its kind and is run by one of the leading bounty facilitators in all of DeFi. We join an exclusive group of 3 other projects with top-tier security such as Belt Finance and Autofarm to name a few.
More info can be found in the BSC news article:
https://www.bsc.news/post/immunefi-adds-two-more-projects-to-priority-one-bounty-program-on-bsc
We wanted to give our users increased ways to express their passion in our community so we created a set of stickers for everyone! You can find them living in both our Telegram and Discord!
Successful Rebalance
Given BTC’s incredible bullish run over the last two months, this resulted in our first Rebalance ever! We notified our community well beforehand on all social media platforms such as Telegram, Discord and Twitter to ensure everyone was aware. When the time came, everything was executed flawlessly!
Tranchess Community Ambassadors
With our incredible growth in both TVL and community, we also wanted to reach out towards our community to open a new compensated position: Tranchess Community Ambassadors! This was a newly minted designation that will work closely with the Tranchess Team for specific regions and focus on supporting the growth of our foreign language groups, improving engagement, and increasing depth of understanding of our community!
To learn more, please see the link to the job description:
Peckshield Audit #2
As we increased our offerings and updated smart contracts, we continued our focus on maintaining top security. This meant we went through a second Peckshield Audit to ensure all security measures were met before rolling it out. All things were confirmed to be secure.
Last and certainly not least, we were the winners of the Binance MVB III for August! Binance MVB stands for Most Valuable Builder, where they feature distinguished and up-and-rising projects that exemplify superb potential. We were honored to be a winner and will strive to continue meeting everyone’s high expectations for Tranchess.
King: Phew … all these happened within the last 2 months.
A part of our success is definitely due to you guys ~ Tranchess Community !! Please continue to give support in terms of sharing & explaining our project, in terms of continuing to give suggestions on ways to improve and most of all, understanding and continuing to believe in what we are building. We believe the growing TVL is the effort of the community as much as it is the Tranchess Team.
To share also … charts to illustrate our growth till date.
Live from Tranchess:
The growth of BTC has been steady so far and we continue to look forward to this growth with your support.
Live Price Chart from CoinGecko (https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tranchess)
Some community members have been concerned with the price of chess fluctuating and the trend it has been. Our team’s expression is “We believe to continuing delivering a good protocol and the rest will come naturally”
We trust that you understand that we have as much skin as community members in how well Chess tokens performs.
But we don’t want ourselves to be distracted from this and would like to focus more on getting quality deliveries out.
Now a quick glimpse onto what had been on our roadmap…
“- Track more underlying crypto assets”….
Yes Tranchess Community, we have ETH lined up as our next underlying!!
Delivering soon to you within a month ~ I am sure everyone is very excited at this juncture as are we as well…we will look at other items in the mean time before we move on to talking more about ETH on Tranchess.
- Offer a variety of fund structures, creating innovative synthetic derivatives (in explorative stage )
- Expand multichain — still explorative stage, concerns with cost of gas fees and also security concerns.
- DAO governance — Working on the different paths to apply DAO. Also observing the effectiveness and impact of DAO on other protocols.
On business development
- collaboration with other protocols in the ecosystem (InsureAce & more incoming soon ~ )
- building a full-fledged team, focusing on the tech/marketing field (Gambit + Tech hired to join our Tranchess Family )
- ongoing functional upgrade with regular audits (done + Peckshield)
I really need to get someone to do this with me next round…this monologue thingy is kinda sad and Rook will just grunt.
Moving on…
ETH Launch
And now to focus on ETH launch on Tranchess ~ Some quick facts.
- Smart Contracts reviewed & audited
- GUI undergoing testing and doing final bug checks
- Launching in less than a month’s time.
So Why ETH?
As a lot of our community members have already requested & mentioned — ETH is the natural next underlying to go into. From both a market cap perspective and the fact that ETH has a lot of ongoing developments + future upgrades, ETH will continue to appreciate steadily in long term value. Its position as the largest programmable blockchain sector + increasing institutional acceptance and adoption will continue to bolster this long-term trend. ETH is also the 2nd largest coin cap on BSC, similar to BTC. (Besides BNB that is !! )
So Why BSC?
We are having ongoing conversations with different chains on developments and implementations. The natural next step for Tranchess was to consider the Ethereum chain as a next move. Of course, gas fees were a major consideration and bottleneck. We felt it unnecessary for users to be paying hefty gas fees for every transaction they did including — Creation, Split, Merge, Stake, Lock, etc. There are however solutions being discussed at this juncture to allow Tranchess to move forth into ETH and other chains.
We would update on this once the concrete solutions materialized. BSC continues to give good support: including Learn & Earn + MVB programs + Priority One with Immunefi and most importantly low gas fees + efficient network. We see it as a natural next step to launch ETH on a chain that supports and works well for Tranchess — Tried & Tested for Growth.
So Why Ethereum @Tranchess?
If one takes a quick look at the BTC yield earnings of most protocols, One would undoubtedly realize that for a single asset yield farming pool, Tranchess compares rank amongst the highest. In fact, some users have pointed out that the yield can be even higher than dual/multi asset pools.
We are confident that Tranchess can offer an attractive yield as well for the ETH underlying to be launched soon.
So What does it mean for Tranchess & Community?
If we observe a similar success of TVL for ETH vs BTC, the growth in TVL would be a great uptrend. With the increased TVL, it would mean the protocol earnings would also be increased. Currently 50% of the protocol earnings is shared with locked chess community — We have no intention to change that with the launch of ETH to our platform. Rest Assured Tranchess Troopers!
Coming to also Chess locking… With the pragmatic choice of ETH being chosen as the next underlying. Current and new users who locked or are going to lock chess can be sure that the pipeline for the protocol is well straddled. Needless to say, we are also working on new underlying assets and also new ways to earn yield in the next couple of months.
Rook: Thanks King for the valuable inputs!
King: My pleasure … And Tranchess Community — Rest assured that the platform is growing in a solid direction!
Rook: Now we will move on to the next segment, Twitter AMA
Question 1: Community is the key to the success of projects. So, besides organizing AMAs, what strategy does #CHESS has to reach out and explore new investors? (Twitter @parkenCSGO)
King: I believe by “investors” you meant our community members and Tranchess supporters.
It is absolutely true that the community is the key to the success of any project and our team has always been paying close attention to the voice of our community; Be it questions, expectations or complaints, we welcome them all & we try to learn and improve from them. We are working on plans to increase current social media activities, and also exploring means to better cater to our users from different regions.
For example, some of you might have noticed the recent Tranchess Community Ambassador hire. We will like to take the opportunity here to also express our thanks to the many entries incoming from across the region. As mentioned on our telegram channel, we would move onto different language groups one at a time. With the current role search ongoing for Chinese Community Ambassadors.
We are also exploring different collaborations with other protocols, the recent launch of the InsurAce package is just the beginning.
Rook: Thanks!
Question 2: When will $chess become multichain? When will Ethereum be added to the protocol? (Twitter @bitco1ner)
King: As mentioned…you will see the long-expected ETH added to the protocol very soon!
As for the multi-chain part, believe me, we are as eager as you are and the development has never stopped on the backend. Going multi-chain is not as simple as copy-pasting the old codes to the new chain, there is so much more to be considered.
As a DeFi protocol, just as many others, most of our functions run on-chain. Launching on a new chain means evaluating the overall ecosystem for security, revamping some of the functions for a better fit-in, changing some of the codes to ensure cost-optimization so our users don’t have to bear excessive gas fees, etc.
Due to the complexity of Tranchess protocol, besides security, transaction speed of the chain is also a major concern.
We are always prepared to go multi-chain, and once we see the chain is prepared for us, we will launch our multi-chain version ASAP.
Rook: Thanks! Moving on…
Question 3: Hi Tranchess Team! I would like to know if there are any plans to tokenize veCHESS, allowing it to be used as collateral like veCRV? Additionally, are you working on any partnerships to expand $CHESS use cases? (Twitter @velpac)
King: We are not looking to tokenize veCHESS anytime soon, but we do have an interesting function coming up a few weeks later after the ETH tracking launch.
However, we’ve noticed the frequent question around tokenizing veCHESS recently and we will definitely examine the possibility.
As for CHESS use cases, the answer is yes, but we can’t disclose too much about it at the moment.
Too many Forks lurking around.
Question 4: The interest you get for staking is very low compared to other projects. I also have a small portion but I think about whether the income is worth it. Does Tranchess plan to increase the yield percentage for Queen Bishop Rook in the future? (Twitter @SKC8323)
King: The yield is more than competitive to other protocols out there and in fact — we are still one of the highest yielding single pool assets for BTC. But does that mean we are not keen nor looking at more ways to increase the returns for our community? Of course not! Increasing the yield percentage has always been something we always want to keep doing better.
We are now testing out a few options and look to provide everyone with a feasible solution soon~
Question 4: Has Tranchess considered offering the promotional fee rebate rate again when another underlying asset is added to the tranche protocol? That would entice users of the protocol attracted by ETH or BNB to lock CHESS in addition to creating Queen. (Twitter @matthewgiglia)
King: Nice suggestion and it’s something that have been thrown on the drawing table before. We will discuss it with the team surely.
Question 5: Will Tranchess begin merchandising? T-shirts, hats, hoodies, coffee mugs, laptop stickers etc? (Twitter @matthewgiglia)
King: Maybe sometime in the future. We were asked multiple times about this, and our team also thought it could be an interesting gift to our community. However right now we want to focus on delivering some of the key essential items on our agenda. I would definitely like some cool Tranchess merchandise too myself!
Rook: last question from this segment:
Question 6: With the current NFT hype being mainly on the Ethereum blockchain, and the upcoming release of the ETH-tracking token, does Tranchess have any plans to appeal to the growing NFT community in an attempt to increase their TVL? (Twitter@sigiwardstone)
King: One of the favourite question of the moment!
NFT is something that’s definitely on our to-do list. Unfortunately in this townhall I can’t discuss this in detail. Rest assured, we are monitoring the DeFi hypes rather closely and are exploring possible adoptions whenever we notice a suitable match.
Rook: Ok great! We will be moving on to the last segment now! King will take questions from the community here!
….a million questions flood the chat…
Live AMA Question 1: What will your CHESS Emission Schedule after 20th November? Currently with the Seed/team CHESS unlock + Syrup pool + inventives, how do you balance the growth of the system with the CHESS released weekly? (TG@thompsondefi)
King: 10 weeks from Nov.11 to Jan. 20 2022, the first week (the week from Nov. 11) starts with 1,261,977 CHESS tokens and decreases by 3% every week.
You can also see this updated on Tranchess FAQ
The new initiatives such as the launch of the underlying and other plans to come would itself be an attraction to farm chess. Our other developments also center around bringing more value to the community as well as increasing protocol earnings over time — which is important.
On a personal angle…I didn’t really look at the Chess unlock even till this very day.
Live AMA Question 2: Hard to admit this this but a lot of DeFi users are mainly focused on just the price of Tranchess token (Chess) and/or the short term gains from the protocol. Could you please tell us more about why we should be invested in Tranchess and hold on to Chess Tokens in the medium/long term please? (TG@maximaxter)
King:
- Protocol currently shows tremendous product-market fit. Proven by TVL of only one asset currently.
- Willingness to hold CHESS long term also shown by 50+% CHESS locking of circulating supply
- Product is focused on risk diversification whilst offering market leading yield. Building out our ecosystem with CHESS at its core.
- Investors that want to hold our token will not only be entitled to rebates as our TVL/acitivty grows exponentially through increasing underlying assets + multichain, they will be part of our decision making where they can have tangible impact & influence on protocol direction….
- There’s really lots more to come Tranchess Community!
Live AMA Question 3: Does the rebalance recently affect my position? What should I do with the extra tokens? What is your recommendation for someone with Rook / Queen on hand for the next couple of months? (TG@ TmHens)
King: In the rebalance, the value of the portfolio is not affected, only the types of tokens you’re holding (most likely more QUEEN than before).
If you are holding on to mostly Bishop. This means you’re now more exposed to BTC price movement due to increased QUEEN after RB. If you are holding on to mostly Rook. This means you’re LESS exposed to BTC price movement after RB.
Either way, the monetary value of the portfolio has not changed but gives you a refreshed look at re-diversifying and balancing out the portfolio to your liking.
Want leveraged exposure to BTC Get more ROOK by switching out QUEEN.
Want to hedge against BTC Change more into BISHOP.
Please read through our FAQ for finer clarity.
Live AMA Question 4: If Tranchess has a superpower, what would it be? How can Tranchess maintain & build out this superpower? (TG@thirty_three_33)
King: This is an interesting question!!
I guess Elasticity (if that’s even a superpower). We believe so because we have innovative products for users of all risk profiles and provide market leading returns.
We plan to keep building out this superpower through continuous development of new features, a responsive feedback loop with our community, continuing in the strong direction we currently have set with our fantastic growth so far.
…And with that…
We have come to end of Live AMA session and also the Townhall II!
We have noted the many questions that has been put here and also on Twitter. Thanks very much for your efforts and interests.
Also, thanks everyone for being with us here today. We hope that with the Townhall — things are clearer and that everyone remains excited of what Tranchess has and will continue to offer in the near future。
We will be reaching out to the community in a few days’ time over Twitter — To get your feedback and understanding of what else you might want to see moving forward. This is to give everyone some time to digest the information after Townhall before sharing your thoughts
Appreciate the support once again Tranchess Community
Goodnight and take care for now…
Rook: Thanks King for your time!
