We held a combined AMA in the Binance telegram chat to discuss Tranchess! As such, our CEO & co-Founder Danny Chong, aka King, introduced Tranchess to the massive 165,000+ Binance Telegram community, addressing our last few months of developments as well as our new exciting launch: ETH Fund!
Overview
Throughout the AMA, King covered a wide variety of topics including: General intro, elaborating on protocol security, past & future developments, and our new ETH fund. As a general overview, some of the topics covered are:
1) Tranchess general protocol introduction
2) Protocol security
3) Tranchess Swap & Token Settlement Time
4) Function of QUEEN, BISHOP, ROOK
5) Tranchess’ Relevance to Real World
6) New ETH Fund
Should you be interested in reading the full original script, please find it in the pinned posts within the Binance English Telegram chat!
Transcript starts below…
Participants: Tranchess: Danny Chong(@Tranchess_King) / Binance: Zuni@@ZuniBNB, Venkyy@Venkyy_Toroop)
Intro
Zuni: Hi chat and welcome to a special AMA with the CHESS team! It is my pleasure to introduce to you Danny Chong aka Tranchess King, who is the project’s Tranchess!
King: Hello Binance Community! This is Danny Chong, Co-Founder, representing the team @Tranchess.
The team and I are excited to be with everyone here today. We will be trying our best to cover as wide a range of topics as we possibly can, including HOW Tranchess works and how holding on to Tranchess tokens can benefit users.
To introduce a bit more about myself — My roles in investment banks which spanned over the last 16+ years, includes sales, trading and management of teams across Asia Pacific.
I am currently based in Singapore. Once again, I am excited and pleased to be addressing the Binance community today for this AMA session. A Big Thank You to the Binance team for hosting us today.
Also to add on for Tranchess Team ~ Huge part of our c suite comes from the financial sector — we have across investment bankers, asset managers, hedge fund PM and execution.
We also have team members hailing from tech giants such as Microsoft / Facebook/ Google. Our tech team is strong with cyber security as well as smart contract coding, which is always an important part for any DeFi protocol.
And to introduce Tranchess…
Concept of Tranchess was first incepted in 2020 and was developed quickly into its current state — A Yield Enhancing Asset Tracker with Varied-Return solutions. Our seed investors include: Binance Labs, Three Arrows Capital and Spartans Group.
Inspired by different tranches in a traditional fund set up that caters to investors with different risk appetite, Tranchess aims to provide a different risk/return matrix out of a single main fund.
The main fund Queen can track any crypto underlying and we have purposefully chosen BTC as the first crypto asset to track. Meanwhile, it also shares some of the popular DeFi features such as: single-asset yield farming, borrowing & lending, trading, etc.
So to explain on the tokens in Tranchess a bit further — The main fund Queen currently tracks BTC and can be split into 0.5 token Bishop and 0.5 token Rook. Token Bishop purely earns more yield and does not track BTC at all, while Token Rook earns smaller yield but is essentially a 2x leverage token for BTC.
The following diagram gives a better explanation of the flow.
I’ve used BTC as an example above but we have also just launched our 2nd underlying — ETH and will also move quickly to other fund underlyings!
https://twitter.com/tranchess/status/1455537929804189699?s=20
Zuni: Thank you Danny for that quick introduction!
King: My pleasure ~
Zuni: Chat, if you’d like to learn more about Tranchess, do check out these links below. Follow the team on Twitter and join in on conversations about Tranchess via their Telegram channel.
Website: www.tranchess.com
Telegram: http://t.me/tranchess & Chinese : t.me/TranchessChineseGroup
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tranchess
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tranchess/
Discord: https://discord.gg/UgmEnMxGdE
Let’s jump right into the first segment of today’s AMA session. Danny, here’s our first question for you.
King: sure thing ~
Segment 1 — General Questions
Question 1: There have been so many reports of protocols being hacked, how is Tranchess ensuring its effectiveness in safeguarding its protocols and protecting users’ interests?
King: Tranchess undertakes the highest standard in ensuring the security of its protocol. Top-notch global audit firms had been engaged to conduct audits on all of Tranchess’s smart contracts.
These firms include Certik, Peckshield, etc. To further strengthen the protocol, we had also worked with Immunefi, DeFi’s leading bug bounty platform, to uncover any vulnerabilities before our public launch … in fact an ongoing process till today.
We’ve also recently done another round of audit with Peckshield for functionality upgrade checks and also increased our Bug Bounty coverage with Immunefi.
One of Tranchess’s unique defense mechanism lies in its 30min TWAP (Time Weighted Average Price) method of trading the live prices of tokens.
Many Defi Protocols have a reliance on trusted price feeds, and most protocols take a discrete tick price from the oracle’s price feed which is updated frequently. This is easily exploitable via oracle attacks, especially under extreme market fluctuation.
The 30 mins TWAP window prevents any discrete outlier price from taking place and thereby eliminating such oracle attacks.
Zuni: Thank you for sharing insights on CHESS security features, and on to our next question.
Question 2: For the Primary Market — What time does the trade settle and how long does it take to do settlement for creation or redemption of Token Queen?
King: At 14:00 UTC every day, Tranchess protocol automatically calculates the NAV (Net Asset Value) of the main tranche based on the oracle’s price feed, processes all creation and redemption requests for token Queen received in the past 24 hours.
The Creation/Redemption function is designed for long-term crypto asset holders, (as compared to the Tranchess Exchange that is meant for quick buy/sell).
The time buffer allows for smoothening of internal processing and to allow internal governance checks to take place.
Also, when Rebalance Mechanism is triggered, the Creation/Redemption function will be temporarily suspended; the longer period between settlements also acts as a buffer for this situation.
Zuni: Thanks for sharing! I bet we have lots of audience members watching and supporting CHESS’s every step! 🙏🏻
Question 3: can you explain a bit more about the correlation between QUEEN, BISHOP, ROOK and Tranchess?
King: Tranchess is high yielding asset tracker for users of different risk return profiles. The protocol is designed to track any underlying crypto asset. Tranchess 1.0, which is the first fund we issue with Tranchess protocol, is a fund that tracks the price of underlying BTC/USDC. And as of yesterday, we have ETH as a new underlying fund.
Token QUEEN is the token for the main fund. Each Token QUEEN represents one share of the main fund. Token QUEEN can be further split into/merge from two equal sub-tranches, Token BISHOP and Token ROOK.
QUEEN’s movement is in parallel with the price movement of BTC. BISHOP yields a steady fixed return and is unaffected by changes in price of BTC. ROOK is a 2x leveraged BTC synthetics designed for more aggressive users.
Here is the link to our FAQ for further understanding: https://docs.tranchess.com/
Zuni: That’s awesome! Moving on to question 4.😉
Question 4: Tranchess definitely has quite some elements from a real-world fund management set up, could you elaborate your plans on relevance to the real world?
King: Tranchess’s first and immediate aim is to introduce the concept of asset tracking with different risk/reward profiles, offering a first of its kind preposition to the DeFi world.
It is also well documented on our white paper that Tranchess also addresses a few needs of the community such as: Enhanced Yield, Tracker for other Crypto assets, Steady returns, Reducing Impermanent losses, Leveraging positions with low margins, no forced liquidation, Prevention of oracle attacks and so on…
It is however true that the nature of Tranchess has also attracted a good level of interest from traditional finance types.
One can definitely see the recent onslaught of pro crypto related news forthcoming and that adds attraction to Tranchess.
There had been outreach to the core team to seek further understanding of the protocol as well as strong understanding of overall DeFi space.
We remain committed to sharing our knowledge on Tranchess and DeFi space continuously, without bias, to any users keen on the protocol.
Zuni: Amazing! On to the last question for this segment! 🥳
Question 5: Let’s talk about the new asset that Tranchess is about to add, ETH. Any key takeaways?
King: Absolutely ~
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 also the fact that ETH has a lot of ongoing developments + future upgrades, ETH will continue to be a major crypto asset in the long term. ETH is also the 2nd largest coin cap on BSC, similar to BTC ~~
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.
Needless to say, gas fees was major consideration and bottleneck.
We felt it unnecessary for users to be paying hefty gas fees for every transaction they did. BSC continues to give good support: including programs such as 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.
Tranchess ETH fund has launched for creation on 14pm UTC, Nov. 2nd, and rewards will kick in from 14pm UTC, Nov. 4th.
Create and stake now so you don’t miss out the first reward block!
Venkyy: Thanks a lot Zuni for giving us Introduction with King about Tranchess.
This is very interesting , I am sure users has gone through all details which will help them in answering for segment 2!
Thank you Danny for sharing your thoughts and answers with all of us. Once again chat, here below links to all things CHESS
King, you ready to move for next segment?
King: Anytime you are!
Segment 2 — Quiz
Venkyy: Great, chat, here is the form with all the questions, you have 5 minutes to answer, users that get all 5 answers right will share a bag of $4,500 in $CHESS tokens
Are you guys ready??
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1aCZkQlGo3LpWZb198R5qiZ4r89LlP7s5X8okhXFqPzA/edit
Are you guys ready??
Are you guys ready??
Are you guys ready??
Time starts now!
So, King, while our users are answering the form, let me know what the first quiz question is!
King: The first question is…
Q1: How many tokens in total are there in Tranchess & what are they?
Venkyy: Nice one! And what is question 2?
King: Question 2 is…
Q2: How many firms are Tranchess working with to ensure the security of its protocols? Who are they?
Venkyy: Great, so what is question 3?
King: Q3: Which are the main characteristics of Tranchess tokens?
Venkyy: I see, so what is question 4?
King: Q4: What are the benefits of locking CHESS tokens?
Venkyy: And finally, the last question will be?
King: Drum rolling…
Venkyy: Last one minute left!
King: Drum rolling…
What is the benefit of holding on to Tranchess’ Queen, Bishop & Rook and is there any lock up period to enjoy the benefits?
Venkyy: Hurry Up!! And, time’s up!!
King, please share with us the answers to the questions!
I hope you all got 5/5.
King: The answers for the above questions will be…
Answer 1: (B) Total Tokens = FOUR. Token Queen, Bishop, Rook & Governance Token Chess
Answer 2: (B) Firms = THREE. Certik, PeckShield, Immunefi
Answer 3: © Token Queen — BTC Tracker, Token Bishop — Yield Enhancement, Token Rook — Leverage
Answer 4: (D) Earn veChess tokens & share in proportion 50% of Tranchess’s fees earned on platform.
Answer 5: (A) Earn Returns in the form of Token Chess through Staking. No Lock Up Period.
Venkyy: I hope all of you got these questions correct! And now, for the next segment..
As we move on to Segment 3, here’s a quick reminder: In order to be eligible for any prizes for Segment 3, you need to have joined CHESS Telegram Group! https://t.me/tranchess
Please join the Telegram channel to be eligible!
The 10 best-asked questions from the chat will win CHESS tokens!
Chat, are you ready?
*a million questions flood the chat*
Segment 3 — Q&A
Round 1
King: So many questions! Thank you Binance Community!
Let me look through now 1 by 1…
Venkyy: We have all enthusiastic users! Meanwhile, please join our Telegram channel.
King: This is a nice question!
Q: Why should I use Tranchess? What are the key strengths of the protocol?
We hope Tranchess can bring more possibilities to our users other than just holding their tokens. For long-term BTC and ETH holders, Tranchess provides enhanced yield on top of the asset price changes; for USDC holders, they can swap their idling USDC for BISHOP, which gives them additional interest rate that’s usually a bit higher than many other lending protocols; for the aggressive traders, ROOK provides a leveraged position which provides impressive returns especially when users enter the market at the lower point.
Even if you are not holding any of the underlying assets or USDC, holding and locking CHESS gives you veCHESS, which will allow you to enjoy the weekly protocol fee rebate.
But of course, if you hold Chess and stake other Tranchess Tokens, you would get a nice boost to earn Chess at a faster speed!
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as first winner for round 1 of segment 3.
King:
Q: Given all of the high-profile exploits that have been happening, how does Tranchess ensure their users’ funds are protected?
Tranchess undertakes the highest standard in ensuring the security of its protocol. Top-notch global audit firms had been engaged to conduct smart contract audits for all our protocols. One round of comprehensive audit with with Certik & Peckshield had been done pre launch and we had again engaged Peckshield recently for audits on functionality upgrades.
To further strengthen the protocol, we are also working with Immunefi, DeFi’s leading bug bounty platform, to uncover any vulnerabilities.
Last month we also formed a collaboration with InsurAce. Our users can now buy cover on InsurAce for another extra layer of protection on both their BTC & ETH assets.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as second winner for round 1 of segment 3.
King:
Q: Binance Future recently launched its TWAP function too, but it seems a bit different from the one Tranchess is using. Can you explain more?
Sure. First of all, happy to see more and more adoptions of TWAP! TWAP, by definition, basically means the time weighted average price over a certain period of time.
For Binance futures, it is used as a tool facilitating the trading experience and users can set their own preferred time window.
For Tranchess, the time window is set for 30 minutes, which means that we treat every 30 minutes as one slot/epoch and we take the average price of the 30-minute window as the base when calculating the price of the slot. Specifically, the price oracle feeds and validates one price every minute.
In our protocol, we hard-coded the minimum amount of price feeds we need to receive and verify for every 30-minute window, and if the number of feeds fails our requirement, the back-up oracle feed will kick in.
This double-layer security measure is how we prevent the protocol from price manipulation attacks or flash attacks. Of course, the downside is that our users need to patiently wait for 30 minutes for every trade to settle and become claimable.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as third winner for round 1 of segment 3.
King:
Q: As Tranchess expands their underlying asset offerings and goes multi-chain, how will Tranchess maintain the top tier security currently set in place?
This is more of a future plan related question but an important one. We hear our community’s call for multi-chain and complaints about not migrating fast enough. Sure, it is easy to just copy-paste the code onto another chain and go live. It’s not rocket science and that’s how a forked project might behave.
This is not the route undertaken by Tranchess because for every step we take, we evaluate security related topics first. Every chain has its own characteristics and unique eco-system, we need to ensure our codes for the final product fits in perfectly.
Similarly, every time we add a new asset or launch on a new chain in the future, we will treat the version as if it is our very first product, and accord the same amount of caution, if not more, to make sure all the security measures are in place.
In order to maintain the security level, sometimes we have to sacrifice priorities, eg, GUI design speed or on functionality development, etc. At Tranchess, we believe that security of the protocol is a top priority; Security will always be a top concern in DeFi space, and we believe that our users will understand the trade offs that the team has to constantly balance in ensuring the long term robust growth of Tranchess.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as fourth winner for round 1 of segment 3.
King:
Q: Given BNB is the second largest circulating mcap coin on BSC, why did Tranchess choose to go with ETH instead?
As a lot of our community members have already requested & mentioned — ETH was the natural next underlying to go into. From both a market cap perspective and also 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.
As such, we’ve decided to launch ETH first.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as fifth winner for round 1 of segment 3.
King: Shall we go to the second round?
Round 2
*a million more questions flood the chat*
Venkyy: Chat is now closed.
King: Fun question~
Q: If Tranchess had a superpower, what would it be? How does Tranchess intend on utilizing this superpower more and/or build out to gain other powers?
Superpower related questions seem mighty popular lately.
Elasticity! if that can be classified as a superpower. We believe so because we are offering innovative products for users that stretch across different risk profiles and providing 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 growth direction we currently have set ourselves so far.
Venkyy: I liked it!
King:
Q: What are some of the underlying assets that Tranchess are potentially adding?
When determining the next underlying asset to expand to, we keep three main factors in mind (not in order of priority):
(1) How widely used is the coin? This can be measured in market cap
(2) How volatile is the coin?
(3) How much does the Tranchess community want the coin? We will always take into account how much our current user base wants a certain coin
In light of these criteria, there are many coins in mind such as BNB, SOL, ADA, DOT, etc. Note how most of these are in the top 10 in mcap within the crypto market.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as sixth winner for round 2 of segment 3.
Congratulations , your question has been qualified as seventh winner for round 2 of segment 3 .
King:
Q: I read chinese chat that the team’s token unlocked 10% and then have linear vesting, is this affect Chess price?
Thank you for asking this question!
I would like to take this opportunity to properly address this and clear up any doubts.
First of all, there is NO 10% unlock for team tokens, only a cliff period and then a linear vesting. Second, we did NOT sell any tokens. As clarified multiple times in the community, all vested team tokens are currently locked in the protocol.
Feel free to check the contract addresses. We do understand that the price movement might not meet everyone’s expectations. But we do feel the need to address this random guess.
Additionally, we welcome anyone that would like to discuss CHESS price and CHESS price only to join our price discussion group: https://t.me/chesstraders
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as eigth winner for round 2 of segment 3.
King:
Q: Does the team have any plans regarding the token price? CHESS hasn’t been performing much even with its listing on Binance.
Ever since when we first launched the protocol, we’ve been emphasizing on the fact that we are here for the long run. Of course, in DeFi world, people may appreciate “long-run” rather differently.
We are absolutely excited to be listed on Binance, and we know that there are many protocols that treat “listing on Binance” as the ultimate goal.
For us, listing on Binance is definitely one of the BIG things we need to achieve on our “to-do list”. Yes it is definitely a big milestone and an absolutely important one, and we appreciate Binance’s help and support for achieving this.
There are also so much more we want to complete and many more functions we want to bring to our users, and listing on Binance to us marks the beginning of our journey of Tranchess 2.0, not the end but a new beginning.
We cannot decide how CHESS price moves, but we know that a good model of product design and tokenomics together will have a positive impact on the price, and we are confident in the ambition and pipelines that we have embarked ourselves on to deliver this.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as ninth winner for round 2 of segment 3.
King:
Q: To what extent does Tranchess plan on expanding their underlying assets?
This is a good question. Right now Tranchess is still at the phase of launching one single underlying asset at a time, but as people become more and more familiar with the Tranchess model, there will be a point when more complex asset offerings/combinations are in need.
In fact, we have already picked up similar suggestions from our community channels. So I think the actual question is, what is the potential of asset tracking, and the fact is, we are just at the beginning of exploring the countless possibilities.
Venkyy: Congratulations, your question has been qualified as tenth winner for round 2 of segment 3.
Thanks a lot @Tranchess_King for your time and coming us for an AMA .
It has been great to have you, Danny, with us today to talk more about CHESS’s business. Here are some important links for our community to follow the project.
Links to share or last minute info to share:
Website: www.tranchess.com
Telegram: http://t.me/tranchess & Chinese : t.me/TranchessChineseGroup
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tranchess
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tranchess/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UgmEnMxGdE
King: Many many thanks for having me with everyone here.
Venkyy: https://twitter.com/tranchess/status/1455537929804189699?s=20
Tranchess ETH Fund is live! We look forward to everyone’s active participation.
Looking forward to join us on Twitter as well .
Thank you chat for your time! For those of you who had your questions selected in Segment 3, please make sure your username is not private. Please PM me and share your information in order to claim your prize.
Last but not least, thank you to the wonderful team at CHESS!
Thanks Zuni for being the co host with me for this wonderful AMA.
King: For also people who might need a quick guide on Tranchess: https://tranchess.medium.com/tranchess-quick-facts-ffd56b8c0639
Venkyy: Have a nice day everyone!!
King: Thanks for the brilliant hosting! Thanks again Binance Community!
