DEFINFTs Apes & Charged Particles: AMA Recap

On Tuesday 5th January 2021, we welcomed Rob Secord from Charged Particles into uniswap definfsapes.eth telegram. Rob Secord is the Founder and Lead Dev of charged particles. He was previously with PoolTogether and helped with the development of version 3 of their protocol.

Charged Particle is a protocol fusing Defi and NFTs. Charged particles are any Non-fungible Token (NFT) that is minted with an asset token (like Dai) and accrue interest via a yield token (like aDAI) giving the token a “charge”.

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Q: what inspired Charged particles and the idea of DEFINFTs?

A: I have been a big fan of NFTs for a long time, and I have constantly been pondering ideas for their use-case. At the time, Defi was relatively new and just taking off, so I just started thinking of ways to combine the two. I had the original idea in November of 2019 and I released an early Proof-of-Concept by January of 2020. I started a Discord group around that time to float the idea by the community and people seemed to like it! I even inspired AaveGotchi back then, when Coderdan reached out to me to discuss ideas around it. Market-fit seemed to be there!

Q: Do you think DEFINFTs will significantly improve the price appraisal and liquidity problems of NFTs? What other issues do you believe Charged Particles is solving?

A. As for liquidity problems around NFTs, I don’t think we will solve that either, and in fact, some aspects may be more complicated (as is the nature of financial instruments). I believe there are a few aspects of NFTs that we are solving (like intrinsic value, think NFT loans), but mostly I think we are providing more of a tool that can be used to solve problems.

Q: Do you think Charged Particle will be the only project going this route? If no, how do you intend to stand out in a space full of clones and the habit of cloning?

A: We are a protocol first. As such, we encourage others to build on top of Charged-Particles, rather than try to rebuild the framework themselves. If anyone else is going this route, they may benefit from just collaborating with us. Most projects we have seen that are similar do have differences that basically lock you into their platform. We aim to be NFT and Defi agnostic, an open-protocol for everyone to use.

Q: Any funding achievement and milestones you can share? Does the project have a platform token, and has Charged Particle offered some for sale? Do you think there will be a token offering event for the platform token soon?

A: We have received initial angel funding and we are in the middle of raising our seed round now, so unfortunately I cannot share those details until the deals are closed. But we will be announcing that soon! What I can mention is that we have been accepted by The LAO as well as an Aave Ecosystem Grant. We do have a platform token, but we are doing a Fair-Launch with a mining program, and therefore there is no pre-sale of the token. The community has been earning some of our Loot Token called $Charge, and the holders of $Charge will receive the initial airdrop of ION tokens at genesis.

Q: Do you think Artists will welcome the idea of DEFINFTs, and how do you intend to get this adopted in the NFT Art world?

A: I think Artists will welcome the idea, and they are Creative by nature, so I think they will have a lot of fun experimenting with the idea. This is part of our reason for targeting Artists is their Creativity. We don’t plan to have the Art world entirely adopt this, we are enabling a new feature for all NFTs to take advantage of, in very creative ways that generate actual value over time.

We think value-appreciation could be a big factor for Art, but more importantly, is the idea of generating a perpetual stream of interest-based revenue for creators that could go beyond their lifetime. A piece of art with perpetual interest-revenue going back to the creator’s wallet and being part of an inheritable estate that can be passed on for generations. Or a Museum Piece that pays for its own placement in the Museum by redirecting a portion of the interest to the Museum that displays it.

Q: How do I determine the value of my NFT in Charged to get an APY? How is the interest generated by the NFT paid?

A. Answer: The charge is determined by the LP you choose, right now we only support Aave, but we will support many LPs in the future. The APY comes from Aave, so if you deposit DAI you will get aDAI in your NFT — The interest and APY come from Aave based on their liquidity. The interest is paid by redeeming your aDAI for DAI tunneled through Aave.

Q: Model of Charged is backed up by some research results or surveys?

A: We have done plenty of research into NFTs, but this model is brand new and there is not much info to back-up our model, this is an experiment first!

Q: How does the “charged particle” protocol generate revenue?

A: We don’t right now. Like Uniswap and Compound, there are no protocol fees and we are more interested in generating a user-base first. We have Dapp ideas that we will build on top of the protocol to generate revenue.

Q: Recently, NFTs are the new trend that projects are trying to take advantage of. What are the most important features for the distribution and use of NFTs? What innovations will you present?

A: We are providing a new token mechanic for NFTs to take advantage of.

Imagine a Babe Ruth rookie card that was stuffed with $1 and earning interest since 1916! The same might be true of a Charged Particle NFT in 100 years! Imagine an NFT that represents a Sword — the power of that sword could be dependant on the amount of “Charge” the token has. Or perhaps certain items can only be used once they reach a certain level of charge. Other possibilities include battling over the “charge” of a particle — the winner earns the interest from their competitor’s particles.

To find out more about Charged Particles, please see:

Website — https://charged.fi

Medium — https://medium.com/charged-particles

Twitter — https://twitter.com/DefiNft

Discord — https://discord.com/invite/Syh3gjz

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