Thank you to the NanoNews Community for participating in Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Meridian Network on July 25, 2020. This guest star Mark and Yomonk Founder at Meridian Network. If you were unable to join the live AMA, no worries, here comes our 35th AMA recap!
We are glad to meet here
Mark and Yomonk, Founder at Meridian Network
For taking your time out from busy schedule for the AMA!
Host: How are you feel today?
Mark: Great, glad to be here! Hoping to give you guys some insight into what we’re doing
Yomonk: Im feeling good! Glad to be here.
Host: I feel very happy today to be here talking to you and the Meridian Network, Our community hopes to talk and learn more with the Meridian Network
Introduction Session
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you join Meridian Network Project?
Yomonk: Yeah sure. Mark and I are founders of the Meridian Network. My background is in enterprise sales (selling software to enterprises) and e-commerce (ran several e-commerce sites). Mark’s background is in digital consulting for industries, namely helping restructuring industry related businesses while providing digital services such as employee training and systems integration.
We’ve both known each for several years through trading crypto and one day, one of us had the idea of building our own protocol and the idea grew from there. We pivoted the original ideas several times and now we’re here.
Q2: Can you briefly describe what is Meridian Network? and what makes Meridian Network different from other competitors?
Mark: Meridian Network is an ecosystem of Defi dapps that is governed by its own DAO. We’re different from our competitors because as a project/team, we are very nimble and flexible in what we set out to achieve. We’re not set in stone in our value proposition. We can build more dapps based on the current use cases in the market, rather than just sticking to one. Also, we will have a functioning DAO as well, which is something quite new to DeFi projects.
We also noticed that most DeFi dapps were external to users control, and so we thought finding a way to give some of that control back to users would be a good starting point. This is the main reason we decided to begin with a DAO along our first dapp
Q3: What are Meridian Network Progress from the beginning until now?
Yomonk: So our first milestone was building our staking interface called Meridian Vault. We did a token swap and launched the Vault on Monday and since then, we have close to 70% of our circulating supply locked in the vault. The Meridian Vault is a temporary reward system that gives our holders 1% daily dividends until the launch of our 2nd dapp, the DAO Balancer Pool (index fund built from the top performing crypto assets).
So far, we’ve made great progress in building our community and starting today, we are now available on the Bilaxy exchange. We’ve also made great progress on marketing which started this week. We’ve had 2 AMAs so far besides Nano including Moonwalker and The Gem Hunters. And after this AMA, we have 2 more. We also got featured in Crypto Zombie’s video two days ago.
here is the video here: https://youtu.be/hX-U4UJxETk?t=717
Mark: We have also been growing our community recently where we’ve just reached the 2k member mark on Telegram and Twitter. We’ve also been audited by HACKEN in regards to our Vault and Swap portal, and we managed to lock liquidity on Uniswap at the request of our holders.
Yomonk: Also, we have a partnership with bartertrade (https://bartertrade.io/) this partnership will be announced today/tomorrow.
Q4: What technology stands behind and What are its advantages?
Mark: The basic tech behind our network is Ethereum, which as everyone knows is getting a major upgrade soon with the release of ETH 2.0.
One other technology we will be incorporating is the DAO, which we believe will help us differentiate from current DeFi projects as it transfers most of the control to the hands of our holders, allowing them to have a bigger influence on the project’s decisions going forward
Q5: What are the major milestones Meridian Network achieved so far & what are in future pipeline?
Yomonk: I think we answered a part of this question earlier but we’ve got a lot in the pipeline coming up. We’re focused on launching our 2nd dapp, the DAO Balancer pool as mentioned which should be a great defi dapp for our investors to build passive income from investing into an index fund built from top performing crypto assets. We’ve got our education portal which will be launched along with the new website update. The team will also be revealing their identity then. We’ve got plans for more exchanges coming soon as well. Also, we’re in touch with a big youtube influencer (bigger than crypto zombie) to help spread our awareness for our 2nd dapp in several weeks.
Here are some of the milestones achieved in the past 30 days:
- First dapp (Meridian Vault) completed and live with close to 70% of circulating supply already staked
- First litepaper released
- Website updated ( to be updated again within weeks )
- Github released
- Liquidity locked on Uniswap
- Audit performed by HACKEN with a top score
- Expense report released with team addresses included
- LOCK token successfully launched
- Swap portal completed and currently live
Q6: what is your opinion about DeFi? and do you think this DeFi user will always go up every time?
Mark: We believe DeFi has a lot of potential, from what we’ve seen so far it’s probably one of the biggest reasons the crypto community has been growing so much this year. Projections point to a 200% increase in the total DeFi market cap within the next couple of years, which we honestly think is a conservative estimate. With new use cases popping up every day and the steady rise in demand for such projects it is our opinion this is just the beginning. We hope to be one of the catalysts that help fuel crypto adoption by being in the forefront of the DeFi space for next few years.
Twitter Session
Q1: Talking about staking, what is the minimum that can be staking on Meridian Network, for how long, and is worth it for us doing staking or holding?
Yomonk: The minimum you can stake is 100 LOCKs and the Vault with last for 1-2 months. If you stake for over 2 weeks, the Vault will be very profitable for stakers. If you stake for 1 month after the unstaking penalty, you gain 14.57% of your initial holding. I would say this is worth staking hence why 70% of the circulating supply is now being staked.
Q2: You want to simplify DeFi Apps for real life users, but the majority of real life users don’t know what blockchain is all about. How will Meridian Network bring the adoption and education on blockchain and consequently DeFi to these ones?
Mark: This is actually something we announced a couple of days ago. One way we thought we might attract new investors while also providing a means to educate them ( as well as current ones ) is to develop an educational section on our next website update, which will include the basics on blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized technologies, as well as an overview of current DeFi protocols. This will help new users understand how a balancer works so they can make better use of our DAO balancer
Q3: Kindly explain more about Swap your MRDN for LOCK and LOCK staking, what’s the minimum and maximum requirement and APR, what’s the penalty and burning fee?
Yomonk: The minimum is 100 as mentioned and there is no maximum. Our holders get 1% dividends daily for the 1st month and the unstake penalty is 15%. 10% of the 15% will be burnt from the supply and 5% will be re-distributed to holders. So the longer you stake, the more dividends you get along with the re-distribution bonus when others unstake. In this way, we can say that we have a hybrid staking model unlike other staking applications. We incentivise holding behavior.
Q4: Why you introduce a coin called LOCK other than MRDN , does we have to lock it for certain period as the name suggests LOCK, What is the differenc between LOCk and MRDN ?
Mark: The reason we decided to go from MRDN to LOCK was due to the fact the MRDN smart contract lacked the functionality to work with our staking dapp. As you know smart contracts are near impossible to change once they’re deployed so we decided to replace our token with a new one that would be compatible with the Meridian Vault, while timing both their releases to happen at the same time. You don’t have to “lock” it per se, however by staking your LOCK you will increase you holdings which in turn means a greater ROI once the balancer is live
Q5: What is the difference between the Vault portal and the Swap portal? What is the role of these portals within the Meridian Network ecosystem?
Yomonk: The swap portal has been built for our token swap from MRDN to LOCK. And the Vault portal is our staking interface. Both are important in our current stack for our users to swap + get utility from our platform through the dividends. But again, the Vault will be terminated once we launch our 2nd dapp, the DAO Balancer pool and this will create more value to the ecosystem.
More info on the DAO Balancer pool and its benefits will become available with our new website update / when the education portal goes live!
Live AMA
Q1: How will Meridian Network overcome the threat of centralization in the community?
Mark: This is exactly what we set out to combat starting at the release of our first (permanent) protocol, the DAO balancer. Through the DAO we will implement a set of rules/mechanisms that will prevent power accumulation by individual holders regardless of their holding ( one such mechanism is a marginally decreasing voting weight, where each additional token you hold represents less voting power than the previous one )
Q2: Can you tell us the motivation and benefits of investors holding LOCK tokens for a long time? What are your plans to help drive the demand and scarcity of LOCK tokens?
Yomonk: In the short term, our Meridian Vault and our high dividend model is the reason for holding our token. If you believe in the potential value that our token can bring in the future, then this will be great way to accumulate in exchange for taking the risk of buying/holding. We have a burn mechanism within the Vault right now to drive scarcity. In the future, we are experimenting on driving more scarcity through various methods of burn features. The demand for Meridian Network will increase as our ecosystem of Dapps increase and our use cases will increase. Combine all with promotions/marketing, I think we can raise more awareness to the value of our ecosystem to drive demand while reducing the supply to increase scarcity.
Q3: Projects that were launched on Uniswap often receive criticism due to the fact that there are many bad actors running on the platform. what makes the Meridian network different from them?
Mark: We realize this, and so some of the decisions we’ve made were made as a way to combat this specific issue, which was also raised by our community.
As we previously stated:
- We made our github page public
- We created a channel with constant development updates which we asked our developers to provide
- We released an expense report which includes the team’s wallet addresses so anyone can track our holdings
- We locked the liquidity on Uniswap meaning we can never remove the 500 or so Eth that are currently on our Uniswap pool
- We were audited by HACKEN in regards to both our Meridian Vault and our Swap Portal
Finally, we decided to reveal our identities to the public which will happen within less than a month
Q4: Talking about staking, what is the minimum length that can be staked on MRDN, is it worth it for us to stake out or hold it?
Mark: Please don’t confuse MRDN with LOCK. MRDN was our old token, the new ( and permanent token ) is called LOCK.
There is no minimum lenght for staking, the staking platform will be live for 1 to 2 months after which we will be releasing our first balancer pool. The main benefit in staking is increasing your holdings so that you earn a bigger income from the balancer fees when you pool your LOCK.
Q5: What are your strategies in building a big and strong community? Do you agree that the power of the community will lead your project to grow globally?
Yomonk: Absolutely, community is #1 in the crypto space. One of the many steps to expand our community is through doing AMAs with communities such as Nano. We’re looking to expand our reach across other major markets besides EU/US such as India, Indonesia, China, Vietnam and other countries that have a strong appetite for new crypto investment opportunities. Currently, we just hired a group to build our vietnam community and we’re looking to replicate these efforts across new markets mentioned above.
Q6: I saw that max Supply of LOCK is 10 million. It’s huge right? So, will you conduct token burning in the future to reduce the supply of LOCK and increase its investment attractiveness
Q7: Security is one of the threats to the continued growth of DeFi. As one of the earliest innovative DeFi products, how do you overcome this problem? Do you have a bug bounty program to check for vulnerabilities in smart contracts?
Mark: We understand security to be paramount especially within a new space such as DeFi. That is what led us to the decision of being audited, which we will be doing for every protocol we release in the future. We also do have a bug bounty program which has been running for over a month now, where users can receive LOCK by letting us know of bugs and suggesting solutions
Q8: What expectations do you have of the Balancer Pool? Any advance that you can make us of what projects could be inside?
Mark: We are still deciding which assets to use in our pool but we want to have perhaps one or two more stable coins ( not actual stablecoins ), LOCK, and a few more volatile ones
Q9: Can you give me 1-3 killer features about Uniworld to convince me and other big investors to invest in $Meridian Network for Long-term?
Yomonk: Our vision is to become an ecosystem of all the latest Defi dapps in the market and this starts with our DAO Balancer Pool. We’re a nimble/flexible team and will deliver new dapps based on the strongest use cases in the defi market. So you’re not investing into 1 product/value proposition but a portfolio of them. I think this aspect is something that should be attractive for future investors. Also, through the DAO, investors can contribute to the growth and direction of the ecosystem.
Q10: Does the Meridian network have cross-chain interoperability? Which public networks are you planning to integrate with?
Mark: We do not have cross chain interoperability, nor do we plan on integrate with other networks besides Ethereum. As you know we have locked the liquidity on Uniswap so it isn’t possible to upgrade our token anymore
Q11: We are still deciding which assets to use in our pool but we want to have perhaps one or two more stable coins ( not actual stablecoins ), LOCK, and a few more volatile ones?
Yomonk: we’ll have a mix portfolio of high performing stable coins, mid-cap and low cap in different industries/verticals such as Big Data, AI, Defi, etc. Our aim is to have one of the top performing balancer pools in the industry. Many factors will be weighted to achieve this but we’re up for the task.
Q12: How is progress on launching the DAO balancer index progressing? What can we expect from him?
Mark: The DAO balancer is set for release in August, that would be for our first milestone which is launching a balancer pool containing LOCK. The second milestone is in development and will have the DAO structure in place so users will finally have a way to vote and decide on the project’s direction going forward
Telegram Group: https://t.me/meridiannetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/networkmeridian
Medium: https://medium.com/@meridiannetwork
Discord: https://discord.gg/nbRUbhE
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/meridiannetwork/
Github: https://github.com/cryptopinions3/meridian
Etherscan: https://etherscan.io/token/0x95172ccBe8344fecD73D0a30F54123652981BD6F
Official Website: https://meridian-network.co/
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