Timothea:

Hi everyone and welcome to the second Development AMA on our YouTube channel. I’m Timothea, I'm the CMO of Orion Protocol.

It’s been an intensely busy couple of weeks as we’ve launched the first Orion SolarFlare with Victoria VR - to massive 2000% oversubscription before we closed early (130k ORN committed with a market value of ~$1m), Depositless trading - which led to new a new Terminal Volume ATH of $82m, plus unveiling a series of strategies for ORN supply reduction. On top of this we have a lot more coming up that we’ll be discussing today.

So part of this initiative is to not only address questions and key topics of discussion, but also to give you the chance to meet more of our development team. As of today, we have 41 developers in our core team, with a number of contractors too working on specialist areas like USDo, and these guys and girls are the ones working tirelessly in the background to drive Orion forward. 

Really pleased and grateful to have Aleksandr Kraiz with us, the Lead Developer on our frontend team.

Today, we’re going to be addressing a few key areas based on your questions:

• • SolarFlare
  • ORN supply reduction
  • Fiat/on off ramp
  • New chains
  • B2B solutions
  • Orion Bridge
  • Organizational structure
  • Vesting schedule
  • Liquidity sources
  • B2B solutions
  • Staking lock ups

We have a lot of questions to get through and will publish the full transcript on our blog and link it below after this is live. 

So firstly I’d like to touch on topic of the week - Orion SolarFlare, as there have been a number of questions around this, so I’ll just bucket them into one answer. 

For anyone who has been MIA this week, SolarFlare is our latest solution to add further utility to our ORN token - unlocking guaranteed IDO access via ORN, while reducing supply through a commitment to remove every committed ORN from circulation (we’ll touch on this shortly).

SolarFlare was built to enable guaranteed and democratic access to IDOs via ORN - without minimums, maximums, lock ups, KYC, accounts, or pool caps. While IDOs typically have plenty of limitations (either lottery tickets, or requiring staking to receive access) we wanted to build a decentralized launch solution where the entire community can access and they themselves determine the value of a project.

Undoubtedly, the numbers speak for themselves, and I think we can all agree this was a huge success, from demand to performance. 125k ORN was committed, over 800 users participated, and the performance of Victoria VR itself has been incredible to watch.

But of course, with every new solution there is room for improvement, and we’re always looking to the community for feedback on ways to optimize and improve for the future.

Firstly, there was some confusion around the dynamic nature of the allocation ratio, the need for claiming, etc so we will ensure the entire process is as clearly communicated as possible for the next SolarFlare this month. We’re also working to optimize the process itself and host it in its entirety on the Orion Terminal. 

Secondly, while this initiative as brought a lot of newcomers to the Orion community, we want to reward our existing community members and long term holders. So our focus is to increase the allocation ratio for stakers, and we’ll share more on this ahead of the next one. 

Finally, we’ve seen just how much appetite and demand there is for SolarFlare, so we’re working to ensure higher allocation budgets for the community for our next IDOs. As well as working with a number of projects launching on BSC instead of ETH.

There’s more optimization of SolarFlare in the works which we’ll share ahead of the next IDO, and we welcome your feedback in the meantime. For anyone who missed out, there’s plenty more coming, and a partnership with a major launchpad to be announced next week to funnel their top IDOs to SolarFlare.

So enough from me for now, and perhaps enough on SolarFlare for now, as while it has been a big focus this week, there’s so much work being done on our core proposition. and let’s touch on some of the other areas with Aleksandr:

Firstly Aleksandr, thank you so much for being here! Really glad to have you on the show to talk to the community. So let’s jump in:

1. How far are you into the progress of integrating other major chains besides Eth and BSC?

Aleksandr: Our priority right now is integrating the Fantom blockchain which is underway and we’ve made significant progress on. There are other chains in the works too, but we’re primarily focusing on the chains that will bring the most value to us as a business. 

By integrating Fantom, we can not only bring new assets, users, and sources of liquidity to the terminal, but we can release the Wallet Swap SDK within the Fantom fWallet to drive volume beyond the terminal itself.

However, before releasing new chains, we want to release Orion Bridge. Releasing Orion Bridge ahead of new chains will better optimize the trading experience on subsequent chains for seamless cross-chain trading via the first truly decentralized peer to peer atomic swap bridge.

Timothea: Quite a few of our community members would like to understand how the Bridge will work. While we have documentation that will be shared closer to launch, can you explain step by step how this works?

           2. On that note, how is the Bridge coming along? Any ideas on when this will be live?

Aleksandr: We’re very close to completion. The back end is done, we are currently optimizing the UI and we’ll soon be launching the bridge in test net staging for our VIP users ahead of public deployment. This will follow the release of our ‘single network trading view’, where users will see all available assets across chains in one view, without the need to switch and reconnect their wallet each time. We’ve integrated this functionality already, currently Metamask wallet isn’t disconnected when you change network in app. If you change network in Metamask, app network changes too. No more painful disconnects. The single network trading view, followed by the bridge, will make this a truly seamless cross-chain experience.

We’re even expanding the capabilities of the Bridge itself, creating our own pegged tokens for more effective trading across different chains - beyond ETH + BSC. While our primary focus was to enable essentially zero fee trading on ETH, we’re taking this further to build a chain-agnostic bridge, while also identifying areas to further monetize the bridge from a B2B perspective.
 

Timothea: Quite a few of our community members would like to understand how the Bridge will work. While we have documentation that will be shared closer to launch, can you explain step by step how this works?

3. My question is about how your bridge works. For example, I would like to better understand how it will technically be possible to pay for ETH transactions at a lower cost. Are your partnerships with CEX considered for this functionality? Would the transaction go directly from the user to the broker internally? 

Aleksandr: Yes, our brokers are at the core of this p2p network.

1. 1. Alice wants to send 10,000 USDT from ETH to BSC.
   2. Alice sends request to Orion (in ETH network) - like she places a regular order (but via a different UI screen, for now). Aggregator confirms that Alice can place the order.
   3. Alice makes a special transaction on ETH, locking her 10,000 USDT on OrionExchange contract.
   4. Aggregator choosing a Broker for Alice, who can swap 10,000 USDT between chains.
   5. Broker makes a counter-order (in BSC) and sends it to Alice (through Aggregator). Broker's order is made off-chain (this is important).
   6. Alice redeems Broker's money (in BSC network) 
   7. Broker can now receive Alice's money in the ETH network. 
   8. Swap is finished.

So, in a few simple steps (almost all of them are run automatically) Alice receives 10,000 USDT on BSC (excluding fee). Unlike other bridges, users don't lose ownership of their tokens until they receive the corresponding pegged tokens on the other network - so no stuck funds like other bridges. This is why we have kept the ‘deposit’ functionality on the terminal with the launch of depositless trading.

Soon we will launch Atomic Swap Bridge between Ethereum and BSC networks which allows users to trade on the Orion platform with high speed and cheap network fees using only their ERC20 token. This first iteration will enable, for the first time, practically zero fee trading on the ETH network. 

4. Will the atomic swap work within the terminal with staked ORN?

Aleksandr: Going forward, we want to move all transaction settlements to a cheap network in a way that remains transparent to users - removing the boundaries between blockchains. We do plan to utilize atomic swaps across our pools to reduce fees for stakers, although this may not necessarily be in place in the first iteration. There’s a lot of utility for the atomic swap bridge, plenty we haven’t even communicated yet!

5. You’ve said you’re integrating other liquidity sources, when are these coming?

Aleksandr: There are several centralized exchanges currently in the process of onboarding, one in particular in final stages. However, we ideally want to release the Bridge ahead of the integration of additional liquidity sources. 

As our brokers are a key element of Orion Bridge, we want to test and ensure the p2p broker network is fully operational so we can effectively onboard them into the bridge ahead of launch to ensure our bridge is as robust as possible. 

That said, with the bridge planned to be live this month, additional liquidity sources (both CEX + DEX) will be added very shortly.

Timothea: I will add that these are lengthy processes and this is why they take time - we have to remember that this is a completely new technology, and centralized exchanges do a lot of due diligence to make sure we’re in line with their legal and regulatory requirements. The amount of development hours and resources from both sides is significant! But as Aleksandr said, we’re in final stages with one broker, with others in the onboarding pipeline.

6. Are there any plans to develop mechanisms for Protocol owned liquidity (like Olympus DAO)? Any plans to transform protocol into DAO? 

Timothea: On the latter part of that question, that is indeed our current focus. We want to slowly migrate towards becoming a decentralized autonomous organization, or a DAO. For us, this is an important move towards future-proofing in the face of regulatory changes, as well as the fact that we exist in the DeFi space and therefore want to put the power and control in the hands of our community. This month, we’ll be releasing more details on our first steps towards this, including governance voting on a number of different areas, including the removal of ORN from circulation.

So that leads on to the next question:


SolarFlare

7. Can you explain what has happened to the ORN committed to the SolarFlare and staking lock ups? Are you already removing tokens from circulation? 

Aleksandr: The removal of ORN from circulation will happen quarterly. We plan to have a big event around these ‘removals’, with the first one planned for the end of the year. We’re updating the dashboard for users to track how much ORN will be removed.

Timothea: Part of the ORN removed from circulation will be committed from trading fees, licensing fees, and staking lock up fees, so let’s touch on that.

8. You said that staking lock ups would be live in December. When will this be live? Will you give us notice? Also, what happened to the ⅓ pool fees for Governance stakers?

Aleksandr: The plan was for staking lock ups to be live at the beginning of December, yes. However, we want to ensure we do not have to make significant changes post launch, so we are taking on and analysing feedback from the community since our announcement in order to make sure we get the mechanics of this right for all. We do not want to disincentivize staking, and we want to ensure we have the right ratio of lock ups, unlock fees, and rewards. 

Once we have finalized this, we will announce and give the community notice to unstake if they wish to do so.

For the ⅓ pool fees, we’re looking at distributing these asap, there have just been a number of technical challenges in doing so because of the smart contract. However, these will be distributed!

9. When will you share more details on the vesting schedule beyond December 16th?

Timothea: this will be shared in the next week or so, and will include the foundation unlocks, marketing unlocks which I am excited and grateful for, team unlocks and everything else. I will say, these are healthy unlock schedules, drawn out over a fair amount of time, without any big unlocks.

10. What other things have you been working on that haven’t been announced?

Aleksandr: There’s a lot going on in the back end to continually optimize. We have ‘silently’ deployed V2 of our aggregator, with improved swap algorithms, reworked APIs,  faster order status, and improved order book feed. We’ve also been working on the SDK based on community and partner feedback so we can deploy SDK V2 and launch our B2B solutions. We’re also working on arbitrage ‘order books’ to take advantage of multileg arbitrage opportunities. There are other areas in the works too that we haven’t necessarily spoken about in a while, including USDo and our NFT aggregator. As we get closer to launch, we’ll share more details on these.

11. When will the fiat on ramp be live?

Aleksandr: The integration is done and we’re ready to go! We’re excited for this and plan to launch this asap, with a zero fee campaign.

12. Why does Orion Protocol not develop its own Blockchain ? With launchpad, DEX, it will be massive.

Aleksandr: There’s a lot to achieve before we get to that point, including the bridge, adding new liquidity sources and pairs, launching B2B solutions, launching the Orion app, our NFT aggregator, but it has been something in discussion.


Timothea: So a lot has been done, and there’s a lot more to do. We’ve got a lot coming up - in no particular order more SolarFlares, supply reduction, fiat on ramp, Orion Bridge, new liquidity sources, Orion app, new chains, and of course our rebrand.

There’s a lot not mentioned here in detail today as we’ve focused on your submitted questions, so if you want a question answered or a topic covered, make sure you submit a question! Its very simple, and always at the bottom of our Dev AMA blog posts.

So I look forward to your next questions, and an exciting month ahead.

In the meantime, don't forget there’s a deposit less trading competition running until Dec 15th, all you have to do is trade deposit less to be entered to win up to $10k ORN, new rebrand Orion march, and new Orion NFTs. More trades, more entries, it’s that simple - we’ll link more details below.

So that’s it from us today, have a great weekend everyone and we’ll see you soon.