Mimo Bittrex AMA Recap
While Mimo’s governance token begins trading on Bittrex — one of the leading Bitcoin & Ethereum cryptocurrency exchanges — we were excited to introduce ourselves to the community in their community on Telegram.
Mimo went over:
- PAR and how we’re revolutionizing the euro
- Mimo’s milestones
- Thoughts on DeFi
- Mimo’s business model
If you’d like to follow along with the conversation from June 24, 2021, here is a direct link.
Otherwise, we’ve provided a breakdown and summary of the highlights.
Mimo & PAR
Q: Could you provide a brief introduction to MIMO Governance and Parallel?
A: Okay let me start with a little bit of a backstory to set the pace.
While running TenX we’ve seen a lot of data suggesting to us that there was unmet demand for a Euro stable coin, and the negative interest rates in Europe made it difficult to make one.
We’ve then realized that we could build one, but use a different business model, a more decentralized one.
This was the PAR token.
Klodio goes on to explain how PAR, therefore, is issued on the Parallel Protocol. Further, PAR is backed properly through overcollateralized “loans” to ensure its safety. $MIMO, the governance token behind it all, is what governs the platform.
Q: What was the motivation behind starting this project?
In the spirit of empowering users and migrating from the previous card program that turned into Mimo, the change was also inspired by being able to help users hold their assets instead of spending with a card.
A: The motivation was partly the fact that we had all this data, and partly the fact that we wanted a European project for Europeans to access DeFi without taking the fx usd risk!
The main motivation for picking an overcollateralized “loan” platform design was that we have also seen that there was a lot of demand for accessing liquidity from crypto assets, but it was generally seen as a necessity to sell these assets.
Effectively, unlike many of the popular Decentralized Finance applications who rehypothecate their assets, Mimo’s platform avoids this unsound approach by requiring users to maintain a required over-collateralized cushion.
Q: Were there any major milestones for Mimo & PAR this year?
A: We’re very happy we could:
- Ship a platform
- Redesign it to accommodate the needs of users
- Add features allowing users to manage their vaults in good and bad times
- We even have a telegram bot to notify users of the health of their vaults
- Passing Quantstamp audits
- Making the platform stable
- Breaking 50M TVL with a Euro stable token
More milestones were actually reached under the hood (partnerships), but we’re not announcing these yet.
We’ve also managed to keep PAR very stable during the previous highly volatile weeks, which is an achievement of our finance team.
A lot of stable tokens couldn’t maintain their peg. It’s not easy.
The Future of Mimo, Finance, & Our Place in DeFi
Q: Any long-term or short-term goals for the project you can share?
First and foremost, the short & long term goals are to serve the largest number of users with the best, most sound product we can build.
A: The question then becomes: what can make PAR the best product? In my opinion, it needs to be the most liquid one, with a lot of access points, a decent trading volume, and one with a very decentralized governance. We see decentralized governance as a very important part of our strategy, and it is the current priority in product development.
Which brings us to the longer term. It’s trust, we need PAR to continue to be stable and trustworthy for people to continue using it for years. Any stable coin play is a long term play, in my opinion. We focus on building a very stable and usable foundation which we will leverage to build applications and partnerships.
You can expect to see PAR in more hands as we grow.
In an even longer term, we intend to scale this vision further, with more stable coins. We also intend to be on more chains, to help more users. We will keep MIMO as the governance token for everything.
Q: What is your project’s business model?
A: The protocol itself has a form of a business model. It has what we call a Borrowing Fee — when people mint PAR on Mimo DeFi, they need to return more PAR than they minted, depending on how long they’ve been keeping the position open. This is similar to interest rates for a loan.
These fees can be partially distributed to AMM pools to incentivize providing liquidity, or to the safety reserve of the protocol, to make the protocol more robust in case of unhealthy vaults!
However, the protocol isn’t the company, and the safety reserve doesn’t pay our bills.
The company’s business model is different, we are building applications around the protocol and will charge modest fees in exchange for convenience and connectivity to the fiat world.
Q: Why did you release PAR & MIMO as ERC20 — Why not BSC, for example?
A: Ethereum is still the most widely supported chain for smart contracts. There are more wallets supporting ERC20, and there are far more nodes running Ethereum, which makes it better to start a decentralized platform in my opinion. This doesn’t mean we’re not looking at other chains, and BSC is surely very interesting, but we needed to get the protocol solid, stable, and audited on Ethereum first.
When people build other protocols and l2, they build bridges for Ethereum and so far for almost nothing else.
We want our decentralized governance to manage the protocol over multiple chains, which is easier when you start on the chain everybody builds bridges for.
Q: Currently, most investors only care about profits at the moment but ignore the long-term benefits. Can you give them some advice on why they should buy and hold this token/coin in the long term?
A: I think the narrative about short term-profits-only has slowed down drastically since the arrival of DeFi. A lot of people are now looking for annual yield over basic trading.
The same thing happened in the traditional finance world where more and more people look at passive funds over stock picking.
Now when it comes to people holding on to their tokens for a short or a long time, if you watch telegram communities carefully, there are now a lot of people who are also looking at projects from a long term perspective, because many 2017 ICO projects are delivering value now.
A lot of people feel burned to have sold their tokens too early for many projects that have been producing value over years rather than producing hype over weeks, and these people are already seeing more long term now.
I can’t give any advice to anyone, I’m more of a builder than a financial advisor, but I would clearly recommend people to conduct some form of due diligence on whatever they’re buying, and to form their decisions based on that. Read audit reports!
Q: How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates?
A: The best way (or at least, my favorite) is Telegram. You’re welcome to join the mimodefi telegram channel.
Twitter is also a good way to stay in touch with us on @mimo_labs.
When it comes to local communities, we’re not there yet, but intend to be. I have witnessed the strength of local groups before, and we intend to build our community efforts in this direction.
Q: DeFi is an important topic in the blockchain space right now, can you share your opinions on DeFi? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system or do you think we can live in a balance where both systems can work cohesively?
A: I think DeFi is here to stay, and that some form of disruption is to expect.
I don’t think we need to (or try to) totally annihilate the current financial system to bring value to people. In my opinion it’s about providing a better alternative, and to provide choice to people. Without DeFi, you’re in a world of artificial gatekeepers and arbitrary rules, which are tolerable at best, inefficient most of the time, and abusive at worst.
I do believe DeFi and the traditional system can cohabit and I know some traditional players are working towards DeFi to expand their offerings (my phone keeps ringing).
One thing is certain, as long as we can all build great decentralized software and use it, users have a lot to gain. The elimination of friction and the presence of truly peer-to-peer systems is an essential layer we all need.
Q: What are the current developments going in the product to make it more sustainable over other customers?
A: We’re starting by adding calculated annual returns on our mining page on https://mimo.capital/mining to help users manage their positions better and allow them to make the most informed decisions.
Further down the line, we’ll bring Mimo to different platforms to reach users where they are.
As a generic answer to people asking whether Mimo wants to burn tokens: No, we do not want to burn means to govern.
In order to vote on proposals, users will need to lock MIMO tokens for a certain amount of time. The longer the lock, the more voting power.
And that’s a wrap.
If you wish to learn more about Mimo and our DeFi products or have any questions that weren’t answered here, please find us on Telegram or Twitter.
If you have a community or want to talk about Mimo or members of the team on your show, etc., reach out to us on Telegram and we’ll be happy to chat.
