Hi Folks!

After the announcement of the partnership between UniLend Finance and Mirror Protocol, a new AMA was held, this time on the Mirror TG channel (https://t.me/mirror_protocol), where Chardresh Aharwar, UniLend's founder and CEO, Vishal Kothari, UniLend's community lead and Ayush Garg, UniLend's marketing ops lead, answered several questions, including the some details abut this parnership. Here is the recap of this event.

Segment 1: Introduction and basic questions

Mirror:
So without further ado, let’s get to it. I would like to welcome Unilend team to our Mirror Telegram group. Chandresh Ahrawar is the CEO of Unilend and Vishal is the Community Lead for Unilend.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Hi Everyone, really glad to be here. Thanks Aayush for Inviting us.

Vishal Kothari:
Hello Everyone. Glad to be here. Hey Ayush, Glad to be with Mirror Community.

Mirror:
Likewise🙂 To start, for the benefit of our community members,would you mind giving us a brief overview of UniLend?

Chandresh Aharwar:
Sure. Before we get started I would like to give a shout out to my team for their relentless work, recently we opened our Alpha, Initium V1, to our entire community for testing. We’re making excellent headway on our roadmap and we’re excited to hear feedback about Initium V1.
https://app.unilend.finance

Vishal Kothari:
Hey, I am Vishal Kothari - Community Lead at UniLend Finance. I have started my career from Computer Education in 1998 and jumping from various IT related businesses finally realised the best thing technology has given us is the Cryptocurrency as I was studying and researching about cryptocurrencies since 2014. I have been guiding projects on marketing front & community growth from more than an year & have been an early part of UniLend Team from start.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Many of you probably already know I have been actively contributing to the blockchain space since late 2016, including holding the lead Marketing & Strategy position at Matic Network before co-founding UniLend Finance. UniLend is a comprehensive DeFi protocol with the mission to unlock the true potential of decentralized finance. Essentially, UniLend Finance will offer every DeFi capability imaginable for any ERC20 asset, including the $30B+ of assets which are currently excluded from DeFi. I have heard people say UniLend is like a combination of Uniswap, Compound and Aave. This is one way to think of our protocol. In addition to an intuitive UI, UniLend will also have a robust governance model powered by UFT (UniLend Fiance Token), and this is just the beginning.

Mirror:
Thanks for the introductions - very impressive indeed. Matic team is well known for their execution and marketing! It’s great to hear that your team is so focused and congratulations on the launch of your protocol’s Alpha release! How about we expound on what you stated, that this is just the beginning. Maybe you can share a little about the partnerships you’ve recently released information about?

Vishal Kothari:
Thank you for your positive words, I would be happy to share. I think everyone should be excited for our upcoming roadmap goals and the many collaborations with the projects we’re working with. Like stated above, we’ve recently launched our Initium community testing event. We believe we’ll receive great feedback, since our early access program community testing initiative was very successful. In addition, Q1 of this year has officially kicked off, so expect to see new releases on the horizon. Specifically, the next big release will be the Beta release of our protocol. There are many additional milestones coming soon after, such as liquidity mining/staking features to be added to the mix. In regards to our partnerships, everyone probably noticed that we recently strategically partnered with Mirror Finance to enable decentralized lending and borrowing of synthetic stocks via UniLend. Yes, we’ll be the first protocol to offer this type of functionality. Get ready to lend and borrow the world’s major stocks (including the FAANG tech giant stocks).

Mirror:
Yes- we are very excited to work with you guys too! :)

Vishal Kothari:
Again this is just the beginning, many more collaborations and unique protocol functionalities are yet to be announced.

Mirror:
This all sounds so exciting, Chandresh and Vishal! I would like to touch upon a very sensitive topic guys - as you are aware people are really scared of rug pulls and security hacks in Defi! Maybe to assuage their concerns, can you explain how can users be sure they are safe while using such a new protocol?

Chandresh Aharwar:
Great question. I would say we are much more secure than other money market protocols. For instance, current protocols are dependent on other DEXs like Uniswap etc. for liquidations (which is a major concern for adding illiquidity & more volatile assets). Nobody has any sort of control on these DEXs, whereas in the case of UniLend, we are deriving the lending/borrowing capacity of assets based on the liquidity available on our trading platform. Hence, we are not dependent on any other protocol for liquidation & everything is handled within the UniLend ecosystem. The problem we are solving is quite large and it requires a complete ecosystem to be built for catering to such a problem. Progress on this front is going strong. Maximum security is a key priority of UniLend Finance, we are picking up where key DeFi protocols like Uniswap left off and continuing the development of the decentralized finance revolution. Also like our roadmap suggests, during Q1 of 2021, we will have proper audits in place from a variety of the best industry players to make sure our protocol is safe for users.

Mirror:
That's interesting. In-built liquidation engine for security! You brought up the roadmap and it got me thinking about the future of your protocol again. What else do users have to look forward to further down the road in 2021?

Vishal Kothari:
Though our Alpha was a monumental event in our journey, there is so much more in store for 2021. Above we stated that Q1 has many exciting roadmap milestones on the horizon, including our Mainnet release coming in Q1. Additionally, Fusion Farming should also go live during the first quarter. This is an innovative feature which will allow UniLend liquidity providers to attain two different tokens at once by providing liquidity. Again, this is just the first quarter of 2021. In the future, UniLend will implement community governance, the UniLend Ecosystem Fund, launch onto multiple chains, layer 2 implementation for a superior user experience, and even metatransactions. We’ll also bootstrap new projects in the UniLend ecosystem with full DeFi functionality right from their token launch. Empowering brand new tokens with comprehensive DeFi functionality is a concept completely new to the crypto space, and something which is extremely valuable to new tokens looking to establish a user base and solid use cases for their token.

Chandresh Aharwar:
That's one of the major USP's for us.

Vishal Kothari:
Therefore, we anticipate that listing on UniLend (in addition to traditional platforms such as Uniswap) will be standard procedure for new token launches. In fact, we recently launched a poll on Twitter regarding this, and the crypto community echoed our sentiment strongly.

Mirror:
Love the fact that you guys are so focussed on user experience. Using Layer-2 and meta-transactions are crucial for enhancing user experience!!

Vishal Kothari:
You can see the full roadmap outlining our plans up until Q3 of 2021 here: https://unilend.medium.com/presenting-unilends-roadmap-gearing-up-for-alpha-launch-in-december-2020-89ff10805bcd. These are all things that we can confidently say we can fulfil based on the dates shown via our roadmap, though there are many other items we are also working on/researching in the background.

Mirror:
Ok, great answers so far. So you stated that you’re picking up from where Uniswap left off? I heard your team has great comparison articles in regards to this (if I recollect correctly), could you expand on this topic and let us know where we can find some of these articles?

Vishal Kothari:
Yes, to clarify, we have the utmost respect for Uniswap and the other leading protocols for being trailblazers in the DeFi space. That said, we believe that our comprehensive DeFi functionality and permissionless listing model will facilitate the evolution of DeFi and bring the next wave of users into the DeFi space.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Please see our list of articles here for detailed comparisons with other protocols:
Compound: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-simple-comparison-of-unilend-and-compound-2e00235bab92
Balancer: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-simple-comparison-of-unilend-and-balancer-4411fc766697
Maker: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-brief-comparison-of-unilend-and-maker-3d33c7332982
Uniswap: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-unilend-finance-taking-the-uniswap-defi-revolution-to-the-next-level-b576ce915350
Aave: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-a-brief-comparison-of-unilend-and-aave-2e7726c1e7ee
bZx: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-comparing-unilend-and-bzx-two-decentralized-lending-innovators-8933213d7de0
C.R.E.A.M: https://unilend.medium.com/defi-dissected-comparing-unilend-and-c-r-e-a-m-two-game-changing-protocols-2a0c8f55e7c8

Vishal Kothari:
Our community has requested further clarification on UniLend’s strengths as a DeFi protocol, which is why we launched our DeFi Dissected article series. The goal with the series is to show the cryptosphere why we will be a major contender, with more to offer than our competitors. UniLend is a unique protocol, built from the ground up, that is capable of truly revolutionizing DeFi. I would encourage everyone to follow us on our UniLend Medium (https://unilend.medium.com/) to stay up to date on our collaborations and to take a look at the DeFi Dissected article series for themselves. Two of the most recent articles within this series were for comparing UniLend with Aave and Uniswap, above are the links to get you started.

Mirror:
That's much more comprehensive than I could have imagined. Glad I asked this question. These articles would be really useful for our community to understand Unilend better!!

Chandresh Aharwar:
Definately. We plan on keep sharing such content regularly

Mirror:
Ok- so this is my last question, before we open the channel for the questions from the community! Here you go- saving the best for the last. Let’s discuss our strategic partnership with your team, to integrate mAssets into the UniLend platform. Could you tell us more about the user scenarios after integrating mAssets are integrated into UniLend?

Chandresh Aharwar:
First of all, I want to say that this news really got the community excited. We’ve received an immense amount of engagement regarding this topic in our community Telegram and other social platforms. We believe that Mirror Finance’s fungible synthetic mAssets, that track the price of real-world assets, will ultimately bring the world’s existing assets to the blockchain. Imagine the major global stock market assets entering into DeFi. Users will no longer be required to go through a centralized entity to have exposure to the 90 trillion dollars locked within the world’s stock exchanges. Users will be able to lend/borrow stocks of major companies like Amazon, Tesla and Google (FAANG stocks) using Mirror Protocol’s mAssets on UniLend. This type of exchange for stock pegged digital assets in a fungible market environment will allow for new DeFi strategies. You could potentially collateralize mAsset stocks to get a stablecoin backed loan to participate in other DeFi capabilities and then later exit back to mAssets to grow your position in your favorite stock. This is only one of the various strategies which will be enabled through this collaboration.

Vishal Kothari:
Aahhhh! Faang stocks on UniLend! 🙂

Chandresh Aharwar:
Of course this all ties into our other strategic partnerships which will potentially open new doors into cross-chain activities, robo-advisory and yield farming. We haven’t even discussed how this may impact the derivative markets, UniLend DeFi is truly finance on steroids! Furthermore, we’ll be the first platform to unlock these types of DeFi functionalities in unison with Mirror Protocol. We encourage everyone to join the revolution now, to be on the bleeding edge of the future of decentralized finance.

Mirror:
Just thinking about the possibilities makes me excited! Marriage of stocks and blockchain is a match made in heaven! Glad to know that Mirror and Unilend are bringing it all together

Segment 2: Live Questions

Q1. Unilend allow to any ERC-20 have access to many useful services, but apart of them Unilend also can provide the same services to other types of tokens? Like Tron or BSC? If not, maybe in the future?

Chandresh Aharwar:
I would like to highlight this again that UniLend structure is designed considering all such scenarios & we are totally immune. Also, we are still waiting for further details on this scenario & will keep our community updated. Personally, I think Indian Blockchain Ecosystem has grown immensely in last few years & we have strong group of people representing ourselves

Q2. Many New users find it complex to use new platform, How will You try to provide Smooth & Less Complex User Interface?

Vishal Kothari:
We are trying to keep the UI as simple as users are already comfortable as they are using in most used DeFi protocols such as Uniswap. So no hassle of the learning more about the protocol UI. You can check out our current UI, which is going under changes & will be shared with our beta launch https://app.unilend.finance.

Q3. Anybody will be able to list any ERC20 token without any entity controlling the listing process, making UniLend’s features accessible to every token. That neans that scam tokens can be listrd without any restriction? How can users feel secure while trading any asseton UniLend?

Vishal Kothari:
This is the full DeFi experience where people can list any ERC20 Tokens for sure but for safer side users need to understand the thing that our protocol will ask full liquidity from both sides in pool from the listing entity so that wouldn't be so easy to list a token as well as provide liquidity in Ethereum / UFT token for pairing up in DEX and also needed that liquidity will be used for Lending on the platform.**

Q4. What makes UNILEND different from existing cryptocurrency money markets such as Compound/AAVE?

Chandresh Aharwar:
Existing protocol supports limited assets currently. Out of 6k+ erc20 tokens, less than 50 are supported by current protocols. We plan to support all ERC20 assets for lending/borrowing just like uniswap does for asset swap. Also, if you crunch the numbers more than 50% of the market cap is still untapped & 80% of the community is still untapped for lensing/borrowing. All this will become possible with UniLend.

Q5. What are the major milestone for UNILEND FINANCE in this year? Can you share with us the short-term goals and long-term goals of UNILEND FINANCE?

Vishal Kothari:
You can checkout our detailed roadmap:https://unilend.medium.com/presenting-unilends-roadmap-gearing-up-for-alpha-launch-in-december-2020-89ff10805bcd

Q6. We are in DeFi mania currently and even NASDAQ mentioned that UniLend, a lending protocol, raised $3.1 million. How will this amount be utilized and when can we expect your public token distribution event and platform launch?

Vishal Kothari:
Token Distribution of Public sale already completed and our Alpha version of the protocol you can find at https://app.unilend.finance

Q7. I’m a developer, and I’m interested in contributing to your project alongsides earning, Do you have any Bug Bounty to check for vulnerabilities?

Chandresh Aharwar:
We will soon be coming up with bug bounty program after our beta goes live this month 🙂 Please keep an eye on our announcement channel -https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement

Q8. Do the token holders have right to participate in the governance of the project? On what kind of decisions can they vote on about the project?

Vishal Kothari:
Yes, The token holders will have right to participate in the protocol's governance, they can vote on important decisions like collateralization ratios, interest rate models etc.

Q9. What strategy will you implement to bring non-crypto-natives into your ecosystem? How do you keep a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of your token?

Chandresh Aharwar:
We have some interesting collaborations coming up soon, which will highlight more on how we are working closely with some partners to bring the capabilities of UniLend to non-crypto audience. This is going to be a great addition to UniLend ecosystem.

Q10. What is the structure of this project , is it decentralised or a open sourced protocol where everybody can contribute? If so, how does the governance plan on being handled?

Vishal Kothari:
This is a decentralized and Open Source project and its codes are live in github as well you can checkout here: https://github.com/UniLend.

Q11. I wanted to follow your project for the long term. Where i can get all the latest news about your project? Do you have Twitter/Telegram/Discord community? If yes can you share the link here because there is a lot of fake telegram/twitter groups?From your website , we can submit problem, suggestion, idea or bug report and get reward, where we can submit that?any ambassador or referal program.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Telegram (https://t.me/UniLendFinance)
Announcements channel (https://t.me/UniLendAnnouncement)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/unilend_finance)
Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/UniLend/)
Medium (https://unilend.medium.com/)
Please free to ask any of your doubts in future in this communities.

Q12. From where you get the project name? What does it means to you? And why you choose this name for your project?

Vishal Kothari:
The basic inspiration behind the name UniLend is - Universal Lending and Borrowing, which will be the crux of our platform so the name is combination Universal and Lending.

Mirror:
I guess- we should wrap up now guys! You have already taken more than anyone can handle.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Sure Ayush. It was a great expereince. Mirror community is amazing.

Mirror:
ChandreshAharwar and VishalBlockchain: Thank you so much guys for patiently answering so many questions. This AMA was really amazing! I personally learnt so much and I am sure our community did too.

Vishal Kothari:
Yes feeling great to be part of the Mirror community. Thank you for inviting.

Chandresh Aharwar:
Looking forward to the Mirror integration also soon. Future looks bright.

Mirror:*
Likewise- looking forward. Thank you Chandresh! It was a pleasure to have you