Defi-Search x API3 AMA
We had great pleasure of welcoming Sasa Milic, Founder of API3, as well as Midhav, on our Telegram channel for the purpose of letting the community ask questions, which they have always wanted to be answered. Join our Telegram channel now and become part of the community.
The following is a recap of the event:
✅ OFFICIAL CHANNELS ✅
🔗 Website: api3.org
🌎 Telegram: https://t.me/API3DAO
📢 Twitter: http://twitter.com/api3dao
😺 Github: http://github.com/api3dao
📖 Medium: http://medium.com/api3
📃 Whitepaper: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api3dao/api3-whitepaper/master/api3-whitepaper.pdf
👨💻 FAQ: https://daotalk.org/t/api3-frequently-asked-questions/2047
🦄 Uniswap: https://info.uniswap.org/pair/0x4dd26482738be6c06c31467a19dcda9ad781e8c4
API3 team:
Saša M
Hi, I’m Sasa. I’m one of the whitepaper authors and cofounders of API3.Midhav
Hey. I’m Midhav. I’m one of the business developers of API3.Saša
I look forward to everyone’s questions :)Midhav
And to introduce API3 — It’s a DAO built with the intention of providing data feeds that are governed in a decentralized manner. The primary focus beyond governance would be first-party oracles, or oracles that are run directly by the API providers, and insurance for the users of the feeds formed from the aggregation of these oracles.
Question 1:
what makes you believe that the data providers will prefer setting up their own air node to providing the data to third party oracles like current solutions?
API3 team:
Airnode is a serverless oracle node that is easy to deploy and maintain. It requires little blockchain/crypto knowhow. This is essentially an additional revenue stream for API providers that requires little effort to implement. Here’s an example of Airnode deployment: https://twitter.com/API3DAO/status/1331905770343067648?s=20
Further, there are other elements of API3’s design that is appealing to traditional API providers. For example, allowing fiat payments.
I refer you to Section 4.2 (“Barriers to API providers operating oracles”) in our whitepaper. This sections gets into why existing solutions are unappealing to many traditional API providers and how API3 addresses that.
Further, several founders of API3 previously worked on the Honeycomb marketplace for Chainlink node operators. They have extensive experience with specific API provider needs when it comes to servicing the blockchain.
There is also the legal issues with reselling data via third-party oracles.
Question 2:
What is the most ambitious goal of your project? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any Upcoming Updates?
API3 team:
Going beyond being a data feed provider like other solutions and delivering the node/protocols that will be the default way of integrating APIs to blockchains.
Question 3:
There have been many exploits with price oracles, re akropolis , harvest etc, can API3 help with price oracles to make it safer?
API3 team:
The API3 solution of using first-party oracles completely removes the middlemen, which is the most vulnerable attack surface for oracles. In addition to this, decentralized governance by a DAO provides protection against governance-level attacks via on-chain insurance. So API3 is more secure than traditional solutions in two major ways.
Question 4:
Does the API3 team have any business development / sales team in place (or planned) to gain customers, partnerships, etc? Seems like the market is just beginning for real world data in smart contracts so need to be aggressive at gaining adoption for api3’s solution. Any conferences or presentations upcoming? Weekly newsletter with progress updates and future events / milestones to focus on?
API3 team:
There is a business development team in place, of which I’m a part of. As for the background on it, I can point to our prior work of having interacted with API providers for the past year or two in order to sign them up onto honeycomb.market. I concur with your assessment of the industry at the moment, though I would also add that I personally think that we’re still in a very nascent stage in terms of adoption — I would give it roughly about a decade before we see truly widespread adoption, mainly based on the fact that it took the same amount of time for this to happen with another relevant field, SaaS. We do have plans to present ourselves on different platforms. We haven’t announced anything at the moment, so I would point to @api3announcements as a good channel to keep yourself up-to-date.
As for future events/milestones — the first major one would be the formation of the authoritative DAO, which dOrg has been tasked with working on. Beyond this of course, the DAO would have to come out with a rough roadmap as well as continue its work on data feeds and onboarding users. More info on the first milestone: https://medium.com/api3/announcing-monolith-1-authoritative-api3-dao-ec9ca6d044f8
Question 5:
and how we can become a validator or the oracle node runner to help the sustainance of the API3 blockchain
API3 team:
API3 isn’t a blockchain. The DAO will run on Ethereum. The only node operators in the network will be API provider-run — this is what we mean by “first-party oracles”.
To help sustain and improve the network, one can stake their API3 tokens in the staking pool. This earns one inflationary rewards as well as take a % of API3 profits, as well as potentially be slashed during an insurance payout.
Further, stakers get governance representation when they stake. Because they take on the rewards and risks of the system, they are strongly incentivized to optimally participate in the governance of the system.
Question 6:
Most investors simply focus on the price of the TOKEN in the short term, and not on the real value of the project. Can you tell us about the motivation and advantages of token investors in the long term?
API3 team:
I think I briefly mentioned this in the previous response. Staking API3 tokens earns one inflationary rewards as well as % profits (that come from data feed subscriptions). You are essentially a shareholder that directly profits when the system profits.
Questiton 7:
What are your plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand #API3 and its technology?
API3 team:
We are presently and continuously working on releasing high quality content on the regular. Our Medium articles have gained quite a bit of traction and we have interviews and presentations lined up for the near future.
Further, our github is public so investors can track development progress. Burak has done a great job of keeping our repos well-documented, so even non-coders can follow progress and understand the merits of our technical solutions.
Question 8:
What are the major milestones You achieved so far & what are in future pipeline?
API3 team:
- We have implemented our request-response protocol, built Airnode and had that support the requester-response protocol. — We set up our initial version of the DAO.
The first thing that we want to achieve is the implementation of the authoritative version of the DAO that will grant token holders with voting power and staking rewards. We will be implementing the pub-sub protocol and extending Airnode to support that (and this is expected to be easier since we have the request-response version to build upon). This will allow us to build self-reliant price feeds, but also many other services.
We have the insurance service to implement, which has its own dependencies.
We have created a board that lists what has been done and the upcoming projects, and we will make this public soon to be used as a base for governing the project.
You can follow developmant on our public github.
Question 9:
The (currently) 13 proposals in the DAO which were voted upon from the currently 30 DAO members, what were they about (titles and content)? Are you deciding and developing in stealth mode so your competitors don’t see what exciting things are coming up?
API3 team:
Proposal specs are posted publicly for them to be validated
https://github.com/api3dao/proposal-verifier/
This will be made more user friendly for the next version of the DAO.
Question 10:
Hi! two quetions: 1. Do 30M tokens for “Founders” all for ChainAPI Company? Who else belongs to “Founders” or “Founding Team”? 2. Who are “Partners and Contributors” and how can they get the API3 token? Will this process approved by API3 DAO?
API3 team:
“Founders” are all individuals, and are not limited to ChainAPI affiliates. “Partners and contributors” are individuals and groups/teams/companies that we have announced as our partners. Being a founder/partner requires the parties to have contributed to API3 up to this point and will continue to do so (the difference being founders have been doing this for a year now). Both groups still haven’t had their tokens locked, this will be done by the DAO.
Further, founder and investor tokens are under a 6 month cliff and 3 year linear vesting schedule.
Question 11:
Would you be able to expand on the DAO with the current token distribution. Specially around the founder fund that holds 30% of the supply. Is this in control of the clc group or just the three founders and how will they take part of voting in the DAO with the amount of voting power they have, which can essentially control the DAO. Thank you, for your time! Ps I enjoyed reading the medium articles around the DAO that Sasa posted.
API3 team:
Certainly. The 30% of the supply is currently vested for three years in the hands of the individuals who were involved in the creation of API3 for over a year. The reason behind this apparently high stake in governance is mainly to put it in the hands of the individuals who have the most skin in the game to begin with, and that consists of the teams (beyond just these founders) that have put the most effort in building the DAO up to what it is, which would make their goals most aligned with its future success. This does not however imply that it will perpetually remain this way (with the token supply gradually diluting over time, due to various factors), nor does it mean that the governance is tilted firmly in one direction. A counterpoint to a hypothetical scenario arising from the latter would be that every individual will not vote for a proposal in coherence, and even if a voting bloc were to arise from a single party, it could be countered by other entities that seek to maximize the long-term prosperity of the DAO. If this voting bloc seems to dominate the DAO in a manner that benefits only itself, it will end up not only shooting itself in the foot with the other parties losing faith in the DAO, but also in the subsequent devaluation of its price. The extended vesting period seeks to minimize the likelihood of the latter issue.
Question 12:
Would you be able to expand on the DAO with the current token distribution. Specially around the founder fund that holds 30% of the supply. Is this in control of the clc group or just the three founders and how will they take part of voting in the DAO with the amount of voting power they have, which can essentially control the DAO. Thank you, for your time! Ps I enjoyed reading the medium articles around the DAO that Sasa posted.
API3 team:
There are 11 founders, I believe. It’s pretty much former CLCG group and me (I wasn’t a part of CLCG although I was familiar with their work and liked it).
I think there’s always the assumption that founders vote in the same way, but this isn’t always the case. Further, one can always debate how much % founders/public/etc should receive but this debate never really settles at an agreement.
Question 13:
Can you maybe explain a bit more further how you plan to let other projects integrate your price oracles compared to the ones that have been responsible for pricemanipulation ? Like in the big drop 90m dai was liquidated cause of the feed from dai/usd coinbase. Similar things happened in flashloans for AKropolis and Harvest.
API3 team:
I’m not sure I entirely understand your question, but here goes:
dAPIs are constructed from multiple first-party, API provider-operated oracles. API providers are assessed for accuracy and security via DAO teams. This offers a kind of transparency that third-party oracle solutions don’t provide.
So dAPIs / data feeds are constructed from multiple APIs and they are further insured.
^ That’s the short answer, but I refer you to Section 3 (“ Issues with Third-Party Oracles as Middlemen”) and Section 6 (“Quantifiable Security through Insurance”) in the API3 whitepaper.
Anyways, that’s all for me, thanks for the excellent follow-up questions. Feel free to join our TG if you’re interested in the project and/or you have additional questions.
