Each week, we host top names in DeFi on the CertiK Security Leaderboard Live AMA. The CertiK Security Leaderboard is your one-stop shop for everything security related in DeFi. Head over to CertiK.org and check out the ranking of dozens of projects, their security scores, Skynet statistics, and much more data.
This week, we had the pleasure of inviting Michael Nikolas, CEO & Product Manager at DeFi Yield Protocol (DYP) — a project which aims to prevent whale manipulation and make DeFi fairer for everyone.
If you missed the stream, don’t worry: here’s a recap of some of what was discussed.
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Let’s start with a quick overview of DYP Finance and your role in the project.
Michael: Sure. I’m the product manager and founder of DeFi Yield Protocol. DYP is a DeFi platform that allows any user to provide liquidity and for the first time get their rewards in Ethereum. We also support BNB after launching yield farming pools on Binance Smart Chain. The best part is that the yield farming pools use an anti-manipulation feature that automatically converts rewards into ETH or BNB.
We also recently released a new feature called DYP Tools. It’s going to be the future of our platform. It’s a generalized tool dashboard that provides a couple of features like liquidity provision and voting.
Looking at that voting feature, it’s like a sentiment analysis but only for users who can verify that they hold the token, is that correct?
Michael: Yes, that’s correct. You can only vote for a project if you hold that token. Of course, voting is free, but you’re not allowed to vote if you don’t hold that token, if you’re not involved in that project. There are a lot of campaigns on Twitter, for example, that aim to manipulate voting for different projects. We wanted to come up with something different, something unique, in order for the real community of a project to be able to make a vote.
Can you speak about the security of your platform? How was working with CertiK, why you chose us, why you chose to enable Skynet?
Michael: We chose CertiK because you are one of the best, of course, and we wanted to improve our security. Skynet, in my opinion, is a very powerful tool for smart contract security. We really like the way it works and we immediately decided to have this done for our smart contracts.
When we started work on our Vault — the Vault is another one of our products — we had security audits from three different security companies, including CertiK. We did this because it was a more complex product and you can never be 100% sure. But when you work with three different companies, like we did, the chances of a bad outcome are reduced by a lot. That’s why we put security first. Even on our token contract we’ve had security audits.
I totally understand what you’re getting at there. At CertiK, we don’t view other top security firms as competitors, we see us as all working toward raising the standard of security in DeFi. It’s the only way we’re going to see the growth we’re all hoping for.
Diving back into that transfer into ETH that you do automatically, that’s part of your anti-manipulation approach, right?
Michael: All of the rewards are distributed automatically to the pools. After that, the conversion to Ethereum happens. Here, we use some security features in order to be sure that nobody is able to control the process. We also use slippage to protect users from impermanent loss.
If the projected slippage is more than 2.5% the platform automatically pauses token conversions.
Michael: Yes, that’s the correct number. We performed some analysis based on our pools, and that was the right number. If the slippage would be greater than 2.5%, the smart contract tries again the next day to convert the rewards to Ethereum. After seven days of failed conversions, the community can vote and distribute the undistributed rewards to liquidity providers, or, if the community decides to do so, they can burn the tokens and remove them from circulation.
Now we’ve got our first community question: What is your ultimate, absolutely must-achieve goal in 2021?
Michael: First of all, we want to create a much better ecosystem for the DeFi community. You already know that DeFi is kind of the Wild West. There are a lot of scams, rugpulls, and security issues. This is why we put a lot of effort into the security of our project. We have developed DYP Tools, which is designed to help new investors. You want to check a project, you use DYP Tools and find out everything about it. We also offer some solutions for new projects, for example if they want to lock their liquidity.
What is the DYP Ethereum Miner?
Michael: We have a mining farm, and mining Ethereum is actually how I got into crypto. We’re going to offer a mining pool that will have some advantages to miners, at the same time they can use the yield farming pools and other features on our platform. DYP Miner is an assurance for our investors to show that we have a background in crypto when we started this project. We’ve launched nine products in less than one year, seven months.
So you guys have some awesome mining hardware and a strong mining background. What happens when Ethereum transitions to Proof of Stake?
Michael: So when Ethereum moves to Proof of Stake we will become validators. We have some plans for this, but we’re at least a year and a half away from the full transition. We still need to wait to see when this is going to happen and how it is going to happen, because nobody knows for sure.
The number of DeFi projects are growing steadily, and many are quite similar to each other. Among these projects, which will innovate, which will survive?
Michael: From the beginning, we were unique. We launched yield farming pools with the unique feature of distributing rewards in Ethereum. Every feature, every product, it had something unique. We do not copy from other projects.
Another important aspect is that we want to be as decentralized as possible. DYP Tools is decentralized, the contracts are decentralized. The only very small centralized aspect is with our Binance Smart Chain contracts because this is the only way you can bridge.
A final question from the audience: How does the recent market downturn affect your project?
Michael: Our project is not affected because the development continues even today when the market was really crazy. We launched a new product today and a new website. We can only improve the project by development, we cannot control the market. You can only improve the product by launching new features and products. In the long term you’ll grow. This is what we’ve done since we first launched our platform: continue to develop.
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That wrapped up this week’s AMA with Michael from DYP Finance. For more AMA sessions with top DeFi and crypto projects, keep an eye on our social channels and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
