Charge DeFi — BSCnews Interview

In an AMA session on BSCnews ChargeDeFi gave an interview about the project. It talks about the team behind the project, the experience they have and the lessons they’ve learned in DeFi. This is a redacted transcript of that interview.

Please introduce yourself and the team behind ChargeDefi.

Hi, my name is Denan, thanks for having us on your AMA!

(Just to get this out of the way: I’m not a financial expert, this is not financial advice, do your own research and only invest what you can afford!)

I’ve been in crypto for quite some time now but only entered DeFi projects with the launch of BSC. Algorithmic Stablecoin projects soon caught my eye, allowing a way to generate daily passive income. A bit like what Tomb Finance is doing atm on Fantom.
After investing in several projects I ended up joining the team of one of the earlier Algorithmic Stablecoin projects, Bolt Dollar. That project was transitioning from a failed gaming coin (Bat Dollar) to a serious Algorithmic Stablecoin alternative for Bdollar or Midas. Initially, I was mostly focused on helping them mod their socials. But as my daytime job is being a technical product manager I soon got involved in the professionalization of the team and development process.

There I met the current team members who are now attached to Charge DeFi.

After several months we decided that we would like to take our involvement to the next level and be more in control of our own project. So that’s when we decided to start ChargeDeFi. Enabling us to create our own success and be in total control of both the strategy and the release velocity. Incorporating the lessons we learned during those past months.

Our team consists off:
- 2 highly skilled solidity developers with a ton of BSC experience. Both complete projects and audits/consultancy for others.
- 2 front-end developers who have deployed projects that are used by fortune 500 companies
- 1 business developer / CTO who is active in the tech/ai space
- 1 UX designer who has worked for several big brands
- 1 technical product manager (me) with over 20 years of experience in IT/Telecom
- 3 marketeers who are responsible for socials, graphics and contacts.
- A group of mods that manage our discord and telegram.

What is ChargeDefi and what is the goal and vision of your project?

In essence, ChargeDeFi is an Algorithmic Stablecoin project that consists of 3 tokens:
1) $Static, our ‘dollar’ token
2) $Charge, our ‘share’ token
3) $Pulse, our “smart” implementation of the bond system.

$Static is pegged to $1.0. As long as the price of $Static is > $1.01 the ecosystem expands, minting new tokens. Investors who stake in our boardroom receive part of that expansion.

Our experience in previous algorithmic stablecoin projects has shown us the value of systems like these, creating a form of passive income for investors who stake.

What is $CHARGE, $STATIC and $PULSE? What are their utilities?

As I mentioned previously $Static is our dollar token and pegged to $1.0 BUSD. Due to the expansions when it’s above peg it will slowly drop towards a price of $1.0. (Something to be aware of when staking into our pools!) Charge is the share, or “seigniorage” token. Allowing you a share of the expansion rewards. And $Pulse is our smart bond.

We’ve seen in previous projects, both stablecoins and others, that many DeFi projects suffer from the “prisoner dilemma”. As long as all parties who invest take actions that are ‘for the good of the project’ everyone benefits. But when investors start prioritizing their personal gains, to the detriment of other investors, projects slowly grind to a halt.

There’s no way to influence investor behaviour securely. So a project needs to have guardrails in place. Some Stablecoins opted for taxation of transactions when under peg. Others chose a bond structure or both. In the end, many projects failed as the incentive to invest would drop and the price of the algorithmic stablecoin dropped below a certain level.

To prevent this we’ve implemented two measures that will always ensure a return to peg for $Static as well as giving investors a ‘bond like’ mechanic to create profit opportunities for pushing $Static back to peg.

Can you briefly tell us some features about your platform?

Yes, of course. A list will be the easiest.. if you have any questions about these let me know!
- Multiple token farming options
- Rebase mechanisms to protect the peg
- Automated smart bond pools that yield below peg
- Boardroom allowing users to profit from protocol expansions.
- LP zapper, allows LP breakup/creation from our site
- Smart Static Swap, allows swapping $Static for $Charge to prevent price impact.

And we have a ton of features underway. Were also working on an extra use-case for $Static that will focus on DeFi security. But it's too early to share it at this stage.

Tell us about your rebase mechanism and how can users benefit from this? Can you give us an example?

To explain some more I'm going to do a shameless copy/paste from our whitepaper. That saves me a lot of typing.

Rebase
If $Static drops below $0.8, or if $Static is below its $1.0 peg for more than 6 Epochs (8 hours per epoch) $Static rebases. Lowering the number of tokens in circulation until the value of $Static is at $1.0 again. This impacts all tokens in circulation, also those in liquidity pools.

Example:
· There is 100,000 $Static in circulation worth $1.0 (value =$100,000)
· The price of $Static drops to $0.5 per $Static (value =$50,000)
· The ecosystem rebases back to peg
· There is now 50,000 $Static in circulation worth $1.0 (value = $50,000)

The rebase system in itself prevents the 'death spiral' that plagued many algorithmic stablecoins. As soon as those tokens dove below $0.6 they couldn't be recovered and the system ground to a halt. But we've added a second mechanism. Whenever the price of $Static drops below $1.0 investors can buy $Pulse tokens for $Static.

So for instance when $Static is at $0.9 an investor can swap these for $Pulse tokens, hold them until $Static rebases and swap them back. Essentially making a $0.10 profit per token. This is similar to traditional bond tokens. But we've added more to this system.

ChargeDeFi introduces bond pools that allow a user to stake their $Pulse tokens when $Static is below peg and yield BUSD. As soon as $Static is above peg again and the expansions start these pools autoredeem the staked tokens for $Static. We came up with this solution as we noticed other projects having serious issues with bots playing that redemption process. By automating it we're giving every investor a fair chance.

What is Charge Boardroom and how can you earn rewards there?

The charge boardroom is the place where investors stake their tokens to receive part of the expansion, creating a flow of passive income. Normally a seigniorage system would only feature one boardroom but we’ve decided to implement two staking options:
- Stake $Charge
receives 85% of the static expansion each epoch
- Stake $Static-$BUSD
receives 15% of the static expansion each epoch AND a share of the 85.5k $Charge tokens that we reserved.

Staked tokens are locked for 6 epochs after every stake, unstake or claim action. Claiming boardroom rewards cause a lock on the claim option for 3 epochs. Our user interface shows the expected number of rewards that users gain.

To give an example:
At the moment each staked Charge generates about 3.5 $Static per charge. And that amount increases with the growth of the number of $Static in circulation.

Why should users stake $STATIC and $CHARGE?

The boardroom staking options allow users to gain a daily income from their stakes and that will continue as long as the majority of the investors uphold a 60/40 rule. For the project to keep growing in size, the main bulk of the rewards needs to be reinvested into the platform. So as long as people abide by that rule and only sell/swap 25–40% of their $Static tokens the price of $Static will stay above peg and the system expands. Looking at other seigniorage style projects like tomb finance you can imagine the possibilities of such setups.

Is your platform audited? How can you ensure users that your platform is safe to use?

Yes, we’ve contracted Certik to do an audit for us. When they first audited our project the contracts hadn’t been deployed yet so they need to do a final pass to confirm we deployed timelocks. That is underway as we speak. The preliminary report was also shared with beefy.finance and they checked our contracts as well. As we’ve opted to deploy 2 vaults on beefy.finance to increase awareness we are obliged to share that information. For beefy security is prior #1 and they also have strong ties with a DeFi security firm that does audits.

They found no issue in our contracts nor in our tokenomics. As our own developers work in security/DeFi, as well as in high availability environments, we’ve built ChargeDeFi from the ground up with automated testing, static code analysis and CI/CD. So we weren’t really worried about the Certik audit. It’s a trust badge.. and good marketing ;)

Any exciting news you would like to announce here today?

There are a lot of things happening with ChargeDeFi at the moment. After our initial launch, we’ve increased our focus on marketing and the velocity of our development. It was bad timing that we launched just before the markets crashed (thank you Evergrande) but instead of pausing, we’ve opted to increase our efforts. So for beefy we agreed to launch 2 auto compounding pools for static-busd and charge-busd staking as well as featuring a boosted ChargeDeFi pool on their site.

Parallel to this, we’re in talks with several marketing agencies and we’ve quadrupled our userbase and following. On the dev side we’re focusing on several extra features that will be deployed in the next couple of weeks:

- Charge reinvestment pools
Owning part of the liquidity and reinvesting over time, increasing APR.
- Charge 60/40 vaults
Allowing users to stake $Static-$BUSD. 60% of the LP farms the static-BUSD farm. 40% is swapped into charge and farms the charge boardroom. Both vaults auto compound, maximizing reinvestment.

We also have multiple compounding and interest-earning options underway for the website itself. And a set of user interface and backend improvements.

End