PlotX — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — October 14
On Wednesday, October 14, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Kartic Rakhra, and,
Bhavya Narula, Co-Founders of PlotX.
We asked them questions about the development of PlotX.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
PlotX is a non-custodial prediction protocol that enables users to earn rewards on high-yield prediction markets.
The project is being managed through community participation governance.
PlotX raised $2.7m through a private token sale and community offering.
PlotX has gone through two independent smart contract security audits conducted by CertiK and Mudit Gupta.
PlotX has partnered with Matic for L2 scalability, making it easy to run prediction markets.
Introduction
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Tell us about your background guys. What did you do before crypto, how did you get into crypto, and did you have any other venture in crypto previous to being involved with PlotX?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: We’ve been working together for a while now and PlotX is a culmination of a lot of hard work that we’ve done over the past 4–5 years.
This video covers our journey as a team, I would really urge the community to check it out! The video covers each of the founding members’ journeys before PlotX.
We started working on PlotX from February 2020. The team has been working on multiple projects before that as well.
Product
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What’s your role at PlotX and what is the project about in a few simple sentences?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: I mostly work on community management and user acquisition. PlotX is a non-custodial prediction protocol that enables users to earn rewards on high-yield prediction markets, think of Uniswap for prediction markets.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What are prediction markets?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: If you look at prediction markets, they typically have had a very clunky UX with heavy dependence on market makers to create interesting markets to predict on. PlotX is a cross between betting and options.
Essentially, users can predict the price of crypto assets like BTC & ETH in hourly, daily & weekly timeframes. This is the weekly BTC/USD market:
You can see here the user is asked a simple question about the price of the BTC/USD pair. This gives the user a very consistent experience with prediction. It’s live on the mainnet.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What are the differences between PlotX and Augur?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: The 2 biggest differentiators are:
- AMM — PlotX markets do not depend on specialized market makers but smart contract code.
- The markets are a lot shorter, making the entire prediction experience a lot more exciting for the users.
We’ve highlighted more of these differences in our wiki. Find out more here.
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What’s the benefit of using PlotX?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: The biggest difference is hedging of risks. With PlotX, you are risking a small amount with the potential to gain a lot more than actually having to buy that asset.
Imagine a situation where you have 100 PLOT tokens — you can either buy positions on PlotX or purchase some ETH. In the first case, if 10 other folks are purchasing positions against you, you have the potential to gain a lot more within that time frame. We are talking about 1-hour markets here!
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What is the token use case? How did you make sure it captures the value of the ecosystem you’re building?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: The PLOT token has 6 use-cases as described below:
- AMM Mining: Incentives for Market Creators
- Referral Mining: Building in virality by design
- Community Mining: Wide distribution in communities
- Play Mining: Stake & Play
- On-chain Governance
- Liquidity Mining
Each of these use-cases is explained in our wiki.
Q — Twitter user @CryptoQueen_1: What is the main reason behind PlotX acting as a non-custodial prediction protocol? Which high-yield prediction markets are currently on PlotX and what is the process of adding these markets?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: On the PlotX Mainnet, BTC/USD and ETH/USD Prediction Markets are there. We want the community to be heavily involved in such decisions and have already started taking some signal votes in our Telegram & Discord groups for the same.
The project will be managed through community participation governance and that should help make some of these recommendations. Having said that, there will be base criteria for assets to be considered by the community.
This is how new markets will be created:
- Any $PLOT holder can initiate a governance proposal for adding a new market. They will mention the price feed as well.
- $PLOT holders vote.
- If the proposal is accepted, markets will be created automatically.
In the future, the project might enable more analysis & indicators and it will be captured in the roadmap.
Q — Twitter user @Howardsilk100: What do you consider to be the main challenges that traditional centralized prediction markets frequently face? And what solutions does PlotX provide to those challenges?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: For most of the short history of prediction markets, Traditional Centralized prediction markets dominated the narrative of prediction markets. However, traditional prediction markets come with their own set of problems which have hindered their mass appeal.
The major challenges in the traditional prediction markets are:
- Counterparty Risk
- High Cost
- Inability to showcase provably fair settlements.
- Liquidity
These challenges reduce the effectiveness of the platform and compromise on the user experience. You can read more about it here.
Q — Telegram user 🆃🆂🅶_🅲🆁🆈🅿️🆃: What is the PlotX Automated Marketing Algorithm and how does this algorithm help the marketplace? How will the problem of manipulation and tampering be solved in PlotX?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: That is what Automated Market Maker allows us to do.
PlotX protocol follows a pragmatic approach for predictions, whereby results can settle with mathematical equations that are based on price-feeds of any asset. This focussed approach provides an opportunity for bootstrapping liquidity, enhanced participation in each market (hence, better rewards) and opportunities for people to create Prediction DAOs that are better targeted in terms of audience. Market Settlement is performed on-chain to compute the winning option and allow the distribution of rewards.
The markets are settled using external oracles and are settled using smart contracts to ensure zero manual intervention and automated, transparent and provable settlements.
Probably fair that algos go hand in hand with the autonomous nature of markets created using the PlotX protocol, which is not dependent on settlement and dispute resolution by a counterparty (at times also called as the “options writer”, “house”). All disputes are governed uniformly by the community of users.
All the details regarding every market are accessible by everyone. Details like how many participants staked how much with what leverage are publicly available. Moreover, the formulas used for rewards calculation and distribution can also be seen in the whitepaper. Using all this information, everyone can verify the results of every market.
Q — Telegram user Goldilock: How will the collaboration with Matic benefit you? How will PlotX disrupt Prediction Markets?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: We are pretty excited about this partnership, and there are more to come soon. L2 scaling has been kind of obvious for a project like PlotX. With the Automated Market Making algo, it becomes very easy to run perpetual prediction markets, but that also means that the underlying infra needs to scale.
We’ve been looking at various L2 solutions and MATIC has been one of our preferred choices so far. Being on L2 will allow PlotX to run shorter time frame markets as well. For example, 5 mins or 15 mins — which are interesting from a retail perspective. It will also solve the Gas issues that ETH faces at the moment. Find out more here.
There are several prediction markets out there already, like HXRO, Augur, Synthetix Options, etc. We have a detailed document that captures the differences that PlotX holds from some of the others mentioned above. We have a lot of respect for what those platforms have done and how they are evolving. We believe there’s still a fair bit of room to innovate in the space for PlotX to capitalize and grow as the Tweet eluded too.
You can access that document here.
Q — Telegram user Serg: How do you rate liquidity mining after its launch? What incentives does PlotX offer for liquidity providers today? Are you planning to add other wallets? How do you see the further development of the PlotX interface?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: We have received very good feedback on the program till now. A lot of participation has already happened at liqudity.plotx.io.
You can check the incentives and the mechanisms here. Currently, about 15,000 PLOTs are being distributed daily among all the participants.
Yes, we are looking to add more wallet support. On the UX front, we have an ongoing partnership with Deep Work to help us improve the UX as well as the suggestions and feedback of our community will be instrumental in that. You can read more here.
Q — Telegram user Cyckorry: How easy is it to use PlotX in an existing infrastructure? What are the requirements for using?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: PlotX has been designed with the users in mind. Even users who are not familiar with Prediction markets can easily sign up and start predicting using the PlotX App. You would just need a Web3 wallet like Metamask.
We have created a quick start guide here.
Q — Telegram user HBD IRE🧸🎈: Are there any plans for community learning and raising awareness?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: We stand by the ethos of Abraham Lincoln’s very famous saying: “The best way to predict your future is to create it”.
The most critical aspect of growing PlotX is driving education for the people who don’t know about it today. It’s the PLOT Heads who will drive that movement.
With that in mind, we’re asking the PLOT Head community to follow the 2ED principle — Educate, Engage & Drive adoption.
- Educate: Sharing thought leadership posts on social media about PlotX and the PLOT token, explaining the 6 utilities of the token and in general, the product’s vision.
- Engage: Introduce relevant partnerships & projects that are complementary to what PlotX is today with a vision of increasing the TVL and the Trading Volume both in retail & institutions
- Drive adoption: Stake on the platform and invite peer networks to do the same.
PlotX has the potential to attract the wisdom of the crowd. We need to do this together or else it won’t work.
Team
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: How many people are in the team?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: Ish Goel, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem back in 2016. Along with Nitika, Ish won the London Blockchain Week Hackathon in 2017 and joined Nexus Mutual as the CTO.
Nitika Goel, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem in 2016 and has served as the Lead Developer of Nexus Mutual. She also co-founded GovBlocks, an on-chain governance toolkit. She was also the author of the ERC1132 lockable token standard on Ethereum.
Kartic Rakhra, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the Ethereum ecosystem in 2017 and co-founded GovBlocks along with Ish & Nitika. He also set up India’s largest blockchain community via the India Blockchain Week in partnership with Fintech Worldwide.
Satheesh A, Founding Member of PlotX.io entered the crypto ecosystem in 2019. He comes with 25 years of experience working on CXO positions in the IT sector across marquee organizations like Cognizant, BORN, and various others.
Also, we have 17+ members from Somish Blockchain Labs as part of the team behind PlotX. Somish is a venture studio that PlotX has been incubated under. Nexus Mutual & GovBlocks are other big projects that Somish has worked on.
Finance
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: Yes. We’ve raised $2.7m via a private token sale and community offering (via DAOMaker).
The aim is to build PlotX to an extremely easy to use platform for crypto traders. We had more than 10k predictions being made by over 2400 unique addresses in our alpha. We want to top that on the mainnet as soon as possible.
Security
Q — Twitter user @ALEX_H1LL: Many projects have been hacked by scammers with the problem usually being data leaks. How does the PlotX team react to this situation?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: PlotX has gone through two independent smart contract security audits conducted by CertiK and Mudit Gupta.
Here is the Report by CertiK (focused on Token Sale, Vesting & Staking contracts).
Here is the Report by Mudit Gupta (focused on all PlotX smart contracts).
Business Development
Q — Alex Raffin from GAINS: What stage is the project/product at compared to where you want it to be in the future?
A — Kartic Rakhra from PlotX: Since the mainnet was launched, we’re seeing some very encouraging numbers. We are aiming to hit the heights of the alpha usage in the next few months. I think another thing that I would like to add in the numbers is the trading volume and the liquidity that the token has seen via our Yield Farming program. More than 500k liquidity and 6m+ trading volume since our launch yesterday.
Q — Telegram user Sonia: How does the PlotX control architecture work? Is PlotX planning to build a community-driven ecosystem and launch DAO?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX:
- PlotX follows a community first model. Onchain-governance has been live on the platform since day 1.
The PlotX token also serves as a governance token. PLOT Token holders will be eligible for voting on proposals that will define the future of the PlotX Protocol. This means that the community will be able to vote on decision points like market dispute resolution, creation of new markets, implementing emergency pause and any other such decisions which shall result in a change in the smart contracts of PlotX.
- You can go to liquidity.plotx.io to see the current APYs and read more here.
- We are looking at various solutions like L2 scaling and even ZK-rollups.
Q — Telegram user ❎ 𝐵𝑒𝓁𝑜𝓋: Are you planning to add news monitoring and analytics functionality to the PlotX platform? How can I participate in the Daily Alpha Challenge?
A — Bhavya Narula from PlotX: Yes, we are looking to add more and more features which can make it easier to use the platform and these are part of our future roadmap.
Since the platform is now on the mainnet, the Alpha Challenge is no longer active. Although 5 weeks of the Alpha challenges were a run-away success, the numbers speak for themselves:
- 14,000+ predictions since August 2020
- Around 3,700 unique addresses
- More than 7,000 Keth staked
We will be coming up with a mainnet challenge soon! Stay tuned!
Thanks a lot guys for coming and telling us more about PlotX. I’m curious to see how things will go in the future. Keep us updated! Where can people go to follow PlotX? — Alex Raffin from GAINS
Our pleasure! Thanks for having us! You guys can head onto our Community Channel.
Visit our website, Twitter, Discord, Medium, or Facebook. To learn how to mine liquidity, click here. — Bhavya Narula from PlotX
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