Debrief and recap: Anchor community call 28/29 Oct

Here is a recap of the community AMA call on 28/29 Oct. It took a few days for me to receive the recording from Twitter, hence the minor delay.

In this thread, let’s discuss the content of the call and follow up action items.

Apart from this thread, I started another as a retrospective on the format of the call. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please share it there.

Link to the full AMA recording: Anchor community AMA call 28/29 Oct 2021 - YouTube

My notes from the call:

(8:40) Part 1: intros and general priorities

  • First AMA hopefully of many!
  • Team is focusing on decentralization, involve community more. Committed to be very active and collaborative with the community, evaluating and refining proposals and prioritizing them appropriately.
  • Putting in SLAs to respond to questions and proposals in 3 - 4 days.
  • Committing to regular progress updates, and a more robust and responsive community feedback loop.
  • Focusing on tokenomics, generally moving the product forward.
  • Hiring Rust developers.

(17:50) Part 2: AMA thread

  • Apart from debating ideas on the forum or AMAs, it’s worth noting that Anchor is open source. Anyone can submit actual work and the team will address that.
  • Best to contribute serious ideas on the Anchor forum rather than in random tweets.
  • Community can debate where the 20% APY should go long term - 20% is probably the ceiling. But yields expected to remain high long term, above market terms.
  • It is possible to offer alternative products with different risk/reward.
  • Adding depositor requirements like locked periods for higher APYs are being considered - a lot can be learned from tradfi banks. Another idea is to require locked ANC.
  • The team is currently 7 people :open_mouth: . Planning to double in size over the next ~3 months. Hiring smart contract engineers, researchers is a major bottleneck.
  • Geography wise, consumer users are from everywhere. In terms of institutional adoption, there is a little more advanced in places with clearer regulations like south-east Asia.
  • Comment on using stablecoins other than UST (EUT, GBT…) - demand is unclear, there is not enough liquidity.

(32:20) Part 3: Encouraging more borrowing

  • Wormhole enables adding new bAssets as collateral. This will now be reasonably straightforward. Two new bAssets are in development right now. In parallel, the team is developing a simple process, documentation and governance procedures for doing that so that anyone can contribute to that.
  • Interchain operations are very nascent, Anchor was one of the innovators with EthAnchor. In future, expecting that all kinds of smart contract calls like the ones needed for borrowing can be done interchain (access without leaving e.g. Ethereum or Solana).
  • Anchor team preparing a general roadmap + revamping the documentation.
  • Borrowing side is more sophisticated than lending and therefore currently underserved - but it still has a great value proposition; the team would love to see products built on top and help anyone that’s trying to built that and improve the UX.
  • Borrowing is not promoted enough - it is largely used to 1) farm ANC, 2) speculate/leverage up e.g. buying more Luna 3) use on other protocols. Now that Col-5 is live there will be tons of new productive use cases for UST that can be accessed essentially for free on Anchor.
  • One other use case being developed is the ability for borrowers to leverage up on bAsset staking yields, and get not ~5% APY, but 7% to 10%.
  • It is possible to add yield bearing assets other than PoS utility tokens as collateral - e.g. stablecoin LP tokens from various dexes.

(56:15) Part 4: Improving ANC tokenomics

  • Requiring staked ANC for better deposit or borrow rates are tricky to get right but could be a relevant idea as Anchor matures.
  • An important bit is governance, Ian posted proposals about making that more effective.
  • The team is considering requiring smart contract depositors to either stake ANC or otherwise contribute to the ecosystem to get a full yield - otherwise the yield will be lower.
  • Coinbase getting native UST (on Terra) in November, soon most likely other assets on Terra. Listings expected before EOY.
  • Economically it looks like it’s too early to increase ANC buyback from 10% to 30%. But different opinions from the community about this and all other parameters are welcome.
  • Interested in creating a central site with priorities and community project requests. Apart from that, guidance will be developed for how proposals are typically evaluated and what gets considered.

(1:16:46) Part 5: Final notes

  • Will come back to the community on next steps within 10 days or so (might be delayed because getting the recording to make this debrief took a while)
  • Want to make community calls a regular fixture
  • Not enough time to really share in-depth everything that’s happening
  • Rust developers → talk to @PFC
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Thank you for recap. With this we can revisit at next AMA. So we will see/monitor move from a to b.