Today we are glad to welcome Simon Zhang, the founder of Aqualis, a new Australian DeFi protocol that is leading the way in terms of interoperability and efficiency. This protocol enables users to trade stablecoins with a minimal price impact, allowing for seamless and efficient transactions. It allows users the opportunity to earn rewards from multiple sources with a single deposit, and set efficiency as a core value.
Together with him, we will discuss what Aqualis is about, who is the team of professionals behind it, how they came up with the idea and many more. Let’s get started!
[Surfer Investor] Can You explain to us briefly the concept of Aqualis?
[Aqualis] As mentioned in the introduction, the core concept of Aqualis is interoperability and efficiency. Aqualis utilizes a Multi Asset Liquidity Pool (MALP) which is designed for a pool of stablecoins. This pool takes the fundamental assumption of a 1:1 peg, allowing traders to swap stablecoins without any price impact. Through our variable trading fee, small deviations from the peg can still be handled by our protocol to ensure users can trade seamlessly. However, large prolonged depegs will affect our operations and thus we will only use the most stable of stablecoins in our MALP.
[Aqualis] With this strategy, Aqualis is the first DeFi protocol to no longer need large amounts of stablecoins to lower the price impact, since there is none! This allows the additional liquidity in the MALP to power our extensive suite of products, including the lending protocol, flash loans, third party deposits and more as opportunities arise. Furthermore, through the interoperable nature of the MALP, new features, or more silos can be added on at any time to improve efficiency. Effectively, users can deposit funds in a single liquidity pool and earn rewards from a multitude of features. This allows Aqualis to offer depositors high organic rewards through protocol revenue, while offering competitive fees for users, making Aqualis the most efficient DeFi protocol in existence.
[Surfer Investor] Could you please introduce the founding team? What is their background and what makes them the right team to run Aqualis?
[Aqualis] Sure, we are fully DOXed team and more info and pics can be seen here. We believe we have the perfect mix of experience in DeFi and innovation with TradFi and real world corporate knowledge.
[Aqualis] I graduated with a double degree in commerce and computer science last year but I have been in crypto for nearly 6 years, advising on multiple crypto projects and successfully managing my personal portfolio through using many DeFi platforms. Through this, I have gained a thorough understanding of how DeFi works, and how to improve the ecosystem.
[Aqualis] Our co-founder, Harold Lucero, is a successful TradFi entrepreneur, mentor and leader. He has all the real world and corporate experience I am lacking, making my ideas into a reality through leveraging his leadership and management skills. We have 7 more people that make up our core team, more can be found in the link above.
[Surfer Investor] Tell us more about how the idea of Aqualis came to life?
[Aqualis] Since 2021, I have been using DeFi platforms but I always hated the lack of interoperability and inefficiencies.
[Aqualis] I wanted to create a new platform that would solve these issues, but I lacked the coding skills to do it myself, and lacked the real world experience to find a team to do it for me. However, later that year while I was doing an online FinTech/blockchain course I met Harold Lucero, who was a guest listener for our final presentations. I had presented a prototype of Aqualis, named StableSwap back then, which Harold instantly saw the potential of. We exchanged contact information after the presentation and began working on team forming the following week, and the rest is history!
[Surfer Investor] What is the item in the roadmap that gets you the most excited?
[Aqualis] Honestly, it’s one of our secret features that we cannot share yet! However, from the public features it’s definitely simply just getting to launch. I honestly believe we are building the next age in DeFi here, where interoperability and efficiency is key to maximizing rewards and minimizing fees, which will truly allow us to compete with CeFi platforms.
[Surfer Investor] How many people are on the team?
[Aqualis] We have about 10 people on the team right now that I can leverage to assist the project, but only the developer and myself are working on Aqualis full time. Since we are fully self funded at the moment, with a reserve of outside funding that we have not yet touched, we have to be budget conscious. We also have a trusted circle of advisors of about 3 people.
[Surfer Investor] Can you tell us from which region of the world are you based?
[Aqualis] We are for the majority of us from Australia.
[Surfer Investor] In an ideal world, how would Aqualis look in 5 years?
[Aqualis] At the very least Aqualis would have developed the integrated AMM, lending, flash loans and third party utilization on multiple EVM chains. In an ideal world, Aqualis would also have completed cross chain trading and cross chain lending. Furthermore, Aqualis Academy would be in full swing, helping onboard users into the blockchain space and Aqualis Institutional would be onboarding large corporate and government entities onto Aqualis.
[Aqualis] Our DAO would be fully automated and all team members and contributors will be paid directly from the DAO’s treasury. Our secret products would be launched by then as well, hopefully propelling Aqualis as the top DeFi protocol in the world. Since we plan to work on Aqualis for the long term, we will likely have several features launched not even in our roadmap yet! Lastly, Aqualis Gaming is a passion of mine, which I hope to work on in parallel, creating new and exciting web3 games that integrate the Aqualis economy into it.
[Surfer Investor] There will be an Aqualis token, without giving any financial advices, could you please describe what usecases the AQL token will have?
[Aqualis] The AQL token will be the core governance token of our ecosystem, so primarily it will be used to make decisions via the DAO. Initially, we will only have team-made proposals to minimize the possibilities of an exploit. As we grow, we plan to automate more features such as treasury management and certain protocol parameters such as fees, protocol revenue share and ratios of liquidity.
[Aqualis] Furthermore, to incentivize innovative decision making, a portion of the protocol’s revenue will go to buying back AQL tokens directly from the market. A portion of this will be burned, removing them from circulation forever and another portion is rewarded to AQL stakers, proportional to their Aqualis Power, thus directly rewarding responsible governance.
[Surfer Investor] For people who wanna jump in, how to get started?
[Aqualis] We have not yet launched on the mainnet, so the best way to get involved is to simply follow us on Twitter, join our Discord and Telegram, and stay active in our chatrooms! We will also be releasing YouTube videos soon
Thank you very much Simon for taking the time to introduce us to your innovative project. We wish you all the best for the launch of Aqualis on the mainnet and would be delighted to have you with us again in a few months for an update!
