Last Friday, on April 8, FMFW.io team hosted a live AMA with a Head of Business Operations at RelayChain — Edmund Hillary!
RelayChain enables fast and secure cross-chain token transfers between the world’s leading blockchains. The platform offers Bridging as a Service (BaaS) to partner dApps wishing to expand their footprint beyond a single chain.
RelayChain currently supports bridges between any combination of Moonriver, Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Fantom, Shiden and Huobi ECO Chain. Multiple other networks including Polkadot, and Cosmos, will be added in the near future.
We’ve prepared a recap article for those who want to follow Friday’s discussions about RelayChain and its platform. Enjoy!
AMA session with RelayChain April 8, 2022
Bogdan Popa — marketing manager of FMFW.io
Edmund Hillary — Head of Business Operations at RelayChain
Bogdan Popa: Happy Friday everyone! I’m Bogdan, FMFW.io’s Community Manager and I’m excited to be to host of today’s AMA with Relay Chain!💪
Our guest for today’s AMA, representing the Relay team is Edmund Hillary, Head of Business Operations👏
We will proceed to the predetermined questions shortly, and we will open the chat to our community ‘s questions once our guest have finished answering my questions.
Make sure you have your questions ready, we are giving away $100 RELAY to each of the top 5 questions asked! 🙌
Let’s roll get this ball rolling, Edmund! 🚀
Edmund, Please introduce yourself to our awesome community!
Edmund Hillary: I’m head of… all kinds of things at Relay. We joke but we all wear a ton of hats. Today — head of AMAs!
RELAY was originally ZERO Exchange — we pivoted to do what we do best — bridging.
We built the first bridge to Avalanche and we haven’t stopped building bridges since.
I’ve been racking my brain tom make a good FMFW joke. Free the Money… Free the World. RELAY… Free the Bridges… Free the… DeFi? Needs some work! 💪
Bogdan Popa: The mindset of “wearing a ton of hats” is what really moves the needle forward, Edmund!
Since you’ve touched on Relay’s mission using your joke, can you please guide us through what Relay Chain is about and what your project’s mission is?
Edmund Hillary: What we have on CoinGecko is actually great here.
Our goal at Relay Chain is simple, “Have the best and safest bridge”. We will provide value to our token holders by giving them native gas tokens for providing liquidity instead of our native project token (RELAY). By doing this we eliminate all sell pressure to Relay and we can give the highest APY’s to Relay Liquidity Providers. This allows us to have a token that provides value, and it’s deflationary (via buyback and burns) which is doing with a portion of the gas token profits from bridge transactional volume. The brings the positive feedback loops and true ecosystem synergy into the Relay Chain ecosystem where all partners provide utility to the end users of our platform.
Quite simply, we want to connect the most chains possible.
Small, medium, large — it doesn’t matter for us. We believe in an interconnected world.
And we try our best to bring those highly valuable gas tokens along for the ride
We’ve introduced AVAX token to Polygon, MATIC to Metis, etc. !
Bogdan Popa: Thanks a lot for sharing this! It truly feels like Relay embodies the WAGMI mindset!💪 I love it when a project’s focus is to grow through collaboration and connection, it’s what our industry truly is about and we need to hold onto this principle for the long run!
Bogdan Popa: Now, we can all agree that security is such an important element within our space. Could you please expand on Relay’s security features?
Edmund Hillary: Triple Audited. The original Chainsafe contracts are audited by consensys diligence, we’ve since received clean audits from Zokyo and Halborn.
And working closely with our partners.
We frustrated some of our community yesterday by working closely with the METIS team — but there was a pretty nasty exploit — we were able to rapidly shut down the bridge (with the help of our Relayer partners) and minimize the damage caused to the Metis ecosystem.
Also protecting our bridge liquidity and even the broader RELAY token
to be clear — not an exploit with OUR bridge
Bogdan Popa: This surely gives our traders a sense of trust, as we all want to know how secure a project is before getting behind it!
Edmund Hillary: It was an ecosystem exploit — involving a hacker trying to escape with funds.
DeFi is intended to be decentralized — and we try our best to maintain that as best as possible — but thieves getting away with tremendous sums of money are not good for the space.
Bogdan Popa: Couldn’t agree more, Edmund! DeFi needs to be protected from those that are trying to exploit it.
Let’s talk about the practicality of your token, RELAY. Could you introduce us to token’s main use cases?
Edmund Hillary: Absolutely.
So for starters — nearly all of our bridge fees we collect we utilize for token buybacks or returning value to our holders via single sided staking
stake relay. earn gas tokens.
In the near future we’ll be launching veRELAY — (this is ‘alpha)
the premise is simple, stake relay. earn veRELAY. the longer you stake the more gas tokens you earn.
and we’re launching the ability to stake stables into our bridge to allow for better liquidity to/from chains in need of it (such as METIS) — we’ve got an exciting announcement coming that way in the next week or two!
we’ve recently launched a ‘new’ eth bridge that costs 90% less and performs transactions about 90% faster — we’ve got a brand new UI/UX coming soon too.
So the future for RELAY. Stake an earn.
Bogdan Popa: Returned value to holders through staking is a great strategy on the long run, Edmund!
Now, we’ve been reading a lot about this Battle of the Blockchains project that is powered by Relay. Can you tell us more about what it is?
Edmund Hillary: https://www.botbnft.com/
This is something we are INCREDIBLY proud of — 100% community led.
We launch and mint next week — featuring the biggest projects on Avalanche — Relay, Trader Joe, Avalanche Party Animals, Avalaunch, and Yield Yak!
These NFTs not only LOOK phenomenal BUT they’ll be treasury backed.
A portion of the sale will go to market buying JOE, YAK, floor APAs, XAVA (access to new token IDOs!), and RELAY
In addition to all of that we’ve got constant contests going on our twitter leading up to launch
Easy way to win $1,000 right now: https://twitter.com/botb_game/status/1512256735884546050?s=20&t=dbPB3_AIITQ0R477f_vofg
And the easiest way to get on the whitelist is to own 5000 RELAY
If and when we sell out — we’ve got a huge ‘real world’ game studio lined up that will deliver an incredible on-chain gaming experience.
And the core BOTB team is made up of ex-Riot Games employees — so they know what they are doing.
We’re hoping this is a mint to NOT miss out on
Bogdan Popa: An NFT project that doesn’t just look good but it provides usability and is treasury backed — Now that sounds refreshing in more than one way!👏
Edmund Hillary: Rumors of a fighting game, I hear?
But honestly, we’re letting the COMMUNITY decide.
Bogdan Popa: We’re looking forward to see what the community comes up with! 💪
Last but not least, you probably agree with me on this one, Edmund: A roadmap is an important element that builds trust and expectations around a project. So my last question for you is what does 2022 hold in store for Relay? Can you give us a sneak peak on what this year looks like for you and the rest of the team at Relay?
Edmund Hillary: A big roadmap item was our first CEX — FMFW.io! (With a trading competition under way!)
Building out and assisting with BOTB as we can — utilizing the power of our bridge and Avalanche Subnets will be another BIG roadmap item
Then it’s all about connecting more chains and make the bridge _fun_ to use
We want to gameify bridging. There’s a bunch of bridges to choose from now — we want our experience to be easy and fun — and we’ve got some exciting ideas as to it pertains to that on the horizon soon!
We’ve been in this bridging game for a while now — we’re the lowest “market cap” bridge (I think?) — so we’re just going to keep delivering value and partners and we’re confident we’ll return value to the RELAY holder!
Bogdan Popa: Sounds like a packed year for you and your team, Edmund!💪
I love the idea of gamifying bridging!
Speaking of the trading competition, I would like to remind our traders that the $35,000 RELAY trading competition is underway!⏳
Trade the RELAY/USDT pair and climb your way to the top of the leaderboard!🔝
The competition is fierce with this one, folks!💰
Competing for the BIG prize is as easy as clicking here.
Edmund, it’s time for you to get questioned by our fantastic community! Are you ready?!👀
Community question #1: Hi buddy @edmundhillary1919 Thank you for this AMA my question,
By being a simple, fast and safe cross-chain bridge and supporting multiple chains. Can we expect #Relay for future bridges with future NFT?
Edmund Hillary: Yes, BOTB will be a great example of this — we fully intend on bridging NFTs — we see a mass exodus of P2E economies out of Ethereum and we want to be the bridge enabling that
Community question #2: The next step for bridges is the true nature of “Decentralized bridges” without any “Centralized bridge” relayers but managed by smart contracts and etc. Is this a threat to you? Or in other words. What do you think, idea, solution for the next technological improvement in future bridges? Thanks
Edmund Hillary: Whilest you won’t win the competiton since I’ve seen this question 5 times and it’s clearly bot driven — I want to at least call out that we believe in a mix of centralized and decentralized. True decentralization is good in practice but doesn’t enable a lot of handling of ‘real world’ scenarios like hacks and exploits. We have trusted relayers and partners that stand next to us.
Community question #3: Can you list 1–3 killer features of this project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your project has that you feel most confident about?
Edmund Hillary: 1) Speed of the bridge
2) Return nearly all fees collected to holders
3) Identify new and hot chains before the competition
4) lean into our community!
Community question #4: How important is the community to you? And how can we collaborate or help you for the development of the project?
Edmund Hillary: Community is everything. Check out https://botbnft.com — a completely community led project by the RELAY community.
Community question #5: What is the competitive advantage of your project? Can you point out the strengths of your project that other projects do not have to attract investors?
Edmund Hillary: We return value to our holders. Multchain has largely kept most of the profits to themselves. STG offers limited tokens and limited chains.
Bogdan Popa: A big thank you to Edmund for taking the time to answer all your questions for walking us through Relay Chain!💪
Another big THANK YOU for our community for all the questions asked and for the continuous support.
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