1) Can you give an introduction of yourself and your core members?
The founding team is made of Jewel Master, J Lat, Naphtha and Colortones. We have been in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space for a while, across a range of projects, and we have seen all kinds of tricks.
We noticed that on top of the usual fraud issues (for instance rugs, honeypots or other scams ), there are also a lot of projects that fail due to the team being unable to deliver due to people problems, such as ego issues in the team, lack of core competence in the team or even just a lack of motivation once team members have the pre-sale money. As we shared the same views on these issues, we decided to launch a project which came up to our ethical values. We are sure you are going to LOVE what we are going to offer to you.
2) Tell us more about Degem Exchange. What are the key elements in this exchange?
The degem.io (DGM)platform is user-centric. We are about empowering the user about their choices, while also rewarding them for joining our community. In practice, this means that we are launching a platform with advanced features such:
• a swap & chart all-in-one page
• stop losses and limit orders allowing the user to manage their exposure even offline
• a contract analyser allowing the user to scan any contract on any supported network and conduct automatic safety checks
• user intelligence tools (for instance is this a honey pot? Have there been big whales selling recently? How are these whales connected to the project team?).
In rewarding users, degem.io gives half of the fees generated by the platform and associated tools to DGM token holders in proportion to their holdings.
3) Where is your exchange registered? Is it licenced?
As a decentralized undertaking, degem.io is not a registered or licensed exchange in the formal sense, as a CEX would be. The team is currently looking at a range of options with regard becoming a registered business, however the platform is separate to this. Just as the blockchain exists without borders, so do the tools we supply to interact with it. We make use of a range of data sources and open-source code, many of which are licensed. We take every care in ensuring we utilise such sources legally and with permission in line with the owners requirements.
4) What is your tokenomics like? What is your selling point?
The degem.io (DGM) tokenomics are straightforward and transparent.
• We have a fixed supply of 100,000,000 tokens, no burn and no mint.
• There is a 7% buy/sell fee of which 2 % goes into the liquidity pool, 2% to the marketing budget and 3% is allocated to the ongoing development of the platform.
The real advantage in owning DGM is in the rewards paid out to holders as a percentage of the fees generated from platform use; on top of being able to stake DGM against tokens holders receive as a further reward from future IDO launches and projects that we form strategic partnerships with.
5) From now till the end of the year, what plans do you have for marketing?
Through word of mouth and our own networking, we have been able to already gather over a thousand people on our Telegram, two weeks before launch. We are starting our AMA tour on October 24 until our pre-sale event on November 2 with at least one Voice Chat a day. We also undertake social-media marketing and engagement on Reddit and Twitter. What gets interesting is after the pre-sale event, we can market our platform even more effectively than we can the DGM token.
We can provide automated bots for price charts and other information across social media channels to channel owners. This creates publicity for the exchange, and at the same time, DGM. Of course, we will also undertake more traditional DeFi project marketing, with many more AMAs and publications to come. We also remain flexible and will adopt any strategy which allows us to grow.
6) I see that you have your exchange up and running already. What other future tech plans do you have?
Our platform will be available for inspection and use at pre-sale, with a lot of features already production-ready. After launch, we have a number of short-term objectives already planned (such as launching our reward system in Q1 of 2022, ongoing UI improvements based on user feedback, and improved search capabilities). Longer-term we will continue to develop new functionality such as uniquely delivered cross-chain bridge services.
We know that a launch can make or break a project.
Like you, the team has had both good and bad experiences participating in launches. These experiences have shaped our approach to what we believe makes a good launch for users. We believe utility tokens should actually launch a token with utility, otherwise, they are no different to meme-coins. Utility tokens must derive value from a service rather than being hype-driven “pump and dumps”, or team-centric cash-grabbing tokenomics. To that end, we have been striving to deliver a working platform before we even launch the token. In this way, we show you, our users, that we mean business. That we are not about making empty promises. We are dedicated, we dream big, and we convert our ambition into action. We are committed to openness and to listening to our users. This has been driving force leading us to raise 150BNB from private investors from within our network (and a big thanks to these investors who have trusted us from when degem.io was just an idea and a team, without even a website, whitepaper or publicity – you know who you are – you made this happen). This initial seed funding has already been used to develop the core platform components which will be ready at launch.
7) Will you be listing your token outside of your exchange? If yes, which other CEX or DEX are you looking at now?
We’re firm believers in the concept of “dog-fooding” – if it’s good enough for our users, it’s good enough for us. So we’re happy to announce we are actually launching using our own platform, with liquidity held on Pancakeswap (PCS). While we could focus on having liquidity on our platform, we would rather see everybody trading any token on any supported network (starting with the Binance Smart Chain) through degem.io. We are aiming to provide a ubiquitous one-stop-shop driven by mass adoption. We aim to be volume-driven thanks to the unique features our platform offers, and not just because we’re the sole liquidity provider for a token that listed on our launchpad.
8) Can you share with us what partnerships have you forged so far?
We can talk about one project: The8BitDoge (BITD).
We collaborated with the founding team after they came to us. We thought they had a great idea, and great technical developers, but were lacking the bandwidth to also handle marketing. We established a partnership and within two weeks, the BITD market cap went from $600k to some $4M, and we would love to see even more gains happen for this project.
A lot of our founders and key team members come from a professional enterprise background. We are rigorous and organized as any well-funded Silicon Valley start-up. We love sharing our values, skills and resources with other projects that can demonstrate a real idea with a great use case, but who might lack a core skill necessary to the success of the project. Some will have great technical skills but lack marketing ones. Others will have a great idea and a great team of marketers but don’t have a competent developer on hand. For these teams, degem.io is the bridge between these two worlds. This allows us to also establish a real DeFi community of not just users, but also developers, marketers and others, centred around our platform. These strategic partnerships and team development opportunities are also the basis of how the Gemcave (our staking vault) will be filled.
9) What are your plans for Asia?
We will be focusing heavily on Asia after launch. We’ll be reaching out to more Asian crypto communities as well as recruiting bilingual marketing talent comfortable operating on non-Western social media platforms.
10) Share an inspiring quote to our members. We love to be inspired by you :>
“À vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire” (To defeat without peril triumph without glory”_~ Pierre Corneille, Le Cid, 1636.
