1) Thanks for coming by. Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Mephisto, I’m the Lead Developer on the project. With me are Diabolus, our Head of Business & Partnerships, and Old Scratch, our Head of Marketing & Community.
We’ve been developing Devil Token for most of this year and are very excited to be preparing for our upcoming whitelisted presale.
2) You will be launching with Dapps & Staking, can you explain how this works?
We decided to take a slightly different approach than a lot of projects – instead of focusing on just the brand, marketing, and pushing out a token with a promise of functionality, we believed we shouldn’t announce the token until we’ve developed at least a foundation of the DeFi ecosystem we are creating. Why ask for people to invest in something that is only a promise?
So despite coming together to take on this project earlier this year, we just announced Devil Token in October. We spent most of this year developing, planning and designing a project that we hope not only has a good launch and a very strong start but something that will exist long-term.
For these reasons, we will be launching with 3 dApps: the Vault, Gateway, and Lock.
The Vault is a yield farm, that allows holders to deposit DEVL in exchange for their share of BUSD rewards generated by a 3% tax on transactions. Why BUSD? This allows users to receive a stable asset and hedge themselves against volatility. By leaving your tokens in the vault, you’re earning BUSD as a reward for not selling your tokens, thus helping the price.
The Gateway is the dApp I’m most excited about – it allows users to onramp/offramp fiat currencies into and out of cryptos, you can then also buy DEVL with BNB. What this means is at launch – users will be able to buy BNB with fiat, purchase DEVL, and vice-versa, all from one screen! A core goal of our project is to make DeFi easier and more accessible to everyone. This will also help open us up to new investors that aren’t currently being targeted by other projects as these users aren’t currently in the DeFi space.
Finally, we have the Lock – which is the first version of our token’s governance structure. It allows users to decide when the DEVL token contract is allowed to be unlocked so that the team can make necessary function changes in the course of development and growing the token. It’s intentionally simple, as later versions of our governance are going to be quite complex. That complexity not only requires development time, but a robust community of holders so that power is evenly distributed. But to have this governance function at launch is an accomplishment we’re proud of.
3) You have a game-changing wallet come out, can you explain how your wallet is different than others?
The wallet is our big-ticket item – the end of the 2021-22 roadmap, and the beginning of the second phase of DEVL. Being that it will be released in Q4 of 2022, we do not yet have visuals to show anyone but I will do my best to explain.
A principal issue for many DeFi users, but especially people new to crypto, is the UX of wallets. Working with addresses can be complicated, working cross-chain is almost impossible, and sending transactions can be terrifying. There are some incredible wallet projects out there, three of which I use: Metamask, Trust, and Nano. However, I know plenty of people that need to watch youtube videos, google, or have a friend show them how to use pretty much every wallet on the market. So that is where the first differential comes in for the DEVL wallet, it’ll be designed in a way more similar to the incredibly accessible UI/UX you see with many iOS and Andriod apps. The type of UI/UX that people kind of just jump into and get. At the same time, we will make sure that the wallet is still usable by those with knowledge of DeFi and who are used to other wallets.
Diabolus has a background in software development as well, focusing on education and entertainment software, so he’s an expert and has been a huge part in helping us develop a uniquely succinct and accessible UI/UX.
The other major differential will be that it’ll entirely encapsulate the ecosystem we are building right now – everything in the roadmap will be accessible in this wallet, in your browser or by your phone. Governance, multi-chain, token & asset tracking, an escrow service, a fiat gateway, staking – in many ways our roadmap is about building the components piece by piece, handing them to the community, leading into the release of the DEVL wallet.
By following our project, participating in our ecosystem, you’ll actually be working with different parts of the wallet which will then at the end of the roadmap, be integrated into one application – if you so choose to use it that way.
So everything unique about our project, is what will be unique about the DEVL wallet.
4) You are building a fiat to crypto gateway for your token, can you tell us how you are accomplishing this?
This would be admittedly huge for the DeFi space. It’s an incredibly complicated task. First of all – fiat currencies don’t exist on the blockchain. Next, you have the problem of the wide range of different fiat currencies out there and their different rates. Finally, you have regulatory environments all around the world to be considered. All of those and more are likely what has prevented other projects from developing their own gateway.
We want to have this functionality and show users the power of using DeFi outside of, or next to, centralized exchanges – which is why at launch we will have a fiat gateway using a 3rd party integration with onramp. But having our own gateway is the goal for a number of reasons including our vision to have a DAO made up of DEVL holders ultimately in control of as much of the fiat gateway itself.
From a technical explanation of how it would work, I’m going to remain very high-level, not to be cagey, but because this approach is unique and thus proprietary at the moment – until it is released and the code pushed to Github in Q3 of 2022. In essence, it would be in three main parts – the blockchain dApp that tracks the crypto and a representation of fiat value – an oracle to communicate outside the blockchain – and what would be in essence a closed banking app.
Liquidity is another challenge – you have to have a supply of DEVL and something that pairs it with fiat in order to allow trading. Our token actually already has mechanisms in it to help fund this liquidity, but that will also be announced as we move along the roadmap next year.
The idea of having a fiat-to-crypto gateway isn’t the exciting part to me, we’re using a third party at launch, but the idea that this gateway would ultimately be controlled by a DAO is. The fact that we can bridge traditional finance with decentralized finance is the jewel that we’re after here.
5) Are you planning to build a marketplace for NFT as well, to be able to change from crypto or fiat? How would you go about doing this?
We do not currently have any plans to build a marketplace for NFT’s, although we do have plans to help people organize their NFT’s or assets that they own across multiple chains. This could lead to further venturing into the NFT space, but that is not in our current roadmap as we would rather work on improving the user’s experience with NFTs and be more of a tool you could use with a number of the amazing NFT projects happening right now.
There currently aren’t plans to trade NFTs for fiat directly, but you will be able to use our dApp to interface between fiat and crypto after selling an NFT on an existing marketplace.
6) Can you tell us about your yield farm and what you plan to have users of this token be able to properly implement it?
The yield farm is called the “Vault” as that is what we more see it as – it’s a place to store your DEVL and earn rewards in the process. The Vault itself is incredibly straightforward to use, unlike more complex yield farms, it is being designed for anyone to be able to use it very easily. The purpose of the vault is purely to have a place to store DEVL and let it earn BUSD rewards so that you can either take profits without selling DEVL or so that you can reinvest that BUSD into DEVL, thus chaining the effects of the rewards.
The dApp has a very simple interface that provides users with how much DEVL is staked, a users individual DEVL balance, along with how much they have staked, the total rewards are given out in BUSD, and the amount of rewards a user has available to withdraw to their wallet. To operate the dApp, all you have to do is input how many DEVL tokens you want to deposit or withdraw, and simply select those buttons. Claiming works by simply selecting “claim”, any pending rewards available are sent to your wallet. Rewards are distributed automatically by the smart contract.
The dApps is actually two smart contracts – one that is the actual yield farm and another that automatically handles turning BNB that is sent out from the DEVL token contract into BUSD. The modularity is a design pattern for us, as it allows for greater security and upgradability. We’re a long-term project, so we have been very careful to make sure everything is designed in a way that it can be upgraded and accommodate our ambitious plans.
7) Can you tell us about Mephisto (Blake Dellinger) and his history with full-stack blockchain development?
I’ve been involved in the crypto space for several years, first as an investor, then as a miner, and subsequently getting into smart contract development around 2019. My interest in crypto began pretty early into the lifetime of bitcoin, around 2010. I followed it closely and remember how difficult it was to get into and understand. It’s amazed me over the year to see what bitcoin and the crypto space has become in a relatively short time.
Professionally, I have a background in government communications and political campaigns actually, which may not be the most common background for those in crypto. But I believe that background could help bring a unique perspective to many of the challenges the space faces, as well as approaching different demographics and getting them into the space for the first time. I have always been interested in computers, technology, and economics – so interest in cryptocurrencies was a natural outcome of that.
Having built plenty of computers in the past, it made sense to take a stab at the world of mining, where I mostly mined Ethereum due to its profitability. But it was through mining Ethereum that I began to learn more about it, its purpose, and its potential.
I started studying smart contracts and was rapidly enthralled with how revolutionary eth, and subsequently DeFi, really is. A Turing-complete language that can create applications allowing users to exchange value? It’s absolutely incredible. In my work on campaigns, I already had experience in web development. So through learning smart contracts and frameworks such as Angular and React the dots started connecting…and here we are!
8) One of the primary goals of DEVL is to increase accessibility to the world of DeFi, how do you plan to do this?
We plan to do this by providing tools (dApps) that solve a huge amount of the issues those of us experienced in DeFi face while removing the barriers that discourage people from getting into DeFi. Issues such as the sheer complexity of turning fiat into crypto, finding where to buy tokens, wallet compatibility, using mobile vs desktop, knowing what you own across multiple chains, being able to set up special transactions with people in an escrow service so that transfers for services can be more secure, these are all problems DEVL will be tackling.
Everyone here loves DeFi, but it is complicated and often too obscure. It is hard for people to understand which address to send things to, which network they are on, etc. We believe by solving many of these problems, we are not only going to become useful to the daily lives of people already in DeFi, but will be able to advertise to and bring people who like to invest but who is totally afraid of all that complexity, risk, and obscurity.
By the end of our roadmap – we envision all of the dApps we have outlined creating an experience where you can use the DEVL Wallet to easily access multiple chains, send fiat in and out, have the option to set up secure transactions with people that would require both parties to confirm before a transfer of tokens is made, and being exploring DeFi from the safety of this hub of tools that encompasses anything you would need to accomplish, all in one place.
9) So you are able to lock and unlock the token contract in Devils lock, how do you instil confidence in the holders when you’re about to unlock the contract to do the changes necessary?
This is a fair concern and one I went back and forth on. As someone with a background in government and political campaigns, I know the ins and outs of real-world governance very well. There are three main patterns I’ve seen take place in crypto projects: 1) contract get renounced 2) contract remains unlocked 3) contract is time-locked or unlocked until a dApp comes out to allow governance. A token like ours cannot be renounced, as we would not be able to make some changes that would allow the ecosystem to work better. So we get stuck with launching a totally unlocked token, or going with option 3 and making promises. I considered pushing the project further until our ultimate governance dApp is released, but I realized due to voting power equaling economic power this wouldn’t be as safe as it seems early on. When a token has a low-cap, a smaller number of people hold a greater number of economic power – there’s no way around that. As it develops, it becomes more distributed. So it wouldn’t have made sense to start with the totally decentralized and trustless approach we are building towards.
But we still do fundamentally believe in the role of governance on any token – lock is the compromise for the early months of the project.
Most likely, the governance will update to an almost finished version of Lock, which is much more restrictive. But at this time, the Lock does provide good protection for holders, such as when an address needs to be changed. To change an address within the DEVL token smart contract, devs need to request the vote by proposing the address first. Holders vote on that specific address, and ONLY that address can be used to make the change.
10) Diablous and old scratch don’t seem to be doxxed, I was able to find the name of Mephisto, is their plans in the future to tell your token holders who you are?
As the lead developer, I deployed and thus own the token contract until we launch and give ownership to the DEVL Lock. That’s why I am first and foremost doxed. As a crypto investor, I like my project devs to be doxed, especially if that dev deployed the contracts.
Diabolus & Old Scratch do have plans to doxx in the near future, but risks in the crypto space are a two-way street. There are some risks to being doxxed, risks that I’ve acknowledged when doxxing myself. We love crypto, but it can be a very adversarial marketplace. As the project launches and we get into a regular groove with the token, I believe they will be doxxing themselves. This decision is about balancing the well-being and needs of team members with building trust in our community. This is also why we made sure the project was audited, KYC’d, and that I was doxxed before we launch.
11) Can you share an inspiring quote for our users?
We love DeFi and believe in its fundamental mission and potential. We hope you can join us in our mission to make the space even better by being part of the community that will become known throughout the space as the go-to solution for trading crypto with fiat currencies, keeping track of your tokens and NFTs across multiple chains, creating secure transactions and agreements with other users through an escrow service, and ultimately – the most user-friendly wallet in crypto.
DEVL isn’t only aiming to become a part of every DeFi users portfolio, but through its easy-to-use technology, it will become the first token users totally new to DeFi – and even crypto – will hold.
