Launchpool AMA Recap — Bumper
Place: Launchpool Official Telegram Community
Date & Time: May 20th, 9AM UTC
Guests: Jonathan DeCarteret (CEO), Samuel Brooks (CTO), Gareth Ward (COO), of Bumper
Host: Marilena Egitto, Social Media Lead, at Launchpool
Launchpool was excited to host Jonathan DeCarteret (CEO), Samuel Brooks (CTO), Gareth Ward (COO), of Bumper for an interactive Ask Me Anything session with the Launchpool Community. The AMA comes in anticipation of Bumper’s $250k Allocation Mining Event on the Launchpool launchpad.
The session lasted for 1hr, and consisted of questions from Launchpool Team and questions from the community “on the spot”.
Marilena Egitto: Morning everyone. We are excited to have today a very much awaited AMA — we have the pleasure to have with us today Jonathan DeCarteret (CEO), Samuel Brooks (CTO), and Gareth Ward (COO), of Bumper. It’s a great pleasure to have you guys here today.
Gareth Ward: Thanks for having us!
Jonathan DeCarteret: Thanks.
Marilena Egitto: Bumper, protects the value of your crypto using a radically innovative DeFi protocol, will have an Allocation Mining Event with Launchpool. $BUMP
Jonathan DeCarteret: Yes. As a quick overview — Bumper protects the value of your crypto using a radically innovative DeFi protocol. Set the price you want to protect and if the market crashes, your asset will never fall below that price. Importantly, if the market pumps, your asset rises too.
Marilena Egitto: Jonathan, Samuel and Gareth, please tell us a bit about yourselves, about the project & team, and your involvement with the space.
Jonathan DeCarteret: I studied AI at University and have spent the interim starting and then exiting startups and SMEs, most notably SWITCH which I grew to the UK’s 60th fastest growing company. I’ve migrated from creative businesses, to tech, fintech and full-on crypto from 2017.
Samuel Brooks: Electrical Engineer by training, but spent a lot of my career in financial services. Became fascinated with blockchains around 2014 when I first understood the potential of Ethereum. I’ve been working full time with the tech since 2015.
Jonathan DeCarteret: Bumper intends to solve the Holy Grail problem of volatility by utilising all the innovation that DeFi has to offer. We essentially built a near-zero slippage engine to produce a massively efficient protocol.
Gareth Ward: I’ve been working in creative industries, start-ups and tech for about 20 years. Co-founded INDX with Jonathan in 2017 and been a full-time crypto nerd on that and, subsequently Bumper, ever since.
Marilena Egitto: Excellent — What makes your project unique, and what’s the project’s vision to bring upon a turning page in the cryptoverse?
Jonathan DeCarteret: Volatility is obviously a major problem in crypto for retail, institutions and everyone else in-between.
Samuel Brooks: That commonality is a great point. A lot of DeFi innovation to date has been around lending, AMMs and asset management. Bumper is something that is common to all of those verticals.
Jonathan DeCarteret: But the instruments out there to combat volatility are pretty poor. Stop-Loss is a one way ticket out — missing any subsequent surge. Theres trading bots which are not easy to get right, usually incur licence fees, and of course, accumulate slippage. Options are expensive, clunky, and typically only within reach of professional traders. Bumper is an efficient and flexible instrument to protect yourself against risk.
Marilena Egitto: Bumper arrives also at the perfect time, due to what we saw the last few days. What made you choose Launchpool as your launchpad partner for the AME?
Jonathan DeCarteret: Two things from my side, you have a strong intelligent community and affiliation with Alphabit which is a strategic investor.
Marilena Egitto: What is the total allocation you’ve set aside for the LP community? Are there any KYC / AML limitations or is the AME open to everyone? Please list any countries that are excluded from the allocation event due to regulatory reasons.
Jonathan DeCarteret:
$250k worth for LaunchPool and we don’t expect there to be any limitations from our side.
Marilena Egitto: Wonderful. Since we talked about the AME values, what happens after the Allocation Mining Event? Walk us a bit through the tokenomics: total supply, initial circulating supply, initial market cap, initial vesting, total vesting period (from launch until when will the last token be vested for), etc.
Jonathan DeCarteret: $100m total supply. No initial circulating supply since all private investors, team and founders on 18-month vesting from release of 1st smart contract.
Circulating Supply at TGE — circa 16.5%.
Initial Market Cap — estimated at $73m.
Gareth Ward: Last token vesting for everyone is December, 2022 with approximately 57% tokens circulating by that stage.
Marilena Egitto: Sounds great! I’m curious to know where does your community live and breath? Johnathan maybe you could share with us a bit more on the development & product roadmap, milestones etc. What’s Completed? What’s In Progress? What’s Scheduled?
Jonathan DeCarteret: Here are all our Social Links for all your enquiries.
Official Website: https://www.bumper.fi/
Medium: https://bumperfinance.medium.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/bumperfinance
Follow #BumperFinance on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/bumperfinance
Discord: General Invite — https://discord.gg/YyzRws4Ujd
You can watch a RealTime Build here of Bumper
https://www.notion.so/6f6df7a584264f96bbaec17663df455c?v=7d174c9f32ca4985a8046215a71cdf84
Our roadmap is as follows. 2021 Q1: [Design & Raise — COMPLETE]
$10m+ Fundraise (over $40m USD oversubscribed). In 2021 Q2: [R1a Launch — IN PROGRESS], A detailed white-paper, Agent-based and game-theoretic modelling for proving cryptoeconomic design. Modelling of token economics (i.e. token liquidity and treasury forecasting). Dual independent smart contract audit. Then in mid June: (On-Track) release 1a for Liquidity Providers (“Makers”). Target TVL for initial release $100m — $300m USD. In 2021 Q3: [R1b Launch — IN PROGRESS]. Mid-August: (On-Track) Version 1.0 Bumper protocol launch. Retail go-live via Bumper DApp. A Secret partnership announcement and integration with major DeFi protocol. Then continued work on improved Bumper protocol capital efficiency via integrations with:
CDP lending sites (Aave/ Maker/ Compound)
Wallets (Metamask/ Coinbase)
Centralised exchanges (Binance)
Decentralised exchanges (Uniswap/ Sushi/ Balancer)
Synthetic assets (Synthetix/ Mirror)
Derivatives (Barnbridge/ Nexus/ Vesper)
Our final quarter 2021 Q4: [R2 Launch — IN PROGRESS] We have expanded asset protection whitelist to include:
Major large-cap ERC-20 assets
rBTC/wBTC
bCOIN, e.g. (bTSLA/ bAPPLE/ bGOOG)
Expanded stablecoin compatibility (BUSD/ USDT/ DAI)
2022 Q2: [R3 Launch — ON ROADMAP]
Interchain interoperability (i.e. BSC/ ETH L2)
Roxana Nasoi: We love the transparency around what’s being built.
Samuel Brooks: Lots of fun stuff on the horizon.
Marilena Egitto: Indeed. Any strategic partners (aside from LP) that you can share? and who is helping with the Audit?
Samuel Brooks: We’ve engaged an audit firm, but won’t be disclosing them until after the audit report has been released.
Jonathan DeCarteret: But we can name some people we have commissioned:
- Professor Nihad Aliyev — Agent Based Modelling to determine protocol settings.
- Professor Talis Putnins — Agent Based Modelling to determine protocol settings.
- Rayyan Fathallah — Formerly Morgan Stanley/ Merill Lynch. Ongoing advice on risk analysis.
- Gokul Alex — ETH Hackathon Winner 2020. Organiser of Bumper hackathon.
- We are in discussion with Gauntlet (who advised Maker, Compound, Aave, Celo, Ampleforth) to assist with modelling & protocol refinements
- Gareth Ward: We will have an audit firm for the first smart contract release in June and then in August, another auditor for the final release.
Marilena Egitto: It’s a really solid list. Just a few last questions. As we saw the ambitious roadmap, how will the funds be used? How was the project funded until the AME?
Jonathan DeCarteret: Funds will be used by treasury for operational and development expenditure. The majority of Pre-Sale and Public funds will be sent to the Stablecoin Reserve and Prudential Capital Reserve to bootstrap liquidity.
Marilena Egitto: What is the expected cap at TGE? How do you expect your token to gain value over time, any mechanisms to support the DeFi component (staking, burning, earning, spending, others)?
Jonathan DeCarteret: Forecast circa $450m FDV at public launch in August. Multiple utilities of BUMP force value onto the token — paying protection premiums in BUMP, receiving yield in BUMP, daily distribution of BUMP to all protocol actors and staking in the PCR and of course as a Governance token.
Marilena Egitto: Wow — Thank you for sharing all the details with us.
Samuel Brooks: There’s a lot of thinking that’s gone into the token and how it’s designed.
The fixed supply means that the value of tokens required for various functions floats, and as the size of the Bumper market increases through increased usage, so does the value of the token as a proxy for the value of that market.
Marilena Egitto: Great, thanks Samuel. We are now opening the floor for questions from the audience.
“On the Spot” Community Questions
Roxana Nasoi: We heard there is a bonus for holding the token at least for 6 months.
Jonathan DeCarteret: Yes thats right, each 6month for up to 18months you receive 100% bonus tokens.
Gareth Ward: You’ve gotta HODL it though!
Roxana Nasoi: Something the industry is familiar with.
Roxana Nasoi: Any plans for bug bounty campaigns, Bumper Team?
Samuel Brooks: Yes
Roxana Nasoi: I believe you mentioned that right now, you are working with ETH and USDC, any plans to add other cryptocurrencies?
Samuel Brooks: Yes integrating other cryptoassets, at least those that exist natively on Ethereum mainnet.
Mr. $$$: Is there a possibility to have a staking program or yielding ?
Samuel Brooks: It will be straightforward technically, but in terms of the risk profile that other assets create for the protocol,
Gareth Ward: Large-caps after initial launch but will be modelled first to decide.
Jonathan DeCarteret: Yup thats in our model. In fact from mid June you can start to deposit USDC and earn $BUMP.
Samuel Brooks: Bumpered assets will require whitelisting. The approval process for this includes microeconomic modelling
Roxana Nasoi: Keep us posted, I’m sure our community will want to know what new crypto assets are being added to the pipeline.
Samuel Brooks: But it’s certainly desirable to have more bumpered assets given the improvement in risk efficiency from diversification effects.
Mr. $$$: Is whitelisting is open?
Samuel Brooks: No, not yet. The whitelisting process will be done via governance post the 1b launch. We will have a set of candidate assets that will undergo the whitelisting process starting around September. But expect them to be the bigger ERC20's
Adil: Any plans to burn BUMPER tokens making it deflationary in nature?
Samuel Brooks: Not at this stage. The design centres on a fixed supply, however in the future this is definitely an option if the protocol does not require all of its reserves.
Jason Suttie: Are there any concerns with future regulatory attention given the nature of the business in the finance/insurance sphere?
Samuel Brooks: For example, under certain conditions, the protocol could buy back BUMP and burn them.
Mr. $$$: If bumper protects crypto assets, what will happen if the price goes down? Is it still protected? For how long?
Jonathan DeCarteret: FATF, the global regulatory advisory body, has published guidelines that will certainly affect DeFi protocols with their Travel Rule on Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASP) rules. We’re watching the space closely and feel that Bumper can be adapted to whatever the market demands.
Jason Suttie: Bumper has been fairly open about the roadmap so far. Any ambitions to expand beyond the bump protocol and offer other types of financial services? For example Crypto loans etc.
Jonathan DeCarteret: That’s a really good question.You’ll see our roadmap is about expansion both the asset types and chains. But depending on how far we integrate Bumper with lending sites, we would consider forking out a lending DApp that offered zero liquidations. It would also be interesting to offer traditional smart contract hacking insurance and aggregator providers out there. This would give full suite of protection
Gareth Ward: Yup, that’s the whole point… and as long as you want and keep paying for the policy.
D. Naz: Agreed, paying 4 fees for a number of tokens in a PUP is too much
Jonathan DeCarteret: Thanks guys & Launchpool Community — looking forward to building this juggernaut with you guys
Gareth Ward: Thanks all! Really appreciate you having us.
Marilena Egitto: This was a really good session, thanks Bumper Finance for answering all our questions.
About Bumper
Bumper ($bump) protects the value of your crypto using a radically innovative DeFi protocol. Set the price you want to protect and if the market crashes, your asset will never fall below that price. Importantly, if the market pumps, your asset rises too.
Website — Twitter — Medium — Telegram — Flashpaper
About Launchpool
Launchpool ($LPOOL) leverages communities, knowledge, expertise, contacts and capital to provide crypto projects with the best possible start to life, maximising their chances for success in this fast moving & dynamic space.
Website — Twitter — Medium — Telegram — Telegram ANN — Substack
