October 15th, AEX and Token Damo invited Michael Egorov, the founder of Curve. This is his first AMA in China community. We will know more about Curve’s latest developments and future plans.
Before that, Token Damo spoke with Michael Egorov along with AEX, and this is the full interview.
Token Damo&AEX:
Hey, Michael!
I’m glad that you can accept our interview. Many people in The Blockchain industry in China know about your project, but there are few details about it. We hope to let more Chinese communities know about your project through this interview. Let’s start with the simplest question.
* 1/You are an expert in physics, doctor of Philosophy, computer science. What motivates you to learn in different fields？What hobbies do you have in addition to your regular job？
Michael Egorov: Well, fields are pretty related. Talking about Curve, for example: invariants for tokens may sometimes feel as writing a Hamiltonian in quantum mechanics. Not the same thing, but a similar feeling. I do keep passion for Physics though.
As for hobbies… Well, not too much time I have for hobbies. For me, it torns out that my work is my hobby, too.
* 2/You have worked on project NuCypher for 5 years in very important position. Can you share your experience in project NuCypher ?
Michael Egorov: NuCypher is very interesting. Over that time, we’ve managed to build a fully decentralized, resilient team. Unlike largeco top-down approach, the team comes up with important decisions very well, with every team member having a lot of autonomy in decisions. I think, NuCypher was probably the best team-building experience of my life.
* 3/Why did you choose to leave and recreate a new project Curve? How many people were involved in the project at the time?
Michael Egorov: I saw an opportunity with stablecoins and knew exactly how to solve the problem. I felt it’d be too late, and I’d regret if I don’t do that.
For the first months after launch (until maybe 10M TVL) I was the only person working on Curve. Though, we had a very fruitful collaboration with iearn at that time (in February).
* 4/What challenges have you encountered during the development of the Cruve project? How did you overcome these challenges?
Michael Egorov: The first challenge was to find a balance between decentralization, safety and speed of development. It took some time to build a good testing infrastructure, as well as it took a couple of vulnerabilities discovered to make sure we have good incident response practices.
Another one: in February we had lots of troll attacks due to rumors that Curve could be unsafe (was growing too fast). And right now we’re having this time again with token performance. What’s important here is to keep building rather than spending time arguing with them.
* 5/The project is currently very popular in the blockchain community.How do you analyze the market demand for Curve? In the future, it will become the exchange tool for stable coins from various different countries ? For example, the dollar stablecoin and the yen stablecoin.
Michael Egorov: Yes, I think it quite could expand to different stablecoin denominations. Basically I would love to see it becoming a sort of forex-on-blockchain.
* 6/Some argue that privacy will be a challenge to decentralised finance.How do you think about privacy in decentralized finance？Will Curve adopt relevant privacy protection measures in the futuer?
Michael Egorov: Privacy protection measures are complimentary and can be implemented on top, by independent third parties. It’s probably dangerous for is to work on privacy protection directly because it could go against compliance measures, so regulators wouldn’t be happy. But I think, privacy protection tools compose well with different protocols, so they can be worked on independently.
But you’re right: DEXes don’t make transactions private. If something is tainted — it stays tainted after exchange.
* 7/The Swerve threatens the Curve market. How do you and your team deal with this kind of market competition? What are the barriers to competition in a decentralized financial project? For example, Curve.
Michael Egorov: Good question. I think, it is important to keep the very competent team behind the project. It’s basically this supporting expertise which defines who will be the market leader, not just the code.
Compare Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, for example.
[End]
The Chinese article about this talk from Token Damo, you can click here to read.
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