Polkastarter and Genesis Shards AMA Recap

You can see the original AMA conversation on Polkastarter’s main Telegram Channel here.

Polkastarter

Hi everyone and welcome to another exciting Polkastarter AMA, this time with the co-founders of Genesis Shards, Nilotpal Mukherjee and Garlam Won. Welcome both, and thank you for taking the time today to join us! 🎉

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

Hi everyone, thanks for having us here. Polkastarter is one of the most active communities in the space and it’s always a pleasure to be here! 👍

Polkastarter

Wooo go Polkastarter community! Ok, we’ll first have a few questions to Nilotpal and Garlam directly, before we open it up for community questions.

Let’s get started!

Nilotpal and Garlam, could you please first introduce yourselves?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

Sure.

Genesis Shards (Garlam Won)

Hey guys!

Quick bullet points about myself

Garlam Won — https://twitter.com/GarlamWON

Advisor to — Kylin, PAID Network, Raze, PolkaFoundry, KPAD, SPLYT, etc

Here’s my quick stat

• Previously Head of Marketing at Harmony
• Led Marketing for projects such as: Harmony — Sandbox — Findora — Kava — Centaur — KIRA — SEASCAPE — Butterfly — PAID — MANTRADAO — Unifi — Apy Finance
• Have a wide reach in Korea with the crypto network and retail market as well as having a great brand

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

I am Nilotpal Mukherjee, and i am one of the cofounders of Genesis Shards.

We are a 12 member strong mission driven global team that has built and scaled products at Harmony, Marlin, EOS, Accenture, Deloitte, and Wharton.

My first step in Crypto was back in 2015. Being an investment banker with Deutsche Bank working on deal structuring, valuation and IPO processes, and later a strategic consultant at Accenture with a deep love for economics, it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the dynamics of the crypto space.

In 2018 I joined Marlin Protocol (a 1.7Bn$ project atm) and headed the Business there. I was instrumental in early growth of the company, where my expertise around business growth, crypto-economics and strategy helped lay a strong foundation for the brand.

You can find me here: https://twitter.com/M15Nil?s=09

Polkastarter

Awesome! Great to have you both.

Those are some pretty impressive experiences, both of you. Great to see this kind of talent building in Web3!

Ok so diving into the project — what is the problem that Genesis Shards is trying to solve and what’s the unique approach been adopted?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

PROBLEM:

The DeFi ecosystem as we all know has leapfrogged in the last few years specially in 2020–21 with IDO or Initial DEX Offering fast becoming the method of choice for token distribution and capital raises. With the conclusion of an IDO event we have seen an influx of liquidity into the token.

However the Pre-IDO space is still riddled with several liquidity issues —

1. while on one hand there are very few avenues for pre-IDO trading by the community
2. it is also a big pain point for projects as they have limited community participation, and little sense of price discovery in the early stages.

For most of these pre-IDO transactions, they are currently being executed in OTC (over the counter) ‘platforms’ or ‘forums’ which are quite shady, scattered and fairly hard to find for the average investor. The biggest problem, however, is the highly inconsistent OTC trade practices for pre-IDO tokens where these trades are often conducted by two parties in an uncertain environment with a high risk of default.

In short, there are hardly any trustless and permissionless platform that allows for fair and easy trading of illiquid pre-IDO tokens.

SOLUTION:

At Genesis we are building a completely new liquidity marketplace for pre-IDO tokens on NFTs. By NFT-ying the OTC market we are transforming them into a liquidity vehicle for pre-IDO tokens.

Further, through our community engaged platform we are creating a launchpad like environment for early stage projects to get exposure and early liquidity.

You can find more on how GS works and the value props here in the link below:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1376519177620615169?s=19

ARCHITECTURE:

At the core of its architecture, GS has 4 main building blocks:

1. The $GS token — It is the native utility token of the ecosystem. It is an ERC20 token issued on Ethereum and can be swapped for elements such as Gen Access. It also plays a significant role in governance of the Genesis network.
2. Gen Access cards — Gen Access cards are the ‘entry passes’ into the Genesis Shards ecosystem. They allow holders to acquire Gen Tickets. Different NFT cards grant different access rights — ranging from Gen ticket size to governance influence.
3. Gen Tickets — Each ‘Gen Ticket’ will have a varying amount of Pre-IDO tokens that are inside. The tickets themselves can be traded on NFTX — or they can be swapped for tokens after the IDO, at the time of the token generation event.
4. Gen NFTX — It is a marketplace for DeFi products that come out of the Genesis Shards ecosystem. It has the ability to shard NFTs for fractional swaps.

By wrapping time-locked fungible tokens (in this case PreIDO tokens) into NFTs (in this case the GenTickets), the NFTs start behaving like a DeFi option which can then be traded on the NFT AMM dex (Gen NFTX). Gen tickets are accessed through Gen access cards bought with GS tokens and are redeemable for post-TGE (Token Generation Event) tokens once its vesting cliff period is over. Just like regular options, these Gen Tickets will have some value derived from the underlying assets (pre-IDO tokens), and some value derived from time sensitivity (token unlock points).

As one can sense, the first use case of GS is to create a liquid OTC market using NFTs. However, the very derivative nature of Genesis products can open up endless possibilities for NFTs in the DeFi space subject to ones exploration and interpretation.

Polkastarter

We are also obviously very passionate about the IDO market 🙃, amazing to have you join the ecosystem!

And yes, we have been seeing quite a lot of Gen tickets all over Twitter. Impressive!!

So what are these Gen tickets and how do they function? Can you explain in detail the process of creating Liquidity in a pre-IDO phase?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

Haha. Yeah we are humbled to see the demand. We just ended our Gen ticket whitelist with an astronomical 215k registrations overall. More on this here:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379872143895265282?s=20

But yeah let’s try and understand how the Gentickets work.

As said before, each ‘Gen Ticket’ will be more like a basket product with varying amount of Pre-IDO tokens locked inside. The tickets themselves can be traded on NFTX — or they can be swapped for tokens after the IDO, at the time of the token generation event. Let’s go through the steps with an example:

Let’s say a single ABC Gen Ticket contains a total of 100 tokens. How will the timeline look for this Gen Ticket?

Phase 1: Pre-IDO

From Day 0 (Gen Ticket creation), until the Token Generation Event (TGE) Day

The Gen Ticket would have 100 locked tokens and 0 unlocked tokens.

Phase 2: IDO date (Unlock event 1)

Upon the completion of the IDO, the initial unlocked tokens (say 20% — so 20 tokens) would be credited to the Gen Ticket.

At this point, the token holder has the option of liquidating the 20 tokens — in which case the ticket would serve as a promissory note for the remaining 80 tokens

Phase 3: From IDO to the next unlock

In this phase, the Gen Ticket would be freely tradable on the NFTX exchange, with the value being derived from the split-in unlocked and locked tokens within it.

Phase 4: Unlock event 2

Say after 3 months, 20% more tickets are unlocked — another 20 tokens would be vested into the Ticket. The split may now look like this : 60 locked tokens + 40 unlocked tokens (assuming no tokens have been liquidated so far).

Phase 5: Unlock event 3 — the final unlock

Let’s say another 3 months later, the final batch of tokens is unlocked.

At this point the Gen Ticket would contain 100 unlocked tokens and 0 locked tokens — so if the unlocked tokens within it are all liquidated, it would lose all its value.

Basically, the time value of the Gen Ticket would wind down to zero on the date of the final token unlock — so its value would purely be derived from the number of (unlocked) tokens within it.

You can read more on Gen tickets here: https://medium.com/genesis-shard/introducing-gen-tickets-50e0b0a060ec?source=rss----6c54b1791097---4"

And yeah you would see a lot more of these in the coming days. 😄

Polkastarter

Wow 215k thats a huge amount of registrations for GenTickets. Thanks for all of that great info, and excited for what comes next.

The visuals look C👀L

How big is the market that you are trying to tap into?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

The crypto season of 2021 is witnessing a quantum leap in the value recognition of “NFTs” or non-fungible tokens. NFTs are soon becoming a rapidly popular asset class. However, few, if any, NFTs have any added utility part from their collectible value .

The idea of NFTs being re-defined as Defi Options opens up possibilities of a whole new suite of DeFi applicatons that weren’t previously explored.

We call it the birth of a new NFT era :

NFT 2.0 — NFTs for DeFi options.

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

Now as far as the market size for this new segment is concerned, our preliminary analysis suggests that — the DeFi derivative marketplace could be worth $540 billion — and this is super conservative. We are just using the DeFi TVL in the current state of crypto for our extrapolation without even considering the potential growth in cryptomarketcap size and the potential growth in DeFi dominance within it.

Even if we assume that DeFi options on NFTs should capture 5% of the value of the larger DeFi derivatives sector — this alone gives the DeFi options marketplace a $25 billion value — and this is using the conservative number for the market size.

Polkastarter

This is very cool : “The idea of NFTs being re-defined as Defi Options opens up possibilities of a whole new suite of DeFi applicatons that weren’t previously explored.”

So how do you aim to increase the adoption of Genesis Shards?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

For Genesis — adoption would be both in terms of

a) DeFi projects adopting it as their early stage partner and also

b) the community, using our pre-IDO marketplace platform more as a launchpad

Once we have promising early stage DeFi projects choosing us as their preIDO partner — the community side of the equation will largely take care of itself.

- Excited to share that we are already seeing massive interest from DeFi startups interested in our ecosystem and product — even before we formally launch.

In addition to this, we have a strong line-up of Network partners who will be helping us expand our ‘field of vision’ — by helping bring in promising early stage DeFi projects into our ecosystem.

Happy to share that we have nearly 50+ Access, Ecosystem and Mentor partners at the moment supporting the network. You can find more on them in our Twitter and TG threads:

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/GenShards

TG Announcement Channel https://t.me/genshardsANN

The cherry on top is the strong marketing background and networks of our team in the DeFi space. Our Co-Founder Garlam Won headed marketing at Harmony, and has consulted several top-tier DeFi projects in this space. Nilotpal headed the Business of a Bn$ project Marlin and has significant connects with projects in the DeFi ecosystem.

Sharing a couple of these names for your reference

[Forwarded from [OFFICIAL] GENESIS SHARDS — ANN]

#Partnerships #accesspartners

We are happy to welcome

- 3 commas &

- Spark Digital Capital

into our family of Access partners ! ✈️

🗣 Do not forget to leave a retweet !

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1376841790033166336

- — -

About Genesis Access Partners 🤝

As Genesis Access Partners, they will help bring in promising early stage DeFi projects into our ecosystem

This will effectively help expand our ‘field of vision’

Learn more about Genesis Access Partners here :

https://medium.com/genesis-shard/introducing-access-shards-69716b784bb3

- — -

Genesis Spotlight 📸

📌 Genesis Shards and Kylin Network enter into a Strategic Partnership

📌Genesis Shards partners with Polygon for scaling solutions

📌Genesis Shards and PolkaFoundry collaborate to bring pre-IDO liquidity to a wider range of Polkadot-powered projects

👥 Do follow us on social media ! 👍

Medium
Twitter
Telegram Community
Telegram Announcements

[Forwarded from [OFFICIAL] GENESIS SHARDS — ANN]

#Partnerships #mentorpartners

We are happy to welcome Rachid Ajaja, CEO of AllianceBlock 💎 as our very first Mentor partner ! 💪🏻

As a Genesis Mentor Partner, he will assist projects within the Genesis ecosystem

- — -

About Genesis Mentor Partners 🤝

Mentor Partners are individuals or institutions with deep experience in the DeFi space.

They would share their experience with regard to critical areas such as product-market fit, tokenomics, partnerships etc.

Learn more about Genesis Mentor Partners here :

https://medium.com/genesis-shard/introducing-genesis-mentor-shards-448f57604e39

🗣 Do not forget to leave a retweet !

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1377281566062350337

- — -

Yeah let’s move to the next.

Polkastarter

Looking forward to seeing what comes next with your Access, Ecosystem and Mentor partnerships.

Ok so tell us, where exactly does Genesis Shards fit in the ecosystem? How does it compete with other projects in the DeFi space?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

I am sure you it won’t fall short of any expectation.

Just to being to notice, Genesis Shards’ vision attracted the support of participants from every corner of the DeFi sphere. Our funding rounds were crafted to be inclusive of the entire ecosystem.

Industry heavyweights such as 3Commas, Block Dream Fund by OKEx, LD Capital, Spark Digital Capital, Momentum 6, Solidity Ventures, BlackEdge, Morningstar, BitBloc, Blocksync, Chain Capital, X21, Astronaut Capital, Moonrock Capital, Moonwhale Ventures, PNYX Ventures, AU21 Capital, Master Ventures, PetRock Capital, Rarestone as well as many other reputed angels such as Santiago Roel Santos of Parafi Capital; Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder and chief operations officer of Polygon; Danish Chaudhry, CEO of Bitcoin.com; and Rachid Ajaja, CEO and founder of Alliance Block all supported the rounds.

You can find more about it on our recent PR release:

cointelegraph.com/press-releases/genesis-shards-raises-27m-to-create-new-pre-ido-market-using-defi-nft-options

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

GS has been creating its own niche in the DeFi NFT space. As said earlier, we are trying to create a new generation for NFTs

NFT 2.0 — NFTs for DeFi options.

Now from a competitive landscape standpoint, GS can be seen from 3 different angles:

1) Pre-IDO liquidity platform: the very fact that Genesis Shards is creating an entirely new market by introducing liquidity to Pre-IDO tokens through its NFT swap architecture, it has a first mover advantage in that space.

2) NFT marketplace: Yet, from a marketplace perspective we are more like Opensea — but for Defi Options.

3) Further, given the very nature of GS, it can also be looked at as a launchpad, where there are some existing paltforms like Polkastarter, DaoMaker, Duckdao, Poolz etc.

However, the best part about GS is that we don’t compete with any of them, rather intend to have a strategic tie-up with all, where projects launching on Genesis Pre-IDO platform can be funneled into these ecosystems further upstream for an IDO.

Nilotpal, [09.04.21 14:49]

Our partnership with an upstream IDO platform ZeeDo exactly depicts how the equation would be for us with these existing IDO launchpads

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379112408929607681

Can we move to the next one

Polkastarter

This is a wildly impressive group of advisors — a lot of these names and groups have been responsible for building out the core tenants of DeFi — thats some great expertise to call on.

You’ve shared some awesome info with us today — what would you say are the recent major updates for Genesis Shards? What’s in store for the project in the next few months?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

The last few weeks have been pheomenal for GS with some major milestones being hit

1) Gen ticket whitelist: 215000+ registrations

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379872143895265282?s=20

2) 30000+ followers in less than 5 days of #MyGenticket launch

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379828628968501251?s=19

We are almost about to reach 40k as we speak 🔥

3) 6 major partnerships with:

Polygon:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1375485883156168706

Kylin:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1376222832468889603?s=19

PolkaFoundry

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1375880420731064327?s=19

Raze: https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379755217730859013?s=19

Dart:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1377693241760489474?s=19

ZeeDo: https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379112408929607681?s=19

4) 12+ AMAs and community engaging sessions. Some of the recaps can be found here:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1378411484510744576

5) a successful 2.7mn raise as already shared earlier:

http://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/genesis-shards-raises-27m-to-create-new-pre-ido-market-using-defi-nft-options

The next few months would be much more exciting with a lot of Pre-IDO launches on the platform. This is going to be one big ride for all of us.

Also on the tech side we have made signigicant progress and are well positioned on our roadmap. The tech team has already shipped codes for -

Landing page design, Gen Tickets Web Frontend Mockups, Gen Tickets NFTs Design, GEN Access Cards NFTs Design, GenFactory & GenTicket contracts (on testnet), GenFactory smart contract v1 + tests, (on testnet) GenTickets smart contract v1 + tests (on testnet), GenAccess cards smart contract + tests and Gen token contract + tests (on testnet)

The next few months would see the platform shape up further with new version releases being made and more Defi NFT products being brought into the ecosystem.

That’s pretty much on this one. We can move to the next

Polkastarter

Great! We’re at time, but we’ll stay a little longer if thats ok. Could you please share with our community your website and social media channels, so they can make sure to follow you and be kept up to date on your progress?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

Oh yeah sure:

▪️Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/GenShards

▪️Official Medium: https://medium.com/genesis-shard

▪️Official Announcement Channel: https://t.me/genshardsANN

▪️Official Website: https://www.genshards.com/

“

Polkastarter

Great, thank you Nilotpal and Garlam. Let’s open the chat for a brief window to give our community a chance to ask their questions, and don’t forget, that after the AMA Genesis Shards will choose the best question and hand out one whitelist spot for their IDO on April 14th (don’t forget you will need to KYC fast and on time).

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

And for those who haven’t whitelisted for the Pols IDO yet, that’s where you will find all the information

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379882389246074883?s=19

[ QUESTIONS FROM POLKASTARTER COMMUNITY ]

Polkastarter

Wow wow, always so many great questions from this community, thank you! Nilotpal and Garlam will read through and pick one question to answer.

QUESTIONS

2017 Alts

One of the main things that intrigued me about Genesis Shards is the fact that usually, NTFs are built and powered by Ethereum, but I noticed that Genesis Shards’ NFTs are power by Polkadot, can you tell us more about this and why did you decide to be powered by polkadot? What kind of technology did you use to create your NFTs? And what benefits will you get from this?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

[In reply to 2017 Alts]

While Genesis as a pre-IDO platform will have its own liquidity engine, we see huge value in partnering with the existing cross-chain architecture of Polkadot for inter-chain communication. The solidity compatible Polkadot parachains will enable Genesis Shards ecosystem to take pre-IDO tokens from various low liquidity blockchains, wrap them into Gen NFTs and be traded on Genesis enabled liquidity pools. This will also allow the projects to take full advantage of the liquidity internal and external to their native chains.

We would also be utilizing Moonbeam for our relays. Moonbeam is a smart contract ‘parachain’ on Polkadot, for ERC-1155 tokens which enables compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts.

On top of the cross-chain communication, Polkadot and Moonbeam will enable faster transactions while reducing gas costs on the Genesis exchange.

Виктория Warss

On your website you have mentioned many partners on your website. But, however, I did not see any crypto project on them, Am I correct? If yes what is the reason for this? Because being a partner with a successful crypto project always give a great potential to the project.

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

[In reply to Виктория Warss]

You have to check our blogs and the Twitter posts for the latest updates. We have 6 major Blockchain pprject partners as we speak

Polygon:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1375485883156168706

Kylin:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1376222832468889603?s=19

PolkaFoundry

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1375880420731064327?s=19

Raze: https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379755217730859013?s=19

Dart:

https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1377693241760489474?s=19

ZeeDo: https://twitter.com/GenShards/status/1379112408929607681?s=19

Derek Campbell

What is your vision regarding the current market with NFTs and what vision do you have of the market for next year? Do you notice a remarkable growth in the NFTs market?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

[In reply to Derek Campbell]

NFTs are completely shaking up a lot of traditional industries including, notably, art.

The highlight for NFTs so far has been the Beeple artwork selling for more than $69 million!

We like to look at NFTs as building a new liquid IP ( intellectual property ) marketplace for any form of digital content. This is a market with innumerable number of units that can be tokenized — the potential is truly limitless. We really are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here.

Let’s look at the progress of the NFT space so far, from 2017 through 2020

31 -> 180 -> 211 -> 365 (USD millions)

( Data from : https://nonfungible.com/nft-report-2020 )

The numbers clearly show an upward trajectory — and the NFT space has never come into the public spotlight like we are seeing currently.

With continued growth of the NFT space — the market will find newer and more exciting uses for these instruments. We believe with our DeFi options on NFTs, we are playing a key role in expanding the lens for how people view NFTs.

Ela Peterson

What can I really do with my coming GS tokens and what makes them valuable? What percentage of the value will GS token holders hold at swap fees, how is the fuel system associated with GS?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

[In reply to Ela Peterson]

The $GS token is native utility token of Genesis ecosystem.The token gets used for Genesis Access, Genesis NFTX and plays a significant role in Genesis network governance.

The various roles of $GS token in Genesis ecosystem:

Gen Access:

$GS Tokens are required to be swapped for Genesis Access NFTs to be a part of the Genesis network. Based on the amount of tokens held access tiers are decided enabling different access rights to its users.

Gen NFTX:

$GS token is the native token on the NFTX platform allowing users to benefit from reduction in Swap fees for tickets, access cards or Gen smart contracts.

Gen Governance:

$GS tokens would provide governance rights to its members where they can vote on different proposals within the ecosystem. The number of tokens held would be a representation of voting power within the network.

The best part about Genesis token is that it accrues value with every new pre-IDO that gets launched on it.

Johan Alder @aldsjohn

Before your project listing, we investors would like to know one vital thing on every project. What is it that you decided to call the project Genesis? Is there a story behind the name of the project or any inspiration or reference? Did you adopt the name Genesis referring to the biblical stories?

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

[In reply to Johan Alder]

Interesting question!

‘Genesis’ refers to : the origin or mode of formation of something, whereas

‘Shards’ symbolises pieces.

Well, Genesis Shards is all about addressing ‘pre-IDO’ (early) stage liquidity, and building a helpful ecosystem for DeFi projects in their nascent stages bringing together all the tiny pieces of the ecosystem.

As it deals with the early stages in a project’s lifecycle, and involves creation of a well rounded dynamic environment built on network pieces , hence the term ‘Genesis Shards’

Polkastarter

Congrats @altchamp you have been selected for the Whitelist ! Genesis Shards team will contact you in PM and give you all information regarding KYC etc 🥳🎉🥳🎉

Thank you so much to Nilotpal and Garlam for your time and for the really informative and descriptive answers on Genesis Shards. Lots of great information in there to unpack and dig into. Really looking forward to the launch of $GS on April 14, and to welcome you to the Polkastarter Family and continue working together in the future 💫

Genesis Shards (Nilotpal Mukherjee)

A pleasure to be here and interact with your wonderful community . We are equally excited for the launch.

Mark the date 14th April. 📅

Polkastarter

Thanks to everyone for tuning in! This will be the end of this AMA, thank you everyone for joining us. The chat will now open back up. 🍻