As part of our intention to feed news and developments to the Sweetbridge community, last weekend we ran an AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) with Gal Mordechai, Product Manager at Sweetbridge while he was at the FedEx ETHMemphis Hackathon (pictured on the left below with the rest of the team attending).

Gal Mordechai (left) with Sweetbridge team Alan Chute, Melvin Petties, Laurie Chute, Karen Nelson and Scott Nelson

Here are some of the highlights from the AMA feed (now buried in a thread in our telegram channel at t.me/sweetbridge).

Q: Can you use Sweetcoin (SWC) to increase how much you can borrow while simultaneously reducing interest?

A: Yes, as part of activating SWC you’ll be able to increase your collateralization ratio by up to 10%. The portion of the increase will be determined by the amount of fees you’ve reduced. This means that if you reduced all of the associated fees of the loan, your collateralization ratio will increase by 10%. If you reduced only half of the fees, your collateralization ratio will increase by 5% and so on..

Q: Will the Sweetbridge Product Suite work like a bank in the sense that a user can connect with a Sweetbridge team member that can see all the information and transactions of a user and discuss the user transaction with the user?

A: Yes, our goal is to onboard organizations and that is something that requires trust and support. To do so, we will allow our support team to assist members with all the Sweetbridge product suite. To do that, they will need to have visibility to that type of information. Having said that, we are still in the process of defining the minimum amount of info they should have access to in order to support our members ideally

Q: Could you explain the discount factor variable on the SWC Calculator?

A: The Discount factor is a variable that is defined in order to cap the total amount of fees that can be waived with SWC activation. For now and the foreseeable future this number will be 50%, which means that in every single moment 50% of the system fees will be waived. This number is important as it will determine the fees that will remain in the system (in the stability pool) and will be distributed to all the Bridgecoin (BRC) holders and users. This factor is critical as it creates an incentive for members to hold and use BRC and by doing so creating an upward pressure on the price which stabilizes it.

Q: In the future, when Sweetbridge gains some adoption — if you had to give an estimate — what would you think the average number of Sweetcoin activated in the system would be as a percentage of the SWC circulating?

A: it is very interesting to think about that as there is a specific turning point in which it makes more sense to use SWC as a collateral rather than using it for discounts and there are multiple factors that determines that. I’m adding a chart here that explains this point:

As a result I think that the number of people that activate SWC will constantly vary as the opportunity cost and multiple variables are changing all the time.

Q: Could you give us a brief overview of the product suite roadmap and and then tell us what can be tangibly expected in the immediate future, say to August this year?

A: Sure, so as you all heard already in our presentation in Consensus, we will release our first component of the Sweetbridge economy, the Sweetbridge wallet, to the testnet for Alpha testers by the first week of June. If you haven’t signed up already, please do as we have only 50 spots for that.

Then, shortly afterwards we will release both the mainnet version of the Sweetbridge wallet and what we call the Exchange 2.0. The Sweetbridge wallet will include feedback from our testers and some additional features that we already plan on adding and the exchange will allow buying SWC directly from your Sweetbridge wallet in-app, in additional to some other functionalities.

After that we will introduce BRC into the economy as a KYC-ed, whitelisted, stable token. And after we introduce these foundational components, we will be able to introduce Sweetbridge Assets (our loans product) against crypto assets. As we develop each one of these components, we will continue to evolve them in parallel and create protocols to the community that will be able to evolve their own solutions on top of these components as well.

Q: Will the number of Sweetcoin needed to reduce interest decrease as the network, and therefore value of SWC, increases?

A: The SWC needed to decrease your fees is a factor of three variables:

the discount factor (a constant that I explained above) the total fees in the economy the total amount of SWC activated in the system.

Since 2 of these variables are changing regularly, the discount value of a single SWC will change as well regularly. To minimize these and to avoid from trying to game the system, we are using 24 hr windows as data points and averaging out these data points based on historical.

Q: Gal, I don’t remember seeing the sell line in the portfolio view. Is there a way to monitor this?

A: Yes, each portfolio will have a sell line and a notification line which will be a percent out of the borrowed amount. The member will be able to customize the notification line to make sure that he will get notified if the value of the collateral drops beneath his risk preference (notifications will be sent in-app and to your email). The Sell line which is a lower % will be on the summary of each portfolio and as you access the details of it.

Q: The recently announced accounting layer sounds fantastic. How is the settlement layer coming along?

A: The accounting layer is the basis for the settlement layer and that’s why we worked on it so early on in the road map. That is also what we use to query all of the information for the user’s financial statements. The settlement bus will require all of the components that I’ve mentioned above and hence will be functional only after all of them will be operational

Q: So everyone that uses Bridgecoin will need to be KYC’d by Sweetbridge or a licenced partner of Sweetbridge?

A: At first it will be by Sweetbridge, however in the future and based on the federated governance model that we aim for, many other organizations that adhere to the Sweetbridge charter will be able to KYC new members into the ecosystem

Q: What crypto assets do you accept as colleteral at the start? ETH? Or ETH and BTC? Or also other ECR20 tokens …?

A: At first we will accept as collateral ETH and SWC as collateral. Then, BTC will be added shortly after. Once we will prove a successful integration of a cross chain crypto asset (and will release a protocol to others on how to do that), we will move forward to commodities (and again will release a protocol to the community on how to do that) and from there to invoices and A/R [accounts receivable]

Q: How can Sweetbridge make money and grow, other than fees and coin appreciation?

A: We are not taking any of the fees from the system. Fees are distributed to the economy and BRC holders to stabilize it and grow it. Sweetbridge grows from the demand for SWC and its appreciation

Q: Will the Wallet be available in other languages?

A: For now, the wallet will be only in English, however all of our designs are internationalised which means that if our users will ask for a different language it is something that can be done very very fast without any refactoring or redesign of our products. Our product approach is that we are here for our community and therefore, please let us know your needs and interests and we will accommodate these in the products. The first step for that is sign up for the wallet Alpha:)

Q: If the value of my collateral (ETH/BTC) falls suddenly and by a large amount, how much time will I have to cover? What options will I have to increase my collateral amount? Only depositing more crypto?

A: There will be a process that we will publish, so you will have full transparency to how to avoid from that event. The ways to avoid it are either adding additional collateral, or paying down some of your liabilities with BRC. I will post in the upcoming weeks another calculator and a blog that will explain this process in detail.

To learn more about the products and Sweetbridge you can sign up through the member dashboard at www.sweetbridge.com.

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