Last week we introduced the bi-weekly AMAs at r/AVA — a format available for anyone in the Avalanche community to address their questions and concerns to the team.

Community AMAs will run every other week with a thread opened for questions on Mondays at 1:00 PM (UTC) and closed on Wednesdays at 9:00 PM (UTC). The team will be answering questions on Thursdays at 4:00 PM (UTC).

The first AMA took place on April 2, 2020 — with 31 questions exploring various aspects of Avalanche’s vision and technology.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, we got you covered.

r/AVA AMA #1 Highlights:

Q — zaccguy:

Have any existing DEFI projects committed to using Avalanche? If not, how does the team plan on convincing builders to come to Avalanche instead of Ethereum or EOS?

A — Kevin Sekniqi:

Really good question. We’re working on several partnerships, both in the DeFi space as well as large financial institutions to extend DeFi to a much larger pie. To my surprise and huge delight (mostly because there are just so many other projects out there), the response that we got from the current set of DEFI projects has been overwhelmingly positive. Lots of active interest in collaboration. We’re working on several ways to support Maker, Compound, etc. Our first approach is to build a bridge with Ethereum and support porting over the native DeFi ecosystem tokens into our smart contract subnet. Now is as good a time as ever to announce Avalanche-X, the Avalanche division that will be dealing with outreach and development, in the same way as Google X did. With that program, details of which are going to be released next week, we will be granting various teams substantial resources to build bridges to Ethereum as well as clones of various DeFi projects.

Something that we did that no other project did is that we tried to stay fully backwards compatible with other projects. We’re not just backwards compatible with Ethereum. We are designed in such a way to also allow developers to extend functionality to more virtual machines, one of which is EOS. We’re hoping to have the EOS dev crowd try to develop an Avalanche-EOS subnet, and start deploying the many different applications that EOS has right on our ecosystem. No other project has this level of extensibility.

Follow-up Q:

If Maker and Compound are executing on Avalanche, that is huge. Is there a rough timeline to expect when support will be ready after the launch?

Incentivizing Ctrl-c Ctrl-v is an interesting move. Do you expect any backlash similar to what Justin Sun and Tron are facing currently with copying the Maker CDP?

A — Kevin Sekniqi:

Those guys are great friends of ours and overall amazing people, so we’re very excited that they’ve shown openness to working together. As far as timelines go, we’re not sure. We have many things going on, so it’s very likely that some of the peripheral things will not be met in the desired deadlines, but we want to make sure that the core infrastructure is delivered on time. With that sequence of priorities in mind, we are still hoping to have the bridge in place within 2 months, hopefully in time for mainnet launch.

We hope not. Justin is obviously doing it in a “hostile-takeover” manner without providing clear evidence of any benefits. On the other hand, we want to interoperate the space as we see huge value in it, and we want to instantly provide benefits to tokens that move over in terms of performance, speed, and security.