An exclusive interview with the founder of VCRED

VCRED evolved from a prototype I built at a hackathon demonstrating flash loans to automate DeFi strategies such as maximizing arbitrage yield.

My motivation for starting VCRED was the several failed attempts I had in using some established projects which had frustrating UX, and also required users to pay very high gas (For ex: Ethereum). I wanted to build a project not just for developers, and investment funds but for retail users. There was in general a lack of ML integration and automation in DeFi projects. So there is a strong motivation to enable new ways to maximize yield for users, and not just rely on yield farming models built around other projects.

I have several years of experience in C, Python, and backend development, developed interest rate forecasting models and built trading bots..

I started DeFi trading in 2020, attracted by the speed and energy in this space. It was amazing to perform trading without using brokers, and barriers of the traditional financial system which limits innovation. DeFi allows new business models, non zero-sum, and unique use cases absent in existing web2 tech giants. At VCRED I am also the lead developer, still writing and reviewing code, and it’s amazing to be a part of the DeFI revolution.

One of the main challenges faced in building VCRED is that we had to unlearn existing web2 methodologies, learn new web3 models and apply it in building VCRED. Our team emerged stronger with greater focus around this vision.

Abstracting the complex mechanisms to enable automation requires building a simple single sided staking model familiar to DeFi natives. This was another major challenge, and meant that we had to build most of our codebase from ground up instead of forking existing projects. It took time but we have built a strong project ready to launch.

One of the major issues faced by new DeFi projects is high gas fees, competition from forked projects and lack of potential for growth in the ecosystem. The Avalanche community is vibrant, welcoming for innovation, and we aim to provide a cutting edge automated solution.

Through VCRED we aim to offer a no impermanent loss single sided staking model built around flash loans and borrow bots simplifying UX, generating revenue and maximizing yield for our liquidity providers. This will differentiate us from some existing applications which rely mainly on yield farming.

We will be one of the first projects to offer stablecoin rewards which offers a different unique risk reward framework during volatile market conditions for investors.

Our strategic partnership with Blizzard will enable us to integrate deeply in the Avalanche ecosystem. We have already formed strong relationships with existing projects, and further assimilate exploring synergies with other projects. We will also explore unique opportunities for ecosystem rewards with other projects, and include Avax token rewards in our projects.

I already received a lot of messages after our Blizzard announcement, and am looking forward to the increased engagement and support from the Avalanche community as we get closer to the launch.

Our magic sauce is

Team: Myself and everyone on the team is hands-on and product driven.
Product: We are not just forking or copying existing projects, and instead innovating with best practices, and enabling automation.
Potential: This is a new space in DeFi, and there is a lot of scope to innovate in the new DeFi 2.0 paradigm with unique use-cases such as market making, automating payments, etc.

Users can interact with VCRED platform in the following ways:

Deposit into our flashloan pools to harness the power of our permissioned flashloans. This reduces any impermanent loss risk, and allows users to earn yield without the need of performing any further actions.
Stake into our leveraged farming pools which performs a leveraged deposit with other protocols incentivizing users with protocol rewards, and in the future after launch of VCRED tokens, earn VCRED token rewards as well.
Earn feature enables users to stake VCRED tokens and earn a portion of stablecoin rewards, and also rewards payoff similar to the gauge tokenomics model.
With the launch of VCRED’s Version 2 we can provide more unique rewards for our token holders including boosted yields on our pools.

We are one of the first projects to offer stablecoin rewards which will enable users to stake any token including our token, and earn rewards in stablecoins. Permissioned flashloans is our other innovation. This is an improvement over the existing flashloans which can be used as an attack vector, and is a race to the bottom enabling mainly feeless flash loans. My vision is to have an opposite approach of maximizing rewards to liquidity providers with the protocol having variable fee rate to optimize for MEV.

We are running an exclusive campaign for early believers in the project. The selected members from this campaign will have an exclusive access to automated staking feature and gain access to airdrops. To learn more, join our discord server. discord.gg/vcred

I started VCRED with a 5 year plan to automate DeFi not just limited to staking, borrowing from a retail user perspective but also help projects launch into their ecosystems by providing support in market making, liquidity. Our arbitrage bots, borrow bots are stepping stones to building a strong on chain pricing model which will revolutionize the way projects launch tokens. This will eliminate barriers by enabling a new protocol bootstrapping model maximizing synergies between users, communities and projects in DeFi space.