Cross-Chain DeFi with Juliun Brabon of Unifi

In today's episode of the Koinos Group podcast I'm excited to be interviewing the head of another project, Juliun Brabon, CEO of Unifi, a cross-chain automated market maket (think Uniswap but on multiple blockchains) that rewards liquidity providers in UP, a token which is essentially 100% backed by all of the rewards that are earned through the AMM.

I am not a holder of UP token and neither I, nor Koinos Group, LLC have any business relationship with Unifi or SesameSeed. These are just my personal opinions as an unbiased observer and nothing in this article or the associated media should be interpreted as investment advice.

What I really like about Unifi is the people who are behind it. Like Koinos Group, the Unifi team is a group of passionate people who have years of experience working together and shipping functional products. Also like Koinos Group, they didn't raise any outside funding or build their project on top of a token sale. Instead the team volunteered their time to build Unifi, just like we are with Koinos.

It's practically impossible to predict at the beginning of a project which teams will be able to execute on their stated goals, but if people are willing to volunteer their time (as we are right now) and work together for years to build something innovative, this dramatically reduces the risk that the team will fall apart or fail to deliver.

What is Unifi?

That being said, it does sound like Unifi is also doing some innovative things. Unifi is a protocol built around automated market maker technology but which distinguishes itself from other projects like Uniswap by focusing on cross-chain interoperability.

By focusing first on lower cost blockchains they were able to worry less about gas fees and more about offering unique features like ensuring that rewards for liquidity providers were more sustainable over time. This is just one example of how lowering fees enables developers to explore more features and more business models.

How it works

Unifi rewards liquidity providers every time a transaction occurs, so they basically get a share of all transaction fees. The reward is in UP token which is essentially a 100% reserve token backed by all of the rewards that are earned through the AMM.

UP tokens are minted every time there's a transaction (buy, sell, transfer) and then distributed to liquidity providers who can redeem them for the native currency. If they're using the Binance Smart Chain, that would be BNB, if they're using Ethereum that's ETH, and so on. Unifi reserves a portion of each trading fee for the specific purpose of insuring that the redemption value of UP increases over time through a process that is completely governed by audited smart contracts.

We covered a lot of ground in this interview so definitely check out the video linked above and if you like what you see, don't forget to subscribe. In that video we also discuss impermanent loss, running a successful decentralized team, being a community led project, building for the long term, and dealing with regulations.

To learn more about Unifi check out this Medium post

To learn more about Koinos, go to koinos.io