Understanding the Polkadot's DeFi Ecosystem with Yubo Ruan

Ishan Pandey: Hi Yubo, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind Parallel Finance?

Yubo Ruan: Sure! My name is Yubo Ruan, and I’m the founder of Parallel Finance.

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a bit about the decentralized money market protocol and how does it work?

Yubo Ruan: So essentially, you can think about it as an autonomous driving bank in the sense that the smart contract will be in charge of lending, borrowing, and calculating interest rates. The whole process is transparent and decentralized. Users can either lend out their spare tokens to earn interests or borrow cryptocurrencies they need with valid collateral.

Ishan Pandey: Can you explain the leveraged staking model to our readers and how can one amplify their staking yields?

Yubo Ruan: In the Polkadot ecosystem, users can get roughly 14% as a normal staker on their DOT. Since our protocol offers Money Market, we can achieve leveraged staking by combining Money Markets with Liquid Staking protocols. Moreover, users can use their staking token (xDOT) as collateral to borrow more DOT and restake. As long as the borrowing rate of DOT is lower than staking APY, users can achieve higher returns and thus, we called it leverage staking.

Ishan Pandey: What exactly is a Parachain Crowdloan and what are some tips you’d like to give to our readers who might want to participate in crowdloans?

Yubo Ruan: Parallel Auction Loan product is a new way of raising a crowd loan campaign in the Polkadot Ecosystem. The most significant benefit of product users is that they can get liquidity of their locked DOT through cDOT token, whereas the transitional crowd loan requires 2 years locked up of their DOT.

Ishan Pandey: DeFi is a fast-growing segment of the cryptocurrency market that offers to provide traditional financial products without the involvement of regulated intermediaries like financial institutions. According to you, should DeFi be regulated?

Yubo Ruan: Yes, I think in the long term, DeFi should be regulated. It is actually better for the full industry adoption. With clear regulation guidelines, more institutions can participate in DeFi, which will provide deeper liquidity and secure the stability of the DeFi interest rate. As more institutions are involved, it serves as a good reputation to attract more retail users who never heard about DeFi to jump onboard. In my opinion, DeFi means a new financial system is building on top of smart contracts and blockchain with self-custody, transparent governance features. It doesn’t mean any regulation!

Ishan Pandey: What are your thoughts on the rising popularity of the Solana and Cardano ecosystems?

Yubo Ruan: I really like Solana. In fact, I’m an early investor to Solana. Both of them will have a substantial market share in the blockchain space. Each has a different trade-off between security, decentralization, and scalability. Solana, for example, has better scalability but worst decentralization compared with Ethereum. However, in real-life, many people care about scalability (low fees, fast confirmation time), and they are fine with less decentralization. Thus, I think Solana can serve the demand for those users very well.

Ishan Pandey: What does the roadmap ahead look like for the Polkadot ecosystem as a whole?

Yubo Ruan: Parallel wants to be the most prominent DeFi builder who can bring 1 billion people to use the DeFi and Web3 products in the next ten years. I think all big brands should be part of the NFT landscape. NFT is one of the best ways to increase community engagement for big brands. All NFT holders feel true ownership and will market the brand very hard. Two years ago, the whole NFT space had almost nothing that existed besides crypto kitties.

Today, according to nftgo.io, the total NFT has a market capitalization of $16.8B with over 22M different NFTs. I don’t think big brands should ignore any industry with a speed of growth like this.

How do you expect NFT use-cases to evolve in the coming years?

NFT holders need finalization. I think a specialized money market for NFT will start to emerge in the short term. On the one hand, similar to Airbnb, users can rent NFT that they like to capture the economic utility (airdrop and royalty sharing) and usage right (in-person community meeting right, etc.).

On the other hand, NFT owners access credit lines by using their NFT as collateral. I think an on-chain crowd NFT appraisal platform will exist in the long term. Currently, the pricing of NFT is one of the most significant issues for DeFi platforms to accept NFT as collateral. If someone can solve it, I think we can price everything in the world, such as your house, art, etc.

Disclaimer: The purpose of this article is to remove informational asymmetry existing today in our digital markets by performing due diligence, asking the right questions, and equipping readers with better opinions to make informed decisions.