“Pinecone is a Yield Aggregator protocol and our team is dedicated to making investment in DeFi world simpler, easier and hassle-free than ever.”
Andrew (BSC.News)
Hello everyone and welcome to the AMA with Pinecone Finance!
Today we have Jin, the Founder and Chairman joining us alongside Rina from Pinecone
Welcome guys, its a pleasure to have you here 😄
Jin:
Hello Andrew glad to be here. Nice to E-meet
Hello everyone, it is my pleasure to share Pinecone with you guys
Andrew (BSC.News)
Yes, nice to e-meet you as well haha
So how this will work is, the AMA will consist of two rounds. The first round will be us going through the questions that I had prepared for you before hand. And then the second round will be a community round where I will open up the room to allow questions to come in. The second round is also where we will select the two winners of our giveaway
Sound good?
Jin
Clear
Andrew (BSC.News)
Awesome, so let’s get things started then
Jin
sure go ahead
Andrew (BSC.News)
1. Please give an introduction to yourself as well as the team behind Pinecone Finance
Jin
Hello everyone, this is Jin, founder & chairman of Pinecone Finance. I Graduated from Tongji University with a bachelor’s degree and Oxford University MBA, and currently served as the Secretary General of Oxford and Cambridge Alumni Society.
I have been in crypto world for 4 years, and was involved in the founding and development of two crypto projects, including Wabi Project which got listed on Binance in 2017. Before that, I was a business consultant worked in McKinsey.
The team behind Pinecone consists people with various professional background.
The core team members come from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, US, UK, China and other parts of the world. Each has more than 15 years of rich experience in traditional and crypto industry, and served in senior executive positions in Fortune 500 companies, including CEO, CTO and other C-level positions, industry experience varies from blockchain, Internet, gaming, finance, marketing and public relations, etc.
Other than their experience and expertise, what is more important to me is the integrity and ethical standard of team members. All the team members are either my childhood friend or long-term business partners/colleagues. The team was built based on the shared value of trust, transparency and high ethical standard.
Andrew (BSC.News)
Wow that is really amazing
Not only you but the team as well has so much experience and hands-on application to back Pinecone Finance
Jin
Yes, actually some of the core team were colleages in previous crypto project, so we have been around for a while
Andrew (BSC.News)
That’s great
So then let’s talk about what you guys have put together
2. What is Pinecone Finance?
Jin
but still learning new things everyday
I will put it in simple terms: Pinecone Finance is a next-gen yield optimizer protocol on BSC focusing on single asset farming. By providing users with multiple farming strategies and anti flash loan attack mechanisms, we aim to provide DeFi users with high returns while minimizing risks.
On top of PCT (our native token) rewards, holders of PCT tokens can also enjoy sustainable income in BNB coming from the performance fee.
Andrew (BSC.News)
Great, thank you for that introduction
Jin
Welcome
Andrew (BSC.News)
So when researching your project, I found that you guys had this big missions to solve many problems within DeFi and Dapps and one of them is with yield farming
So my next question is
3. What issues are inherent within yield farming currently?
Jin
Yes indeed
There are quite a number of issues plaguing yield farmers
a. A lot of high yield promised by projects are neither sustainable nor real. In most cases the super high return of a project is achieved by releasing more tokens to the market but inevitably will cause the dropping of token price as times goes by. By the end of day, you may realize the real earning is pretty low when taking token price into consideration, or you may even suffer huge loss in principals as well. Honestly speaking I was one of the victims of such projects before.
Recently there are some new models coming up and grabbing yield farmers’ attention and interest immediately with their super high APY. The problem is that these attractive APY often comes with some hidden terms such as the profit you earned is subject to long period (e.g.180 days) of linear vesting. Basically it is like a fixed term saving account with a highly volatile token price. The APR being promised is very much on paper only.
b. LP staking looks very attractive with super high APY, but the Impermanent loss is often greater than what we thought especially for the pairs with high price volatility.
c. As a defi farmer myself, the no.1 question is always “is my fund safe?” If we put our money somewhere, not only do we need to make sure the project has put sufficient security mechanisms in place to prevent hackers, but also, we have to trust the integrity of the project team so that they will not rug our money and run away.
Hence Pinecone is founded to tackle these challenges.
Andrew (BSC.News)
4. How does Pinecone Finance go about solving this problem?
Jin
To put it simple, initial high APY comes with the over supply of the token if the project does not possess ways of generating profit itself, and this is not sustainable
First of all, Pinecone Protocol focuses on single asset farming to avoid the impermanent losses caused by LP mining, also LP farming smart contract is easier to be attacked than single asset farming.
Secondly, we provide users with various farming strategies with different risk/return profile to help users to diversify risk while achieving higher returns.
As high return always comes with high risk, especially in yield farming. There is hardly any one strategy which could meet the needs of every investor forever. Hence we often see farmers keep moving their fund around looking for higher returns and we just want to make it easier for users by having vaults with different farming strategies in one place.
Taking our cake vaults for example, one of the cake vault adopts a two-layer compounding strategy, which means, the principal is deposited into Cake pool on pancakeswap, and then convert the $Cake profit into $BSW and reinvest in Biswap’s BSW pool to earn higher returns. Such a strategy comes with a certain hedging mechanism, i.e. when $Cake price against $BSW appreciates, you can enjoy an increase in principals, and if $Cake price against $BSW falls, profit will increase dramatically to hedge against some of the losses caused by the decline in token prices.
Naturally some investors might prefer more stable earnings without the impact of price fluctuation. Hence we also provide a traditional single layer auto-compounding strategy, which is just take $Cake profit and reinvest in Cake pool on Pancakeswap to meet the needs of users with low risk appetite.
Of course investors can also choose to divide their assets and deposit in different vaults to have a balanced risk-return portfolio.
Thirdly our tokenomics is carefully designed to ensure the interest of the team, early investors, PCT holders and Pinecone protocol users (farmers) are pretty much aligned.
When vault users claim their profit, a 30% performance fee will be charged, and for every 1 BNB earned in performance fee, 4,000 PCT are minted and distributed, out of which 80% will be distributed to the vault users and 20% goes to the team and early investors.
As such the higher the TVL, the higher the profit, which generates more BNB income for holders and a corresponding high token price, forming a virtuous cycle to drive the long term growth of the ecosystem of Pinecone Finance which benefits every participant.
Last but not the least, we have an unique anti flash loan attack mechanism to prevent flash loan attacks from two perspectives:
• We restrict the direct access from 3rd party smart contract unless they go through our due diligence and passed our security check
• There is a max transfer limit per block to ensure no flash loan attacks can profit from dumping large amount of PCT within one block
Andrew (BSC.News)
One second to read this please
Jin
sure
sorry it is a bit long
want to make my answer comprehensive
Andrew (BSC.News)
No Im glad you are very thorough in your reasoning, provides a lot of insight that many projects are not willing to do
an interesting read so no worries
Jin
Well, I believe Defi world should be as transparent as possible
So does Pinecone. We should have explained everything we do clearly before asking users to use it
Andrew (BSC.News)
Yeah no that’s great
So that was a great answer and lots to unpack there so let’s start by talking about your token
5. What is $PCT? And how is it used on your platform?
Jin
sure welcome
Pinecone Token (PCT) is a profit sharing and governance token.
When PCT holders stake PCT in the vaults, on top of the PCT rewards, they will also get the rewards in BNB. The BNB rewards come from the performance fee, which is the 30% of the profit collected when vaults users claim their profit.
PCT will also serve as a governance token to our Pinecone ecosystem.
In a few month’s time we will allow PCT Holders to receive voting rights, allowing them to decide on key governance decisions.
The total supply of PCT is 1 billion, including 1.2-1.3 million for presale (worth of 3,000 BNB), the remaining part will be released in a linear way gradually based on how much performance fee is collected
Andrew (BSC.News)
Fantastic, glad you mentioned the fees because that is something we will touch on shortly
6. Can you tell us about your different pools? Are you planning on adding for example to allow single staking ETH or BTC through your multi strategy yield optimizer?
Jin
Other than PCT, PCT-BNB pools, currently we have 8 signle coin pools including Baby, Cake, Alpaca, BUSD, USDT, BNB, BTC and ETH. Except Baby, all of other pools have more than one farming strategies to choose from. E.g for BUSD, depending on whether you are a Rabbit lover or Alpaca lover, you can choose between “Alpaca + Pancakswap” and “Rabbit + Pancakeswap” strategies. The first one is to deposit your BUSD into the pool on Alpaca and convert the earned $Alpaca into $Cake to reinvest, the latter one is to deposit BUSD into the pool on Rabbit & convert earned $Rabbit into $Cake to invest.
Of course we will be adding more token vaults soon.
Sure. We already have BTC/ETH multi strategies
i send a screenshot
Andrew (BSC.News)
Oh I see
So with that you can essentially hold onto your bluechip coins while also getting more exposure in DeFi
Every token has at least 2 choices
Jin
Exactly
People just stake their bule chip coins and that is it
simple, hassle free
Andrew (BSC.News)
Very neat
To touch back on the fee structure
7. Can you tell us more about the fee structure?
Jin
stake, and sit back and watch the asset grow lol
sure
We are starting off with the following fee structure for farming:
a. Withdrawal Fee
There is a 0.5% withdrawal fee from vaults if a you withdraw your principals within 72 hours.
b. Performance Fee
There will be 30% performance fee charges and distributed to PCT holders when vault users claim their profit.
Meawhile or every 1 BNB in fees collected, 4,000 PCT tokens are minted and distributed to respective vaults users (proportionally based on individual’s share in the vaults).
Andrew (BSC.News)
So this 30% performance fee is only collected from the profits?
Jin
To be clear, we take 30% of the profit as performance fee, but in return give back vault users PCT. So as long as BNB:PCT <4000, vault users are making more money
Andrew (BSC.News)
Oh I see, because the PCT gets redistributed in the end anyways
Makes sense
Jin
also the performance fee we collected are used to buy back pct and return BNB back to users. So the platform is not making any profit
Andrew (BSC.News)
So the platform makes no money?
Jin
currently no.
all profits will be returned to pct holders
Andrew (BSC.News)
Oh I see now, while the platform makes no money. There are still mechanisms that ensure it can survive haha
Jin
in the long run we will adjust a bit of that
Andrew (BSC.News)
Gotcha
Jin
We plan to come up with highest USDT/BUSD apr on BSc,
Andrew (BSC.News)
wait hold on
Jin
If we can achieve 40%-50% apr, maybe we can take some of the profit
Andrew (BSC.News)
Before you answer that question
How is that possible with a stable coin pair?
Jin
No we don’t do pairs
I mean single coin only
I know it sounds impossible, yet we are testing the strategy
Andrew (BSC.News)
Right, which would only make this much more appealing as well
Oh okay
Jin
stake USDT and get the highest apr
Andrew (BSC.News)
well don’t be afraid to give us a shout when this goes live haha
Jin
it is not entirely through smart contract
need proactive hedging mechanisum
we are testing it
should be next month
surely will let BSc News know first
Andrew (BSC.News)
Gotcha, well that’s really exciting!
Awesome
8. What measures are you taking to ensure that Pinecone Finance is safe to use?
Jin
Other than the anti flash loan attack mechanism we mentioned above, we have also taken the following measures to ensure the safety of Pinecone Finance
• Tech audit by leading auditing firms. currently we have finished main contract audit by Beosin and PeckShield, and Certik audit is in progress.
• Establish and follow strict security process including adding a role of security auditor internally to ensure proper code release procedures.
• Add PCT token price alert and emergency response mechanisms. For example, if the token price drops by 30% within 10 seconds, the deposit function of the smart contract will be immediately suspended, while reducing the maximum number of PCT transfer limit and turning off all PCT minting mechanism until the troubleshooting process is completed.
• Launch bug bounty program sometime soon and leverage the power of community to help us continuously improve the security of our protocol.
Very importantly, we realize that for DeFi projects, comparing to tech risks, sometimes the bigger risk still lies in the integrity and ethics of key members, hence I decided to 100% publicize my identity so that everyone can be rest assured that we will not steal fund and disappear.
Andrew (BSC.News)
Awesome thanks Jin, sounds like you guys are really taking the right steps here
Jin
Thanks very much for asking these questions
I wish we can grow together with BSC
Andrew (BSC.News)
9. Do you have any exciting news you would like to announce here today?
Jin
We will launch Gamfi Financial NFT soon. The goal is not only making earning passive income safe, easy but more fun as well. E.g the NFT owners could have different level of “yield booster” which entitled them to different level of APY, and there will be more gamified feature coming along with it make the farming experience more rewarding and more fun.
The NFT will be using super cute squirrel images and I bet you will love it!
Andrew (BSC.News)
Oh yeah that’s so cool!
Jin
The other news I already mentioned, we plan to have a single USDT high yield valut (no less than 20% apy) and this one will be very stable,
no matter how big is the TVL
Andrew (BSC.News)
Well very exciting stuff to come out of Pinecone Finance
Could you provide us with links to your social media that you would like our community to go and check out?
Telegram English Group：
Multiple Strategy Cake Vaults：
Squirrel Ambassador Program：
Squirrel Ambassador Program apply link：
Pinecone AMA Giveaway：
Better? 😄
Jin
Nice! Where did you get that lol??!!
Andrew (BSC.News)
From Rina haha
Jin
You now know us better than me haha
Andrew (BSC.News)
Hahaha
rina Sand
🙈
Andrew (BSC.News)
So for everyone here, make sure to go check out Pinecone Finance, they are here on BSC with great multi strategy yields optimizers backed by an experienced team who only want to bring you profitable, sustainable and transparent yields!This is a paid Ask Me Anything (AMA), BSC.News does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products, or other materials on this page. The project team has purchased this advertisement AMA for $2000 Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company. BSC.News is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods, or services mentioned in the AMA.
Source : bsc.news
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