On December 12, we had the opportunity to delve into the world of decentralized finance with Kinza Finance, a notable player in the blockchain and DeFi space. This Ask Me Anything (AMA) session provided a platform for an enlightening and in-depth discussion, shedding light on Kinza Finance’s latest developments, strategic vision, and the future of DeFi. In this recap, we’ll cover the key highlights and insights shared during this engaging event, offering a glimpse into the innovative strides Kinza Finance is making in the industry.
Q1.Intro of yourself (what do you do)?
Hi everyone. I’m Lain, I am the marketing director at Kinza Finance. I am a crypto-native professional communicator working in blockchain since 2019 driving marketing and communications for multiple crypto projects. I joined the Kinza Finance team in April, and am thrilled to share about what we have been building at Kinza.
Q2.What is Kinza Finance, can you give us an overview of your project?
Kinza Finance is a DeFi lending platform on BNB Chain. We were a member of the Binance Labs MVB accelerator Season 6 – and were selected as a standout project for Binance Labs investment. We launched our mainnet four months ago and have already surpassed $16M in TVL. Most recently, we launched on opBNB chain as well as our Airdrop Points and Referral Systems as we head towards TGE and Airdrop. Our focus as a project is on security. We aim to grow as a sustainable DeFi mainstay in BNB Chain.We have already launched some cutting edge solutions like Asset Isolation to protect the protocol with high-level security and have conducted multiple security audits. Our ve-3,3 inspired tokenomics ve-real yield is another standout aspect of the project that delivers real yield to users through vote-directed weekly emissions – we will dive into a little deeper into this in later questions. So for those new to Kinza – welcome!
Q3.What key challenges the Web3 space currently faces, and how is Kinza designed to solve them?
With so many projects emerging in the DeFi space across multiple chains, I think one of the biggest challenges Web3 faces has to do with developing a cohesive, sustainable, and opportunity-rich ecosystem that users can focus on and base their investment strategies around long term. Kinza aims to build a sustainable secure money market on BNB chain with real yield. We aim to provide the highest-level of security so users feel confident in their positions on-chain, deep liquidity to ensure sustainable and healthy lending, feature-rich tools so users can protect and grow their investments tailored to their levels of risk-management, and finally – to delivery unmatched real yields. Furthermore, Kinza will build with our BNB Chain and DeFi partners to ensure users have access to innovative investment opportunities. Focusing on these goals will bring millions to DeFi on BNB Chain and ensure we deliver a home base for all users looking to secure, grow, and build on their investment positions.
Q4.What makes Kinza Finance unique compared to their competitors?
Security is a big one here. Our team is constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to level-up our feature-set and platform security. I mentioned asset isolation above – what is asset isolation?
Asset Isolation is a way to protect the overall health of the protocol by isolating higher risk or asset pools with high volatility. Each asset will either be isolated, closed, or open – an Isolated asset type can be used as collateral – but in isolation – so other deposited assets won’t be allowed to be used as collateral in tandem. Closed asset types cannot be used as collateral, and open-type assets can be freely used as collateral simultaneously with other open-type assets. This prevents a domino of negative effects in one pool affecting the whole system.
Other features on Kinza are focused on maximizing capital efficiency – for instance – Efficiency Mode. Toggling on efficiency mode will give users more efficient Loan To Value and other parameters on specific classes of assets – so users can do more with their capital. Currently, Kinza supports a stablecoin asset class to be used with E-mode.
Also – really want to highlight our ve-real-yield tokenomics model. So this really makes Kinza stand out, and I can’t wait to see this rolled out. So we talked about the pools of tokens $KZA that will be directed and emitted as borrower rewards each week – this process will occur over four years.
I’ll also quickly note that all token allocations, including team token allocations are vesting over four years – this is to ensure sustainability and bullish for the long-term momentum of the project – and these four years include community emissions.
So ve-Real-yield – we have the staked token holders – xKZA holders – voting each week to direct upcoming emissions for the next week. Here there are also bribes. Now bribes in the form of KZA can be directed to voters to get them to vote for pools that benefit them. This whole process of battling for directing and earning the weekly KZA emissions is known as the Kinza War.
This will be very exciting, and fuel energy, liquidity, and generate real yield for the community. The team was inspired by the ve-3,3 experiments that brought insane TVL to DEX’s and realized that a similar model would be perfect for driving healthy liquidity for a lending protocol. I can’t wait for the Kinza War.
So really, lots of awesome features and opportunities to take advantage of now and in the upcoming months/years 🔥
Q5.How does Kinza Finance prioritize user security and trust, especially in light of recent security breaches in the DeFi space? Any Features and strategies for risk mitigation.
We touched on a few features in the last question and mentioned asset isolation, but I think it’s a good time to talk about some of the other features in development at Kinza to help strengthen our security. Kinza is committed to the highest level of security, as soon as any security breaches occur in DeFi, Kinza is already directing energy and resources to developing solutions to protect Kinza from similar attacks. For instance, after the Curve incident mentioned earlier, it was necessary to get to work on a more sophisticated asset risk controller to set interest rates and Loan to Value parameters that include important variables crucial to the health and security of lending markets. We are building and developing an IR controller that includes factors like real-time available DEX liquidity for instance. This metric is important, as available DEX liquidity impacts the ability for liquidations to occur smoothly. We believe including these factors and other relevant metrics in asset-specific risk assessments only improves the security and sustainability of the Kinza Protocol as a whole. The Algorithmic LTV Controller is just one example of our ongoing development efforts to strengthen security with innovative features.
Another key component of our security approach is consistent comprehensive audits from a variety of partners, including crowdsource auditing like we are currently doing via Hackenproof. We have already conducted 3 smart contract audits, and make sure that any new piece of code in our smart contracts as we introduce new features is looked over with a fine toothed comb and stress-tested before it is live. We will continue to bring in more security partners, conduct ongoing audits, and push our smart contract security testing to the limit.
Q6.Can you provide a more detailed explanation of the functioning of Kinza Finance’s lending pools and the benefits they present to both lenders and borrowers within the DeFi ecosystem?
Money markets are central to a healthy DeFi ecosystem. Kinza Finance aims to be a sustainable mainstay to the BNB Chain DeFi ecosystem by providing secure borrowing and lending. Kinza Finance DeFi lending allows investors to do more with their investment positions without having to sell them. Users can take advantage of Kinza Finance DeFi opportunities with loans, they can generate yield by providing liquidity, participate in governance and rake in KZA emissions, or they can find purchasing opportunities of tokens at a discount and be rewarded for keeping the platform healthy as a liquidator. Our ve-Real-Yield tokenomics now give an added incentive to borrowers through the weekly emissions, this fuels more liquidity and further builds strength and health for the entire protocol and the BNB Chain DeFi ecosystem in turn.
Q7.Could you share the strategic roadmap for Kinza? Are there any upcoming features or updates that the community should be excited about?
Definitely. We have had an incredible 2023, moving through the Binance Labs accelerator program, our Binance Labs direct investment, launching our Testnet, mainnet, releasing features, growing our community, and surpassing 16+ Million in TVL within 4 months. We are beyond excited to move on to our next development goals, importantly our Token Generation Event. KZA TGE is getting close, while I can’t give you an exact date, stay tuned because an update on this as well as some other roadmap development steps is coming soon. As part of our Tokenomics, up to 5% of the KZA supply will be airdropped at TGE to those who provided liquidity early on our mainnet application app.kinza.finance. This will kickstart our vote escrow tokenomics model and put the Kinza Protocol into full swing.
Some other of our development roadmap goals include releasing updated support for mobile users, internationalization, security feature releases, new security audits, powerful marketing campaigns, and we are excited to mention our development of novel asset opportunities. More information will be released soon on this, but for now, I am thrilled to share that we are experimenting with some really interesting DeFi offerings as we explore Inscription and the Bitcoin ecosystem. We have so much in store, make sure you guys all follow our official Twitter, and join our telegram and discord communities to keep up to date as we make announcements and progress through our roadmap objectives.
Q8.Are there any opportunities for the community to contribute to the growth of Kinza, either as users, developers, or even bug bounty hunters?
100%. There are many ways to get involved and contribute to our development. Importantly, I mentioned the airdrop above and should expand on this here. The KZA airdrop is a huge opportunity to get involved, support the project, and for users to be a part of our momentous TGE. We recently launched our Airdrop Points and Referral System to give users a chance to see in real time how their KZA airdrop allocation is shaping up, and a chance to earn bonuses on referred users deposits. This airdrop is huge for us, and is also an opportunity for us to show our appreciation for early support from community members who have provided liquidity on our mainnet. The users who receive the KZA airdrop at TGE will be the first users to stake for xKZA, and direct our token emissions as part of the Kinza War. We couldn’t be more excited to kick start the Kinza War and our vote escrow tokenomics model with these core users. It’s by no means too late to get involved, so if you haven’t already, head over to our application at app.kinza.finance, connect your wallet, and deposit any supported token to see your airdrop points grow. You gain airdrop points according to a combination of your deposited amount and time held – so deposit and hold is the name of the game. You will also gain a 10% bonus on all referred eligible airdrop amounts. So you can share your referral link in your airdrop dashboard- then when your referred users deposit liquidity and earn an airdrop allocation – you will have 10% of that amount added as an airdrop allocation bonus.
Next, in our community – we launched a program called the Community Legends program. This program gives us the opportunity to show our appreciation and reward active users for their contributions – it could be because of their positive and consistent presence in our community, it could be because of the content they produced, it could be because of their support for newcomers, or their ability to link up resources and information. Our team is constantly looking out for Legends in our chats, and we are rewarding these standout users each week with up to 50 airdrop points. So join our communities, stay active, and we’ll take notice.
Finally, security. We are so excited to have launched this bug bounty program with our partners at Hackenproof. For those of you listening who have technical knowledge, we want to see you put your skills to stress-testing and pointing out any possible vulnerabilities in our smart contracts. We believe in the power of decentralization – in this case – decentralized auditing. More eyes, more perspectives, a diversity of skill sets and talents. We want to ensure that no possible vulnerability is left unnoticed. So here’s the deal:
We want to know every possible vulnerability in our smart contracts that may affect asset pools, user funds, stability, or affect the normal functioning of the Kinza protocol. This includes vulnerabilities that may lead to Stealing or loss of funds, Unauthorized transactions, Transaction manipulation, Attacks on logic (behavior of the code is different from the intended designed behavior of the code), Reentrancy, Reordering, Over and underflows.
The bounties range from $100 to $1,000 for lower impact vulnerabilities, to $5,000 to $50,000 for critical vulnerabilities.
For more information on the bounty program – head over to the hackenproof website linked in the AMA description, and get started today. We look forward to rewarding you for your discoveries.
Community questions
1. What features/improvements are you planning to add to your products in the near future?
We have a lot of exciting things in the pipeline. Firstly, we have a lot in development regarding features that we are building. We have a list of some of the features we are currently building in our docs at docs.kinza.finance – this includes an Interest Rate and LTV controller to further expand our security features to keep the system healthy during unusual conditions.
We are also always building with our partners and have some exciting offerings coming up. As an example of our collaborations with partners, you can check out our Synclub collab with Helio, which is a unique LSDfi opportunity – users can stake BNB on synclub 1:1 for snbnb and then deposit, lend and borrow that snbnb on Kinza.
We also just dropped our roadmap which shares some of our plans of experimenting with Inscription and the Bitcoin ecosystem to develop novel asset opportunities and features.
2. Kinza Finance’s integration of Efficiency Mode seems promising for maximizing capital efficiency. Could you elaborate on the technicalities of this mode? How does it ensure that users get the most out of their assets in terms of borrowing and lending?
Efficiency Mode is a highlight Kinza Finance feature for users looking to maximize capital efficiency. Essentially, Efficiency mode is a capital efficiency boost for all lending parameters for specific classes of assets. Initially, a stablecoin category will be available for users. This means that if users are looking to deposit as collateral, and borrow an asset from the same stablecoin category, they are able to enjoy boosted Loan To Value ratios, Liquidation Thresholds, and Liquidation Penalties.
3. The Kinza team mentions they are inspired by the vote escrow (3,3) Tokenomics used in DEXs. How does Kinza Finance’s gauged voting system work, and how does it impact the distribution of KZA token emissions among lending pools?
Vote escrow experiments in DeFi have shown some incredible potential to drive insane TVL. As you mentioned this has been demonstrated in DEX’s, but Kinza is the first to bring this tokenomics model to lending. We dove into some of this mechanism a little in the main portion of this AMA, but i’ll give a quick summary here because it will be really exciting and we are getting closer to the Kinza War.
Over 55% of our token supply is allocated to community emissions. These emissions are released in a programmed amount each week. Kinza token holders, KZA holders stake for xKZA. xKZA holders have the power to vote each week and direct where the weekly emissions will be distributed in the upcoming week and earn a portion of interest as well as bribes that further fuel the system and influence voters. The emissions each week are primarily earned as borrower rewards.
4. How important is the community to your project? And how can we collaborate or help share tokens for the development of the project?
Yeah, our community is hugely important to us. Our community and users hold the power to vote and direct emissions and help shape the future of our project. We are really passionate about collaborating with our community and really value the contributions from community members in Discord and Telegram. We recently launched our Community Legends program which gives us the opportunity to highlight community members and reward them for their contributions in the chat with some Airdrop Points. These are up for grabs each week – so If you would like to get involved, join our Discord and/or our Telegram, and take a look at our Community Legends program in our docs and Medium articles – and i look forward to seeing you in the chats.
5. What’s the Date Of TGE?
I’m jumping on this question – the final question from the community submissions. It’s a simple question that’s come up a lot in our last few months but it is an important one it is – What is the date of TGE – that is our token generation event for KZA.
We are excited to have just launched our Roadmap that points to our TGE at Q1, 2024. At TGE a few things are happening, we have the Token Generation, but then we also have a massive airdrop coming to users who have been early liquidity providers of our platform. This airdrop is up to 5M or 5% of total KZA supply so it is pretty massive. To get involved and be a part of this airdrop, come join our communities, and read up on our Airdrop Points and Referral Programs, and deposit and hold liquidity on our application app.kinza.finance to make sure you are ready for the airdrop.
