Recently we sat down with Matas Sauciunas, CEO of one of the most exciting DeFi projects of the year: ALF Protocol. Matas and his team have already secured significant Venture Capital funding which they have used to develop a protocol for capital deployment on Solana for the purposes of liquidity provision and yield farming. Alf aims to become the go-to place for blockchain liquidity, initially launching on Solana and then potentially expanding to other chains.
Matas is passionate about the Solana ecosystem and how its low fees and extremely high speed give it the potential to be the leading Layer 1 solution, and his team is building out a core piece of the Solana native Decentralized Financial services. I trust you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and I look forward to watching this dynamic team and project go from strength to strength in 2022.
Interviewer: Hi Matas, thank you for setting aside the time for this interview. I can imagine how busy everything is at your side, knowing that the development of the protocol is well underway. Please, could you explain in a simple way what is Alfprotocol?
Matas: Hi there. Yes, everything is super busy on our side, but anyway it’s great meeting you and speaking with you today. I get this question quite often because of the complexity of the project so my usual reply is that Alfprotocol is a decentralized application built on the Solana blockchain that lets the user supply their tokens to earn interest, borrow some funds for outside use by providing collateral, use our in-house built decentralized exchange & become liquidity providers by supplying tokens to the farms and earn yield rewards and token rewards. What’s unique is that Alfprotocol will provide leverage for users to use to increase their position size while investing in the liquidity provision.
Interviewer: The idea that you and your team are building sounds complex but exciting! Could you tell me a bit more about Decentralised Finance (DeFi)? Why is DeFi getting so much hype and what is your personal opinion on the future of DeFi?
Matas: Decentralized Finance lets users use financial services like lending and borrowing without centralized intermediaries, it also provides endless opportunities to create different protocols that are providing unique use cases of the decentralized money market. What’s important is that DeFi had a growth of 88x last year and is expected to grow by another 10x this year. Also, DeFi comprises only around 5-6% of the entire cryptocurrency market cap. That statistic alone gives me the insight that we’re still in the early stages of DeFi, and we can lock a decent spot within the ecosystem itself.
Interviewer: Thank you for such an explanation. Alfprotocol has chosen the Solana blockchain to work on. Why Solana?
Matas: First of all, Solana is experiencing tremendous growth in attention from developers and investors. And that attention comes for a reason. Solana blockchain is super fast and super cheap and next to that the whole ecosystem of Solana is growing rapidly. We chose Solana because we’re building a leveraged protocol, so we need a blockchain that is super fast with the transactions and also cheap to use. Solana can provide that. Also, the DeFi protocols within the Solana are still at the early stages. So we do have a great opportunity to lock a decent spot for the future of Solana and aim to become a homepage for DeFi on Solana.
Interviewer: Thank you. Solana is definitely on a massive growth trend as you said. Your and your team’s decision to build on this fast and inexpensive blockchain does make sense. Could you provide the top three advantages of the Alfprotocol?
Matas: Certainly. The first advantage would be that users will have an all-in-one place, (a “one-stop shop”) for all DeFi services which at the moment isn’t widely available in the ecosystem, meaning users need to move between different protocols. The second advantage is that those who are risk-seeking investors will have an opportunity to use higher leverage (in some cases up to 200x) for liquidity provision. Of course, the use of high leverage will be highly monitored and will be available for limited farms and users. And lastly, the third advantage is that the entire team building and collaborating on the protocol is transparent and provides regular updates on the development status, educational material, etc. So having a strong and transparent team behind the protocol is a very important aspect.
Interviewer: Absolutely. Transparency and regular communication with the community is always necessary. Just a few more questions Matas, at what stage is your project now and who are the backers of the Alfprotocol right now?
Matas: At the moment Alfprotocol is at the early development stage. We aim to have our public IDO within Q2 of 2022 and aim to launch a fully working protocol in late Q3, 2022. The MVP release of the protocol is expected to take place in early Q2, 2022. The current backers of the project are Zen Capital, Dust Ventures, DIB Ventures, SRT Ventures, Alpha Hunt and Scorpio VC.
Interviewer: Last question for you Matas: how can users participate in the early stage of the Alfprotocol?
Matas: Users do have an opportunity to apply an allocation of Alfprotocol tokens at this early stage of the protocol just like Venture Capital firms do. We cal this round a Pre-IDO round and it is available on our website. Alternatively, users can send us an email via invest@alfprotocol.com with the headline of “Pre-IDO round” and our dedicated person will reply and help with the allocation process.
Interviewer: Thank you for answering all of the questions! It’s been a great time speaking with you and I would like to wish you all the best for the future of Alfprotocol!
Matas: It’s been a great talk with you as well – thank you for your time.