The spectacular rise of DeFi observed with each consequent year leaves no doubt as to the extraordinary potential of this niche to transform all spheres of life. The whole idea about wealth management and value creation has been largely reshaped under the pressure of decentralization, making democratization, accessibility and freedom the new nouns characterizing the old principles. On the bad side, however, with a variety of cryptocurrency tools and meme tokens are flocking the market, investors are more commonly following their FOMO instinct just to find themselves in a trap of their hasty decisions. As a result, the mistrust and frustration among investors prevail, blocking them from following the new potentially winning bet.
NFTs have entered the market as the next game-changer, transforming the essence of digital ownership in the way the data is stored, recorded and transferred. In the last year, it proved itself to be far beyond an ordinary speculative tool by offering a range of practical applications in marketing, branding and intellectual property rights. All of that makes it a mouth-watering investment; this is partially why WOWswap was the first swap to come up with a leveraged trading option employing fractionalized NFTs. With the FOMO nearly reaching a fever pitch, this protocol enables the leveraged trading of the most renowned NFTs in space – some examples include celebrated CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats. WOWswap allows to play on the market sentiment and take advantage of the agiotage created around the NFTs – and thus make FOMO play into your hands.
Reaching out to the co-founder of WOWswap, I asked him a few relevant questions about the industry and his vision of the project.
To begin with, let’s speak about what guides WOWswap along the DeFi journey. What are the values lying at the platform’s core, and what mission does it pursue?
We started WOWswap already a year ago with a mission to become the most popular DeFi leveraged trading platform for digital assets. Currently we are underway with more than 200 tokens available for leverage trading and lending on 7 blockchains. For our 1-year anniversary we just launched WOWswap Pro, added limit orders and notifications, and we believe other DeFi protocols will soon adapt.
For 2022 and beyond our mission is to max out the possibilities of DeFi. Decentralized finance is at the core of the Web3 revolution, with tokenization of assets, and ownership it brings financial independence, and redefines the way companies organise via DAOs. Therefore, we will focus on introducing innovative products to increase capital efficiency with a yield aggregator, leveraged farming and introducing trading incentives via NFTs.
To someone entirely unfamiliar with your platform, how would you describe WOWswap and its underlying purpose?
WOWswap brings financial freedom to the people via leverage trading and decentralized lending. We support more than 200 digital assets on 7 blockchains, so if you feel bullish on a specific digital asset you can maximize the returns with leverage trading or if you are more risk averse, can lend it out to receive passive income.
WOWswap is extremely easy to use. It is as easy to use as your favourite decentralized exchange, with an added feature of leverage which is adjusted with a slider.
I’m aware that WOWswap has been audited by Hacken, a trustworthy auditor in the space. How does it add up to WOWswap’s intrinsic worth?
DeFi built on smart contracts is still at an early stage. The technology is complex and hacks/rugs in DeFi are common. The most savvy users with technical knowledge can verify contracts themselves, but the absolute majority of the people do not have necessary skills to make sure the contracts are safe.
Therefore, before we launched WOWswap we received an audit from Hacken which gives a trusted third party examination of our code. It gives some assurances to our current and future users that the contracts are safe to interact with.
NFT has been an explosive trend in the DeFi space, which WOWswap immediately integrated into its core functionality. How does NFT leveraged trading work?
WOWswap was the first to launch NFT leverage trading. It is an innovative feature which is possible thanks to the composability of DeFi.
To bring NFT leverage trading, we built on top of NFTx and Sushiswap. NFTx fractionalized NFTs by simply dividing the ownership of an indivisible (non-fungible) NFT into fungible smaller fractions. So while NFT is one and unique, fractionalized NFT tokens are divisible and can be tradable as any other token such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Those fractionalized NFT tokens are then listed on Sushiswap automated market maker, which allows users to buy partial ownership of the NFT with any other supported token on Sushiswap. Finally, for WOWswap NFT leverage trading, we provide our users with additional capital (ETH or USDC) to purchase those fractionalized NFT tokens with up to 5x leverage.
We launched the feature on Ethereum. Unfortunately, the high gas makes NFT leverage trading prohibitively expensive, so we hope that with the popularization of NFT fractionalization and decrease in gas fees, the feature will be more used in the future.
Your native token – $WOW – has been already sold out with over $11 million worth of BNB shortly after an ICO sale started. What is the final goal you achieved?
We held WOWswap ICO on February 25th, 2021 expecting the sale to last 3 days, but we sold out 14% of the total WOW token supply in 9 seconds. In total $11 million USD had been sent to the smart contracts, but we returned all but $700,000 USD, which was our goal.
Once again thank you to all the participants in the ICO, and we are happy that after a year since the sale we are here building innovative DeFi products.
What are the special rewards users can count with $WOW? And generally speaking, what are the benefits of holding $WOW on a long-term span?
WOWswap is first and foremost a governance token. WOW token holders can stake WOW token in our DAO page to receive governance rewards from protocol revenue and WOW inflation.
Yet DAO would not be a real DAO if users could not affect the functioning of the protocol. Therefore, by staking WOW users can vote on 18 financial & economic parameters, such as adjusting protocol fees and their distribution.
All the parameters are adjusted instantly on-chain based on your voting power. The more and the longer period you stake WOW tokens, the higher your voting power.
What are the features of the upcoming WOWswap Pro release? Are there any other upcoming projects on your bucket list?
The original WOWswap is extremely easy to use. The interface is similar to any of your favorite DEX with an added slider for leverage.
You can follow the latest updates on our Twitter (https://twitter.com/Wowswap_io) or Medium (https://wowswap-io.medium.com/) pages as well as in our Telegram (https://t.me/wowswap) and Discord (https://discord.com/invite/H4Z4fVNnFF) community channels
Yet WOWswap Pro brings centralized exchange trading experience to DeFi. It has always on chart for the best timing to open a leveraged position, and allows to perform technical analysis on the same page.
Additionally, all the long and short positions, debt level, liquidation health are managed on the same page. Finally, users can see the exact liquidation price and set up Stop Loss and Take Profit before they open a position.
And finally, what waits ahead of you in 2022?
As I mentioned before, for 2022 and beyond we want to max out the possibilities of DeFi. It includes introducing gamification elements with NFTs and prediction markets. We will be focusing on making the protocol more capital efficient with yield aggregator, liquidity optimizer and leveraged farming.
