Avalanche Vietnam x Hubble Exchange AMA Recap

On Sunday, Sep 26 at 02:00pm — 03:00pm (GMT+7), we hosted a live AMA with Sam and Arpit from Hubble Exchange team.
A revised transcript is available below:

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Before we dive into the questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to the Avalanche Vietnamese community, and share some background on your journey to found Hubble Exchange.

Maybe you could speak a bit to sort of what the rationale behind the launch of Hubble Exchange was and what you guys are hoping to achieve and the vision?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): I’m Arpit. I been in the crypto space for 3 years now, where I started from participating in several ETH hackathons. I then joined Polygon as a senior engineer where I worked for 15 months and then later built some cool projects as part of DefiDollar DAO.

Perpetual futures is one of those few use cases that generates renevue in any market condition. We dug more and realized that there is no perps dex that provides cross-margining and multi-collateral (an FTX like experience), while there is a lot of demand for such a product. That’s why we set out to build Hubble — A perpetual futures dex.

Sam (Hubble Exchange): I’m Sam. I fell through the crypto rabbit hole first as a trader back in 2016. I traded spot at first, but later went big on perpetual futures when they were pioneered by Bitmex. When the bear market began, I started building in crypto with a social trade sharing app. I then went onto work on multiple projects on Ethereum, trying to solve problems ranging from an on-chain messaging standard, an open education resource (DeFiPedia), a decentralized curation protocol (ideamarket), and more recently, NFTizing contributions made towards DAOs (Daofolio).

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Much appreciation to your detailed introduction of your team background and Hubble Exchange 👍
Alright, let’s move to the 10 questions from Twitter.

First question: If case Hubble issue its own token in the future, will the token holders have the rights to vote and govern the project under the DAO structure?

Sam (Hubble Exchange): Hubble is initiating as a community-run protocol — decentralization is a top priority. This will absolutely happen. In fact, after an idea suggested from a community member, we are fast-tracking the release of our proposal discussion forum — it will be live after the testnet trading challenge begins. We’re excited to see the proposals that emerge from the community and as a DAO are looking forward to implementing what the community decides.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Thanks for your sharings. We can’t wait to join your testnet 😄. ok let’s move next question

Question 2: Leveraged and futures trading are quite difficult to new users. Do you provide any guidance to help new users get familiar to leveraged trading in general?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): Absolutely, leverage is a double edged sword and its important to present leverage ethically — we’re initiating a community-run guidebook for Hubble that’ll include risk management and critical knowledge needed for those who are beginners in trading with leverage.

We’re also sharing knowledge on twitter, we’ll have a series of video tutorials, we plan to have a guest speaker to talk about “The Basics of Perpetual Futures 101” soon which will likely be part of a larger series involving more guest speakers to come talk to the community about perps.

Along with this, we are very open to more suggestions — if you have ideas, please hop on the discord and share them.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Great! Please share your discord link 👀

Sam (Hubble Exchange): https://discord.gg/A5ahWztc4C

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam):
Question 3: One of the main concern for leveraged trading is liquidation. How do you protect investors’ position from price volatility such as flashloan attacks?

Sam (Hubble Exchange): We use chain link oracles, which are battle-tested and very reliable price feeds. We don’t depend on any one exchange for the price feed so traders can be confident the price feed is reliable and flash loan attack proof.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): yes, Chainlink is what we want 😉

Question 4: Liquidity, Transaction fees and slippage are always the 3 important factors in financial services. How does Hubble exchange solve the above problem to attract more users? What innovations will it likely make to improve users’ trading experience?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange):
Good question. There are three questions in one, so I’ll address each one separately.

- Liquidity

Since Hubble does not use a AMM, there are no liquidity providers. Instead, traders provide liquidity to each other.

— Transaction fees.

This is why we are building on Avalanche — near-instant transactions and at an inexpensive price. Perfect for perpetual future traders —
especially high frequency traders.

- Slippage

Slippage is a phenomenal that occurs when the intended/expected price is different from the executed price of the trade, on Hubble there is no order book where a lack of liquidity can cause slippage! Instead, we use a vAMM design, liquidity and slippage is not an issue — you can be assured the trade you make will be close to the market price (though there might be a rare discrepancy in case of extreme market conditions). Hubble uses Chainlink oracles for the price feed, and then the funding rate incentives contract price to stay as close to the spot price of the asset. The funding rate is a fee imposed on either long or short positions to encourage the market price of the contract to mirror the spot price of the underlying asset. This is used by all perpetual futures exchanges and its a battle-tested mechanism, not novel to Hubble.

The result we will achieve will be an unparalleled trading experience never seen before on a decentralized futures protocol. Across all chains, Hubble will likely be the fastest and with the most features, thanks to cross-margin, multi-collateral and eventually, tokenized positions.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Thanks guys for the sharing. It’s so so informative 👌
Question 5: There are many competitors in this perpetual future such as DYDX, Perpetual Protocol, Injective Protocol,etc, so are there any orientations to attract users?

Sam (Hubble Exchange): Hubble has two key features that set it apart from other decentralized futures protocols:

- You can trade perps while maintaining full exposure to your favorite coins — Use multiple coins like BTC, ETH, USDC, etc as collateral.

- Cross-Margining — Automatically utilize PnL from one position to either offset losses to increase leverage in other positions.

Along with these two flagship features, for the future, we’re also working on tokenizing perpetual positions so that they can be utilized in other DeFi protocols. You could use your profitable perps position as collateral on lending platforms.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Sounds awesome! users can earn passive income from their perps position. 🎁
Question 6: Contract security is a big issue in DeFi. Has your smart contract been audited? How do you ensure the protection of users’ money so that users feel safe?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): We’re taking security very seriously — this is why we don’t even have a main net launch date yet. We don’t want to commit to a date, until we’re confident the protocol is secure. First, we’re battle-testing the protocol on the testnet so it is well stress tested. It’ll begin an audit by PeckShield shortly, who are one of the leading auditors in the space.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam):
Question 7: Launching projects in a bull run is much profitable than during the bear cycle. In a bear run where most of the projects fail and sometimes gone into oblivion, how will “Hubble Exchange’ stand the test of times? What strategies do the project employ to mitigate possible losses?

Sam (Hubble Exchange): This is a good question. During bear markets, capital dries up. TVL slumps. It’s one of the reasons we are building a perps exchange — regardless of if the market goes up or down, there will always be traders taking a directional trade whether that is longing the market or shorting the market. As long as there is trading volume, Hubble will be able to generate revenue even during bear markets as traders use it trade. Of course, there won’t be as much trading volume as there is during a bull market, but people will continue to trade and Hubble will continue to generate revenue.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Looks really cool when Hubble will continue to generate revenue no matter what stage the market is in.

Question 8: Could you please tell me just a little more about the team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced teams?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): Most of the team members are ex-polygon. I, who is leading the protocol developement wrote the Matic bridge that holds billions today. Other than that our team has collectively shipped multiple DeFi products in the past with a collective TVL of $50M+.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Thanks for your sharings Arpit 🙈
Question 9: What is your top 3 things for priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?

Sam (Hubble Exchange):
1. Launching safely and securely.
2. Decentralizing the protocol with a community-run approach.
3. Growing the trader-base.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): And last question from Twitter.
Question 10: What is the most ambitious goal of your project? What is the ultimate vision that Your project is trying to achieve within the cryptocurrencies market? I would appreciate it if you could share with us any Upcoming Updates?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): We really want to make a dent in the dex market share for derivatives. Binance and FTX is where almost all the perpetual futures volume is right now, we’d like to build a decentralized alternative to them that competes side-by-side.

Houy (Avalanche Vietnam): Your team must have been working really hard to achieve these goals 🚀

Live Q&A:

1. Retail investors like me are very concerned about the price growth of token in the future, how to design your tokenomics to meet this factor?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): I haven’t yet launched a token yet. It will be launched only after Hubble has product market fit.

2. What does the name “Hubble “stand for? Do you have a story behind this name?

Sam (Hubble Exchange): Yes, we named Hubble after the Hubble Telescope.

3. How safe is your platform? Has there been any Audit so that its safe from bugs and smart contract is fully audited

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): The audit is starting in October. We are writing lots of tests and that is a part of our development process.

4. What is your advantage over other projects? Is it from a security point of view or the technology you are using? Or are there other advantages? What makes you believe that your project is worth choosing?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): Hubble’s value add is that it is supports multi-collateral and cross-margining systems. These are not yet present in other futures DEXes.

5. Is it possible to create a pool for leveraged trading on my own on your platform? How many types of assets/trading pairs shall be supported on your platform?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): We won’t have this functionality in the first launch.
Their will be some coins that will be whitelisted as collateral and several markets depending on what the community is most interested in. AVAX will be supported at launch 🙂

6. How can the vAMM reduce the limitation of old AMM like leverage, shorts and impermanent loss?

Arpit (Hubble Exchange): Or vAMM mechanism is based on curve v2 pools, which concentrates liquidity around the current mark price. This leads to a very low slippage at all times.

About Hubble Exchange:

Multi-collateral/Cross-Margin Perpetual Futures on Avalanche.
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