Pavel Shkitin, CEO of the Nominex and Nomiswap ecosystems, talks about the current market situation, the price of the NMX token, and development plans.
Boosting Pools
The long-awaited boosting pools have recently been launched on Nomiswap. Totally 4 million NMX are blocked, which is about 37% of all tokens that were in the launch pool. That is, 37% of the tokens from the launch pool flowed into boosting pools and were frozen there for some time.
Regarding the impact on the price of NMX: there were expectations that after the launch of boosting, the price would go up. You need to understand the mechanics of the impact on the price of a particular functionality. Boosting does nothing more than simply freeze tokens for a certain period of time. Generally we expected that people who already had tokens on hand would simply put them in boosting to get additional yield. Mass purchases of the token were not planned. At the same time, some tokens are burned if the user withdraws them from boosting ahead of time. It turns out that it is more difficult for someone to succumb to temptation and sell. That is, boosting affects the price, but indirectly.
We also have further plans for boosting. What is now implemented is the first version. Boosting gives additional profitability, and this profitability is an additional emission of tokens, which may not have a very positive effect on the token. Therefore, the next version of boosting pools will be designed in such a way that we close the existing high yield boosting pools and instead launch lower yield boosting pools. In general, the strategy is to reduce the emission of NMX tokens.
Market
I want to shed light on the market and what is happening to us. Our TVL (total value locked), that is, liquidity, has decreased 3 times over the past few months (namely, since the beginning of summer). This also applies to the price of the NMX token. But, in fairness, if you open Defillama, you can see on the main page a graph of TVL changes among all protocols (on all blockchains). And it will be clearly seen there that the total TVL in January was ±168 billion, and now it is 51 billion. In fact, the total TVL has fallen by more than 3 times across all products, directions, and all blockchains. The fact that our TVL has fallen 3 times is definitely bad. But the fall did not happen out of the blue: the overall DeFi market is going through hard times.
Nomiswap TVL Ranking
I want to immediately raise a question about our high-profile plan to overtake Biswap on TVL by the end of the year. We wanted to do this by launching a competition to attract liquidity, where there would be 100 prizes, and those people or teams that attracted the most liquidity would share the prize pool of $200,000. The mechanics of this competition is now at the final stage of development. However, we believe that this competition will not yet bring the expected result.
Therefore, it was decided to hold it later, at a more favorable time - when we manage to reverse the token rate so that it gets an uptrend. The effectiveness of the competition will be higher, and we will be able to get more significant results. But at the same time, the plan to get into the top 10 in terms of trading volume among all DEXs on all blockchains remained.
NMX token exchange rate
The team of our project has no interest in the token rate falling because farming profitability depends on the rate, and how much liquidity the liquidity providers will bring us depends on it. We all need a strong NMX. The NMX rate cannot grow just like that, there is a whole macroeconomics behind it, a huge number of factors.
Let's take bitcoin as an example. It's at a pretty low level right now. And it would seem that many were ready to buy it at a price of 19k when it cost 30-40k. But by now, bitcoin has long been in the “flat” and is dangling in this price range. Now the macroeconomic state of the market is in such a state that it is not clear where everything will go in the near future. While the general mood in the market does not portend growth.
In my opinion, the story with the course will unfold when a favorable series of events comes - not only in the crypto market but throughout the world. Some factors should positively influence the minds and thoughts of people. I believe that it is wrong to talk and talk about the price of the NMX token in isolation from the whole world and crypto markets in general because these are interconnected things.
Every time we raise the question about the fall in the exchange rate, the answer opens up by itself - we are such people, and now we behave this way in this market. When the general mass mood is negative, even if some whale or project team comes and buys back the token for some significant amount at once, people’s mood will not change from this. Most likely there will be a temporary improvement. But without a change in the mass mood of the people, a reversal is unlikely to occur. The combination of factors must converge at one point, and this is what should affect the course. Therefore, one way or another, all these cryptocurrency cycles are based on the psychology of a large number of people.
We all understand that the rate is negatively affected by the constant issuance of a token. But there is no getting away from this because the release of the NMX token is essentially farming. This is what people provide their liquidity for, and earn money from it. If there is a constant emission, but there is no constant influx of users who would buy tokens from the market, then the probability of a price drop is very high.
What can reverse the price of NMX now is buying back tokens from the market and burning them through trading fees, which is what our DEX is generating. We've been doing this for several weeks now. Most likely, other top dexes do the same: Pancakeswap and Biswap. They also have a constant release of tokens in large quantities, and they are well aware that there is simply no influx of new users in the current market.
How are we going to be in the top 10 among DEXs on all blockchains?
It is planned to transfer all pools to the technology of concentrated liquidity, which we have successfully tested on stablecoin pools. Now we are actively working on transferring all pools to this technology. This will allow, without increasing liquidity, to increase trading volume and trading fees, which we will continue to spend on buying back NMX tokens and on subsequent burning until the situation stabilizes.
Why not remove the extra pools? Those that do not show a large trading volume.
77% of all tokens that are issued as farming rewards are issued for NMX token pools and for staking. All other pools that do not include NMX - they take only 23%, which is actually very little. And outsider pools in terms of liquidity (10-15 pools) occupy only 1% of the tokens that are issued. At the same time, there is liquidity there, these pools give TVL and there is some trading volume. The truth is that we spend 77% of tokens on NMX pools - which is a lot, and we need to reduce this number. This high percentage is due to our high profitability. We have a significantly higher return on our farming, staking and boosting pools than on other pools that do not include NMX.
If we look at our top competitors, then the profitability by pools, and by staking, where their native token is, has long been much lower. We believe that in order to achieve stabilization in the price of the token, it is necessary to implement such technological improvements that will lead to an increase in trading volume and trading commission volumes, which we will also continue to spend on buying back the NMX token. On the other hand, emission reduction is also necessary to stabilize NMX. We will be careful to reduce emissions and try to compensate for the decrease in profitability with new, replacing functionality.
The high profitability that we see on our screens, of course, is nice. But you need to understand that thousands of people receive this profitability, and if I do not sell my tokens received for farming or that I earned from staking, this does not mean that other people do not. There is no mechanism that affects the price of a token, except for the sale of this token. The higher the yield, the stronger the decline will be, since the pressure on the price is higher (especially if the price of the token falls for a long time). We are convinced that the exchange rate will most likely not be corrected without a reduction in emissions.
But when the rate straightens out, APR will automatically rise as the price of the token rises. That is, we just need to go to this trend line.
Marketing
We constantly advertise and experiment: we launch advertising where we have not advertised before (Telegram channels, YouTube channels, native Telegram advertising, Twitter advertising). But against the backdrop of negativity around the market, advertising is now working poorly, and it works poorly not only for us, but for the vast majority of crypto projects, against the backdrop of general negativity in the markets. Nevertheless, we continue to make advertisements, but we experiment more: we make links that we didn’t do before; we cover informational events that have not been covered before; we place ads with new opinion leaders or bloggers. We have not reduced advertising budgets.
Listings
We are not yet ready to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on listings in the current general negative situation in all markets. In our opinion, the effectiveness of this will be small. In order to be on the top exchanges, we must first list on a large number of non-top exchanges of the 2nd and 3rd tier. That is, you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get listed on Binance, and this does not guarantee the final listing there. And even if it guarantees, it does not guarantee what everyone wants - a positive impact on the price of the token.
I'll give you one example that we were poked with a few months ago - AMAZY. After listing on several exchanges, their token dropped 10 times. And the trading volume is now not much larger than that of NMX.
If we launch a message that we are listed on Binance (assuming this happens), it is obvious that some will want to “ride” on this. People will understand that this is positive news and will start buying back only to sell when the price makes a significant 2x. But this hype usually does not last long. The growth from the listing is speculative. If the growth is not organic, there is no positivity in the market, these short-term moments of positive return to the previous state very quickly.
Listings are not enough, you need a product that is used by a large number of people. This is the main criterion for project stability.
Concentrated liquidity
Thanks to the introduction of the new technology "concentrated liquidity", we stand out in the liquidity aggregators in the first place, ahead of all other technologies. Now trading stables is most profitable on Nomiswap, despite the fact that Pancake has hundreds of millions of dollars of real money on stables, and we have 4 million. Now it is really more profitable to trade stables on dexes, and not on Binance - because of the great competition among dexes. And accordingly, we must compete with them. We are now number 1 in swap fees. The trading volume is pretty decent right now, with several million dollars going through stablecoin pools alone. Due to the fact that the commission there is thousands of fractions of a percent, we earn on this in the form of commissions $200-300 per day, we also let them in at the mercy of the NMX token.
Stable swaps yielded results: we were able to concentrate liquidity, we understood how the technology works, but they did not give us many trading commissions. And if we draw a parallel between stable swaps and concentrated liquidity on other pools, then these are different things. Pools with stablecoins are not volatile, but in pools where one of the tokens is a stablecoin and the other is not a stablecoin, the volatility of one token in relation to the other is large, and there is arbitrage that generates a large trading volume. The higher the volatility of one asset relative to another, the greater the trading volume. This is how we pull liquidity from other dexes to ourselves. Even if the number of live traders has not increased, arbitrage bots do their job and automatically generate trading volume.
Now our number one task is to better develop this technology, implement it and expect it to increase trading volume while increasing the trading commission, which we will continue to spend on buying NMX.
In the long term, our Nomiswap is transforming to be not only a dex, but also a liquidity aggregator. It is better to become an aggregator and cooperate with dexes than to compete. There will be more benefits for traders, we will attract more liquidity, thereby increasing capitalization. Ultimately, the number of users affects the capitalization of the product and the cost of the token.
Our team has not been reduced throughout the entire time, we have not fired a single member of the team, neither from the technical department nor from marketing. We all continue to work and achieve our goals. We build hypotheses, we test them. The most important thing is that we do not stop and understand that if we give up, then nothing good will come of it. In this regard, we are very different from other projects, we have been working continuously for 5 years and have experienced several falls in the crypto market. Fundamental products must take years to build.
Q&A (questions and answers section)
Willy: What other steps are planned to maintain the course besides boosting and burning? Maybe we, as investors, can influence the rate?
Pavel: You have an understanding that there is a secret ingredient that will lead to the fact that the rate will grow. Actually, it doesn't exist. When people in the mass are positive and understand that in the long term the token will grow, they buy it or hold it, and in case of corrections, they buy it in addition. In such cases, we see that the rate feels confident and it grows. No one influences the course except the people who hold it. We as a team cannot impose investment strategies on our users. What is the team doing to positively influence the course? We are currently developing concentrated liquidity and expect to increase the trading volume, and increase the trading commission, which we will fully spend on burning.
In the recent months, the token rate has fallen, liquidity in NMX pools has also fallen, at the peak, it reached a total of 25 million, and now it reaches 6-7 million. Now it is easier to influence the token rate than with a liquidity of 25 million the same amount. We will also reduce the issue by reducing the reward for farming in pools, which is now abnormally large for the crypto market. If these 2 tricks have a positive effect, we can get a more stable NMX.
Ivan: How will you support old holders, for example, airdrop? I would also like positive news for newcomers - how to attract new users to the team.
Pavel: It is unlikely that airdrops will somehow improve the situation now. Airdrops, in my opinion, should be distributed at positive moments, we did this at the time of the launch of the dex. Then it paid off. Now I don't see any benefit in it. Now our number 1 task is to straighten the course of the NMX. We need more fundamental product changes, not airdrops or contests.
As for attracting new users: we do not have a goal to attract newcomers with a beautiful wrapper and “hook them”. It will not lead to anything good. People should use the product, farm, stake, trade only when there is a logically built chain in their head and everything is financially justified. We need fundamental changes in the product, in its competitiveness, then it will bear fruit. Not semi-marketing campaigns.
Victor: Good evening, is there any plan to make the Nomiswap app and improve the Nominex app? Have you considered adding P2P?
Pavel: There is no application for Nomiswap and it is not planned for the near future, because it will not work. We are now devoting all our resources and efforts to fundamentally make our product stronger than all other similar products and better compete with them. If we are now developing an application, we need to defocus and spend part of the resources on the application. Now it is more rational to spend resources and time on something that will give more output, which we all need. Once we have an understanding that Nomiswap feels great, we compete well with the rest of the dexes, in which case we can think about convenience and release the application. It's the same with Nominex. Moreover, there are not so many traders now, and it is still more convenient to trade on the desktop.
Regarding P2P, we are not going in this direction, since there are a lot of scammers there. I don’t want to come into contact with fiat, then get lawsuits and communicate with the police. This is all inevitable, as fraudulent schemes are actively operating in P2P. We understand that it would be convenient to do everything in one interface, but we are not ready to take on these risks.
M P: Is Nominex a member of Binance Labs? How many tokens are being sold per day by the team within the project?*
Pavel: No, we are not part of the Binance startup aggregator. Last year there was a competition for the most innovative DeFi projects, we entered the top twenty.
Regarding the sale of team tokens, we have not been selling team tokens at all since June. It is vital for our project that the token stabilizes. Since the beginning of the summer, we have not earned anything from both of our products: we spend the commission from Nominex and Nomiswap on buying and burning tokens.
Geegun: If the team itself is not making money, how much capital does Nominex have to survive the bear market?
Before we got the opportunity to sell tokens, 4 years passed when we developed the product. For the first 2 years, the sites were not available. All this time we have been developing with our own funds, which we have from a previous project that is not related to crypto. There is a reserve. Plus, we have significantly strengthened in terms of the technical base for blockchain development. That is, the expertise within the team is quite high. And this allows us to feel confident - we can do complex things in a reasonable amount of time. Including what we have recently implemented: concentrated liquidity on stablecoin pools and what we are currently working on for other pools. The main thing is that we have the expertise, and we also have a reserve of finances. We did not spend it in the first 4 years of work.
Are you planning to introduce a lottery? Why don't you conduct surveys in telegram chats about the updates you want to implement?
The mechanics that we implement are not adopted spontaneously. There are always discussions, we arrange focus groups and brainstorms, and we think through everything. We try to take into account many factors, including those that do not lie on the surface. Therefore, you need to understand that before we implement something, we conduct a serious study.
About the lottery: this certainly adds functional diversity to the product, but we are concerned about the stabilization of the coin. And the lottery will not affect it. We looked at studies of how these lotteries affect our competitors. Many have removed them so as not to create an even greater emission of tokens. I think in some form a lottery can be done. But we will return to this issue when it is appropriate - that is, when the product is more stable.
If we did not conduct surveys about the functionality in the community, then there was enough data to make a decision without a survey. In addition, we do not always have to make popular decisions. Many users find it difficult to accept that now they need to be patient, and then it will be useful. So yes, that's one of the reasons. The second is that in most cases we are sure that we are doing everything right.
Kuzmich: Is Nominex subject to the restrictions that Binance has? For citizens of the Russian Federation.
At the moment there are no restrictions. Nominex users are anonymized for Binance. But there is a caveat: until recently, Binance placed the responsibility for validating transactions on us. But recently there was a case when they themselves blocked the wallets of a group of people with the wording “stolen funds”. There is no massive problem, but given the authority of Binance, it makes no sense to believe that they will do badly to their own users in some cunning ways. They don't even tell us not to let the citizens of the Russian Federation in, even in an informal conversation.
Anton: Are there any plans to launch futures on Nominex and Nomiswap?
We have a large list of items that we would like to implement on Nominex. But now the focus has shifted to the development of Nomiswap. DeFi direction is now more promising. Therefore, futures on Nominex are in the plans, but there are no specific dates yet.
Boris: Have you thought about adding NFTs, for example, NFT avatars?
I am convinced that this will not affect the situation in any way. Yes, it's a nice touch, but there's no business case yet for implementing NFT in the current state of our product.