Chainlink AMA Recap Update

Below you will find a recap of our AMA with Chainlink, as requested by several of our community members who couldn’t attend it live.

The AMA was held last Wednesday. Hosted by Chainlink, our Educational Director Stanton Wong represented Horizon Protocol. Stanton explained the basics of our project, and answered questions to members of the Chainlink community.

Moderator Questions

What makes HZN different?
I think as of right now, one of the unique parts of our project is that we are currently the only fully functional synthetic assets exchange on the BNB Chain. The low costs for each transaction matches with our mission around easy access, so everyone can try trading without much cost.

I also want to mention that to fulfill our mission, Horizon Protocol needs to make synthetic assets and defi derivatives very accessible. To do that, we take a user centric approach and have a strong focus around UI/UX design.

How does HZN integrate Chainlink’s products and services?
Chainlink is absolutely critical to what we are doing as the entire exchange is dependent on Oracles and we believe Chainlink has the strongest offering, especially to real world assets. We use Chainlink’s Price Feeds for users to trade on Horizon Exchange (launched just last Friday)!

Additionally, we will use Chainlink’s Keepers network to help maintain certain key functions in the protocol, such as weekly reward distribution, debt snapshots, as well as for limit orders and stop-loss functionality while trading.

What is the best way for newcomers to get started with your project?
A quick description to help wrap your mind around the process:

• Staking involves buying HZN, Horizon Protocol’s native token, and staking it as collateral in Horizon Genesis for weekly rewards.
• Trading can be done by buying zUSD, Horizon Protocol’s stablecoin, from PancakeSwap and using the zUSD to buy other synthetic assets on Horizon Exchange (i.e. zBTC, zETH, zAAPL, zTSLA).

With the low fees on BNB Chain, it is a great way to experience what synthetic assets and defi derivatives are capable of.

Can you share what’s next on your project’s roadmap?

So much is coming!

Our next release will be Horizon Genesis v2.0, a major update to our staking platform, with significant quality of life improvements that will make it easier for users to manage their stake with the help of charts and analytics!

Secondly, we will be updating the Horizon Dashboard with an increased amount of real-time statistics, giving our users more information to make better decisions in managing debt and trading synthetic assets.

On Horizon Exchange, we will be adding the ability to short assets. We will also be adding a bunch more synthetic assets into the market to be made available for trading! We invite everyone to join our discussions on which assets to add next round.

Community Questions

Q: When can we expect Horizon Exchange to launch inverse assets/shorting? Currently there is no time frame for that particular goal on the roadmap.
A: This is our next big project. From discussions with the dev team, the expected timeline is sometime in Q3.

Q: When will Horizon Exchange introduce leverage trading?
A: We have had a lot of internal discussions about leveraged trading and futures. We were deciding between futures and options, but it is most likely that we will be aiming to do futures after inverse assets/shorting.

Also from discussions with the dev team, we are aiming for a Q4 release for futures and leveraged trading.

Q: With Horizon Exchange being live, now would be a great time to attract new users. What is planned for marketing in the near future to gain new users and community members?
A: We do have a campaign that is getting started that uses a lot of the typical marketing strategies: email marketing, social media, paid social and display ads, influencers, etc. This makes sense this time around because of the release of Exchange.

In the long run though, we are interested in exploring more guerilla marketing tactics to really punch above our weight.

We are also very interested in engaging the community more to help us brainstorm and figure out how we can do better.

Q: Are there any incentives planned to increase the current volume on Horizon Exchange?
A: The main incentive we are exploring in regards to incentives is to create a trading leaderboard so everyone can see how certain portfolios are doing. Pairing that with social elements, we hope to create more engagement around trading and make it more fun.

In general, one of the more important strategies will also be to explore how to increase liquidity. The goal for increasing liquidity is to start connecting with other projects, i.e. liquidity providing platforms and yield optimizers, etc.

Q: Will the community be able to vote which new zAssets they wish to see added on HZN exchange?
A: Yes. We are intent on moving towards a DAO structure, so we want as much feedback as possible. There will always be some limitations though. We have a limited number of new zAssets that we want to bring each round and we also need to make sure that the oracle is available via Chainlink.

Q: The Horizon Protocol introduction and Horizon Exchange videos were well-received by the community. As educational director, is there anything you can share with us on whether — and what type — of new videos may get added?
A: In addition to the ones you mentioned, we are also preparing for a Genesis video to be released. We agree that access and ease of use is very important, so that is something we are planning to focus on building more of (tutorials, text and video).

Q: When can we see HZN get listed on a major CEX?
A: We’re actively communicating with a few CEXs, but we are very careful about how to get started because CEXs will drop you if you don’t have enough volume.

Q: Is the project’s code audited?

A: This was one of the first things we did. Here’s a link to the article, which also contains a link to the audit and its results: https://horizonprotocol.medium.com/horizon-security-audit-f4cc820de090

Q: Is there any major marketing plan? The way I see it, the majority of HZN investors are holders who are in it for the rewards. Very few are actively trading the newly released Exchange.
A: I’ve mentioned above that we are activating a marketing campaign around the Exchange. We will heavily measure the effectiveness of it to see what we should do more of and what doesn’t work.

With most of crypto, people are here for the gains, so that is completely understandable.

We do want to make sure that we are building towards are mission of global borderless access to investment opportunities all around the world.

We would like to thank the Chainlink team for giving us the opportunity to present our project to their community, and we would also like to thank the Chainlink community for their time.

We hope you, the reader, found the answers insightful. And please do let us know it you would like to see additional AMAs. (Feel free to drop names!)

Website: https://horizonprotocol.com
Medium: https://horizonprotocol.medium.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/GxfGJn6afB
Telegram Community: https://t.me/HorizonProtocol
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/HorizonAnnouncements
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HorizonProtocol