KuCoin AMA With Unizen (ZCX) — Engineering Growth in the Digital Assets Sector for Everyone

2022/10/26 13:01:37

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: October 26, 2022, 10:00 AM - 11:57 AM (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the Chief Technical Officer at Unizen, Martin Granström, and the Chief Executive Officer at Unizen, Sean Noga, both in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Official Website: https://app.unizen.io

Whitepaper: https://www.unizen.io/docs/unizen-v1-litepaper-2021-04-23-22-02.pdf

Follow Unizen on Telegram and Twitter.

Project Introduction

Unizen is a crypto financial services trading platform whose aim is to provide a unified interface to enable seamless access to decentralized and centralized web3 innovations. The platform incorporates user- accessible tools that reduce friction in interacting with the increasingly multi-chain universe. Unizen also provides custom-built trade aggregation services that are built on top of publicly accessible smart contracts to bring blockchain-related services together under the same user interface. Unizen’s mission is to reduce complexity and increase accessibility in a secure web3 environment to reduce the threshold for new adopters and to help experienced traders stay on-top with new innovations.

Guests

Martin Granström — Chief Technical Officer of Unizen, Smart Exchange Ecosystem

Martin Granström is the Chief Technology Officer of Zen innovations Pte Ltd., the operator of the Unizen Smart Exchange Ecosystem, and the CTO of JUN Capital Management Ltd., a leading crypto VC and strategic advisory firm. Martin has over 15 years of experience working with and leading complex software architecture and development projects; including system-level, data-driven, UI/UX applications; and cryptographic projects in the rapidly evolving blockchain market. Martin currently lives in Lulea, Sweden. He is a full-stack software developer who previously worked for Netrounds (acquired by Juniper Networks in 2020), where his role was to manage the R&D team responsible for a cloud-hosted (AWS) microservice application that monitored Tier 1 Telecom Operator networks and services.

Sean Noga — Chief Executive Officer of Unizen, Smart Exchange Ecosystem

Sean Noga is the CEO of Zen Innovations Pte Ltd., the operator of the Unizen Smart Exchange Ecosystem, and the CTO of JUN Capital Management Ltd., a leading crypto VC and strategic advisory firm. He has been directly involved in the blockchain and cryptocurrency movements since the Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper in 2008. He currently lives in Singapore. Sean became deeply involved with direct crypto investing, blockchain project discovery, whitepaper evaluations, crypto-exchange strategy and strategic advisory whilst living in Tokyo in 2014. He is a broadly and deeply connected member of the global blockchain community and has had the privilege of continuously reinforcing these connections and working relationships with high-quality crypto-investor syndicates, enterprises, leading crypto exchanges, editors, key opinion leaders, market makers, and the management teams and advisors across a plethora of projects.

Q&A from KuCoin

Q: How does Unizen function as a Web3 Operating System?

Martin: An operating system is a framework of tooling around applications. At a very high level, that's really what Unizen is, but for web3 applications.

Due to the openness of programmable blockchains, we can onboard any dApp to Unizen and provide a unified look and feel with a full feature set. That means anyone looking to trade on Uniswap, for instance, can do so through Unizen simply by opening the application drawer (Modules) and selecting Uniswap.

One aspect of positioning ourselves as an Operating System is making web3 applications accessible through a single interface/web app. But the more important component is the tooling and custom OS logic we've introduced to make interactions with the applications more user-friendly and secure.

Consider token bridges, for instance. They exist for the sole purpose of transferring digital assets between blockchains. So a user that wants to stake on Polygon Network, but has their "stakeable" assets on the Ethereum Network, needs to find a secure bridge that supports that network and its asset. There are many risks associated with this process.

The many steps include:

  1. Finding the bridge that supports the asset.
  2. Navigating to the website.
  3. Learning how to interact with it.
  4. Using the bridge provider's official token to use the bridge.

We do not view a token bridge as a product that a company is founded around. We view it as a messaging protocol. Similar to TCP or UDP in computer networking. A user should be able to find a website that supports datagram delivery between clients.

What if you had to do so to send a message on Telegram. Find and navigate a specific website that could deliver that message to your friend. That's how cross-chain communication works today.

Our solution packs that logic into the Unizen OS. It allows users to access any web3 application immediately, no matter the blockchain or the website it's hosted on.

At Unizen, our Web3 applications will be immediately accessible in the application drawer, no matter the blockchain your assets are on. You'll be able to interact with it without ever leaving the web app and exposing yourself to "phishing" attacks and sketchy token bridges with clunky UIs that force the use of their native token. It just works.

We're making Web3 look, feel and act like Web2 without compromising fundamentals.

Q: Can you share the utilities of your token?

Sean: $ZCX is at the core of Unizen's innovation at all times. We believe in deep token utility and want to incentivize platform users to leverage the benefits that holding $ZCX enables.

There's always a balance to be struck. We do not want to enforce the usage of $ZCX for users that want to interact with our products. So we try to make it more subtle.

The current use cases for $ZCX are as follows:

  1. Dynamic Multi-Asset Staking
  2. The acquisition of a PRO membership tier NFT
  3. Reduced trading fees on our CEX module
  4. Zero bridging fees when interacting with our multi-chain bridge
  5. Dynamic and deflationary characteristics as users interact with the Unizen Trade Aggregator.
  6. Deflationary by design, in a similar but expanded capacity to what we are witnessing recently in Ethereum's historic merge.

We recognize Bitcoin as a burgeoning world reserve asset due to its sound tokenomics, and we wish for ZCX to follow in these great footsteps with its hyper-deflationary tokenomics.

There is plenty more to come with the continuous expansion of the Unizen operating system and web3 application support.

As our roadmap reveals, we believe in ​​kaizen (continuous improvement) in every aspect of Unizen, especially the $ZCX utility.

Q: Can you let us know about your product? What does it do?

Martin: While I touched upon this in my previous answer, the high-level pitch is that Unizen is essentially a one-stop shop for all things web3. The Unizen product provides a presentation layer for market intel, NFTs, portfolio tracking, portfolio management, and much more. We also provide OS logic to enable seamless cross-chain interactions and aggregating trades over thousands of liquidity pools across a plethora of blockchains. We enable access to the top web3 innovations and the tooling around them to make those easily accessible.

Users of the Unizen OS can:

  1. Buy/sell thousands of assets across several blockchains with a single click, knowing that we will scan 70+ DEXs (growing this count by the day) to find the optimal returns for the desired trade.
  2. Interact with third-party web3 innovations across several blockchains without having any digital assets on said blockchain: or at all for that matter.
  3. Move digital assets between blockchains seamlessly.
  4. Track, monitor, and rebalance your portfolio across multiple blockchains.
  5. Perform technical analysis, collect market intel, and track transactions.
  6. Earn a plethora of different tokens through the DMAS staking platform.

No sign-up. No bridging. No KYC. No complexity.

Q: How does Unizen plan to scale and add innovation to the Unizen Trade Aggregator?

Martin: The Unizen Trade Aggregator is the only trading platform for digital assets that provides seamless access to thousands of digital assets across seven blockchains. On top of that, we're ensuring that users trading on Unizen get the most out of their investments by scanning 70+ DEXs (and counting) across seven blockchains (and counting) every time a trade is conducted.

We're also introducing "trade splitting" to take that even further. This feature will split a large trade across several liquidity pools to keep slippage at a minimum and truly maximize the returns while keeping costs at a minimum for conducting said trade(s).

Because we designed and owned the trade engine, we also can attach it as OS logic to coming innovations. Much more to come on that later.

Q: We noticed that you have decided to incorporate Burning Mechanism in Q4 2022, as stated in the roadmap. Can you give a technical breakdown of that?

Martin: We're working on this as we speak. The way the Burning Mechanism will work is rather simple. With every single-chain trade conducted by a user of the Unizen platform, a portion of ZCX will be burnt. No matter the asset acquired. For cross-chain trades conducted - twice that amount will be burnt. This enables an additional deflationary mechanic as part of the core innovation that hopefully incentivizes people to interact with the Unizen Trade Aggregator.

Sean: In addition to the concerns of this Burning Mechanism, we are truly committed to hyper-deflationary tokenomics, which is the opposite of what we see going on in the world today with fiat currencies. Our native token $ZCX is hyper-deflationary by design in a manner that exceeds the current inflation of mainstream assets by orders of magnitude. As such, expect our iteration of the Burning Mechanism to be measured not in thousands or even millions - think 10's of millions or more.

Q: You also talked about building the Portfolio Management v1 dashboard in the roadmap. Can you share any updates regarding that?

Martin/Sean: The Portfolio Manager v1 is a perfect example of how we can innovate on top of our custom OS logic. Because we've built the Trade Aggregator from scratch, we have the power to leverage that seamlessly with innovations as well as third-party applications, as I alluded to in a previous answer.

We have re-imagined portfolio management. Today, users have separate applications to monitor and maintain their portfolios. A popular example of this is Delta, for instance, which is an application to monitor one's portfolio. In other cases, it may be an Excel sheet tracking trades and assets. There's a disconnect with these portfolio monitoring tools since they need to be manually updated with each trade conducted. Whereas the actual trades take place on some outside crypto exchange. There's also the issue of risk management. For the most part, the only diversification for risk management that investors do is take multiple positions on volatile assets. But in this new world of cross-chain - it is far from sufficient.

What if the blockchain that their assets are residing on where to get hacked or become inaccessible? What if their wallet is hacked? What if their stablecoin loses its peg? To appropriately spread risk, a user should diversify their portfolio across different stablecoins, blockchains, wallets, and assets. This very time-consuming activity requires a lot of maintenance and tracking.

With the Unizen Portfolio Manager, we have enabled a simple portfolio manager that the Unizen Trade Aggregator powers. A simple drag-and-drop interface lets users rebalance their portfolio across multiple blockchains, wallets, and stablecoins.

As the user re-arranges the portfolio, we bundle multiple transactions on the blockchain and execute multiple trades over multiple networks for the best price possible.

Here's an early screenshot of the "Edit Portfolio Mode." Way more to come on this!

Q: What are Unizen's plans for marketing and scaling overall?

Martin/Sean: Unizen is targeting true mainstream adoption. We've signed contracts that are estimated to scale our wallets and active users into multi-millions once executed into fruition. This is in addition to our noteworthy organic growth.

We envision Unizen as the evolution of extremely economically strong projects such as Uniswap, Binance, and Coinbase, which take small fees over large volumes of trading activity.

We are currently incorporating a game-changing web3 marketing strategy and an entire team.

As a hint, expect specialized Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and more tools designed to activate community engagement. We expect to work with renowned global agencies as we collaborate with some of the biggest names.

Free-Ask from KuCoin Community

Q: Kindly ensure that your project is not an idea and already has working products or practical use cases.

Martin: We've released quite a few products already. They're all accessible! No sign-up or KYC is needed. So connect your wallet and start exploring!

Sean: Our Unizen Trade Aggregator v1 is 100% functioning now, along with other innovations (i.e. DMAS). Take it for a spin on our official website! You'll see why we were just named amongst the 3 Best Crypto Trading Aggregators 2 days ago here.

Q: Do you have a user manual or short videos to guide potential project users in safely navigating your platform?

Martin: We've done a great job simplifying UI interactions. We do have an FAQ and Support team only at the moment. But we plan to release video walkthroughs to help onboard users less experienced with Web3.

Q: How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users?

Sean: We're making Web3 look, feel, and act like Web2 without compromising fundamentals. If you interact with our Unizen Trade Aggregator v1,, you'll see how much work we've put into this, and it'll only improve continually!

Q: How can I buy this token? Is it available on any exchange?

Martin: It's available on KuCoin, Gate.io, Houbi Global, and Uniswap. But we're planning on adding more DEX liquidity to different chains. So stay tuned for that!

Q: Since NFT is popular nowadays, is there a plan for NFT integration?

Martin: Absolutely. We do have partial support for NFTs as it stands. But we have grand plans to extend that support.

Q: Is your project a community only for English-speaking countries?

Martin: We do support multiple languages and currencies on our official website. For us, it's very important to keep participation open, so these are household items!

Q: What about ZCX domain?

Martin: There are plans for the zcx.com domain. We're still getting quite ready to share those with the community. But soon!

Q: Any plans to engage more actively with other projects/advisors now that there's an emphasis on web3?

Martin: Absolutely! We engage with quite a few, but we're always eager to explore new partnerships and integration possibilities.

Q: What are your top things for priorities at the moment?

Sean: I would say:

  1. Increasing our marketing team to balance our engineering-heavy organization.
  2. Building aggressively despite market conditions.
  3. Demonstrating to our community that $ZCX is a project worth believing in.

KuCoin Post AMA Activity — Unizen (ZCX)

🎁 Participate on the Uinzen AMA quiz now for a chance to win 10 USDC!

The form will remain open for five days from publishing this AMA recap.

Giveaway Section

KuCoin and Unizen have prepared a total of 2,000 USDC to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 50 USDC

2. Flash Mini Game: 600 USDC

3. Post-AMA Quiz: 1,350 USDC

. . .

If you haven’t got a KuCoin account yet, you can sign up here!

Follow us on Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.