KuCoin AMA with Sienna (wSIENNA) — Privacy-First and Cross-Chain DeFi Protocol

Dear KuCoin Users,

Time: November 3, 2021, 11:00-11:54 (UTC)

KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with the Sienna team in the KuCoin Exchange Group.

Privacy is a fundamental right and also required by financial and privacy regulation. With privacy by default, Sienna protects your PII and keeps all users' interactions private, even from Sienna. Sienna’s vision is to make privacy-first and scalable DeFi interoperable with the biggest blockchain ecosystems, such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, Cosmos, and more.

Official Website: https://sienna.network

White Paper: https://sienna.network/whitepaper

Follow Sienna Network on Twitter and Telegram.

Guest:

The Sienna team consists of multiple international groups of core contributors to the DAO.

Q: Tell us about Sienna Network and what it aims for.

Sienna Team: Sienna is a privacy-first and cross-chain decentralized finance platform where you can privately swap, lend and convert your tokens into their private equivalent.

There is a deeper purpose to the privacy part of Sienna than just for the sake of privacy, and that is the protection of PII - Personal Identifiable Information. The nature of blockchains is an open ledger, and that is fine if you would like to reveal all the transaction history of your wallet and make your balance available to the world. At Sienna Network, we believe money is a private matter, and only you should have access to the content of your wallet and the transaction history. Just like with bank transfers, where the legislation requires transactions to be private.

Q: Why is privacy important?

Sienna Team: There are both technical and non-technical reasons why privacy is important. As mentioned, the non-technical reasons are for the sake of protecting your private data and information. Also important is to prevent front-running, which is the phenomenon where bots monitor pending transactions and bid higher gas fees to “hijack” the transaction. Not only is this unethical - it also violates financial and privacy regulations.

Privacy itself is a bigger point of discussion. There tends to be a bigger perception of wanting to hide something from the public if privacy is discussed. However, privacy is a human right as expressed in the Human Rights Act, Article 8, and you also see, e.g., GDPR in Europe and similar in other locations. Privacy is a good thing and should be considered as such.

We believe privacy will be a megatrend for the next decade as too many tech companies have turned into spyware and used your data to monetize one way or the other. When we talk about privacy in that way, the perception seems to be very clear, and people prefer protecting their PII - and privacy is the only way to do that.

As privacy is a fundamental right and also required by financial and privacy regulation - Sienna decided to tackle this. With privacy by default, Sienna is protecting PII and keeping all users' interactions private - with each other and with the protocol - Even Sienna doesn’t know what users do - it is strictly limited to the users themselves.

Inherent privacy that lets you, and only you, to export your transaction history is an important step towards true DeFi adoption. Institutional investors need privacy to protect their positions, trades, and competitive edge, avoid being front-run, and more. Sienna Network is also focusing on bringing in big institutional investors in the future.

Q: Tell us about Secret Network and why you chose to build on that blockchain.

Sienna Team: As mentioned above, the core contributors to Sienna were searching for a privacy-preserving blockchain and realized what they were looking for had already been built - the result of several years of MIT research, Secret Network introduced the concept of “Programmable Privacy” - in reality using Intel SGX to establish Trusted Execution Environments. The thing is that you cannot provide any protection of PII without privacy. They go hand in hand.

Another important aspect is the scalability of the blockchain. We have all seen the insane gas prices and slow transactions from other chains, and we wanted to avoid this. It doesn’t make any sense to pay $250 in gas to swap $100 or less.

Sienna Network was one of the first projects to launch at Secret Network, but we have seen many successful other projects, and this emphasizes the relevance of inherent privacy and PII protection at the chain level.

Now IBC is coming, allowing Cosmos blockchains to become interoperable, Secret Network is poised to become the privacy hub across all major blockchains, and Sienna will support a wide range of Cosmos tokens.

Q: Cosmos is a very interesting ecosystem, and we can see it is growing rapidly. Can you tell us more about it?

Sienna Team: What sets Cosmos apart from other blockchain ecosystems is the idea that it’s the Internet of blockchains - so interconnected chains become possible. Sienna is a protocol on Secret Network, which will upgrade to IBC support on November 9, making tokens like LUNA, ATOM, and UST private (via wrapping) on Secret Network and utilizing them on Sienna’s platforms (AMM, lending, etc).

Q: How do you see the future of Sienna? And what does your roadmap look like?

Sienna Team: After the TGE in May this year, the first product launched in October, less than a month ago - a privacy-preserving AMM with generous liquidity provider rewards in addition to the trading fees earnings - already passed USD $110m in cumulative volume, Sienna’s been hugely successful so far and generates over $18k in daily LP fees.

The contributors are currently working on the lending protocol, which will be the first crypto lending platform with inherent privacy and front-running mitigation. This means you can protect your PII whenever you trade and you lend or borrow tokens. From the launch of the swap/AMM, we saw a high demand for depositing liquidity, and we expect the same interest with the lending protocol.

Q: How will lending/borrowing work?

Sienna Team: Similar to Aave or Anchor on Terra, the SiennaLend will allow stakers of volatile tokens as collateral to earn interest and additional rewards and allow lending of stablecoins, e.g., secretUST - the privacy wrapped version of UST, or sUSDT/sUSDC. This is hugely attractive to anyone who wants to keep the upside in their tokens while having the safety of a stable token.

Q: What do you need to get started?

Sienna Team: Sienna Network exists on Secret Network - as mentioned above, a privacy-preserving blockchain, which means MetaMask, etc., can’t be used for now. Currently, the best choice is Keplr (keplr.app). You’ll also need some SCRT, the native token of Secret Network similar to BNB on BSC or ETH on Ethereum, to pay gas with. You can buy a small portion of SCRT to get started with, then swap other tokens to it afterward on Sienna Network.

If you want to bring other tokens to Sienna - e.g., ETH, BNB, ERC20 tokens, BEP-20 tokens, or Monero, you can use the bridges at bridge.scrt.network.

Other wallets do support Secret Network, but not Sienna.

Q: How do you see the competition for Sienna Network?

Sienna Team: At the moment, we do not see a whole lot of competition for crypto platforms with built-in privacy and PII protection. However, competition is always good because it forces you to do your best and make the best solutions for the users. So we always make this little game on how competitors will act and how we can be at the forefront of things. Thanks to the awesome community at @GoSiennaNetwork, we get a lot of great feedback.

We still believe the user experience of crypto is premature, and we are really eager to create an ambient user experience that makes it seamless for new users to benefit from the platform. The experts will always figure out what to do, but they are the few, and to be honest, the crypto space has a steep learning curve. Whenever we design a product or a service, we do it with the user in mind. We spend so much time explaining things in an intuitive way, so you know exactly what happens if you hit this button and if you do this and that.

Q: What can you earn from staking at Sienna Network, and are there any other ways to get a yield out of Sienna?

Sienna Team: When you provide liquidity to SiennaSwap, the AMM, you will earn trading fees, which is 0.28% of total trading fees relative to your pool share.

Once you’re a liquidity provider, you can stake your LP tokens and earn a high yield on several different reward pairs. You can see all of them here: https://app.sienna.network/swap/earn

Q: On your website, you don't mention that you have done any internal or external audit of your smart contract, so can you give us details if you have done any audit before? And in case you haven't, would you plan to perform any review of your smart contract in the near future?

Sienna Team: That's not correct. The Sienna code was first audited by CertiK and is now additionally being audited by Halborn. The audits are linked from sienna.network.

Q: Where can I currently buy your token?

Sienna Team: On KuCoin.

Q: Do the token holders have the right to participate in the governance of the project? On what kind of decisions can they vote on about the project?

Sienna Team: Yes, Sienna is a DAO, and governance is defined in the tokenomics. The voting is in development.

Q: Is your project only for elite investors? How about others with small funds? Is it open to everyone?

Sienna Team: Great question - on the contrary - as gas fees are significantly lower than, e.g., on Ethereum, Sienna is very attractive to small investors.

Q: How important is the community to you, and how can we collaborate or help you with the development of the project?

Sienna Team: Super important - Sienna has helped over 30 local language groups get started, and they're growing rapidly soon to reach 100k users thanks to the great work of the ambassadors.

Q: What are your security measures adopted from hacking and bugs in smart contracts? Have you conducted any audits to make your smart contract safe?

Sienna Team: Sienna has been audited by CertiK and is currently undergoing a second audit from a different firm, which will also audit SiennaLend which is coming soon.

Security is of highest concern which will never be deprioritized.

Q: Until what corner of the world do you plan to arrive? That is, to what extent in the world do you think Sienna Network will be solving people's problems with their infrastructure?

Sienna Team: It's a global project (but users need to check their local eligibility).

Q: So many projects just like to speak about the long-term vision and mission, but what are your short-term objectives? What are you focusing on right now?

Sienna Team: The short-term objective is to get the awesome community at @GoSiennaNetwork to grow and contribute to the development of great Sienna products.

Q: Can you tell us what special features do you have or plan to implement that keep you ahead of your competitors?

Sienna Team: Low gas fees + high APY + no front-running

Q: Privacy-concerned projects have seen lots of barriers from central exchanges and regulators. What are some key factors you guys are focusing on so that your project doesn't face any hindrance or issues in the future?

Sienna Team: Great question - the core insight is that privacy and anonymity are distinctly different - and a lot of education is needed.

Q: Can you explain how your tokenomics distribution is? How many tokens will be minted? And how many tokens will be locked by the team?

Sienna Team: All tokens were minted at TGE, so the fixed total supply after full vesting (after +4 years) will be 10m tokens - making Sienna anti-inflationary as circulating supply will also be reducing over time.

Q: How many team members do you have? Do they have enough experience in the blockchain field? Do they have any experience working on crypto and non-crypto projects?

Sienna Team: There are multiple geo-distributed teams with over 20 full-time developers contributing to the development, with deep experience in the BC space.

Q: Can you please explain what IBC is and how it affects Sienna Network?

Sienna Team: https://docs.cosmos.network/master/ibc/overview.html

Q: Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contract addresses, and how can I buy them, and what are the benefits?

Sienna Team: You can find all contract addresses on sienna.network/tokens

Q: What plans do you have to implement/maintain interoperability between privacy-protected and public blockchains? What precautions do you have for the loopholes appearing?

Sienna Team: Operating bridges to other chains is a 3rd-party task - Sienna will focus on its "native" ecosystem - the IBC-compliant Cosmos chains, which include ATOM, LUNA, etc.

Q: Is this platform suitable for crypto beginners? Or does it only appeal to professional users?

Sienna Team: Hopefully, it's very easy to use, and explainer videos are currently in production.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?

Sienna Team: If you like the project, go visit sienna.network, or engage the community at @GoSiennaNetwork - and thanks for the great questions and super AMA.

KuCoin and Sienna have prepared a total of 50 wSIENNA to give away to AMA participants.

1. Free-ask section: 2 wSIENNA

2. AMA activity: 48 wSIENNA

Activity 1 — Quiz: 37.5 wSIENNA

Activity 2 — Price Guess: 7.5 wSIENNA

Participation Rewards: 3 wSIENNA

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