1. Could you please give us a brief introduction about BoringDAO?
BoringDAO is a cross-chain service provider driven by DAO, offering two major products:
- The first one is for transfers from PoW chain to EVM chain, called oToken;
- The second one for transfers between EVM chains, called oPortal
The transaction fees collected from both services will be allocated as incentives for BORING holders. It is also the governance token of our DAO.
2. Ok, so BoringDAO aggregates two types of cross-chain services, which is quite similar to what REN and CELER together could provide. Recently BoringDAO has just celebrated its first anniversary, can you give us some insights of the milestones that BoringDAO has achieved?
Sure, we would like to summarize the achievements by using 3 numbers.
The first number is 13000. So far, BoringDAO has been served for transfers of at least 13000 BTC to/from ETH. As loyal supporters of BTC, we hope to use our NEL tech to make BTC more secure and achieve programmability in a decentralized manner. At present, every oBTC has 110% protection, including contract-level assets, and our corporations with projects such as Nsure and InsureDAO.
The second number is 15. Up until now, BoringDAO has been supported 15 different chains in total:
- BTC, LTC, and DOGE
- ETH, BSC, Polygon, AVAX, FTM, Harmony, xDAI, OEC, and HECO
- Arbitrum, Optimism, and Boba
The third number is 2M. BoringDAO has made an income of ~ $2,000,000 for BORING holders and the treasury in the past year. There is no DAO that could survive without a consistent income. At the moment, BoringDAO has made 12 proposals in total, and quite a few of those are directly related to the income model. We have involved our community in making decisions and gained trust from our members.
3. That’s very cool. So what would be some of the differences between the BoringDAO oPortal and other cross-chain bridges?
That’s actually a good question.
First of all, there are usually two types of cross-chain bridges:
- The Official bridge
- The third party bridge
A majority of the L1s build their own official bridge, such as Polygon, Avalanche and OEC. Let’s take USDT as an example, with the official bridge, even if Tether hasn’t issued USDT on Polygon or Avalanche, users can still transfer their USDT through the official bridge. Basically what they do is to lock 1 USDT on ETH, while releasing 1 UDST in the corresponding chain, which makes quite a lot of sense.
However, a lot of the third party cross-chain bridges prefer to issue their own USDT as xxUSDT. We believe such an approach is quite useless as xxUSDT will usually have low liquidity and acceptance. What BoringDAO wants to provide is an optimized solution for farmers to transfer their USDT between any chains. Soon BoringDAO will also support USDC, ETH and WBTC, and of course our oBTC is included.
4. That’s very helpful. Could you also tell us a little bit more about some of the future strategies of BoringDAO? Such as how to gain more liquidity?
We will adopt different strategies at the same time. The first one is to boost. Right now if you stake stablecoins such as USDT on any chains mentioned above, you can get up to 100% APY without any impermanent loss and risk of liquidation. This is very competitive in the market. Moreover, different from other cross-chain bridges, we currently reward all the transaction fees to the LPs.
P.S.: we also support OEC, which is one our first batch of supported EVM compatible chains. The gas fee on OEC is still relatively cheap, even though right now $OKT is not cheap anymore : )
5. Can we learn a little bit more about the story behind BoringDAO? Like what inspired you guys to do it?
It is an interesting story because we were all BTC miners and farmers in the first place. At that time, we had some BTC in hand and we tried to farm on Curve during the DeFi summer, when the APY for BTC was above 100%. We minted quite a lot of WBTC and RenBTC. However, we were still really worried and couldn’t sleep well at night. This was not because we didn’t trust the Bitgo or Ren team, but due to the reason that these centralized service providers were always subject to the risks. If anything happens, we would lose everything.
Then we came up with a pretty creative idea- why not just use Bitcoin as the server. So we started to develop a BoringDAO BTC tunnel.
6. Wait, but how do you use Bitcoin as a server?
Good point!
The way that all the other BTC cross-chain bridges work is that they would create an address for each individual, like what the CEX does. This is definitely not safe as no one knows what would happen to your server.
Bitcoin has a function called op-return, which can be used to transfer information.
You know, the most difficult part to set up a cross-chain bridge is to make sure that information could be transferred securely. This is how BoringDAO bridges work. If you mint oBTC, you need to put your Ethereum address in the op-return, and this is the same for LTC and DOGE. Once this is done, the information is recorded to the ongoing chains of BTC, and no one can tamper with it.
The most important thing for our approach is that we are using BTC as the server and if anyone wants to hack it, he must hack Bitcoin first.
7. This idea is really cool. Practically speaking, what can oBTC be used for?
That’s a good question. We have cooperated with Curve, YFI, and Badger. Currently, oBTC has the highest APY among all the other wrapped Bitcoin on ETH. The APY for mining oBTC on Convex or YFI is more than 10%, which is significantly higher than renBTC or WBTC.
oBTC is the first batch of wrapped Bitcoin on Curve. To give you an alpha leak: since curve war has been mentioned a lot recently, we have also joined it. The latest proposal on our community forum is to bribe the CVX holders on Votium, which now supports BORING as the incentive token, in order to increase the APY of the Curve pool. At the end of the next Votium round, the APY for oBTC on Curve is expected to reach 20% or even above.
8. Seems like BoringDAO cares a lot about the compatibility in the DeFi world. Could you please let us know what your ultimate goal is?
Sure! We are all experienced farmers. We know that DeFi will eat CeFi in the future, which is also a famous saying of our lead investor 0xArthur at DeFiance. I’m not sure what will happen in the Web3.0 era, but there are many things we can foresee — for example, in the future we may all use DEXs. When borrowing money, people no longer go to the bank but choose Lending protocols. They will use distributed storage platforms to watch videos every day. We might spend the majority of our life in the metaverse. This is pretty cool.
Blockchain technology has a relatively low entry barrier. We believe that in the future, there will be hundreds of different blockchains, which will definitely boost up a huge demand for cross-chain services, leading to huge amounts of money making opportunities.
A year ago, no one expected that cross chain bridges would increase so rapidly, as at that time, there was only ETH. Now we can find more than 10 popular chains. In the future, there will be hundreds or thousands of chains, and cross-chain needs will rise exponentially. When crossing from 1 chain to the other, we only need 1 bridge. However, if we make transfers between 2 chains and the other 2 different chains, we will need 4 bridges. From 3 chains to the other 3 chains, 9 bridges are required, and so on.
You could probably imagine that in the era of Web3.0, the cross-chain bridge services will be a hundred times better than it is now.
9. Cross-chain bridge is indeed a new imperative. However, many cross-chain bridges have been hacked recently. What do you think?
In our opinion, the most difficult part of providing cross-chain services is to ensure the security of information exchanges across chains. The other parts are easy. If you don’t care about the security issue, cross-chain bridge service would become an industry with very low entry barriers.
In fact, the easiest way to do it is that you just lock a Token on the A chain and issue an additional Token on the B chain. But many other projects are overly pursuing the fancy ways of doing this, such as secure multiparty computation or some other immature ideas. They want to bring more innovations for the sake of innovation. Unfortunately, their innovations brought more bugs for the hackers to take advantage of. A cross-chain bridge usually controls the ownership to issue tokens on one chain and the ownership to withdraw assets from another chain. Once the information transmission reveals a problem, all assets related to the bridge can be taken away.
In BoringDAO, we consider security as the most important aspect. Our community members might think that our product progress is very slow, but this is actually because we are constantly testing whether the product is safe enough to launch. From the establishment of BoringDAO to the present, there have been no incidents on our cross-chain bridge. This is what our CTO is proud of.
And we will go further. We know that in the OKEx community, there will be some other project parties. If you need cross-chain services, please feel free to contact us, since we can build an exclusive bridge for your asset.
What are our advantages? For example, last time, there was an accident that happened to a cross-chain bridge, which caused 20 project parties related to it to be stolen. This is due to the fact that the cross-chain bridge service provider is very unprofessional.
For us, we use our NEL technology. We usually set up a 2/2 multi-signature node, and we will invite the projects to become one of the multi-signature parties. In this way, even if there is a black swan in which a project party is stolen, there will be no influence on the other project parties, which are completely isolated.
And we are developing the next version. In the next version, BoringDAO oPortal Bridge will become completely permissionless, which means that no request or approval is required for the project party to directly develop a cross-chain bridge to nine L1s and three L2s for their Token, as long as they accept the nodes.
10. That’s cool! Seems like the final step of all DeFi projects is to move towards complete permissionless. One last question: OKEx and BoringDAO have teamed up to engage in a lock-up mining activity. Can you briefly talk about it?
No problem.
First of all, we are very glad to cooperate with OKEx, which is one of the world’s top exchanges. Therefore, we are pleased to see more users using it.
This time, we will provide a 500,000 USD equivalent BORING reward. As long as users deposit BORING to OKEx, they can freely choose the lock-up days for mining, which are 7 days, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days respectively. Of course, the APR will also be different.
This is very similar to the PP Token and the 3,3 pool on our supported chains, but there is no gas fee on OKEx 🤭. The highest APR can reach 1020%, and there is no impermanent loss. This is actually a very friendly way for holders who are not familiar with operations on chains to experience some easy mining.
Well, time’s up for today. I’m very glad to share this with all of you guys here.
Hope you all become a #boringman!
