Crypto Thrust x Orion AMA

Crypto Thrust
10 min readSep 11, 2021

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Guest : Sam (Co-Founder)

I’m one of the 3 co-founders of Orion Money. Little background on myself, I started my journey with crypto back in 2014, the time when I first came across bitcoin while doing deep dive into monetary policies, gold investing.

Over last 7 years I invested in different projects and kept a close eye on entire industry how it evolved, experienced most of crypto bull and bear runs and saw how in recent years stablecoins market started to grow and how more and more investors started to diversify their portfolio into stablecoins. I came across Terra back in 2019 and if you don’t know anything about Terra just shortly its the only decentralized algo stable coins blockchain with Luna being the only asset that's directly exposed to the growth of stable coins market.

I realized that Terra has something that no other blockchain have. Back then there was no community for Terra, there was just one discord channel so I decided to join core community and help grow it from day one. Today i’m proud to say we have one of the largest and most passionate community in the space.

I invested and was part of every project that launched on Terra from day 1 and came across Orion Money when Vol and Kos ( other 2 co-founders ) submitted this basic but pretty profound idea to hackathon, to bring anchor protocol high stable yields to other blockchains, starting from Ethereum and enable easy spending of stablecoins in the real world.

I immediately joined the team in first week of hackathon, we ended up winning the hackathon and we went full speed on development. We’ve launched our first initial MVP version of Orion Saver app.orion.money during the hackathon, guys built it essentially in 48 hours during hackathon 😁

Little feedback on other two co-founders, they managed to built big e-commerce analytics business in the real world from 3 founders to 300+ employees out of which 75+ were hardcore developers and engineers. Their customers were Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola + 150+ large worldwide brands, they sold the company last year to private equity firm and took some break, looked what else to do in their life long term ( 10+ years )

Segment 1 — Project Introduction

Q1)We are so curious about Orion! please tell us about Orion in detail.
Orion Money’s vision is to become a cross-chain stablecoin bank providing seamless and frictionless stablecoin saving, lending, and spending. Within the Orion Money stablecoin bank, we have three main products planned — Orion Saver, Orion Yield and Insurance, and Orion Pay.

Orion Saver essentially connects to Anchor Protocol and enables users to earn atm up to 16.5% stable APY on stablecoins as USDT, USDC, DAI, BUSD, FRAX and wUST.

directly on Ethereum, you can just go to app.orion.money, connect with your Metamask wallet or wallet connect and click to deposit. You start earning from the moment you deposit in full non-custodial way.

We’ve recently completed 3 smart contract audits and also added 2 insurance options so you can earn with piece of mind knowing smart contracts are secure and insurance option available.

you can review all audits details in link above

Orion Yield and Insurance will come through partnerships with upcoming money markets protocols as Mars Protocol, ApolloDAO, Spar Protocol where you will be able to earn even much higher yields with our own insurance fund insuring your investments.

Orion Pay is planned for later next year, through partnerships we are planning to add fiat on-off ramps and debit cards so users can easily spend their stablecoins in the real world.

Q2)Saw a tweet Recently that there’s an Internal exchange pool to help the Orion users.. Can you tell us more about it? What are the advantages??
Sure, when we designed and executed on our private farming idea ( private sale for community ) we realized there are some big pain points with onboarding new users on Ethereum as high gas fees and high cross-chain / swap fees.

we’ve decided to build our internal pools to reduce swap / cross-chain fees to $0 on all deposits under $20k and by batching transactions we’ve reduced gas fee on those deposits down 4–5x

https://twitter.com/orion_money/status/1434878637275336714?s=20 , some more info in that twitter post

our private farming approach helped us gain initial $70m in TVL in 3–1/2 days from many community members, influencers and value added investors / OGs

Q3)What are the unique aspects of Orion that makes it a competitive project?
Ability to provide non-inflationary, stable and high APY on your stablecoins wherever you are. We are building Orion as a cross-chain stablecoins bank with very soon expanding to Polygon, BSC and hopefully Solana through wormhole integration.

here is little existing rates comparison
This slide showing targeted APY after token launch

Q4)Can you share your Roadmap with us? And tell us more about the goals you are planning to achieve.

besides that general roadmap where I see Orion Money will grow really fast is through other projects, protocols, treasuries integrations.

we’ve recently announced our partnership with Blockbank where very soon 45000 users of blockbank will be able to experience Orion Money high stable yields and Orion becoming main source of yield for Blockbank.

that’s just one integration, we’ve also partnered with Student Coin to bring high stable yields to their 70000 users. and are in active discussions with multiple projects to integrate the same way and bring millions of users to Orion Money.

Also something to note, every $1m we bring to Orion causes $1m in UST mint what ultimately causing $1m of Luna to burn. you can see even on the day like today luna climbing btc dumping, because luna burning every time UST mints.

Q5)Which partnerships you have now? Also which partnerships in the Future you will be Heading to ?
We are about to announce two huge launchpad partnerships in coming days. Announcements will be made in our Telegram, Discord and Twitter channels

Website- http://orion.money/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/orion_money
Telegram- https://t.me/Orion_Money
Medium- https://orion-money.medium.com/
Discord- https://discord.gg/5vbWB2PWeS

so please follow us as you don’t want to miss the biggest IDO launch of 2021 🔥🔥

Segment 2 — Questions from Twitter

Q1) Orion’s initiative is indeed great. So can you tell us the stories that give you the motivation to build and develop great project like Orion? How will the Orion project generate revenue in the long run?
My motivation and passion comes from understanding how big of the market we are targeting and how amazing team we have that can scale super fast. Everything we build with Orion Money will in some way or another generate revenue for Orion Money protocol. ALL the net revenue will be used to buy Orion tokens on the open market and distribute to Orion stakers through Orion Staking Fund.

by having all those separate sources of revenue, we are creating real value and real non-inflationary revenue that will all flow into Orion token.

Also something to note here, at very start we setup our own validator on station.terra.money.

I'm proud to say today we are no. 1 validator in terms of voting power and staked Luna with Orion Money, in last 4 months we got over $850m staked with us.

We are planning our token generation event on September 29th so few days before the launch we will introduce 5% commission on that validator. All the net revenue generated through that commission will be used to market buy Orion tokens and distribute to Orion stackers.

Good idea to stake Orion tokens as larger TVL we get, more revenue we generate and more Orion stackers will earn.

we don’t generate any profits for ourselves, everything flows back to Orion Money.

Q2)Can you provide an overview of $ORION tokenomics? is there any token burning mechanism???

Total supply: 1,000,000,000 ORION
ORION Token Generation Event (TGE):
ETA September 2021

The ORION token will be minted on Ethereum and a portion of it will be bridged to Terra, Polygon, BSC (and other protocols as needed) to enable Orion Money dApps to operate across these networks.

We don’t see burn as net positive value for Orion at beginning of our journey. We are planning to add burn functionality with time once we grow our TVL $1b+

Q3) Sufficient Funds are Essential for the sustainability of a Project. Does Orion’s team is financially able to carry out this project? Do you have sufficient funds for development?
Great question, we raised $1.7m in seed round, $2.45m through our private farming approach and we are planning to raise $1m through 4 upcoming IDOs — 2 on Terra and 2 on Ethereum.

Our developers are located in eastern Europe and overall cost of development is very very low compare to a lot of other projects. That allows us to hire a lot more developers for 5–6x lower rates vs San Francisco dev for example.

I can say we are very well capitalized, our costs are great, and I don’t think we will be raising any more funds so upcoming IDOs will be the last chance to get your hands on Orion tokens at $0.05 price

Q4) How will Orion Money be able to reach a APY 13–20% while having a really high % if we compare it to the APYs other platforms offer? Other platforms haven’t been able to offer this % of APY before, is there any risk you are taking here in order to be able to do so?

Orion Money partnered with Anchor protocol to bring high stable yields to other blockchains through our smart contracts infrastructure and partnership with anchor team.

Anchor protocol is much different from AAVE or Compound, I would say it’s quickly becoming gold standard for savings.

Its ability to offer high sustainable APY levels come from using POS assets as collateral option for loans. As you might all know by now POS assets are designed the way that when staked they earn all the revenue from blockchain activity + inflation what generates stable and predictable APY.

because anchor lends on over-collagenized basis on average users deposit $3 worth of POS assets for $1 loan.

if POS assets earns 10% APY that translates to 30% if its used as collateral in 3–1 ratio for example, Ethereum 2.0 currently earns 5% APY so that’s 15% APY. By offering multiple collateral assets as a deposit option anchor avg out after costs and treasury deposits around 19.5–20% APY and that’s sustainable for years to come as long as POS APY levels stay where they are right now.

Q5) Many Projects have inexperienced team members, Also some of them not doing well because of EASILY AVOIDABLE MISTAKES. Can you tell us a more about Orion’s team and some of their background?
I think I shared a lot about this at start of our AMA, but shortly to answer we have an amazing team of 12 ATM ( 9 developers, 2 commercial co-founders and one front end developer)

We also have ability to scale dev team very fast given other two co-founders network of developers from previous startup where they build the team of 75 developers and engineers

Segment 3 — Live Telegram Questions

Q1) Does your project support staking program? if yes. how is your stake system work, what is the requirement for user if they want to stake in your platform? Do you have a Token Burning plan to increase Token value and attract Investors to invest?
we are about to launch our staking right after IDOs and TGE, follow us on Telegram and Twitter for all major announcements.

Q2) My question is do you have any competition in the market and where are we expecting to see this project in the next few years?
We do but we have something that our competition can’t offer 😁 so we are moving full speed to take as large market share as possible.

Q3) Do you have a coin burn / buyback system or do you plan to increase the value of those token burn tokens and attract investors to invest?
buyback is built into our tokenomics, burn coming after $1b in TVL

Q4) what companies are you partnered with or seeking to partner with in future ?
Existing protocols, projects, businesses that currently not sourcing yields from anyone or do source yields through other lending / borrowing protocols on Ethereum.

Q5) Are there any other Social Media Platforms or Online Places that you are promoting and advertising $ORION to grow communities other than Telegram? Or Just Telegram for now?
we’ve partnered with many influencers and telegram channels to build awareness about Orion Money.

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