AMA with Hubble Protocol

Introduction segment

[May]:
Can you tell us about Hubble Protocol and the inspiration that got it started?

Marius | Hubble:
Hubble was something that was born out of the Solana Hackathon called Season. I joined a team (called Zero-Interest) and programmed all the Rust smart contracts and we received an honorable mention team. The project stopped right after, but you can still see ZeroInterest mentioned on some Solana infographics.

I wanted to make this project a reality because I seemed that Solana could allow for a lot of interesting DeFi 2.0 features (they were not called DeFi 2.0 at the time) and the idea for Hubble was an extension of that project.

I used to work in traditional finance, eight years at Bloomberg as a programmer and and Rust advocate as well. I essentially followed a tweet to enter the hackathon, and from there I saw what was happening in DeFi and what Solana was like. I thought: this has to be the future.

After I left Bloomberg, I started Hubble, and now here we are. The project has been in development since August, and we're getting ready to deploy our Devnet any day now.

Btw, if you want to find out more about the Devnet launch, make sure you join our socials. I'll put them here:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Hubbleprotocol
Telegram: http://t.me/hubbleprotocol
Discord:http://discord.gg/EwBCKgDJ3X

Hubble is essentially a combination of MakerDao and Liquity on Solana. You can mint a stablecoin USDH by depositing tokens and yield bearing tokens as collateral.

For example you can deposit SOL, MSOl, BTC, ETH and earn yield on them and also get USDH to spend it elsewhere.

There is a need for such a primitive on Solana that other protocols can build on top, especially a stablecoin that is decentralized and is redeemable for the underlying tokens.

[May]:
What innovative solution is Hubble Protocol bringing to topple its competitors with similar offerings in the DeFi and FinTech sector?

Marius | Hubble:
I wouldn't say Hubble is trying to "topple" any competitors! If anything we want to work together—collaborate instead of compete—to make the DeFi space something that really works for people. However, of course, there are protocols going for the same market so we will compete with superior product, an engaged community and network effects.

We're often compared to MakerDAO as the Maker of Solana, but we have a lot of differentiating features as well: multi-asset collateral, yield on collateral, earn profit from arbitraging USDH or depositing it in the stability pool, and of course staking HBB earns users a massive amount of the protocol's collected fees. Our token is fixed supply and earns fees.

Hubble is a lot of good ideas that we've seen work elsewhere put together in a way we haven't seen before.

In my opinion there are 3 core factors that will make us stand out:

1. The community and our brand. We're striving to be a super trusted and transparent stablecoin. For a stablecoin to be successful you need to prove the stability and be there for a few cycles so that trust is built. We take security extremely seriously and we won't release until we know funds are safely handled.

2. The network effects from building partnerships and from being composable with other protocols. We have a strong team of backers that can help us with product ideas, mutually beneficial partnerships and onboarding institudional users.

3. The effectiveness of our dev team. In an open source world, ideas are a dime a dozen so the differentiating factor becomes time to market and execution. If you build bad code it will be very hard to extend it and create new features quickly. We're building an elite team of developers that combine software and financial experience.

In hindsight, Solana found me, but now that I think about it I would want the program that handles my money to be the safest possible, I would just simply not go for Solidity no matter what the chain is.

Then you want users to be able to use the platform seamlessly. The users don't care if it's written in Rust or Haskell or has any other super interesting implementation detail. If the user has a bad UX it doesn't matter what micro optimizations you pulled off.

I believe Solana offers a great combination of high performance (low fees, low lag), good marketing and strong network of backers that want to make it succeed. A lot of developers are joining it too (you need to be somewhat of a competent developer to be able to produce something meaningful in Rust so that filters out the hacky kind of engineers - kudos to them but wouldn't want them to write code that managed my money).

[May]:
I never saw it from this angle. It’s a great perspective!

You’re right on the user experience bit. No non-techy person cares about the details, just create something that works and works well 🤣

What are the utilities of $HBB and $USDH?

Marius | Hubble:
USDH is a stablecoin. Stablecoins have a few properties that makes them desirable for different kinds of users:
1. You want yield on your stable (you want yield on anything tbh)
2. If you're a treasury of any kind, you want it decentralized. Any asset freeze is existentially threatening.
3. If you're a power user you want to have the power to be leveraged
4. If you're a protocol you want the stablecoin to be programmatically mintable/redeemble in an atomic manner such that you can build on top of it.

USDH can be minted and, upon burn, you can retrieve back your collateral. Unlike USDC, if you buy USDC against SOL and SOL goes up, you lost all that upside.

USDH will be minted against SOL, BTC, ETH, LUNA, AVAX, and all the other major L1s that come to Solana, but also SPL tokens (LPs) and we will delegate them to earn yield, such that your collateral doesn't sit idle. Once you mint it, you can buy more collateral and repeat the process, effectively leveraging up.

Upon minting, there is a one-off 0.5% fee that the minter pays. That fee is added to the debt, not taken from the collateral.

HBB stakers will earn 85% of those fees. The more volume, the more fees to the HBB stakers.

[May]:
This is cool!

Could you talk about your yield earning incentives and loan interests?

Marius | Hubble:
When you mint, you pay a one off fee of 0.5%. That's it. It looks like you need to pay back the minted amount to get back your collateral, but it's not really a loan, so we don't charge continuous interest.

Incentives will be the following:
1. For USDH stakers (that deposit into our stability pool) they will make HBB returns for the forseeable future with the majority of the returns coming at first. The USDH stakers also make money when there are liquidations!
2. HBB stakers earn fees
3. USDH-USDC LP providers will earn HBB and we will also issue bonds so they will get discounted HBB

[May]:
What major news should we look forward to from Hubble Protocol by the start of 2022?

Marius | Hubble:
We have a major roadmap, but we don't want to be distracted, so we will focus on one at a time and parallelize when it makes sense. Here are the essentials:

1. Launch
2. More collateral
3. More yield opportunities for the collateral
4. Bonds offering
5. Structured products (option and yield strategies for treasuries)
6. Undercollateralized lending

Everything is built to feed the previous product such that they all rise together. There are many things that we can build but we want to stay focused and be ready to react when it makes sense.

All of these are product launches, but we will also focus majorly on partnerships, integrations, governance and community.

[May]:
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Looking forward to these and more in 2022.

Twitter segment

[May]:
I have noticed that they are one of the few projects that prioritize their users when rewarding them, since they give them not a certain percentage of the transaction fees, but 100% of them, so where do you get income for development and marketing costs that the project needs?

Twitter Username: @Pirry05Universe

Marius | Hubble:
We give 85% of the fees to the users, we keep 15% exactly for that. We can't live sustainably by selling our entire treasury of tokens, so we take 15%

it's relatively important to understand that HBB earns fees, so that our community if they hold HBB they are aligned with the project's success

[May]:
How can Hubble Protocol incentivize market liquidity? Does Hubble Protocol have an internal market maker to ensure continued liquidity? What if people are interested in providing liquidity to Hubble Protocol?

Twitter Username: @Alon14091

Marius | Hubble:
We will reward USDH-USDC pairs on Mercurial and Saber and we will buy permanent liquidity by selling HBB for USDH-USDC LPs. We follow on the footsteps of Olympus for that.

Please be on the lookout for that.

[May]:
Could you please share the links to your community so we can stay updated with Hubble Protocol?

Marius | Hubble:
Here they are, but just one thing to mention - we're an idea and a vision and the people that relate to it should join, become part of it, and make it happen.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Hubbleprotocol
Telegram: http://t.me/hubbleprotocol
Discord:http://discord.gg/EwBCKgDJ3X

[May]:
Partnerships and collaborations play a vital role in expanding each project. Sir, Can you list some of your partners with us?

Staking, NFT is very hot, do you think you will apply NFT technology to your products in the achieved future?

Twitter Username: @alisadavid0

Marius | Hubble:
we will announce very very shortly.

NFT technology is amazing, I love decentralized unique provable ownership, we will use it for membership/tiers kind of features, but also if nfts of anything (real estate, etc) become liquid, we can consider minting against them.

Website segment

[May]:
What special feature(s) guarantees long-term sustainability of Hubble protocol?

Telegram Username: @Johnsnow0x1

Marius | Hubble:
Hubble will grow with DeFi in Solana, USDH is a stablecoin primitive that will be used by other protocols to create more layers of complexity, so we benefit from the rising tide if we execute correctly.

Also, HBB earns fees so the community will be incentivised to participate in the governance, make it work and come up with new ideas.

Lastly, our dev team has made the protocol very reusable such that we can add more features quickly.

[May]:
I saw something about Zero-cost borrowing on hubble whhch lets lets users borrow USDH for a one-time 0.5% fee. How is this possible, because i imagine this is not a charity project, how then do you make profit from Project Hubble?

Telegram Username: @kaptinblack

Marius | Hubble:
The thing is that to get USDH, you need to deposit BTC, SOL, ETH, then upon repayment you get back access to the collateral. This looks like borrowing, but it's not, you are actually minting agains your own tokens, so we don't need lenders to keep the rates competitive.

[May]:
Hubble Protocol allows users to borrow USDH for a one-time fee of 0.5%. Will this fee always be fixed or could you consider changing it depending on the needs of your platform or the needs of your users?

Thank you!

Telegram Username: @shitosan

Marius | Hubble:
We plan to keep it one-off fixed, but we're willing to change our minds depending on community feedback. For example, if you want to borrow for 1 year it makes sense to pay a one off, but if you borrow for 3 days, it doesn't. So we'll try to make it work for both short term and long term borrowers. Maybe some NFTs!

[May]:
Hubble Protocol is a solid project! We're only 70% done with the session but I'm 100% impressed.

It's now time to take questions from our live audience.

Community rules:

In this 4th segment, I will open the group for some seconds for the live community to shoot you some pressing questions.

Please pick four original questions to answer.

Try to ignore generic, vague, and copy-paste questions 😊

Live segment

🍎🍎Hawk Paba🍎🍎:
@y2kappa

When would #hubble protocol IDO be announced please?? How can I also check for your beta product on test net?? please answer the quistion.

Marius | Hubble:
https://twitter.com/Solrazr_App/status/1472902997873086473

2)Ayesha:
Do you have any plan related to your hubble protocol for staking and farming mobile app or any website ??
🫐🫐🫐

Marius | Hubble:
yes, we plan to integrate with mobile wallets like Slope finance

3)Ayesha:
🍒🍒🍒🍒whats about your team who working in Hubble protocol project?? Mean how many their experience??🫐🫐🫐

Marius | Hubble:
there are 5 developers with a combined experience of 25+ years, companies from Bloomberg, Blackrock, Mizuho, Google, Microsoft, Apple, EOS, etc. Only I am public, the rest of the team is not.

we will grow by 4-5 more developers in Jan-Feb

4)Temitope Awoyinka:
🔥
🫐🫐🫐🫐🫐🫐

Due to the current financial system that favours mostly ELITE INVESTORS & LARGE INSTITUTIONS when it comes to " BORROWING " AND " LENDING "

Will LITTLE INVESTORS and NON-CRYPTO USERS be allowed on your platform. ?

And before being able to LEND and BORROW, what are the eligibilities. ?

🔥

Marius | Hubble:
anyone can participate, no matter how big or small, there is no minimum amount of HBB or USDH you need to hold to gain our rewards