On September 2, 2021, Aluna.Social was invited to do an AMA in the Polygon Community!
Here’s a quick recap of what was discussed between our Co-founders Alvin Lee and Henrique Matias, and the Polygon Team and community.
Polygon: To begin, please tell us something about yourself.
Alvin: Hi everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here today! My name is Alvin Lee, and along with Henrique Matias, we are the Co-founders of Aluna.Social. My background is in Digital Marketing and Business, and I got into the crypto space in 2013 as a trader and later founded a crypto trading blog that has seen over 1M views.
Henrique: In a nutshell, I have worked as a programmer for a long time (about 20 years) and in 2014 I ended up buying bitcoin for the first time. Not long after that I started creating tools for crypto trading, got really excited about Ethereum, participated in the first Solidity workshops, and kept researching the space. Eventually, I met Alvin and we decided to join forces! Since then a lot of things have happened and now we are a team of 10+ people working daily on Aluna.
Alvin: In terms of how Aluna.Social came into being….
The idea behind Aluna.Social was born out of the need to solve the problems that we ourselves faced as crypto traders. She is the tool and guide we wish we had when we first started learning about trading crypto.
When I started out crypto trading in 2013, I used to frequent Crypto Twitter to see what the traders were saying and doing. However, as most traders do, I quickly realized that there is a lack of trust and transparency on social media networks and crypto trading communities. Anyone could say things like “Bitcoin is going to $100,000 this year”, or “I made 30x on this or that coin,” but it’s hard to know if these traders actually put their money where their mouth is. In other words, you don’t know who to trust, and who you can learn from to become a better trader.
This is one of the problems that Aluna.Social solves, by providing a transparent environment for crypto traders to interact with, learn from one another, and profit together.
The biggest problem we want to solve is to help crypto traders and investors earn more money and Aluna.Social is our first product for doing that.
Polygon: Great! Thanks for the introduction. I see you use she, for Aluna this concept is unique, I really like it. Can you tell us more about Aluna.Social and its features?
Alvin: Aluna.Social is a social trading terminal built for the Web3 world. Our mission with Aluna.Social is to help aspiring crypto traders unleash their full potential, and help them achieve financial freedom through the cryptocurrency markets.
We aim to do this by:
- Improving transparency between traders,
- Establishing a trading community incentivized to share data, and
- Creating an environment to leverage positive social feedback.
Aluna.Social combines a trading terminal with a social network, and:
- Rewards top traders financially and reputationally, and
- Enables beginners to learn from and auto-copy the better traders.
The platform is also powered by our utility token $ALN, which is tradable on Gate.io, Uniswap, Sushiswap, and Quickswap.
We currently have over 30,000 users and over $30M in monthly trading volume.
Polygon: Wonderful! To dig deeper, what are the campaigns that are currently running or will be in the future? Like LP mining for ALN, etc?
Alvin: We currently have a Trading Competition ongoing where traders can “Play-to-earn” $ALN.
100K ALN is up for grabs for traders who connect their BitMEX API keys to Aluna.Social and trade with a minimum volume of $1000. More info can be found here: https://aluna.medium.com/aluna-social-x-bitmex-trading-competition-100-000-aln-token-prize-pool-a4fe70571250
To take part in the competition, go here: https://aluna.social/trading-competition
We also have our LP mining campaign (Uniswap) and ALN staking ongoing until the 9th of Sep. This is at aluna.social/farm
Lastly, we’re also working closely with the QuickSwap team to add ALN to Dragon’s Syrup.
This will enable ALN liquidity providers on QuickSwap to earn $QUICK, while $dQUICK stakers can earn ALN.
More info coming soon!
Polygon: Great! I won’t be surprised if our viewers drop from the chat. These are some appealing campaigns! How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? There are a lot of trading platforms in the market, how can a user benefit from Aluna?
Henrique: Aluna is a lot more focused on the social aspect and also on openness. Anyone can be part of our platform and browse and share data. We believe our platform should be similar to a block explorer and that we should make it as easy as possible for users to participate.
We are also working with design specialists in order to improve the design and ease of use more and more. Soon we will be launching a new version of Aluna which is even more user-friendly and will include more ways of having social interactions.
Once you register/browse the platform you will notice we provide a profile for every user which can be used to show your portfolio distribution and performance in real-time, pretty much like a Twitter or Facebook profile but with actual real-time trading data ( :
From my perspective, it seems a lot more fun and a lot more community-oriented than every other platform I have tried!
In my personal opinion, It’s like a mixture of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook but only talking and trading crypto.
Polygon: Absolutely! Now I’m getting the feel of it, it is quite different from other trading platforms, and with your own profile-like UI it makes it even more attractive. I must say even the current UI is pretty cool with more user-friendliness it can be the next buzz. What are the safety measures, can you talk more about users’ security?
Aluna: Sure. If you just sign up for the platform and want to browse other people’s profiles, comment on trades, etc… It’s as secure as it gets, as you only need an email and password to register and it will be saved encrypted on the database.
If you plan to participate in trading competitions and be eligible for prizes/rewards, you can connect READ ONLY API keys provided by the exchanges, which also makes it 100% secure.
If you plan to trade using our UI and/or copy trade other users you will need to use API KEYS with trading permission (same as all the other platforms with automation/bots etc ) and your API KEYS will be saved encrypted (all keys are encrypted on the database) and will be decrypted by a computer just when it needs to be used.
We’re constantly working on making the platform more and more secure and having more security audits, getting more resilient to DDOS attacks (we have received a few).
If you have any specific questions regarding security that I didn’t answer please feel free to ask more!
Polygon: I’m sure the audience reading this might have some questions and I request the audience to be prepared as we’ll be opening the chat soon. Can you tell us what milestones Aluna.Social achieved and what are your future plans?
Alvin: Our achieved milestones so far include:
- Launch of our long-awaited Copy Trading and Counter Trading features, currently available for BitMEX and Bitfine
- Integration with 7 exchanges: BitMEX, Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Poloniex, Gate.io, and Valr
- Developed and deployed our Token on Ethereum (Audited by CertiK)
- Partnerships with some of the industry’s top players: 100x Ventures, BitMEX, Genesis Block Ventures, DEXTForce Explore, DXdao, DAOMaker, and Gate.io Labs
- Oversubscribed pre-sale and public sale raising $1.5M+
- 30,000+ Platform users
- Trading volume increased by 100x over the past year to $65M per month
- AUM has grown 33x over the past year to $20M
Here’s our Roadmap for the short to medium term:
Platform
- FTX and Binance Futures exchange integrations
- PRO subscription plans
- Improvements on Copy-trading
- DEX and Web3 Wallet integrations
Token
- Bridging the token to other chains
- Integrating the token with our platform
Web3 Product Roadmap
- DeFi Leaderboard
- Prediction Games (for market prices and potentially other predictions)
Polygon: Wow! Without any further due, I’ll open the chat for the community questions now!
Gillu: How do you deal with the security threats of your project? Do you have any AUDIT in recent times for trust? The most curious thing about trading platforms is the SECURITY infrastructure. How will you prevent Aluna users and investors from being exposed to third-party risks?
Henrique: We have had security audits on our infrastructure and code and we’re working on having a new audit very soon. We also got a new security Advisor who used to work for BitMEX and is now working for ChainLink, so we should have new updates and enhanced security and keep working on this.
David: Are the rewards for the competition in ALN?
Henrique: Yes and soon we will also add BTC and ETH prizes.
Gillu: Did you consider community feedback/requests during the creation of your product in order to expand on fresh ideas for your project? Many projects fail because the target audience and clients are not understood. So I’d like to know who your ideal consumer is for your product?
Henrique: Good question. Indeed we’ve had some good feedback from our community (and everyone is welcome to feedback by sending us an email on support@aluna.social or using our discord channel).
Our ideal consumer is every crypto trader who wants to interact with other people, keep track of their portfolio, share their trades (without sharing their balances), learn from others, maybe automatically copy other traders… We‘ll also be launching more features to help people automate their trades in different ways, etc…
Gillu: Creating tokens is easy, but it takes professionalism & intelligence to keep them valuable in the long run. What are your plans to make Token valuable in the long term? Can you share your product or tokennomics and token use case?
Henrique: Yes absolutely, this is a very good question. I’m 500% with you here! This is a huge challenge for sure. You can see the token current economics and white paper on the token page and we’re also working on a new updated version which should have even more features.
You will see we plan to use the token to give discounts to our community for using the PRO services we will be launching and we’re also working on prediction games at the moment, and on some other web3 features which we hope to have in production next year.
Alvin: Our goal is to create long-term value for the Aluna Ecosystem, where its products and services and cash flow are owned by the DAO — and its token owners.
In late 2021 we will roll out PRO subscriptions, which will give a boost to ALN’s utility by enabling spending ALN, and introducing significant enhancements to the Aluna Token Economy.
Attached is an illustration of how PRO Subscriptions on Aluna.Social tie in with the ALN token economy.
Read more about this on our recent Team AMA recap on medium: https://aluna.medium.com/aluna-social-team-ama-recap-1a6c2a145eb7
David: Will there be any tutorial video for copy trading and API connection?
Henrique: to be honest if you register on the platform it’s very easy to copy trade other people!
You just need to connect your Bitfinex or BitMEX account and go to someone’s profile and click “copy.”
Alvin: You can also check out this video of how Copy-trading works on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uohyTsKS19g&t=3s
David: Thanks, I believe this will be a super platform for the future. Is there any future for NFT in this platform?
Alvin: We had one before where we minted 10 for our Top 10 traders on our previous trading competition: https://opensea.io/assets/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430/136677
There’ll be one new NFT dropping very, very soon!
We’re also looking into adding an NFT gallery to user profiles.
Gillu: What are your top 3 priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?
Alvin: Integrating the platform with FTX, working on new features for the token, creating PRO subscriptions.
On top of that, deploying a new version of the Aluna social platform frontend to make it more user-friendly and as I mentioned earlier, working on some NFTs and NFT related features for the platform.
Polygon: Wow! I really enjoyed the AMA, I get a different vibe from this platform, and it was really great having both of you here today with us. Thank you so much for your time, you both have been amazing!
