Fantom ecosystem spotlight – Grim
What better time than the Halloween season to focus our spotlight on a project with a logo like Grim’s! Grim is a quickly growing Fantom-based Smart Yield Optimizer backed by a professional and active team.
We're grateful that they took the time to answer a few questions, and as always, we're humbled by the care devs on Fantom show for educating the community about opportunities in DeFi.
In this interview, the Grim team provides what we think is one of the best analogies we've come across for describing liquidity.
As gaming projects quickly adopt Fantom as their platform of choice, we're also quite eager to see what this creative team comes up with for their GameFi app!
1. What is Grim?
Grim is a compounding yield optimizer that allows users to automatically harvest the rewards earned from AMM reward pools and then experience exponential growth by depositing their LPs or single assets into Grim vaults.
Grim offers users a detailed overview of all Fantom platform reward offerings, and this allows them to explore new assets, compare rewards, and discover new tokens and exciting projects.
Grim offers the largest selection of vaults and lowest fees anywhere on Fantom Opera, making it the one-stop-shop for yield farming on the network.
2. How do you introduce Grim to a novice or someone who knows relatively little about DeFi?
Yield farming is a topic that intrigues new DeFi adventurers and attracts them to the space.
I introduce yield farming by comparing it to a FOREX exchange kiosk at an Airport. If you have ever traveled to a foreign country, you understand that it is necessary to exchange cash for native currencies to have buying power abroad as your currency may not be accepted in another country.
Imagine you are taking a trip from New York to Madrid and you would like to exchange 100 dollars for 100 Euros to visit a restaurant when you land.
When you are at the counter to exchange 100 USD for 100 Euros, you know that this is never exactly a 1 to 1 transaction because the company that provides the assets takes a small fee for the conversion to pay for their operating expenses.
This fee incentivizes an exchange to get in the business of providing liquidity in the first place.
When creating an LP pair, you are acting similarly except that you now are the one who earns the fees for providing the assets and enabling the exchange.
When you pair 100 USDC with 100 FTM, you enable users to exchange their USD to FTM and support that buying power on the network.
3. How did you come up with Grim/what was your inspiration?
The inspiration for Grim comes from Vanguard and Jack Bogle, who touted diversification as the key to a successful portfolio. Vanguard is a mutual fund company Jack Bogle founded in May of 1975, which pioneered theindex fund.
At the time, the index fund was a groundbreaking idea that provided investors with a low-fee and passive investing approach to gain near entire market exposure via the SP500.
Vanguard is also unique in the fact that the company is owned by the people who invest in the funds themselves instead of shareholders.
Grim operates on the same principles, and our goal is to offer the community a chance to participate in the platform by earning through our native token GRIM.
50% of all platform profits are redistributed to GRIM holders through the GRIM single stake pool, allowing users to pay effectively even less in fees and mutually benefit from the application.
GRIM offers low-fee access to the widest selection of vaults on the Fantom Network. We are also developing our own index fund offerings for users who wish to gain single-click exposure to different asset classes in their portfolio, such as stable assets, LPs, or by market cap.
4. Are you part of a team? If so, how did you end up working together?
GRIM is a team of people who are passionate about DeFi and lifelong friends.
DEDE initially identified Fantom as a blockchain with a lot of potential as it offers many yield farming benefits due to its high throughput, low fees, and transaction speed.
DEDE proposed the idea of Grim Finance to Aries after studying various DeFi projects, knowing his interest in portfolio management, and he immediately asked Blue if he would like to join the team as an engineer and explore the project.
5. What's your background?
Aries is a senior software developer at a Fortune 500 company. Aries has worked in the industry for many years engineering consumer-grade products and software, along with hardware drivers that have been used in commercial test flights.
Blue is a strong engineer whose skills include OOP programming, 3D modeling, video game development, and graphic design. He most recently created a 3D SLA Trophy that was used in the Super Bowl. He enjoys working on a wide variety of projects.
DEDE was a prominent crypto asset manager back in 2017, and this is where his experience within the space developed. DEDE is a business development manager, financial investor and is currently a construction program manager at a Fortune 500 company.
6. Why did you decide to build on Fantom?
We were attracted to Fantom due to its Ethereum compatibility and low transaction costs. Fantom also has a great community of developers to whom we had been introduced.
In short, Fantom has the capacity to handle a large data set and allows us to offer our product with extremely low fees and fast compounding rates.
Fantom also has some of the best yields in all of decentralized finance. The community here has also been amazing, and we love supporting both large and emerging projects alike.
7. How did you learn about Fantom?
We’ve followed Fantom since 2018. The growth of DeFi in the summer of 2019 led to very high gas prices on the Ethereum mainnet, which made it nearly impossible to build on that network.
We decided to focus our creativity somewhere else, on a network that offers the same decentralization with higher speed and cheaper gas, and that's how we found ourselves building on Fantom.
8. How was your experience of building on Fantom?
Building on Fantom gave us opportunities to explore our creativity, to test and deploy to the mainnet without the hesitation of spending lots of money on gas fees, and to see our work/contracts go live within seconds, ready to be tested.
On top of that, the Fantom Foundation Team was always in contact with us if we had questions or needed help.
9. What brings you to DeFi, and what excites you most about the space?
We look at DeFi as the future of finance that will be adopted by almost every country in the world.
DeFi opens the space for every individual to have complete control of their investments and will also allow every user to have the ability to shop and get the highest return on their hard-earned money.
Also, individuals can be lenders or borrowers without the hassle of spending years building their credit for third-party approval and the chance to build their dream project.
10. How did the community receive Grim?
Seventy percent of the total supply of GRIM (seven million tokens) was airdropped to users who staked on the platform in July and then completed the airdrop form.
Above all, we wanted to reward early supporters and investors that helped us grow.
11. What's coming up for Grim? Free alpha!
The Grim Team is working 24 hours a day to bring new opportunities to Fantom and its community.
That being said, we are currently working on three products: a GameFi application, a market maker application, and an index vault to maximize their returns, adjust their risk tolerance and give them single-click exposure to multiple asset classes.
12. What would you like to tell fellow developers who haven't started building on Fantom yet?
If you want to be creative and explore your talent, Fantom Opera Network is the place where you can unleash your capabilities, with lots of support for the platform community projects and teams.
Also, let's not forget to talk about the Fantom Foundation incentive program that offers 370m FTM to support network growth. Fantom is where you can turn your dream into a reality.
Engage with Grim at:
