Bumper offers loss protection alternative to stop loss orders

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have gareth ward co-founder and ceo of bumper gareth welcome back to the show it's great to see you once again yeah you too ashton thanks for having me again you're very welcome uh since we last spoke in the middle of 2021 bumper was

0:23working hard on uh the platform and uh we can talk about this as we dive in but i know the platform does capitalize uh especially well when the market goes down a little bit and uh that that did happen near the end of the year but i would love for you to start for the people who didn't see our first interview and aren't familiar with bumper the little bit about

0:46what is the bumper platform what are the solutions that you're bringing to the blockchain space then we can sort of dive into those details yeah yeah all right so bumper is a decentralized uh non-custodial missionless platform that provides price protection of an unstable asset so um this is not a

1:13kind of insurance in terms of like a smart contract hack insurance protocol it's very different this is taking the asset um like if or bitcoin and protecting the value of it so by taking out a policy you can protect a level so that if the price drops below that level and you then exit the policy you will

1:40come out with the amount that you've protected to so what that looks like is if you bought eth and you have if and it went up to four thousand dollars um cross fingers it goes back up there um and at that point you decide you know what it's getting a bit toppy i'm i'm not sure where it's going to go i might i want to go along on these i believe in it

2:06i want to protect 90 of that of that value so what that says is that if the price stops below 3600 the bumper protocol will make sure that you still have thirty six hundred dollars worth of value um and if for some reason the price drops down below that thirty six hundred goes to thirty two hundred um and you decide to exit and you're able to exit at that

2:35point you will walk away with 3 600 worth of value so essentially what we do is we create a marketplace of sellers of risk and buy the risk so the sellers are those people who are taking out the policy we call them takers and the buyers of risk are the makers they are the liquidity providers they provide a stable coin on

3:04the other side of the protocol and that works to to protect that value of the takers and that's a an incentivized part of the protocol with you know safety nets and all kinds of things very cool and yeah that probably would have come in handy when ethereum went up to almost five thousand dollars and and dropped to you know the 2500s 50 percent drop um to

3:32utilize it yeah right yeah absolutely i mean now is the time that you can really i think people feel that pain and it does have a lot of applications you know obviously for for someone who just has an asset they are going along on it and they don't have the time to trade in and out they don't have maybe the knowledge to do a particularly good job of that

3:58and they would pay a fee to really just have that underlying value protected um this is very good for that for professionally traded it is for funds it can be very good because what they're trying to see is showing on their balance you know for their investors than you see on the balance book and what they're often doing on the side anyway is is taking our

4:26options um taking out options to protect the um the value of um offset all that other asset um and that can be quite complicated and cumbersome um it's old technology and it's definitely something that is um you know better and better back in the 70s so they need an overhaul and um bumper's here to do that

4:55definitely gareth and you know this sort of sounds to me you know as a beginner trader it sounds very similar to like a stop loss or just protecting your losses but i believe it's a little bit different it's more intricate than that and maybe you could explain the difference between you know stop-loss function and and the bumper protocol because from what i understand

5:18it can go back up and you don't have to sell or there's other ways that you can use the technology yeah yeah i mean um stop-loss is kind of a reactionary um tool um in that you know what you do with the stop-loss is it's exactly what it says on the tin if it drops below that level um it will automatically sell out and then you've at least protected a

5:48to the lowest position you're prepared to to go what that doesn't allow you to do is to remain in that in that actual asset so for those who have a long basis on it the most frustrating we've all been there we think we're doing the right thing by protecting the asset you think great okay it's getting pretty volatile and then there's you know it's a stop-loss chase

6:15right so so somewhere i'll just know where the stop bosses are and then they just dump it down everyone sells out they basically pick up everything cheaply and um and then it just pumps back up and in crypto this is um really exacerbated because you know fundamentally low liquidity level than crypto compared to traditional markets um and so it's much easier and far more

6:41volatile so that kind of usage of stop-loss can be quite tricky to to do and you can often get caught out and what you end up doing is you're now out of that asset and you don't get the pump on the way out what bumper does is it allows you to go long on that asset so under those conditions you're not worried about it you don't even have to think about it um and then

7:09if if or when it does pump um then you're in that asset and you're capturing all the upside stop-loss doesn't have an upside um and and and the reality is that um it means that you have to be very um active and for most people you know even if they have the time to be active they're not they're not any good at it you know it takes years to be a very

7:36good trader so definitely um yeah so so you know at the end of the day um bumper allows you to not have to worry about that yeah great point gareth about hitting the stop losses and then the asset goes back up i feel like that happens to so many people and then you're out of the position right um and looking into the uh the the protocol with bumper i saw that

8:00there's also staking and there's the stable coins and there's a giant pool that the team has already accumulated from from the community maybe you can talk about like how the staking works in bumper as well yeah so um it's been quite popular we brought the staking module forward we were going to build a bit later but we had a lot of comments saying questions from the

8:23community you know once they get the tokens do we have a staking program so we um kind of um did a little kind of dev pivot to to give that some priority um created the staking module which will be utilized um when the main main bumper protocol launches um so at the moment it's just a pure um you know ability to get more you know bump tokens

8:51and um later on it does play a an important function as a as a safety module um for for the protocol um down the track um so the way it works is you stake you have a choice of um like a flexible term which means you can just take it out any time there will be a kind of cool down period but effectively you can take it out and then there are three other

9:18kind of terms 30 60 and 90 days now depending on which term you get you'll get what's called a multiplier it's like a staking power so if you put in a thousand dollars on a 1000 bump sorry on a flexible plan that will give you the power of a thousand bump so if x amount of tokens which five thousand one percent have been

9:45distributed every day um if there's five 000 bump tokens in the actual um staking module you have a thousand of them you will capture one fifth of that um but if you've got other people are in other uh because you've got 1000 everyone else is flexible if um if other people are in other terms they have different multipliers so that will reduce your ability uh your kind of

10:13staking power so if you're on a um 30 day you got 1.5 times multiple so that thousand bump then becomes like 1500 bomb so you could potentially capture more of the pro rata of that distribution for the day and then there's a seven 2.75 percent on the 60 day and six times on a 90 day so um those are kind of the staking power the way that works

10:42very cool that's great to know and yeah i think a lot of people i've seen at least in the community locking in for longer term and it's really not that long crypto moves so quickly um that and you know this protocol i'm guessing the vision is to be going years and years in the future um right and as digital assets continue to mature yeah exactly and um

11:08you know there's like anything there's there's a bit of um game theory in that in that you know whether it's 90 days or 30 days or flexible could be the better option for you because if a lot of people come in staking and there's not as much uh pro writer kind of um you might be better off in the flex and having that flexibility

11:36to trade the tokens but if there aren't a lot and you've gone in and you get captured a six times multiplier then you can really clean up so so it's it's really just it's quite an interesting game so it's um one that i'm sure people will get used to and see how it plays out definitely and you mentioned there about the full mainnet protocol working towards that maybe you can talk a little

12:03bit about the plans for in the first half of 2022 and and is there a tentative schedule for when that main net is rolling out yeah so um we're we're definitely over halfway through um at the moment and it's moving quite a quite a lot of pace so um there's um the architecture of the protocol is pretty much done um

12:31and we're just working on a few tricky things um like fungibility is quite a tricky one um so we're requiring a bit more time on some of those things um but for for the most part it's all done the uh the abm um which is the agent-based modeling where we've had some really good initial results from that showing that against the european options

12:59desk we would be 10 to 70 cheaper than an options um and that that um is again something like hedgic for example so um that was really and that was unoptimized right out of the tick so what we're now doing is we're rebuilding the python code for the simulations um so that we can do a few

13:27more things with it um and that's not far away probably less than a week away from being finalized and then we're going to start really optimizing it and adding in a few extra things that we didn't include the first one as part so we expect that to be even better that will then feed into the protocol um and that's something that we're kind of that information will

13:55drive some of those early you know settings that we need to make once we've completed the build um ui is always moving forward so we're constantly doing um ux and ui we're looking at a few key changes that we think will make it much more user friendly um and also just um we're we're also looking at maybe slight uh a bit of a u ui that just the interface change design

14:25wise it will be fundamentally the same but we'd like to kind of push it in the direction that we that we kind of really wanted to go um a lot more looking like it's a 1980s uh game a 16-bit game and um that could be it's one of those things like do you fully commit you know um and um so we're kind of um juggling that at the moment um and then you know essentially

14:54um you know the front end is always developing on whatever the ui has been doing um so they're you know getting through again they've already got stuff out there so there's a bit of refinement on some of those existing pages but now we're really into that whole protect flow uh of build at the moment and there's lots coming out of that because we're also trying to

15:20put in put things in place that will allow for extra networks extra assets and that the dap can scale and still be functionally um very efficient for a user to to and clear for them to understand definitely so many moving pieces to have in the right place uh and the timing as well you know with the user experience and and where the market's at

15:47and looking at the long-term vision of it um you know we don't have a lot of time left gareth but i wanna get your vision on the long-term prospect for for bumper you know where do you see bumper in the industry three to five years down the road which comes pretty quickly in cryptocurrency yeah it's a good question um it's it's a tricky one to answer um

16:20you know three to five years um you know last year was was a really busy year for us um you know we kind of came out that that was our our entry year into the market the market welcomed us we've built a good-sized community brand um obviously we're finding that we're building a business having to build a business to scale

16:48um for where we want the protocol to be and that's one of the top d5 protocols um this protocol is very unique we are keeping our car our cards close to our chest at this point for that kind of ip protection until it's open source and out there and i would like to think that we will be an absolute leader in this space

17:15in the derivative space and have captured the market on multiple chains where we really want and this is where i think d5 needs some real work in general is that at the moment d5 is still um for the for the nerds and the pseudo nerds at the moment you know you're connecting a wallet you have to hold private keys all that kind of thing

17:43and integration with um more retail friendly applications um is is where we'd like to go and we see that if you were on an app that you use could be any crypto.com teetoro or whatever kind of app revolut that has crypto that you can buy and you simply just press a bumper button in this corner

18:11um and it just does it for you it bumpers your your asset then that would be the easiest for a retail person to to to deal with there's no kind of connecting wallet and you know paying gas fees and having to understand that world so we need to bring in general d5 the applications need to be far easier um so that so that users really can

18:40um interact with it in the way that in the way that they interact with everything else now it's a face id um and then they're straight in and that's it and they don't have to think about that does mean that there's possibly centralization on one end but if d5 can solve for that that's the holy grail they can solve for at the back end being decentralized but

19:04at the same time the ease not necessarily having to hold that but um yeah i'm not the genius that will design that so i think someone out there will i think the integrations with major exchanges and and uh on-ramps and off-ramps will be key to success so thank you for pointing that out gareth and you mentioned uh we talked about the staking we talked

19:30about the path towards the main net for the viewers that are interested in learning more and you know getting involved with the staking right away following along for these updates towards the mainnet rollout what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved with bumper yeah the best thing is to go to the website it's bumper dot phi uh fi

19:53um that will have all the links so you'll get a dis there's a discord link telegram um medium articles there are plenty of kind of explanations and various levels of um you know what your knowledge base is um that would be the best best point if you want to play around if you kind of know how to deal dc you just won't get stuck in then go to app.bumper.fire and that'll be the dab

20:17amazing thank you so much for taking the time gareth to come back on once again uh i'm impressed with all the progress with bumper and i'm looking forward to these updates that we spoke about and let's follow up in the near future yeah thanks i really appreciate it happy meeting