Each week, we host top names in DeFi on the CertiK Security Leaderboard Live AMA. The CertiK Security Leaderboard is your one-stop shop for everything security related in DeFi. Head over to CertiK.org and check out the ranking of dozens of projects, their security scores, Skynet statistics, and much more data.
This week we had the pleasure of speaking with Andrew, Justin, and David from the EverRise team. Justin and Andrew are co-founders of EverRise. Andrew has worked with a few crypto projects prior to EverRise and Justin is a billboard charting country artist turned crypto entrepreneur. When Covid hit Andrew and Justin met Titan, the EverRise Developer, and joined on to help with the business side including marketing and branding. Also on the call with us was David Gokhshtein of Gokhshtein Media. David works with the team as a Branding Consultant and is a crypto entrepreneur and educator. He was doing a review on EverRise and liked what he saw prior to joining the team. EverRise is a hyper-deflationary token,which rewards investors for holding tokens, while also incorporating the Buyback approach currently present in the stock market. EverRise is the first cryptocurrency ever to include automatic Buyback.
The novelty or the new feature that you guys brought to crypto with EverRise is the tokenomic setup with the buyback feature. Can you uh go ahead and give us an overview of the buyback model?
Andrew: Yea, so Titan pitched the buyback model to us and he’s very well educated in stocks and obviously he’s seen a lot of stuff in the crypto industry, so he felt there was a need for this. It was something that he envisioned in his head and he’s capable of actually coding it into the contract. The way the buyback works is it stores a percentage of every transaction on buys and sells and it holds it in the contract. The only place for that money to go is back in through a buy, and as soon as it’s bought it’s burned instantly. We didn’t know at the time exactly how big it was, but clearly people really liked it considering there’s been about a thousand copies of us already and it has sort of become the new standard. the biggest benefit of this is, if you know how to use it properly, it is a safety net for investors because if you see some tough market conditions or a big dip, you have this money stored and the only place that it can go is through buys to kind of help with the market cap and add some buy pressure and when it’s much needed. Three percent of every transaction is taken off and goes towards the marketing budget as well.
Speaking of that, I actually saw the Time Square advertisement live. Are there any other notable ones that you guys are working on?
Andrew: Our focus is really on targeting crypto buyers and people who get this stuff, because we’re not another meme token. We have actual utility and massive plans here so we really want to focus. At the beginning we kind of got caught in the trap that everyone gets into; we were looking at celebrities to deliver and it just really causes a pump and dump effect that is not for us at all. We’re looking to really bring on serious buyers and investors who appreciate what we’re trying to do here. All of our marketing is targeting those people who’ve been running crazy amounts of ads, we do b-talk ads, and stuff more along those lines. We’ve used a lot of the marketing funds to buy back into the kraken as well, we put $500k in there just a week ago just to show how much we believe in this and that’s really the true celebrity and ultimate marketing tool we have. the bigger the kraken gets the more, the safety net is, the bigger celebrity he becomes. That’s what a lot of the clones are missing as well. They’re using it for pumps to satisfy their investors in the short term but really, the longevity of the project is in that safety net.
Is the marketing budget going to be decentralized? Will you allow the community to vote on how to use the marketing funds in the future?
Justin: We often take suggestions and we listen to the community like crazy and are very active. We have a EverRise radio that is hosted 24/7, our voice chat is always open in the Telegram channel, and we’re very open to taking suggestions. We listen to the community and we implement a lot of the ideas from the community, so as far as decentralized marketing, we kind of do that in a way where we do make some decisions on our own but we do involve the community a ton.
Andrew: At the end of the day a small team of people have to be making the decisions to be efficient and I think we’ve earned the community’s trust based on where we’ve deployed that capital already and everything is scrutinized. I mean with a project like this, if you took out multiple million dollars from the marketing wallet and weren’t deliberating people would notice and track your wallet and there would be scrutiny. We wouldn’t be where we’re at today if we didn’t earn the trust.
Looking to the future of EverRise, can you sort of walk us through your road map? I know that you have the contract holder and I think a liquidity locker coming down the line. Can you give an overview of those two and then anything else that might be coming?
Andrew: Yeah for sure, so EverOwn is a tool to temporarily renounce ownership of a contract by handing it over to your community. One of the biggest mistakes that new projects make and they feel pressure from their new investors to renounce ownership of the contract which is by far the number one biggest mistake you could make for a serious project, if you’re a meme token it’s fine; renounce ownership and get some investors, you’re not a long-term project anyway so it doesn’t really matter. But if you have real utility you need that contract in order to make little changes for things like an exchange, you find a new utility and you have to white list an address, or you have to change one of the variables, so this is a way that you can hand over the contract to your community and then once you earn their trust they give it back to you and we think that this will be the new standard. EverLock is an improvement on the way that liquidity pools are currently locked. It’s similar to the idea of EverOwn where you’re actually handing over the liquidity pool to your community because there are rare circumstances where, maybe you screw something up and you need to launch a new token, but that liquidity pool’s locked in there and obviously you can’t control that because then people will be scared of you rug pulling it and pulling the liquidity pool. But if you hand it to the community and they vote to give it back to you, it’s a much better option because there are extreme circumstances where you would need that liquidity to go back. It’s all about trust and safety in the space we’re in right now. I mean you guys see how many scams are going on and what we’re trying to build is just something that’s going to protect everybody and make everyone feel safer and really there’s no reason not to use these products. Titan is the developer himself and we’ve all been on core teams of other projects so we’ve experienced this pain ourselves and our goal is to solve industry issues and reinvent the way things should work and improve on them, all while using the average token as the facilitator of the ecosystem adding value to the token.
Your audit had three critical and four major findings, as well as a handful of informational and minor. You chose not to take the recommendations of the CertiK team in the resolutions. Can you walk us through that decision?
Andrew: Yeah for sure, we had a lot of in-depth talks with Titan about this. He’s the technical guy on the team and the one who wrote the contract. A lot of the issues had to do with changing variables and the ability that he was in control of it instead of kind of renouncing the ownership like a lot of the findings were that we could change this variable; but you really need to do that to control the kraken in the way that we do it. We’re looking into a lot of automation and AI bringing that into it but for now I think he’s earned the community’s trust — we all trust him, and we all make group decisions on how to do it. Somebody had to have control for this to work. It’s a brand new concept and we didn’t really know where it was or where it was going to go, but now that it’s gotten so big and so many people are involved in this we are looking for alternatives. We’re going to be handing our contract over to everyone as soon as it’s ready and the community will actually own it. That will cross off a lot of the critical findings right there.
Is there a reason you have chosen to not implement multi-sig or timelocks yet for privileged operations such as moving liquidity?
Andrew: Well it started off as a single man operation and Titan was the one who quoted the buyback. At that time there was no reason for him to implement those because he invented it and we didn’t know it would turn into EverRise. So once it did, we are constantly adapting to what’s best for the community. We want this to really succeed and be a long-term project so we are looking at adding that now. We’re going to do whatever’s best for the community so we’ve had all these conversations. We looked at the audit report in depth and implementing those is something we want to do.
Why did you guys seek out an audit and what made you choose CertiK, and more specifically, Skynet?
Justin: CertiK is obviously the best of the best and with a project that’s growing in this caliber, we didn’t really have a choice. I mean it was the only feasible option for what we’re trying to build here. We knew that it was going to be a tough audit because I’m assuming this was the first time the buyback contract was ever seen by CertiK because we invented it, so unless somebody forked our code and hit you guys up earlier than that you wouldn’t have seen it so we needed proper eyes to look over it. It was super important for us that everything was transparent. We preach transparency and we tell everybody what’s going on all the time, that’s our biggest thing, and we know that CertiK is as transparent as can be so we wanted to just do that to give our community knowledge about what we’re up to, what the code is doing, and things that needed to be changed. Skynet specifically is again a transparency thing. I mean the amount of scores that skynet shows is unbelievable so we always want to have as much information available to the general public at all times and skynet definitely helps with that. You guys are number one and we want to be taken seriously and want to be a top project so we had to pass and if we didn’t pass we had to figure out how we could because we’re in this for the long run. We’re building out all of our apps so it is better to find out now if there were critical issues and deal with them.
Speaking to the kraken a little bit more, can you explain what happens in a bear market and how this buy pressure helps?
Justin: in the event of a catastrophic crypto crash we have 2.6 million dollars at the moment to deploy right into the chart if need be to stabilize the price. It is the main thing to keep investors money safe which is the whole point of the kraken. You can go to sleep without worrying about checking the chart every five minutes. I don’t have to do that anymore because I know if there’s something crazy that does happen, which let’s be real it happens, this is real life and that is why we have a safety net available to all investors. The amount in the kraken is available to see at all times, it’s a public wallet. It’s really setting the new standard for tokens. It’s also not a new concept in the stock market, that’s where it originated, so if a company’s price gets too low due to other conditions it is the company that actually buys back some of the shares to instill confidence in the investors. It’s based on the same model but this is taking it even one step further because not only are we buying them back and doing a real increase to the price and pumping BNB into the liquidity pool, we’re burning those tokens instantly so we’re both increasing the price with buys and putting BNB in and then also lowering the total supply of tokens that are available. So it’s a double whammy.
What’s your strategy for building a strong community?
Justin: The community itself ripples into other community members. We are obviously very active on telegram, engaging with contests/giveaways, and more within the actual community itself. Then once you do that properly, it kind of just snowballs into others.
What are your top priorities in 2021? Can you share some plans for the upcoming year?
Justin: Yeah, so the main thing is building the dApps because everyone’s based around a utility. The token is here right now but the main point of EverRise is EverOwn, EverLock, and Titan’s talking about EverWallet. There are also a few other things he wants to build so it’s going to really become a global crypto brand so we’re really focusing on developing those and getting them out to the public and marketing them.
Andrew: Yeah that’s really the key here. I mean the buyback function is unbelievable and that’s what got us here and got us our traction, but the hype of that is going to wear off and it’s just going to become more of a safety net so really the way to take this to the next level is to build up that utility and that’s why we’re moving away from celebrities and kind of the quick pumps. We want to be something that revolutionizes the blockchain industry by solving real issues, not just another meme coin.
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That wrapped up this week’s AMA with Luke from MacaronSwap. For more AMA sessions with top DeFi and crypto projects, keep an eye on our social channels and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
