Foreword:
Blue Fox Note also introduced the Cook protocol "Cook: Asset Management Protocol in the DeFi Era" before. This article is an excerpt from the community AMA of the Cook protocol and shared by the CSO Kun of the Cook protocol.
What does the Cook Agreement do?
Kun: Simply put, the Cook Agreement is a cross-chain decentralized asset management service agreement, or it can also be called a decentralized fund market agreement.
On this platform, there are mainly two roles, one is a fund manager and the other is an investor. Fund managers are free to create their own funds and use trading tools for asset allocation. Investors can choose a suitable fund for follow-up investment based on their own risk appetite and investment philosophy.
The entire Cook Protocol platform will be implemented through smart contracts to ensure the safety of funds and the transparency of profit and risk data. Its significance is that ordinary investors can follow the investment fund strategy on it to achieve higher investment returns. Professional investors can contribute strategies to the above to transform their investment experience and capabilities into greater value.
How did the team decide to enter the track of asset management? Because DeFi can enter many fields, such as lending, trading, derivatives and so on.
Kun: There are currently two types of DeFi projects. One is the underlying financial infrastructure, such as Uniswap and Compound. The other type is revenue aggregators built on these infrastructures, such as YFI.
Compared with the underlying financial infrastructure, the Cook Protocol belongs to the top-level DeFi Lego, which is an asset management service agreement built on top of these infrastructures. The reason why we decided to enter the track of asset management is that we believe that the infrastructure on Ethereum has gradually improved. And the asset management track on top of these infrastructures will begin to develop slowly. And this track has just begun to develop, and it is not too crowded.
What are the background and strengths of the Cook core team?
Kun: The team members of the Cook Agreement come from world-class universities and top companies. Members have graduated from Berkeley, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, as well as work experience in Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Youtube, and Dropbox. All technical team members have decades of experience in smart contract development, user interface design, front-end and back-end programming, artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure.
The team has more than 4 years of experience in the blockchain field and has many contacts in the industry. Team members have experience in management or technical leadership in large companies or fast-growing startups. In addition to the core team, in the past few months, the Cook team has also recruited outstanding talents from all over the world, as well as engineers, community management managers, and investors from Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
How does the Cook Agreement attract fund managers and investors to participate in Cook's ecology?
We will take three steps. The first step will be the official strategy developed by Cook as the main goal. The most important thing in this step is to attract investor users. One of the target audiences of our products is some users who are not particularly familiar with DeFi. We will make them profitable from DeFi in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
The second step will begin to focus on the development of the ecology and attract high-quality fund managers. We will build the investment tools that fund managers need to use in order to assemble more advanced high-quality investment strategies for investors to follow up. At the same time, we will strictly screen fund managers to select high-quality fund managers. There is also that we will cooperate with some existing funds to allow them to create funds on our platform to provide our investor users with more diversified services.
The third step is when the entire ecosystem matures, we will gradually liberalize the selection of fund managers, and the entire ecosystem will survive the fittest through a market economy.
What are the differences in the model between the Cook protocol and the liquidity mining aggregation protocol (such as Year, etc.)?
Kun: Compared with traditional revenue aggregator projects, the Cook Agreement mainly has the following differences:
The Cook Protocol is a cross-chain asset management platform. In addition to Ethereum, it will also be deployed on public chains such as HECO, BSC, and Polkadot to help everyone manage assets on different public chains.
The Cook Agreement will support access to more underlying infrastructure including decentralized exchanges, lending, mining, derivatives, and insurance platforms, giving fund managers more options for asset allocation.
The income aggregator generally implements an open source passive strategy defined in advance. The Cook Protocol not only supports passive strategies, but also allows fund managers to actively conduct transactions, such as ambushing potential tokens or grabbing top mines in advance based on cognition.
DeFi is the key target of hacker attacks. We will support the insurance of funds to protect the interests of investors in extreme cases.
The Cook Agreement will design NFT games based on the setting of navigation and adventure to enhance the product's interest and user stickiness.
How does the Cook Agreement protect the security of investor users' assets?
Kun: All transaction records on the blockchain are open and transparent. The past performance of fund managers can be checked. Fund managers can win everyone's trust through good historical records. At the same time, the opening of a fund needs to pledge COOK tokens. If the fund manager does any illegal behavior, ckToken holders can confiscate the COOK tokens he previously pledged as punishment through proposals and votes, or even replace the fund manager.
In addition, fund managers need to use whitelisting protocols (such as Uniswap, Compound) and trading token whitelists (such as WBTC, WETH) when opening funds. The smart contract will restrict the DeFi protocol platform that fund managers can use and the tokens that can be bought and sold through the whitelist. If the fund manager needs additional permissions, then he needs to make a proposal through DAO, and investors vote on the chain.
In addition, we will also support the insurance of funds to protect the interests of investors in extreme cases.
What role does COOK token play in the Cook ecosystem?
Kun: COOK token is a governance token that allows token holders to govern the Cook Agreement and control the future of the Cook Agreement. Token holders can initiate incentive plans by creating proposals and voting to develop the ecosystem, improve the governance structure, and upgrade the platform.
In addition to the governance authority, COOK tokens can also be used by investors and fund managers to pay for the services of the Cook Protocol platform. When an investor decides to invest in a popular fund, the TA must first pay a certain amount of COOK tokens. The fund manager also needs to pledge a certain amount of COOK tokens before initializing the fund.
In addition, when the fund manager decides to withdraw the management fee, he needs to pay 2% of the management fee earned as a platform usage fee. COOK token holders can also directly or indirectly share revenue through platform fees. For example, COOK token holders can collectively decide to adjust platform fees and distribute dividends to token holders, or use platform fees to buy back COOK tokens on the open market.
In the Cook protocol, a dual governance structure is adopted, which is rare in DeFi projects. What is the reason for this design?
Kun: COOK token is a governance token that can govern the Cook Protocol through proposals and voting. For example, COOK token holders can vote to adjust platform fees and update the DeFi protocol whitelist at the Cook protocol level. , Dividend the platform fee to COOK token holders or carry out repurchase and destruction.
The ckToken is used to represent the certificate of partial ownership of the investment fund, and each fund has a unique ckToken. For example, when a user invests in Fund A, the user will get a certain amount of ckTokenA according to the proportion, which represents the user's ownership in Fund A. Holders of ckTokenA enjoy the governance authority of Fund A, and can govern the fund through proposals and voting, including modifying the whitelist of Fund A's DeFi protocol and replacing fund managers. Holders of ckTokenA can at the same time redeem their own principal and income in the fund at any time through ckTokenA.
There are also some agreements for asset management. What thoughts does Cook have in terms of maintaining competitiveness?
Kun: There are not many participants in the asset management field. The main ones are Set Protocol and Enzyme.Finance. The Cook Protocol has many key differences from these platforms.
First of all, due to the high gas fee of Ethereum, the cost of becoming a fund manager of Set Protocol or Enzyme.Finance is very high. The Cook Agreement is a cross-chain solution that allows the platform to take advantage of low-fuel alternatives provided by other ecosystems.
In addition, Set Protocol does not have advanced trading tools and only allows trading pairs. Although Enzyme.Finance provides more complete products, their UI is not intuitive, and the setup process is very cumbersome.
The Cook Agreement intends to build a very simple and clear user interface, and has more advanced trading tools, such as a decentralized leverage tool that allows margin trading. Fund managers can use the platform to use leverage for income agriculture. As a result, funds from investors can be effectively used to generate as many returns as possible.
The Cook Protocol is also developing its products on blockchains other than Ethereum, especially Huobi Eco Chain, Polkadot and Binance Smart Chain. Huobi Ecochain became the first place to launch this product due to its EVM compatibility. In addition, the Huobi Eco-Chain is developing at an ultra-fast speed.
The Cook protocol has a universal design and is technically adaptable to different DeFi protocols on different back-end platforms. Therefore, it does not take a lot of effort and time to integrate with different underlying DeFi protocols in different ecosystems and blockchains.
Regarding the progress of Cook, for example, when can the product be used? When will liquidity mining be started?
Kun: It is expected that in April, Cook’s first "index fund" product will be released on Ethereum and HECO, and will be launched on BSC, OKExchain and other public chains in the future, and liquidity mining is also expected in April. First launched on Ethereum at the beginning of the month.
It is expected that the COOK active fund will be launched in June, when the core functions of the platform will be realized, fund managers will be able to create their own strategies on the platform, and users can choose to invest in active funds. In the second half of the year, we will spend more energy on ecological expansion, while docking more DeFi protocols, launching an online governance system, deploying polkadot, launching NFT games, and so on.
At present, we have established active community groups at home and abroad. After our products are launched, these communities will become the first batch of users of the Cook Agreement. At the same time, we have begun contact with many outstanding professional fund managers and DeFi scientists. They are very interested in becoming the first batch of captains of the Cook Agreement and participating in the construction of the platform together.
