Decipher 2022, a second annual gathering of the Algorand foundation held in Dubai was a massive success. The active community engagement portrayed confidence in the existing blockchain technology. Following below is an exclusive interview of delegates conducted by TheNewsCrypto.
About Daria Yakovleva
Daria Yakovleva is the CEO of Cometa, a single-sided liquidity lending protocol with Impermanent Loss protection. Daria was the runner-up of the SCALE pitch deck at the Decipher 2022 and is going to carry forward Cometa in the Algorand blockchain with the foundation’s official backup.
Daria is the ex-team leader of Ads Smart Strategies at vk.com with over five years of experience in Software Engineering and Machine Learning. Her current focus area for the past few years has been high-load smart advertising technologies, although she had machine learning research in state-of-the-art advertising algorithms such as bidding strategies and ads recommendation. Also, she has experience in product management, hiring, and team leadership.
What is Cometa, and tell us about the current phase of the project?
In Cometa (derived from the word comet), we build single-sided liquidity lending, it’s a DeFi protocol, a kind of finance. If you have a project, then we help you to attract liquidity to the associated token. We guide the project coming to us to gather liquidity for their token.
So, it’s a long journey for us. We are already a year old in Algorand. We started from the NFT collection, we built 3D avatars for the metaverse and it was really successful, with sales like $300,000. It was our first capital, but then we realized that we are mostly developers and we love finance and algorithms and we have less knowledge about gaming. So we just brought in our community and started the DeFi protocol. After that, we launched yield farming, which is just the basic mechanics of users providing liquidity and getting back some rewards. Now it’s the mainnet, we try to get all communities from all platforms such as GameFi, NFT, and DeFi to engage in the common ground. Next, the strongest and hardest project is Liquidity as a Service. It’s on the testnet now and we will launch it by next year.
Did Cometa start off from Algorand or was it shifted from any other blockchain?
We started from Algorand. It’s not typical, I would say. We want to be on the multichain and our next target is the Polygon.
A one-liner about Algorand or Decipher event that you think will be an appropriate description?
It’s the best conference I have ever been to. It’s been a family since I worked here, I have seen everybody there on the screen and now I feel the people, they are all deeply integrated. What they’re doing, they know alike a lot.
The cryptocurrency market is very unstable as of now, But the crypto population is optimistic about the industry, as we can witness a huge audience turnaround all over the world in blockchain and crypto events, similar to this. What’s your take on this?
It’s a hard time for everybody, but the technology under Algorand, the strongest of it, makes algorithms survive even amidst the bear market. And the people here (Decipher), how much they know, how deeply they are integrated, are the strongest to face the downturn of the system. So I believe in Algorand, and we have to tell everybody about it. That’s our current challenge.
As mentioned before, the crypto market is going down and it is a dominant sector of the whole blockchain industry. So how do you see the impact of crypto on NFT and Metaverse?
The impact of crypto on NFT and Metaverse is huge since they are just combined together. Because it’s all new areas on new projects and the bill of the crypto is on top. So if it’s in the future, there will be crypto. It’s 100% sure, we see the value already, but it will take time.
All around the world we have governments coming up with many regulations or putting hurdles in the path of the blockchain industry. So which space /region would you say is more pro to blockchain developers and the industry?
I would say that Dubai is definitely a DeFi hub and a crypto hub. There are a lot of conferences here, also in London. But it also depends on the project and everything.
What’s your plan for the year 2023? What’s on the roadmap for the project?
We are going to launch on the mainnet. We also want to scale on the Polygon network. We want to understand more about how many projects need liquidity, and how we can scale, for example, order books not only automated market makers kind of like big determinants but the scale. So this is the best market ever seen because now there is a less competitive project that people that really want to build something and that’s the best people that I want to work with, so our goal is to build something very useful.
