Clover Finance is a smart contract platform based on Substrate and plans to bid on the Polkadot parachain. Clover hopes to help users use DeFi more easily and lower the operational threshold of DeFi.
In this exclusive interview with PolkaWorld , the co-founder and chief operating officer of Clover was invited to chat with her about the creation process, operational goals and economic design of Clover.
Interviewer: Can you explain what Clover does in plain language?
Norelle: Okay, in fact, Clover Finance is the smart contract platform in the Polkadot ecology , mainly to help some developers use the blockchain infrastructure more easily and reduce the threshold and cost of developers. It is also a one-stop compatible EVM framework created based on Substrate.
Interviewer: What are the characteristics of Clover?
Norelle: We think clover has several highlights:
The first one is its compatibility , because it is based on an EVM implementation of Substrate. The existing smart contracts only need to be changed through simple changes. Projects on Ethereum only need to copy its dApp and use some familiar tools. Migrate to Clover.
The other is interoperability . Clover owns a technology of SPV Simulation Technology , which allows decentralized cross-chain seamless communication and two-way hooking. This is a technology we made ourselves, which supports the use of two trustless methods for binding between Turing-complete and non-Turing-complete blockchains. Clover can interoperate with any external transaction by checking Merkel proofs, etc., and then each block can refer to the previous one and calculate the total amount of work it took to prove it. Clover is now also building some new tools and operations to simplify the overall flow of third-party developers. Then, in this way, Clover can check bits locally without storing or checking the entire external blockchain history. Bitcoin or Ethereum transactions, so as to allow Bitcoin and Ethereum to carry out trustless two-way binding.
The third point is that we have gas- free transactions. In fact, gas-free transactions are to achieve a frictionless user experience. Clover has completely redesigned its economy. It allows repeaters to conduct transactions on behalf of the sender, and then use the base currency to fund gas and obtain compensation for denominated assets, so users no longer need to use some past base currencies (such as Ethereum) to pay for gas, but any network token can be used to pay for gas fee.
Then the fourth point is that we pay great attention to improving the user experience . Clover will provide a very convenient and secure multi-chain wallet to realize the storage and transfer of multi-chain assets, and the exchange function between multi-chain assets, and then to satisfy users Some basic needs in the Polkadot ecology. Our wallet will also focus on user experience and lower their barriers to participation in DeFi. Because DeFi used to be a very complicated world, users had to constantly jump between contracts and agreements, so we spent a lot of time on improving the user experience.
Interviewer: you introduce your team? Why did you come together to be Clover?
Norelle: I am the co-founder of Clover, and now I am mainly responsible for operations. I am studying Computational Cognition and Computer at the University of Toronto in Canada. Before founding Clover, I was the head of Amber's business and later a partner of Bithumb Global.
Two of my co-founders, one of them is Viven , who also read computers, and we also entered the blockchain industry very early. Before entering the blockchain, he was a technical leader of Microsoft's ERP software development and an architect of Microsoft partner solutions. He also did the core development of many blockchain projects in the early days.
Our other co-founder, Burak , is also a computer student and has 20 years of development experience. Currently doing mobile, desktop, and Web3 development at Clover, as well as designing many animations and products, he is an all-round developer. He is also the founder of Staqq, a cross-border payment product.
We have known each other for a long time, and we all think that the current DeFi is very slow and expensive. At present, a lot of liquidity is on Ethereum. If you look at the market value comparison of Ethereum and Polkadot, Polkadot has great potential in terms of market value. So we established a team around June last year and started Clover.
Interviewer: Why did Clover choose to build on Polkadot?
Norelle: We believe that even if Ethereum upgrades to 2.0 and migrates from PoW to PoS, it will not be the ultimate solution to the current high gas fee and network congestion problems.
At that time, we saw Polkadot. Polkadot is a sharded multi-chain network. It can eliminate the bottleneck of legacy network processing transactions on multiple transactions on many chains and improve scalability. So we picked Polkadot because we believe that with the Polkadot and Substrate framework, Clover can provide users with a lower gas fee and a high-speed transaction experience.
You just mentioned that Clover is "free of gas fee". Can you tell me more about how the handling fee on Clover is billed?
No gas fee is not really free, but you don't need to use the platform's base currency to pay transaction fees .
For example, ETH is used for transactions on Ethereum and BNB is used for BSC, both of which use the platform's base currency to pay transaction fees. In our model, transaction assets can be directly used to pay transaction fees to reduce operational barriers. The asset sent by the transaction is automatically used to deduct the handling fee. In this way, users no longer need to store some base currency, and there is no need to pause and buy a little Ethereum first.
In addition, Clover’s account has a binding mechanism that allows users to directly bind EVM addresses to Clover and Polkadot format addresses, so that users can use the same account to interact with Polkadot’s dApps, or with Ethereum dApps. For interaction, the handling fee can be directly deducted from the Polkadot address, and there is no need to have enough balance in the contract to pay for gas, thus saving users time.
Interviewer: If users don't use Clover tokens to pay for handling fees, where does the value of Clover tokens come from?
Norelle: In fact, Clover's token CLV can also be used to pay for handling fees. In addition, CLV can also staking to obtain revenue, operate nodes, and participate in governance, etc., so CLV has many functions.
It can also be used to encourage ecological contributors . We are currently vigorously encouraging dApp developers to build on our platform. We will allocate gas to developers. In the past, many such smart contract platforms did not reward developers. In addition to the maintainers of the network, we also hope to inspire developers.
Like the current transaction on our testnet, smart contract developers will get 49% of the transaction fee, and validators will get the remaining 51%. Of course, this is the data of the test network, and the parameters of the main network may be somewhat different.
Interviewer: the chief operating officer, what do you think are the current short-term and long-term operational goals for Clover?
Norelle: We hope to become the largest linker in the entire ecology, to connect the DeFi field and the Polkadot ecology without any trace, and to help developers and project parties share the dividends of the entire Polkadot ecology together.
I think at present, whether a project can be completed in a long-term, traffic and products are two very important points. So on the one hand, we need to do a good job of our products, and the other is to do a good job of traffic. For example, how to do a good job of drainage, to educate users to use this product.
In fact, we didn't do much marketing in the past, because most of our time was devoted to product research. Now our mainnet is about to go live, and there is more time to complete the traffic. So in the short term, we hope to bring up the traffic part. In the long term, we must continue to focus on our products.
Interviewer: Does Clover have plans to bid for Parachain Slots? Will Kusama and Polkadot both shoot slots?
Norelle: Although we have not announced the parachain auction plan yet, we actually have access to the Rococo parachain.
In the Polkadot ecology, everyone knows that the card slot is very important and can bring a little more traffic, so in fact, we also reserve a part for auction .
At present, our main focus is on the Polkadot slot auction. We are also considering whether to bid for the Kusama slot.
Interviewer: How can users and developers in the current community participate in Clover?
Norelle: For users, our cross-chain wallets and browsers are already online and support BSC, Ethereum, Fantom, and users can already see all cross-chain assets on the same address on one page.
For developers, we have an incentive plan and will give developers some grants . This part of the product is already outside, in fact, our developer community is quite large.
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