ThunderCore AMA Series — Gains Associates
We recently did an AMA session (Pt.2) with Gains Associates’ CEO and Co-Founder, Alexandre Raffin, to address some questions from our communities. This recap focuses on introducing Gains Associates to our users.
For the AMA recap (Pt.1) that focuses on ThunderCore, visit the link below for more details:
⚡️Host: David, ThunderCore’s Developer
⚡️Guest: Alexandre Raffin, CEO & Co-Founder of Gains Associates
⚡️Location: ThunderCore’s official Telegram group
⚡️Time: Tuesday, August 17at 2:00 PM (UTC).
⚡️Reward pool: $10 USDT to 10 selected winners.
AMA Recap structure:
- Part 1 — Gain Associates’s introduction.
- Part 2 — Give answers to the 5 best questions asked via Twitter.
- Part 3 — 3 best questions and 2 best answers from the community during the live AMA session.
Part 1: Introduction
Raffin: Hello! Thanks for having me. I’m quite excited to have this AMA and have a good one while explaining what we do at GAINS, a decentralized VC 😄
David: Fantastic! Would you mind introducing yourself a bit more to the ThunderCore community 😉
Raffin: Sure! My name is Alexandre, I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of GAINS Associates. I’m from Paris, France.
I have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science.
Before crypto, I was a professional League of Legends player, ranked 300 in Europe, participated in some tournaments, played in front of a few hundred people. It was a great experience!
I like sports, I often run, do calisthenics or climb.
We’ve been in crypto for 4 years 24/7 so we know a lot of people and how most things work.
And the second reason I love crypto after the GAINS are the memes:
David: Can you briefly introduce what is GAINs to the ThunderCore community?
Raffin: Yes, it’s a decentralized VC, which means anyone who holds enough $GAINS joins some kind of investment club and is offered deals. These deals are for private sales and seed rounds of ICOs and we’ve historically had very good returns on some of these.
Some of the best ones: Quant Network (200x+ as it pumped again recently), Avalanche (116x), Reef (62x), Persistence (66x), and many others.
We have a short hype video here that shows more projects: https://youtu.be/HoBMQ0apaFU
I think it’s a great way to be exposed to other things. You can expand your horizons by learning about so many new projects. And it’s also a good way to diversify your portfolio, make some GAINS and maybe buy even more $TT if you wish.
Recently, our last two deals got listed very fast and did both 25x: BuniCorn and Spores Network.
The market seems to be waking up so it’s the perfect time to invest imo.
David: Now let’s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far(some of them you may have already mentioned😉), and about your upcoming plans. Super excited to learn about them🤩
Raffin: We’ve raised $1.2M back in April this year. We could have actually raised a LOT more. The demand was overwhelming. But we didn’t want to do a money grab. Instead, we left a lot of upside on the table for the investors (many had been with us for years before GAINS was tokenized, so this was also a way to give back).
Regarding plans:
— We’ll have our web platform live very soon. It will be a great dashboard to visualize how all your investments with GAINS are doing, when the tokens are due, info on the projects, etc.
— We’re also working on our launchpad, aiming for the end of September for the launch. This way, we will cover all the fundraising rounds: both private and public sales, bringing opportunities to even more people.
— We’re going to go live soon as well with a project we’ve been working on for the past 8 months. Still kind of a small secret but we’re very excited about it.
Part 2: 5 best questions from Twitter
Q1-All project’s coins have their main Utilities & real-life use! So, Can you tell us what the main role of your coin is in your ecosystem? Explain its Utilities & Real-Life use cases? and Why should I invest in your coin for the long term?
Raffin: Good question. I believe our token has more utility than 99% of crypto projects 🙈 Indeed, there is a real use case to the token: it’s an entry ticket (that you keep!) to the private groups where we offer our deals. As simple as that. Because of that, there’s effectively a huge % of the supply that’s locked in people’s wallets as they’re holding to stay in the groups.
— GAINS Tiers —
🐳 Tier 1: GAINS Blue Whales — 200,000 GAINS required
🦈 Tier 2: GAINS Baby Sharks — 100,000 GAINS required
🐬 Tier 3: GAINS Sleek Dolphins — 30,000 GAINS required
🐟 Tier 4: GAINS Silver Fishes — 10,000 GAINS required
We have tiers. The more tokens you hold, the higher the tier. In higher tiers, you get to invest more. Indeed, the allocations we get are not unlimited. We have to fight for them by providing as much value as we can to the projects.
There are also sometimes exclusive deals for whales and sharks.
Regarding why invest in the long term: I truly believe we will see some decentralized VCs in crypto become huge. It’s just destined to happen because of the network effects. Also, many projects are starting to realize that decentralized VCs can be better than traditional VCs that essentially “just” bring their name, and sometimes a few high-level intros.
Here, you get the power of the crowd, a lively community of holders, and ambassadors before even launching.
And as for why GAINS specifically, we’ve been in crypto for 4 years and intend to be there for the next 10. We’re also scaling and bringing onboard quality people to build the products of tomorrow. On that note, let me share a job ad we published a few days ago: https://t.me/thunder_official/154585.
Q2-What is your project marketing strategy? What will you do to make your project stand out against others in the crypto field and the people who come to explore your project?
Raffin: Doing AMAs like these for starters. This is something I love about crypto, how open people are. You can collaborate and in the end, it’s beneficial for everyone. You learn more, meet new people, have more diverse opportunities.
Then, we’ll take time to educate people. First, our friends. I’m personally telling all my friends to get into crypto and $GAINS because I believe it’s better if they get in early, before the massive retailer wave. We’ll have tutorials and explainer articles on our website for all the noob questions newcomers can have.
And, I’ll also do more YouTube videos, on what happens daily in the space, in addition to the interviews we already have with founders of other projects.
Q3-What is the ultimate vision your project is trying to achieve within the cryptocurrency market? Obviously, the whole space will experience huge growth in the upcoming years, but what role would you like your project to play in this?
Raffin: The ultimate goal would be to have a great community of people and see them all thrive, be happy and free by investing in crypto. And also learning and participating, not just sitting on their asses 😉
In a few years, what would be amazing, is to reach DAO status and be fully decentralized and autonomous. Right now, we do a lot of work behind the scenes to source the deals, negotiate, better our brand and so much more. And then, we provide value to the projects we invest in by helping with marketing, making intros, advising them.
This could be done by valued community members with special expertise. They could be rewarded with some extra tokens for their time and contributions. It’s going to take some time as we need to grow more and things need to be well thought out for the various incentives so that things run by themselves but I believe in it.
Q4-Collaborations and partnerships are some of the most important cornerstones to help improve adoption. Can you tell us about your current partners, plans for partnerships, and what everybody stands to gain from these partnerships?
Raffin: We worked with Unifarm recently for a staking program. We actually broke all records and filled the pool faster than any other project they’ve had: https://twitter.com/unifarm_/status/1409870135356186626
That was a testament to how active our community is 😊
We also have partners who are influencers and invested. They relay some of our news.
Finally, it’s great to be friends with serious projects like Thunder and educate both communities about what we do.
We have more partners like Market Makers, VCs, known advisors, YouTubers, and more. Always good to keep in touch with them, it helps to get good projects early and help the projects we invest in by introducing good people.
Q5-A strong community not only brings interesting ideas to the project but also attracts larger partners. So how are you planning to build its community? And is there a plan to recruit people with blockchain experience to your team?
Raffin: We already have some people with blockchain experience in the team. They’ve coded a few Smart Contracts for us. We’ve also hired I would say about 50% from our community. It’s great because you know people and they know you.
Building the community is a daily task which is quite hard when you have many things to attend to but this is what we strive for and the reason we wake up every day. Investing alone would be boring.
I’d say we’re also genuine, sharing what we think openly goes a long way to build trust and invite people to bring their friends, creating a good vibe.
Part 3: 3 best questions and 2 best answers from the community
Q1-Can you please share about your burn system and buyback system? How does burn work for your token?
Raffin: We’ve burnt some tokens already: https://t.me/GainsANN/4207
Now, we’re realizing there’s more value in the long term by using these funds to hire people and build products rather than doing a buyback and burn, which seems like a temporary band-aid, compared to creating lasting value by building. Again, focusing on the long term here :)
Q2-When THE BEAR MARKET COMES, WILL your token PROBABLY DUMP? Are you prepared for this bear market? How will you handle the panic of your Investors?
Raffin: This is a good question. Tokens of decentralized VCs are actually super sensible to market sentiment: meaning they tend to pump more when things are doing well and to dump more when the market is bearish. The reason why is that, it’s the key to investing. In a bull market, everyone wants to invest so the demand for the token to access deals rises. In a bear market, it’s the opposite.
So, we have crafted incentives knowing that. For example, those who hold during prolonged periods of eventual bear markets will get priority access for premium deals in the future over people who sold to try to buy back lower.
Q3-How I can buy your tokens? And how to invest in your projects?
Raffin: Here is a good message that summarizes who we are, our track record, and how to take action if you’re interested 👇
1) Where we come from. If you’re still worried about scams or how competent we are, our background and experience, even just quickly going through these will help.
— 2018 Summary https://medium.com/gains-associates/gains-2018-rewind-and-2019-outlook-4441d738d6f1
— 2019 Summary https://medium.com/gains-associates/gains-2019-recap-and-2020-vision-4e878ec93731
— 2020 Summary https://medium.com/gains-associates/gains-2020-review-ed39206914f8
2) Track Record (non exhaustive).
— Quant Network 57x
— Avalanche 116x
— Reef 62x
— MANTRA DAO 21x
— Bridge Mutual 42x
— Persistence 66x
— OpenDAO 19x
— Xend 52x
— PlasmaPay 21x
— Kylin 73x
— LABS Group 45x
— Jigstack 71x
— Cellframe 67x
3) If you wanna take action after reading this, the lower tier starts at 10,000 $GAINS, which are at a very affordable price right now. The higher the tier, the bigger the allocations, and the more exclusive the deals.
👉 You can buy $GAINS here: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?outputCurrency=0xd9b312d77bc7bed9b9cecb56636300bed4fe5ce9
— GAINS Tiers —
🐳 Tier 1: GAINS Blue Whales — 200,000 GAINS required
🦈 Tier 2: GAINS Baby Sharks — 100,000 GAINS required
🐬 Tier 3: GAINS Sleek Dolphins — 30,000 GAINS required
🐟 Tier 4: GAINS Silver Fishes — 10,000 GAINS required
4) Once you’ve bought enough $GAINS, how to join the private group with deals: https://gainsassociates.medium.com/how-to-join-the-gains-private-groups-talk-to-gainsy-3fd784367b9f
Q1 from Gains-What does GAINS mean? 😎
Community answer: Group Action Is Never Small
Raffin: Yes, indeed!
GAINS is a catchy name. Of course, we all want to make money, so that’s the meaning people see at first but there’s a story behind it-embodying the collaborative spirit that makes crypto so strong 💪
This way, we can build hard together
Q2 from Gains-What’s the cumulative ROI needed for all deals offered by GAINS to reach, to release the team tokens? Explain how it works :)
Raffin: The answer can be found here: https://www.gains-associates.com/deck.pdf
Community answer: Only once a combined cumulative ROI of 1,000x is achieved, and the 2-year vesting period is up, 100% of the team, advisors & partners tokens can become fully unlocked.
Raffin: That’s correct ahah. To explain more, we want to deserve the team tokens. First of all, there’s a 1-year cliff so we’re not getting tokens anytime soon. But let’s say we didn’t deliver and brought shit deals: we wouldn’t get any tokens.
We need to deliver deals that bring value to our holders to get access to our tokens, and the values are displayed in the answer. It’s a good way to make sure the incentives are aligned and that we keep on working to bring the best to our members and holders.
David: Fantastic! That wraps up the main part of today’s AMA. I think we should all thank @Firunner again for joining us today. It’s been such a pleasure🤝
Raffin: Thanks a lot for having me today. I hope it was interesting and fun. Don’t sleep on $GAINS and investing in general, it’s the key to financial freedom, and learning more about the world and yourself.
About Gains Associates
GAINS Associates is the World’s First Decentralized VC, allowing anyone that holds $GAINS to invest in the crypto unicorns of tomorrow. With over 3 years of experience and several ultra-high return deals, we are removing the barriers of entry to investing and changing the world, one deal at a time.
GAINS stands for Group Action Is Never Small, embodying the collaborative spirit that is the essence of blockchain and decentralization.
In addition, GAINS provides daily news, articles, video interviews, and fun & educational events.
Website | Telegram ANN | Telegram Group | Discord | Twitter | YouTube
About ThunderCore
ThunderCore is a secure, high-performance, EVM-compatible public blockchain with its own native currency, TT. With a breakthrough consensus protocol that overcomes the scalability “trilemma” called PaLa, the ThunderCore network offers 4,000+ TPS, 1 second confirmation times, and low gas fees that cost less than a fraction of a cent, giving decentralized applications security and scalability.
Currently, ThunderCore has an international user base that spans across more than 100 countries.
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