O3 Labs’ Communications Director, Matt Powers, joined Neo Global Development’s AMA series, Neo Live, on Thursday, Oct. 21. O3 Labs is the team responsible for building and maintaining O3 Swap, a cross-chain liquidity aggregation protocol designed to provide users with the most cost-effective rates and a simple one-click solutions for swapping assets between different blockchains or layer two networks.

In the AMA, Powers offered an overview of the O3 Swap protocol, plans to launch a NEP-17 version of the O3 token on Neo N3 in Nov. 2021, future development of an O3 blockchain, O3 Wallet mobile app development, relationship with the Neo ecosystem, and much more.

A transcript of the AMA can be found below:


Panda Skiing (Neo Telegram Admin): Hello, I would like to thank the members of the Neo community for joining me today for this AMA event.

O3 Swap is a proprietary cross-chain aggregation protocol built by O3 Labs. The mission of O3 Swap is to provide consumers access to cryptocurrency-based financial services, allowing them to exchange, or ‘swap,’ various digital assets within their O3 Wallet. 

The benefits of this design can be attributed to the high level of safety and security that is inherent to the decentralized model of asset storage and protection. The platform also provides cross-chain swaps to conduct exchange settlements without regard to the limitations of a typical isolated blockchain network. 

The term cross-chain derives itself from the fact that the exchange is executed after traveling across two or more separate blockchain networks. With a cross-chain swap, the initial asset and the target asset are deployed on two isolated blockchains that otherwise are non-communicative. In light of the advanced development of DeFi protocols and the increasingly mature markets for lending, exchange, and derivatives.

The O3 Swap protocol, in cooperation with its associated decentralized wallet software, provides a one-stop aggregation and exchange platform for consumers and offers developers access to an open, distributed, limitless, and secure trading environment.

Matt has been investing in cryptocurrency since 2017 and talking to anybody who’ll listen to him about it since he bought his first Litecoin at that time. He joined O3 Labs in 2020 and has quickly become an integral part of the communications team and risen to the role of Communications Director.

We are happy to have Matt from O3 here with us today.

Matt Powers (O3 Labs Communications Director): Hey everyone! I’m Matt!

Q1: What is O3 Swap? Can you provide some details about the project and its functions?

Matt: O3 Swap is a cross-chain aggregation protocol. That’s a very fancy way of saying we connect to DEX’s on different chains. Currently, O3 Swap connects to the largest decentralized exchanges on Ethereum, Huobi ECO Chain, Matic, Neo Legacy, Binance Smart Chain, and Arbitrum to perform swaps by sourcing liquidity from the largest advanced market makers on those blockchains.

O3 Swap also has a cross-chain pool on the O3 Swap site, where users can trade safely and simply across chains within their decentralized wallets. Users need not log in, do KYC, or provide identification. All they must do is sign using their wallet signatures in their wallets. We currently support O3 Wallet and Metamask.

Q2: Can you share the roadmap with us and what updates are coming within the next five years?

Matt: Yes, so currently, our roadmap doesn’t run that far ahead.

In Q4 of 2021, we plan to launch a DAO that will arrive with our O3 Swap V2 protocol. This will essentially give stakers of O3 tokens the power to make proposals on changes to the protocol, vote on proposals, and elect representatives depending upon how much O3 tokens they’re staking.

We also plan to launch on Neo N3 before year’s end, hopefully in November of 2021. So, that should be big news to the Neo community.

Down the road, we’ll also launch on other layer 2 chains like Avalanche and Optimism, and we hope to also launch on Solana later on in 2022. 2022 is also a time in which our developers hope to develop O3’s own blockchain, but that’s a bit far down the road when we have so much to look forward to in the near future.

Q3: Will O3 Labs be totally independent that you can do all functions on the mobile, or will users need a desktop app as well, and will users be able to vote via the O3 mobile wallet?

Matt: Updates such as these will first come to the desktop app before being gradually incorporated into the mobile app. The reason for this is that the developers need to work on, and test these two separately and the desktop app takes precedence.

Eventually, all functions will be available on the mobile application, and that includes voting. Still, we’ve got to test it more vigorously to make sure it holds up as many of our users are onboarded via our popular O3 Wallet.

In short, all functions will eventually operate from the mobile app; however, it will take a bit longer than the desktop application.

Q4: Can you describe the benefits Neo has offered O3 Labs?

Matt: Neo is the reason O3 got its start. The O3 Wallet was originally developed purely as a wallet to store NEO, so that’s where O3 began back in 2017.

As far as support on the marketing front, Neo has also been super supportive of O3’s mission and the O3 team is super familiar and friendly with the Neo team, which provides us with guidance whenever we seek it.

I’d be remissed to leave out that Neo is both a partner and investor in O3, so our success is, in part, owed to Neo.

It’s really a big brother, little brother type of relationship between the two entities.

Q5: How do you see O3 fitting into the Neo ecosystem? Any different feeling between the Neo ecosystem and other ecosystems?

Matt: From my understanding, Neo works a lot differently than a lot of other chains and this allows the ecosystem to innovate in its own unique way.

It seems like the O3 Swap is necessary for the Neo ecosystem as a cross-chain solution because not too many bridges are sophisticated enough to deal with Neo, but O3 can since we’ve worked with Neo for so long.

O3 sees this as a major advantage to the relationship between Neo and O3. We’re strategic partners with a long history and can be seen as a demonstration to other big projects as to what Neo can do for its partners in terms of cultivating relationships and building useful solutions within the DeFi space.

Lastly, of course, it’s different because Neo is our longtime partner and supporter. We can’t say the same about the other chains we’re connected to.

Q6: Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market, and there are many new platforms under development. So what do you think about Southeast Asia, and do you have plans to grow there?

Matt: Yes, actually, we’re looking to grow more specifically in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and we’re looking for ambassadors and KOLs that are looking to promote O3 Swap in these areas.

We’re in talks with several KOLs to do just that. Listing on Huobi and MEXC gave us a big step toward doing that, and we plan to list on more Asia-centric centralized exchanges in the near future.

Q7: Do you have a coin burn or buyback system?

Matt: We haven’t had any coin burns or buybacks yet; however, we do plan to implement coin burns after the release of O3 Swap V2 and other coin burning events and competitions to get the users involved where coins will be burned, much like BSC does with their tokens from time to time.

Q8: What is the most ambitious goal of O3 Labs?

Matt: The most ambitious goal of the project, in my opinion, is to create its very own O3 blockchain sometime in 2022. I think that’s super ambitious, and it would be amazing if this were completed before 2023.

Q9: What is the revenue model for O3 Labs?

Matt: Our revenue and data can be found on the Dashboard tab within the O3 Swap website. We have revenue from our fees in addition to the money we raised during our IDO. Right now, we’ve got plenty of runway to grow.

Q10: You’ve done AMA in many Telegram groups. What other ways will you make your project more popular?

Matt: That’s a good question and well said. We’re going to find KOL’s in countries that are rapidly adopting cryptocurrency to partner with. We’ll align them with our interests by making them investors and strategic partners and go from there.

I also think we could revamp our digital marketing model to get the community involved by having competitions and more engagement within the community, similar to the way memecoins do it. They’re fun environments to be in and the O3 community needs to be more fun while also maintaining its utility in order to thrive in this hyper-competitive environment.

Note: Some edits have been made for formatting and readability.

The full AMA can be found at the link below:
https://t.me/NEO_EN/182608