Tokemak AMA With Carson Cook

Tom:
Hi everyone, today we are extremely excited to kick off our first AMA with Carson Cook, the founder of Tokemak. We also have several members of the Tokemak team including Bruno (Head of Tokenecon), Paul (Head of Design/Social) and Conor (Head of Communications). Tokemak is aiming to be a crucial part of DeFi as the core utility for sustainable liquidity. As a disclosure, Delphi is an investor in Tokemak and a transcript of this AMA will be shared with Delphi Digital Members. We are aiming for a 60 minute AMA so feel free to answer questions at your own speed.

• Tokemak’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/TokenReactor
• Our Tweet Thread: https://twitter.com/shaughnessy119/status/1374549244405805058
• Our Last Podcast (and Transcript) with Carson: Carson Cook: Tokemak Is The Decentralized Liquidity Engine for DeFi

Carson:
Hey Tom thanks for having us!

Tom:
To start off, Carson, Bruno, Paul and Conor can you share a bit about your backgrounds?

Carson:
Hi I’ll start off – background is technology, PHD in physics, a master’s in electrical engineering. I was at McKinsey for a number of years in financial services and traded before entering into crypto market making.

Bruno:
Hi all, Bruno here. Currently focused on Tokenomics at Tokemak. My background is with a fortune 500 tech company in the SFBA.

Carson:
Fractal started market making in crypto and defi in 2018 and began going    deeper into defi, ultimately arriving at Tokemak to revolutionize liquidity and market making.

Tom:
Carson, while the rest answer their bios, what is the problem Tokemak is attempting to solve today?

Paul:
Background in the design/architecture world, started investing in crypto in 2014 and came on to handle brand direction for Tokemak last year.

Carson: 
We realized that token projects lived and died by liquidity and market making yet it was notoriously difficult and opaque for them to navigate. Liquidity and market making requires massive amounts of tokens to be set aside for liquidity mining and/or large contracts with centralized market making firms. Furthermore, liquidity is even important to defi and crypto than it is to traditional finance, as it serves as the bandwidth of decentralized finance.

Tom:
(As an aside, I will ask a bunch of questions then open this up to our institutional members as well)

Carson:
In other words, users of protocols can only interact with these applications if they’re able to get in and out of the tokens with reasonable slippage/losses. We realized there is a decentralized model for market making and providing liquidity that is consistent with the values of defi and also benefits everyone – token projects, DAOs, exchanges (AMMs)