Before we proceed, we want to remind you that using flowty involves risks and can have adverse outcomes for Borrowers, Lenders and other platform participants. The following is not financial advice, and we ask and encourage you to consult a qualified financial advisor and tax expert to understand the full implications and consequences of using flowty.
If you are new to flowty, please take a moment to review our step-by-step guide and overview of the platform — Flowty Primer. It is important to us that all of our users are comfortable and familiar with flowty’s functionality before taking any actions on the platform.
Introduction
The flowty team is excited to announce that we will be launching in beta on February 7, 2022. After months of building, the platform is ready to begin onboarding users.
We have published several posts about flowty and how to interact with the platform (as either a Borrower or a Lender) on our Medium page. We encourage new users to review each post, with a focus on the Flowty Primer (step by step instructions and some basic information for users) and our post on the risks of using flowty.
Why Beta?
Our team believes it is important to provide clarity to our users on what they can expect when they engage with flowty. We decided to launch in beta to distinguish between the short-term experience on the platform and the experience we hope to provide thereafter.
During beta, we will be experimenting with layouts, UX/UI, and new features, adding support for different Flow-based NFT collections, permitting flowty team members to engage with the platform, and more. We will request feedback from our community and implement changes based on what our users value most. We have established internal milestones to help our team stay on track to exit beta. Once we exit beta, users can expect fewer structural changes and a greater focus on iterative improvements, with the occasional larger upgrade.
We want to stress that we will never compromise on the security of your assets or capital. Flowty passed a thorough analysis and stress test by Flow’s contract review team. We have spent months testing internally. We have taken extensive measures to ensure that the platform is safe for users.
Having said that, we recognize that smart contracts are not infallible and our platform may have vulnerabilities. As such, at launch, we will be capping loans at $5,000 [Edit (3/1/22): loan cap has been increased to $50,000]. The cap is in place to minimize the impact of any unexpected issues and to ensure our users have an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the platform before borrowing / lending larger sums. We understand that some may be frustrated by the relatively low cap on loans during beta but feel as if it is the best decision for our user base. We hope and expect to lift our loan cap shortly after launch and continue increasing the limit throughout beta.
Additional Details About What Users Can Expect in Beta
Feature and UI Tinkering
One of the benefits of launching in beta is that we can introduce real users transacting with real money to the platform while simultaneously introducing new features and UI enhancements.
Anyone who interacts with the platform while flowty is in beta should expect regular and, sometimes, material changes to the platform’s UI and available features. We will take beta users’ feedback into consideration as we work to improve the platform for you.
Relatively Low Caps on Loan Size
In an effort to limit any adverse outcome for our users, we will launch with a $5,000 cap [Edit (3/1/22): loan cap has been increased to $50,000] on any individual loan. While we do not anticipate issues or contract vulnerabilities, in the event that there is an unexpected and adverse situation, we want to ensure that users have relatively low levels of exposure. The cap will be raised soon after launch.
Volatility in Market Standards
When we launch, loan sizes, interest rates, length of time before a loan is filled and more are likely to fluctuate as the market searches for equilibrium. We expect that over time, market standards will emerge and Borrowers and Lenders will have greater levels of information to leverage to make informed decisions.
Flowty Team Member Participation
During beta, flowty team members may participate in the market (as Lenders or Borrowers). The goal of team member participation is to experience the platform ourselves (direct experience will help guide enhancements to the platform), add liquidity and loan listings to the market, and, perhaps most importantly, to show our confidence in the security and safety of the platform by having true skin in the game.
To avoid any issues or misperceptions of any insider edge, the flowty team will not participate in the flowty marketplace (as Lenders or Borrowers) once the platform has emerged from beta.
An Unfinished Customer Experience
While we are proud of the state of our platform and hope it is an exciting and productive tool for our users and the Flow ecosystem at large, the beta period will likely have more downtime, maintenance, and site changes than users may be accustomed to. If your preference is to only interact with a fully polished platform, we encourage you to wait until we have emerged from beta before using flowty.
Your Input Matters
Community feedback is vital to our improvement. We value our users and encourage all feedback on any aspects of the platform. Your suggestions, questions, and concerns matter greatly to us. For anyone who is joining the beta, we would greatly appreciate it if you took some time to share your thoughts and feedback with the flowty team. Please join our Discord to offer suggestions or request support from our team.
Supported NFTs
As mentioned in our post describing why we built on Flow, flowty exclusively supports Flow-based NFTs. Our goal over time is to onboard many Flow projects to flowty. At launch, we will only be supporting NBA Top Shot (read more about Top Shot going non-custodial here). As of now, NBA Top Shot only offers non-custodial support for Legendary tier moments, but we expect that Common, Fandom, and Rare moments will follow in the near future.
[Edit (3/1/22): in addition to NBA Top Shot, flowty is proud to be supporting Ballerz and Sneakerz (the Ballerz airdrop) as of March 1, 2022]
We have had extensive discussions with some incredible Flow-based NFTs that we will be adding to our platform sooner rather than later. If you are a team member or a user of another Flow-based NFT and believe the platform would be a good fit for flowty, please feel free to reach out to us to let us know.
For the safety of our users and to ensure an uncluttered marketplace, users will only be able to create listings with NFTs from projects that we approve and whitelist. In other words, unless we explicitly support a project, a project’s NFTs will not work on flowty. Many participants in the NFT space have been victims of scams or been unable to verify that an NFT is genuine. We do not want our users to be anything less than fully confident that the NFT that they are lending against is legitimate.
Where to Find Us
