whitepaper

Whitepaper Peacock Finance

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Abstract

The cryptocurrency industry is changing each day. For instance, the number of cryptocurrency exchanges keeps growing with each platform choosing to offer an extra unique service as a differentiation strategy in the crypto universe some choose to focus on trading, brand identity, customer service or education resources. Strategy chosen by these centralized exchanges has led the industry to grow alongside imminent challenges not possible to solve using centralized strategies and or plans. Therefore, there is a need to support decentralized exchanges that are truly focussed on the original Satoshi Nakamoto vision in Bitcoin of creating a trust less, permission-less and a peer to peer ecosystem where each user has control over their funds or wealth. Peacock Finance is such a platform seeking to revolutionize the crypto ecosystem by introducing innovative decentralized finance solutions.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The first cryptocurrency exchange started its operations in March 2010 . Ever since, the cryptocurrency exchange ecosystem has grown rapidly with over 500 active exchanges helping crypto users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies. Available exchanges have little product differentiation and are centralized platforms. Centralized means as a user of cryptocurrencies you trust and engage services of a third party to monitor all your transactions as well as hold the digital assets on your behalf. It should be a concern if a user stores funds in a centralized entity as this compromises its security because such exchanges are vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as hacking. In the event of hacking users not only lose their funds but also personal information because centralized exchanges will always request users to verify identity by giving their personal information. For instance, in 2018, Coincheck a centralized crypto exchange was hacked and at least $500 million funds in crypto stolen by the hackers . Further, more than $11 billion in cryptocurrency have been hacked between 2011 and 2019 . Evidently, centralized exchanges have contributed to the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem by introducing more people to digital assets. However, these platforms continue to aid loss of user’s funds because of weak security and infrastructure systems. Concerns and issues with centralized exchanges has led to development and innovation of decentralized exchanges and ecosystem. Fundamentally, the decentralized ecosystem is growing rapidly more so, decentralized finance (DeFi) because of ability to use smart contracts to develop finance products and eliminate the need for third parties or middlemen. For instance, decentralized exchanges are increasingly becoming popular owing to their feature of allowing users to have control over their funds. Building a decentralized exchange eliminates the worry of hacking or other cyber-attack concerns. Satoshi Nakamoto developed Bitcoin with the aim of empowering people to exercise own control over their wealth and improve financial inclusion. Similarly, decentralized finance products bolster ethos of empowerment and decentralization. Peacock Finance plays an important role within the decentralized finance ecosystem with its decentralized exchange. It is a platform seeking to solve imminent industry challenges while giving its users security, transparency and control over their funds.

Industry Problems

“We Believe The Future Of The Industry Lies In Decentralization, And With The Momentum Increasing, It’s Time To Go All-In” CZ- CEO Binance Certainly, centralized exchanges have been pivotal to driving cryptocurrency and digital assets adoption worldwide. However, these centralized platforms face some serious challenges that at this point in the cryptocurrency history developers are working to solve some of the imminent industry challenges. Many of the problems facing centralized exchanges occur due to their involvement intermediaries and lack of pursuing the ideals and vision of Bitcoin namely decentralization. Satoshi Nakamoto vision and intention when designing Bitcoin was to do away completely with intermediaries and introduce a currency with a network that has users interact without engaging an intermediary. Decentralization as though by Satoshi was to have control shift away from institutions and go to individuals. However, this has been hijacked by centralized exchanges leading to industry problems as discussed below.

Centralized Projects

A lot of exchanges operating at the moment are centralized with their computer power and network centralized in regional servers which makes them prone to cyber-attacks. Further, users holding crypto assets with these exchanges, their funds are stored on exchange wallets and used for trading. In case, a user wants to withdraw funds from “his or her” wallet an exchange must reconcile records for funds to be available for withdraw. Significantly, creating the problem of having to wait for longer periods especially if a user is withdrawing a huge amount. Notwithstanding, transacting in a peer to peer model as was the vision of Satoshi with Bitcoin the only wait time a user would encounter is the time for blockchain confirmations within the network. Further, being able to sign up with such centralized platforms requires one to trust an exchange will keep funds safe notwithstanding the requirement to file Know Your Client (KYC) information .

Technical Infrastructure

Centralized exchanges often face infrastructure issues owing to their relying on regional servers and centralized platforms which leads to creation of a single point of failure contrary to what decentralized technologies aim to achieve . For example, these servers may experience technical glitch leading to downtime and this affects trader’s ability to access funds or worse penalize a trader who wanted to make a trade move at a particular time leading to losses. For example, Bithumb a leading crypto exchange experienced a downtime lasting about 1 hour 30 minutes leading to loss of trade value of at least 60,000 Bitcoin. A surge in trade volume alone can lead to technical difficulties of centralized platforms because of their servers can’t deal with a massive influx of activity.

Lack of Transparency

Numerous centralized exchanges do not record their transactions on a blockchain network meaning they operate on off-chain systems. Their operations are similar to escrow systems, hence, hold user’s funds prior to engaging in a transaction. Choosing to operate off-chain limits transparency of operations leading many exchanges to engage in wash trading (creation of fake volumes) mostly with the intention of indicating market strength through high levels of liquidity. In addition, choosing to operate off-chain, some exchanges are take part in insider trading as well as price manipulation of crypto assets. A report by Bitwise Asset Management in March 2019 found out at least 95 percent of Bitcoin trading volume as per listings on CoinMarketCap had evidence of wash trading .

## Security Concerns

A leading industry problem in the cryptocurrency ecosystem is security vulnerabilities and this is driven by the fact existing centralized exchanges take custody of user’s funds. Precisely, out of all crypto exchanges available in the market, 73% are custodial platforms which means they are in charge of not only user’s funds but also their private keys. Moreover, these platforms operate using centralized servers thereby, creating a single point of failure and are attractive to hackers. Holding crypto assets in a centralized platform gives control to a centralized entity and exposes customers to lots of risks. For example, in 2019 QuadrigaCX a Canadian exchange announced death of its CEO . The news devastated users because funds close of $190 million at the time were rendered unusable because it’s only the CEO who had access to the entity’s cold storage.

## Poor Market Liquidity Liquidity is an important element in every market. Poor market liquidity leads to an imbalanced environment. Even though not factual a key benefit of centralized exchanges over decentralized exchanges is they purport and illustrate to have liquidity. Centralized exchanges are known to engage in trade washing as a way to create fake trade volume to illustrate high levels of liquidity. In a recent poll 36 per cent of Bitcoin traders remarked they were not happy with the volume of liquidity available on exchanges .

## Poor Customer Support The number of cryptocurrency exchanges especially centralized ones is growing each, but only a few offers genuine 24/7 support. Users transacting with an exchange with a poor customer support often themselves in a devastating situation with no one ready to offer a solution. In the cryptocurrency world things are fast paced and risks are everywhere especially for newbies. A technical problem, hacking or theft of funds can occur anytime when dealing with exchanges more so centralized platforms. Hence, lack of an effective and around the clock customer support further erodes confidence of beginners to adopt and use cryptocurrencies. For example, the QuadrigaCX exchange handled the public relations and customer support following the death of their CEO with customers who had funds in the platform not receiving appropriate communication on events at the company.

## Poor Internationalization and Linguistic Support

A lot of cryptocurrency exchanges operate and are registered in the US, UK, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Eastern Europe . In these countries or regions, they operate most of them offer one language in their linguistic support which locks prospective users not conversant with the choice of an exchange’s language support. Blockchain networks do not know or are not geographically limited hence services offered using this distributed technology are bound to reach a global audience. Hence, an exchange focussed on success within the cryptoverse should be ready to offer multi-lingual and more than one country support as part of their internationalization strategy.

## What Is DeFI

The traditional finance system is centralized with central entities that control activities such as issuing the currency used in our normal lives. Governments together with other agencies can print more money at will to tackle issues such as financial crisis affecting our general wealth by reducing it through weakened currencies and inflation. Similarly, we are normalized to give our wealth such as money and other assets to financial organizations like banks either as savings or investment. In return we expect to earn some interest for allowing these entities to keep custody of our assets. However, these banks and investment firms use our money to trade, lend and invest making huge returns only to pay depositors or customers a very small fraction of total earnings. However, all this is about to change with the inception of Decentralized Finance also known as DeFi. It refers to an ecosystem made of financial applications built using open and public blockchains such as Ethereum. Within this ecosystem it is possible to develop, and issue decentralized financial application leveraging on features such as transparency, peer to peer transaction, permission-less and trust-less framework. This means DeFi is going to disrupt financial services and products as we know it currently because elimination of single point of failure and role of middlemen in provision of products such as lending, borrowing, saving, insurance among others.

Our Solution- Peacock Finance

Our next level generation decentralized cryptocurrency exchange seeks to revolutionize and disrupt the currency digital assets ecosystem. Our team understands the challenges faced by users in the industry with some members who have a past experience in financial and crypto markets as well as cryptography technology and development. Some of our products are as described below.

Peacock Swap Exchange

Our exchange Peacock Swap Exchange will be built initially on the Ethereum blockchain using ERC20 standard and supporting affiliated tokens. It allows us to develop a truly decentralized exchange which will eliminate the role of intermediaries in our ecosystem and we deploy the revolutionary smart contract technology. In order to solve the liquidity problem faced by many cryptocurrencies exchanges we use Ethereum smart contract infrastructure to allow our community to trade easily. Additionally, we are planning to add other exchange protocols with their supported tokens such as Tron blockchain effectively allowing us to access TRC10 and TRC20 tokens. Others include Cardano blockchain with its ADA tokens, Binance protocol alongside its BNB token, Nem and EOS blockchains with XEM and EOS tokens respectively. Effectively, this allows Peacock Swap Exchange to leverage on these protocols access to various liquidity sources and providing a decentralized exchange where users can exchange in a peer to peer model. Eventually, it will mean we solve the high fees experienced in the present cryptocurrency ecosystem as well as other significant benefits for our users.

Peacock Swap Exchange Features

Creation of wallet and connecting to other wallets

A user willing to get started on the Peacock Swap Exchange needs only email and password credentials to sign, secure private keys among other credentials. The process takes less than 5 seconds to create a Peacock wallet. It is easy if a user has other wallet options which he or she can connect to our main wallet on the exchange. Some of the wallet connect options include:

Peacock Staking

Our platform will have Peacock staking option for users interested in staking their Peacock Finance Currency (PCKF), borrow other assets and use this as their voting right on community improvements. Users who choose to stake which is another strategy of providing liquidity to our ecosystem will earn a yield on their PCKF token. Unlike other DeFi staking products our staking users can unlock their amount after a short time of 3 days and receive earned yield for the period staked with us. Additionally, we do not have minimum staking requirements. What’s more have a look at earnings the highest industry so far available on staking PCKF below:

Pre-Sale 1 Supply 100,000 Hard Cap $60,000 Soft Cap $30,000

Capital gain from price growth of our token will be essential to generating working capital. Such funds will be used in further development and improvement of our decentralized exchange such as development of own blockchain network, with smart contracts to allow tokenization of projects on the platform. Our token sale will take place in different crypto exchanges both centralized and decentralized and will be run in a transparent way.

Token Use Cases

We expect our token to have several utility functions such as aiding payments and movement of value in real estate project, as well as other suitable businesses and investments.

Token Sale

Our token holders will participate in token sale in a 3:1 ratio and this will be available on Tron, EOS, NEM and Cardano exchanges. There will be 3 round of Peacock Finance (PCKF) pre-sale each retailing at $0.6 initially.

By the time of launch on Peacock Swap Exchange and Uniswap each PCKF will cost $3.

Token Allocation and Pre-Sale

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Peacock Finance Team and Advisors

Road Map

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