| We are happy to present iZUMi as one of the winners of the first round of the ETC Grants DAO program! Below please find our email interview with Larry Lee, who is the business development lead at iZUMi: Donald McIntyre (DM): Can you describe the team please? Larry Lee (LL): We are a group of people who strongly believe that on-chain solutions and decentralized exchanges will eventually cater all user experiences while achieving features including non-custodial, safety, and transparency. Most of our team members come from top tier universities, such as U.C. Berkeley and Tsinghua University. Diving in the cryptocurrency world for over 5 years, we experienced and witnessed a lot. Now we are distributed all over the world, dedicated to building a top DEX on multiple chains. DM: Can you describe the project please? LL: As our name "iZUMi" in Japanese signifies, our ultimate goal is to help every partner and token to enjoy on-chain liquidity like spring water, continuous and long-lasting for centuries. iZUMi Finance is a one-stop liquidity platform for multi-chains. iZUMi Finance presents three products, iZiSwap, LiquidBox, and iUSD. iZiSwap is a top DEX with the unique DL-AMM (Discretized Liquidity AMM) design. With $100M+ TVL and 1M MAU, iZiSwap is the first concentrated liquidity DEX supporting on-chain order book features like CEXs. LiquidBox is a smart liquidity boosting and management product built on concentrated liquidity DEXs. it provides and manages over $100M in liquidity for 50+ reputable partners including BitDAO, Near, Woo Network, and Ankr. We use iUSD as the first efficient liquidity backed stable coin. Over-collateralized with an ETH-USD LP, iUSD has issued $30M and got adopted by 10+ chains and protocols, providing fully-decentralized stable 7-12% APR for investors and stakers. The DEX-Liquidity-Stablecoin combo will be the flying wheel for iZUMi to help the DeFi world sustain lasting on-chain liquidity. We have been crawling from the bottom of the zkSync Era and now the 2nd largest DEX in TVL. The next step is that we hope to work together with ETC to bring in more users and trading volume, and provide better liquidity services to the projects on the ETC chain. DM: How much money did you receive from the ETC Grants DAO? LL: iZUMi applied for and received a $50K ETC grant for program deployment and marketing activities. 100% of the grant will be used to build the on-chain ecosystem. Some awesome campaigns are on the way. DM: Why did you choose ETC? LL: DEXs on the ETC chain are currently dominated by the V2 DEX model, while the v3 model is more efficient compared to the v2. Specifically, the centralized liquidity model could be more capital efficient. We believe that iZUMi's DLAMM model will have an advantage in liquidity services, the most intuitive example of which is that we can achieve significant TVLs, with lower slippage and better prices. ETC Grants DAO was very friendly to the development of the project, which can help our project to further iterate and develop. They also provided us a lot of high-quality market resources, which allows us to have more interaction with the solid ETC community, including early liquidity supporters. Besides, there are some key advantages of Ethereum Classic: for example, ETC maintains the principle of immutability, preserving the integrity of historical transactions and preventing interference from external influences. It is also a community-driven governance, we all know that Ethereum Classic relies on community governance, allowing participants to propose and vote on protocol upgrades, making it more democratic and inclusive. Last but not least, security is one of the primary factors why we chose ETC. By adhering to the original principles of Ethereum, Ethereum Classic demonstrates resilience and security, making it attractive for long-term projects just like us. Following you may find some links to the iZumi team and project: Website: https://izumi.finance/home Twitter: https://twitter.com/izumi_Finance To see the full list of winners go here: https://etcgrants.softr.app/projects-list-en | 
