GEM DIGGERS AMA WITH BEYOND FINANCE
Every now and then a person or a group of people come together to create something truly special, something that will transcend the traditional barriers to entry for investments in billion dollar industries and change the lives of billions of people by helping them to achieve financial freedom. As the host of Gemdiggers AMA it was my absolute pleasure recently to talk to Kenneth Moon, Head of Product Development about just such a project — Beyond Finance
Beyond Finance is bringing a fresh perspective to trading synthetic assets, they are tackling the current problems of usability, transaction speed, high fees and mass adoption.
With the application of synthetics Beyond Finance will open the door to assets in markets such as FOREX, Commodities, Cryptos and Traditional Stocks…why is this important you ask?
Well…it’s especially attractive to those who cannot access traditional investment brokers or are unbanked/under-banked…there are approximately 1.7 billion people in this predicament so that market is ripe for synthetic trading…here is a small spoiler from one of Kenneth’s answers
“Indian farmer without a bank account, who views positive on electric vehicles and Elon Musk’s vision, can just connect his wallet on Beyond and purchase Synthetic TSLA stock. He doesn’t have to go to security company to do a KYC, proof his fund, setup a foreign stock account, transfer the funds and exchange to foreign currency.” — Kenneth Moon
What came through most for me during this AMA was the care and attention that the Beyond Finance team are taking to put the users of the platform at front of mind. They are thinking on a global scale with partners around the world, actively sharing knowledge about the art of the possible with Beyond Finance. They are thinking about the unbanked/underbanked who, for the first time will have a user-friendly gateway to financial freedom…
We added a little twist in the AMA, $150 USDT prize for the best audience question…more about that later.
So without further ado, here are the Q&As from the AMA.
Ozzy: Let’s start with you and the Beyond Finance team, tell us about yourself and the core team at Beyond Finance?
Kenneth: Hi I’m Kenneth. I’m in charge of product development in Beyond project. To briefly explain about myself, I’m from traditional finance background — used to work in global investment banks for almost 10 years, moved to a start-up field, ran a couple of my own companies and made some good success there.
One day, from a good friend of mine, who was a founder of Beyond project, I learned about a huge opportunity about the synthetic asset space. Soon after, I did some of my own research, and it was just fascinating. I had a strong belief that this is going to be another game changer in DeFi space, so I joined the team and started to ride on this exciting journey.
Our team members have similar belief and foresee a huge opportunity in synthetic asset space. In terms of their backgrounds, some of them are from traditional finance like myself. Other members have experience in reputable crypto projects and exchanges. Also, we have a very solid tech team building out platform.
Ozzy: What kind of experience does your team have, have you and the team worked on other blockchain projects?
Kenneth: One of the key competitiveness of Beyond project is our team. We have a very strong team of ~20 people. On the business side, most of them are from global asset management companies, investment banks and other reputable financial institutions. We think this is very important given the nature of our business dealing with various types of synthetic assets ranging from equities, forex, commodities to even highly complicated derivative products. Also, few of our core members are founders and former executives of global top-tier crypto exchanges. They give a tremendous help on exchange operation and industry networks, given their experience and in-depth knowledge in the space.
Lastly, we have 8 solid tech team members who’s working very hard to develop our exchange platform. They have strong track record of building trading platforms of local security companies and running them for many years without any technical issues. We are very lucky to work with these highly experienced development team, especially times like this where skilful blockchain dev are really hard to find. All-in-all, we have a pretty good mix between traditional finance background, blockchain specialists, and experienced development team. We are confident that we will deliver what we are aiming to create.
Ozzy: What is the inspiration for creating Beyond Finance?
Kenneth: DeFi market has been growing rapidly, but until now, it has been mostly concentrated into a few sub-segments such as yield farming, loan and swap DEX. However, we envision that there is an enormous opportunity for synthetic asset trading platform, which users can have exposures to various underlying assets by investing into their synthetic tokens. In the past, a few synthetic asset projects have been introduced (like Synthetix) and they have made a great success in terms of token price and market value. We respect them as they are the pioneers of this new segment in DeFi space. Nonetheless, we view there are still many areas of improvement in terms of actual mass adoption and scalability, since these platforms are still mostly used for staking purpose, rather than the trading purpose. Therefore, we have focused to create a more advanced synthetic asset trading platform with better UI, aiming for mass adoption, as well as enhanced scalability and wider range of supporting asset classes, to become a true synthetic asset trading platform for everyone.
Ozzy: What are the major ‘real-world’ issues that Beyond Finance is solving?
Kenneth: The ‘real-world’ issue which Beyond aims to solve is allowing huge population of people without the access to traditional finance to be connected with traditional finance investments.
30% of global population is still unbanked/underbanked. Limitation of access to basic finance instruments like loan or deposit is one problem, but more importantly, they cannot “invest” to generate profit and grow their asset size. Even for those people who have access to banks, it’s very difficult to invest in overseas equity, private stocks, advanced financial products, given the regulation and various restrictions. For example, Tesla stock has been skyrocketing, but majority of global population had no way to invest on Tesla stocks unless you are living in US or have off-share trading account. Another example, everyone know Coinbase IPO will be a huge success, but only a very limited number of people is eligible to trade Coinbase stocks because it is unlisted and still remains as a private stock.
Beyond can solve this problem. An Indian farmer without a bank account, who views positive on electric vehicles and Elon Musk’s vision, can just connect his wallet on Beyond and purchase Synthetic TSLA stock. He doesn’t have to go to security company to do a KYC, proof his fund, setup a foreign stock account, transfer the funds and exchange to foreign currency.
Or if he wants to be exposed in Coinbase IPO, he doesn’t have to spend all his time finding an ex-Coinbase employee to purchase some of his stocks. He can simply purchase Coinbase synthetic stock on Beyond and gain a big profit when it goes through IPO.
Ozzy: How will you be tracking the subject of anonymity on your platform? Will KYC be required?
Kenneth: We believe it is important to have users to access the platform without complicated process of disclosing themselves. Also, we believe it is a core idea of Decentralized finance. Any user can just connect their Metamask wallet and have exposure to various types of asset classes around the world. No matter you are in Myanmar or in Bolivia or anywhere, you can freely invest in Tesla stocks, Crude Oil futures, Coinbase IPO equity etc. to expand your investment opportunities globally.
To prevent any potential issues, users will have enough collateral of their synthetic assets by staking BYN tokens on our platform. Also, any malicious activities can be monitored and rectified. We are doing everything that we can to maintain the stability of our platform, however, we do not want all users to send their passports and proof of residence, in order to make a trade on our open platform.
Ozzy: Do you have a demo/testnet for your product?
Kenneth: We have successfully completed our private funding round within 3 weeks. One reason that we could have a great success in funding was that we have built a POC (proof of concept) very early, about 3 months ago. The Beyond DEX Alpha version, has all the core functions ready and fully operational — Custom AMM (Automated Market Making), traders can swap BYN tokens. stake BYN get collateralized USDb, use the the USDb to trade Synthetics assets like GBPb OILb (b= Beyond). Our early investors were impressed to see a well-built, convenient and smoothly running synthetic asset trading platform.
Over the last months we’ve been working on the Beta upgrade, to open it to bigger audience. In the Beta version, we are focusing on enhanced functionality with better UI/UX and wider range of trading asset pairs. Not to mention, we are exploring Layer 2 solutions which will bring enhanced scalability in our platform.
Ozzy: Do you have any venture capitalist backing, or planning to?
Kenneth: During our early funding rounds, many reputable VCs approached to us and on-boarded on our journey. Not only they are backing us up with the funds, but also, they are giving us a full-fledged support on their specialty areas such as marketing, technology, partnership network and many others. Thankfully, they are very active and giving us a tremendous help. We are expanding very fast not only with our capability but also a strong tailwind from backup of our investors.
One thing to add is, our VCs are widely spread across the world. We have strong investor base, not only in Asia but also in Europe, US, LATAM and many others. It helps to build a strong community across the globe.
Ozzy: What makes you different from your competition, why should users choose Beyond Finance?
Kenneth: Existing synthetic asset trading platforms in the market are generally not user friendly, have scalability issues and are limited in exposure to synthetic assets. Due to these issues, despite a huge TVL and market cap, number of users and actual trading volume has been very thin. Beyond DEX is aiming to overcome these problems and make a synthetic trading platform for mass adoption. Firstly, user interface is integrated in one seamless UI friendly way, easy to learn and understand, even for new users. All the core functions to navigate and execute to trade & stake are built in one platform. Also, Beyond protocol is working on Layer 2 solution to resolve the issue of scalability, network congestion and high transaction fees. Lastly, Beyond will continue to introduce new assets and implement innovative solutions for greater adoption.
Ozzy: Please explain the Utility of your token. Where will the Demand come for it?
Kenneth: BYN token’s main function is to collateralize USDb stable coin and our synthetic assets. User can stake BYN tokens and mint USDb stable coin. With the minted USDb, users can freely invest into various synthetic assets such as TSLAb, OILb, GBPb etc. BYN is also used as the main Rewards for all the activity of the platform — such as Staking Rewards, LP (liquidity provider) rewards, trading fee rewards. In addition, BYN token will be used for participation of DAO though BIPs (“Beyond Improvement Proposal”). Users can decide on key matters of exchange operations, such as adding new trading pairs, fee structure, new functionalities etc. though the voting on BIPS.
Ozzy: Is your contract audited, if not what are your plans on this front?
Kenneth: Yes, we are working with not one, but multiple top-tier auditors for all contracts we’re building. So far, we have received audits for our existing smart contracts, and once our beta version is ready, we will also go through the full audit of our open-beta version. Then once it’s live, we are confident it will be a very safe and secure platform, which everyone can stake and trade without concern of being hacked or security breached.
So that covers all the questions asked but Kenneth did have a little more to say at the end:
“Thank you for your interest on Beyond project. We have worked very hard to build our Beta platform and it’s going to be released very soon. We are very excited to show our product to global community and have users freely trade on our platform. Also, we have many great partnerships/events/announcements prepared, and they are ready to be disclosed closer to the launch. Hope our excitement could be shared to all the members here, and wish many of you could ride on this journey and become a part of Beyond project” — Kenneth Moon
And the winner is!!!
I mentioned earlier that we had a prize for the best audience question, we had many excellent questions and great engagement from the audience, ultimately there can only be 1 winner:
Kenneth’s answer to the winning question was:
“We think the main issue with existing platforms is lack of actual user adoption. If you have used existing Synthetix trading platforms, it’s mostly used as staking purpose, but actual trading volume is very thin. It’s because of slow transaction speed, gas fee burdens, and poor UI.
We have spent a lot of time and effort to make a very seamless process for trading the synthetic assets, and faster transaction speed. Also, users have to pay $30 gas fee for $50 transaction is just not right. We try to solve these issues with prompt L2 migration.” — Kenneth Moon
Kenneth explained the reason for choosing this question as the winner:
“That is the core of our Beyond Finance project. We are here to overcome the limitations of existing synthetic asset platforms” — Kenneth Moon
I hope you’ve enjoyed catching up on this great AMA about Beyond Finance, follow me @ozzymalik on twitter for news of more AMAs and join our TG group.
To learn more about Beyond Finance use these resources and feel free to share:
Website: https://beyondfinance.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/beyondfinanceglobal
Twitter: https://twitter.com/beyondfinancee?s=09
Medium: https://medium.com/@bfinance
GitHub: https://github.com/Beyond-Trade
