Beyond Finance — Telegram AMA — March 25
On Thursday, March 25, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Marco Pharaoh, Head of Strategy.
We asked him questions about the development of Beyond Finance.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
Beyond Finance is a novel way to access synthetic assets, bringing traditional financial services to the global crypto community. Beyond’s DEX will simplify Synthetic products trade, and provide new opportunities.
Beyond Finance raised $7.5 million in private rounds. The rounds were supported by Moonwhale Ventures, DuckDAO, Block Sync, Gains Associates, Consensus Capital, among others.
The BYN Token is the core token on the Beyond protocol and serves as collateral, governance, and fee payment token within the Beyond ecosystem. BYN is also used as the main Rewards for all the activity of the platform.
Introduction
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: Let’s start by hearing a bit about you. What did you do before crypto and did you have any other previous venture in crypto?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: Before crypto, I always worked in tech, first as a web dev, then full-stack related to big data. I got into crypto in late 2012 and traded until 2014, not the best trader, got wrecked, and returned to crypto in 2017 as a project Advisor.
I really fell in love with the Ethereum ecosystem. I attended most of the major Blockchain week Conferences, NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, etc. Then, from 2018 started to work closely with core teams to BUIDL as they say.
I work a couple of startup ICO, global and local here in Tokyo
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What is your role with Beyond Finance?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: Regarding my role at Beyond Finance as Head of Strategy.
Well, It’s really about me using my experience and my understanding of the blockchain space to guide Beyond to make the right moves at the right time. Mostly regarding partnerships at the protocol level and product delivery. Beyond’s main product is a DEX for synthetic assets.
The crypto space evolves constantly at a blazing speed. I never get too comfy, I keep learning, I try new things, and try to find fresh sources of knowledge.
I will also do a lot of troubleshooting and work closely with the early BETA testers.
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: For how long have you been working on the Beyond Finance project? And how many people are on the team?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: From the very first weeks of the Beyond project. My close friend in Seoul called me up, told me yo, I got something big. What do you know about synthetics!
Our team is about 16 split 8 Devs and 8 on operations, all full time.
Most of the team is in Seoul, whereas I’m in Tokyo.
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: How is the DeFi scene in Seoul and Japan?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: DeFi is just getting started in Seoul. But the basic leverage spot trading volume is huge. In Korea, the centralized crypto exchanges have already overtaken their local stock market.
Japan is a little different with lots of heavy staking and cloud mining. Again, DeFi is just getting started in these two major markets.
Q — Telegram user Isabella Isla 🌸: Do you like Egyptian culture? Are you a pharaoh?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: I always been fascinated by Egypt Ancient Culture of Mystery and eternal life.
About Beyond Finance
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: Let’s try and break things down. You mentioned synthetic assets. What is the Beyond Finance project really about in a few simple sentences?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: Beyond is a Decentralized Synthetics Trading Platform. Based on the BYN token and collateralized the USDb (synthetic stable coin). The USDb Token is used to trade other synthetics assets. While the underlying asset the BYN token is used as collateral and reward.
The strength of the project is the long-term vision of its founders.
The founders have worked at Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Franklin Templeton, Credit Suisse, Citi, and they also have strong experience in Crypto, One of them co-founded one of the top Korean Crypto Exchange, another one was on the Board of another top Korean exchange.
Because of that rich knowledge, the Beyond team strongly believes that synthetic trading tools and instruments can bring much more than what DEFI currently offers
It’s also a fact that the actual trading volume of synthetic assets in DEFI is very thin. Beyond will change that and put the actual trading of synthetics at the core of our DEX.
Hard to keep it short, talking synthetics but that’s about that :)
Q — Twitter user @RosemaryT08: Speaking of rewards, they say that users/investors will be able to enjoy a portion of the fees earned on Beyond Protocol as an incentive for Beyond users. How do you get these rewards? Is it part of the distribution of your native BYN token
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: Yes, the rewards will be distributed as part of the staking rewards
On top of the annual APY for all stakers. The platform is very transparent so everyone will be able to trace the rewards distribution
Q — Twitter user @calebkure: What is the top milestone you achieved so far since inception?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: The first achievement was to put a great team together at the right time! timing is everything. The second was to build the POS proof of concept on the testnet.
Thirdly, we raised our funds efficiently with little marketing. The fourth is our collaboration with our early backers, but it’s just a start. The biggest challenges are ahead
Q — Telegram user Isabella Isla 🌸: Why have you decided to include the synthetic token in Beyond? What difference do they have and why should they be better than traditional tokens?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: BYN can scale to infinite the entire world will be digitized and synthesized and ultimately traded
Token
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What is the token use case and how does it capture the value of the ecosystem you’re building?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: In short,
BYN token’s main function is to collateralize USDb stable coin and our synthetic assets.
BYN is also used as the main Rewards for all the activity of the platform.
Staking Rewards, LP (liquidity provider) rewards, trading fee rewards.
BYN is also our very important governance token, for our future DAO.
And the BYN Token will also ultimately be cross-chain.
Financial
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: Did you raise funds so far? If so, how did you handle them? Are you planning to do any future raises?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: We raised 7.5M USD value, over 3 rounds. Seed, Private 1, and Private 2. Because of the bull market, we sold out in just 3 weeks, oversubscribed.
No future raise other than the upcoming IDO. The public sale is really aimed at the community.
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: How will you use the funds raised?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: We’ll use our funding mostly on hiring talented Blockchain developers and also real capital is often needed for protocol level collaborations and partnerships.
Also bringing mainstream Finance to DEFI is the ultimate goal, so we do need a war chest to accomplish our ambitions.
Business Development
Q — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS: What stage is the project at? And what should we expect from you in the next few months and indeed the rest of 2021
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: One reason for our funding success was that we built a POC (proof of concept) very early, about 3 months ago. The BEYOND DEX Alpha version has all the very basic functions ready. Custom AMM (automate Market making), traders can swap BYN tokens. Stake BYN gets collateralized USDb, uses the USDb to trade Synthetics assets like EURb BTCb (b= Beyond).
Over the last month, we’ve been working on the BETA upgrade. improved version with Better UI/UX and more trading instruments. And very importantly we are exploring Layer 2 solutions.
Regarding the 2021 Roadmap,
The first half of 2021 is about Layer 2, and Protocol partnerships,
The second half of 2021 is about onboarding traditional finance to use our platform.
Beyond DEX should be good enough to services the pros and yet accessible to regular crypto traders.
Q — Twitter user @nguyen32225128: NFTs are becoming more popular, and many projects have come out related to NFT. So how do you rate the potential that Beyond finance’s NFT can bring? Do you have any plans to make NFT become a new market trend?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: 😍Oh this one is the best question of the day.
NFT and DeFi is the crypto revolution. I’m a big fan of NFT and an NFT collector myself. We have a real plan to integrate the next-gen of Utilities NFTs in our ecosystem later in the 2nd half of 2021. Stay tuned, and if anyone is an NFT artist you can send me Opensea links later
Q — Telegram user Kengkong: Are you planning to form an Indonesian community or an Asian community to develop on a global scale, because Indonesians are always interested in new projects and continue to make progress?
A — Pharaoh from Beyond Finance: Absolutely. I Love Bali.
We will build a community with education and a very simple UI/UX to onboard new crypto traders. We also care a lot about gas fees. the very low gas fee gives a chance for a smaller trader to capitalize on real GAINS
I think we already have a telegram group for Indonesia, keep in touch.
It was a pleasure having you in our group today, Marco. I really liked the quiz switch-up you did. Anything else you’d like to say? Where can we follow you to stay updated? — Ayeley Commodore-Mensah from GAINS
Telegram is Best and you can follow us on Twitter too. I had a great time. I love this community and I will be back, with some cool stuff and big announcements. Merci beaucoup. — Pharaoh26 from Beyond Finance
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