Biggest DEFI wave YET? AllianceBlock will bring the big $$$

Hey guys, and welcome to Box Mining. Today we have a super interesting interview, and this is one of the smartest people I've ever talked to in this space. So I'm super excited to present to you guy Rashid Ajada. He's been in the traditional finance space for a long time, over 10 years experience in traditional finance, doing developmental work there. And he's jumping straight into decentralized finance. He's like, you know what, move that away. Let's go. He's currently now the CEO of Alliance Block, and he's sharing a lot of insights on what's in decentralized finance. You guys know this is popping up, and we're taking this expert view on what is happening in decentralized finance. Why are you jumping into this, Rashid? What is happening? What is making you so excited? First of all, thank you very much, Michael, for having me. And it's really been a pleasure to be here with you. So I would say I've been in traditional finance for 10 years. I work as a quant at Barclays. I did also at BNP Paribas, and Moody's, one of the top leading firm. I work also in AI. And I saw that there are a lot of, lot of problems in traditional finance in terms of systems, in terms of costs. It's super expensive. And even like to be able to do something, it takes a lot of time. On the other hand, we saw that decentralized finance started like, it's become $1 billion. And then in one year, it jumped to $100 billion. And we know for a fact that it's going to go to $1 trillion, which is amazing opportunities. And we are seeing this huge increase of user base and even retail and traditional people that are not in crypto. Now they are speaking about crypto and about DeFi without even understanding crypto, which is for us, we've been waiting for this since I would say the creation of Bitcoin, because we want adoption. And actually decentralized finance is bringing this adoption. This is why we are excited. Exactly. And I think this is just such a big figure. So it's almost 100 times growth, right? So starting at $1 billion last year, and then moving to $100 billion. And why is this? Is it because, you know, decentralized finance is faster? Or is it more transparent? Or is it because traditional finance is so bad? What's the reason here? In my opinion, I would say it's both. Traditional finance is too slow. A lot of things that you need to be done. You need to wait for, you need to respect a lot of, lot of rules, which is good. Regulations are being done to protect retail. So it's absolutely no problem. On the other hand, blockchain and specifically DeFi, there is a lot of competition. And as we know, competition drive innovation. We saw it, for example, in 18 months, one guy came after seeing a talk from Vitalik, and he decided to build Uniswap. He built it in 18 months. In 18 months, he had a product that has $6 billion in total value locked in less than a year. This is almost impossible in traditional finance. And just since last summer, and now we have Uniswap V1, V2. Now we have V3. We have Balancer V1, and now V2. So it's, and this is just, just the beginning, because you know that in DeFi, there are a lot of things that need to be solved. And so many teams are working on this. And we are happy also to work on the same, solve the same problems by bringing the highest standard of finance and using the technology of decentralized finance. It will bring huge innovation. And we have banks, Drip Morgan, Morgan Stanley, all the big banks, a London Stock Exchange, all NASDAQ, all these guys, they want to jump into DeFi. So this is why it's really exciting. And this is just the beginning. And we are seeing in the current, I would say, atmosphere, how people are excited about DeFi and the opportunities that it's bringing to not only retail, but also institutionals. Right. So, okay. So, so there's a lot here. So what you're seeing right now is that there's a lot of traditional finance really interested in jumping into DeFi, just because of how fast this is, what the innovation is, is that the spark, this cradle of innovation here. So obviously you're running AllianceBlock and it's focused exactly on this. Can you just tell me a little bit about what you are doing? Yeah, of course. So like in one sentence, I would say AllianceBlock is building a new financial infrastructure, which will be used by both decentralized finance and traditional market participants. See it this way. Imagine if we take all the financial infrastructure that exists since many, many years, and you build it by using the current technology. What will happen? You will have faster settlement, you will have new product that you can propose to investors, and they will have much higher return on investments. For example, now with all the problem we are seeing, imagine you go, you put your money, 100,000, for example, dollars into Remitius account, maybe you will get 0.5% or 1%. Now, thanks to this DeFi, you can get 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 30% in the same amount of money. So you can imagine how it's beneficial for retail and for institutional, but also for all these traditional players that want to get little bits of this to propose it to their clients. I just want to start to give the audience like a simple example. So if you think this way, like before sending and receiving money is one of the most basic function of the banking systems, and everyone knows and everyone has at least one time in his life send money. But even until recently, it could be really difficult and expensive, and it still is in many countries. Banks would charge fees, they would make it difficult or really expensive to send it cross-border. You have to use source codes, banking numbers, count, SWIFT, and all these kinds of terms. They would be super slow. And then all of a sudden, there was a company called PayPal. So allowing you to send money to whoever you want, wherever you want, at low, at zero fees. And this means the bank had to improve their system, and it drive a lot of, lot of, lot of innovation in the traditional space. We think that new technologies such as decentralized finance can be used to improve not just banking services, but loads of different parts of the financial infrastructure that will have really big impact as PayPal did on sending money. And this is what exactly Alliance Block is aiming to do. So I would say, instead of decentralized finance being one thing, and traditional finance, as we were discussing, being another thing. So because every time, since the beginning of crypto, like users and people seeing this two as a silo, basically. To have two, it's different. You have crypto, and you have traditional. We don't need to see it this way. They need to interact between them, because it will bring benefits to both of them. And it's not just for these institutions, actually, it's even for us as retail, because the services are faster, the costs are less, and it can increase our return also. So this is what I would say. Yeah. So this is exactly what we want to build, and what we want to have an impact. So as I said earlier, is bringing the financial infrastructure with the current technologies to help users having seamless use for the financial services, and bringing them like a lot of return, but also like ease of use. And this is what will make the difference in the next few months and years. Right. And I think that's a big picture, right? So your big picture here is that you want this, these two worlds to work together, right? So everyone can have access to the best of both worlds. And you're seeing that this is the driving factor, because PayPal drove the banks to make transfers cheaper. DeFi is going to make everything different, because everything needs to be cheaper. So what kind of specific things? Because one thing I saw about Alliance Block, so I took a position on Alliance Block, and when I first saw it, I was just like, there's so many things that you are doing. So what kind of aspects stand out? What are you most proud of here in terms of aspects that you are building? I would say the most important and successful project that is built, they come from problem that we have faced. So let me start from the beginning. When we started and issue our tokens, there was problem of liquidity. And this happened to every single project that is launching in the crypto space. We said, okay, let's start with something simple. And it could be possible only because of DeFi, which is liquidity mining. So we started our liquidity mining. Then we have multiple protocol, Uniswap, Balancer, and on BSE. Then we started our staking. And we noticed that actually in this space, a lot of people, like if they can use this, they will get a lot of, I would say, benefits from it. Not only for the project, for the liquidity, but also for the users, because there are return, but also they showed interest on the project. And it gave us the opportunity to build this liquidity mining as a service, which means now projects, they will be able just in a click on a button, they will launch all the system, multi-share to propose to the users, good API with liquidity mining, staking, analytics, and everything in just only one place. And we were looking for this, we didn't found it. So we decided to build this ourselves. And I think this is the most important thing that, and it's happened just because of DeFi exists. And this is why it's exciting. Yeah. So, so I just interrupt you there because this is something that any project can use, right? So not just Alliance block, but any project that's looking for additional liquidity in there. So they want people to be able to trade it more access to a market. They can set up their own mining pools. They can set up their own systems using Alliance block, right? Exactly. It will be basically any project. He will have like the full platform. They can have the analytics, how many users are using it. They can deploy the pools like in click on a button. They can have staking program. They can do lockup, no lockup, and there will be a lot of, lot of features and they don't need to have any single code written and all the contracts are fully audited by three firms, which mean that we bring the security for the users. So there is no problem basically using this product, but also it will give them, it will enhance the liquidity for the project. So it's going hand in hand, actually liquidity is the most important point to solve for project in the traditional space and the DeFi space. And thanks to this product, it will open really new opportunities. Nice. Nice. So, so that's directly a DeFi product, using DeFi to solve problems in the project space. So that's one of, that's just one of the features that you guys have. Right. And I think, do you want to show us the next platform as well? Cause I think you want to do a screen share earlier. And we're talking about this because we're talking about how there are so many launch pads right now, and you're doing something that's taking that to the next level, right? Exactly. So we had this problem again. So when we didn't have lots of liquidity, we needed to have a little bit of money to be able to pay for developers, but it was absolutely impossible to have this liquidity because there was absolute no volume. And we cannot every time raise money because it's not good. So we saw the traditional financial and it happened also with Coinbase actually. So what happened company get a loan, let's say $100,000 and the investor that's the lenders, he will be able to convert his loan into shares, or he just received his money back. So we said, how can we use this to help crypto projects, not only on the bull market, but specifically on the bear market. We are in cycle. The bear market is going to come no matter what we are seeing now, the bear market. So we need to prepare from now to the bear markets. And this is what brought us to this product. And I think this is exclusive because we never shared this and I'm happy to share this with you. Awesome. So here we go. So basically this is the platform that we will be launching around Q2, Q3. And this is something that is good for crypto projects, for traditional financial institutions, or for traditional startup. Imagine it's Cedars, Kickstart, AngelList, and the next level of IDEO's platform and launchpad. So for example, you can be crypto startup that is seeking financing, and you will get some loans from the lenders from DeFi, and they can get return. But the good thing here is that the lenders will have the choice to either receive their money back or to convert it into tokens, which is kind of new, and it will be good for this period of time, but also for the bear, because everyone at startups need financing. So we can see here that we will have like a lot of features on this. So for example, we can see how many people have funded the project, what is the average tickets, but the true innovation here, and you spoke about this, Michael, earlier, we have seen the craziness about NFTs. NFTs, we just NFT anything, and there is craziness. But actually, NFT is much more than that. And we use the NFTs to represent the loan, okay, which is backed by real assets, arts, or by the crypto project, which means the lenders, actually, they receive a ticket, NFT, that they can sell, or they can use it to convert to tokens, convert to real assets, or to receive a claim interest. So we have new use for these NFTs. And this opened not only doors for DeFi, but also for traditional finance, because there are whole new products that can be built thanks to this, we call them structured loans. But to keep it simple, it's just something that represents another thing, okay, which has real value in the real world. And yeah, so we have the onboarding, we have the principle, we want to be fair, inclusive, transparent, participative, and equitable. And this platform will be fully run with the DAO. Wow. Okay. So this is already developed, or what stages is that? Yeah, so actually, we have developed most of the smart contracts, we need to do the audits, and we will be able to support multiple chain actually. So we have Ethereum, BSC, and also Polkadot. We will be able to release more, I would say, news later on. So for example, so like here, I want to show also, so this is basically how you can fill the form. It will be much easier. So I will show you, for example. These are different forms, right? Because it looks like a long form. Yeah. So this is basically to onboard, because we want to do it in the traditional way. So we can have security, transparency, and there is no possibility of people to scam users. This is why we are putting also milestone-based financing. So the project receives funding only, and only if he finishes milestone. So for example, so I can show you like just in the investment, the investment side. So there are a lot of things, but I can show you like, we will do real demo. But for example, here, people can basically invest in crypto, can invest in fiat, they receive their notes, and then it will be very seamless. And then here they can see their portfolio. For example, for the first milestone, they have 30 NFT total, and they receive 10 NFT after the milestone, and they will be able to convert them into tokens. Either they claim the tokens with discounts, or they can wait at the end and claim the return, which is interest plus principle. So we mix really these technologies. They can also stake these NFTs, receive extra yield, use our liquidity mining as a service also, which will help this project to have liquidity. So as you can see, we are building a lot of products that are independent. But if you see the bigger picture, each product represents a part of traditional, I would say, financial institutions. And we are aiming to build the next generation of infrastructure for this financial. So we have the lending, the borrowing, the investments, crypto, non-crypto, NFTs. And if you see the whole picture, you see why we speak about Alliance block building the future of finance. Hmm. So, so, so this is kind of interesting. So what you're doing is you're taking all the aspects, all the features of traditional finance, and then just bring it straight over to DeFi. And then you're having, um, almost like you're, you're just like, you're, you're taking the best parts. You're taking all the necessary ingredients because we know that the traditional finance system actually, it works. It worked for a long period of time, but of course it's slow. It's encumbered. And we know that in crypto right now that people love funding new projects because people see that innovation here. I mean, that's, that's the best part about crypto, right? People, people love going into these new projects. People love this innovation. So you're just taking that and saying, look, okay, you can have, um, you can, companies can take up loans and then they can convert those in the coins and investors can come in with their different assets and also participate in the platform as well. So you got the borrow lending, you got the whole package for everyone here. That's exciting. So, and it supports multiple chains as well. Right. So you're like a start launch pad for like everything. Right. So yeah. And yeah, just if I may to do something. So these products, I think it shows how we can bridge the two words exactly how perfect you say it. So, and even traditional investors and institutions will be able to use this product because it's impossible for them to use the idea now the way it's done, but we have this platform fully decentralized, but respect every aspect in the term of how institutional do investment, lend money, but also we have the easy way how defy use you connect your wallets, you do your lending, borrowing investment, and that's it. Right. So, so, so you're saying here was something that's quite interesting is that it's quite hard for a traditional investor to come and invest in defy. Why is that right now? What's the, what's the current problem here? Because of the KYC AMN traditional investors, they cannot, especially entities, they cannot come and invest into something that other, they don't know who is investing basically, because you can have money laundering. Someone from us, he cannot invest into security or into tokens, for example, that is issued in Europe. Okay. So all these things, it's block this barrier between the two words, which mean the flow of money to defy. Now imagine you have compliance rule engine to tell you if you can, or you can't invest or lend to this entity in this jurisdiction, imagine that you have KYC, but users hold their data and they have the full control of it, which mean that like there will be one user, he will not do every KYC with every single project because it will have a potential of leak. And this is why also it's blocking many people from defy to participate. Okay. So now imagine you have something decentralized, trustless, respecting all the regulations without having, I would say the complicated stuff. You need to share your documents. You need like basically to have an account, you need to have the insurance and everything. Here it's make it super simple, but by leveraging the current regulation in a super easy way. Right. Right. So, so, so that's the biggest barrier. So, um, because of these restrictions, a lot of these bigger funds, they can't participate, but obviously they can bring a lot of money into the space, right? So you're basically allowing one way to do it. So it's a complete package with a better KYC solution with compliance engine built in. And of course, with the whole entire engine, the whole ecosystem, we can do the lend and issue out the entities as well. So there's a complete package for everything. So I guess we're super excited. So how, okay. So how can people find out when is it going to be launching? You know, how can people find out more about this? Yes. Of course. So we are launching at least two products end of April. So the liquidity mining as a service, which is, we have already a lot of, lot of projects that want to use it because it's really, uh, it's added value for them and for the community. We have like our website, of course, like to, to know more, we already have a lot of updates, Alliance blog.io, our Twitter, we tweet every day. We try to have always the latest information for our community. And of course, our telegram, where we are really, really active and we have amazing community managers, to be honest, that answer to all questions. So we are really lucky to have them. And we have really amazing community that's help others to answer questions, help them to navigate into these moody waters. So yeah, so we are very lucky and we are here because of our community and we will do everything to make things safe and transparent to our community. That's great. So if you guys want to learn more, so you can even ask questions on the telegram about what's happening, especially for those who like, I think this is one of the problems as well. So, you know, I came here without a background in traditional finance, but I knew that this is where I needed to learn. So if you guys want to learn more, definitely check out the telegram, you know, understand a little bit more about what's happening, what the features, um, what, what's important for traditional finance and learn a bit more. So I'm excited for that launch that's coming up. And then obviously you guys are probably excited, uh, find out more. I'll put the links down below, uh, before you leave, Rashid. So I think, um, wrapping up this interview, I think you provided a lot of insight on both what's happening in traditional finance and, um, decentralized finance. Um, I want to ask you this question. So what's your vision for this? So let's say we're 10 years down the road. Do you see the banks being gone? Do you see this, this total cooperation happening or do you see banks like, Oh, what do you see in 10 years in this space after 10 years? I guess it's a big bold prediction. Exactly. To be completely honest, I do. I will, I will give one simple example. Uh, we see Revolut and 26, all this new bank, digital banks, they come, it's because of regulation, open the data. It's because we have this, what we call digital transformation. So we have a lot of companies in payments, in fraud detections, and that are just, you plug to the current systems in the bank and it's open new stream of revenue for the banks. So I do believe that the banks will not exist if they don't collaborate with startups and more specifically into the financial space with DeFi startups, we will see more collaboration. We will see like, because startups move fast, which means that they can have features super fast. We have been having our product in, we will have it in less than four months, which is for a bank, they will have it in five years. So if you take the best things, which is the innovation of the startups with, I would say the notoriety of the banks, this is how the space will, will, will, I would say we'll move forward. And we have one example, yesterday or two days ago, we saw that consensus, they have raised $65 million, uh, with JP Morgan and most of the biggest bank, why they are investing in consensus is because they see the huge opportunity of DeFi and it's not, it's not free money. It's because they will use it. Banks invest on product that they will use. So, and banks cannot exist if they don't use this technology. And I strongly believe in this. So we are at the right space at the right moments and all the retail and the crypto that are in this space now, I think we will have an amazing journey. Nice. And I think that's great. That's a great vision going forward. And I definitely believe this is why it's worth spending that time in looking at this. It might, it might sound a little bit crazy. A lot of stuff, a lot of things, you know, uh, learning a little bit about what the traditional finance system is, but that's why you learn about what they're doing, disrupt that, and then you force their hand to come in. And I think that's, that's the, that's the crazy part about right now. So guys, thank you guys. Thank you, Rashid so much for coming in and talking about both decentralized finance and what's happening on Alliance block. I hope those launches do well. Hope to come see you back and see those projects succeed. And we'll update you guys on that soon. So guys, thank you guys so much for watching. Thank you, Rashid, for coming over. See you guys next time. Thank you very much for having me. Really pleasure.