Ex-Binance researcher reveals ALL (Impossible Finance)

Hey guys, and welcome back to Box Money. Today I have the pleasure of presenting Calvin Chu. And he's, okay, the best way to describe him is a visionary. He's been in this space for such a long time. And he's been both tracking projects, investing in projects, and of course, finding the best projects in the space. I think we discussed, I've met him a few years ago, and we discussed a few things, and he was right about a few things too. So we'll talk about that. Wrong about a lot more. But we'll talk about your experiences. You've been in Binance before. You've also been doing on the research side. So welcome. Glad to be here. And, you know, I think maybe three, four years ago, I was watching this show. So it's amazing to see this kind of full circle kind of happen. So really great to be on the show, Michael. Welcome, welcome. So I guess it's your first time on the channel. So let's start from the kind of the start first. You know, like, what's your experience like? What was your previous roles and how did it lead to kind of your situation right now? I started from very humble backgrounds. I studied economics and statistics at the University of Chicago. I was on the research team at Binance. So that comprised of a lot of the listing diligence, as well as bringing up some of our early projects into our Binance launchpad. And then also built out the Binance staking platform to get starting to, you know, bring some of Binance's products back into the on-chain world. Whereas most of everything else was very trade-focused and more active. That staking and some of these other yield programs allowed for passive users to just come and stick funds in Binance and earn passively. Right. And that's something that, you know, mom and pop see. So what was the drive? What was the vision behind that then? Like, you know, was there a certain drive? Was there a certain sector that you were more interested in, whether it was gaming or decentralized finance? Like, what kind of push was there and, you know, what made you decide some projects over others? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is scale. Part of it, whether it's NFTs or layer 2 stuff, you know, everyone's talking about all of these scaling solutions today with ETH gas fees being so high. You know, I think the main thing is that if a technological solution provides more access or reach to a lot of people, it's inherently more valuable. And so even in the NFT case, the artist that has like a physical gallery or just, you know, you know, indie game developer. I know, Michael, you have a lot of gaming experience. You know, a lot of times a lot of stuff is localization. It's trying to get all of these, you know, artists or like, you know, any random city has incredible museums. Right. How do those people get known across the world? That's, I think, some piece of how this NFT collection that, you know, I think we talked about, like, I think NFTs are collectors' world, not a, like, maybe optimizers' world. You have to be a little bit of willing to take the first gamble there to get into a lot of these ecosystems. Let's back up a bit. So you're talking about scale. You're talking about, so how would you choose that? Scaling in the sense of like technology scaling or was it scaling in the sense of community scaling? Yeah, I think it's a balance of both. I think some of the best projects that we worked with had a balance of things that were both like ready to use right away so that people could, A, figure out it's not a scam. It's got a real working product and it has, you know, some baseline value of services that it can provide or help you with as well as a bigger long-term kind of vision. So three of the, you know, most successful Binance Launchpad that we were able to lead were Matic, now Polygon, Elrond, and Axie Infinity. And I think all three of them had a really nice balance of each of these things. So you were involved in all three of them. So Matic, I think, was the first one chronologically in these three. And we were lucky enough to see them at, I think, ETH India as just a hackathon project. At that point in time, what they had built was something called Dagger, which was basically real-time push notifications for Ethereum events. So like, you know how nowadays you get like a notification from Binance or other places saying that your funds have been successfully deposited. They actually built something like that for Ethereum so that then if I'm a developer and I wanted to let, you know, some friend know that, hey, your funds have arrived. So they weren't really building something that was as a brand as it is today. But you kind of spotted them very early on just from a hackathon. So how did you kind of like isolate them out of kind of everyone else? Yeah, I think first off, you know, obviously they had this kind of baseline piece of it, but they're also looking into Plasma at that time, which ended up maybe not being the hottest solution for ETH scaling, but that they were essentially always looking towards like one foot now and one foot forward in the future. And that folks like Sandeep, a lot of people, you know, know the name, but they don't actually know he's not the CEO. He's not. He's actually the COO. And I think a lot of these like, you know, really successful teams, they have very technical people in key operational roles so that they understand the product as well as understand the community and are able to bridge both. Because, you know, developers, they always want to build the grandest vision and create the fanciest thing. Right. But at the same time, you need somebody that keeps you grounded and gets, you know, stuff rolling out the door. Right. And so having those folks that can, you know, straddle both sides keeps both the community that's, you know, in need of, you know, knowing that there's progress versus the long term vision of, oh, let's go build the best scaling solution. Right. So it's so so you kind of you kind of spotted that kind of. Trait. Yeah, it's a trait. And it's it's such a rare trait, too, because I definitely see a lot of projects that are like very tech focused, but they have no idea how to talk. And then there are projects who only know how to talk, but have no tech whatsoever. Right. So it's being able to do a little bit of both. Right. And then isolating this. So do you find like hackathons are a great place to find people or is that like, you know, is that the only place or is that like, you know, it's definitely not the only place. But I think one of the beauty of hackathons is that you meet really genuine people, especially at really late hours on a weekend. It's almost like a filter of like the guy that wants to show off a Lambo or his new crypto punk or something isn't probably going to be sitting at a hackathon at three or four a.m. on a Sunday because he needs to get some code shipped before the 10 a.m. deadline on a Sunday. So for those who aren't very familiar with hackathons, usually they're like a 36 hour kind of format where it's probably like Saturday and half of Sunday. So there's a lot of sprint work where these builders, they also have to be really good under time pressure, essentially, to execute what they want to build. So I feel like hackathons are almost this pressure cooker where if you survive these types of kind of competitions and opportunities, it means that this team is able to always deliver quickly. You know, the question is, is this team really committed and driven to keep that pace and that innovation that happens a weekend to scale it to, you know, a multi-year project that they want to build? Got it. You know, you kind of identified these base traits that were happening. So you're like very deep into the community. You're talking to real people behind there. You're seeing what they were interested in. And then you're kind of taking the next logical step forward. So I think that's kind of the thought process that kind of seems to apply to almost everything that you do. You do very deep analysis, you know, whether it's from your background, you know, looking at exchanges or looking at projects or looking at NFTs. And then you take the next logical step. And that seems to be what is the winning formula, really. And I think, you know, at Binance, obviously, we want to make sure that we were never leaking any information with regards to listings. So we got really good at, you know, blending into the, you know, background and going kind of undercovers. That's where some of these hackathons, you know, I was always just a student, right, that was just building stuff. But maybe I'm actually interviewing the CEO of a project that might get listed, right? Same thing with hopping into the Discord for a lot of these projects. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about DeFi overall, that so much of the building is happening in the open, that just any random person that, you know, hasn't really heard about, you know, liquidity farming or anything, right? They can go and try for themselves and see what's happening or participate in these governance proposals. It's a lot more open doors. Whereas, you know, for me, as a college student, when I was researching these exchanges, right, no exchange would give me their data. I had to go and, like, scrape a ton of APIs and try and figure out as much as I can. And I think that's the thing about crypto. I think I've always used the analogy from, I think, is it Tom Sawyer, where, like, he's, like, whitewashing the fence in the book. He basically turns a chore of him, you know, whitewash the fence into a privilege that other people pay him to do, right? And I think that in the DeFi world, there's so many of these things where people create these types of positive sum games, that other, you know, jobs might be paid salary jobs. Whereas in DeFi, there's people that just hop in your Discord and they're like, oh, how can I help, right? And so as a project now, right, with Impossible, it's something that we're already starting to see these folks in different communities, you know, volunteer to translate white papers, you know, get their hands dirty into whatever they can do to help scale what the product is. So going back to the scale thing, I think that DeFi is permissionless building, that, you know, anyone can walk in the door and participate in your office, your virtual office. And that's something that's never scaled before because, you know, whether it's Google Meets or Zoom links always dying, like virtual work and distributed work has always been very difficult. Last week, our team actually had a virtual meeting inside a place called Gather Town, where all of us were little like emojis and avatars, right? And we're all like sitting, like fighting for seats at this table, right? And I think that's the thing where as we've gotten deeper into the kind of DeFi world, you know, our meeting had, our team had maybe, I think, nine different passport holders, all in one little virtual table, right? So interesting. Now, okay, so let's kind of like continue to where you are now. So you left Binance after that. So recently you left Binance, you're starting your own project, Impossible Finance. What are you doing there? Yeah. So obviously, you know, I have always really enjoyed this process of finding some of these early projects and seeing them grow. A lot of the projects like Matic, Alron, Axie, Infinity as well, they weren't instant, you know, overnight successes. There were a lot of, you know, long-term hard work and hours even before the launchpad happened. You know, obviously it's a pretty arduous process. And so I think Matic and Alron took maybe nine months or so before they actually got onto the launchpad platform. We were working with them on figuring out how to structure token economics, you know, plan everything ahead of time so that hopefully we would unblock everything for when they were ready to unleash their products to the world. Right, right. And that kind of process is a little bit maybe hidden from, you know, the current public perspective. But that's, you know, why I got to be a part of building. And I think that, you know, especially as these, you know, projects try to launch in DeFi summer, you know, many launch pads have kind of tried to do this in the decentralized world. What they didn't really realize that it's not just a sale platform, it's a scale platform. Right. If you can actually, you know, like Binance leverage your user base of traders and users to come and try these products, that's kind of the holy grail, right, that you can bootstrap these projects networks and communities on top of, you know, combining that technology, like you said, to have the best of both worlds. And so that's where a lot of the, you know, maybe best success stories were some of these projects that were pretty technical, but then tapped into the leverage of a kind of launch pad platform. That being said, you know, I think there's obviously some trade-offs always in the centralized versus decentralized kind of spectrum. A lot of these kind of project teams that do centralized platforms, it's a little bit of a tedious process, right? Many projects cannot afford to wait nine months before, you know, it's their showtime on a launch pad. And also there's so many more, you know, new products that just pop up from smart people building cool things and then communities aggregate around them. We saw this with all the yield farming opportunities and a lot of these fair launches. And so we really do think that there's something that can kind of balance both worlds, something that can have the scale of centralized platforms, but have the kind of flexibility and just kind of fluidity of launching something whenever you want to launch something in a decentralized world, right? And so with Impossible, we're basically building a builder-first incubator launch pad and swap so that then we can have a full-on kind of suite of services for builders to launch really solid projects. And that's what we think is the key for a user for a launch pad, that it doesn't really matter if, you know, all of these things are hyped up for, you know, a couple weeks when they launch. It's about can we find these types of product market fits before they happen and then give those opportunities to the regular users, the people listening to this channel, not just, you know, some VCs that sit, you know, in Silicon Valley or somewhere else, right? Right, right. And I think that's kind of like the new way to do it, right? It's really about community and then identifying kind of the key strengths and then, of course, incorporating everyone into it. So I really hope that goes well. I mean, Impossible Finance, you're doing the impossible. You're making the impossible possible. So guys, if you guys are interested, check out whatever Calvin's doing. Link up below. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously, I think it's a great time to talk. And I think it's great that you share some of your secrets as well. I think, you know, I would love to be that guy. Pretending to be a student, you know, asking the CEO some questions. So fun fact, I actually slept on a lot of these hackathon floors at that time because unfortunately, I couldn't get my flights or hotels reimbursed by Binance. And, you know, coming straight out of college, I didn't really have any savings. So a lot of people met me with my head sticking out from under a table, sleeping at like, you know, 4 a.m. at these different hackathons. So, you know, sometimes you have to grind to, you know, get there. It's not... Little did I know that was the interview for Binance. There you go. So that's how the world works. And that's how the cookie crumbles. So guys, thank you guys so much for watching today. Hit the likes up. Check out Calvin. I'll also check out socials as well. I'm sure you're on all the socials. And hopefully I'll be back here on this channel anytime. Talk to me about NFTs, DeFi, or maybe we should have a not rap battle. We should actually do like a public battle of, you know, this or that. That'll be fun. That'll be fun. All right. So guys, thank you guys for watching. Click the likes. Check out socials. Let's do it. Peace.