UNLOCKING Value on every Blockchain - RAMP DEFI

Hey guys and welcome back to Box Mining. Now over the past few weeks you guys probably know that decentralized finance is just super hot right now but you've been hearing a lot about total value locked and all this fancy DeFi jazz. Today we're going to look at total value unlocked with a project called Ramp. So today I have Lawrence Lim here and he's going to talk a little bit about what he's working on in the decentralized finance space and if you're holding Elrond or IOST you should pay attention because he's going to tell you a little bit about how to unlock that potential and get some ramp on the side as well. So to start off with Lawrence, let's give a small introduction. Let's tell you a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this whole space. Sure. Thank you Michael for having me here on Box Mining. Super excited to share about Ramp DeFi with your community and followers. So just a little bit about myself. My name is Lawrence. I'm from Singapore and I started my career in private banking and asset management in the traditional financial sector. So that was with financial institutions like JP Morgan, EMP Paribas, KPMG to you know that really set my base in the financial sector. And four to five years later I realized you know that tech is booming and you start to see that transformation happening and I decided to do a career change to move into tech. So it's from centralized finance to decentralized finance, right? Exactly. From yeah, you know, old money into new money. Excellent. And how are you finding this space? Are you finding some parallel similarities between the centralized finance space and what's happening here in this whole crypto field, decentralized finance space? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think when crypto first started, it really mirrors the traditional financial sector. So you see that exchanges popping up, you know, to service users. Users are still a lot more comfortable with centralized exchanges. And I think that's normal because that's a concept, that's a business model they understand. But over the last, especially, you know, one year, we have seen decentralized finance coming up with different and more innovative models to change how the typical financial mechanisms can be. So, you know, just a simple example would be Uniswap and its continuous liquidity pool concept, which totally changes how exchanges or the books are being done. Exactly. It's so surprising, right? All of a sudden, you know, people, because the problem is the liquidity business is actually quite a kind of, you know, off records, a kind of a gray area, right? And now all of a sudden it's automated, it's transparent, it's completely open to everyone. I think that's pretty crazy. So you're seeing that as one of the biggest changes right now, right? Correct. Correct. And I think one of the key things is that decentralized finance, I think, since the launch of Uniswap, actually now has a liquidity for liquid coins. Where previously, when it's centralized, it's on other books, you are reliant on the other book being present for liquidity, which, you know, right now we are seeing that liquidity pools have taken over the role of other books, which actually very much changes the concept of how finance can be executed. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the second kind of cool thing is you're almost crowdsourcing liquidity. Now that anyone can just like, oh, push out that liquidity pool and boom, you got something working, right? So that's, I think that's kind of crazy. Yeah, correct. And I think that's really the power of blockchain and the power of DeFi, because now, you know, it's so decentralized, you don't see anyone really owning a particular solution, but it's actually being owned by a pool of users who contributed liquidity. Now, do you think that DeFi is moving too fast though? I mean, right now, obviously we have a huge frantic, you know, all these people just looking at the coins going off 10X, 15X and all that stuff. Do you think we're going too fast? Yeah, I think, well, I think it's always good for industry to, you know, especially something as nascent as DeFi, to be moving at speed, because this creates a sort of energy and attention around the, you know, the entire space. I think as with things that move fast, things break as well. I think we have seen quite a few projects breaking, but I think it's all very experimental. And I think, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of breaking things, because that sets us the sort of experience to make something work. And, you know, I think all this contributes to the layer of knowledge and resources that the industry can draw upon. So, yeah, definitely, you know, you know, it has its advantages. Nice. All right. So now talking about moving fast, obviously you're building RAM. So can you tell me a little bit about what you're trying to do and what you're doing in this DeFi space? Yeah, for sure. So I think when we look at DeFi and, you know, a lot of projects seek to get liquidity and they call it total value locked. And that's definitely very interesting because, you know, with liquidity being such a key driver within the industry, then, you know, in a sense, everybody starts computing for the same dollar to be moved into that solution. So I think, you know, this is what we are happening and seeing on Ethereum right now. And for RAM, we actually have a slightly different concept, which is, you know, rather than going for the same dollar, which does not grow the economy pie, we look outside of the current existing DeFi ecosystem, which is taking place mainly on Ethereum. And we look at, you know, there are other blockchain ecosystems out there that's actually very active, have a lot of capital being invested. And how can we bring this value to merge with what is happening on DeFi right now in Ethereum? So, you know, this is actually, actually, there are over $22 billion of state digital assets in other blockchain ecosystems, especially on the proof of state blockchains. So what we want to do is to unlock value from all of these state digital assets. And we actually call this total value unlocked. So instead of total value unlocked, we unlock and bring it and we grow the economy pie for everyone. So I guess like it kind of put it to perspective, right? Because our channel, we've been pretty big on Neofarming. It's all happening on Ethereum. You have your different coins, whether it's your USDT, USDC, or if you're fancy, you have your link or whatnot. But these are all based on Ethereum. What you're trying to do is you're unlocking the potential of other blockchains and also trying to create a total merge economy there, right? Yes, exactly. And I think that's super important because, you know, in these last two years, the staking economy has been extremely buoyant. We see a lot of investors pouring capital into these ecosystems and they are getting more matured and more developed. And, you know, I think they will continue to do so. So, but, you know, because they are on their own ecosystems, they are actually separated from what's happening in DeFi right now. And I think, you know, some users, some investment funds are seeing a, what is really a capital allocation decision. You still keep your asset stakes within the ecosystem and earn staking rewards when DeFi on Ethereum is taking off. Do you exit? Do you have to choose? What we think at REM is that you don't have to choose. You can have everything. You can have your staking rewards. Okay. Okay. How does that work though? I mean, that sounds great, right? That sounds like a dream, right? Like I can be staking. I can be on the other blockchain. I can be there. How does this all work then? Good question. So I think you're just really on the high level. I just give a quick sense of how this works. You know, so if you own a, if you're on a staking program, what you can do is delegate your assets into our delegation smart contracts. In return, what we do is collateralize this into a stable coin, which you can use within the native blockchain ecosystem. And at the same time, you are able to wrap it and bring it over to Ethereum ecosystem. And all this different portfolio of state assets can come under a common stable coin standard, which means that the risk is actually being spread out across a big portfolio of different assets. And, you know, it's not dependent on a single point of failure. It's not like you can manipulate one oracle or, you know, one particular price of a specific token and it crashes the system. So by doing that, you know, users can unlock liquid capital within the Ethereum network. And at the same time, because they have delegated their digital assets into our contract on the native chain, what we do is that we still allow them to receive their staking rewards and allow them to hold and own this portfolio of assets. And this way, you know, basically they are able to enjoy everything from, you know, the staking rewards they're receiving, capital appreciation, potential, as well as even farm rent tokens. Nice. Nice. Okay. So, okay. Let me get this straight. On every different blockchain. So let's say, um, not just on Ethereum, you were saying Elrond a little bit earlier. You're saying IOST. With these blockchains, obviously people are looking at cross chain. So you're solving that. You're saying, look, you create these, you can, you can delegate your locked assets into smart contracts. So this is non-custodial. So this is done in a non-custodial fashion. They can feel safe and they can audit their contracts, et cetera. So stake it there. Then once it's staked, you can either generate an asset or generate a stable coin. And this stable coin can be removed between blockchains. And so you can use it on Ethereum, et cetera. That's very interesting. So, um, how does this technology actually work? So it's like, you can cross this chain so you can cross from say Elrond. You can create an Elrond version of the USD and then move it over. Yes, correct, Michael. I think that's, uh, you summarized it really well. Um, that's how it's going to work. Um, that's two of our partners right there. Elrond and IOST, who are one of the, you know, first two partners we are announcing. And we have a lineup of partners who will be joining us as well on Red DeFi to be announced very soon. But yes, if you are holding Elrond or IOST, once the smart contracts delegation, uh, set up is developed, what you can do is to send in your Elrond tokens or IOST tokens into our contract. You still receive your staking yield, you still retain ownership of your tokens. And as you say, you know, that's a stable coin that's being generated, which you can project over to the Ethereum ecosystem. And we will incentivize you to do that by letting you farm rent tokens as part of the reward as well. This would be lots of, what we call it is really yield stacking. You can stack yield over yield over yield. And when more chains are being added into the whole ecosystem, what's going to happen is that we actually have a universal shared interest pool where rent tokens, if you're holding rent tokens, you stake it, you will get returns and yield from this shared interest pool as well being distributed to you. So it's just like yield over yield over yield. So I'm almost facepalming here because I mean, obviously there's going to be concern over that because you're constantly stacking, you know, this sounds too good to be true. What are, what are kind of the security safeguards in this case then? Good question. So the key for us is that, you know, having that sort of MakerDAO set up natively on chain is to allow everything to have a consistency in terms of security, as well as, you know, when we come to managing the assets. So, you know, cross chain itself is a challenging proposition. So what we are doing is to manage risk by developing the MakerDAO on chain, having that collateralization and liquidation functions also develop over there so that, you know, when the time comes for any event driven trigger to occur, you know, all this thing will be smoothly done. And then only the stable coin that's developed is actually being wrecked and sent over to Ethereum. And, you know, this just create a very linear and lightweight sort of cross chain solution. And, you know, I, and I think the key as well is that we are developing this as a common stable coin standard. So, you know, if we are developing such a solution natively on say five different chains, we can be assured that all these five different chains have the same standards in liquidation, in collateralization, in delegation. And this common stable coin is actually buffered by a range of different assets rather than just one. And that makes sense. So, I mean, MakerDAO is for, yeah, they're brought in and up, but mostly for Ethereum, right? Everyone's collateralizing Ethereum on this. And this is actually what I'm doing, right? So I have actually my Ethereum hodl, which I want to have Ethereum exposure. I want to keep it as Ethereum, but I also want to go yield farming. So I pull some die out. So that's exactly what I'm doing. And I can envision a future. I can be on Elrond, deposit, still stake my Elrond, pull some of your stable coin out of that using smart contract, then migrate that to Ethereum and play yield farming, whatever I want to do. So that's kind of the unlocking aspect of it. Now, I think my biggest concern, obviously, is what if the just price volatility on Elrond's side, what can I do? Like, what's going to happen if the value drops below a certain amount? Obviously, there's a liquidation clause in there. So what's going to happen there? Of course. And I think this is the part that we definitely want to work directly with the foundation on. So, you know, we have a spoke at length about this. And, you know, I think there are multiple layers of mitigation that can be done to ensure that users' assets are safe. So, for example, the first layer is always, again, the collateralization ratio. I think, you know, that's the first protection because if you collateralize it at a ratio that's too low, you actually create a higher possibility of the assets being liquidated. So, you know, just to start off with, make sure we don't break things. We set a high collateralization. So that's the first step. So that's the first step. Second step would be that you actually create a mechanism where potentially liquidators can come in to provide the sort of what we call the offtake in case of any drop in the assets value. And I think, you know, this can be set up as a very specific structure. Essentially, you know, if the price drops and within 24 hours doesn't recover because sometimes prices bounce back very quickly. You know, only then does liquidation events occur. And this is actually because this liquidators come in as like a sort of like an OTC liquidator and it doesn't hit the markets. And I think that's the key thing because, you know, you don't want a wave of defaults to trigger the prices, which should get away from defaults. It has a domino effect on the whole token price. That's terrible. That's not something we want to do. We're talking about liquidation. We talked about this use case. Eventually, you're basically allowing chains to unlock its potential. Like, I think this is super interesting because I mean, super into yield farming these days. So I can like use to still keep those assets, unlock some capital, go yield farming, go have fun. And at the same time, cross some chains as well, which is great. But with all this, in terms of security audits, where are you there? Because I think that's probably my biggest worry then. Like, I just worried about, you know, getting hacked and GG, right? 100%. And I think that's a very key focus for us. I think any solution that essentially are dealing with users' assets and, you know, having that sort of delegation being done into the smart contract has to have the security and, you know, robustness of the code to ensure that there's no vulnerabilities. Users' assets are super secure. And, you know, and that is why we wanted to work with the blockchain foundations to build such a solution. Because firstly, they know that platform the best. They can be the, what we call the four eyes check, you know, on our, the smart contracts that we develop. And then, you know, you have the, the other two, another extra pair by the contract auditors who can come in and make sure that everything is tight. You know, only then when this level of rigor has been done on the smart contract auditing before we release it for the users to be used. Got it. So that's, that's good. I mean, I mean, we've been through a few of this, you know, let's, let's test things in production. And yeah, that's not the best way. Right. But okay. So, so all that is done. Now let's talk about the token use case. Well, what is this ramp token used for it in this case then? Good question. So really the ramp token is here to power the value accretion for the entire ecosystem. So firstly, holders of the ramp token undertake, take part in governance. So pretty much as the industry changes, as things develop, you know, I think we want our community of ramp holders to step up and play and have a voice in deciding where the solution should go. I think that's really important. You know, after all, we do see that as a community project where everyone participates. Right. Right. Right. The second one would really be the, you farming, you farming. So we focus on a very participation driven model. So we have divided the you farming reserves into a, you know, a few different pools to ensure that, you know, various different asset holders join the ecosystem as well as participate in the activities. So for example, if you need a stable coin, you start to farm ramp tokens. If you take part in lending and borrowing, you start to farm ramp tokens and it's activity driven. So we want to enhance the, yeah. So we want to enhance the participation rate of users in our ecosystem. And I think the third thing is that, you know, I think this is an interesting concept is that we have this, a farming power. So holders of ramp tokens farm with greater efficiency. Oh, right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay. So that incentivize people who are really tight into the ecosystem. So like, you know, did you sell the ramp tokens, the more ramp you hold, you actually farm at a higher efficiency than the same guy who put in the same amount of assets or capital, but doesn't hold any ramp tokens. So the people who care more about it get more, I guess that's the way it goes, right? Exactly. Exactly. And we want to incentivize the people who actually care and want to be part of the ecosystem to play a bigger voice and have that and be rewarded for it. Got it. All right. So we talked about the ramp token and I think something that we've been looking at in the channel a lot is about dumpamentals too. So like, you know, did you sell tokens for cheap or to any foundation? What was the race like and how did everything go there and, you know, who was invested and what's the cap at? Good question. So, you know, just about dumping, you know, I think right now. This is a hard question. It's actually a question I really wanted to answer because we do have a solution for this. What we are seeing is that, you know, there's a lot of tokens that came out, but, you know, without having a value being approved to the token that's developed. And what we do at RAM is that, you know, all these staking rewards, all the, you know, interest that's being generated actually go into what we call the shared interest pool. And all the shared interest pool will release value to hold us a RAM token. So it means that actually there is a business model behind the token. Correct. I think quite a few, you know, different sort of models out there that doesn't have such value accretion to, you know, to the native token. So I think this is it. And I think, you know, this will be something that will prevent people from just thinking, you know, I'll dump it. Because, you know, if they take it today and over time, the ecosystems grow larger, they are actually, they may be even receiving value that is much higher than sticking what they are receiving. Okay. How much was it raised? Like, how much was it raised? Yeah. Yeah. So we raised just over a million dollars on our private sale to develop the RAM solution. It's a, yeah, we are invested by, you know, some very prominent investors, including Alameda Research, Verify Capital, as well as XRP Arrington Capital to develop a solution. You know, quite a number of other VCs or four or five items also on board. So, you know, I think, I think when we propose a solution, it actually hit right into the pinpoint that a lot of these venture funds actually have. Because over the last few years, they invested so much capital into all these different blockchain ecosystems and they want, they really want to extract it. So I think, you know, product market fit right there. Got it. Perfect. Cool. Okay. So, so now when are you close to launch? Are you close to launch? What's, what's happening there? When, when, when, when can we do this? Yeah. So, yeah, all this partnerships are already underway. We already have several signed. So, you know, just get ready for some good news. You know, the first two that, you know, most likely to launch at the moment will probably be IOST as well as Aron. So if you're holding Aron tokens, if you're holding IOST tokens, you know, we want to start this early, you know, have that delegation contract set up so you can participate at the earliest opportunity. It's already underway. And, you know, I think your launch would be very, very soon. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So, you know, we want to, you know, get our community engaged and participating. Got it. Got it. So how can our community find you? So what's the best way to communicate and where to find us? Yeah. So you can, you know, look for us over and follow the Ram DeFi project over several channels. The first one would be Twitter for sure. The Twitter handle would be at Ram DeFi. So please follow us over there. You can also find our community channel at Ram DeFi official on Telegram. The link is our Twitter profile. So, you know, please join the correct one. And, yeah, you know, I think these are the two core channels that you can find us. And, you know, just also something interesting for the audience. And our public sale will be announced very soon. So please, you know, if you like what Ram is doing for the DeFi ecosystem, please follow us and support us. Awesome. I'll definitely check it out. And hopefully things go well. So, guys, make sure you check out the links down below. Thank you, Lawrence, for your time. I think this is definitely something that I'm looking at. So I'm really glad to have this interview for you today. And I hope you guys like this. So thank you so much, Lawrence, for coming in today. Thank you so much, Michael. This is super awesome. I really appreciate this opportunity for my interview. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.