Thank you to everyone who joined AMA Blockelite x DeFinity on 26th May at 3:00 PM UTC I 10:00 PM (UTC+7). Here is the recap for those who missed this AMA.
Our special guest today is Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity
Segment 1: Introduction about DeFinity and Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity
Q1: Can you briefly introduce yourself as well as about the DeFinity?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: Yea sure, I am Manu Choudhary, co-founder and CEO of DeFinity. To give you a brief background I spent 17 years working for several investment banks in London, most recently Lloyds and Barclays Capital, selling spot FX and FX derivatives to funds and corporate clients. I left banking for FinTech world in 2019 when I joined DMALink and partnered with WeOwn to create DeFinity in late 2020.
DeFinity is a blockchain agnostic decentralised exchange for the execution and settlement of FX, tokenised fiat, stable coins and central bank digital currencies.
Q2: Please explain how DeFinity works? What role do DEFX tokens play in the DeFinity ecosystem?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: The initial focus for DeFinity will be on Fiat FX which is a USD 6.6 Trillion a day market and our intention is to combine trade execution with clearing and settlement. For those that are not familiar, currently we execute fiat FX trades in 1 millisecond, and then settle them 48 hours later via expensive and slow 3rd parties and DeFinity would look to disintermediate this clearing and settlement layer. Thereafter, we will focus on stable coins and central bank digital currencies (CBDC).
DeFinity has created a utility token to allow network and crypto participants to benefit from the future of Decentralised FX. The DEFX Token services three major use cases, namely, Governance, Staking & participation fees and Rewards.
Q3: What are the advantages that can make DeFinity become a top project? In contrast, what is your weakness? How will you overcome it?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: The greatest advantage DeFinity has are the existing relationships with 50 of the top investment banks and hedge funds. Our greatest weakness is trying to explain just how big a deal solving real world / traditional market problems with digital solutions is. The only way to remedy this is to raise the awareness in both the traditional market and digital market communities of our offering
Q4: What conditions do users need to be able to use the DeFinity platform? What is your market strategy to help you build a great community and attract more users to join your project?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: We currently have two interfaces, Clarity is the regular / retail investor app (https://clarity.definity.network), and clarity pro is the institutional trading engine (demo access available on request).
In terms of building community We have a regular AMA every Friday evening @ 8pm BST with our DeFinity community and we also intend to publish a lot more bespoke content from a technical analysis and global macro perspective.
Can you share about IDO of Definity?
How much token has sold? and when listing ?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: So our IDO with CardStarter went extremely well and literally just ended. We will be turning on liquidity on Uniswap shortly.
Q5: What milestones have DeFinity achieved and what is the next roadmap for 2021?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: In terms of milestones, I guess having just completed the IDO is perhaps the biggest so far. We have had incredible levels of engagement in the traditional financial markets community and thanks to people like Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy (Elon Musk, not so much), blockchain went mainstream in 2021.
In terms of roadmap within the first 100 days we will have launched our fiat FX settlement and clearing solution and integrated to our custodian, via FIX. In terms of users, we are already in negotiations with several funds and exchanges. We will also have launched our retail app, Clarity.
Segment 2: Twitter questions
Q1: From where you get the project name? What does it means to you? And why you choose this name for your project? What is your mission and vision to built this project? What you want to achieve Through your project in future?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: The Project name DeFinity is a combination of DeFi and Infinity, because we believe that DeFi truly has infinite potential to reshape our financial world.
Q2: What blockchains are your team planning to connect to in the near future to unlock more features and provide customers with access to key DeFi protocols and innovative applications in the blockchain space?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: DeFinity is using the WeOwn blockchain as the Layer 1 core processing and transaction component and integrates via side chains or bridges to Cardano, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Binance Smart Chain.
Q3: Your project name seems to be very interesting. Does it have any story behind it? Can you share us with the inspiration for approaching to this name?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: The idea for DeFinity came to us during and investor meeting last summer, when we were asked about central bank digital currencies and the transition away from fiat. When we investigated, we discovered that Stablecoin adoption and trading volumes had grown exponentially over the last few years and we concluded that the transition from fiat currency to central bank digital currencies would include an intermediate phase most likely in the form of stablecoins. We believe that a growing percentage of the $6.6 trillion average daily FX volume will gravitate to the stablecoin market in the initial phase. So DeFinity was created to help bridge traditional and digital assets to help accelerate this move.
Q4: Revenue is an important aspect of all projects to keep the project / company up and running. What is the way to get token profits / income? What is the revenue model?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: Fiat FX is a huge market trading about USD 6.6 Trillion per day. We are fortunate, because DMALINK, one of the founding businesses, already executes about $1 Billion a day in London with 50 of the top investment banks and hedge funds and DeFinity will plug into the platform for the clearing and settlement element of fiat FX in the first instance. Our USP is our institutional background and relationships which will help to create volume and revenue. Our revenue model is simply to charge a fee per trade executed or settled using DeFinity and our objective is to share the deep, liquid and super tight pricing with retail users
Q5: Do you have links we can use to stay updated with this project; Are there channels, or probably local communities where users can get the latest information especially your medium you mentioned?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: Yes absolutely we do, please follow DeFinity’s social media channels to stay up to date with the latest news:
Telegram Official Community : https://t.me/DeFinity_Community
Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/DeFinity_ANN
Medium : https://medium.com/definity-network
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/definitynetwork
Twitter : https://twitter.com/definitynetwork
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/definitynetwork
Segment 3: Live questions
Q1. Can you tell us about anything blockchain or crypto-related that has excited you recently, or anything new coming up in your respective projects?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: What has excited me the most is the shift in thinking from large institutions, such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs creating their own stable coins. They obviously came to the same conclusion that we did.
Q2. Do you have any plans to add Nft’s to your ecosystem as this is the hottest topic in the crypto space?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: 2020 was all about DeFi, 2021 is al about NFTs, of which I am a huge fan, but wait till you see what happens in the real-estate market next year, this is going to be exponentially larger than NFTs. Currently we have no plans for NFTs in our roadmap.
Q3. The lack of do training with forex assets are the regulatory terms, so can you tell us how many licenses or permissions do you have or you’ll have?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: Spot FX is unregulated as an asset class; however we do intend to become regulated as an MTF either in Europe or Singapore as we build out our offering.
Q4. Can you indicate a feature or feature that you like best about the platform so that it can compete with other competitors? What are you most confident about for your platform? Do you have plans to get users to choose your platform?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: I guess the most salient are: –
-Fully decentralised exchange with automated bridge and swap mechanisms across multiple popular blockchain environments.
-Hybrid on-chain order book combined with automated market making algorithms. This allows for reduced slippage and impermanent loss across traditional FX, stable coins, and future central bank digital currencies.
-Built-in KYC and AML features, which allow the user to utilise existing popular wallets and ensure maximum encryption and privacy levels.
-Institutional liquidity pools, which allow traders to stake and pool amongst a variety of FX asset classes (both digital and traditional)
Q5. Could you please tell me just a little more about the team and some of their backgrounds? I have personally seen many projects launch with inexperienced team members, and some of those didn’t go so well due to easily avoidable mistakes.?
Manu Choudhary – CEO of DeFinity: We are very fortunate to have a great team with huge amount of experience across many disciplines. Myself and Chris have a banking and financial market sales and trading background, Sascha and Florian have a blockchain background and Michael and Ashwind have an electronic trading and exchange background, which I think makes for an all-star team.
