Philip Blows on AQRU's yield generating platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have philip blows ceo and co-founder of accru phil welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you very much for having us you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into a crew more people are accruing interest at a

0:23higher percent than ever introdu than in traditional finance and it's only continuing to grow with defy exploding and more people that aren't really in cryptocurrency understanding the benefits of occurring interest with digital assets and with that said i would love for you in your words to start us off with just a little high level overview of what is a

0:46crew and what are the solutions that you're bringing to the financial space absolutely so we found a crew because we like you just said it seemed there's these amazing yields that we had in the world of digital assets but for the average investor it remained really really difficult expensive risky and complex to access them so we wanted to build an app that was the simplest

1:11pace possible to either transfer an existing crypto portfolio or a in order just to put normal cash or money onto the account and convert it into into crypto and start earning the highest yields around on those assets but just take away all of that complexity the gas costs the wallet management that so many people find tricky and yeah just make it a really nice user

1:36experience and back it up with great customer service and you know engaging content to educate the user and so that's what we've set up definitely yeah and you're right even with d5 you know decentralized finance where you have to you know you have custody of your own coins and you have to manage through the contracts and pay the gas fees it is

1:57technical even for people that are in cryptocurrency and that's why there's so many people that are holding bitcoin and ethereum that aren't really putting it to use or even stable coins because the technical barriers to and to understand you know to make sure that they're not doing anything wrong and that they're putting their funds in a safe place and

2:14that they're not going to lose it you know and send something to the wrong address and it's gone but at the same time this i think a crew is the perfect solution for those people that are already holding and they're like oh i can easily do earn yields on my digital assets safely but also the people that aren't in cryptocurrency overall that are like hey not only can i you

2:37know there's this bitcoin thing and stable coins but the interest is you know like i haven't seen this before in traditional finance like why am i getting really good interest you know and i'm curious if you know a crew where you're positioning yourselves are you really catering to both of those kinds of customers where people are in crypto and not in crypto as well

3:01yeah so i think the ability just to be able to easily fund your account by a traditional bank transfer is very much catering for that crypto novice or the traditional investor who as you've said has probably had their if they've invested a small amount of crypto before is it's sitting in a in a large exchange account probably not earning any kind of interest they may

3:21not even be aware that you can earn interest so what we're trying to do is make the whole journey from traditional money through to earning interest as easy as possible and yeah we've we've been really lucky and i think it's one key differentiator of the business it's just how operationally slick that the tool is so once you're signed up you can generally fund the account via

3:43bank transfer takes under about 30 seconds you can then buy it by the crypto whichever it is bitcoin ethereum or a stable coin we charge no fees for that process and then you're instantly earning crypto that's paid out every second and can be withdrawn anytime so it's there's no kind of weekly payouts that you've seen where you know you build up your earnings you can take

4:06it out the week and then some of those earnings might be in some strange coin that you can't take out for three months yeah all of that complexity's been removed and i think that's really catering for the person who's saying i just want this these deals seem great i just want i want access to them i don't i don't want any of the complexity i don't want any strange coins i want the

4:24ability to come out to my normal currency that i'm used to at any time and making it really simple quick and easy to do that's who we're catering for but i think there also is a slightly more that's bringing new new people into the world of crypto and you know we're passionate about it being the bridge between traditional finance and decentralized

4:47finance but at the same time there's people just sitting on crypto which maybe they're thinking look i haven't got into staking is too expensive was too risky and you know what we're really keen to sort of demonstrate is we've built a bank grade infrastructure in our custody solution trying to make this as safe as possible in the world of crypto so hopefully gives people who maybe have

5:08been on the sidelines with their crypto portfolios the confidence now to come and actually start earning interest on them for the first time definitely yeah both of those are important and i was looking at the platform and in terms of like the first assets and the returns you know somebody's like they've never earned yield on any digital assets before and they're going

5:28to the platform i saw you know i saw one number on the on the platform of like 12 but maybe you can talk about you know on average what are the assets that are first being able to deposit and what did those yields look like yeah so we've really kept it pretty simple to begin with so we've got stable coins which for those who don't know what they are they're effectively crypto

5:55currencies that are pegged to the value of the us dollar so what that's done is it's taken all of the volatility the price volatility that you see in some of the better known cryptocurrencies out of that investment and really it's just paying you a yield so although it's quick though it's kind of return profile looks a lot more like what people would think of as a bond

6:16The other the other things that we have on the platform are ethereum and bitcoin and we pay a seven percent yield on those what is quite i think quite important to note a lot of our competitors are a little bit cheeky in this area they say okay we will pay you a percentage which is usually lower than our of our percentages but i'll only pay

6:38you that on the first say ten thousand dollars or the first half of bitcoin and after that it craters and you end up some of the biggest providers in the market they're paying sub 1 yields on bitcoin and ethereum you know our yields are are set at those levels so it's it's become it's proved attractive for a lot of larger investors as well

7:01who may be a bit tired of getting good yields on the first part of their portfolio but then not so much on the rest which is more attractive i did see some some major whales that were posting about how they were earning a lot of interest on some of the platforms and like literally the next day or the next week that platform dropped their interest

7:23like significantly and yeah so if you have a lot of money that's good to know i didn't know that about a crew and i was gonna ask you because you know there are some other centralized kind of lending yield earning platforms and how do you how do you get that competitive advantage when there's other platforms in there like is it is it just the best yield is it

7:48the best user experience you know it sounds like from what you've said you know you do have very competitive yields and especially when there's more capital and also you're trying to make it a very good user experience are those sort of the two priorities in capturing the market or is there something else as well i think at its most fundamental level

8:09we've got to compete and be aggressive on the yields that we pay and we want to be the best yields in the market then in terms of how else we're differentiating ourselves it's it's trying to make it flexible and so we don't have any ties in where a lot of other companies will have lock-in periods to earn decent levels of interest or will only pay rewards in frequently

8:31we accrue awards by the second and we pay out daily so it's that gives people a lot more flexibility but also we are we've hired an amazing team in our customer service team who are on hand 24 7 to answer questions to educate our users and to make it a good user experience because we've probably anyone who's been encrypted over any period of time has

8:56probably had an issue and we know of some big exchanges we've had backlogs of millions of queries so it takes them months to get through them they're kind of victims of their own success and we are we are front running our kind of needs in the customer service team to make sure that we are always well supported and well staffed there so hopefully people who have

9:18maybe they've been close to taking the plunge into crypto and said oh if i could just talk to someone and get a bit of reassurance and they haven't found that reassurance previously because they haven't been able to get through a platform yeah they're going to get that with us so that i feel is going to be a big difference especially for those newer

9:35newer participants in the crypto market definitely and no there's still a lot of people that aren't staking their basic you know mainstream digital assets like bitcoin ethereum stable coins but also in d5 part of the reason that is it exploded is there's all these other financial products that are available for more people when they get more advanced you know which

10:00are higher risk and higher reward it is that something you know not high risk but is that something that a crew is looking into where maybe you'll add more assets in the future or other kind of financial products that are in decentralized finance the crypto market is the pace of innovation is incredible and i think what we found is if you rewind three years ago the top

10:26ten coins three years ago 70 of them aren't there anymore which which is crazy and what we don't want and what we think that target market that we're going after which is longer term crypto investors i would hate to have an asset on the platform which we'd put there and people are assuming because the asset is there that we've done our due diligence on it

10:49we believe in it in the long term and then in a year yeah two years time it's disappeared so yeah we're really keen to be highly selective with the assets that we're putting on there and yeah not to say that bitcoin and ethereum that's there at the moment aren't volatile because they are but i think there's very few people invest in crypto don't don't believe

11:12that they will be there in five years time and hopefully be you know appreciate a lot more in value and how they're used than today so we're going to be very selective about the assets that we add to the platform and i think going back to that target market it you can make a lot of money in these in these crazy sort of volatilities fluctuations that you see in these old coins it's not

11:36easy to do and it doesn't really fit as with the long-term investment mindset that they're trying to encourage on our platform you're right and i completely agree and i like your answer phil so that's great and one other question is with the platform right now i from what i understand it's fairly you know financial services like this and giving out interest is becoming more

12:02and more regulated as crypto and mainstream finance blend into each other do people that are put their assets into a crew is that all you know assured regulated backed up maybe you can talk about that side of a crew absolutely so in order for crypto to become a mass market product you're going to need to get institutions involved you're going to need it's going

12:28to have to permeate the whole of society so that won't happen unless it's a regulated product and at the moment globally there are not many fully regulated regimes there are not too many places where you can get regulated it tends to be that you do registrations and those registrations are very very strict where they are they're assessing your

12:50ability to spot money laundering to know your customer to you know manage risk and ensure that customers know risk well so that is only increasing and that but it's what is absolutely needed because that's going to give customers the confidence that this is a product that people regulators and the company that you're dealing with is genuine and there

13:14because that's what plagued the early crypto industry before these registrations came out was that there were just too many bad actors in the space and increased regulations actually pushed a lot of them out of the market which is great to see so i think you know it's something as a business we need to be incredibly good at is navigating the regulatory environment

13:34and you know we're engaging with every regulator we need to in every jurisdiction that we're operating and that's going to put us in a good position as regulations because it's one of our core capabilities the management team has come from the traditional world of finance and has been is used to is used to working in a in a fully compliant regulated and

13:53method compliant way so that's quite a good skill set that we have internally that we will be continuing to develop as as the crypto regulations develop but that is going to be the catalyst to institutional adoption and wider adoption so we're doing everything we can to try and get it out in the open if we possibly can definitely i like to hear it phil and

14:17with that you know 2021 was super explosive for d5 and a lot of institutions coming in not just in the metaverse in gaming but overall in custody yielding holding large large amounts of digital assets and i expect that to continue and maybe even accelerate throughout 2022 and i would love to know your prediction for how you see a crew

14:45growing throughout 2022 as the industry continues to explode we've got some amazing use cases where we've seen our competitors in a very very short period of time build billions of dollars of assets on their platform we're we're paying higher yields we're more attractive to their larger customers we've got a great team really good user experience on a product that is

15:11you know there's a app on it's available on the app store android and web which a lot of our competitors haven't even done after after being an operation a lot longer than us so we're more accessible we're higher yielding and hopefully easier to deal with than a lot of the competition out there so you know we're looking to attract a lot of the existing customers in the crypto

15:30industry to our platform but at the same time open up investors who've never done this before and show them that this should be a part of any diversified portfolio yeah we're not saying it should be a massive part we're saying crypto assets should be 5 10 of a diversified portfolio because you know it's been the best performing asset class in the last

15:5010 years so i think that message as it goes out that's what we are that's what we're pushing and seeing 2022 be an explosive year where we're building significant assets on the platform i think we are we're poised to do that great to hear phil and for the viewers that are looking to start earning yield on a crew and learn more ask questions join the communities to

16:16hear what other people are saying about a crew what is the best way for them to get involved the best way is to download the app or visit the website which is aqru.io or just just look on the android or app store great thing is the moment you get into the app you'll see it pop up and we've got a highly responsive customer service team just just waiting to answer your

16:37questions so yeah i see it i see a lot of all of these questions as well and i'll reach out to customers because they're keeping the customers concerns queries is core to us improving the product over time so the whole management team read all of them so yeah we will reach out reach out to me on linkedin i'd love to hear from people as well and yeah we're it's

17:00we're very very open and transparent so very basic i will leave all those links in the description box below for easy access for the viewers as well thank you so much for taking the time philip to come on and talk about a crew all the best in 2022 and beyond i know we will speak before then in the coming months i would love to follow up and look at the

17:23progress and see you know just how explosive defy and yield earning is going to be for digital assets this year i think it's going to be the best yet and i'm wishing you all the best so let's follow up in the near future thanks ashton appreciate your time