Steven Ward bringing DeFi to Cardano blockchain

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have stephen ward ceo of five finance stephen welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today it's a pleasure thank you so much for having me you're very welcome let's dive into the world of defy but more

0:19specifically defy and finance in the cardano ecosystem which is huge up and coming potential i know a few of my smart friends that are already involved in it but i feel like the mainstream really hasn't touched into it yet compared to at least in ethereum and some of the main d5 ecosystems so let's start off our conversation stephen by hearing a little bit about the specifics

0:42and vi finance and why your team brought we think this is a good idea for defy on cardano and then we'll jump into the details after that yeah absolutely look let's start with why we thought it was a good idea to launch on cutoff you know that's a good place to begin cardano is an up and coming blockchain so there isn't a whole heap or a whole

1:05host of programs on there yet so we kind of saw an opportunity with a bit of an open market there to be able to insert ourselves and you know give utility which might have otherwise been lost on other blockchains we are doing a few you know world firsts but we'll talk about that coming soon and we didn't want them to be ignored or forgotten about because we're so covered

1:32with other projects on like ethereum or on avalanche or not any of the others so it was really to give ourselves a point of difference as well as to access more remote markets cardano is really focused on you know third world second world up and coming africa south america those sort of areas there my background is in finance i did spend a period as a financial advisor in

1:57fact as well but mostly dealing in investments right and having come from investments i just know i know personally the damage that there is within this system and funneling all the money through to the top end of town essentially yeah exactly so and you've been you know dealing with people in finance for a while as well i'm sure you're quite

2:21aware definitely so i saw karana was the perfect opportunity to sort of push these powerful tools to those that need it most right and i wanted to be part of that change great great point stephen and you're right i've been following the cardinal ecosystem in terms of their developments in emerging economies as well and i feel like africa is one of those that's

2:45going to come from the bottom up to the top and sort of skip all of that middle infrastructure that was needed for the archaic internet and move straight into decentralized finance and financial inclusion for those who need it most for those who don't have access to the traditional financial systems and hopefully they don't need to get access

3:04to it because this is going to be even better so that's exactly it yeah so with that said maybe you can talk a little bit more about vi finance as a product and as a platform and what makes it different and how people that are looking for financial inclusion can capitalize on those products yeah absolutely so buy finance is a suite or an

3:27ecosystem really it's not just any one product we're launching a dex fairly soon so we're looking for that around may that dex is going to be a decks in the classic sense so we're going to have swaps we're going to have farms we're going to yeah it's at the decks swaps and farms we are also going to include a bar now have you ever heard of sushi swap

3:53yes yes so sushi swap used to have their bar but they actually did away with it but that bar was essentially a distributive mechanism to allow a percentage of every swap that takes place is converted into wi-fi and then that wi-fi is distributed to those that are keeping their wi-fi at the bar now what we've done to kind of expand our ecosystem and that was the core of

4:13the idea right is that we've got this bar which is distributing income from our decks but we want to be able to expand that bar so we can give more upwards pressure to our token right because the more wi-fi that we're distributing the more we're purchasing the more upwards pressure we have so from there i we added in or we're constructing an auto harvester do you

4:38know what an auto harvester is i think so but i feel like we should definitely explain it for the audience absolutely i was going to say so an auto harvester is similar well an existing platform would be as an example would be so their current auto harvester essentially they are where you get a strategy on the blockchain or a strategy in the world of decentralization such as

5:01i will do 50 die 50 ethereum right and then we'll put that into liquidity pools for you users who then don't know how to manage the funds themselves across the blockchain but then rather than having to manage themselves on a decks are able to just engage with that oil harvester where they place their crypto into the auto harvester we then take that and

5:21manage it on the blockchain for them and then distribute back to them the income that's earned now this is where we've actually got our world first we're doing something really rather different with our water harvester the way that most auto harvesters work now all auto harvesters work now i'm not most sorry is they are set strategies so someone is the example that i just used

5:42would have a strategy of an ethereum die strategy right in our example sorry in our system we're generating or building a neural net now a neural net is an advanced form of ai which essentially teaches itself the most optimal way to perform tasks so it's used a great example of it would be watson actually watson who also was on sale of the state was the sale of

6:09the century it might have been i can't remember which i think it was out of the century actually but watson essentially teaches itself how to identify cancers in medical patients right and then it looks at millions and millions and millions and millions of scans so that it can find the optimal form or the optimal situation which represents cancer based

6:33on those scans right we're going to be doing that for yield farming so we're essentially building a neural net which teaches itself the optimal situation to place your funds to be able to optimize yield farming wow now we're stratifying this into a high risk and medium risk low risk and stable coin so we've gone have four separate risk levels what makes this system so different to

6:59all the other auto harvesters that exist is that it is actually self-managing in other words it's not a static strategy in the case of an ethereum dipole you're always dealing with ethereum die if you are in a curve b usd pool you're always dealing with curve busd our neural net is going to be analyzing the market and adjusting the positions in those pools real time based on

7:22current market conditions to optimize those risk levels based on what the risk the user wants to engage with right in that way we're hoping to make the system safer and more consistent rather than having to rely on just a set strategy that's been created in the past definitely now most importantly 15 of all the income that's made in the auto harvester

7:46gets distributed to our bar so that means we're drawing in funds from across the cardano ecosystem taking 15 of them as the income from the from the auto harvester converting them to wi-fi and then distributing to the holders of our token so that's going to be creating a funnel where we're drawing an income from outside of the wi-fi ecosystem and bringing it in

8:09right and that's really important most dexas and almost all dexes don't actually have any kind of funnel that brings an income from outside of their ecosystem they're a closed loop such as pancake or such as little sushi swap such as that i can go through lists for days but yeah we're trying to change that idea and turning it into rather a closed loop turning it into an open loop

8:31which accepts money from outside of itself incredible a lot of great points there you know with the auto harvesting with being able to move strategies one thing i'm curious about with this and you know because we're talking about the cardano ecosystem and a lot of people that are using ethereum using ether as the main asset in this case are you using

8:55cardano's ada coin or are you also using other digital assets or are you also using wi-fi like what are the main assets that people would use we're principally going to be using ada and we're also going to be using the upcoming stable point on ada called jed which is being released by koti we actually announced our partnership with them just yesterday i believe might have

9:13been the day before so and jed's quite a large company they're actually building their stable coin in conjunction with iohk so we're kind of working with them now to try and figure out how exactly we're going to manage this that's incredible because i feel like people are looking for stable coin alternatives you know i've heard a lot about in the luna ecosystem you know usd

9:38ust and how the economic models differ from you know usdt and usdc the one that most people are using and it's actually way better so i'm actually looking forward to seeing more stable coins and just the growth of the ecosystem in the cardano platform yeah exactly and the reality is that stable coins are really important to be able to manage right

10:05if you don't have a safe option to be able to move your funds into a stable situation the second stuff starts moving quickly a lot of people panic and get out so one of the most important things to stabilize d5 as a whole is the option of a stable point where you can quickly move your funds into something that's stable without that d5 doesn't function

10:28properly right because you're always going to have these well not always hopefully does come down at some point in the future as the markets mature but you are going to regularly have these swings that as a you know an everyday user not a large end investor might not necessarily be comfortable for you definitely yeah now there is still one one other part well there's two other

10:54parts of our project actually first we've also got an nft project that's that we've launched now our nft pro we actually won an award for the most utah nft of 2021 from the cnft awards so there was an awards for all nfts on kardana and were able to get one of the six there were six what are they called six awards that were given out we won one of them

11:17Six categories that's the word and from this we actually allow users to farm using our nft so we were the first we were the first stakeable at ft on cardana and in doing this we were able to really sort of give users an early option to engage with some d5 like tools prior to d5 being properly launched on cardano which has been something that i'm very proud of

11:44incredible and then the last one i should also add six percent of all the royalties from our nft are going to be distributed to our bar and so far there's been a total throughput of eight hundred and eight hundred and sixty or eight hundred seventy thousand eighty eight purchased on our nft so it is in the top fifty nfts in terms of volume on all of cardano

12:05and the floor on that is about a thousand two hundred ada so you know they're not a low end nft so it isn't necessarily easy for people to engage and it is for this reason that we're releasing a smaller one like a cheaper one to allow more people to engage in the next few months and again all six percent of all the royalties from that so half of the

12:26royalties from that are going to be distributed to our bar so everything that our business is doing is attempting to essentially deliver income to our distributed mechanism to continue building that upwards pressure on our token and to allow the users who hold our token to share in the income that's generated definitely yeah that sounds like a great

12:45economic system that your team has built out i think it's very important for a governance token or a utility token of a d5 platform where often you know if people are getting a high apy of a newer token they're incentivized to dump it if because the price might go down they don't really know so from what i understand with the bar

13:11With wi-fi wi-fi holders that are also participating in the ecosystem are incentivized to hold it for longer as your economic model is going to be burning and raising the floor price of wi-fi that's exactly it right so essentially we try wait we're trying to turn our token into a deflationary token because we're perpetually drawing income pushing it in and then delivering that

13:36income out to the users so that means by holding wi-fi you will have a natural rate of increasing the amount of wi-fi you hold a sense or you'll have the option to do so by staking it up very cool and do people only stake it on wifi.io or how can they get involved in the platform well actually on as of the as of two weeks time minswap which is an upcoming decks on cardano is

14:01launching a wi-fi ada farm so very soon you're going to be able to provide wi-fi and ada to the min swap decks and farm min which isn't even our token which is really cool to me i can't believe that our token is going to be able to farm another token but you can also use wi-fi to farm tokens natively on our app right now so we've actually got token vaults where

14:22you can deposit wi-fi and you can earn wi-fi card ax flick i'm definitely forgetting one or two you can go to app.wifi.io and you can see all of our staking options of course it is flat staking it's not pool so the returns aren't you know the 300 apy the you know we've got returns between 20 and 30 but that's still compete you know on the cardano ecosystem that's still very

14:46high compared to a lot of other well pretty much any other project that's around definitely and definitely compared to banks in traditional finance you're astronomically higher as well you know people yes about those high returns over 100 percent apy you know you really have to be focused on your position and make sure that you know it's either

15:07everyone's going to get into it and it's going to go down or it's too good to be true yeah that's exactly it and in fact i've started calling those massive apys they see like three hundred and fifty percent three hundred four hundred percent i've started calling them marketing apis yeah because they're really completely non-representative of what you're saying

15:26yeah and well this all sounds great stephen in fact oh i was just going to ask you about the cardinal ecosystem and you know as you said you're really bringing something different and expanding the ecosystem and it sounds like the stable coin is coming soon and a lot of people don't know or aren't using d5 and cardano yet are you expecting others to

15:49follow along and continue growing up the ecosystem behind you and like is this really early stage for people that are looking for like a new better d5 ecosystem yeah i think it is still very early stages so in cardano we have to deal with building the blockchain in a totally new language plutus which is based on haskell which is in terms compared to

16:15solidity it's like going from you know english to arabic it's just totally different now as a result of that we've had to design a lot of new things from the bottom up and that takes a lot of time a lot of these things aren't open source yet which means they haven't become available to the general public or as i should say the general public that is

16:38developers because you know as a nor as an average everyday person you're probably not going to be going to be pulling github repos so we're actually working with the cardano d5 alliance which is an alliance of about 10 to 15 12 projects i believe now where we're getting together and we're based on the research and the construction that we've done we're

17:03trying to work out how we're going to open source it how we're going to get this out to developers and how we're going to create the educational material so that developers are able to start developing without the assistance of well i'm not going to say the assistance of iohk i should say in a manner that's more accessible to the average developer because at the moment it's still very

17:23difficult to approach definitely well it's no i should add go ahead there are advantages to the actual design that they have so the language itself is a lot safer it's a lot more mathematically sound than solidity i won't go through the technicalities but it is a lot harder to do a rug pull for example on cardano it's a lot harder to hack the system or hack a smart contract on

17:50cardano purely because there are as simply as i can put it the smart contracts have requirements that have to be met prior to the execution of the smart contract whereas in solidity the actual requisites are checked after you execute the transaction so that's the biggest functional difference interesting that's great to know well it sounds like you guys really have figured it out so

18:15far and it does sound like it's very early on i feel like people should at least go and take a look at the differences and understand why it's better and you know maybe get involved when it's early on here for the people that want to learn more about the education of it just about the cardinal ecosystem and about how to get involved in wi-fi what is the best way

18:39for them to get involved stephen absolutely first head on over to our website wifi.io from there you can check out our app which is there's already some portions of it live so you can go have a look at the actual system how it looks join us on telegram wi-fi official follow us on twitter we release news at the moment at an incredible pace we've had two partnerships and a farm

19:01announcement the last three days so there's a lot going on across the entire cardano ecosystem and come and ask some questions say good day you know we're not we're not biting anyone we want to talk we want to engage amazing i will leave all those links as well in the description box below thank you so much steven for coming on the show all the best with wi-fi and the

19:23growth of d5 on cardano i'm really looking forward to following along and seeing how everything goes let's follow up in the near future after all these updates come in and as we continue to grow absolutely and also just one very last thing we are going to launch the first on-chain governance on cardano by the end of this month so it's going to be a first for the cardano

19:46blockchain to actually have a system of governance managed on chain so that's an exciting first that we have coming up soon very cool all great things thank you so much again i really do appreciate you taking the time and let's follow up thanks so much for having me ashton it's been a pleasure i can't wait to talk again you