Valentin Pletnev on investing in Cosmos through Quasar Finance

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Valentin platnev co-founder and CEO of Quasar Finance Fountain welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time massive pleasure to be here thank you very much Ashton you're very welcome let's dive into investing in the cosmos and IBC enabled

0:23ecosystems always looking for other solutions to just find other ways to have Financial products and increasing availability for different ways to invest and I'm really excited to learn about what your team's working on in the cosmos based ecosystem as well I feel like that's a huge up and coming blockchain and ecosystem for apps and defy and everything so let's just

0:47start off our conversation Valentine by hearing from you a high level overview on the main solutions that your teams build at Quasar and then we'll dive into everything in the cosmos absolutely sounds great man and I totally agree that Cosmos is kind of bound to be the new home of D5 for end users moving forward but I'd like to kind of start off with the

1:08philosophy behind Quasar I think that's an easy and kind of a nicer way to guide what we're building so I saw from your Twitter that you also know about the GameStop bubble and you've been exposed ecosystem right and what we saw there is that retail investors came together and trying to basically level the playing field in the financial system right and it was a and it still

1:30is an uphill battle because the traditional Financial system is kind of rotten from the inside out it's almost unfixable to a certain degree what it has though is the usability and you can't argue with that it is perfectly designed to be as easy as humanly possible to use for the end user unless they want to do some complicated stuff or some permission stuff then it's basically

1:52impossible in gatekeep so the philosophy that we have is I started realizing if I tell people about crypto friends of mine family I struggle to recommend anything to them because I feel like if they don't keep up with the news to the extended I do I don't recommend most people and they are basically going to get eaten by sharks right we are already way past

2:14kind of the super early adoption curve where we can argue you know it's just a couple enthusiasts trading we are in full-fledged institutional institutions in crypto high frequency trading hedge funds Quant researchers proprietary strategies I mean we are completely in that zone already right the trade for that is introduced to crypto has long past and especially now we can also see

2:36that D5 in some shape or form is the future now how we get to the chain performance unclear but I think that a lot of people can agree to the thesis that we need to enable an easy way to use D5 and a secure way to use defining creatively that serves people that don't have the time or want to spend a lot of time understanding D5 now that is obviously a massive challenge but that

3:03is kind of where we are sitting at with Quasar Quasar is built to allow end users whether they're passive investors D5 curious like probably most people listening or completely fine experts to have exposure to the best strategies that are usually get kept the way we look at this is right now the hedge funds and institutional investors have an edge over the end user because they

3:29can spend a lot of money to get the best talent right they have the pipelines from the universities they have the prestige with their name a lot of the people that kind of build The Cutting Edge strategies that seem to outperform anything I go into these companies and they're working for the few which is an easier sell for them there's less stakeholder

3:49management it's very predictable capital and obviously a huge upside and return so what we've designed is a way where we basically mimic the effect that GameStop had in the sense of a lot of people coming together and acting as I would say one entity right with one common goal if we pull end user funds we can be as attractive if not more than those hedge funds for the best

4:17strategies on the planet right if we can combine kind of the best Quant researchers and those people and tell them look you don't need to work 20 hours a day you mean you don't need to be shouted by people like Ken Griffin right you can you can work for common people across the globe and allow them access and to be able to profit from your strategies obviously it's not a

4:40charity you have upside on that direct upside you don't have someone taking a cut from you on the top right and that's precise of equations it's a platform for people that know what they're doing a strategy side to be able to run and execute and create your own strategies and have ownership over them and it's a way for D5 curious and end users to invest into those securely and safely

5:04and it's all made in a way and shaped in a way where it could might as well be a fintech app so we are trying to make it as humanly easy as possible so that my goal is I can tell my mom or my dad that they should just invest into quasar very cool Valentine great intro thank you for that and I'd love to sort of reiterate that and dive further into that you're right about trying to keep

5:29up with the crypto news and all the different blockchains and defy and having to worry about taking control of your own funds and accidentally putting them in the wrong spot because there's a million places you could put them in now you mentioned about pooling funds and making a strategy and following a specific strategy that others have

5:49outlined it sounds a little bit different than this but in some way is it more like a like a strategy or like a decentralized hedge fund where somebody can make a pool of certain assets and then regular users can look at different strategies and just choose one to invest into and somebody else is sort of managing that so yeah so internally we

6:12sometimes use that analogy actually decentralized hedge fund but it's a bit more than that on a to kind of get the people that understand crypto up now right now we are basically allowing permissionless Vault creation and What Makes Us special in that sense is that the vaults are IBC enabled natively most of you have probably heard of The Nomad Rich exploit that literally happened

6:34like last night maybe you know a week ago when this airs and it yet again showcases the issues of end users not fully realizing the risk they're exposed to they think that if they buy a wrapped asset you know they always say bridges are bad bridges are risky but then they buy a wrapped acid and they're exposed to the same risk right because that ass is just a

6:55synthetic on a different chain of where it should be right so yeah with that philosophy in mind we have native multi-chain capabilities with IBC so for people not familiar with Cosmos IBC internet blockchain communication is a protocol layer communication standard where you can transfer tokens from one train to the other natively you can look at this the

7:21same way as the analogy I like to use is if you use a bridge you go to a centralized entity you give them a gold bar right and then you fly to another country and that entity gives you a piece of paper in that other country that says oh you have that gold bar where you're originally from but we are holding it for you and this piece of paper guarantees that you have it and

7:42you just better hope nobody breaks into us at night right now the way that IBC works is you have a passport which is your token and every time you fly to a different country a different chain it's almost like getting a stand with a different ID you still hold the same asset it just gets a different ID depending on which country it goes to so that it works within their borders

8:03within their ecosystem so that's kind of where we draw the difference is that we want to create a vault in ethereum you are bound to ethereum period if you create a vault with Quasar you can get exposure to the cosmos ecosystem which are like already 300 chains and some of them tenement enabled chains people don't even realize that they are basically the same consensus mechanism

8:24polka dot for example is natively getting IBC soon polygons theoretically uses a tenement Fork as well so moving forward we are going to be the main hub for running decentralized strategies across multiple chains without Bridge risk very cool and I was going to ask you about that in terms of the assets for users that are looking to take the next step from just holding Bitcoin and

8:51ethereum passively they're looking at moving into a good ecosystem like Cosmos obviously they're able to utilize the atom token which is the cosmos native token but what are the other main assets that people may have heard of that work within the IBC ecosystem on Quasar right right so you actually perfectly kind of segue it into one of the reasons why people

9:18are very excited about Quasar if you look at ethereum and you want to bet on the growth of the ethereum ecosystem you buy ether because it's the gas that all of them have to use one way or another whether to roll up a layer two layer three whatever they are and at the end funnel down to using ethereum Cosmos is technically not a chain right we the atom you talk about is the cosmos

9:41Hub chain and that's where the problems start to arise if people buy atom they don't have exposure to the ecosystem the way they would have with ethereum because they're just buying the native gas feature from the cosmos Hub which is not the biggest chain on Cosmos and there's only one of all a lot of them so that is precisely why our product makes sense for Cosmos if we start running

10:03strategies on various Cosmos chains we are going to start creating an index in a way so it's like yeah you could call it ETF I call it a cosmos index where every single Vault that's going to be launched is going to share part of its profits with the treasury to which people can stake into with crazy tones and receive upside so you can run decentralized strategy and it's going to

10:26be in my opinion the only way to get through exposure to the entire Cosmic ecosystem but you can't just buy the native gas top now granted with interchange security coming in the future where we have a we're going to have a polka dot like model where you have a shared security model where the cosmos Hub can secure other chains that's gonna kind of fix that issue to a

10:46certain degree but I don't see a lot of chains using that it's going to be the new chains coming into it's going to be lower barrier of Entry which is really good for the ecosystem but the well-established big ones I see them sticking with their Sovereign security so that's kind of where we really feel together great explanation and there's definitely

11:06a lot to unravel for new investors it's so this is a big feat in developing all this and sort of keeping up as new chains integrate IBC and the cosmos ecosystem is up and coming compared to D5 on ethereum which is much bigger than what we're seeing right now on Cosmos how far along is your team with actually implementing all of this you

11:34know is are end users able to invest in different strategies right now and are people able to create different strategies or is that still in the works so it's still in the works but we're very close so we started developing this last November which is I mean we already like I think what is that eight months seven months and we are actually

11:53launching our when when this podcast Comes live we have launched our internal test lab already so that's not the public one but it's the one where we're already running a version of our chain with independent validators we're going to open it up month to month and we envision a launch in November where we're going to get to a point where permissionless wall creation will

12:12be available we're going to have at least one strategy running and we're going to have the entire IVC ability already or in the future we're actually moving to other training accounts but to not over complicate things it's just a smoother implementation so right now users can't engage already but we are very close we have been working this for a long time we're

12:31now a 10 person team we fundraise two three months ago we've announced it actually like last week and we are yeah I'm I'm very confident that we are going to be live this year and people will be able to get the upside that we've been working on for at that point more than a year very cool Valentine and I was reading into you know creating the strategies or

12:54from what I understand you're labeling them as as vaults what are the specifications for somebody to create a vault do you do you need to have some expertise or do you just need to have the Quasar tokens and how does that work to create a strategy for others to invest into yeah so it absolutely depends on the stage of our roadmap development and also on what

13:18they're trying to do so for instance a vault can be a lot of things it can be an automated strategy right it can be a Dao just pooling funds like in a we don't advertise this yet but we're going to get to a point where we you can basically have dial treasury management an aspect that I haven't introduced said to not over complicated things is volts are independently governed

13:40so if you create a vault you get wall chairs and if people invest into your wallet they get shares to govern that Vault independently from our chain so you can absolutely do dow treasury management natively with our product with our vaults right so that for example is a totally different I would say application and development kind of procedure than someone trying to run a

14:03fully automated you know low frequency trading strategy so what we see in the bridge between getting to a point where Vault creation is three or four clicks is we're gonna offer the ecosystem some cousin wasn't developers right because at the end of the day the vaults are built their totaling cars and wasn't so rust based right they can be independently upgraded from the chain

14:26which is also super important for keeping them independent and we're gonna assist teams in basically creating vaults we're going to have some internal strategies where we take full care of it we see most of the I would say kind of high quality you know fully professionally run vaults to be like three-person teams one cousin wasn't developer one Quant strategist and then

14:49one maybe one mathematician right or someone really going to analytics but we also can see some walls just being one guy that let's say you know is a is a media personality maybe someone on Twitter with a lot of followers saying trade along with me now granted that introducing entirely new set of issues which is again why it is not a focus of ours but it kind of

15:13showcased that what creation is not what creation per se it totally depends on what you're trying great great explanation and yeah I could see how there'd be a lot of variables within that and that leads me to a question I wanted to clarify as well you know talking about decentralized hedge funds and putting your funds in a strategy that somebody

15:33else has created is it the case that the end users are giving up their keys or they have full control of their keys and also the liquidity are they able to pull out any time or is it locked in for a certain amount of time and does that so just quickly on the liquidity and then I'll go to the actual permission so liquidity as long as liquid staking

15:56is not enabled it is locked up to a certain degree so they do say you do say how long you want to lock up your tokens but you can also with a mild panel to get them out earlier there's actually more function of Cosmos so if you want to kind of get your tones out it takes like a period of time but again we have enough liquidity we can offset someone else's deposit to let you

16:18know go out earlier and then pay a fee to the rest of the Vault now when it comes to the security of the world it is a I mean saying it's a massive hose of ours really doesn't cut it because as you can imagine if I want to build a product for my family and a majority of my entire net worth is tied up in that one project security is not a side thought so we've already been

16:38internally audited by hellborn we haven't announced that yet we're going to publish the report soon halborn is one of the most I mean best regarded Auditors in the entire space I don't think no I'm not going to drink this I'm not saying that but it's so far that a good track record and then on the wall specifically it is essentially a design where you allow

16:57the Vault to kind of you can basically trade along the Vault itself so you're never giving up your keys and you're not necessarily giving the Vaude Creator complete Independence so just you know take the entire Vault and transact it out to a private wallet there's going to be multiple safety mechanisms in place a lot of them we've already developed a lot of them already

17:20figured out some of them are still nuances where again it depends on what sort of watch you're creating to kind of Define them but I would just urge people to keep an eye out on our medium because that is a big Focus we're going to talk a lot about security just because again exploits happen every day and we can't have that happen on our platform yeah yeah pretty much also there's

17:40one other aspect which again is kind of a mild Alpha leak but we are looking at ways to ensure vaults from Smart contract hacks so there is ways to get insurance on Smart contracts where if it gets exploited or hacked users get compensated now that doesn't cover a strategy being bad but it takes on the entire risk factor of even the slightest amount of trust you have to

18:05put into us just by you know building the blockchain having the blockchain that if a smart contract if our world standard is exploitable you will get your funds back in those Insurance walls it cuts it to yield but again this is for me a Paramount factor to tell my parents to invest into something definitely and I completely agree that is something that most people

18:28should look into and you know most of the time cutting your yield a little bit for the security of actually having your funds is worth it you know as we've seen in these centralized Finance yield platforms you know some small amount of yield for four or six percent to happen to lose 100 of your funds is not worth it at all so a slight cut is definitely

18:50something that everyone should consider and I'm looking forward to seeing how your team builds that out now Valentine we don't have a lot of time but I also wanted to touch back on the Quasar token and as that comes out if that is required to start a strategy or to invest and how else it's used in the ecosystem yeah how does it create a sustainable ecosystem for both

19:12sides of the platform absolutely so it was very Paramount for us to design a quiz that will be non-intrusive I we feel at Quezon that a lot of projects basically just create casino chips and put that total between easy usability which being a part that wants to be as easy to you to be used as possible we can't do that right and we don't want to do that so the way we've designed the

19:36Quasar token is if you're an end user and you want to deploy money into a vault you don't need to engage without talking at all period you don't need it you can just deploy into a vault with an asset at a vault accepts whether it's atom or osmosis or uscc in the future whatever it is you don't need to touch Quasar when it comes to yields we are not gonna you know fool you into saying

19:56you have a 300 yield because we dump a lot of emissions into vaults to boost them with our own token being distributed right again that is not something we're going to do we're not we'd rather go for sustainable low yield than faking high yield that could implode at any moment because again the entire idea of the project is you can sleep tight and you don't have to check

20:15it daily now where question is needed is at two places number one is if you want to create a vault it's basically like a deposit and a just it secures that it makes sure that we don't have a million low quality vaults right or wall creation it's not going to be I ridiculously high amount of money so it's not going to basically disallow anybody to create a vault but

20:40it's just a buy-in to make sure that you know we can keep track of the ecosystem vaults we can keep track of support with the ecosystem people approaching us for certain maybe issues or features that they need it just allows for a higher quality of what we are hosting the second place where you need a the Quasar token is for the index strategy so if you want to be exposed to the

21:00index strategy you're gonna need the Quasar token the way we've designed this is basically if because our chain is basically in infrastructure layer for vaults and they're independently governed it is incredibly important that we are as secure as possible the way security works and improve of stake change you know Cosmos is you take your tokens with

21:24a validator so if you have an end but if we build a product for end users that don't understand blockchains how can we make sure that we are secure enough so the solution we designed is if a user deposits an asset we accept again atom osmore uscc into Quasar into the treasury that is exposed to default strategies to the index we ought to swap you for queries in the background and

21:48auto delegate them to validators to the same percentage points and validators we're delegating the we're secure network beforehand so we didn't introduce bias so that is going to be where I see most users engaging it's a one-click deposit you have exposure to any strategy that we have running you're securing the network actively and receiving admissions which I don't think

22:07we're even going to advertise in a way because again too many projects say emissions are profits right but you're gonna you're not going to be diluted doing that and you're going to be able to vote on government's proposals without having to because our number one goal is security first and foremost not how much people participate it if we are building for the people

22:27that don't want to check it every day amazing and thank you so much for focusing on that security aspect and there's so many people that as you know they're just moving from passively holding Bitcoin and ethereum into something that is supposed to be the next step for them and then one wrong move and they've put all their money in Celsius and lost it or some defy hack

22:52back to zero yeah and we see those as our main competitors to be honest we don't see other yet as who we're fighting we're seeing the cd5 or whatever the hell they want to call themselves as the main issue placing themselves between the users kind of curiosity to defy and actual native D5 exposure now we're going to have to be honest in crypto a lot of people don't

23:14want to hold custody of their own assets but to take that choice away from them and of trying to offer them an easier solution which then exposed them to that unknown risk is almost criminal you may have seen you know our logo looks like an app we are not there yet but our vision is we're going to have an app with the Fiat on-ramp and you're going to be able to

23:35decide whether you want us to hold your keys or not because that should be a user's choice and that should that should be not our call to make one way or another because that way we would gate cap huge amounts of potential users speaking of that developing out the app and all of these functions that are that are still to come what is the best way

23:58for people to follow along with these updates and stay on top of it so they can start using the platform when it's available for them absolutely so our website is quasar.fi you're probably going to link it in the description I can imagine we're gonna have links to all our social media platforms so we're mainly using Twitter we have a Discord which is already set up but we're still

24:18looking for Community manager we have a media where we have kind of way more detailed rundown explanations of what's Happening we have a knowledge Hub on notion for people that are more natively exposed to D5 so if you want to know the nitty details that's where you're going to find them and yeah just keep up to date on Twitter you're gonna hear enough about us in the coming

24:38months I'm sure of it and thank you very much for hosting me Ashton great thank you so much Valentin I will leave those links in the description and let's definitely follow up in the near future absolutely thank you man foreign