BeInCrypto held an AMA with Yield.app on our public Telegram channel on Nov 25, 2020.
Yield.app prides itself as a one-of-its-kind platform that aims to put “DeFi Banking in your pocket” by making decentralized finance accessible, usable, and profitable for the masses. We hosted the team behind Yield.App last month to give our Telegram community a chance to talk to them directly about the intricacies of Yield.App, DeFi, and how they plan on spearheading innovations in the space.
Yield.app was represented in this AMA by Tim Frost (@Tim Frost), CEO & Founder; Justin Wright (@Justin Yield), CFO and COO; and Jan Strandberg (@Jan), CGO. They provided in-depth answers to the questions asked by our community and shinned the light on the future that Yield.app is committed to bringing.
[This AMA has been edited for clarity.]
BeInCrypto: Hello, nice to have all of you here
Justin Yield: Hi all! Excited to be here.
[BIC: The channel has now been muted so Yield App can start their AMA without interruptions, if you need to say something please feel free to message me with any other questions if you didn’t have the opportunity to ask. Thanks so much to the Yield App team for taking the time to do this AMA!]
Jan: No worries, and glad to be here
BIC: Thanks for coming! Questions have been asked within the last 1.5 hours. So feel free to scroll up and start answering questions your team finds most relevant. If new questions come in I’ll post them
Justin Yield: I’ll start with an introduction from my side, I have spent most of my career in capital markets and fund management before moving over to Fintech, this is my first venture in the crypto space. I have spent the last 6 years building out Beehive P2P, the largest SME P2P lender in the Middle East, and having been introduced to DeFi by Tim and seeing the potential to really take crypto to the mainstream, I jumped at the chance to be part of the founding team @YIELD.app, ill start digging through some of the great questions your community has already posted shortly
Jan: About me, Being a growth hacker, digital nomad, and creative thinker, I oversee marketing and growth for YIELD. I’m very data-driven and have extensive experience in branding, PR, and SEO. As the head of marketing at Paxful, I helped the company scale up from 50k users to more than 4.5M, and from 100k$ weekly revenue to over 45M$. I also have many successful ventures in the gambling industry. Also involved with many communities and hopefully get you guys involved with @yieldapp.
Tim Frost: My name is Tim Frost and I am CEO of YIELD. I have a rich Fintech, marketing, business development, and operations background. YIELD.app is my 3rd digital bank and I have been a key figure with many successful fintech and blockchain companies.
Specializing in early-stage growth, operations, and development. I was part of the founding Wirex team and supported operations, business development, and marketing for the first 18 months. I also joined and helped take EQIBank to market a global digital challenger bank with an average client AUM of $250,000. I have helped accelerate early-stage blockchain startups QTUM, NEO, Paxful, Polymath, Selfkey, Everex, and many others.
Jan: About Yield:
In short, YIELD makes DeFi accessible to anyone thanks to our intuitive app and web platform, where users simply deposit crypto or traditional currencies and select the investment plan that suits them best.
Operating under a banking license, we offer insured and innovative financial products managed by a team with years of experience in FinTech and cybersecurity. This ensures that our users always feel comfortable earning with us.
Tim Frost: We are backed by:
https://www.alphabit.fund/
https://bnktothefuture.com/
https://digistrats.com/
https://www.palcapital.com/
https://www.yeomans.capital/
https://chronosvc.com/
Community: Are there plans in place for mainstream marketing? In Asia and Europe?
Tim Frost: We haven’t completed the buildout of our card program yet, but I do like the crypto/cashback element. Wirex my former company had done it well. If our clients like it, then we will explore how we can implement this.
Community: Crypto currencies are constantly appreciating and depreciating. How does Yield.app intend to hedge against these depreciations and transfer the gains in the case of an appreciation of value?
Jan: Our first fund will be $ neutral and relatively vanilla as we complete the build-out of our portfolio management system. Going forward, our strategies will cover many areas as we grow, these include dynamic hedging against impermanent loss (already in Beta), multi asset-backed farming and building our own vaults, automated funding rate arbitrage (also in Beta) etc. Depending on the complexity and associated risk, we will offer different funds and relative returns subject to the sophistication of the users and the associated risk, we intend to add these quarterly.
Community: Question for Yield: I am seeing a lot of comparisons of Yield App with Celsius Network. How are you different from them? Why should one go with you instead of Celsius?
Tim Frost: We aim to offer up to 20% APY as one major difference. Others are we are DeFi focused on investment while they are more lending and CeFi. They are a great company and have done well. We see ourselves in a different space and more focused on southeast Asia and this underserved market.
Jan: Celsius doesn’t offer full-service banking, while we do. Also, Celcsius doesn’t offer a Card program, we do. Celsius doesn’t offer up to 20% APY. We Do. I respect celsius a lot, and I think they are a great company but I think we will have more upside than them 😈
Community: What is your strategy for marketing and for Mass Adoption? How do you evaluate the support from the community?
Jan: This is a good question. I think the best way to get mass adoption is to touch base with as many Communities as possible, and the other aspect is to educate people about DeFi. Mass adoption will happen sooner or later but it is starting to look like that we are on the edge of that.
I think DeFi will become bigger and bigger and something that I think is that smart contracts will become more and more sophisticated which will mean that there will be more and more use cases around these which eventually will lead to mass adoption. The financial revolution is here to stay and banks will become more obsolete. Within 12 years, 80% of financial firms will either go out of business or be rendered irrelevant by new competition, changing customer behavior, and advancements in technology.
The community needs to really believe in the project and also the movement itself. And at the moment I see a lot of people in normal finances turning into crypto. I hope that our community will educate their friend and families about this change what is happening and where the finance world is going to.
Influencers are also part of the community and already have some people signed up. The bigger and better community we have the more opportunities we will get as a company
Community: Are there any regulatory measures imposed on the project by countries not friendly with crypto? How is the team dealing with that?
Justin Yield: We are licensed from day 1 with offshore banking, securities, and fund management license. Most regulators are looking for professional service providers that employ best practices and are also best positioned to educate and drive the licensing regime rather than fight it, the same as I achieved with Beehive. We have a regulatory road map as we expand jurisdictions and product offerings. I have been in regulated entities throughout out my career as have most of the team including our in-house legal counsel. As CeFi on DeFi, we are opening the asset class for everyone without moving away from the foundation principles of decentralized finance.
Community: Your website tells about “Robots”. Do you have a built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps?
Tim Frost: We have built a Bloomberg-esque terminal to manage our portfolio. We use a lot of automation to maximize our returns.
Community: Privacy and confidentiality of the information and user property are important issues, so what solutions does #UP have about that? And how to compete with other projects what are the specific differences you can details?
Justin Yield: Hi, we take privacy and security very seriously and will be constantly evolving around this area as we grow, to help. For now, we have some detailed cover and answers on this through our support desk on the website https://support.yield.app/hc/en-us/sections/360004525358-Security-Privacy
BIC: A few more questions for your team as you continue to answer. Some really insightful stuff so far.
“The way YIELD works is very simple in my opinion. Just deposit funds and choose an investment package. But I still don’t understand What is meant by DeFi maneuvers. How do the DeFi maneuvers work? What kind of products does YIELD offer so that everyone can benefit from this new financial system?”
Justin Yield: We’re building IP in our service delivery model by putting together a front-end simple application that is familiar to everyone. at the backend, we have a team of analysts, quants, portfolio managers and developers that are building an automated allocation, analysis and secure portfolio management suite that doesn’t exist today, hence DeFi maneuvers or our secret sauce, thats said we are transparent and wil publish monthly repots on portfolio/fund performance and other key metrics, insurance fund balances YLD token treasury rebalancing (audited).
Community: Which partnerships are on the roadmap of Yield? Having the support of projects consolidated in the field always helps with trust and therefore adoption
Justin Yield: We are targeting a global audience from day 1, we are already working with and continuing to build out alliances with other professional actors in the DeFi space. Some of these are technology-led, all of them are knowledge-driven with the aim of constant improvement and to pass the benefits back to our customer’s, we are publishing details weekly of new collaborations, keep watching our blog, website and social media to see to catch these.
BIC: 1. We’ve seen many projects offering their farming goodies, without clear use cases. How can Yield stand out of these projects? What is its real use case and why would it be a long term investment? 2. Which features of Yield do you think that can generate trust in users to invest in the platform?
Tim Frost: We are a bit different than these yield farming platforms. We are a centralized platform where users can put money on our platform and passively earn yields up to 20%. We take care of the heavy lifting and the complications. We are building an insurance pool, and have a platform that practices diversification. DeFi is complicated and we take this burden for users.
Time and consistency. Yield.app is my 3rd digital bank and there is no shortcut to trust. It takes time, good communication and support, and overall providing an excellent product every day.
Community: DeFi is the new frontier and already buzzing in 2020, what roles do you play in the innovativeness of DeFi and what’s your approach to DeFi and ultimate DeFi solutions?
Jan: Simplify the process for normal people to participate in DeFi. Educate people about the over all DeFi (https://www.yield.app/blogposts), and have everyone being able to participate no matter if you are a micro user or a big whale
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