Daniele Lucarelli on Bridges Exchange’s DeFi platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have danielle lucarelli ceo and founder of bridges exchange danny welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today thank you ashton thank you for having me i'm super excited to be here today

0:21you're very welcome there's a lot to dive into uh with the bridges blockchain ecosystem the exchange let's just kick off the conversation by hearing a little bit from you on you know high level overview on what bridges exchange is all about and then we'll dive into the details yeah so bridges is a project that started to go around my mind since last

0:46summer when we were in the middle of a explosive bull run in the crypto markets and uh together with a lot of scams going on in the space so i just decided to do something and give my contribute to solve this problem uh because i'm a big fan of decentralized fan and finance and i just wanted to keep my contribute to clean the space and help this field to

1:13reach the so-called mass adoption so as of now the problem with defy is that it's basically a wild wild west and it's not easy for an investor to navigate the space uh there are a lot of check mark that you have to go through in order to get a project before taking the decision if to invest or not in a project so you have to uh check the the smart counter because at the end

1:43of the story a token is just a piece of code uh you have to have a look at the smart contract have a look if there is something sketchy going on in the smart contract have a look at the team which most of the time is anonymous and this may mainly mean that the investor is asked to blindly uh trust the project the the project and the team behind it and we want to

2:10switch this paradigm and change a little bit the way the the space works so i recently came across a report from serpic in which uh they mentioned the amount of scams that happen in the space since the beginning of 2022 and we are talking about 1.7 estimated estimated 1.7 billion dollars in scamming just the first four

2:37months of uh of 2022. so this is what we are trying to solve our bridges and we are trying to build what we call a semi decentralized exchange so why we call it semi-decentralized exchange because it will work exactly in the same way the other decentralized exchanges work for every single stakeholder so for the liquidity provider for the investor but

3:03it will work a little bit differently for the project developers so if you are a project developer out there and you want to get listed with us then you have to undergo a drawbacking procedure by our team and we will check the smart contract we will check who you are we will do kyc on you to hold you accountable what we are doing in the space and then when you uh go through all

3:27these uh check marks and you are approved then you can get listed in our platform so what we are trying to offer to the investors and the other stakeholders is a safe place where to approach this wonderful work called decentralized finance and um when it comes to uh the ecosystem this is our big differentiator together with

3:54uh our token and uh the opportunity that are related to our platform in order to earn passive incomes and put your money at work for you which is pretty unique and it's a differentiator from every single other decentralized exchange up there but we can touch base on this later on when we talk about the token definitely great intro danny and i

4:22actually wasn't aware of you know the amount that was already stolen and through scams i know that there's been a few uh smart contract hacks and and yeah rug pulls and exit scams from projects that are able to list on decentralized exchanges you know with with almost no compliance you can anybody can list their token on on these defy exchanges and and there's obviously a uh solution

4:48to be had there that where bridges exchange can come in and solve that i guess it's also a balance between making it not so scrutinous that uh and and having a platform that projects want to list on right you know some of the greatest advantages of decentralized exchanges is that it's really easy to trade on and and i feel like that's also going to be important

5:14for uh for the traders you know to have a good user experience and part of the reason why uniswop is so popular as one of the most popular decentralized exchanges is that it's very easy to do one-click trade and now talking about um the now that vetting process is super important i'm also curious on the other side about bridges and the the trading solutions and the advantages and you

5:40know the user interface and how it's going to be uh competing with some of the top decentralized exchanges from a uh usability perspective yeah so uh as i said uh we will uh build an ecosystem that is uh pretty similar to the other decentralized exchange from the user experience point of view because this uh this platform are now battle tested

6:08and people are used to it they know how to use it and of course at the beginning our main target will be the crypto savvy people so people that are already in the space they're used to these platforms and they know how to use it so of course it's risky to go out of the rail since day one but then in the long term what we are what we want to build is a one-stop shop

6:36uh with third-party integration for uh for example crypto ram so that uh the user experience as of now inside of a platform it's uh kind of easy to use yes i agree but the problem is the steps you have to take before landing on the platform so you have to first go to centralize exchange buy the native coin of the blockchain and then uh land on the

7:04decentralized exchange swap your token and then you have to go through the same procedure the opposite procedure if you want to cash out so you have to go back to the centralized exchange and so on and so forth so in the long term with uh we are planning to have uh this third party uh provider working with us so that basically you have everything in one place uh you can go

7:27there and do every single operation from zero to the end uh in uh in our platform and uh and with that said another thing since we are betting this project uh another thing that is difficult in defiance of now is that which is part of the research that currently investors have to do in d5 so before investing in a token you have

7:55to go through different websites in order to check if the liquidity is locked if the tokens from the team are vested and etc etc etc while if you list with us and you are going through the vetting procedure we basically gathered this information for you and we will show this information to the investor all in one place so the investor will will have

8:18access to uh all this information before taking a decision and decide if if to invest in your project or not so the long-term goal is to provide a place where the investor only have to focus on the idea behind a project the theme behind the project the business idea and just decide if to invest or not based on this and not

8:45if it could be a scam or not as it is right now definitely great information danny and now you mentioned there about the bridges token and often decentralized exchanges are creating a token and centralized exchanges as well for helping with either fees or governance things like that what's the story behind the bridges token and how does that fit into the

9:08ecosystem yeah so we launched our token back in november 2021 and it's a pretty unique token compared to the tokens you usually have in other decentralized exchanges so our token is a limited supply token and it's a dividend paying too okay so how this is being integrated in our ecosystem so first of all uh the name of the game in decentralized exchanges is

9:38to incentivize liquidity providers because otherwise without liquidity providers you don't have a market and this is basically done in two ways uh the first uh is to provide a fee to the liquidity providers and this is mainly uh and this is related to the liquidity where you're providing and when it comes to this we are paying uh

10:05something around 20 more with respect to the average decentralized exchange up there and then the second way to incentivize liquidity provider is to uh they with your native token uh all the liquidity providers willing to commit their liquidity so through staking so also known as farming so uh when it comes to farming uh there

10:33are two problems in this model so these uh these platforms are using an inflationary token so they are fueling their ecosystem by mean constantly minting new tokens so you go on the farm page of uh decentralized exchange and you see this uh stellar api fifty percent sixty percent but the way the ecosystem work is again minting your token and these are two drawbacks drawback number

11:02one is that you are diluting the total supply this will drive the price down lower and the other thing is that the only way uh a liquidity provider has to cash out and to basically earn the the the their profit is by selling your token and so increasing the selling pressure on the on the asset this mean that yes you can see a 50 api on our farm

11:30but this is computed with the current rates so no one there is no guarantee that that asset will have the same price in one year from now with bridges first of all we have a limited supply token so we are not maintaining new tokens to fuel our ecosystem but actually on the opposite we will be forced to buy back our token in order to

11:57fund our ecosystem therefore driving the the value uh and increasing the the price of the asset and on the other side uh as i said it's a dividend paying token and the way it works is that by holding our token you will get a portion of the entire volume going on in the decentralized exchange paid out in dividends so this will incentivize you to hold our token and

12:25therefore reduce the selling pressure that's great danny and yeah i think having the proper uh token mechanisms to sustain uh you know the the price floor and just like the um the flow in and out of the utility of the the token is very important so i'm glad that your team has worked that out now i'm curious on you know the token

12:52integrating into the exchange what is the current stage and the scope of where the exchange is at right now yeah so uh we are currently approaching the last week of beta testing so our dex is not uh just a fork from another one so it's completely new in the way it work and uh

13:18to be sure that our platform is safe we wanted to go through a better testing phase and we are approaching the last the last week of beta testing after that we will wrap up fix all the bugs that the beta tester will report and uh we are approaching the launch of the platform and we are aiming to launch the platform before the end of q2 so in the next month

13:46that's great to hear and uh you know you talked a lot about the you know the wild west of crypto at the beginning i'm curious are you targeting a specific blockchain ecosystem you know there's different blockchains that sort of have different security protocols and they're decentralized exchanges like uniswap only works on the ethereum blockchain and some other exchanges only work with

14:12one blockchain how are you working in the different blockchain ecosystems or where are you working at with the exchange yeah um we are working currently on the binance uh the bnb chain the current that recently changed uh the name from binance march into uh bmp chain uh and we picked this chain because it was the where the problem was uh

14:40at least when we started uh thinking about the project so because of the low gas fees uh of course you you if you are a scammer you don't want to go on ethereum where you have to pay uh several thousand of the dollar to just deploy your smart contract so of course you pick uh cheaper solutions and before other chains came out like uh for example mavic or

15:06phantom or other good technologies out there finance was the the where to go for the scammers and and where the the most of the problem uh is as of now so if you want to solve a problem you have to go where the problem is and we started with finance change but with that said in the long term we are not binded to a specific blockchain and we will evaluate

15:35in the future the market and we will use to go multi-chain that's good to know and maybe you can talk about where you see bridges exchange and hopefully you know the the solving of uh this uh wild west and scams of crypto with bridges you know one year or two years from now and

16:02how you see it fitting into the decentralized exchange ecosystem yeah so uh we called ourselves a crypto tech company so uh we don't want to stick just to uh one technology uh namely a decentralized exchange uh we don't uh we don't want to set a hard roadmap uh for a reason because uh defy and crypto in general is a

16:30field that is evolving very fast as of now and you constantly have to monitor the monitor the market and see what are the new trends and you have to be fast in order to bring your user uh one of the the new tools uh the new trends of the markets and so on and so forth so as of now the focus is absolutely the decentralized exchange then after the

16:58platform will be launched the next focus will be to make it an established platform so starting uh to roll out the the projects uh make the listing procedure a well oiled machine then the the next piece uh will be to integrate a launchpad so that uh the projects that want to bootstrap the the project can come to us and use a suite of tools that we will

17:26prepare for them um but in the long term uh one year two years from now uh we want to explore other field as well for example nft as of now it's a big trend but it's still it's in its infantry if you think of it because it's still mostly related to art picture and these kind of things but actually with nfts

17:54you can tokenize every single asset every single thing in the real world and uh we would like to explore this field as well which is super exciting to us um but yeah with that said uh the the main goal of bridges is to provide uh and indeed that's the last last last step of our roadmap once our ecosystem is grown and we implemented several tools

18:23several opportunities to access the space the main goal at the end is to wrap up everything and pack it into a one-stop shop app application mobile application so that you user can easily access the space which is incredible and full of opportunities but as of now it's very difficult to access there are so many

18:50barriers uh and these are the the barriers that we want to break with our final solution and providing even another piece which is very important for us uh which is a knowledge base uh application so the the problem of the scams up there it's it's because it's because of two reasons mainly so the first reason is because to if you

19:19want to build a successful project it takes time it takes effort it takes skills it takes commitment while if you want to run a scam a scam as of now it's cheap it's fast it's easy and this is one of the reason why but the the other reason is in my opinion is the approach of ninety percent of the investor uh

19:45that they have in the individual when they approach defy so there is this overall thinking that you approach defy you go there with 100 dollars and you become be millionaire overnight and this of course is fueling the the hackers because they can run the scams and they are sure that there will be a big portion of investors falling for that

20:13while what we want to build is our knowledge base uh providing information to the investors are at least the ones using our platform to provide them a tool as with a tool to use to approach these markets and give them a realistic expectation give them a tool the tools to make some research in this field because when you approach this project it's not

20:41a normal company so you have to change a little bit the way you make research on this project so we want to pack everything in this uh application so that to create a safe environment to approach this board and a safe environment that can be used by everyone from the cryptocv to the normal person out there that just want to

21:09invest some of his money in in this space that's great i'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes to fruition with bridges and part of the first step is you know launching uh out of the beta and and to the public what is the best way for the viewers to follow along uh with the launch of the exchange and to get involved with the communities yeah so you can find us uh first of all

21:35in our website bridges.exchange you can find all the information you can find our whitepaper our roadmap and in our website you will always we you will even find uh all the links to our social so our twitter our telegram our discord and all the other socials where we are you can follow our community it's a very inclusive community it's an amazing community i'm very proud of them

22:02and yeah we are waiting for you all right danny i will leave those links as well just for the viewers in the description box below all the best with you know everything moving forward with bridges um rooting for you guys um please solve these problems in the space and i'm looking forward to following up in the near future we'll try our best thank you very much

22:26for your time thanks for having me it's been a pleasure