Denko Mancheski on Reef Finance’s DeFi operating system

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have denko mancheski the ceo of reef finance denko welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to be here hi ashton thanks for having me it's a pleasure yeah i'm really excited for our discussion if we could just jump right into it

0:22let's start with what exactly is the focus of refinance and what are the problems that your team is solving for sure so basically we are solving uh three main issues the first one is the fragmentation of this landscape as we've seen as the d5 landscape grows we have you know multiple apps multiple ecosystems so it's very hard to manage you know your lp tokens across

0:46multiple wallets so this is the first one the second one is you have so many choices so where do you invest like it's uh it's different apis they change on daily basis on hourly basis and you as a new investor coming into the landscape you're confused you don't know the names of the project you don't know what you have to learn where to start from and the third one is all the you know

1:07all the fees and how how expensive it is to participate in in certain activities so these are these are the problems that that we are tackling so what happens is we are building on top of the diva ecosystem so we are composing and integrating on the on the existing uh financial primitives out there that's great and yeah there's definitely some confusion

1:29right now especially when you have multiple lp tokens and you're providing liquidity and it's really sort of scattered around so to put that in a easy to use platform makes a lot of sense and now there are a lot of d5 platforms that are popping up because there are a lot of problems that need to be solved which is great that you're solving these problems

1:50but would you say there's something unique or different about reef that allows you to have a competitive advantage over other d5 platforms sure so if we if we take aside you know the financial primitives because these these are what we we stand on top so if there if those projects don't exist such as like balance or unit swap we will not be able to do what we want

2:12to do so besides besides the fact that we are like one layer above uh we are we have something very unique which makes reef non forkable so you cannot just spin off another version and call it like another name because we have this analytics engine which uh we've been working for over two years now and uh last year we we did like a b2b model so we were

2:33providing metrics to certain crypto funds who were who were basing their decisions on those metrics so what happens is we collect a lot of data in the background it's like you know ai powered and there's a lot of like statistics going on so we collect metrics from three different sources social media uh blockchain traffic exchange data and we extract metrics for each

2:57of the different instruments and i call them different instruments because something like is a for example a direct token exposure something is a lending protocol something is a is a pool that you stake into and so on so we extract a lot of metrics and out of these metrics we derive the risk levels and then you as a user you come to the platform you can choose

3:16the types of the baskets and the baskets are just a composition of different uh different instruments and then you choose your risk level and our analytics engine in real time is proposing for your you know personal fit what would be the best uh you know the best composition to get into and then we just one click you're invested and then you're able to

3:38like track the performance of of the whole basket and the cool thing about it is that when you invest you don't really like the output of the investments for example an lp token you don't have to manage it yourself because the basket is holding your whole position so it's really just one click invest one click divest so that that's that's something that no no other project uh

4:01has at the at the very moment definitely and in this world of of data analytics really can give you a competitive advantage so it's great to hear that you have been working on that for so long now and that sort of leads me to ask did you start two years ago or when did you really start the core of the platform and and how long have you been working on it

4:21leading up to this launch yeah so uh you know half of our team is like traders uh investors and we've started by building this analytics engine which we wanted to turn it into like uh uh its own analytics company where people can or big fans can like buy like uh you know they can pay a monthly basis and then we can provide them certain metrics and this worked really

4:47well but we thought that why not allow the average user to be able to have the same insights and have the same you know uh augmenting of the whole uh you know investment landscape the same just like those investors it seems like this is a more scalable model plus we are a bit to see and you know we are getting we are in an early landscape so we can be like uh

5:12like a leader and take take like a big market share from the start and that's how that's how brief happened so basically our initial goal was not to build like a b2c product it was it was the goal to build this analytics engine and work with uh funds and family offices but we figured when when the defy spike happened in november which we saw through through our analytics engine we

5:31decided let's let's fully focus on defy and build this on-chain infrastructure and make it make it easy for everyone to participate so that's how that's how it happens or organically yeah yeah it's funny how the environment moves and then you pivot and all of a sudden you find a great uh position in in the industry and starts to grow and now you mentioned you're focused on

5:54b2c but it seems like these tools also would provide a lot of value for institutional investors uh and and funds do you see everybody in the industry potentially using reef for these tools correct yes actually we've been we've been talking to so some of our investors they're like oh look this is this would be awesome for ourselves because we want defy exposures

6:16as a fund as well so what we what we decided to do is uh mid next quarter we actually want to expand in singapore and as you know now it being you know the financial center and most of our investors funds being based there we would like to start onboarding institutional investors and family offices as well that's great and i wanted to ask can you talk a little bit about the partners and

6:39investors that you have so far in reef sure so uh we have you know some of the most you know popular investors in this landscape you know uh probably like the viewers know ngc qcp uh woodstock uh bitcoin.com ld capital one one of the you know biggest uh biggest chinese funds then you have kinetic uh and you have genesis block which which owns one of the

7:05biggest otc desks in hong kong so it's a diverse diverse group of funds as well as as well as influencers that's great and i really what one interesting thing about reef is the the technology underlying this platform and most of the d5 space is built on the ethereum network at least that's where a lot of the traffic is right now but you've built it also uh with the

7:30cross chain you know optimization to polka dots network can you can you talk about why you chose that combination of that tech stack sure sure so uh our initial version of the product which we want to launch very early very early q1 might even happen by the end of this year is uh is a solidity implementation which means we'll have we will deploy it on ethereum

7:53as well so what happens is uh polka dot is not like a separate ecosystem polka dot and the whole interoperability layer was built to unite or defragment those ecosystems so our goal and why we chose polka dot is uh we we will be able to be present in multiple ecosystems at the same time and offer our users a different variety of assets into a single basket

8:18so they can for example with one click and get into for example ethereum cava and uh and akala which is three different ecosystems we we do we just one click and uh our goal is to eventually abstract away all the different ecosystems and all the bridging mechanisms away so the users don't and shouldn't even care that this asset is somewhere else like the ux shouldn't change at all for

8:43him definitely the user experience will be key to the growth and as it continues to grow and d5 potentially grows into many more blockchains do you foresee having that compatibility to expand if if there's something on the cosmos network or other blockchains that are now growing in the d5 space as well yeah for sure actually we already partnered with big projects such as cava

9:11we are working together with avalanche they created their evm uh instance uh as another chain on their platform and they are working i think it's on testnet they have a bridge so we will be we want to be the first project to utilize their bridge on mainnet so you know we are not waiting uh to for a polka dot ecosystem to to become mature we are trying to bring to our users

9:34whatever is currently available and want to be first at that uh so yeah so when pokeball goes live we want to be you know the main the main gateway to onboard we use the ethereum users and other ecosystems users to to to bulk a lot yeah and when you launch having this onboarding are you expecting a lot of organic growth from user adoption and people that are swapping and and

9:59using d5 or are you also providing incentives and other marketing efforts to help grow the platform yeah we do both we do both for first like uh since we we as a team have a lot of experience in the uh traditional startup world as well as crypto world and as you've heard about the analytics engine we are really good at like pivoting and shifting and figuring out what the user needs not

10:22what we think the user needs and uh we you know after after the launch we are trying to establish this feedback loop before you know the team and the user base and then you know basically just shift the value proposition based on what the user exactly needs and obviously you know now since we have a token we have uh we have the ability to to do some

10:44incentive layers so people can uh can start using it and they they'll you know be able to start using it faster yeah and i wanted to ask you about the reef token can you talk about what is the main functionality within refinance and how does it create a sustainable ecosystem uh that's a that's a great question so uh the the first the first thing that we

11:08had in mind was sustainability so the token uh is built into all the you know on-chain infrastructure and it helps us create three different income streams so uh for example the token will be used first for governance like there there are different parameters around the system second it's built into the basket engine so all the profit distribution mechanism is

11:28typed to the token and the third one is the protocol fees so whenever you get into baskets uh our analytics engine triggers like a rebalancing or reallocation certain protocol fees occur which can be paid with the token they can also be paid with ether which we will unchain convert like up a really small percentage it's not fixed just like like the gas so so it will directly go

11:49into the unislop pool so the token helps us create revenue streams uh as well and uh this comes from the basket engine as well as from some governance structure where people will be able to leverage the stake tokens into the pool in order to increase uh increase their voting power and yeah so the token is our like main thing that ties together the revenue streams and all the all the

12:11uh in the whole infrastructure thanks for that and as the platform is launching you also have a token generation event for the reef token it's not out yet can you talk about what are the details surrounding that and what are the timelines for that yeah sure so uh we plan to launch the tg in the next two to two and a half weeks we are currently finalizing

12:33uh some uh discussions with certain tier one exchanges uh it's uh it took uh some time we're actually fully prepared to do tg and we just finalized the first audit of the product but we have to finalize those discussions and hopefully will be on the primary listing will be on a really big year one exchange that's really exciting denko and as the platform continues to grow what do you

13:01think will be one of the major key success success factors for the long-term success of refinance yeah so our goal is to be robin hood for defy so basically what robin could do in the traditional financial landscape how they have this perfect ui i think it's all about the quality of the product the value proposition and the utility the real utility that this

13:23product brings to the users so we are expanding our basket types you will be able to invest in like tokenized silver and gold and we are coming like in q2 with a completely new asset class which is digital items which through our our wallet you will be able to be exposed to completely different ecosystems not related to crypto so i think all of those

13:44things are very important to be built and uh it's it's also very important to do this in an incremental way so people start from something simple and then as the product evolves they understand what the new feature means so you don't wanna you know release 50 features and everything is overclouded so this is this is our goal and we believe that being early

14:08in this landscape we can uh with the experience that we have and with our approach we can definitely be the leader and take like a like a big market share mm-hmm great answer and i think that we definitely are very early on and we're running out of time denko but for the viewers what is the best way for them to follow along with the launch of reef the launch

14:27of the token and to just get involved with the community sure so the best way is to join our telegram group we also have we have the community group as well as the announcement group uh we also like publish frequently very frequently on twitter as well as medium and on medium we have a lot of material from uh you know founder story to origin story to

14:48what all the partnerships that we do mean and do so i think these three sources are the best way to follow the project sounds great i will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers all the best on the launch with reef and let's follow up in the near future perfect thanks thanks ashton thanks for your time you