Part 1 of 3 – The Origin Story – Crypto Conversation Podcast

The following is a transcript of the Crypto Conversation Podcast with Fran, held on 19th September 2024. It is split into three parts.

The transcript was generated using AI technology and has been carefully edited to align with the actual podcast. Some light editing has been applied to remove repetitive content and improve the flow of the conversation, while maintaining the integrity of the original discussion.

*** TRANSCRIPT PART 1 of 3 BEGINS ***
The Origin Story

This is the Brave New Coin crypto conversation hosted by Andy Pickering. 

Andy Pickering: Hi, everyone, Andy Pickering here. I’m your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency space. Let’s do it. 

My guest today is Fran Strajner. Fran is the founder of the Techemy Group and he is a Core Contributor to Stabull Labs, which of course is a capital efficient web3 money market, which we’ll learn all about today. Welcome to the show, Fran! 

Fran Strajner: It’s great to be back on Andy. Great to be here. How are you doing? 

AP: Great to have you back on Fran. I think it’s been a, gosh, at least a year or two? So, be fantastic to catch up with you today, I guess. Yeah, just for the benefit of new listeners, please at the top of the show, just to introduce yourself. Love to hear just a little bit of your personal and professional backstory. What have you been doing since we last caught up with you? And yeah, what has led you to now move into web3 money market with what you guys are building at Stabull.

FS: Sure. Yeah. So I guess for those that don’t know my background, I’ve been in the Bitcoin space for over 10 years, I feel like I’m part of the furniture here. We’ve done a whole array of industry-led efforts, predominantly focusing on structuring transactions as advisors to many well known projects. 

So for example, we did the tokenomics for Chainlink back in the day, as well as Bancor and Salt Lending. And Techemy Capital has structured more than $600 million worth of transactions across 35 or so clients. 

And a couple of years ago, we saw the need for a New Zealand Dollar stablecoin. And so we used the center circle code base that they open sourced and we created the gold-plated way to issue safe and reliable stablecoins. And we went quickly from zero to, I think, $40 million total assets under management very quickly and everything was going great because we had a partner that was able to offer a good interest rate or APY for adding liquidity. 

And it was a huge incentive to take dollars out of your bank account, turn them into Stablecoin tokens and then add liquidity and earn an interest rate that was above the inflation rate. But the problem was that the third-party partner was hacked for a third time. And somebody drained, the GBP and the CNY and the Canadian Dollar and all the different stablecoin Pools including ours. 

Our team was in a unique position to help lead the recovery effort. We managed to recover, I think it was north of 80% of all the hacked funds. It took a long time to clean up that mess. 

And I took the opportunity to get various Stablecoin issuers into a series of workshops to say, hey, we, we can’t afford as an industry to have this kind of unreliable core infrastructure, what do we as an industry need? And it was really common sense stuff. It was actually really good. So somebody said, well, why don’t we put five percent of the protocol swap fees towards an insurance pool? Why don’t we prioritize, you know, security and some other very, very helpful mechanics?

So it kind of felt like back in the day if you recall Andy, there was Verisign and they were controlling a lot of the DNS space and they had too much power and the industry kind of didn’t like the direction of certain things. So the industry came together and created ICANN. 

And so I was staring at this alongside, you know, Aditya at BNC does fantastic research and we were looking at this research about the growth in the coming years of Stablecoins in real world assets. And so I’m looking at this feedback and I’m looking at this research and I’m thinking to myself, golly whiz this is the largest growing industry, telling me exactly what they want to exist. 

And so I put my founder hat on, so to speak, and I decided that for Techemy Capital, we would incubate this core infrastructure and it really revolves around the fact that there hasn’t been a solid attempt to create something that is specific for stablecoins in real world assets. The Curves and the UniSwaps and the Sushi Swaps and all of those different decentralized exchanges, they’re just simply not built for the asset class of foreign currencies and commodities. 

And so we got some quants and mathematicians and we rewrote the concept of an automated market maker and we created what we call the fourth generation AMM specifically designed and branded to the largest growth sector for the next 10 years, you know, as the real world comes on-chain. So that’s the kind of genesis there. 

Part 2, looking at how Stabull solves a common problem for Stablecoins and Real World Assets, will be released tomorrow, with part 3 to be published the following day looking at the $STABUL token sales & future plans for the platform.