Part 3 of 3 – The $STABUL token sales & future plans – 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.

Part 1, looking at the origins of the Stabull Platform is published here. Part 2, looking at how Stabull solves common problems for stablecoins and RWA’s is here.

*** TRANSCRIPT PART 3 of 3 BEGINS ***
The $STABUL Token Sales & Future Plans

Andy Pickering: Very nice Fran. Yeah, it would be fascinating to see the long awaited return of DeFi Summer 2.0, 4.0. However, you want to look at it, you mentioned the pre-sales Fran. So do you want to just explain a little bit more about what that is, when it is, where people should go, on GemPad I believe? Anything that people should know about the Stabull Finance presales. 

Fran Strajnar: Yeah. So I, I spent all of 2023 and you know, 22 dates this year, making sure that we subscribe to non-predatory investors, right? We don’t want constant sell pressure after we launch and everything else. So every single one of our investors, in fact, the lead investor is publicly listed company and all of them have said, look, this either goes to zero or you become a massive unicorn, and offered alternative to SWIFT, the London or, or the CME or something like that for commodities. 

And so they have good conviction, they don’t want a quick flip on a project like this. They see the market positioning and the importance of this infrastructure. So we’re pretty much sold out of the pre-sale, it was only 2 million. And so we have the 25% left and because we already have our strategic partners. Now we’ve decided to try and decentralize the exposure in the ethos of this whole industry by loading up on the decentralized platform called GemPad, The last allocation. And that goes live on Monday next week. You put a time stamp in the comments under where you post this podcast. So that’s, that’s the pre, and then we’ll be doing a public sale that’s always been planned just before actually listing the Governance Token and everything else. And that will probably happen in early to mid November. 

And we’re expecting that the Bitcoin market after what, almost nine months of consolidation is sort of like a beach ball underwater and should continue its grind up and bullish momentum. I think the market’s just waiting for October to begin a quarter for it to begin at this point basically. 

So we think it will be in a good market conditions, irrespective of the geopolitical chaos out there with the elections and everything. 

AP: Yeah, that’ll be fascinating to watch. Of course, as we record today on September 19, finally got the rate cut by the Fed. September traditionally very bearish for Bitcoin. But as you’ve pointed out, Fran, yeah, October Uptober, November, December, just Q4 usually brings fireworks and you’re right, we are overdue fireworks just because of that. I don’t know, very, very long and painful sideways consolidation that Bitcoin has done really this whole year since the launch of the ETF, so fascinating time. 

 FS: And the industry is sick of meme coins. I mean, they’re fun and all that, but like it’s really, really sucked out the momentum, you know, out of everything and with enough time passing, the interest wanes and people are starting to get hungry for, you know, infrastructure with longevity again. So we’re getting some really good positive feedback from the industry about our market positioning and our product. 

AP: Yeah, I very much agree. Fran just in terms of the Stablecoin pairs on Stabull Finance that are available, I suppose both for swaps and for people that they want to lock up or add to the liquidity pools and, and earn a little bit of yield. What are the supported stablecoins at the moment and anything, you’ve got to say on what could be added in the future as well? Of course. 

FS: Yeah, of course. So we have the New Zealand Dollar, Euros, Turkish Lira, Brazilian Real and a few others that were only just loading initial liquidity to now. So anyone could go and source the official, you know, Turkish Lira, Brazilian tokens from a different platform, bring them to Stabull and add liquidity and start earning interest rates on providing that service today. So you’re gonna see that grow step-by-step, pool-by-pool.

Now again, we have talked to everyone and there is a whole smattering of products coming to the market for those unaware. There’s been easily over a billion dollars invested in the last 18 months into Stablecoin and Real World Asset companies and they’re getting their, you know, products out of the lab and into the wild at this time, so to speak. And so they’re all gonna be going live one at a, well, not even one at a time. 

I talked to an issuer yesterday who’s launching 35 Stablecoins by Christmas. And they’re a Neo Bank so they can do it because they already have the FX and everything in the real world there. 

So I think this is going to be an exponential growth curve and we’re focusing on stablecoins to begin with, simply because the real world assets are not prevalent right now on Polygon and Ethereum, they’re, you know, experimental to an extent, in private Federated blockchains or the likes of Stellar in some regards, and all the others. 

Also worth noting is, every single layer one and layer two’s number one strategic priority moving forward is stablecoins and real world assets. Nothing else is going to drive wallet numbers, user numbers, transaction volumes on their chain like stablecoins and real world assets with the real world coming on chain effectively. 

AP: Yeah, I very much agree. That’s very well said Fran, what about, you know, the one I suppose concern that perhaps new users to DeFi have is, there’s this perception that sometimes DeFi can be, yeah, it’s not necessarily user friendly when people first start to engage with DeFi. But as long as you know what you, what you’re doing, you can get around that. But there’s also a perception that DeFi is vulnerable to various attack vectors, fraud and rug pulls and so on.

What is the focus at Stabull Finance to ensure, I’m sure you’re doing various audits and making sure that security is top of mind and everything is as safe as it needs to be. 

FS: Yeah. So it’s a two part question one on sort of go to market or user personas like who, who’s using it and why, especially focusing on the new ones where DeFi is scary. Well, I mean, your millennials are already leapfrogging the conventional banking system and jumping straight to Neobanks like Revolut and many others. And so if they on-board and you know, do all the compliance with a Neo Bank, they don’t even need to know that the Neo Bank is actually doing the swap facility through Stabull, right? 

So I’m sitting there in Europe with my whatever, next generation bank solution and I wire in some Euros from my European bank account and I want to buy gold or Swiss Francs inside that provider’s interface. The user will never know that the swap could be routed through to Stabull’s Liquidity Pools. So that’s for the mass adoption that they solve. 

We’re at the bottom of the tech stack or, or the bottom of the solution, the sort of core infrastructure, if you will, providing the liquidity pools and the incentives to bring liquidity to those pools. 

Whereas from a security perspective, yes, those pools become giant honey pots, right? And so not only have we audited every major release as well as our governance token, And we will audit every single chain integration and pool moving forward. We have natively baked in that 5% of all transaction fees on the platform go towards an insurance pool. As I said, that was a great suggestion by the series of workshops we did almost two years ago now.

Additionally, we have partnered with one of the if not the most comprehensive cybersecurity experts in the web3 space. I believe they got like a $200 million investment from the likes of Binance and others. They’re called Hackdra and they create a product called Oznet and we’re about to launch a $50,000 bounty program to begin with, so that people can ethically disclose if they find any issues there. And we’ll be doing pen testing and other security things on a regular basis, that makes sense? 

So, but countering that as well a little bit as you know, time has passed, right? We’ve seen the early days of Solidity when Ethereum first came out and how clunky the interfaces and everything was and we now have the rise of AI in cybersecurity. And so a lot of this stuff has been ironed out. Like Chainlink, one of our key partnerships there so that we can bridge our own token from Polygon and Ethereum and other places that’s coming in the next couple of months. 

Their contracts have been, you know, used throughout the industry as a standard. They’ve done more than sufficient audits and it’s just kind of become a core puzzle piece for other people to, you know, use this open source already audited, safe and battled tested code base. 

So things are getting easier despite the regular news of various hacks, but I do think that the number of hacks has actually gone down over time and it will continue to trend that way. But we refuse to be one of those victims. We take security seriously and you know, we’ll just scale the paranoia, a healthy paranoia as we scale the users and the liquidity on the platform. 

AP: Yes, indeed. Thank you Fran shifting gears for a second. You know, there’s still various central banks around the world are working on their own central bank digital currency pilot program. Some banks are closer to implementation than others, but it seems like as everything goes digital, digital money, of course, will happen. Now we have decentralized digital money. But yes, central bank digital currencies are on the way.

How do you see kind of decentralized finance, particularly something like Stabull, which kind of specializes in stablecoins. How do you see them as kind of operating in a world where CBDCs slowly start to roll out? 

FS: Yeah. So as, you know, I have a lot of experience in Stablecoins and CBDCs,, having actually sat on one of the advisory panels in New Zealand Reserve Bank and all the rest, the world is sort of heating up in the competition if you will between centralization and decentralization. 

I think the war has already been won and the public just needs to go through the back and forth machinations between, you know, the attempted roll-out of CBDCs and the public backlash that inevitably unfolds, some places might adopt it. But so far attempts out of Japan and Nigeria have been just an unmitigated disaster that they had to cancel and undo. However, we have had already, people approach us and say, hey, what if we provide you a wrapped CBDC to pair against USD on your platform? And our answer is always, well, we’re infrastructure where we’re trending towards decentralization. 

If you bring liquidity, we’re not going to judge what the winners are in the market. We will do due diligence checks to make sure that the issuer itself is legitimate and they have good back office processes, licenses, compliance, et cetera, so that we’re not dealing with somebody that, you know, is taking money in but isn’t actually buying the underlying, this has to be 1-to-1 reserves, right? 

So, yeah, that’s kind of a market positioning. We will load whatever people bring liquidity to and let the market decide in the long term, what the winners are so long as there’s a legitimate attempts in terms of the pools that we offer. 

AP: Yeah, very good. All right. Well, look, Fran, as we start to finish up this part of the podcast, anything else that we need to know in terms of what is happening with Stabull Finance, you said earlier, you had some plans in place? Effectively described as how we become unstoppable. 

So I’d love to hear just a little bit more context around that. Any other partnerships that you can kind of tease at and yeah, just the roll-out of some of these features and of course, the pre-sale again. 

FS: Yeah. Well look, I mean, we’re effectively feature complete right now. What really completes V1, if you will, is the launch of the secondary market for our governance Token, the TGE, the public sale and all the activity that goes around that. So next Monday is the presale on GemPad, check that out link below and that’s the last allocation that to, you know, further decentralize who’s backing us, so to speak. 

And then we’ve got the public sale coming up in six weeks, eight weeks, something like that. And then in quarter 2, early quarter 2 next year, we’ll have the voting portal where people can write proposals and say, I think the insurance pool should be 10% not 5%. Or I think that the JPY USD pool should be, you know, a higher interest rates to stake there instead of another pool. So that creates healthy competition and demands for a voting power for a token over time, a governance token. 

Yeah, it’s a pretty straightforward project. We’re surprised no one has built something like this. We’ve sort of distilled our experience consulting on 30 plus major projects over the last eight years into creating the best dynamics and game theory possible. And we’re just really excited to offer something that, you know, can just scale and scale and scale, and doesn’t need hundreds of staff and support and everything else and is partially, mostly controlled and governed, owned by the users themselves. And I think the world needs it, right? 

AP: Very much so. And just shout out the website Fran link, of course is in the show notes, but Fran the website is?

FS: Stabull.Finance and Stabull, of course, a play on words. S T A B U L L dot Finance. 

AP: Yes, indeed. Thank you, Fran. Stabull dot Finance, as I said in the show notes or just, yeah, S T A B U L L dot Finance. I’ve also put a link in the show notes to the Stabull pre-sale, which is on GemPad. So that pre-sale begins very soon, just a matter of days away. In fact, you’re about four days away. So link is on the show notes and I suppose we reach the end of the show. 

So thank you, team for listening. hank you very much to Fran for coming and spending some time today with us to tell us all about Stabull and that Stabull pre sale. 

All right, folks, this was a Crypto Conversation for Brave New Coin. See you next time and bye for now.