Crypto Veteran. Tokenization, DeFi and Security Tokens – Blockchain.
Ishan Pandey: Hi Elan Neiger, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind Levana ?
Elan Neiger: Hi Ishan, thanks for having me. I got into crypto in early 2017 as an investor. It was clear to me then that crypto was not going away, and after working in other industries all my life, a few months ago, I had the opportunity to join Levana. Levana is a platform for generating leverage on any asset. It is also an acronym; Levana stands for Leverage Any Asset. We’re a financial tool for traders to increase their exposure to tradable assets.
The core product is a leveraged synthetic asset trading platform for perpetual swaps. That’s a long way of saying we’re building the most advanced decentralized exchange in the Terra ecosystem. We have an incredibly experienced and diverse team, investors and an amazing community of excited supporters. At the same time, simply building an exchange is boring. Adventure and magic make life fun. The team is composed of sci-fi, fantasy and adventure geeks, so we decided to trailblaze the Terra NFT space.
We established an entire world of backstory and lore around dragons (leverage), dragon riders (leverage traders), and the community of dragon keepers who enable the platform. We launched last month with our unique evolutionary NFTs in a 44 hour Meteor Shower launch, and by the end, we raised roughly 4M. Those funds are being used to create a trading pool for the first product we are bringing to market, Levana Leveraged Index tokens (LLI’s), the first of which is Luna2X. Since our NFT launch, our NFTs have become the largest NFT project on Terra, with the largest number of wallets and the highest trading volume for weeks running.
Ishan Pandey: What are your views on NFTs and how can NFTs be leveraged in different industries? Further, how do you market NFTs?
Elan Neiger: We love NFTs. So much can be done with them, so many ways to create touchpoints that appeal to a massive audience. We were tired of “yet another PFP” and projects that build up to a minting event and disappear almost immediately after. When we first brainstormed about designing a new approach to distributed NFTs, we started by looking at all the things that have become a standard in the space that presented significant detractions from healthy community building:
● Whitelists
● The Good Morning Army
● Discord shilling
● Fake users to boost up numbers (on Telegram, Twitter and Discord)
We wanted to avoid these aspects, so we decided to start at square one and invent a completely new distribution method that would be fun and open to anyone. That became the basis for how we designed and built our project and our initial NFT Meteor Shower; essentially a silent auction for different tiered meteors, with a chance for a dragon egg inside. The Meteors, dragon eggs, and power dust all have a role to play in our metaverse gaming and world-building, which we are currently developing with several game studios. We also wrote a recap of our NFT event that explains more.
Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about the Levana protocol and how it works? Further, please tell us why did you choose Terra as the native blockchain for your project?
Elan Neiger: On a high level, Levana is a Delphi incubated protocol led by a team of crypto veterans who understood that leverage trading represents a huge opportunity for the crypto space. The protocol leverages tokens and Perps are positioned to capture significant market share. It is also a DAO, fully community governed.
There doesn’t yet exist a way to efficiently and cost-effectively gain exposure in either a long or short position to generalized assets – that is, assets that do not necessarily involve custody.
The market for derivatives is huge – the spot market is 80-90 trillion, and the derivatives market is 40x-200 the size. The protocol enables a user to no longer simply be exposed to the markets based on their current financial standing; your only limitation to how successful you can be in a trading market is just by your level of confidence, and that’s really a game-changer.
Why build on Terra? We feel that Ethereum has been taken over by the dominance of centralized companies like Tether and Circle. Collateralized stablecoins like DAI are also backed by centralized coins; there is a lack of capital efficiency.
Stablecoins on Ethereum like […]
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