Influencers are Shilling the “Next Big” Token or Project Every Day – Investors Beware

Crypto Veteran. Tokenization, DeFi and Security Tokens – Blockchain.

Ishan Pandey: Hi Rachel, welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind SynFutures ?

Rachel Lin: I’m Rachel Lin, co-founder and CEO of SynFutures. I started my career in TradFi at Deutsche Bank in the global markets department, specializing in structured derivatives. Later on, I joined Ant Financial , where I helped build the first version of its blockchain platform. Prior to SynFutures, I was one of the founding partners and head of DeFi and lending for Matrixport, a spin-off of Bitmain and one of Asia’s largest crypto neobanks.

We founded SynFutures based on a few observations:

First, there is already a big demand for derivatives in the financial market. Derivatives transactions accounted for approximately 70% of the total trading volume of traditional foreign exchange (FX) in 2019.

Second, centralized finance (CeFi) derivatives exchanges have a number of limitations, including behind-the-scenes mechanisms that have long been controversial—especially during forced liquidations. Other factors include operational inefficiency that limits the variety of trading pairs and a reliance on the CeFi exchange’s credibility.

At SynFutures, we’re embarking on a new era of accessibility in investing by democratizing the derivatives market and empowering users to trade anything at any time.

The project was able to launch thanks to the strong backing of our top-tier investors. Last year, we announced a $14mn Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital with participation from Framework, Pantera Capital, Bybit, Wintermute, CMS, Kronos, and IOSG Ventures.

Ishan Pandey: How can we short or long NFTs? Further, how does it work as each NFT has a separate market?

Rachel Lin: While NFTs have been skyrocketing in popularity since early 2020, every health financial market must have a way for participants to take both sides of the market, or in this case, short or long NFTs. This enables traders to maximize their profit opportunities while hedging risk and exposure.

SynFutures has a product, NFTures, which enables users to go long or short on individual or baskets of NFTs with a smooth single-token trading experience. This is achieved through NFT fractionalization, which divides an NFT asset into smaller parts so that there can be multiple owners of a single NFT. NFTures bases its contracts on spot price oracles from decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and SushiSwap, as well as NFT fractionalization protocols such as Unic.ly and Fractional. Similar to traditional futures markets, the spot and futures prices eventually converge on a set periodic schedule.

Ishan Pandey: Can you explain and define the key players in TradFi, BlockFi and DeFi. Also, kindly elaborate a little on the key differences between these three major factors leading to a rise in crypto banking?

Rachel Lin: Traditional finance, or TradFi, refers to the financial systems and operations that we have long known. This includes your local bank, such as Citibank, along with fintech platforms like Paypal. These are centralized companies and organizations.

Blockchain finance, or BlockFi, refers to blockchain-based banks and services. These are centralized and regulated like TradFi systems, but they exist on the blockchain. Common BlockFi services are BlockFi and Coinbase.

Unlike BlockFi, a central organization doesn’t oversee decentralized finance (DeFi) services. As such, users can engage with and use DeFi services anonymously and without fear of censorship. DeFi platforms include Uniswap, Aave, dYdX, and now SynFutures.

The growing interest in BlockFi and DeFi services is rooted in the issues that have long plagued traditional finance, including high fees, cumbersome approval processes, etc.

As institutional interest in DeFi continues to grow, we can expect more TradFi platforms to implement blockchain-based services and for BlockFi and DeFi services to continue to increase in popularity, leading to a rise in crypto banking.

Ishan Pandey: Solana, was one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies in 2021 and has also posed as one of the biggest competitors to Ethereum. What are your thoughts on this?

Rachel Lin: Solana’s growth in 2021 reflects the growing interest in Layer 1 chains, which are often viewed as alternatives to Ethereum because they have lower gas fees and offer more efficiency than Etheruem. However, it’s important to note that Layer 2 scaling solutions for Ethereum also saw growth this past year.Ultimately, we believe that the blockchain system will consist of many different chains and ecosystems, each of them offering its benefits and use cases. Interoperability between these different ecosystems will be important as we work toward the future of DeFi and Web3. Ishan Pandey: Can you please share some tips for beginners in crypto trading. […]

source Influencers are Shilling the “Next Big” Token or Project Every Day – Investors Beware