Convergence AMA Recap

31 Aug 202018:08

AMA

Convergence AMA Recap

Cryptodiffer Team

Hello, everyone!😁

We are glad to meet here:
Oscar Yeung, Co-Founder at Convergence
(@Oscar_Convergence)

Oscar Yeung

Hi everyone! Pleasure being here with the CryptoDiffer community

Cryptodiffer Team

Welcome Oscar, thank you for taking your time today!
🙌🙌🙌
Our team has prepared 3 questions for you to start with!
Let`s start with the introduction !

Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community?

Oscar Yeung

Sure, so I am Oscar, co-founder of Convergence. My background is in tokenization and financial markets. I spend the last few year running Liquefy, a leading security token issuance platform in Asia. Prior to my venture in blockchain space, I was working as a global market analyst at Deutsche Bank across Hong Kong and Singapore.

I am also an active investor as co-founder of DAO ventures, early stage growth ventures focused on token investment and pre ipo investment, and Venture Partner of EONXI ventures, VC fund by NBA star Spencer Dinwiddie. Spending the majority of my time in traditional finance and now moving into DeFi, I see the inefficiency of traditional market and also the potential of blockchain to disrupt that.

Cryptodiffer Team

thank you for an answer!
Now let's talk about Convergence
Q2: Can you briefly tell us what is Convergence in 3-5 sentences?

Oscar Yeung

The inspiration of Convergence came from my journey in starting and educating the industry about the potential of real world asset exposure on the blockchain. Our team has a vision to be the first to make real asset exposure interchangeable in the DeFi space by connecting Wrapped security tokens with Utility tokens on a single platform that is easy to use and composable with other DeFi protocols.

For those familiar with DeFi, you can think of us as a combination of Launchpad and DEX AMM for real world asset exposure.

Cryptodiffer Team

Great answer, thank you
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones you have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?
it will be the last question from us before we open the chat for community

Oscar Yeung

The support of Convergence has been nothing short of incredible. We had our Polkastarter IDO last Thursday which saw record number of sign up and so far has over 80k members on our active telegram group. We have great support from our investors (Hashed, NGC, Alameda Research, CMS and Kenetic to name a few) who truly shares our vision of converging the private investment space that we are a part of. We are currently listed on Okex and FTX which we are sure is the first on many, bringing Conv to more users around the world.

In terms of our road, we just released an update yesterday on our medium. The timeline is as follows:

Mid April: ConvX deployed on testnet. The Convergence team will be gathering more user experience feedback from the community, and will release a bug bounty program to test the protocol’s robustness.
Late April: ConvPool launched on testnet.
Early May: ConvX and ConvPool launched on Ethereum mainnet.
Early June: First asset to be offered on ConvO and subsequently traded on ConvX announced.
Mid June: First initial WST offering on ConvO structured and tradable on ConvX.
Early July: Upcoming pipeline deals with existing asset owners (e.g. institutional investors, family office, VC / PE Funds) announced.

For those who want more details, feel free to find out more on our Medium.

Cryptodiffer Team

Thank you for such detailed and interesting answers!
It is time to move to the community questions part.

Cryptodiffer Community

Will the wrapped stocks on your platform be backed by the real stocks? If so, how do you plan to get these stocks prior to wrapping, and through which platform?

Oscar Yeung

Firstly we do not focus on stocks by rather shares of "private" companies. These are high growth companies, typically known as unicorns, that most Venture capital and Private Equity firms invest. (think investing in airbnb or uber before they are listed on Nasdaq) In the crypto world, it is like getting in the private sales before they get listed. In the traditional world, the timeline for a company from seed to listed can take years. As mentioned, I have been in the investment space through various entities and also have a network of investors that are active in Pre IPO investment. Many of these investors are excited about the premise to unlock the liquidity by onboarding their investment to combine them with the world of DeFi.

Cryptodiffer Community

The Convergence Protocol is enabling seamless interchange between wrapped security tokens and utility tokens to converge real world assets with DeFi liquidity. So can you explain the details of this interchange? What improvements will we see in the future with Convergence?

Oscar Yeung

Most investments across the world are transacted using USD, as it is the global currency. For us, we want to give utility tokens the same access where you can swap ETH or DOT to these real world asset investments. When Elon Musk is willing to take BTC as a payment to Tesla, why can't we allow the swap of any utility tokens for other real world assets. The potential are endless as we can imagine Doge coin swapping for SpaceX or Flow token for Dapper Labs shares.

Cryptodiffer Community

Congratulations on the successful start. My question is about technology: will it be a staking service for wrapped tokens, or is the scope of Convergence much broader?

Oscar Yeung

Instead of staking service, we imagine broader use cases such as collateral in lending protocol. In the past, the liquidation of off chain asset with on chain native tokens are hard to achieve. By building liquidity for the wrapped token, we can unlock various use cases that cannot be achieved without a bridge between traditional asset and DeFi.

Cryptodiffer Community

Can you tell us about CONV token and the utilities it grants it holders?

Also, could you tell us your approach to solving Scalability issues?

Oscar Yeung

Conv token is our native platform token with 3 main utilities. These are 1) governance rights in the ConvergenceDAO, 2) split of trading fee in ConvX (our AMM exchange) and 3) privileged access to exclusive offerings to ConvO
The goal has always been to offer a superior, intuitive platform that has the features and offerings that users will want. On the tech side, we are making it a seamless experience for those that might not have much crypto experience but still on those investment opportunities we offer. In term of business, we are working to secure exposure that are most relatable to users. These are more likely brand name that you might have heard and have plans to go for liquidity event in a near future.

Cryptodiffer Community

Can you tell us what makes Convergence different from synthetic and other similar competitors in the industry? What products will you be building to help attract more customers to Convergence?

Oscar Yeung

Synthetix is a great innovation that created a peer to pool concept for all users to speculate against each other. While the platform is great (shown through the TVL and transaction volume), it is a zero sum game for all users involved. For Convergence, the user will actually gain the exposure for the real world asset price and therefore the investment is not a synthetically created derivative.

Cryptodiffer Community

Which one of these aspects important for you?
1-Increasing Token Price&Value
2-Empowering Platform Development
3-Building Community Trust
4-Expanding Partnership Globally

In what order?

Oscar Yeung

While all of these are important, I believe there are certain steps that a new protocol like us have to take. Product development is the priority right now as you can see from our roadmap. The crust of what we are building comes from having a product that is accessible to everyone around the world. With a platform ,then comes the partnership globally to build on top of the product. I compare the product to the infrastructure of a building while the use cases are the interior design that really makes it shine. From there, community trust and token price will follow given people will be using the product as a gateway to find all types of investment opportunities. So while all four are important, they are all linked as each empowers the other

Cryptodiffer Community

From where you get the project name? What does it means to you? And why you choose this name for your project?

Oscar Yeung

Convergence means the act of converging and especially moving toward union or uniformity. Private company valuation are structured as in rounds where the valuation changes in terms of the series A, B, C etc... In Convergence protocol, wrapped security token prices changes depending on price curve in the AMM pool and will typically be at a premium or discount. At a liquidity event, such as a private company goingIPO, the real world asset prices would then converge to the Convergence digital price, hence the name of the project.

Cryptodiffer Community

Ethereum gas costs are really high but for example binance smart chain gas prices are so small and it is faster. In the future can you implemented bsc?

Oscar Yeung

Yes we are aware of the high gas cost of Ethereum and are working with potential partners on an ideal solution. While we cannot disclose more information at this moment, we are aware of the ongoing cost issue of DeFi and will be addressing it promptly

Cryptodiffer Community

Only getting users, holders etc is not everything. In my opinion, a project needs to deal with solving a real world issue or problem What is the problem that your project primarily focuses on?

Oscar Yeung

This is a good final question to wrap up this AMA. The key problem we are solving the barrier of entry for alternative investment opportunities that are cornered by the institutional investors. VC and PE funds are enjoyed higher returns due to their privileged access from their private investment network. We are putting this access right into the hand of the Conv holders and users.

Cryptodiffer Team

Thanks for your time @Oscar_Convergence
👍🏻
Great answers 🚀
Thank you to everyone who took part! appreciate the activity as always

Oscar Yeung

Thanks for having me here! Tons of great questions and I enjoyed hearing the feedback