Velo AMA Recap
CryptoDiffer team
Hello, everyone!😁
We are glad to meet here
Gaurang Desai (Economic advisor at Velo Labs)
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
Hello, happy to be here!
And thanks for having me on to talk about Velo
CryptoDiffer team
Q1: Can you introduce yourself to our community ?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
Well, I’ve been with the Velo Project for over a year and a half now, focusing on the aspects of the project related to use cases, economics, and fund flows.
My background is traditional finance, more on the side of derivatives (equity and credit derivatives) and structuring. I also spent 4-5 years working on the asset liability management side of a global insurance company.
Having moved to Thailand 4 years ago, I saw firsthand the inefficiencies in the existing banking infrastructure, both in how it poorly served existing banking customers when it came to cross border transactions and how it also shut out many of the migrant workers and small villages throughout the region.
Then, around 3 years ago, I started getting into the entire concept of DLT and Bitcoin through a family member who was already involved in the space. I found the concepts to be pretty revolutionary. With that interest in mind, I jumped on the chance to work on a blockchain based project that was seeking to increase adoption and aid the underbanked populations of the world. That is what brought me to the Velo Project.
CryptoDiffer team
Q2: Can you briefly tell us what is Velo Labs in 3-5 sentences?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
If I were to use one sentence, I would say the Velo Project is a “a federated collateralized credit exchange and settlement network” . . . now what does that mean? Well, for one, we sign up Trusted Partners to join the Velo ecosystem, and these partners are businesses that want to get access of DLT and be plugged into other businesses that have similar goals. So . . .
. . . Velo Labs is building this unique network to be powered by the Velo Protocol — a blockchain financial protocol enabling digital credit issuance and borderless asset transfers for businesses using a smart contract system. The Velo Protocol will allow the Trusted Partners to issue digital credits via a smart contract layer, and it uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol to process and settle transactions.
The idea is that in this ecosystem, use cases like money transfer, trade finance, and lending can seemlessly settle using VELO as a collateral to each digital credit
I think using the . . . i was able to keep sentence count low . . .
CryptoDiffer team
Q3: Let`s now talk about the milestones Velo Labs have achieved so far and about your upcoming plans?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
From a product perspective, major milestones include the issuance issuance of the VELO token and our first exchange listing. We are also making great progress on the development of the of the Velo Protocol, and having a working Testnet
From a marketing perspective, we are making great strides building English, Chinese and Korean communities. We’ve also announcement important partnerships with Band Protocol, Matrixport and their affiliate Cactus Custody as well as with Terra. There are also many other partnerships that we will announce in the coming weeks and months. The next 3-4 weeks should be an exciting time.
These are all important milestones towards achieving our mission of building a federated credit exchange network. Moving forward, we will launch mainet, complete development of the Velo Protocol, issue our first digital credits and list on more exchanges.
CryptoDiffer team
Awesome, a lot of updates to come out!
Thank you for great answers!
I think it is time to start community questions round!
Cryptodiffer Community
How does working at Velo compare to some of the other places you’ve worked?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
That an interesting question, I feel Velo is the first place I have worked that is trying to solve a global problem (legacy banking infrastructure) but doing it from the viewpoint of helping underserved communities. Most of my jobs in the past were focused on solving problems faced by institutions and corporates more than the average person.
Cryptodiffer Community
What are the main VELO coin growth drivers in the future? What are the next steps you will take to increase demand for VELO?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
VELO coins growth is tied directly to the amount of partners we sign up and the volume of transactions that flow through the ecosystem. The more use cases we can promote, and the greater the adoption we can push, the greater the demand for VELO. We have already started with large partners as our main iniitlal backing is from CP group, and we are using these connections to rapidly expand our footprint
Cryptodiffer Community
Are you more focused on a top-down or bottom-up strategy? By that I mean are you initially targeting smaller local businesses (thinking like individual Western Union branches) to build up a base and then work your way up? Or are you focussing on larger banks and businesses first and letting them expand down to the masses?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
I think its fair to say that we are taking a two-pronged approach. Of course, engaging with large partner businesses is a necessity in this industry to have any hope of adoption. However, we are not ignoring the smaller market players and SMEs. These smaller market participants can reach populations that larger businesses cannot. This is vital for Velo and its partners to reach the unbanked and underbanked populations of SEA.
Cryptodiffer Community
Users often care less about technology, but rather the value of the token. How do Velo manage to strike a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of the token?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
In my opinion, we strike a good balance by placing the VELO token at the center of the Velo Protocol. The means that the VELO token acts as a universal bridge collateral for the entire Velo Ecosystem. VELO tokens must be put forward as collateral to issue digital credits pegged to any fiat currency. Our partners then use these digital credits in their day-to-day operations. In this way, VELO tokens guarantee settlement between partners. In the Velo Ecosystem, there is no “technology” without the VELO token.
Cryptodiffer Community
How involved is the Chairman in the day to day at Velo?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
The Chairman is quite a successful businessman who routinely helps us with approaching new partners and advising us on overall strategy. He is quite experienced in SEA when it comes to trade finance and cross border payment flows, and his business network is extremely extensive and helpful. Honestly, besides the tech and overall concept, I think his presence is what really sets our project apart from many others.
In regards to Band Protocol, the partnership with Band Protocol will benefit both parties. As you may know, Band Protocol is one of the leading cross-chain data oracle platforms in the world. Velo Labs and Band Protocol are working together to create secure industry-leading FX data oracles. We also recently announced partnerships with Matrixport and Terra. As the team continues to announce partnerships in the coming weeks and months, it will become more and more clear how they all fit together in the Velo Ecosystem.
Cryptodiffer Community
What’s the roadmap for Velo development and what can we expect from Velo next year?
Can you explain in simple terms what a “Digital Reserve System” is?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
The Velo Protocol currently has two major components. There is the Digital Credit Issuance mechanism which issues digital credits pegged to any fiat currency once VELO tokens are put down as collateral. The second major component in the Digital Reserve System. In simple terms, the Digital Reserve System is the smart contract part of the Velo Protocol that ensures that the digital credits maintain a stable 1:1 value ratio with the related fiat currency. It does this by automatically adjusting the number of VELO tokens in collateral as the price of VELO fluctuates in the open market.
Cryptodiffer Community
How many people are on the Velo team?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
There are approximately 50 people working at Velo Labs across legal, operations, finance, marketing and tech departments!
Cryptodiffer Community
Does Velo offer staking/lending programs in your platform? If so, how can I participate?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
We are currently designing a program to launch by year end or early next year. I focus right now, however, is really getting partners signed up to use the Velo Protocol and digital credit system for real world applications. That is taking much of our team’s effort right now.
Cryptodiffer Community
So from the white paper Velo Tokens is built on stellar, what happens when a partner puts in 100k usd worth of velo tokens but the price of velo tokens move up? are they just gonna recieve 100k usd?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
We want to foster adoption of the technology, and in order to get non crypto savvy businesses comfortable with the idea of Velo token as collateral, we ensure they can get back the initial value of the deposited VELO back at any time. This means in the case of the token price going up, the Digital Reserve System will lower the amount of Velo tokens in the collateral pools to maintain the 1:1 initial value.
Cryptodiffer Community
Why is Velo likely to succeed than other digital credits or stable coins out there in the market?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
There are a few reasons why I believe Velo will succeed where other digital credits and stablecoins have failed. In my opinion, the Velo Protocol solves three major issues that have hurt other projects:
-A lack of transparency
-Limited versatility
-Inadequate regulatory compliance
Another major reason why I believe Velo will succeed is because of the VELO token’s unique trait as a bridge asset. VELO tokens link the values of various traditional assets to corresponding digital credits. In this way, VELO tokens can serve as a vehicle to transfer liquidity and value onto the Velo Network. As the Velo network accepts more types of assets as collateral when issuing digital credits, the VELO token will bridge the gap between all theses different asset types, guarantee the value and liquidity of digital credits, and act as the Velo Ecosystem’s universal collateral.
Cryptodiffer Community
What is the main reason of having only 40 million circulating supply against 30 billion total supply? To a potential investor, it only looks like it’s to pump the price at the start and then release more tokens and then price dumps.
I’ve been wondering, why does the Velo Protocol need two chains? Why not build entirely on one?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
The amount of tokens are to future proof the system as the total is fixed and cannot ever be increased. The volumes in cross border remittance are near 1 trillion a year alone. Trade finance is a multiple of that. The available market is huge, and growing. So with this in mind, and a long term plan of 5+ years to get to where we want geographically and in terms of singing up 100s of partners, we felt the amount of tokens was justifiable for the growth we envision. Remember that all digital credits in the system must be backed by locked up VELO tokens, so in order ensure we have adequate reserves, the initial supply had to anticipate a decade (at a minimum) of transaction growth. We do not feel we are starting with a small amount of tokens, as most the total supply is locked up for many years.
Cryptodiffer Community
Where did you get the inspiration for this unique project idea of VELO ? And what influence will we have on the crypto industry due to the project?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
Hello Mr. Wayne, the genesis of the project was to help the underbanked and unbanked, and Stellar founder Jed Mcaleb had a similar vision, so both the Chairman and Vice Chairman of Velo Labs teamed up with him to kick Velo off. Since then, Velo has evolved to have many more use cases, but the core backing from Stellar is as strong as ever. We felt that although Stellar was a great blockchain for transferring IOUs (credit), we could make it better by adding in a collateral layer that then allowed for truly trustless transactions.
Cryptodiffer Community
Velo Labs marketing efforts are primarily focused on China, Vietnam, Japan and Korea. Do you expect to push your efforts into the North American market in the near future? What is your opinion of this region?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
Our initial focus is on Southeast Asia. And, as you’ve mentioned, we starting making inroads into East Asia as well. We understand these markets intimately and know that we can help the existing market players overcome obstacles. However, the kinds of problems that we see in SEA are not unique to this area. They exist elsewhere as well. As such, in the long term, you can expect to see us increase our global presence.
Cryptodiffer Community
How do you plan to explain such technical topics to a wider audience?
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
This has been a recurring question since the earliest days of computer networks. In fintech — and technology as a whole — we are dealing with an extremely complicated system that is even more complicated to describe. Blockchain is certainly no exception. As such, clear and consistent communication is important. We also need to continue to clarify the tangible benefits that we will bring to the world. Just describing technology is rarely enough. We need to make sure to tailor the messages to each audience; to make an effort to explain things in a way that each audience can understand. It not easy, but in the long run there is great satisfaction in getting people to understand new technology and open their eyes as to the possibility of a new way of doing the same old things.
Economic advisor at Velo Labs, Gaurang Desai
Thanks @makscryptodiffer and the entire community for some great questions. I had a lot of fun answering them.
Cryptodiffer TEAM
Thank you for your time! Thank you everyone who took part. Let’s finish the AMA!
