A brief overview of NASDEX: NASDEX is a decentralized exchange that offers our users the ability to trade tokenized equities on blockchain via our minting and trading mechanism that mimics the offchain economics of the real world equity price.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Hello OIG Family! We are excited to kick off our AMA today with the amazing NasDex team! We have Belinda Zhou and Josh Du. Welcome to the OIG Main Channel NasDex 🙂
Josh: Thank you! Excited to be here with OIG!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: So to kick it off — our community would love to learn a little bit more about the team behind this project. Could you guys tell us a little bit about yourself? Your backgrounds, skills, experience from the both of you? 🙂
Belinda Zhou: Hello all, Belinda from NASDEX! Thank you first of all for having us!
Josh: Sure thing. So my experience has actually been in traditional finance for the past 15 years. I have worked at Morgan Stanely, Deutsche bank and a lot of major wall street firms. This is actually why I’m super excited about NASDEX and in general how DEFI will take over Tradfi.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Amazing Josh. It absolutely helps within this industry to have that double perspective coming from traditional finance. It almost allows us to narrow in on all of the issues that DeFi can intimately solve! How about you Belinda?
Belinda Zhou: So I went down the rabbit hole of blockchain in 2018. Back then I was a consultant in Dubai. Ever since then, I have helped quite a number of projects, tokens funds and exchanges with marketing and community efforts. I'm a DeFi farmer too 👩🏻🌾 . Here in NASDEX, I will also be mainly working on PR, marketing and community!
Our tech lead Henry is not here but I will quickly say he got decade long dev experience with 5 years dev experience in crypto and our Product Machine Guru is very well informed in multiple DeFi protocols and provide investment guidance for several family offices.
We are all very committed to this project!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Wow! So clearly a very talented and dedicated team. That always makes a project so much more exciting to follow.
Belinda could you tell us a little bit about where the idea for NasDex came about? And Josh, could you tell us about the token use-case for NasDex?
Josh: Sure. The main function of NSDX is to serve to share in the profit of the DEX. Once the exchange is running, our community will share in the upside by holding $NSDX tokens. NSDX holders will be able to share in the revenues of NASDEX through buy-and-distribute, buy-and-burn, or direct profit share mechanism. Actual mechanics will be voted through the DAO by the community. Another function of NSDX is to serve as collateral in the minting of tokenized stocks. And finally, there are additional governance features like the ability to vote on new stocks to list on the exchange.
Belinda Zhou: NASDEX is a product very dear to our heart, both for Josh, for me and for many of our investors. They hold both stock and crypto-assets. The rebalancing of the 2 assets has been difficult, costly and time-consuming. With NASDEX, users will be able to switch seamlessly btw crypto and stock holdings.
Talking about the target audience, NASDEX will be able to welcome a larger user base who are already familiar with equities. We will very likely bring new liquidity to the DeFi space. I magine those stock investors know about the yields they can get on NASDEX with liquidity mining rewards.
It’s a no-brainer. But 99.9% of the people out there don't know how DeFi works and need some proper guidance and NASDEX is here to do the job.
Just a quick graphic to show how popular stocks are:
So basically NASDEX is targeting a market with a total combined market cap of over USD100 trillion and a target audience of several hundred million people!
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very cool! Yes when we were evaluating $NSDX, one of the things that stood out to us was how much value was being generated and returned to the community. This project provides many different avenues for investors to be involved from liquidity mining, to cross equity exposure, to governance. Amazing model guys! And the biggest challenge but also the biggest value would be bridging the gap between traditional equities and crypto equities.
Equities can be a complex topic, can you summarise how exactly stock tokenisation on your platform will work for the average user that is not that familiar with DeFi?
Belinda Zhou: Sure, it’s actually quite straightforward. I will use a diagram first:
Anyone can mint a tokenized stock by locking up collateral using stablecoins or our platform tokens.
An oracle is deployed to ensure that the tokenized stock price is in sync and pegged with the real world stock price. The locked-up collateral behind the tokenized stock is there to ensure that the peg is stable.
Tokenized stocks can be freely traded on our exchange. However, to burn a tokenized stock, the issuer must burn the amount initially issued to receive the locked stablecoin collateral.
We just published a write-up about product mechanism by our product machine. Feel free to take a look: https://twitter.com/nasdex_xyz/status/1441031053360123904
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very fascinating model. We definitely encourage everyone here to read up more about the product mechanism!
Josh, could you talk about what problems in the equities world does trading tokenised equities on the blockchain solve?
Josh: Sure absolutely. I have quite a bit of experience in this since I’ve worked in the traditional finance world previously and now I’m full-time crypto and defi.
The first problem is the issue of access. It’s not a problem for most developed countries. But access to good investment products and stocks is an issue for most countries. Especially countries with capital control. But once on blockchain, anyone can have access to the dex and be able to trade tokenized stocks.
Another problem is that the yield in traditional equity is just too low at low single digits. Can’t make real money with that. But on blockchain and defi, we can expect to offer 20–30% yields for our users who stake tokenized stocks. Of course, there are other benefits like 24/7 trading. Fractional trading.
So blockchain and defi is actually really upgrading the equity asset class for users
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Okay! So NasDex is producing an almost democratized form of equity trading that anyone in the world can access with high rewards and high yields that trump traditional equities. This is really the power of DeFi!
Belinda Zhou: Well said
Josh: Haha yes that’s right
Saigon 💎 | OIG: So with many different DeFi projects coming into the space now, and many others that offer promising yield returns and access to the broader crypto market. Could you both mention one thing that is unique about NasDex that makes it stand out from the competition?
Josh: Sure I guess the main thing for me is that we are targeting Asian equities that have never existed before on the blockchain. We are creating something that’s completely not done before and that’s very exciting and is different versus all other exchanges out there.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very interesting!
Josh: I’m sure you are aware of the situation around Evergrande recently. We wrote a piece on how one can leverage NASDEX to take advantage of the situation. That’s something no other DEX can do.
Here is the link and basically we illustrate how our users can take a short position on the Tokenized Evergrande equity as the real Evergrande stock price declined:
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Yes! Very relevant right now, and I know a lot of investors are concerned with what is coming out of the Evergrande Case!
Belinda is there something unique on the marketing side that you are currently working on with NasDex?
Belinda Zhou: Great questions. We have a lot of exciting news coming up. IDO is on Sept 28 and the listing will follow closely. We have confirmed a CEX partner and details will be announced in 1–2 days. Stay tuned 😉.
In terms of product, the MVP will be out in November. The product is the most exciting thing for us. We will likely recruit internal testers so make sure you follow our socials for the latest news.
Initially, we will be on Polygon and afterwards multichain including BSC, ETH, Solana etc.
In October, we will announce a series of partnerships such as oracle providers we are working with
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Incredible roadmap! We are VERY excited to be following ALL of these updates with NasDex! I think I can speak for our community as well in saying that this is a project that you do not want to miss out on 😉
So I’d like to switch it over to the community questions on Twitter for now. We had an amazing number of engagements, and we were able to select three of the best ones!
Josh: Sure let's do it
Twitter questions from the community:
Twitter question 1) From @Nht25456236
To be a great platform for both Investors and for it’s users Transparency and security is important. Can you tell us some details about your transparency (likes team members) and your security mechanism. Have you already completed the audit of your platform?
Josh: Yes security is the number 1 priority for us as well. As you can see, we are all real name founders so it would be extremely unfortunate for all of us if NASDEX had vulnerabilities.
With that being said, we will do our utmost to make sure that the security is bulletproof. We have already started the auditing of our smart contracts. Some are already done and we plan to make an announcement soon.
We will have additional smart contracts developed and we will go through testing and as well as further audits to make sure all is well. We are certainly on the side of all our communities in order to make sure everything is secure.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Perfect!
Twitter question 2) From @CesarSi92629775
Your community will have the power to create as many tokenized shares as they wish, backed by collateralized debt positions. Does this mean that the minting of shares will be an infinite process that could generate inflation?
Josh: That’s actually a very interesting question. In theory, you could mint more and more tokenized shares. But unlike real tokens, it won’t be inflationary because of the oracle that ensures that the tokenized shares is pegged to the price of the real shares at 1:1.
So the short answer is that yes you can mint more as long as you pledge more collateral. But it’s not inflationary because the oracle is to ensure the onchain price is the same as offchain price.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Gotcha. Very good precautionary mechanism put in place! And finally:
Twitter Question 3: From @KiyokoSumaru
What is the difficulty in combining crypto and securities? How to convince stock investors to tokenize their shares and trade on a platform like blockchain they don’t know yet?
Josh: I think the difficulty lies mostly with education. It’s the same process of introducing crypto and defi to traditional investors. It all starts with education. And once the user tries it, then the benefits will become very obvious to them.
We hope to use NASDEX as a platform to actually try to attract more tradfi users onto defi platforms. We will have lots of educational material and will make the UI as user friendly as possible.
Saigon 💎 | OIG: Very well said Josh. Education is the main thing that will bring about broader adoption! We are glad to hear NasDex has made it a priority!
Well friends, this concludes our AMA session with NasDex’s Belinda Zhou and Josh Du. If you’d like to leave some closing remarks we’ll end it after. You can find this AMA transcribed on our OIG Medium after this session. We invite you to follow NasDex across their channels and witness some of the amazing things they will be coming up in the very short term!
Thank you Josh and Belinda
Viking |OIG: Amazing Nasdex !
Josh: Thanks a lot Saigon and the OIG community for having us here!
Belinda Zhou: Feel free to join our Telegram and follow our Twitter for the latest updates!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasdex_xyz
Medium: https://medium.com/@nasdex
Telegram: https://t.me/nasdex_xyz
Announcements: https://t.me/nasdexannouncement
