Spicey | OIG
Welcome back OIG family to another exciting episode in our ama series. Today I had the privilege of speaking with Ivan and Philipp from Nezha. Nezha is building the infrastructure to power a new type of prediction market environment, powering the transition from high stakes to staking. Remember, subscribe, hit the bell notification button and hit that like button to stay up to date with all the content coming from all OIG. Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the AMA.
Spicey | OIG
So today we got Ivan and Philipp from Nezha, we’re going to be telling us a little more about the project and what it aims to offer for the blockchain industry. So why don’t we start with a little about who you guys are and your roles in the project.
Philipp:
Perfect. I’m Phil, I’m one of the two co founders. I’ve been in crypto mainly as the investor for the last few years, really interested in all things DeFi across a couple of blockchains. Before that, I set up companies outside of crypto mainly in the media space, in sports and sports betting, and well, got the crypto buzz two years ago and didn’t let me go. And so now it’s time to do something in this space and really excited with where we’ve gotten in wear it will take us.
Ivan:
And so I’m Ivan, the other co founder. I’ve worked in technology for 20 years and Fintech building out worldwide, regulated trading platform businesses, and been very involved in blockchain for a number of years. First started with letting people trade Bitcoin in 2013 On our platform, and more recently launched a cryptocurrency exchange, and invested in in a bunch of different blockchain projects, working with some of the founding teams. And Philipp and I decided to embark on building Nezha, you
Spicey | OIG
can tell when somebody has been in the game long enough, if this is a year before 2017 or 2018, you know, like 2013, that’s really early on in the Bitcoin lifecycle. So good to see that you guys have, you know, a lot of experience on your hands. So, I guess let’s start with what are prediction markets? And how does Nezha tie into it
Philipp:
The prediction markets in its core sense is, you know, you’re trying to make predictions saying what will something be? What will be the outcome, what will be the result, and then making a guess, and usually attaching some sort of value to that guess. And so with Nezha, we’re working with, you know, what we call next generation prediction markets. So we’re different from what would know, as traditional prediction markets wave one of what we’ve seen with prediction markets, especially on chain where you had small decentralised liquidity pools, and then there was, you know, the prediction was, well, the price of Bitcoin go up in the next hour, yes or no, you kind of made a prediction, mostly Yes, or no predictions. And whoever got it, right, got some of the liquidity in the pool, and whoever got it wrong, had to give up some of the liquidity in the pool. And that’s kind of how that that was engaging, were quite fundamentally different from that. We think there’s a way here to have fun to have the possibility to win something. But without all the negative externalities that are connected to losing something. And so when you look at the prediction markets with a Nezha, we essentially see ourselves as a gamified yield aggregator where we operate a stable coin based staking contract, in which we accumulate liquidity, we aggregate yield across DeFi on Solana, and all of the yield that we aggregate goes into one central price pool that feeds the winners of the small games of chance/prediction market games. And so what that means is, you know, people can compete in these small games, but the actual liquidity that they put up to compete remains locked in the staking contract at all times. And it’s only the staking rewards that are given up to have a chance to play. And obviously, that also means you’ve got a chance to win. So the beautiful thing is you might be putting in $50 on a Monday and have a chance to win $100,000 on a Saturday, but the Monday after you still have your $50 that have remained locked in the staking contract. And you can pull them out if you wish, or you can go again and have another chance of winning.
Spicey | OIG
That’s impressive. I mean, two things that stand out, making it fun by a game of gamifying the experience but also removing some of the negative connotations that come with, you know, playing in this playground, let’s say. So that’s really cool. So What features does Nezha introduce that separates itself from the competition?
Philipp:
Yeah, I wish we were the first to have invented this type of no loss prediction, market environment, unfortunately we are not, I think we got to be very honest with ourselves about that one. The main competitor in this space was an Ethereum based protocol that developed a project that is somewhat similar, but we’ve got quite a few differentiating factors, I think the strongest one on our end is that our prizes are fully insurance backed. And this is something you know, it’s a bit difficult to understand. But it really has a very powerful impact on the protocol. So what it means is that the yield that we aggregate, part of it goes to cover an insurance premium for somebody winning the grand prize. So there’s a mathematical probability associated to anybody winning the grand prize and our prediction markets. And what we’re able to do is we’re take a small part of the yield, and we are ensuring with our insurance partner against a very, very large outcome. So you know, we’re aiming for the 150,000 or so dollar week mark as the grand prize. And we can do that on a per entry basis. So when you think about it in a practical example, you stake $25. And technically, the yield that you would get on that within one week would probably be anywhere between maybe eight cents, 12 cents, relatively small stuff, and crazy, because it’s just one week. And so we’re using a third of that, to pay an insurance company to insure against the grand prize of $100,000. And if somebody wins, they have to pay it out. if nobody wins, you still have your original money. And so this insurance, backing of prizes allows us to scale a lot faster, and offer really, really attractive prizes from day one. Because we don’t have to wait until our total value locked is so big, that we would reach those types of prizes, just by the yield generated on a weekly basis. And this is quite a big differentiating factor. The second of that is I think, our team, we’ve built such an amazing team. And I know we’re gonna probably dive into that later. But some of the people involved in actually designing this product, developing this product have been in this, you know, the traditional space of these types of games of chance for many, many years. And they’re experts at retention and gamifying these experiences. And so we’ve put a lot more efforts on actually making the experience of the game entertaining, making it fun, and making it that you want to play. And so you know, it’s sort of it’s a job benefit, you can win a lot of money, but it’s also fun to just participate.
Spicey | OIG
Yeah, and you know, going back to not necessarily being the first to do what you’re doing doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not putting up a good fight, right? Like, look at the story between Yahoo and Google. So it all depends on if you’re doing a good job, and better a better job than your predecessors. And like you touched on too, you need a good team to accomplish that. So maybe we could dive into a little bit more about your team and how you’re going to accomplish this.
Ivan
Yeah, sure. And just to touch on that last point, you know, Apple wasn’t the first to have a phone. BlackBerry are no longer with us. And, you know, that’s not our goal, right? Our goal is to is to engage our community and build an amazing product that they enjoy, right, and what other people are doing is fine. But really, we’re playing the infinite game. We’re not here to bash competitors, there are loads of other people doing great stuff in the space. We just want to build something great for our community. Within our team, you know, we got started pretty early, self funded. And we brought in some great people to work on on the UX and UI design, really thinking about how our users are going to engage what this product is going to feel like making sure that this is something that will help the solana ecosystem draw new people in, right you know, part of what we want to do here is, is make it engaging and appealing to engage in in Solana and defi. And kind of expand the audience of people that want to participate with with what is a pretty simple game in its nature to start with. So we started at the top with the UX get the kind of product concepts really nailed down. And then we’ve got a fantastic partnership with M labs who are supplying us with some fantastic Ross developers. And they have built a really good reputation in the industry as a team that really focus on so auditing and correctness of the smart contract. Obviously, we will externally audit as well, but they’ve got a reputation as being extremely reliable. And they do work on a number of chains, including for people like IOHK. And then we’ve got a great CTO who’s based here in London, who’s got a long history in traditional finance, in online trading, and in building high performing teams. And then we’ve got a head of risk and compliance here in London as well, who’s got an education from a top school in France, has worked in a number of large financial institutions. So important to get a great team. And then on the marketing side, you know, we built out a really good community engagement team, who were there to sort of engage with our community and help us grow. And you know, that that’s really our focus now over the next month into into the launch.
Spicey | OIG
Definitely a Superstock team that you got there. And, well, obviously, it’s not an easy feat to accomplish. But it’s not going to be as difficult as it may seem to other people to create a gamified experience within the prediction markets. So let’s go back to more of the native token, and, and what utility it’ll bring to, to the ecosystem.
Philipp
Yes, we’ve got two main types of utility. We’ve got b2b utility and b2c, so consumer and more sort of platform focus utility. On the consumer side, you know, initially, when we launched the MVP, it will be very much focused on in game benefits, you know, having access to special tiers that will afford you special benefits, special access rights, access to private pools within the games, or additional entries, things like that, you can think of it as kind of like a VIP programme within our platform, where we give back to support the most loyal supporters of our community. And we provide them with special advantages. And then as the product evolves, and as we move on from some MVP further down the road, we’re keen to learn more and more functionality, so that token holders can can benefit from being part of the ecosystem, of course, we will be using with, we’ll be working with exchanges so that there’s rewards on liquidity provision, and that you can get a reward on your tokens if you stake them. And then Nezha will also have the ability, you know, for you to contribute to the governance of the protocol, if you have your tokens. So to be able to have a say in the decisions and the growing, then on the b2b side, we’re building the platform in a way where in future people can technically white label the entire solution, or just parts of it. So you know, there’s there’s a lot of moving components in here. And some of it might be, you know, for example, randomness generation, you use that for a lot of things, we use that for these markets. But you also need that if you want to create 10,000, unique random NFT’s and you want to prove that they’re random. And so there’s a lot of things where components of our infrastructure, the entire infrastructure, will be able to white label to others. And to access them, they will need to lock fundamental amount of tokens to be able to use these these services.
Spicey | OIG
So definitely a robust token to create a lot of utility for users and basically create a robust experience for them as well. So you’ve launched on Solana, and do you have any plans to expand into other ecosystems?
Ivan
Yeah, so I think Solana is an obvious choice, given the alignment with with sort of the game fi space. And there’s obviously a lot of trading that goes on in the Solana ecosystem, and the fundamentals of you know, costs, for transacting and speed and throughput, a very strong there. I think we see this as a product that deserves to be present on more blockchains and open it out to a wider community. I think for our MVP, it’s really focused on Solana in the medium and long term, you know, we’ll definitely be looking to expand and become a multi chain project. I think the evolution of what’s happening at the moment is really exciting. We’ve been very close to some of the evolution in the Cardano ecosystem. Obviously, everyone’s waiting for eth 2 to come live and move to proof of stake and reduce the fees of transacting. So, you know, I think both of those big ecosystems with large communities will will evolve over the next six months. And I think, you know, we’re pretty agile, we don’t need to make a decision upfront, but you know, we’re keeping an eye on the trends. Obviously, there’s a lot of New Layer ones that are coming out as well and, you know, gaining some degree of critical mass. You know, there’s a lot of people talking about new chains with near protocol and algorand. And, you know, I mean, there’s a, there’s a lot to choose from out there. So, you know, I think right now we’re really focused on on getting the product to be amazing getting it in the hands of our community on Solana and really getting to know the solana community really well and participating with with other projects and growing that community. And that’s our main focus at the moment.
Spicey | OIG
The experiences you gain from from this ecosystem will transfer over into any other ones that you decide in the future to venture into, right. So it’s all it’s all going. It’s all going to be put to work. And you’re going to retain all that data that you collect as you test out the product right now and on Solana. So that’s good to hear. So what what are Nezha Spins? Sorry, could you tell us a little more about that?
Philipp
Yeah, for sure. So I mean, a Nezha Spins is when you think of our platform, we’re building out a core infrastructure. But over the medium long term, we can essentially plot multiple games or prediction market types on top of that to say, you know, at the core of it, it’s a gamified yield aggregator, we created yield, and we distributed according to these chance outcomes. But exactly how that distribution works. That can be multiple ways. And so the launch game that we’re launching is called the ninja draw. And it’s essentially a pick a numbers game, where you pick six numbers on a weekly basis, you get all six of them, right? When the grand prize, five of them win a slightly smaller price for them, even smaller price, and so forth. That’s the launch game, incredibly simple to understand. Get these types of games have been around for a long time, and really helps us show what we can do the power of what we can do, and also how simple it can be. But then we want to be developing more games. On top of that, we want to do this in house, we hope that the community will also contribute, maybe they’ve got great ideas. And so Nezha spins is one of those where it’s on our list. It’s one of the next games that we want to do, it’s got a slightly different twist to it. But we’re open to other games as well, we’ve got a very creative team. And there’s, you know, new new thoughts all the time around, what could be the next type of game to make this work. And we’ve also had some great suggestions already from some of our early investors, some of our community. And so we’re excited to see where we’re at hands post the initial launch game.
Spicey | OIG
Very cool. So a lot of games and gamified experiences to keep people busy. So I can’t wait to see that launch very soon. So let’s switch gears here and move on to our next segment, which are the Twitter questions. And these are questions that are asked prior to our AMA. And we’ve picked out three random questions. And we’ll start with question number one here. And this person asks, what is the structure of Nezha fi project? Is a decentralised or open source protocol where everybody can contribute? If so how does the governance plan on being handled?
Ivan
I can take it. So we are going to be launching the Nezha protocol to be governed by the Nezha DAO, the DAO is an association set up in Switzerland. And we will evolve the engagement with the community over a period of time. It’s really important that we get the first product live. And we get a working system that has an engaged community. And we will start with a series of initiatives to decentralise the decision making and take on board how how the community participate in driving it forward. I think the from a an integration point of view and people building other games. There is definitely an intention that the protocol will evolve from from being its first game to opening up and allowing both ideas for the Nezha ecosystem to build but also for other people to build on top of. So I think you know that there’s definitely an opportunity for for third party game developers to build on our protocol infrastructure and provide some really interesting solutions to their community to what will become a bigger growing community and ecosystem.
Spicey | OIG
Excellent answer. So let’s move on to question number two. What is your top priority for 2022? Can you and your team members share a bit about the strategy that you will implement in the near future? What makes the team feel confident to win in the long run?
Philipp
So there’s a lot of questions and one I think for for anyone in this space, you know, are weeks away from launching our ideal and with that launching the MVP of our product. So I think the number one priority for somebody like us in the stages, let’s deliver a product that works that people can interact with, and is safe to use and fun to use. And that will remain our number one priority launching the initial MVP. But then, obviously, it rolls into what next, you know, you’ve got that out there. We’re well aware, our initial MVP will be unaudited for a couple of weeks. So that’s that first step getting that audit. And we already have an audit partner with with Haken. We’ve been in conversation for a long time. And we’re setting itself ourselves up there to have that as a very smooth process so that we can get that out there as smooth as possible. But then yeah, MVP is MVP means minimum viable product. So we obviously want to be aggressive, continue developing and make sure that you use the MVP out there. So our community has something where they understand they can feel it, touch it, they can interact with it. But then we’re here to continue developing, making it better, ad ding things and making sure that it’s, it’s a more comprehensive prep experience. So I think that’s the, that’s the number one priority for us this year. And then when it comes to Team confidence, I mean, I’m very, very happy with the team that we have, we’ve got a pretty big team, or about 20 people working on this project across community, engineering, product, design, creative, all of that, and we’ve got a great spirit. And, you know, we’re confident because we think that we’re using technology to reinvent something that hasn’t been a very great and rewarding experience in so many senses, for the better. And this is only possible by by working together and building a product with a community led approach. Because when you think about what we’re building, it’s one of those where usually when you have competitive environments, you would think more people equals tougher chances to actually do something here win something here and to compete successfully. And we’re the opposite of that the more people are working with Nezha, and are sticking with Nezha, the more liquidity you have to give away to improve the chances of winning something to increase the prices. And so we’re really, really excited that these types of community led winning dynamics were actually all together, we can all win more, and we improve this for everybody, and nobody has to lose anything. We think that’s a really interesting, you know, community led approach to something new and defy, that will show that technology in this space can develop kind of antiquated products, such as initial games of chance, into completely new things that function in very different ways, but offer yet the same sort of core rewards.
Spicey | OIG
Excellent, amazing stuff. So now we come to our last Twitter question. And this person asks, I think many people are interested in Nezha token, both in terms of characteristics and functionality. So can you tell us what are the advantages of holding Nezha? In the long term? What steps would you take to attract more users and educate them?
Philipp
So lots of things? I think we touched on the core functionality already. So I won’t go into too much detail repeating that. But I think the core question around, you know, why should you hold it? What should you do with it? You know, initially, we already outlined there is MVP functionality that is actually value add, it’s not just saying that you can do something with it will give you benefits. But we’re very, very mindful of when we continue to develop the platform, how can we tie in more benefits to those that support us by by staking as how can we weave that deeper into the core of this platform, and we’ll be continuing to innovate that and make sure that we have more and more use cases where the token just affords that extra bit of functionality and utility, you know, and, and besides that, we know we have a responsibility to our community to set themselves up for success. And so we’re very diligent in our listing strategy. We’re having multiple conversations right now with centralised exchanges, obviously decentralised exchanges, and making sure that our token is available to people, you know, there’s incentives to buy it. And there’s a lot of awareness around it. And we were very diligent and active at the moment making sure that we’re preparing us for that map and that we have these ducks in a row early, so that we can, we can have a very, very structured approach to working this one off. And then the last part of that question was around education. And 100%. This is, you know, this is a relatively complex project for somebody that’s been farming for a while. It’s relatively simple to understand because this kind of is Just a different yield farm, in which you’ve got a chance to win a lot more by giving up your potential staking rewards. So, and for that audience, it’s relatively simple to understand this sort of base layer of content would probably suffice. But we’re very, very aware that it is a challenging product that’s kind of difficult to understand, especially with the insurance mechanisms and the different ways that you know, liquidity actually flows around the system. And so we’re investing at the moment into content, editorial content, video content, you know, we’re doing things like this open forums where people can submit questions and will obviously also continue to do internal amas. So we’ll be about to launch amas on our Twitter spaces, where people can kind of just ask us if there’s something that our content didn’t quite explain. And so what keep down the path of making sure that we distribute enough content to cover any questions that we could think of, and everything that we can think of, we’ll try to, to answer our community as soon as possible across the different channels.
Spicey | OIG
Perfect. Well, that concludes our Twitter questions segment. And we’ll go back to our last two questions. So could you tell us a little about your roadmap up until this date, you know, some of the achievements knees as has gone through and what you’re most proud of? And what is there to see in the upcoming future?
Ivan
Yeah, so I guess, you know, the initial sets of achievements were all around, taking a broad idea, and building that into a very real tangible concept. And presenting this idea out to the investment community for our precede round of fundraising. And so, you know, we’re delighted to get a very warm reception, and we’ve attracted quite a lot of capital to help us then scale the business and partner up with a number of VC funds in the space that we’re very excited about this, this change that we want to bring about a new platform we want to launch. So those were some of the really early sort of achievements through achieved last year. And then, this year, really, it’s been about scaling that and taking the concept, taking that capital to really build out a much bigger team, and go beyond the front end into all of the backend, the integration of smart contracts, you know, continuing to attract more capital and in the second private round of fundraising, and then preparing for the launch. And, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got launch pads lined up on a centralised exchange lined up. We have the Dao entity in place. We’ve got you know, a market making strategy all done. And we’re starting to engage with with our community, grow our community and conducting amas with people like yourself, and, you know, getting getting the message out there in the lead up to the audio,
Spicey | OIG
A lot to look forward to where can people find more about Nezha? If they want to see what’s coming up for Nezha?
Philipp
Yeah, we got our website is Nezha. And it just type in nezha.fi. There will be an overhaul of the website, actually, very shortly, I hope that we can go live with the new version just a couple of days. And then you know, you can find a lot of information across all of our community channels, Twitter, telegram and discord. We filled out a pretty comprehensive content library, especially on our Telegram, where, you know, we’re collecting all the most frequently asked question, knowledge archives, and you can kind of have a dive through there and get lost. And then, you know, there’s an endless amount of information across our medium and our website. Yeah, and if there’s anything that you know, your community can find, our community admins would be more than happy to jump in, ask any questions, answer any questions they need. And they should be live pretty much 24/7 across across the channels.
Spicey | OIG
Amazing. Perfect. Well, for all our viewers, we want to thank Yvonne and Philip for coming in and talking to us today. All the links will be in the description below. So be sure to follow Nezha on their road to launching one of the most amazing projects in blockchain industry. And once again, thanks again. Thanks for coming by Yvonne and Philip, and we hope to have you on again. Thank you very much.
Philip
Thank you have a great day. Thank you.
Spicey | OIG
Well, OIG found me That wraps up another episode in our ama series. Be sure to subscribe, hit the bell notification button and like button so that you can stay up to date with all the content coming up from all OIG. Until next time, we’ll see you soon.
Nezha:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NezhaFi
Telegram: https://t.me/nezhafi
Website: https://www.nezha.fi/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/nezha
