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Frumps | OIG: Hey OIG family, today we have a very special video AMA, we’ve Synchrony are longtime partners. This project has a lot of things going on. And we’re very lucky to have Andy, the co-founder joining us. OIG have been massive fans of Synchrony from the beginning. Since we last spoke, we’ve grown exponentially. We’ve gone from 3000 to 15,000 on Twitter, and Synchrony has seen phenomenal growth. So for those people that have joined recently, could you summarise what Synchrony is and what it does?
Andy Keh: Sure, well, first of all, thank you guys, for being long term supporters of Synchrony. I take out the I and just say you guys are OG’s! But, you know, we love all the support from you guys. I’ll give you guys a top-level summary of what Synchrony is. Synchrony is really fundamentally three things. First of all, it’s copy, trading. So you as a user, you have your wallet, you go to our platform, and check out our leaderboard, or even if you want to just put in a Kol or one of your friends' wallets, and you can follow what they do. You can follow their spot trade, eventually, this is going to expand into other more traditional copy trading things like hey, here’s this take profit stop loss, like I have, like some bots on telegram that follow these signals. So there’ll be like signal based trading and things like that. But, essentially, you can follow somebody what they do, because they’re the expert, right? And you’re not trying to like learn how to be a trader, you’re not trying to do that, you just know that there’s a future here with crypto and you want to follow these people. So first of all, copy trading. The second component is composable indexes. So it’s kind of like the s&p 500 The FTSE 100. It’s an algorithm, an equation that determines what assets you’re having exposure to. So for example, top 10 tokens on Solano by market cap, and each one of the tokens will be weighted slightly differently and depending on the market cap of those tokens, if something falls out, or something falls in, it will reconstitute and rebalance. So it keeps those weights based on that equation. The added bonus to that is we use these indexes on our copy trading wallets as well. So one of the problems that we saw with copy trading that I’ve seen with copy trading myself is like it’s centralised, right? Or it’s, or it’s non-custodial, Not your keys, not your coins, right! I’m sending you my money, and I have to trust you, I want trustlessness, right. So having these indexes, buying the copy trading wallets, for example, top 10 tokens on Solana by market cap, if I’m following you as a trader, and you trade outside of those parameters, then I’m going to ignore that trade. And so what that does is I’m able to follow a Kol or random wall that I found while snooping around like ether scan or wherever I can follow that wallet And I can know that like, they’re not going to dump a bunch of money into Doge And I’m going to follow that. The point is, you can bind your wallet to these parameters, you can whitelist tokens as well. So if you want doge, and it’s outside of those parameters, and the trader trades that then you know, that’ll satisfy those conditions and you will follow that so the indexes really serve two purposes. And then obviously, if you’re a fund or you want to build your own index for people to trade, you can do that as well. So if you want to do the bottom five of the top 30 tokens by a seven-day moving average or something weird like that, you can do that. Which is kind of interesting, right? And then the third thing that ties it all together is is our analytics platform because you’ve got to have good high fidelity data in order to make actionable decisions, regardless of where you’re at. And a lot of retail users, once they get a little bit past the learning curve, you like have ground through it, you’re like, I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand. And it’s like, okay, I get it, like a little bit, you want more data you want a centralised location for you to be able to do your own research. And so that’s what we’re trying to provide as well with the analytics platform. And we’ve got a bunch of amazing partnerships there that are helping us with RPC providers, and a couple of other ones I can’t mention yet, but we’re really excited with and they’re gonna provide us like some really, really high fidelity data and we’ll pass that down on to the users through that and is also through an API for other builders. So that’s what Synchrony is, essentially, in a nutshell,
Frumps | OIG: I love that you’ve got different levels of risk in your, in your protocol, you’ve got the parameters, you can choose, you can blind follow if you’ve got a big gamble about you, there are all these different levels, I like that your product has this sort of that functionality that you’re talking about.
Andy Keh: I was that weirdo, I have this Facebook posts that only got one like in 2013, where I was like, Bitcoin is at $190! At the time, no one knew, even really what Bitcoin was. They thought it was just like weird, funny internet money, this weird, sort of like a scam or whatever. But I was just like, wow, this is this crazy thing. And now that it’s being taken more seriously, from an institutional standpoint, even my grandma’s asking me how to pump her bags. You know what I mean? That’s not the case. I had to help her reset her Amazon password. But you know, the point remains, a lot of my friends are coming out who haven’t talked to in years. They’re like, oh, Andy’s he’s still doing that crypto stuff. Oh, that’s crazy. Like, I just bought a bunch of like, Dogecoin like, blah, blah, blah, like, what do you think about this? I’m like, Man, this is not financial advice. Have you checked out their token model, it’s inflationary, and Elon Musk is like doing some weird stuff. I don’t know how legal that is, you know what I mean? But like, everybody’s interested, it’s just as soon as I’m like, the immutable blockchain, that this immutable ledger that represents a blockchain, it’s like this spreadsheet that every bit is essential. And for people, it's way over their heads. There’s just like, I don’t know, and so, you know, for us, we’re like we’ve reframed the question to, what are people trying to do here, fundamentally, and they’re just trying to have their money work harder for them. For me, I don’t do it a lot anymore. Because I’m so focused on building, I just have my core holdings, and I just let it ride these days. Because I don’t, I literally don’t have the time to try and like, see what’s going on or research a whole lot of like new projects and dig into them from an investment standpoint. I don’t want to spend time in charts. I want to spend time with my family. You know what I mean? Like, what’s the point? I mean, you can get really deep, like, what’s the meaning of life, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know what the meaning of life is. But I can tell you what it isn’t like making a ton of money and dying, just making a ton of money. Do you know what I mean? Because I see some people, especially in this industry, because markets never close. And I’m trying to dance this line as well, that is like exhausting themselves, like working themselves to death. My brother’s one of them, overrun the chain, that’s my brother’s company, He’s got a VC and a marketing agency, but he’s working himself to death. You know, it’s just like, his age. He’s my younger brother and people like, Oh, he’s the older brother, right? I’m like, No. What we’re trying to do is optimise time, that’s what a lot of these things are, is, you know, people on a long enough time scale, we live forever, you can do all the research you can get so into the weeds, but because it’s our most valuable and limited resource. You know, we’ve got to do some things for retail, that mainstream adoption, that we’re trying to bridge that gap, because right now, all the people, here are the early mainstream adopters. And then and there’s this gap between where we’re at, and where the future of retail is at that we have to bridge and it’s not a smooth process, because right now, a lot of the people who are in this industry are at this intersection between software development and blockchain, right? In finance, right. These are things that are on their own quite technical and, you know, quite difficult to understand. So, to bridge that gap, we need to have tools in place that, you know, essentially people don’t even know that they’re interacting with the market. Right? Because
Frumps | OIG: It’s true. It’s complicated, isn’t it? So unless you’ve got that much time or that much knowledge, you can get lost within it. As you said, when you speak to people about what is behind blockchain technology, they switch off. So I quite like Synchrony, you’re, you’re simplifying, there are layers to it. So if you want to go deeper into it, you can,
Andy Keh: Yes And the copy trading thing is definitely the most appealing thing for every single person at retail that we’ve talked to copy trading is the most interesting. On the hedge fund side, it’s the composable indexes, being able to create your own fund that people can subscribe to, you earn a profit off of like some of the withdrawal fees. That’s more interesting on an institutional level, for me as an investor, because I’m so bloody lazy, I’m really interested in the indexes because we do indexes of indexes as well. So I just want one asset, you know, it’s like Lord of the Rings, like one index to rule them all. So I want like an index of like other indexes, like an index of like this, Solana top 10 Ethereum top 10 that may be the top five, copy trading wallets, etc. So I can just worry about this one thing, right? I mean, if there’s a study by Vanguard, it might 2019 or 2010 I don’t remember the exact date. But they said like 80% the indexes outperform actively managed funds 80% of the time. So it’s just like, Yeah, like that. Like, I’m all for that. Right? I’ll take those odds in Vegas any day,
Frumps | OIG: I over trade, I overthink and if I can just leave my money in with somebody who has made some good decisions, and they chose the best 10 And I don’t have to do much, That’s perfect!
Andy Keh: I have a couple of really, really big regrets in my life. One is I was too scared to go bungee jumping when I was 13. I still regret that my dad and my brothers did it. And I look back at that. I was like, oh, man, that’s a big regret of mine. And the second one was selling Bitcoin. I mean, as I said, I was trading Bitcoin since 2010. And I traded a lot of Bitcoin I had, like, over 1000 At one point, and I sold a bunch and you know, I didn’t understand custody very well, because it didn’t have a finance background, right. All the financial tools and information that I have has been learned, you know, external to that because I was in supply chain and analytics and marketing and all sorts of other stuff. I like keeping it all on Mount Gox because I’m like, it’s just like my bank. Right? And it’s safe there. Right? Yeah, and then I, you know, got I got scared. I remember this is like bitcoins over $1,000 This doesn’t seem sustainable, I’m just gonna cash out some and make a little bit of money. And now I’m like, Dude, if I just kept every single Bitcoin if I had understood custody if I had practised what I preached, you know, I’d be I, I’d have like, a ton of money right now. And not that that’s again, that’s not the goal here. But it’s just like, you know, that’s definitely a regret of mine is not like just listening to that little voice. As I was reading this research and development division, and so like, I was looking into all this new technology and doing all this stuff, and PGP encryption was really interesting. And, you know, as on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, and so I didn’t get affected by it directly, but I saw the world around me get affected, and then hearing about all these, like bankers getting these big bonuses after everybody’s getting their houses foreclosed and the homelessness, It just didn’t, you know, it just didn’t make sense. So I was like, oh, yeah, I should definitely really, you know, get into this sort of thing. And like, Yeah, this is the future of telling everybody, this is the future, you know, that Facebook posts like, because $190 I told you guys, I told you guys, it’s $190 I told you guys, and now it’s just like $190 movement on Bitcoin. It’s just like, it’s flat.
Frumps | OIG: Obviously, you’ve launched. And recently, you’ve gone on a central exchange, you want to tell us a little bit about how things have gone since the launch? And maybe give us some highlights and things that you’re proud of that you’ve achieved?
Andy Keh: Yeah, absolutely. So we have been stricken by some unfortunate luck. If you look at these sorts of events, like a market maker does, like if it’s green, it’s an opportunity to take profit, if it’s red, it’s an opportunity to buy in low. Right? And I look at that from a more macro scale. It’s just like, yeah, so why Solana went down on our demo day. Solana went down when we’re originally supposed to launch then, you know, just miserable market conditions on the heels of, Federal Reserve interest rates. And I mean, just look at the general market. It’s just like this is not a good time to sort of launch a product but this isn’t a short term product, right? This isn’t something that we’re gonna turn around, we’re not making like, that might have a shorter shelf life, like a game or something like that, you know, like, I’m a big gamer too. But these things are only around for so long, regardless of how much you iterate them. So we are a long term project. So it’s just like, ah, you know, markets not great, but we’re gonna be here for a minute. So like, just looking back in time, on every single time people were like, This is the end of crypto, how many times like 2010 How many cycles that is, but I’ve heard this is the end of crypto so many times at this point, it’s just like, Guys, it’s like you, it’s like you saying the sun’s for sure. Not gonna rise tomorrow. I mean, it’s dark right now, the sun’s not gonna rise tomorrow. Like, I mean, I know, it’s happened a couple of times before this, but come on, guys. Like, you know, this is the future. Aside from that, you know, the amount of support that we’ve gotten from people who are interested in what we’re trying to build, and not the token price, the amount of amazing sort of suggestions that we’ve gotten from our community has been huge. In terms of big things coming up. We’ve got Dopamine integration, they’re fantastic. We love those guys. They’re another intro from my brother, that’ll help us get a lot of exposure to their communities because they have, I think they have like 1.5 million signed up users in like, 300,000, I don’t quote me on these exact numbers, but something to the, to the effect of like, you know, millions of actual users, and then you know, hundreds of 1000s of monthly active users. So that gives us a lot of exposure. We also have, I don’t think I can say, well, we have another partnership with a mobile NFT platform and marketplace that’s coming up that’s going to help host our partnership with Wednesdays. Wednesdays is the NFT that we’re putting out in combination with this other team and some artists and it’s a utility NFT token. So it’s, you know, yes, it’s frogs. And I’m like, I’m, I’m like Low key obsessed with frogs, which is why we went with, with this. I just think they’re, they’re funny. And it’s just like one of these inside jokes that I keep pushing and pushing and eventually, people are like, Alright, I guess I like frogs too. So
Frumps | OIG: I did take a look at them. And the utility is pretty impressive. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Andy Keh: Yeah. So I mean, for me, the first hackathon I entered into, for crypto was an Eth hackers hackathon. And it was an NFT youth hackathon. This is like, two years ago or something like that. We came up with this idea to turn the bill of lading for oil tankers driving from the Permian Basin in Texas, which is the largest oil deposit, like in the world, but because it’s on land, it’s a bit harder to get to or it’s not doesn’t make as much sense supply chain wise, because you have to get it on these trucks around. So it’s, there’s a lot of oil there. And it is quite profitable. But it’s not like you know, the Middle East or something where it’s a little more accessible, but returned the bill of lading of these oil tankers that are going across the United States, bringing oil to these different refineries, so on and so forth, into an NFT. And the purpose of that was not to evolve it or trade it or whatever the purpose of it was to, to have a digital on-chain asset that we could collateralize and for defi purposes because you know, I have this supply chain background, and I’m like, alright, what are the actual practical applications of blockchain outside of like a Dodge coin or, or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, because just like I was saying, with money, like, people shouldn’t even care that blockchain is running, they should just know that there’s a superior underlying technology that’s helping enable this. And from a defi standpoint for in the context of supply chain. All of these goods like I remember, we do these like these, like fashion shows and things. And I’m just like, it’s wintertime, why are we doing a fashion show for summer? It’s because there’s so much lead time for these things because they get on boats, right? And so however long it’s on the water, it’s just sitting there, and it’s not really doing a lot for you. So I’m like, Well, if you could collateralize these goods in route. And even if you’re only getting 30% of the value there and put it out and lend it as a stable token somewhere. Now you’re really helping your margins because like, the worlds getting tighter, especially importing from like China because you know, how can you like optimise like everybody needs to optimise the old way of doing business for bankers. It’s got to change no more like, you know, 100 million dollar bailouts for guys in the middle of an economic crisis. And supply chain. Yeah, it’s getting a little tighter. There’s like inflation that we have to deal with like So I mean, I guess the point is like, I’ve always been searching for further utility for these things I’ve always been searching for like, for the non-vaporware side of things, which, you know, I’m afraid like to say that there are quite a few of these projects that are out there that that are just selling, selling JPEGs you know, I mean, I hate to be so derogatory, and other NFT people would be like, jpg, blah, blah, blah, it’s immutable. And you can, it’s verifiable ownership, I get it. But let’s do verifiable ownership in the context NF T’s, like, I can prove that this is the only one that this is my ID, you know, like, I heard of this, this cab company somewhere in Africa that that’s using a blockchain Uber app, so that, you know, single women who are trying to get taxis will know that, hey, this is for sure the driver, it is safe for me to get into this vehicle, right? So with that sort of foundation, that’s where the way we approached this, but we also wanted to be fun, right? Like, you know, Synchrony, we take, you know, security and all these things very, very seriously. But it doesn’t need to be like the suit and tie traditional, like banking system that stuffy behind bulletproof glass type of thing. And so that, you know, having these NFT frogs, you know, it gives it a little bit of character, I think they’re great, you know, we got a there’s like a couple of really fantastic artists over there, like the art itself is really cool. So from the collectable, fundamental standpoint, I think, you know, there’s value there, I like them, I think they’re really cool. I got to have a little say in some of the characters or the accessories. And, you know, they listened, and they put it out there. So as touched to be able to do that. But yeah, so some of the NFT utility that we’re doing, first of all, you can it stakes on our platform, right, you can put it in your wallet, you can use it as your profile photo, that other people can see right and other people can interact with. So there’s a social component to it that gives users exclusive access to some of our social channels, kind of like the DGen Apes, you have to have the NFT to get access to these things. The NFT also gives you access to our pre-alpha, you know, launches of these, these platforms and functionalities, you basically you get to be first and then you also get a lot of the actual accolades and achievements like we’re trying to gamify this thing as much as possible as well. So it’s like, it’s, I mean, to use it example, like, I’m on like, not to flex or anything, but I’m on. I’m on like day 175 of my Duolingo screen right now, you know what I mean? But having these things, these awards, , these achievements, and then also on if A, for example, if a leader has this NFT in their wallet, it also gives the community a little bit of added knowledge that they’re a part of the Synchrony community, like they, they went so far as to get this thing, they’re there. It’s like a, it’s like an extra level of verification without requiring like that, that KYC you know what I mean? It’s just like, hey, they’ve got this, they’ve got the Synchrony NFT. So they at least participated in one of these things in order to get it. So yeah, there’s a community recognition. So there’s a couple of layers to it. And we’re gonna continue to explore the different utilities as we go as well.
Frumps | OIG: I love the idea of it. How do we get them? Well, when are they released?
Andy Keh: Oh, that’s, that’s a really good question, so from my understanding, the Wednesday’s website is going to be fully updated with a lot of the roadmap and how to get it and where to get it and all that stuff. I saw a sneak peek yesterday I believe it’s next week. So within the next seven days, they’re going to have their website updated. And that will give a little bit more firm deadlines. From my understanding, it’s going to be close to the end of February, when they’re going to launch it. We are doing a small raffle right now, for anybody in the public, because we were doing an airdrop for our IDO participants. So if they held that they hold for the 21 days, and they do a couple of these actions, they’ll be able to, you know, get the airdrop at the community who wasn’t able to participate in the IDO or the people who sold their synchrony tokens or whatever. They can still get it by going to our pre-alpha version of our really basic wallet functionality. We’re just trying to get people to connect their wallets and we’re trying to get them to search a wallet. We’re just kind of stress testing. We want people to you know, we want everybody to know that every single day we spend all of our time building and you know, we’re pumping out all these things and So we have this wallet, sort of analyzer searcher that we’re setting up to have people be able to save wallet addresses that they’re following, and do some backtesting and see which wallets have been more profitable, we’re trying to get a bunch of data for a wallet trust factor, which it digs into the analytics a little bit, which is very interesting and important for me, the wall trust factor, basically, we’re trying to give people these at a glance metrics, trying to bridge this gap, right? Because if I’m coming in, and I’m just looking at a wallet, like how much money has been in your wallet over time, it’s difficult for me, even if I’m looking at the protocols that you’ve interacted with, is difficult for me to be like, hey, is this actually a profitable wallet? Or did this do just like, move money off to a central exchange and bring more money back? Or did they just like Fiat on-ramp somewhere, and then turn that into something? So what we’re trying to do is, collect a ton of data, and put it through some of these, like machine learning algorithms and see all right, how long is the wallet been around? what protocols has it interacted with, we will be able to do it Within a confidence range, it’s not going to be like for sure, this is like, you know, the best wallet, supersafe, we’ll be able to be like, hey, like, red, yellow, green, or, you know, the gold, silver bronze or on a scale of one to 10? How confident do we feel that this is like a trustworthy, profitable Wallet. So that’s one of the things we’re doing. I believe it’s on our like, on our Twitter and in our Telegram, so people will be able to earn some of these, these NFT’s through that, just by getting on there and connecting your wallet. And we’re going to do a raffle when we will, we’ll drop a couple to the community to check out when Wednesday’s launches, as well. So that’s one of the ways that the community can get involved now. And secure one of this limited edition, Wednesday’s NFT frogs, really excited about that there’s only going to be 5000 I think they I think that they are going to do like another season or something like that. We’re gonna see what happens with that.
Frumps | OIG: That’s exciting. I really like the way you have done it. It’s a great way to stress-test your platform to get people familiar with it. And a good way to reward holders as well. Very intelligently done. You mentioned earlier about staking. So that was one thing I was excited to hear about is when will your native staking model store.
Andy Keh: Native staking is at the end of this month, within 10 days, we’ll announce the exact date. We’re auditing it. We’re auditing everything. I mean, there’s safety programmes, or there’s a lot of them out there. So and they’ve all been audited. But we’re gonna go through this extra layer of security because, you know, it’s your money and therefore your time. And you know, we take that very seriously. And I think this that was $2 billion got hacked last year or something like that. Again, don’t quote me these ballpark numbers. But yeah, so you know, we want to make sure that that, first of all, is the platform is really safe and secure. And then you know, make sure it’s very user friendly as well. But yeah, staking is going to go live at the end of this month. Really excited about that. We’re trying to time it like on the heels of this AirDrop. So that you know people will go from there to the staking programme. And the staking as well, as also starts unlocking this Synchrony token utility, because we’re really focused on driving a lot of value through the utility of the token not driving the value through other means, right. And so for the advanced features for advanced copy trading, because like, there’s going to be a free and tiered version of this subscription model, which is the business model we’re looking at. And the synchrony token is going to help enable that. And you know, staking it, we’ll provide insurance on the indexes. Staking will provide users with advanced analytics for the analytics components of the business as well. So we’re starting to, you know, tie that into the other functionality of the site. So,
Frumps | OIG: Brilliant. Is there anybody that is doing something similar that you would consider as competition and if so, what makes you stand out over them?
Andy Keh: There’s no competition because we want to be the place that people come to and you can interact with any protocol how you want to interact with seminary you can do it here you interact with there, you can do it here. I’d like I said I wanted the one asset to rule them. All right, like We’re gonna do this thing where were you know when we’re going to be cross-chain, we’re going to be all this because people want their money to work harder for them, and they don’t really care what blockchain they’re on, right? You know only like only the maxis or whatever really like, you know what I mean? I think that’s a little myopic like and you know, I have a bunch of big BTC Maxi friends that I made fun of and stuff here that, and I for a long time was a vaccine, you know, when I first heard this other thing someone’s like, come on guys, like, what are you doing? And then I heard about smart contracts. I was like, okay, all right. All right. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, we are looking at nobody being a competitor. Because if someone does do something better than us, then like, how do we integrate with that? How do we use that like, my, my old boss at that Berkshire company used to say, you don’t have to be smart, you just have to recognise it and copy it effectively. So that’s, that’s how I’ve kind of lived my life is just like, you know, if I see something that’s interesting, interesting, that’s a good idea, you know, kind of like trying to remove, you know, my ego from it and just be like, That’s a good idea. That idea is better than my idea. How can I either reach out to them and partner with them? Or how can we do this and do it more effectively?
Frumps | OIG: Great answer and it leaves room for growth and for development. As you said, the number of partnerships, you’ve already got, you’re not out there competing with everyone, you’re out there to grow with people. There’s a lot of stuff you spoke about coming up in the short term, I’m really interested in your vision for synchrony in the future, and what excites you in the long term, like, what maybe have you got planned in the long term?
Andy Keh: Oh, man, the long term vision is the most interesting vision to me.I know, retail is the most interested in the copy trading. But for me, I mean, the indexes, because I mentioned it before, because I’m lazy, I want to spend more time with my family, than be digging around in the charts, I want to have the indexes of indexes going. I want to, to have a single stable coin into, and have it turned into this thing that I can forget about and come back later, you know, for kids college, or, you know, whatever, like just, you know, set and forget type of thing. But the most interesting thing for me is the analytics in the long term, and cross-chain, obviously, in there as well. But the analytics for me, because it’s such an infrastructure level project. And you know, I’m Google Analytics and AdWords certified because I used to work at this marketing agency and stuff and I got to see firsthand you know, I’m also a sales Salesforce admin and architect and all this stuff, I got to see firsthand the value that data can provide. And from a, from a synchrony business model standpoint, uh, it’s like the gold rush in California. And I don’t, I don’t know what time frame it was. But this California Gold Rush people know about the California gold rush. A lot of people moved west, because people were finding gold in these rivers. And it’s just everywhere. Not a lot of people found gold. But the people who saw pickaxes and helmets, they made bank, so I want to sell pickaxes and, and helmets here, I want to support the ecosystem I like. We’re really, really excited about this because we’re working with RPC providers as well. And we’re working on indexing call data. So not just on-chain written data, but when you’re on your wallet, and you’re checking your price, you’re calling this data, right when you’re when your transaction data you pay for when you have to put something on chain, you pay for it, when you just check when you’re just looking, it’s free. And right now, these are PC providers, they get this information. And they just rewrite it on these solid-state drives again, and again and again. And every three months, the solid state drive dies, because that’s how much they’re rewriting onto these drives. Well, we’re starting to collect this data and indexes data separately. And you know, Mohammed on the team, he’s got two masters degrees or, or something like that. And one of them’s in, in data science. He’s, he’s really into analytics and data. And obviously, I’ve done a fair bit of that myself on a professional level. You can get some very interesting insights into the entire ecosystem this way. It's valuable to retail because it’s like, what’s consumer sentiment looking like? Or what projects are having people up trades and not execute? Or what projects are people looking into and checking like, what what are people connecting their wallets to what like what are all how does this look and can we do it on a heatmap and can we do it based off of time? And so users or we’ll be able to, like layer this data into the on-chain data into the platform data into like, you know, Google search trends into, like, you know, hashtags on Twitter, like have this like just stack of data that we consolidate into, you know, red, yellow, green, or as in-depth as you want it to, we can, you know, make these custom marketing reports, things like that. On the institutional level, though, it also creates a whole nother wealth of value through this API that they can call. And, you know, we’re still figuring out the, you know, idiosyncrasies around how we’re going to develop that sort of model. But I mean, I, I’m sure you guys can see sort of potential value here. And having like, a sort of Google level, like, like, we can see, like what’s going on in the industry and you as a protocol, we can, we can approach you and be like, here’s when most people, you have some of this data, but here’s what people are looking for, here are the trades that they’re setting up and not executing, here’s what time here’s the things that like, are not doing well, because right now, you know, protocols, they do have access to some of this data, but they’re not making use of it, because they’re built, they’re busy, you know, building a lending Protocol, or they’re busy, you know, did like there’s a lot of these, these optimization, like areas for them, and I’m super excited about that. It’s probably the least sexy thing, like, you know what I mean, like copy tradings, like, you know, definitely what most retail is really interested in. But for me, it’s like analytics because of how interesting it is, I love looking at data and trying to draw actionable conclusions from it and just, like, get a different idea of how people are interacting with this new reality. So that, to me is really, really interesting. The upcoming development we have for that. I don’t know if I should do this if I should say this, but this will be like sort of a semi first public announcement of this, but we’re going to be putting out our first API called token stream, it’s, you know, a, a feature that synchrony uses currently, we plug into this API, we use this API ourselves, and we’re gonna make this publicly available. Basically, you can look at it as, as like defi, pulse on Solana plus some extra little features and things like that. And that’s like the, you know, we crawl before we walk before we run, this is like a first start, this is eventually going to, you know, be every single chain. So when a new company comes in, when a project like ours comes in, and we need to pull us solana specific ecosystem data to create an index or something like that, you as a builder can do that. And you don’t need to go reinvent the wheel here, right because there isn’t currently something like this that exists on solana and we’re gonna deploy this on on every single chain. This is what the next we’re going to go for Rust compatible chains first because obviously salon is written in rust. So you know, we’re looking at polka dot and near next well, near has a hackathon coming up that we’re going to enter because it’s just part of our roadmap. And it helps us get more exposure to these ecosystems. But I think from a value add standpoint, you know, it gets our foot in the door in these other ecosystems without needing to redo the entire back end and all the smart contracts for synchrony, we can get exposure to these different ecosystems, deploy an index on them, which they're currently aren’t on most ecosystems, there’s not a defi pulse on these on most ecosystems. So people can get, you know, diversified exposure to multiple chains without having to go through all of the hassle. Like how many times have I breached tokens, like I’ve, you know, even like it’s embarrassing, but I’ve said money to contract addresses before I had the wrong thing on my clipboard. Like I literally was like I’m gonna send a test $1,000. it still stings, man, it stings almost as much as like, losing and getting scammed out of all those Bitcoin, but at least I got scammed and it was Mount Gox his fault. This was like all mine, you know what I mean? So like having to reduce some of that friction there, I think is really important. But then, you know, getting our name out to these different ecosystems. Because that’s really important people. I care what chain I’m on, right? I do. But this isn’t just for me. This is for everybody. And most people don’t care what chain they’re on, right? They just want to get some exposure to these things. And you know, when right now especially like, like, my wife’s dad got into Bitcoin at $63,000 Dude, I mean, not, not financial advice. I was always like, Hey, I’m never like, do it or don’t do it. You know? because, you know, I don’t want to be that guy that has you put your life savings into something because you know people see it, they’re like, oh, maybe like, it’ll still go up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, it does help us. It helps the community get exposure, diversified exposure to different ecosystems without needing to be like, Okay, I want to come to solana. But like, you know, there are 300 projects here, and like, what do I do, like the top 10, their market caps are too big, like, I have a little bit higher risk portfolio than then trying to get something that’s not going to move as much, you know, what can I do here to get this and so that that provides us, you know, it provides the community with a pretty interesting opportunity to get their feet wet in some of the different places. And the for us is synchrony. And that’s our deployment roadmap for cross-chain integration is like, we’re going to put token stream on these on these places, provide the API to builders there. Um, it also does these interesting, like secondary and tertiary value drivers to it as well, like, you know, obviously, the API, once you get over a certain call level, like, you know, we’ll probably have to charge it for you, as most API’s do. So there’s an interesting sort of, you know, value proposition there. But also, new projects that come in, that aren’t listed yet. You can get, you can get exposure, you know what I mean? Like, it’s hard, like, what am I going to do is like a VC or user who’s trying to research new projects, I’m going to go to the hackathons going to see who won that I’m going to go to this or that, what we were trying to do is have this platform where new projects who are just getting started, you can get access to your entire to the entire ecosystem, you can use the API, and please reach out to us, we’ll feature you on our platform, you know, it will be in an unpriced section, because you’re not live yet. And then you know, VCs, and this is like really thinking like down the road, and who knows if this business model will work out, but like, you know, VCs will be able to get access to, to new projects as well. Right? And maybe we have like an alpha version, where it’s just like, hey, here’s new projects that aren’t listed yet that you can get access to if you pay a small monthly subscription fee or something like that, you know, I’m just, you know, I’m not trying to nickel and dime people, I’m just trying to create value as much value to everybody. For every single one of these components, like everywhere we go, right? So yeah, that’s like another sort of value driver there. But yeah, that’s like, what I’m really interested in the far future is like this heavily cross-chain integration, where you can come in and get exposure to every single ecosystem that we have access to, through one. And then also, you know, the heavy analytics and treating it like a more of like a Google Play, sort of like a marketing pixel or something like that, where we can really see customer consumer sentiment a little bit with higher fidelity.
Frumps | OIG: That’s huge. I mean, it’s hard to digest the scale of that, because the potential is so vast, it’s exciting.
Andy Keh: It is it’s definitely, you know, synchrony is a monumental project. It is, you know from the building side of things, you look at it, and it’s just like, this is a lot of work, you know, but we started this thing, last February solana was at six bucks. So, you know, people are complaining right now, and I opened up I like, looked at coingecko. Before this, I was like, Oh my heart, but we started building us a lot at six by seven, we and we’re gonna continue to grind for years to come until we have like version ones of everything like really, really smooth, really clean. That’s, that’s best in class that compares to traditional, like E-commerce experiences, traditionally, you know, like, with like Amazon, I don’t ever expect to go into Amazon and have some sort of issue with like payment or searching or anything like that. So we want it to be one of these sorts of experiences where people aren’t even, like, super aware of what shade they’re on and all that. And it takes a lot of work to get there. So like I said, we’re crawling before we walk before we run, you know, we’re leading with in terms of how we address this the community. We’re very transparent in terms of everything that we’re doing, where we’re going, you know, what we’re working on now.
Frumps | OIG: Andy, thank you for those amazing answers. We’re going to go into our next segment, which is the Twitter questions. We had an amazing response from the community. And we chose four of the best questions we could find.
Twitter community Questions:
Question 1)
Andy Keh: So I did talk a little bit about our dopamine partnership, we’re really excited to be working with those guys. Now, we’ve been chatting with them for a while, and they’ve got a phenomenal user base. And I think there’s a lot of synergy there, they do help us get into some, some doors that we would not be able to get into without them. They also have a huge user base, a tonne of regular active monthly users as well. So we do see a tonne of added value there. We also are partnered with Wednesday’s NFT. And we’re really excited about it. I talked about that briefly as well just a utility entity for synchrony. And it’s also frog. So I’m a big fan, big fan of that. And then we have a major major partnership. The integration, I should say, coming up, I would love to talk about it, I can’t, because I promise not to spill the beans until the marketing team says so. But I’m, I’m so excited about that. And I’ve been invested in these guys on a retail level for a couple of years now. So I’m really excited to actually be able to work with them. Yeah, we partied with them a little bit in Lisbon for this Solana breakpoint event as well. So it’s just great to like we know their team, I know their technology. I’ve been a huge fan of them like I know their fundamentals, all that stuff. I’m a big fan of that. So yeah, well, it’s gonna be we’re gonna make the announcement soon. We just have to wait on the clearance from that from the marketing department.
Frumps | OIG: Very exciting stuff. This includes there, I think the IG community will be digging through them.
Questions 2)
Andy Keh: That’s a good question. Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is you’re just trying to make your money work harder for you, right, based on your risk portfolio, and all of that, we have a pretty interesting combination of the way that we approach like social copy, trading, mirror trading, that sort of thing. First of all, it’s noncustodial, we’re not going to hold your money, they’re not going to hold your money, right? Like, your, your keys, your coins. So that’s, that’s like one of the first things that that we emphasise, you follow human traders, right. But they’re bound by indexes. And I talked about this, this briefly already. So you kind of getting the best of both worlds here. And eventually, you know, obviously will incorporate like signal training and that sort of thing. But, you know, currently, the major, like roadblocks for us is they’re centralised. noncustodial and you have to trust the asset manager, right. So we’re, you know, decentralised noncustodial and it’s trustless. And it’s trustless. Because if you’re like, the number one copy trader, if you’re like, an amazing trader, and you have a bad day, and you just feel like trolling a bunch of people, and you know what I mean, you know, they’re, they’re trolls out there, like my friends you build the bridge, I just live under it, right. And that’s, like, kind of the thing that that that happens here is like, we want to, you know, make it safe for people to follow strangers, right. And you do that by having it, you know, noncustodial and, and decentralised, but then by having it bound to, to an index that, you know, automatically, like rebalances and reconstitutes, based off of market conditions, and will restrict what you will follow or not follow. That is definitely like like a big added advantage to what we do and nobody else is doing it like this. And we think that this is like a really, really interesting novel unique way to go about mitigating some of the pitfalls of like current, you know, copy trading methods.
Question 3)
Andy Keh: That’s an interesting question. Uh, yeah, crypto is it never sleeps? I don’t know if you can see in my eyes, I haven’t slept a lot either. We’re a young, small, scrappy team. And I think I mentioned earlier, you don’t have to be smart. You just have to recognise it and copy it effectively. Right. So we’ve pivoted quite a few times like originally, we were just straight like us just a straight index platform. But we so we’re quite agile and in the way that we’re able to move things around and switch, we’re also looking to be cross-chain immediately. Like we’re like I said, we’re entering the near hackathon. Know, that’s taking place this month, we’ll probably deploy on polkadot shortly after that, you know, polkadots got some amazing technology under its substrate, you know, the parachains, big fan of kasama as well. In terms of long term vision for forecasting, that’s all about the machine learning that we’re applying to what we’re doing with RPC providers, like I said, we have, we have on-chain data. So it’s like the written transaction data we have on-chain call data, we have off-chain data like Google search trends, Twitter, analysts, whatever have you, and then we have, then we’ll have our platform-specific data, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna put all this stuff together. And we’re going to see all the interesting new metrics that come out of it because they’re their insights that exists. In a combination of these, this vertical the stack of data, that nobody knows right now that nobody’s aware of that we don’t know yet that we can even hypothesise that once we get all this data lined up and looking at it. And you know, we, we run it through like a couple like ML, like algorithms or something like that, we’re gonna be able to tease out some very, very interesting metrics that are going to drive a lot of value, I think, for the entire ecosystem. And I mean, again, this is like the thing that’s I’m most excited about in the long term. So yeah, yeah, we’re really excited about that.
Question 4)
Andy Keh: That I’m, I’m so glad you asked this question. We actually have a professor of UX and UI. Who’s at the University of Baltimore, or where was it? I don’t know, someplace in the United States. He’s been doing web three user experience and user interface design since 2017. He’s a designer, he’s a phenomenal designer, really, he knows his stuff. He builds these gigantic projects for fun. And we’ve engaged his services to help us as we build out these features for him to go in and do like a full study, like make sure that he’s, he’s gonna do like recorded user studies of every single step along the way to make sure that this is optimised for us because something that I’ve seen, and you know, the current iterations is a synchrony don’t have this applied. But you know, this is in the near future. We’re engaging in services in the middle of next month when we start having more of the platform put together on the front end. But everybody forks code from somewhere else, so everything looks like uniswap, or everything looks like, you know, whatever else, right? And people just, you can’t see the forest through the trees. Like everybody who’s in crypto is just like, Yeah, this is just the way it is. It’s like, no, no, it doesn’t need to be like that. Right? So you know, for example, again, you don’t need to be smart, just recognise it and copy it effectively, if we’re gonna do search, and we have like, a tonne of different products, who does search with a tonne of different products, while Amazon does search with a tonne of different products? While right because if we’re like looking, oh, is it a DAX? Is it a lending protocol? What chain is it on? There’s like all of these different like SKU, I mean, you could, you know, qualify them as individual projects or on SKU and how they’re categorised. We can use Amazon’s hierarchy for that, right? So we’re I’m trying what I’m trying to do is bring the environment that everybody is comfortable with interacting online into crypto. And crypto is ripe for district disruption. I remember I was on this is like two years ago or something or I don’t know what time, right. I was like looking into this project called octofi. And I was like, and is not good right now. But at the end, you know, it pumped really, if you look at the chart like I got out really close to the top. It was great. It was great. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it on purpose. But you know, worked out. But the problem was is I was trying to tell my buddy to get it because their APY was like 3,000% or something. I was like, This is great. This is fantastic. problem was it was on Eth and so gas fees were value-destroying, which is one of the reasons why we built on Solana. But I was like, Don’t worry, Tyler. My friend’s name is Tyler. He’s one of my best friends. I was like, Don’t worry, all you have to do is well, first of all, you got to get crypto, you got to get the wallet. And then after that, you got to go to this one place. And you got to buy these two separate tokens, right, this one and this one and you got to take that and go to another place and deposit them and then you get another token you can then you can take that one and you can go somewhere else. It’s like Bro, that’s too many steps. You know? So what we’re trying to do is just make it as close to one-click solution as possible. It’s our job as builders to reduce the amount of time between intention and outcome to zero, right. Like, what it should be is like, I think of something and it manifests. I mean, that’s the, if we’re looking at the hockey stick, you know, Moore’s law, the singularity type of thing, that’s the direction that we’re going is like, close to as now as possible when I want something, right. I don’t know how good that is for the instant gratification generation and some of the pitfalls there. But that’s sort of beside the point. It’s like, we’re, we’re trying to have this be like, I click a button, and it deploys my capital. Or I go and I see I get the information that I that I’m looking for, for me tailored for me, right now. So we’re trying to get as close to that as possible with like Fiat on-ramps, we’re working with a couple of Fiat on-ramps, so people don’t need to deal with the friction of like, going to a central exchange, and blah, blah, blah, blah, like, you can just feel it on-ramp into a token you hit, you hit Buy, and it purchases your index or know, sets up your wallet and your wallet starts copy trading, whatever it is. That’s that is the midterm goal is to be best in class for UX UI, to I mean, not even reinvent the wheel, just take all the things from all the people that have spent all that money on UX UI elsewhere, and then just apply it in our context. If you look at the video, one of the previous demo videos where we’re just going through like just a sketch, like the wireframe, basically for our dashboard. And you look at the search functionality. It is literally Amazon search, I’m not kidding, because they have they spend millions of dollars, you know, Jeff Bezos Lex Luthor looking guy like, is out there. And he’s he, you know, they’re, you know, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the world for a reason. So, you know, we’re trying to take all of the best user experiences out there and apply it to us in a context that makes sense, obviously, like, people aren’t going to be shopping for a new toothbrush on synchrony. But they’ll look for a new deck. So how do we you know, recontextualize this stuff, but yeah, UX UI is one of the most important things that we’re focused on outside of like, you know, security and making the functions work. It’s like, you got to be able to use it. You know what I mean? It can be the best tool in the world. If you can’t use it, then it’s not a tool.
Frumps | OIG: Well, it makes sense, especially when you give an answer like that, and you explain how you go about forming. It does sound complicated, but I really liked the idea that you’re going to go out there get things that people are familiar with that works, emulate it, improve it, evolve it! You’ve got good people behind your team working with that. OIG already support you but the more you speak the even better it sounds. So excellent answer. So that brings us to the end. I really enjoyed speaking with you, Andy. Are there any final words you’d like to leave with the OIG community?
Andy Keh: Well, first of all, thank you guys so much for your continued support. You guys like I said, you were early investors in us. You know, we really love what you’re doing. We love you guys. Like as we continue to build this thing out. We’d love you guys to give us input. If you guys have ideas on how we can improve. As I said, you have to be smart, just recognising, copied effectively. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at that. You know, so if you guys have a smart idea, we’re always down to hear that. Please check us out on our socials on our telegram and look forward to some of the huge news that’s coming up and some of the features that we’re gonna start releasing.
Great stuff. Thanks again.
Frumps | OIG: Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.
Synchrony:
Website: https://synchrony.fi/
Telegram:https://t.me/SynchronyFi
Twitter:https://twitter.com/SynchronyFi
Discord: discord.gg/synchrony
