Vy Finance Interview

Hello, this is Conward with Crypto Loops. Today, we will be going over a recent interview we conducted with Jack Kochen, the co-founder of Vy Finance or VyFi. Vy Finance is a decentralized exchange (DEX), and so much more, that is being built and prepared in anticipation of the mainnet launch of smart contracts on Cardano.

Conward: Hello Jack, it’s nice to have you on the show, and thank you for taking the time to talk with us today and answer a few questions about the work you’re doing with Vy Finance.

Jack: Hey man, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here, and I’m really liking your set-up. I like your YouTube channel and everything. So it’s great to have this all come together.

Conward: Aw, thank you. So, first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself—your background, what drew you to crypto in general…?

Jack: So, to be a hundred percent realistic about it, while I wasn’t really a partaker of this market when I first heard about Bitcoin, people would say that it was used for a bunch of interesting industries. This is a currency being used for multiple multi-trillion-dollar industries. So, from that I realized, okay, this has huge financial potential, but the technology of it was really what drew me in.

The way a blockchain works is fascinating, and one day we may even have hash-chains if computers get that good. That, and just you know, community growths being evolved with videogames – communities growing up on the computer especially – when you’re talking to people in these games, it will bring up stuff like this.

And I first heard about it a long time ago. I can’t even say when. My Coinbase’s oldest record is [from] 2013, and if Circle Pay was still around then I can get that one, you know. So, I’ve been around for a while. I really like the idea of crypto, but most importantly, I like seeing it evolve. I have a lightning node right behind me, but I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. I’m a progress maximalist, you know?

Conward: Yeah.

Jack: And I feel like it just stems from there. I did not think Bitcoin would get to where it is today, though. Oh my God.

Conward: Oh, no, it’s grown, most certainly. I remember, if you looked through some of the forums, you might see somebody calling somebody a “moon boy” thinking Bitcoin was gonna get to ten dollars, and now you’re like… Well.

Jack: Yeah, and if you held from when it was pennies, and you genuinely thought it was going to be hundreds or thousands or something one day, you’re pretty crazy. I would never even expect that. I’ve been huge into Bitcoin, but to think $50,000 someday, from something that was so cheap back in the day… Most people I know who’ve held that long, including myself in some cases, not really Bitcoin, [were] forgetting [about holding it], which is probably the best way to do it, honestly.

Conward: Oh yeah, so you’re not checking the prices every, ten, twenty minutes. Oh, most certainly.

Jack: Oh, all the anxiety.

Conward: So, Vy Finance and your long-term goals with more community-focused projects like Vy Learn and Vy Charity sound terrific. Can you tell us about how you and your team landed on these?

Jack: Yeah, sure thing. So, with Vy Learn, one of the whole ideas of Vy Finance is that while it is a whole DeFi (decentralized finance) – everything you see directly below (this paragraph) is DeFi – but we will have one small CeFi (centralized finance) kind of offshoot. Because you know you have to keep them separate to keep both things safe. And that will be a fiat on-ramp way down the line.

And with that, we thought we could do Vy Learn, which would be a good way to teach people while helping them to get crypto. This is Australian based, by the way. In Australia, crypto is up and coming, and they have wonderful laws with it. For example, me sending you a Bitcoin is equivalent to me building a chair out of wood and giving you that, or selling you a lighter or a cup, or anything like that. It’s more of an object than in America, where it is six different things at once sometimes.

So, with [Vy] Learn, we want to help Australians, and you know, you can tell I’m an American, but most of the company’s Australian. My great friend, the primary founder, wanted to help Australians – or as they call them, the young ones, “kiwis”, which I think is adorable – get into crypto. They have such a good set-up there, government-wise, for crypto to be exploding in the future.

And Vy Charity is just an offshoot of another project we hope to get into. These are down the line, of course. These are way down the line. These are goals to achieve. They can’t even be promised right now. But Vy Charity would be our attempt at moving away from things such as – I don’t want to say any specific names – specific charities that are known to take big cuts where it’s not necessary. So hopefully we can decentralize the idea of a charity to where people can see, with one hundred percent transparency, that the money is going where they want.

Conward: Okay. Similar to how Cardano is allowing payments in ADA to different organizations, so as to make it seamless between organizations. Is that it? Or how do you guys imagine that possibly going?

Jack: Both the seamlessness and allowing payments, but not to an organization you would directly think of. More so like, for example, I can’t really talk about this too much, so I can just say it without saying their name that we are working already with a charitable organization that will be helping out certain communities in Miami, and perhaps countries that are unbanked, such as Heidi, Dominican Republic, perhaps. I can’t go too into details, so I have to keep it ambiguous, as you know.

Conward: Of course.

Jack: Hopefully, you know, they are unbanked, too, and that’s part of the reason as what we’ll get to in a bit – I bet you have a question for this – why we chose Cardano. That is a big reason. Because of what they’re doing in Africa, and whatnot, becoming such an Ecosystem.

Conward: Of course. As with what you were saying, as you know, I’m a big believer in Cardano and its potential for decentralized finance, and I love that you’re looking to build Vy Finance on the Cardano blockchain. Can you talk a little bit about what made you choose Cardano?

Jack: Yeah, so really, I’ve been a fan of Cardano for years. I heard it was getting the blockchain, the Smart Chain, and I was really excited to hear that, because Cardano’s run rather efficiently. I’ve done a lot of exchanges from Binance back when we could use it, and Coinbase and whatnot. They’re rather slow. That’s because you’re going through the exchanges. They have to do confirmations; you can even see it on Binance where it says “waiting to confirm”. Even after you’ve done your email and everything.

If you do a direct Cardano-to-Cardano wallet transfer, it is extremely fast. The fees are really low, which is a caveat I’ll get into in a second for tokens. But the fees are low, it’s fast, and what’s nice is that it’s scalable. I believe it beats Visa in its transaction scalability and in fees. A lot of people forget that Visa and Mastercard have fees, and that’s the big anti-Bitcoin thing you hear. But if you actually look at the fees of Visa and Mastercard that shop owners have to pay, especially if you want to be a Visa Direct acquirer or something like that, it’s really high. That’s why all those instant transactions like Venmo and whatnot, cost you money, because they’re doing a Visa Direct transfer.

Cardano beats Visa, and what they’re doing lately, is phenomenal to see. They are doing the stuff that crypto should be doing, like all the unbanked people, all the unbanked masses in Africa getting help from Cardano to get a proper financial infrastructure.

And then you have Plutus. Haskell is widely considered to be an extremely difficult language. Programming it, I believe it’s not object oriented at all. I have an iffy understanding of programming. I’m more so scripting like Lua scripting, that kind of stuff. So, with Haskell, it is a ridiculously difficult language. It’s all in order. You really have to be thinking. It’s like an assembly, the way I think of it; although it’s not and I would not tell someone like a programmer that. But it’s a very, in order, difficult, there’s no objects you can set up for yourself [kind of language]. But also, it’s extremely efficient. If you meet the maniac who’s learned Haskell, he will make you a phenomenal product.

Conward: Most certainly. Another thing is, after reading through your team’s litepaper, I saw a really informative image on how VyFi Hotel, Bar, Resort, and Bank all work together along with profit sharing. Could you explain these a bit more for our readers?

Jack: Yeah so, the Hotel, the idea of that was originally we wanted to say “You, go on vacation” in a way. Because this was during COVID, so our original marketing – temporary, of course – strategy would just be the whole “Go on vacation, you’re locked down”. However, now it’s more toward that their money is going on vacation. You know, that’s kind of the idea of DeFi. Your money is working for you. It’s relaxing somewhere getting fantastic APR because you’re also helping out a protocol for something that they need.

So, the Hotel would be, it’s actually been slightly renamed now, but we still do use these words, and Resort for example. The Hotel would be part of this Ecosystem that you see above. There are three separate parts to the Ecosystem. The most important one that you talked about was the Bar, which I’ll be getting into. That is the most important, and its name will remain the Bar.

So, at the top we have an Auto Harvester. We want to be the first if not one of the only Auto Harvesters on Cardano. We’re using a Neural Net to accomplish that. You don’t have to do that, but if you do, the efficiency potentially is extreme. And we have people helping us out with that, because Neural Nets are annoying, and require Random Forest. You need to have data to feed these Neural Nets. So, we’re working with Propella.ai – the minds behind it, not the company itself – to have a Neural Net developed for our Auto Harvester, because we can. And if you can, you should, in my opinion when it comes to Neural Nets. A properly trained Neural Net would be phenomenal. So, that would be your Neural Net Auto Harvester. A good example of that right now that we don’t mind talking about [is] Harvest Finance. Check it out. It’s ERC-20 I believe. So, Auto Harvesting, Yield Farming, that’s kind of hand in hand, you know?

And then we have the Liquidity Pool, Exchange, that’s exactly what you’d think of when you think of DeFi.

But the third tier on the bottom is our Trust Fund. So, being Australian gives us a nice little ability. And this would be, I believe the Resort. We’re just referring to it directly as the Trust Fund to keep it so that people are more understanding, especially if English isn’t their first language. So, with the Trust Fund, being Australian gives us this fantastic ability, or being Australian based, to have our prop firm. When you see my title, I’m CIO of the prop firm, soon-to-be hedge fund, and Managing Director of the DeFi, because as you and I joked about earlier, a DeFi having a CEO would be silly. Or CIO, that makes no sense, too.

So, we can though, incorporate users to stake crypto to our hedge fund, when it is a proper hedge fund. We’re going through ASIC [Australian Securities and Investments Commission], that’s their SEC. And no KYC. I don’t need to know your name, or anything like that. You sign in on your wallet, you stake to that. Which is nice, because it’s a hedge fund, it goes against the market.

So, market’s doing well. I’d probably put my money – I’m not telling people to, this is what I would do, literally – in the Auto Harvester. [If] market’s doing solid, maybe the Liquidity Pool, a nice sideways. [If] market’s doing down, like [when] market’s going iffy, all over the place, downwards even, the Trust might be the move because that’s a hedge fund. And you know, they literally hedge against the market, for people who are unfamiliar with how a hedge fund works. They typically go against the market, use a bunch of weird options. It’s very fun, very stressful.

So the Bar in the middle, though, let’s say you don’t know what you wanna do. Crypto’s trending sideways, some crypto’s going up, some going down, the market is completely uncertain. You go to Fear & Greed, it’s Fear, it’s just full Fear all the way. The Bar would be a good option, then. The Bar is good to consider when you are uncertain of what to do, because fifteen percent of the profits made on our end, that’s not taken from you, goes to that Bar. So, the Bar I would say, of what you just asked, would definitely be the most important key to that Ecosystem. Because if you’re unsure what to do. [The Bar] is the big hexagon in the middle. If you’re unsure what to do, you could just put to the Bar which gives fifteen percent of each part of it, including the swap, taken from us again, and you would be able to stake passively against the entire ecosystem. I think there’s a few DeFis that have done that before, but we want to do that on Cardano.

And one more thing that we’re kind of doing differently, is this right now. I know so many people, I know so many projects who are anonymous, even after we’ve had that whole Rug Pull, Flash Loan, all these attacks, left and right. I don’t see why you should be anonymous in this space. I’m trying to get a product going, need to get my face out there. I want to do this legitimately and correctly, you know?

Conward: Oh yeah, I completely understand. I do see the utility in being anonymous, but the problem is it’s hard to build trust when you’re anonymous. Because, again as you said, with Rug Pulls, people just up-and-running with the money, and there being no recourse. That’s a tempting choice for those individuals. But I’m glad that you guys aren’t doing the anonymity. I think that helps to build trust with your viewership as well.

Jack: We are doing anonymity in one front, and that’s just phones, because you know in crypto, never to give out your phone number. It’s dangerous. You’ll get SIM-swapped. So that’s the only one. If people want to contact me, we have our Telegrams, very public, and we’ll be getting business numbers soon, where you know, [they’re] like throwaways in a way.

But also one more thing that you said that reminded me of, really quick, is the Trust will be done through Australian government trusts, meaning the government doesn’t have access to the coins, but if we were to try to take it all and run, we would immediately go to jail. So, it keeps us safe, the people safe, and it also keeps us safe from a hacker, because it’s split into three different trusts from the three branches that you saw earlier. So, God forbid, something awful happens, we have redundancies. There’s no reason not to, you know?

Conward: Oh, of course. You’ve touched on this a little bit, but I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you see Vy Finance standing out from other competitors like Cardax, Sundaeswap, or Adax?

Jack: I would say the best way to define how Vy Finance is different than the others is that we are not a straight forward [product]. We have so many interesting niche plans, such as the Auto Harvester, [or] being the first crypto, I believe, in any space, in any chain, to have that hedge fund staking. When it’s a proper hedge fund, I must say, because right now it’s a prop trading firm.

But, other than that, we lack anonymity in the right sectors. We do only have one anonymous Dev because he’s stayed anonymous, and he’s not staying with us for long. He’s just helping us out with some front-end stuff. He’s a friend of mine. Other than that, though, everyone that you would see is fully there. Dev Keys will be thrown away, and if we can publicly show us getting rid of the Dev Keys, we will. Or the Admin Keys, you know, you don’t want someone to just run in and do something like that. You’ll see projects publicly say like “We’ve gotten rid of this key or that key”, we’re gonna do something like that as best as we can.

We really want to be transparent, and that’s another thing I see compared from us to our competitors. Cardano has an impending token swap that many people will have to do, because they set up their native Cardano tokens without the proper variables, some don’t even have decimals. I don’t. Vy Finance, you can get our token right now, but it is a token – we’re very clear about this – that will be swapped down the line. I’ve not been seeing many other companies talk about this impending swap, and I feel if you’re investing into a project, you should know 110% of what you’re getting. You should know the future, even. You should know every potential risk.

And one thing I can say that we’re doing differently, because I’ve been in crypto for so long and it’s time to do it correctly, is to be extremely transparent. Ridiculously transparent. Because there’s no reason not to be. And if someone comes to you and try to FUD or troll, and you’re just really transparent, the rest of the community also joins in. Because it’s crypto. When the coding’s up, you will be able to see the programming. The only proprietary information that we won’t have is the Neural Net, because that’s not really crypto. That’s our Neural Net. But the way it connects through the oracle into Cardano will also be public. And I’m not sure how public, because that’s not actually our doing. That’s our first major partnership lately, which is with Charli3.

And we’re not going on CardStarter. I don’t want an ERC-20 token. We’re Cardano through and through. We live and bleed Cardano. ERC-20 tokens to me is a cop-out right now, and we’re not a fan of that. But we like CardStarter, though. I’m just saying we’re not on it. A lot of people make the Charli3 assumption to CardStarter. They’re helping us as an oracle to get the Neural Net up. So, we have a lot of niche things going for us that we do plan on fully getting out there. We want to be a toolset for Cardano.

And here’s another good thing. If someone forks our coding, we want them to be able to fork it correctly, meaning not them, but the coding. On Uniswap V1, SushiSwap V1, a lot of these V1’s (Version 1) – first of all I must say, these are phenomenal programs with phenomenal developers – however, their V1’s had inefficiencies, which is expected. No one’s perfect. But it’s when everyone’s forked those inefficiencies, you now have all these DeFis running with programming that’s not bad, it just could be better. Also, you’re gonna have to trial and error to get to that point. I’m not saying anything negative against these Devs. What we’re trying to do is to kind of future-proof that. We want to make sure if someone forks our platform on Cardano, and makes their own based off of ours, it doesn’t hurt the system. They [will have] forked a good platform, a protocol, with safe efficiencies and redundancies and whatnot to keep you safe. And on Haskell, that’s great, too. Because while, as I said earlier, Haskell can be a pain, it can also be extremely efficient.

Conward: Ok, one quick question I wanted to ask is with the Liquidity Pools, are you going with the 50/50 model, or are you going with what Bancor’s done, which is a weighted [system] so that the impermanent loss is kind of minimized? Do you guys have specifics as to how you might be going about that?

Jack: So, we’re probably doing the two-way 50/50 for the most part, however with balancing… It’s just right now we’re not really sure with Cardano smart contracts, when they first come out, will be able to do that quickly, safely, and efficiently. However, we do have something neat that I forgot to touch on earlier. It’s iffy. It will come, but down the line. That Neural Net, the data that it grabs, will be on the intra[layer] of these pools and then comparing it to, I believe the in-between [layers], if you’ve ever done ANOVAs. So it will be like that in a way where you’ll be able to see your impermanent loss in front of you. You’ll see a percentage. You’ll see a number. I don’t know why other people don’t do that. It is inefficient to do from a math perspective, but when you have a Neural Net, there you go. And with that, you’ll be able to see your impermanent loss in front of your eyes. “Oh, my impermanent loss on this farm right now is 16% down.” And you’ll know. Or you could have impermanent loss where it goes the other way, where you would’ve gained more money for holding. It’ll be very visual.

I don’t know about you, but I love stats. Whenever I’m in like a game, or whatever, and it’s like “You’ve walked this many steps!” When I’m like 90, I better somehow get like a [banner of] “You’ve done this! You’ve taken this many steps.” That’d be phenomenal. So, we wanna do that there, because people like numbers, and it helps people to see these numbers, too. It helps you make a better decision.

Conward: Oh most certainly. One thing I found when I first stepped into liquidity mining or liquidity pools, is some of these concepts were a bit foreign to me. And again, since you guys are talking about also having Vy Learn, I think that’s great to have there as well. Because I remember going in thinking, oh I put in – I think it was BNB and THORChain – so I put those in, and I came back and I’m like “Wait.” I used CoinMarketCap to keep track of what I had invested in, and I saw it and I’m like “These numbers don’t line up. What happened?” So, you guys working on that Vy Learn as well as having these numbers available to people, I think is going to be really enlightening.

Jack: Yeah and also with yourself, with your YouTube channel thing. We could even have one of your videos somewhere. I really like how it’s going, it’s an educational channel. And like we were discussing, your thumbnails aren’t the “mouth agape”, that [kind of] stuff. But, there is a reason people do that for sure, but it’s nice to see it sticking out and not [being] the case, you know.

So, yeah, with Vy Learn, we really hope to just get people get the basis of this. I speak at conferences lately teaching this kind of stuff. Impermanent loss is definitely the hardest thing to talk about. Just explaining it confuses people.

Conward: Oh most certainly. It took [me] a little while, [via] multiple videos. Because it’s not a solid concept. It’s similar to… There are investment ideas that are more like Algebra, they’re easier to understand, they’re more substantive, more solid. And then you have the more Calculus-like ones, where you’re like, “oh, this isn’t as solid.” You have to think it through and then understand this intangible thing.

Jack: That’s when it gets wild.

Conward: I know you’ve touched on it a little bit. Could you tell us a bit about the roadmap for Vy Finance and the Vecosystem, and do you have an expected release date for Vy Finance?

Jack: We hope to go live with the mainnet. The roadmap I would like to get into finite detail on, but I wouldn’t, for the same reason of Cardano’s uncertainties, you know? For example, they said [smart contracts would be out by] August, now it’s September. And I think that’s even uncertain, and it might go backwards now. You know, it’s the ecosystem we’re trying to keep up with. The testnet just came out, so you can actually start programming this stuff. However, for the roadmap, we even say it on the page, the roadmap is very up in the air, because we do have to rely on Cardano giving us the tools to do what we need.

And we also need Haskell developers to start picking up Plutus. I do hear Plutus is a little easier, much like how Solidity is easier than JavaScript, they say. So with the roadmap, that being said, it’s really going on Cardano’s terms. I’d actually encourage people not to look at our roadmap, or even most projects’ roadmaps on Cardano, because no one’s certain. There’s just too much uncertainty. Talking to the team directly, I would say is the best way to go about it. Your question is getting to the progress of the company, so I’d say we hope to launch with mainnet. As it goes, we go with it. That’ll be the goal.

The launch will have basic swap functions. So, it pretty much is the roadmap going off my head. Basic swap functions definitely will be the first; things like Flash Loans, that’ll come last. It’s not our priority. And also the off-shore bank, which is just another way of [saying] that’s going to be part of the fiat on-ramp, as well as one of the trusts, and whatnot, to keep people having the ability to do the hedge fund thing. Because you know, that’s very new, so you have to make sure they can do it correctly. But that also says a lot of these things will be coming in time, you know. We wanna hope to launch with just a basic swap, with liquidity-providing abilities, of course, and benefits from that. Then farming, and stuff like that, Yield Farming, all that, Auto Harvesting, that’ll probably be coming up closer. With the Neural Net, those would be hand-in-hand. And then the Trust Fund would be last. The hedge Trust Fund, because we need to get full ASIC licensing before that. And we are in process, we are talking to the Australian securities to set up over there. It’s ASIC and someone else. And once we have both of those licensed fully, we’ll be a hedge fund. But that is usually what I have to ask Steve [Ward] about. You know, because he’s the Aussie, I’m up here in New York.

I would say as far as the roadmap goes, we are trying to adhere to our goals. However, you’ll have to realize, and you, meaning anyone reading this, that any dates on the roadmap, any months, anything like that, could be moved plus two, minus two months, whatever, with Cardano. If they tell us, look, mainnet isn’t up til XYZ, then that’s the truth of the matter, you know? And we have no intentions of going on another chain right now. Unless they want to pay us to make the cross-chain bridge or whatever, something like that; and we’re still going to be predominantly Cardano. That’s our goal, you know?

Conward: Most certainly. That’s been a reoccurring theme when I’ve talked with people on projects within the Cardano community. You could have Vy Finance ready tomorrow, but it won’t make a difference if Cardano’s smart contracts aren’t there. So, that’s why, I know it is frustrating because as you said, I remember making a video and talking about, “Oh, Charles says the roadmap, right now, shows that their smart contracts will be out at the beginning of August.” And then we saw the next Cardano 360, the Alonzo roadmap, and then the Alonzo roadmap was like “Yo it’s gonna be out at the beginning of September.” Which, I mean, I know my eagerness wants it out as soon as possible, I understand that. And I’m sure everyone else is similar in that facet, but I also think we’ve seen how Cardano releases things, and they’ve been doing it well. It’s not a “run in, break things, and kind of patch it up as we go”. I mean, I do understand that can affect roadmaps of projects like yours, projects that rely on smart contracts.

Jack: Yeah, and it’s gonna be neat. Because it is mostly what you said, and it is also [that] now we have Haskell Devs. It’s so hard to find Haskell Devs. We have a few Haskell Devs. It’s hard to find Haskell Devs, and especially ones that have already been learning Plutus. To find one right now, and to start him off in the Plutus Pioneer program, is a little late for our goals. We do have Devs, and we’re getting more, but it’s just that’s one of the many issues right now. It’s half getting programming on this weird, somewhat antiquated yet every efficient language, and then hoping that it actually has a blockchain to run on.

That being said, the testnet will be public when it’s available to be public. We want people to mess around with the platform, have a fun time. We want people to find bugs. There will be a bounty program to find bugs. You know, decentralized auditing in a way. That’s another issue with roadmaps and progress, and whatnot. Auditing. Who’s gonna audit us? No one speaks Plutus yet. That being said, though, there are companies that are getting into that that we’ll go to speak to, so that’s good.

Conward: Of course, and I’d imagine as you said, bug-finding, probably stress tests as well. Just to see if the system can handle that much going on at once. I’d imagine a lot of that will ideal for the testnet.

Jack: Yeah. One of the issues right now, when it comes to progression and even AirDrops and whatnot, like expected release and whatnot, is that if I want to send you a token, it costs 1.4 to 1.8 ADA. And a lot of people also get a little confused, because they see this 1.4 ADA coming, and they’re like, where’s my AirDrop? They have to check the Asset section. So, that 1.4 to 1.8 ADA is around two dollars. That adds up so quickly, as you could guess with AirDrops. So we have to make it one per person. It’s an AirDrop. It’s not on the DeFi, and to be one hundred percent honest with you, it can be as CeFi as we please. It’s not on the DeFi. The DeFi, once it’s launched, will be its own protocol with governance in and of itself. Because you know, DeFi should have governance.

But right now, the AirDrops are IP-locked. If someone wants to get two AirDrops from the same IP, we don’t let them anymore. We did it early on, and we saw way too many bots. They didn’t even try to hide the emails that were duplicates. And then we get emails saying “Why didn’t I get my 20 AirDrops? I just filled out 20 forms.” Because we don’t want to spend $40 on one person when we could be decentralizing the platform and helping everyone in the future. The more people who separately get these AirDrops, and then stake when the platform comes out. You know, all DeFis come out with high APRs to help get the token out. When that happens, though, it will be fully decentralized because of all these different people with their AirDrops in different ones [IPs]. Even with presale, we have a limit on the max that people can buy, because again, it’s not a DeFi yet.

So, we don’t want a whale to come in, get all the tokens, get a strangle hold on it, and that same governance protocol that’s supposed to keep us safe is now controlled by the whale. So with AirDrops and everything, we’re handling it very carefully. It costs a lot of money right now to do them, but that won’t be forever. Smart contracts will fix that. But until then, yeah, AirDrop’s supposed to be one per person per IP. And the fee is the big issue with that, but as it goes away it will get better. So far, we’ve had great AirDrops, and we planned to probably do another one or two. They’re completely random, one hundred percent random. We do that for the sake of helping out our social medias, just to be one hundred percent realistic with you and transparent with our community. People will stay in a community if they know there’s random chance of getting the AirDrop, and we like that. Our community, our Discord is not about VyFi, it’s a trading hub that’s hosted by VyFi. People talk about whatever in there, and that’s the goal. And hopefully they get an AirDrop while they’re at it, you know.

Conward: Of course. I’m sure everyone’s seen that and it helps bring the community together. Because whereas somebody can jump in, get an AirDrop, sell it and move on, you get people who are actually interested in staying and seeing how the project doles out while they too are actively participating in the community.

Jack: Yeah, and this helps the people, too, you know? No one wants to see a token they bought go down because of people market-selling, having weak hands, etc. They want to see a properly decentralized protocol. So when I explain to the users that’s why we’re doing AirDrops strictly like that, that’s why we’re having maximums on our pre-ICO private investments, it’s because we want to keep us safe, and you. No user wants to hold a token that’s just going down in value because they didn’t set up the tokenomics correctly, or anything like that. Steve is a financial genius. He’s our main founder. And I really care about marketing and transparency in communications. So I feel with that we will have a, hopefully, you know, great protocol – and aptly decentralized, which is very important to me.

Conward: That sounds good! Last question before we wrap up: Will your token allow for community governance or other utility outside of profit sharing?

Jack: So, we will have governance from the token. That’s how we plan to do it moving forward, because from a straight up legal perspective, the more the DeFi is out of our hands, the more of a DeFi it is, the safer we are. Because keep in mind, this is a cryptocurrency. People have launched DeFis in America, and nothing has come to them because it’s out of their hands. And what happens then is, they just programmed it and they released it, it’s now on the blockchain, it’s doing whatever. So, with governance tokens, and the utility that it is relying on, in those governance tokens, and perhaps we may have denominative tokens as well, like LP, for this specific Bar LP. With that specifically, though, it will be ultimately decentralized.

When you have governance. When you have full governance, fully reliable on the community, and you do it correctly, to where everyone else can’t mess it up and become the new “directors”, then it keeps it pure DeFi. That’s what we want. It’s pure DeFi, even to the point where we won’t have much governance tokens ourselves. We have vesting periods, you know? I’m gonna get mine slowly over four years.

Conward: I did hear what you were talking about, about keeping it at bay. I was hoping you would touch on vesting periods, because that is the one thing, I think, a lot of people look at. I’ve heard vesting periods varying with four years. That way, somebody doesn’t get all their tokens all at once, so you’d have a slow burn. So that the developers, the people who started it have a vested interest. Which I mean, kinda fits with the term itself.

Jack: And then when someone gets salty, they can’t rug-pull. You know, the other type of rug pull, where someone just leaves with a lot of money. They can’t do that now, because of the vesting. But at the same time, you’ve definitely heard this, because it’s happening lately. Some people… I haven’t seen it on Cardano, yet; but some companies want seven-year vesting periods, I don’t know if you’ll exist in seven years, you know? And this is for buyers. So interesting.

Conward: I mean, given the crypto industry is, what is it? Let’s say it started really in 2010. So, eleven years ago. So you’re going, oh, this market has only been around for eleven years, seven-year vesting period is like… Woah. Tell me another industry where you’re expected to have a vested interest in a project for what is nearly two-thirds of the whole time the market’s been around. I mean…

Jack: It’s speculation, for sure, being an early adopter. But at the same time, you’re taking that risk and the potential benefits, you know.

Conward: Oh most certainly. There’s a balance to be struck, for sure. You don’t want a six-month vesting period, unless you can get the whole project up, going, and running. Even then it’d still be iffy; but then, seven years, that’s… No.

Jack: I like seven, it’s a good number.

Conward: That’s a lot of confidence, though.

Jack: It is. When I heard that, I was like, damn! Because even then with this [VyFi], with four years, once four years have passed… It’s not like I can up and leave VyFi or anything like that. I love this, this is my child. But the time may come where my role becomes a more passive one, years down, so I think the four-year vesting period works perfectly. It’s not like I can go and sell my tokens when I literally have a hedge fund and Bar to stake them to by the time I have them all, you know.

And that being said, our tokens, we have already mainly decided that if we ever do sell company tokens, we’ll be transparent with people. Here is the inquiry for where your money went. Some people want their money to go purely into development, and it’s like, we can only pay these developers so much. They don’t magically get faster, you know. So, we will be straight forward and go, oh hey, this hired a YouTuber, this hired this, this did this, this did that. And I’ve noticed people get a little antsy about that, but they should be happy, because us getting marketed makes your holding potentially better.

Conward: Of course, that’s one thing a lot of people don’t take into account. Yeah, you can pay your developers so much, but there’s a taper-off point. You can only get so much work done so quickly, and, if people are complaining about marketing, it’s like… You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows about it, that doesn’t help. You have to get the idea out there. You have to get the product out there and show it to people before they can buy in. People can’t buy something they don’t know about.

Jack: And you get diminishing returns. That’s the word I was looking for.

Conward: That’s it.

Jack: I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft, so diminishing returns’ stuck in my head. Because some moves are just really good, and you wanna keep using them. It’s the same reason you can’t just throw money at a developer, as the price-to-performance ratio starts to go down after a while, you know.

Conward: Of course! Also, all the links for Vy Finance will be down below, and this has been super informative, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today. Before we go, how can listeners get involved with what you’re doing, or how can people best support your and your team?

Jack: I would say the best way to support us for completely free, if you wanna help out Vy Finance for free and you wanna really help us out, all you have to do is send a tweet with a relevant hashtag. #ADA or #DeFi or something. That works so well, especially then [when] people look up ADA, or DeFi, and if they see a few different tweets that talk about VyFi – it’s fantastic grassroot organic marketing, and it’s free for you to do. It’s the best thing you could actually do. It’s actually extremely helpful just to talk about VyFi, say something positive, and put a hashtag. But to anyone watching this, don’t lie. Be one hundred percent realistic, just like we try to be. Don’t make any false promises about VyFi.

Also, the best way that you can get in contact with us in person, see me, and hopefully Steve – you know, Australia’s extremely strict with their lockdowns but it’s getting light now – we go to these all the time. We go to conferences all the time. Here’s “Shitcoin 2021”, which I love the name of. That was run by my friend Kenn Bosak. Kenn’s a great guy. This was “Miami Crypto Experience”, run by my friend Wayne Marcel. These two guys are going to be doing some awesome stuff in the future, so definitely check them out. We’re gonna be at the Miami Crypto Experience, actually. This is a second one coming up. September 30^th to October 1^st, “Miami Crypto Experience 2”. It’s not like Bitcoin. If you buy a ticket right now, you’ll not be spending like a thousand dollars or something silly like that. And I did go to “Bitcoin 2021”, but we’re an altcoin, so you know, we couldn’t really have a booth there. I was there with my trading terminal friend. But yeah, you can see us at conferences and stuff. We really want to be around. And I’m a New Yorker, so if anyone’s ever in Manhattan or whatever, just let me know. I like meeting up with the community sometimes in the city, when I take a train in. Or, just come to any of the conferences. We’re even going to some around-the-world ones, like a Singaporean one in the future.

Conward: Oh wow. Of course, we will be linking everything from your website, the twitters, things of that nature. So again, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be with us here to inform us in the community about what you’re doing.

Jack: Thanks for having me, man. It was great.