All right, good morning guys. As always, thank you, say community for joining us for another community spaces. Today we have FlowDesk, which is a renowned market making firm.
in the crypto space and we have Vasco with us as well from the SA team. My name is Joe. You may know me from some of the other spaces or see me around the community. Yeah, I'm excited for this one.
These spaces are a great opportunity for the state community to learn, to get insights into what goes on behind the scenes. So how's it going? Pretty good, Joe. Thanks. I owe me the pleasure to have you on.
Hi, thank you so much for having me. So I work at Flodask. As you said, we are a regulated market maker. We were founded to
a half years ago, we're based in Paris and Singapore and in New York. And we basically provide market making, brokerage and OTC, Treasury management and custody services.
I'm assuming you have an American accent so New York.
in the Paris office, but I'm currently in the New York office right now just overseeing how the office just opened two weeks ago. You know, just getting everything set and ready to fully operate from there.
Awesome awesome. Yeah, I know VASCO as well. VASCO has some market making background as well. Have you VASCO? Have you seen any of the offices in London? I hear that you know area of the world is pretty big for you know this sort of industry.
I'm definitely looking forward. We will be headed to Paris. A lot of our teams will be there for East Paris. Please come by the office for the UTCC where we'll be hosting events. We're sponsoring it.
feel free to drop by anyone who's also listening to our event feel free to reach out and be great to connect with more people from the space. Cool to actions all of the sailors are going to have a storm of your office of more than 160 people now. So yeah, well happy to get this off with
with a couple of questions. I think Joe and I got a couple of questions from the community and we want to dug a little bit deeper on, you know, your operations, especially like USB that flowed as CAS. This is definitely something you were interested in and maybe we should kick off with that. What do you think, Roman?
Sure. So just about the, I'll just say about the market making in general and just how, you know, we operate to give you a bit more background on Floresque. It's mainly constituted by people from traditional finance and from engineers, RC,
We owe and our other founders were, you know, traders in a lot of banks, a lot of them were also engineers. We have our, to give you just a background, our, our, the first employee at Flodask after the founders is our legal officer who just worked to obtain the, the DASP
registration with the French market authorities. So we're all regulated entity getting the regulation in Singapore working on that as well in the US just to be able to fully operate and deliver the best services to our clients.
compliant. Market maker is definitely a top priority right now given market condition and regulatory condition. So since we're touching on the legal side of things already, I wanted to pick your brain a little bit on what you think the other situation is right now in terms of legal framework for. DeFi, obviously more in general, but also
market making more in the specific and how this maybe affects your operations, business decisions and also resources that you allocate to the legal department, which I think I guess they're pretty extensive. Of course. So in our offices we have so you know risk officers, legal officers, compliance officers, we came
I see every single client that we work with, it's very important for us to have the background checked as we're a regulated entity. For us, we're really glad that everyone is paying attention a bit on how we need that transparency and we need to be regulated.
things need to be aligned for both providers and projects and just everyone in the space. It makes it better as the crypto had kind of that image a few years ago and still now for some unfortunate projects but a shadier image which we're really trying to get
rid of because crypto is all about transparency. So for us, it's very important. Getting the regulations were very important. We were the first in Europe to get the DAF certification. There are only a few market makers now that have it. This allows us to have entities allowing us to trade on a lot of venues with integrated
it over 110 exchanges today. We're trading on about over 80 centralized exchanges which is possible because we do all those checks, integrations, KYCs. It's very important even just to check projects funding
Everything then can be very transparent. We publish a lot of reports. We have one of the highest kind of transparency policies and of course, conflict of interest. You know, it's very important for us. We have a strict policy of no conflict of interest and we don't participate
debate on any market manipulation whatsoever, which makes it just very aligned for projects to work with us. And I think that's very important for everyone in the crypto space. Yeah, I think it can be overstated enough how it is important for the health of markets and tokens and launches and exchanges.
is both on the decentralized spectrum and on the centralized spectrum. I'm curious to know since you know it's all about transparency, stress that out quite a bit and I wanted to give you a chance maybe to run us a little bit through the order flow and in general like the integration flow that projects have when integrated with FlowDest services and
Maybe potentially what the key difference are with respect to you guys, who are new innovators in the space fully compliant and what historically has been the problems in the space with other market makers. Of course. So what we do is that basically when we meet a project, first of all, we are agnostic to all the projects
that we work with. So we can work with everyone that's able to provide the right funding in order to get their projects to grow and to have the right attractions on exchanges. So when we work with the project and they decide to take us on as our market maker, we go through our KYC policy so we onboard the
clients, basic form asking regulatory questions and general questions about the projects. We get the significant documents that allow us to run our KYC checks with our compliance officers. And once the project is unborted, then we go through the contract and then
as soon as that's done, we can go on with our market making. I can go into more details later on how we do market making and we have a specific model that's kind of difference from other competitors in the market. But we've onboarded and worked with over a hundred and ten clients
Now we keep working with private individuals for brokerage, for example, with token issuers for market making, with VCs that are either looking to liquidate tokens, and we have a specific way of doing that, which allows them not to destroy the price of a token when they just dump everything
on the exchange. But what's mostly important for projects and why projects kind of value our services is as we're very big on transparencies, we actually give out accesses of live dashboards to all of our clients for
market making. So basically when you start, when we start market making for a project, they get 24/7 accesses to dashboards where they can monitor the assets that we're managing for them, where they can monitor global liquidity metrics. They have views on the market share that we have on
on how much token we're actually putting on the exchange and the liquidity that we have. And it's just very important for us to be able to deliver that life as well as to give them insights on spreads, deaths and more trading metrics and to deliver monthly report as well for them to be able
to see the P&L generated and just how volumes were created and what actually happened for them. So for us, giving as much data as possible is really one of our priorities. Well, that's definitely a great USB and something amazing to have. Transparency is something that it's a big issue.
when dealing with centralized exchange. Obviously when we're talking about unchanged stuff, everything is visible and it's a different pair of hands. I'm curious to know if you have, do you have these solutions, are they white labeled? Do you have a standard solution? Do you have these for Dex's as well? Or is it mostly for centralized exchanges? All the data that we do, you know,
So we access Dexas, which is something that not all market makers do. We have integrated over, I think, 25 to 30 Dexas. We use Dexas for two things. First thing is to hedge our balances. So we have a strategy that is, you know, Delta Neutral.
want the client to be able to, if they have seated a pool and if the community is active on the pool, it shouldn't be disregarded in the liquidity management. So what we do is that we access the pool to hedge repositions. If we are buying on a centralized exchange, we're going to be selling on the decentralized exchange.
that makes it available for the market maker to have balances that are neutral. We also access Dex's to take any arbitrage that we see. As you know, price harmonization is crucial for projects when you go on corn market cap and you see that the prices aren't aligned, that the price index might be wrong and you might just
The project that is growing might just get opportunities missed out because you have bots that are just capturing the arbitrage that shouldn't be happening because prices should be aligned on all venues as they reflect the true value of the token. So we access Dexas for that. We can even run some token buybacks
some token cell program strategies on Dexys. So for all the data and all the the traits that are happening, you know, on the Dexys and Dexys, all of those will be reflected on our dashboards and on our reports. So since we are patching upon the argument of Dexys,
And the centralised exchanges, which obviously is at the core of what say ecosystem is all about. And we would like to address builders on this one and maybe give them a little bit of an insight of how operations look like in terms of integrations for market makers on these centralised exchanges. Obviously, I'm pretty sure you guys don't just create a Chrome extension,
in a metamask wallet and just start trading and hedging your position on there. So I'm curious to know, are you integrated with certain specific custody providers? What is the flow on that end? And how high is the lift of actually integrating with a new DEX? And maybe also potentially what practices and best practices can be done by the central exchanges to facilitate this
process for you guys. Of course. So I'm not an engineer, so I won't be able to go into all the specific detail. However, every time that we integrate a DEX, we have a look at all the API documentation. We need to have a look at just everything how it works in order to be
able to analyze it, we conduct very robust analysis of the venues. And basically, once we've integrated a DEX, we do work with a few custodians, some of the very big ones like fireblocks, ledger, and other custodians.
as well, we try and access the best kind of partners in order to be able to do that. This ensures that the funds are safe as, you know, there are entities that we trust and that we've KYC. And then we just, the way specifically that we access Dex's
could be discussed if we ever plan to know a future AMA with one of our devs and traders. I think that'd be a great idea to give more insights. But we're able to access a lot of Dex's. I think we're pretty much around 30 Dex's now, which is very good. And I think it's important to be able to have
DEXs on several chains just to be able to be in that crypto space. Thanks for the insight. And we were definitely going to have a second round going a little bit more in the weeds for people that are interested in the technical aspects of implementation. And when is it going a little bit back on the operations side of things? This is just out of
How does that work? When I joined over, I think it was a year ago, we were only 15 people. We've raised 30 million last June for our series A, and now having offices in three continents, we're now over 70 people working
at Flodesk. Flodesk, everything was done in-house. All the development of our infrastructures or algos, just everything that we've created, all the services that we've done, work created in-house. We're still working on a lot of bigger developments that will be coming out in the future months. But this,
allows us to provide those four pillars, which are market-making, brokerage, custody, and treasury management. And we have a specific team that are expert in their own domains. And we just all kind of work together in order to become that one stop shop
for clients and digital assets and all shapes and sizes. That's amazing and congratulations for the amazing growth. Thank you. I wanted to pick your brains a little bit more towards the market making and the service side of a flow desk. That's definitely your
the first things that come to mind when you talk about float-esque and it's kind of like the big USB. Can you walk us through a little bit through that process and how it is different at its core with respect to traditional ways of market-making for tokens? Of course. So market-making as a service is different from the classic
You know, loan and call option model that you may have seen that some of our, you know, competitors in the industry offer. Market making as a service is with a retainer model. Basically, what happens is we provide the market making services.
by accessing the client's account with API connectivity. And we plug in with the API and we access the client's funds, so tokens and the stablecoin. And we do the market making. In market making, we time the spread, make sure the price
harmonization is there. Make sure that the order book is filled and that people are allowed to trade and providing liquidity, breeds more liquidity, which is something that is crucial for projects to actually thrive. So you sign with float-esque, you pay them a retainer
So a monthly fee that depends on the number of pairs that you have and the exchanges that you're trading on. The more pairs you have, obviously the price prepared decreases and then we're able to trade with, you know, respecting the clients' instructions, which I think is important to get those
incentives from both the project and the market maker aligned. We trade for the client. We use the clients' funds and there's no call option where we'll be able to generate kind of which is what is different in the two models. For us, it's a fixed
retainer paid every month. With the call option, you never really know depending on how much of the token supply you've allocated to the market maker. You never really know how much profit will actually be generated. And that can cost a lot for projects and they don't really realize that in the early stages of developing a project. So working with a market maker on a retainer
model and there are a few others doing that industry. I think it's really good for projects just to be able to be aligned with the market maker. We communicate, you know, 21/7 with our clients. We have telegram channels dedicated where they can reach the different account managers when they have questions, when they want to review the strategy.
you know things like that. We're always keen to know are you guys adding new developments? Are there big announcements for the projects? Can we anticipate any kind of volume that is going to happen? And then we can kind of adjust everything just to be able to always be ready. I think that's very
important just to have all the incentives aligned. Overall, I think this model makes it more sustainable as you are completely aligned with your market maker. Yeah, absolutely agree on this point. Just to give a little bit more context on this one, basically on the loan and
option model as Romy mentioned earlier, there are a couple of pain points in a couple of obviously difficult situations which the market maker and the project can find themselves in. For example, if the project belongs a certain amount of predetermined tokens on day zero to the market makers and the token ends up doing a 10x and they
have the option of actually paying off the tokens at a predetermined price, they could end up with a huge chunk of the tokens supply. And a lot of times there was no protection in place from a legal standpoint for the token for the projects. And market makers were basically free to talk on the market. And that's what we've seen. A story thing with a lot of, I would say,
not very reputable market makers as a short remain unnamed. But happy to know that there's innovation in this end and there's cloud-esque obviously is working very strong towards a more transparent and open and... Of course. And if I can add just one thing on that point, even in a whole transparency
kind of policy. When you sign a contract with SLOAD-ASK, we disclose in our contracts the pairs that we will be trading on, we disclose the liquidity requirements that we will meet. I think that's very important. A lot of market makers now, which we'll be unnamed, are exiting trading on certain exchanges when they're
that kind of loan and co-option model where they're the ones in control of the funding. And that might be an issue. Example, you list on a centralized exchange, you know how high the fees are to get listed on those exchanges. If you're a market maker that you're paying and trusting exits at venue and it's not trading
anymore and you've allocated a large supply of your tokens to get trading on there and to have that liquidity manager and the market maker exits or isn't meeting those liquidity requirements for whatever reasons. Unfortunately, then something is wrong and you're not getting the service that you've actually paid for.
We disclose everything which exchange we're trading on. We're trading on a lot of venues. Coinbase right now, we're still actively trading on it. I know a few market makers have exited that venue. We're still there. It's just very important for us to be able to offer that service to our clients and for
them to be able to draw dashboards to see even exactly how much liquidity we're actually putting on the exchange. And happy that you touched upon the US exchange issue today is kind of like a hot topic. So I think maybe it would be great to dug a little bit deeper on that front. And you know, do you have a little bit of
insight on why today market makers are actually exiting the US market and what players in the space that you guys can do to make sure that that market remains liquid and you can actually operate safely without the SEC banging on your door every now and then. So is there any legal insight that you can provide?
Sure, I mean, legally speaking, our legal officer is always on top of things and we've been monitoring the situation everywhere actively. What we're doing in trading as a regulated entity is that we're able to
KYC, all of the venues that we work with, which is very important. We're still monitoring the situation actively. For us, we trade on venues that we know we can trade on, and that gives us the advantage to be trading on that many venues.
regulatory-wise, it's quite unpredictable now, but we trust the process of them just making it safer for everyone to be able to trade and for users to be able to just build their projects in a safe way. Thank you very much for the insight, Romi. I think all of these discussions, you know,
around the pain points that market makers have, potential dangers for the projects, for the token price and for the community. I think it's part of the question, why do we need market makers? What is the role of market makers at TGE, the token generation events, on day zero, and what is the role of market makers
over time as well to make sure that the market remain healthy. Can you give us a little bit of insight on that? Of course. So we, you know, we intervene in any kind of stage of the life cycle of a project. We have launched many tokens from like day one. We've done some takeovers for clients that were
already live where we jumped in and started training for them. For us, market makers is all about solving liquidity problems for your token, making it more attractive to both exchanges, users, and also investors. A lot of projects now when they are looking to raise, saying that they have more
market maker gives them a good edge to just show that they're all about getting their liquidity managed to build some traction and to make it available for older users to actually trade the token. I think that for exchanges, first advantage of market makers is
The exchanges are happy to unbord liquid tokens. Today, the listing fees can vary, you know, the numbers are very different regarding, you know, which exchange you want to list on, but they will give you lower listing fees if they see that your token will be well managed and will be very liquid.
because they're going to get their end on the listing fees, for example, and the trading maker and tigger fees that you have on the exchanges. For token issuers, it also makes sure to have a market maker, you're making sure that your token will be tradable, that the spreads
will be tight. It's going to be cheaper for investors to trade in and out because that spread will be tight. It can become very attractive for the community. It can make the community go bigger, having a market maker, as I mentioned previously.
make sure that you have a price harmonization across all different venues. So it always reflects the true value of the token and you don't get arbitrage by bots. And you know just overall having a market maker means you can have small and large orders smoothly executed.
that won't cause big price disruptions which can be terrible for a token. And it brings just overall more confidence and more adoption for the project. So I think it's very useful to have that liquidity managed by a market maker.
Yeah, totally agree on that point. And thanks for providing clarity to the rest of the community as well. So obviously we are, I'm going towards the end of my questions, honestly. So I think I have like the last one that I really wanted to have covered. And then probably Joe, I think there's going to be like some time for for the community also to hop in and ask.
and after a couple of questions. I just wanted to have an idea and a little bit of an insight. Obviously we are in here for the tech ultimately. What we're looking for is to bring all of these extensive processes, listings and things that pay to these players around the world, bringing all of this on track.
So I'm curious to know you have been working a Florida for a while. What is the trend? Do we have an increase in terms of like percentage volume or percentage of theos that are being made on the centralized exchanges with respect to centralized exchanges today or vice versa? Like, can you give us a little bit of insight on that? Sure.
We've had, I mean, as we all know, we've had a couple of complicated months in the, you know, 2022. I think we've seen from our side as a market maker, we've seen great traction in the last months. I think a lot of projects are regaining confidence. The markets, you know,
kind of of made people want to start trading again and I think that's very good. We've had a couple of projects also changing market makers or finally deciding that they need a market maker to build that liquidity. We're trusting the
space. We think it's very important to see that there are a lot of future innovations coming up, regulations, just the defiant general world just booming, a lot of innovation. I think we're seeing great projects now that are
being created. And I think it's good for us to be able to see that a lot more projects are listing again. A lot projects are also starting to raise again, which is a good sign. So we're confident. We're very confident in the future of crypto.
Thank you very much for answering all of the questions that I found out at you for the last 30 minutes. I think, yeah, Joe, the forward to you, like, what do you think? Yeah, no, I want to commend you. Seriously, I learned a ton already. So far, and you've, like, my hand was
the average Joe and I say this to teams that can explain this very well to regular people like me. So, thank you for that. I do also want to give maybe a few sailors to come up and ask us some questions. We'll probably get some when May
and you know why is the faucet broken or something like that but you know we'll see what some of the community has to say. Can depth do something please.
Alright, I got D5 Dawn. How's it going sir? Can you hear us?
maybe give it a second. I also have Erdem. How's it going, sir? Or, or ma'am?
I think sailors come up here and they get a bit camera shy.
Give it a second. We'll see.
Yep, loud and clear. Yeah, that's good. This is an amazing amount. Sorry, I want to have your question for floodgates and also for seeing a truck. All right, let's hear it. What makes floodgates feel like draining the sea in a truck? This is my first question.
And the second question I have is for the scene network. But it's when the scene network went to have the Amel launch. That is my net launch. Yeah, for sure. I think that's a good question to bring up that, you know, I don't think we mentioned too much on the, you know,
Prior, you know, are you excited like is it's what I'm excited to kind of deploy on say as we know say is say's mission is to build you know the best possible infrastructure for exchanges and You know at the end of the day like one of the primary use cases of crypto right now is exchanging digital assets so
So is this something you guys are looking forward to at Flodas? Because it is kind of a unique thing that you don't see anywhere else. Yeah, of course. Thank you for your question. We're very excited. I think, you know, with the state team, we've been speaking for several months now. So very excited to see this partnership
to integrate more blockchains, more exchanges, just working together and working towards that mass adoption of crypto. I think, first of all, our goals truly aligned. We have similar values and similar views of what can be done in the crypto industry.
So very excited for this for this partnership. Yeah, I just wanted to double down if I can't go. You know, the float desk, the impact that float desk and other players, regulator and transparent players can have in any cost system, like say. So obviously the liquidity and I what the liquidity lines is all about.
is to make sure that we can cover builders of exchanges on the SAE ecosystem and that they have tight pricing, competitive pricing and its move user experience for everybody. I would strongly recommend builders that are listening to this base or that will listen to this base in the future to reach out to Florida, ask
out to us, we also have a Google form that you can fill in for an application with the liquidity alliance campaign. And then we're going to put you in contact with the Flowdesk team to make sure that you have the best experience when building on our ecosystem. So I think this is just a call to action that it's worth making. And regarding mainnet job, what do you think
we have any insight that we can give them that? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be like, get #SaySummerTrending. It's going to be a really fun summer. And it's going to be, it's closer than you guys think. I mean, what the devs are doing at say, you know, they're making
a really unique chain and a really special chain. And, you know, we've been out for, we've been on Atlantic 2 for months now. What feels like almost a year now, but it's only been around four months and every day, like Atlantic 2 is getting spammed and like not spammed but just used and
tested and we're getting incredible feedback and she's handling it. So we're looking very good. So soon, tonight, you guys know everybody who joins these spaces, you know I'm not allowed to say anything other than soon, but each day we get very close, very close. So thank you for the question.
Let's see if D5 Dan or Erdman is back. Maybe you guys want to answer or ask a question.
If not, I think this has been a really incredible space so far. And you know, props to you, Roemi, for answering all of these questions we thrown at you. I got one more person I'll bring up and if not, we'll kind of wrap it up and give some time back to the teams. Yeah, thank you so much.
I'm very excited for this partnership and for everything to come in the crypto space. We're always keen on meeting new people and getting connected to a lot of people. As I said, we have offices in Paris, Singapore and New York.
We're attending all the big crypto conferences around the world. We'll be at Bitcoin Miami next week. If everything is there, feel free to reach out and check out our website, flowdesk.co. We have in form, if you have any questions and want to reach out or you can reach out to my Twitter.
just happy overall to have gotten a chance to discuss the importance of market making with you guys. Thank you, Joe, for putting me through. I really appreciate. I'm always on the TCC, something like that. Anyway, aerobics
someone from the community says hi so they say they will like your voice anyway. I need it to say do. Thank you. Okay then I quick a quick question. If I go to you correctly you guys are providing services to your mouth.
100 different, I don't know if individuals or firms, but how are you doing that in terms of liquidity? Are you taking their own liquidity and then providing those market making services all you have and are located fund?
which you draw liquidity from. Yeah, of course. So as I mentioned, what we do is that in our market making as a service model, we access the, you know, the projects liquidity, the clients liquidity, they allocate specific funding for market making and we access
those funds through API connectivity. And that allows us just to have our incentives aligned with the clients as, you know, they remain in control of their funds and we're aligned with their instructions. But we manage the projects liquidity with liquidity
the allocated by the project for market making? Okay, sorry, I'll quick follow up. How, how, how, how, look at this, this liquidity. In fact, if you are managing my position for me and I want you to just get off the market, how
soon am I able to get my position? So it's for example if I think what you're mentioning is if you have invested in a project and you're looking to exit we have developed a brokerage as a service best exit
execution kind of strategy where what we do if you're looking to exit a specific position will assess the liquidity of that token and see how we can run a discretionary cell program in the market. We're going to be able to access one of those, you know,
venues that we're trading on, determine a number of days and a number of tokens that we can sell per day. And that will make sure, you know, and give us the availability, sorry, to sell those tokens without affecting the price and to be able to run that sell
program in a discretionary way. We have officially covered questions from Wales as well. So hopefully on the backside too. No, not necessarily selling. Yes. Crypto qual, are you planning on being a whale or what's going on? What do I not know?
That's a great question though. And thank you so much for your transparency and you know, for coming up here and just letting us ask you anything. So we really appreciate that. And with that being said, if there's no other questions to the community,
I'd like to kind of wrap it up, get back to our days and finish up some work. So thank you guys for joining us. There's 400 people at one point listening to this space. So as always guys, thank you for joining us and hearing
and learning with us. And I hope you guys are really excited because these next few weeks are going to be very incredible for the SAIC community. So thank you guys. Cheers everyone. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thank you very much.