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Zebec x Wise AMA
Recorded: Oct. 24, 2023 Duration: 0:38:57Space Recording
Full Transcription
Can you guys hear me?
Yep, yep.
You're good to go.
Okay.
I can hear you perfect, bro.
All right, cool.
Cool.
We'll just wait and give it like six minutes and we'll get it started, bro.
All right, no problems.
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So, Peter,
well, he should be in here
in about six minutes.
Perfect, bro.
No worries.
We'll just wait for him.
It's all good.
Okay.
Yeah, he should be jumping in right now.
I just text him and he texts me back.
Yeah, he's coming in now.
All right, guys.
So, why?
Let me see.
Let me see.
I'll just keep an eye out, and as soon as I see him, I'll tag him, or I'll get him on.
Yeah, he's coming in now, I'll do it.
I got you.
I got you.
I got you.
Well, I got you.
peter what's going on man hey good morning doing well how are you doing i'm pretty good man good
morning to you as well uh no thanks for thanks for hopping on the call man i know you're super
busy so really appreciate the time yeah absolutely always happy to connect and uh i love networking
and you know expanding our awareness so all good stuff yep absolutely so yeah let's get it let's
get into it so thanks everybody for joining and everybody that's going to be listening to
um after this so uh i'm jj uh head of bd at zebit today we got a special guest in the building we
got peter from wise so peter what's up how are you man hope everything is well um and yeah let's kind
of get it so i kind of want uh for you to touch on your background and a quick intro on you uh so
yeah go take the floor floor is yours sure so i uh came from a military background i was um in the army
since 2007 i just actually recently got out last year uh with the honorable discharge the first four
years i was a combat medic and uh i got deployed to afghanistan as a combat medic uh was stationed in
camp phoenix kabul uh afghanistan and then once i got back from my active duty tour i um i burnt i uh
went to officer kennedy school and uh was an officer for the remaining 11 years of my service um i branched
intelligence and uh i was doing that and i was doing real estate on the sides um some airbnb arbitrage uh
when i discovered crypto in 2017 um and so cryptocurrency kind of blew my mind it uh it
wasn't actually the cryptocurrency itself but the blockchain technology behind it and i knew this
was going to revolutionize finance and uh so i decided to go down that rabbit hole and and and i
haven't come back since um but that's uh that's kind of my background in a nutshell sure no super dope
thanks for your service one and then two like that's crazy that uh kind of like your whole arc right you went
from um obviously in being a medic uh in the army to then um you know doing the um oh my god what
you call it um but yeah just doing uh kind of like real estate on the side then kind of getting
into crypto was there anything specific that brought you into crypto at all other than the blockchain
technology like anything specific that caught your eye well i was just looking for good investments um
and uh you know besides real estate which is which has been you know a long-term good investment to
have um you know i was just looking for something because uh you know there there isn't that many
good investments available for regular people um but like unless you know somebody um how are you gonna
just be a uh uh angel investor you know get involved with a hedge fund or something like that like that
these things aren't available to regular people and there's actually regulations to keep people from uh
from being able to do that like you get like becoming an accredited investor um not just everybody can
do that you have to make a ton of money to be able to become an accredited investor so i was looking for
uh just you know as a regular guy just got out of the army you know active duty and was doing part
time for the rest of my service doing this real estate entrepreneur stuff on the side and just as a regular
guy looking for some place to put my money and so when i saw blockchain technology and you know read
about bitcoin i realized that this was it because this was money that that's um that that couldn't
be manipulated from me like the the us dollars those can be taken out of my bank account um by the bank or
by government uh you know if if i want to wire some money from um from this country to another country for
instance i i ended up buying um some real estate in another country to do some airbnbs that that can
be difficult that like they can put a hold on your money um and yeah and you just don't have control
so i i realized that blockchain technology was a way for users just regular people to be sovereign of
their own money be able to make their own financial choices um which comes with good and bad i mean the
regulations that are in place are there to protect but as a whole um they're kind of old and i like i
think people should be able to um educate themselves and and make the choice to protect themselves rather
than having you know big brother looking over your shoulder um making sure that that uh that you're doing
uh you know everything right by them um so that that's what really drew me into crypto and besides
that is just the yield sources too um because there's not a whole lot of ways to make money
safely and consistently um like if you if you just leave money in your savings account that you're
you're going to get like less than one percent per year um that's that's what the banks are going to
give you yet the banks make tons of money from giving people loans you know credit card interest
like is like 18 to 26 percent if you don't pay it off every single month you got you know car loans
mortgages mortgages yeah these these are all like this is how the banks make money and they don't give you
a slice of that when you give them your money so so they take all our money for pennies and then they make
tons of money off of that and so crypto currency is is a way like blockchain technology and crypto is
a way for people to take control of that and get a much bigger slice because everything can be done
efficiently and transparently and uh and people get to choose where to put their money and they can put
it in a good system or they can put in a bad system um so now crypto has gotten kind of a bad rap
because unfortunately even though the technology exists where we can create these wonderful things
these better more efficient more fair uh financial systems most founders are not doing that because
you know they they got they got uh money in their on their on their minds like most crypto projects
are not uh designed to be like a sustainable thing that's going to be a great investment for your
grandkids you know 20 40 years later um they're mostly things that are really short term not
sustainable and they're designed to make the team that created them rich uh which which is unfortunate
however the technology itself is good and it does exist and we can create good fair systems that are
sustainable and safe um and that's what we're we are doing and and have done with the wise ecosystem so we've
been building since 2019 and we're still here we still have a hundred million plus dollars uh on our liquidity
pair on uniswap that's backing the value of our token wise token and we just um you know started the rollout
for our flagship product which is a lend borrow protocol uh that is going to be able to deliver higher apys to
users than what you see on typical lend borrow protocols like ave for instance
for sure and i i love kind of how you broke everything down um i wanted to kind of ask you too
right um you know you went through this arc uh it doesn't seem like you had like what made you
kind of create your own um just project right so uh and for and feel free to expand on what wise is
etc but uh you're the founder of wise you guys have been you know in the game for so long a legacy project
as i call them so uh what kind of um yeah what kind of like lit the fuel to kind of make your own
project lending borrowing protocol the the biggest thing was like i touched on it a little bit before
how i just saw there was a lot of greediness with uh with products being created and lack of
sustainability so so me as like a regular investor um thinking okay i got some money in crypto now so
where do i put it uh like i want something that i can just dump it in there and be be fine for 10 15
years and and and like not have to worry about it but that's not the way most crypto is like you
like you gotta you you got to really be like a day trader almost with you know what projects are
collapsing what projects rugs and you know what projects are are are actually doing well which isn't
which isn't many of them um so so some of the things i noticed was that by the time i got the
opportunity to invest as a regular guy um somebody else that already made a ton of money because uh by
the time people do token sales there's already been a number of things that have most likely happens
um most likely the team has taken a a large portion of of those tokens like you'll see like team treasury
40 of tokens something like that um most likely investors have been sold lots of tokens for pennies
on the dollar so that you could raise money because you know when you're creating tokens out of thin air
you can sell them for whatever you want and it doesn't cost you anything so that's
one of the biggest ways people have used to bootstrap their protocol what they're they're like okay we're
going to you know do our our ico or ieo token generation event to the public at at uh one dollar
per token but but they'll go to investors beforehand and they'll give them uh you know tokens at 10 cents
on the dollar or 30 cents on the dollar and um this way those you know big whales or you know those
insiders vips can be able to get tokens for cheap and they will fork out a lot of money because
because they know that they can immediately liquidate those tokens if they need to for an
immediate profit so by the time it gets to regular people uh the offering is kind of sour and it's
risky and uh i didn't like that um there's very few projects that are built in a sustainable way
where it's actually a good investment um especially if you're looking over the long term and not just the
short term because many projects will have an initial pump but then uh but then they never
recover from that um so that so that's kind of what i was looking at and uh that's why we created
uh wise token differently so so we started with the creation of a token and then we created the products
that go for that token and and the reason we created the token first was because we believed that
the value of ethereum was going to go up exponentially um and we so we didn't want to delay
the creation of our liquidity pool because uh as the value of ethereum goes up we like it would be
harder and harder to raise a large amount of it um and so so we we raised uh 57 900 ether in in our
token sale which was 41 million dollars of ether at the time and the price of ether at that time when we
started was 350 dollars so we were we were really successful in creating a very large liquidity pool
um and it's still there to this day you know largest liquidity pool on uniswap version two
and the purpose of our token is to act as a substitute for for ether uh for the for the products in uh in our
ecosystem so most tokens are backed by nothing they're just created out of thin air and the reason
that people buy them is because they're speculating on the on the projects so uh so even though the
token has no connection to the project besides the fact that it was created by the project's owners
uh there's there's really no real value backing that up so it's all speculation and that's why you see
these large uh you know price swings usually when when a when a project starts because it's just all
the will of the people basically um well we wanted to do something different we uh we we raised all
this ether and then the then we uh paired that with our token to create this large pool in uniswap which
we then locked so not locked so that nobody can trade it so it's not locked like in a vault that nobody can
get it's locked in a liquidity pool that that anyone can trade so anyone can trade wise for ether or ether for
wise uh but nobody can pull the uh pull the liquidity because we have locked it so that you know the the
um the the pool can grow when people add ether to buy wise or can shrink when people sell wise to get
ether but uh but the liquidity itself can never be removed and so by doing that which is something
really unique that i don't see anywhere else by doing that we created a price floor in ether
for our token wise um so meaning that if all wise in existence were to be sold there would still be
ether in our pool there would actually still be 28 000 ether in our pool um and so we are uh you know the
the the founders of a token that is actually backed by ether that has a large amount of liquidity
and um the idea for our ecosystem is that okay we created this token it's backed by ether it's got a
it's got a price floor in ether and now we're going to create our lend and borrow products to to create
these uh these services for people these banking services where you can get loans or you can just
put money on the protocol to earn an apy and the revenue from this protocol is going to flow back
into our token so most uh most projects use their token to bootstrap the project so uh for instance
they'll use their token as rewards so the apy that you earn you're going to earn in that project's token
and so that's a way so the the token is servicing the the the apy for the protocol that's the way it is
almost all the time um we do the opposite of that because we want our token to be strong and we want
our token to go higher in value and not be diluted and and go lower in value so what we do is we do not
use our token for rewards on our protocol our protocol is standalone and is able to create good apys
best in class apys actually without the need of extra token reward fluff and then we use the revenue
from our product to actually buy wise tokens off uniswap and burn them so that uh you know as the
product gains traction and uh its revenue goes up then the market cap of wise goes up as well because
there's this buy and burn that is happening um from from the protocols of revenue no you guys are i i
love kind of like how you one explain it just super easy for everybody to kind of understand but the fact
that you guys have done everything uh just so by the book and you know you you're giving out a lot
of gems as well and kind of like how the industry works um but it just goes to show that you know
projects that are built uh that there's definitely projects out there that are built to last um and and
people should just take note of that because you guys are a prime example of of just what it is to
to just run a project uh you and congrats to you uh just running a project well um enough to be
sustainable right and it's not just like it's gonna be here today gone tomorrow type project like
unfortunately most of them seem to be so uh and then what what are you know what are some of the
goals and achievements you guys have made in 2023 because you guys have been killing it for a while
so like obviously you guys are releasing the the brand new product the wise lending um but is there
and by the way uh if anybody goes and checks it out on on their website it's super easy to use um but
what are some of the just goals and achievements you guys have made this this year yeah so um launching
wise lending is the big one like this is our flagship protocol that we have been working on for three
years now ever since we started um as soon as our token you know sale was done this is what we've been
focusing on and um it's it's it's really quite an extensive protocol uh because if if you look at um
the top 50 lending protocols and in all of d5 you got aave is number one they've got um you know five
plus billion dollars total value locks then you have compounds and then you have a handful of others
and then what you'll see is most other lending projects are a a copy or a fork of the aave code or the
compound codes um with with a with a new token slapped on it that is used for rewards kind of like how i
was explaining before most tokens uh most tokens are used as rewards um so there's nothing really new
besides aave compounds and a small handful of others and and most people just you know copy that
and then slap a new token on it and it can be exciting for people that are want to speculate
on a new token we don't have that model at all we actually built everything from scratch and and and
we made it better um than than what you have with aave for instance so so we have things like 100 capital
efficiency where uh on on aave at any given time you'll actually have billions of dollars that are
not being used they're not being put to work because they're not being borrowed you know that they you
got your pools pools of ether pools of wrapped bitcoin pools of stable coins and there's a certain
amount that's borrowed at any given time but at any given time there's also some that's not borrowed
uh and so the stuff that's not borrowed is not working so we put all our money to work on the
protocol because uh if it's not borrowed by our organic borrowers then we ship it off to another
lending protocol like aave so we so when somebody deposits into our pools it immediately goes to aave
to start earning that apy and then once uh a borrowers uh come to our platform to borrow it gets pulled
off of a and then and then becomes a native borrower so we have 100 capital efficiency we've got a bunch
of other features as well but the most important one is the fact that we are um raising the apy across
the platform by being able to offer our borrowers uh yield farm opportunities so uh with a platform like
aave the way they generate apy is from their borrowers that like the the lenders put money in the pools to
borrow and then the borrowers borrow them and then they pay interest to borrow but the only use case
for for a borrower on aave is to uh long or short the market that's that's the primary use case so you
would you know deposit eth and then borrow stable coins buy more eth and that would be a long on eth
or you could deposit stable coin or um uh or like you could do the reverse and then sell the eth and then
buy it again uh once it goes down if it does that would be a short um so so um you know there's
definitely people that use that obviously but uh but there's not a huge demand like not not everybody's
a trader and and not everybody wants to take those risks to do longs or shorts in the market however
there's better yield sources that don't involve that type of risk and that and that is yield farming
um so there's many yield sources in in d5 the the best one is actually staking ethereum because you
can lock up your ethereum make it turn into staked ethereum and it's now securing the network it's
helping uh you know uh confirm transactions make blocks digital blocks on the blockchain and you get
uh a an an apy for that you get a return for that so that's staked ethereum so that's something that
happens that's that's passive for for the retail person who just wants to stake some eth you know
you put eth and and you lock it up and you don't have to do anything it's not like a long or short
on the market where it's like oh i better check this all the time make sure i'm not going to get
liquidated or you know decide when i'm going to cash out no it's just it's a it's a passive thing
and so this is better because uh there's it's a much bigger use case so instead of people that are
just actively longing or shorting the market it's it's people who just want passive income which is
you know pretty much everybody who doesn't want to make money passively um so that's yield farming
and there's a lot of great yield farming protocols out there that's uh that can you know safely give
you a great apy sometimes up to 10 like we see on pendle finance so what we're doing is is we are
connecting um our pools to these protocols so that instead of just having a use case where um the only
reason to borrow on our protocol is to long or short the market well we have these other options where
you can borrow money in order to put it in a yield farming protocol like pendle or like spark protocol
or like the curve uh convex pools for instance so so these are higher apy sources and this is going
to raise the uh the apy that lenders are receiving across the board so instead of you know one and a
half percent on your ethereum two and a half percent on your stable coins like you see on ave
it will be double or triple uh triple that because we are connecting to higher source uh apy so that's
kind of our special sauce and uh you know we we've been working out the kinks for a long time
and we are almost fully rolled out right right now we're uh we're in the middle of our audits
we have rolled out a good portion of wise lending and within about four weeks we should be fully
rolled out where all of our power farms are active and ready to be used and there'll be opportunities
for both lenders and borrowers to earn uh industry highest apy there you go and and no i mean what i
love about your guys's platform i told you this when we talked it was just how easy it is to use
and the fact that like you said it's not a fork from anything uh like most uh kind of projects out
there when it comes to just forking uh unit swaps and compounds of the world so uh absolutely love that
one we got five minutes left so i kind of want to touch on uh well probably just one more question
or yeah or two so like um what i know you guys were on bnb are you guys uh looking uh to expand
anytime soon again um yeah tell us a little bit more about that yes so we want to expand to every
good blockchain that has uh you know any any liquidity on it so we're we got arbitrum slotted next
and then we'll we should be on polygon bnb chain um and you know hopefully solana next year sometime
and so uh you know with with the back uh i think you guys are primarily on bnb chain you know as soon
as we get our lending protocol over there uh you're the exact type of uh groups that we'd like to
partner with because you guys do really legitimate uh financial things payroll so payrolls
is consistent and legitimate we and we we would love to tie into what you're doing so that uh you
know your treasuries for payroll are just on wise lending so that you're earning a passive yield
in the meantime before the for the paychecks roll out so we we're doing uh we're doing this with a
number of companies um that just you know pretty much anyone that has a treasury it's like well if if
you have a treasury why wouldn't you just why would you have it sitting there yeah yeah yeah just earn
some apy while you're at it yep uh no and uh again yeah we're on solana and bnb so you know uh with
wise what we want to do is one we want to add uh wise and we're doing it as of right now uh but we're
adding wise um well i guess you guys have to drop bnb but we're we're going to be adding you guys as one
one of the supported tokens um for zevic that way people can get paid uh in wise tokens as it is so
that's going to be one thing and then two once wise is on bnb and solana will be able to connect uh
our daps or add them into our dap store um we're calling it this app store that way people that have
treasuries kind of like how peter said are able to um basically start earning yield uh as soon as they
get their paychecks or they just want to store their crypto and zevic safes right so um it's two
two ways right um we recently acquired a payroll company in ohio and we're doing some stuff uh with
it's called ewa in which uh the the employees that basically work with our payroll uh companies are
able to get paid five days prior to when they usually get their paychecks i think there is some
cool stuff that we can do as well um and i think we'll talk about that well i'll just hit you up
about that peter uh in the back end um but there's a lot of cool things that we can do uh and we love
working with projects that are um not only popping quote unquote but that they are established and they
have been uh in the game for a while and are uh trustworthy by um countless people right so uh but that's
pretty much it i don't know if you want to touch on anything else peter you you killed it today and
uh definitely enjoy uh enjoying hosting this ama man yeah it was a pleasure talking with you as well
i can't wait until we're all expanded onto those blockchains so that we can uh you know work together
um it's it's really an exciting time because we you know we've had our heads down building for
for three years now and now we're finally able to show the world hey this is what we've been up to
uh this is what we've been doing so um you know check out uh check out wiselending.com we're not
fully rolled out yet but we will be in about three to four weeks and there's exciting things to come
so thank you no absolutely and and super excited to be working with y'all um again if there's anything
you guys need from us in terms of uh i mean whatever the case is uh feel free to let me know um
definitely have a lot of uh connections and stuff that we can definitely help you guys out with and
love working with you guys so far and excited to keep working with y'all once you guys are in bmb and
solana man awesome thank you appreciate it absolutely all right guys that's pretty much it for today
thank you guys so much thanks peter and wise team for joining and then we'll catch you guys on the next one
peace
