Research Trail — Terra Protocol
This is not financial advice. Do your own due diligence and research.
Created: Thursday, 20180719
Updated: Thursday, 20180723 22:25 UTC+8
Still researching…
Overview
What is Terra?
A stable coin payment system which hopes to compete with Alipay and PayPal.
Why a stable coin?
A stable-coin will be able to improve upon what Alipay did for the digitization of personal finance by expanding accessibility and variety. Moreover, such a currency will be permission-less and open, such that it will rely on the collective ingenuity and industry of the entire community instead of that of one company.
—Do Kwon, Co-Founder of Terra. “Use Cases for Decentralized Money (Stablecoin)”
You may read up more on stable coins here, from background to use case and current ones in the ecosystem.
How is Terra stabilized?
Initially, the ecosystem will be backed through fiat. Of which, through a basket of currencies defined by the IMF (International Monetary Fund)—the SDR index (Special Drawing Right) The basket currently contains major currencies such as USD, Euro, GBP, RMB and JPY. It is reviewed and adjusted every 5 years.
As the ecosystem matures, network effects realized… the stabilization will shift to Luna—the endogenous token that receives transaction fees every time Terra is used (visualize it as Visa/MasterCard).
Luna is backed by the transactional value of Terra. Insofar as Terra is a useful currency that people choose to transact with, Luna will retain its value by virtue of the Terra cash flows it generates.
@ Whitepaper, Sec 4.3
Why Terra?
Flexibility and Scalability
This is well explain by CEO Daniel Shin in his interview with Ran NeuNer (CNBC Crypto Trader),
https://youtu.be/KByFwsDINsw?t=9m28s
TL;DWatch,
- Terra not backed by USD but rather SDR initially
- Will then shift its stability to the strength of its network through Luna
- Has the ability to apply its protocol to possibly any type of token—making those tokens symbiotically a stable coin with their transaction fees going back to Luna, strengthening the entire ecosystem
Adoption
It has a clear go-to-market plan through adoption by its 7 committed e-commerce partners, which have a collective $15bil in annual transaction volume and 30mil customers:
TicketMonster—Korea’s leading e-commerce platform.
Woowa Brothers Corp.—South Korean startup that operates the country’s most popular food-delivery mobile service.
Carousell—A smartphone and web-based consumer to consumer marketplace for buying and selling new and secondhand goods. HQ in SG; operates also in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and the US.
Pomelo—An online fast fashion brand and marketplace for greater Asia. All branded products are sourced from the fashion capitals of Asia.
Tiki—Vietnam’s Amazon.
Althea—The most trusted source for the latest and best selection of Korean skin care and beauty products, offering the lowest prices and shipped directly from Korea. (Huge industry source leader, especially with how KPOP has taken over the World.)
With these partners ready to integrate Terra in their system, consistent cashflow quickly appreciates and strengthens the ecosystem.
Beyond Payments
Terra is looking to offer a stability platform for ICOs and dApps that will vastly increase both the utility and the design space for decentralized financial products.—Do Kwon
Team
Overview
Daniel Shin
- Co-Founder, Head of Business
- Founder/Chairman of TMON (TicketMonster), 8.5yrs and going
Daniel went to The Wharton School for a BSc in Economics. After that, became an Analyst for firms such as JPMorgan Chase and McKinsey & Company.
In 2012, he founded Fast Track Asia, an incubator per se. Early in 2018, he handed over the reigns of Fast Track Asia (but still a backer) and started The Encore Company, a startup studio that builds market disruptive businesses that can scale globally out of Korea.
Fast Track Asia (http://www.fast-track.asia) is Company Builder, start-up holding company. We’re backed by Daniel Shin (Founder & CEO of Ticketmonster, acquired by Groupon for $300M), Chester Roh (Founder & CSO of 5rocks, acquired by Tapjoy for $40M, Angel Investor of Ticketmonster, Serial Entrepreneur, ex-Googler), Stonebridge Capital (Korea-based Venture Capital, Investor of Ticketmonster), Insight Venture Partners (US-based Venture Capital & Private Equity Firm, Investor of Ticketmonster), Hur Min (Founder of Wemakeprice, ex-Founder of Neople, acquired by Nexon for $400M) and a lot of local serial entrepreneurs
Interesting:
Daniel’s Partner Joon Choi of The Encore Company, also a co-founded Pikicast—a leading news & entertainment app in Korea. It has over 15mil users.
Do Kwon
- Co-Founder
Graduated from Stanford with a BS in CompSci. He had summer internships with Apple (Jun-Sep 2012) and Microsoft (Jun-Sep 2015) while attending undergrad.
He then founded and led Anyfi after Stanford. Its a P2P wireless mesh tech startup, where Do co-invited several of the company’s key patents on decentralized networks and routing systems.
After a 2 year run with Anyfi, he Co-Founded Terra with Daniel and co-authored their whitepaper with Nicholas.
Nicholas Platias
- Protocol Research
Nicholas also went to Stanford for his Bachelors and Masters in CompSci. He co-authored the Terra whitepaper with Do. His LinkedIn shows some experience in trading, derivatives, algorithms and infrastructure work with the National Bank of Greece, Nest (acquired by Google) and RelateIQ (acquired by SalesForce). In these 3 companies, his tenure is within 1–2 years.
Need to verify:
He co-founded Guru Labs, with Sam Motamedi—who also was a CompSci undergrad and worked with Nicholas at RelateIQ as a Product Manager.
Guru Labs:
- Helps offline merchants turn credit card data into sales by using machine learning to predict customer preferences.
- Models risk and fraud in commercial insurance.
- Backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Interesting:
After a year tenure in Guru Labs, Sam joined Greylock Partners as an Investor in 2016. In Sam’s LinkedIn, there’s this:
Theory:
Being closely related Nicholas and Terra’s current whitepaper having a publish date of March 19, 2018—we can potentially tie the two up(?)
Don Kim
- Head of Business
A Harvard grad with BA in PolSci & Economics, Don worked with SPOUTS of Water as a Founding Director for Biz Analysis while he was an undergrad. He spent almost 3 years there, helping the organization provide clean drinking water in Uganda.
After Harvard and SPOUTS, we went to serve with Korea’s Air Force and The Ministry of Defense (2014–2017). After serving the country/gov, he went into a Blockchain remittance company, Streami as BizDev Manager.
Streami is backed by Shinhan Bank (one of South Korea’s largest financial services providers), ICB (a payments firm who works with Alibaba) and Bluepoint Partners (angel investment group). Their site also states that their investors are Fenbushi Capital and Digital Currency Group.
After 10 months with Streami, Don shifted into his role in Terra.
Wayne Shu
- Head of Strategy
Theres not much to go off for Wayne’s background, other than what is on Terra’s site—that he is a Stanford alumnae. That, and he is an active investor and advisor.
KJ Lee
- Head of Product
Prior to taking the Product helm of Terra, KJ was the Head of Dev for Mesh Korea, a highly IT-oriented logistics company with unprecedented nationwide last-mile logistics infrastructure. In 2015, Mesh Korea signed a MOU with TMON (2015–2016), for which we may presume laid the foundation of the cooperation between KJ and Daniel. After this years in Mesh Korea, he then moved onto becoming a TMON Product Owner. He handled the “Super Mart” service which manages overall logistics, supply chain and payment processes.
CJ Han
- Head of Finance
A Univ. of Penn BA graduate of Economics, CJ’s past background involves trading in securities, futures, FOREX, etc. These experiences spanned through:
- Rates Trader at Hanwha Investment & Securities. A wealth management company, provides financial products and asset management services in South Korea. It also offers stock trading, account/banking, and investment information services. The company was founded in 1962 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.
- FX Trader/Investment Analyst at Mirae Asset Global Investments. One of the world’s largest investment managers in emerging market equities (Investments & Pensions Europe, November 2017). The firm manages approximately US$ 127 billion in assets globally.
- Portfolio Manager at Korea National Pension Service. A public pension fund in South Korea. It is the third largest in the world w/ $430 billion in assets, and is the largest investor in South Korea.
Gigi Kwon
- Head of Marketing
Gigi also went to Univ. of Penn like CJ. She graduated with a BA in Comms. Starting as an Associate with Group Gordon (2013–2015), she then landed a Marketing Manager with Uber Korea before moving to take Head of Comms for Terra.
It seems that this was about the same time and through The Encore Company, which Daniel co-founded. She is their EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence).
Basics
- Site, https://terra.money/
- Whitepaper (PDF linked)
Project’s Site: First Look
Simple, clean. Provides you with the high-level problem and how Terra can solve it.
Ran some frontend web analyzers/tests:
- 79/100 (Good) from Website Grader
- 6.2/10 from Nibbler
Community Coverage
The project seems to be under-the-radar. Less than 500 in their Tele with only a segment in CNBC Crypto Trader/Ran NeuNer’s Korea episode.
Reservations
- Token Metrics, not available
- Roadmap, not available
- Supposedly, there are seed investors who are 2 out of the top 5 exchanges. There is no mention of who they are specifically. However, Mark Pui (MW Partners) is quite active in their Tele.
- Who is their CTO?
- Who is their lead blockchain Engineer?
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