AMA RECAP: DeFi Raccoons X Sheesha Finance
Date: 6th of October
Host: Herrman Jacobus
Supervisor: DeFiNaut
Guest: Sheesha( Saeed Al Darmaki)
Hello Raccoon Nation and DeFi Enthusiasts!
We recently hosted a 2hour record AMA with Sheesha. So here is the abbreviated AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session, this post will be a time saver for everyone.
INTRODUCTORY QUESTIONS
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons : Alright lets start the AMA, it is my honor to welcome our friend @DeFiSheikh, from Sheesha Finance
Could you please start by introducing yourself to the Raccoons here tonight? What kind of role do you have at Sheesha Finance and how long have you actually been into crypto?
The Crypto Sheikh: My name is Saeed Al Darmaki and I am the founder of Sheesha Finance, Managing Director MENA for CasperLabs, Co-Founder of Alphabit crypto fund, advisor to a dozen + crypto companies, angel investor in 50+ crypto companies over the last 5 years. Before getting into the crypto industry I was working for Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (3rd largest sovereign wealth fund) for 9 years. I started my journey in this amazing space by co-founding Alphabit.
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Casperlabs? I’ve been eagerly following them since 2018, you’re well connected then but I digress. First of all, it’s a pleasure to meet a Crypto sheikh from Abu Dhabi!
We haven’t seen that many crypto projects from your area. So while I have you here, in your opinion, how does the Middle-East Blockchain market compare in size and legislation to its neighbors in Asia and the West?
The Crypto Sheikh: Great to hear that you're a follower! We are still relatively small in size and community compared to other jurisdictions however on the regulatory side of things very much proactive and embracing of blockchain. The community and size is rapidly increasing now
DeFiNaut | Admin @DeFi Raccoons : Very impressive, I’ve seen your profile around in many projects indeed and they’re all stellar ones. It’s an honor to be able to host this AMA with you 🙂
The Crypto Sheikh: The honor is mine. Thank u for having me
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Thank you for your insight, good to hear the crypto community is growing across the globe. You did however join us to educate the Raccoons about Sheesha Finance.
What’s the aim of Sheesha Finance? Could you give an overview of what you have built and why?
The Crypto Sheikh: The aim of Sheesha Finance is to disrupt the traditional VC model. What we have built is a platform that is currently running on ETH and BSC where there is no need to have a min amount of money to participate, no need to do KYC/AML, run by smart contracts, no management or performance fees that we charge and non custodial. We have built it for our community so that anybody who is new to the space or too busy with their own traditional business can come in and get exposure to a diversified crypto portfolio without having to have a reputation or track record in order to get tokens of top upcoming projects at seed stage prices
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: I remember in the early days of open ICO’s with everyone paying a fortune in gas fees racing in before the hard cap was filled after one block, fun times but impossible now the market has grown so much. I’m glad projects like yours can give us a more reliable gateway to invest in new crypto projects.
In essence you are opening up your personal (vast) network to community investors? A rather noble premise, who else in the team is aiding you on this journey and what are their responsibilities?
The Crypto Sheikh: That is exactly what I am doing. U hit the nail on the head there! Our core team is made of Jei Rahman our Chief Investment Officer, Nathan Cooper our Chief Program Officer, Ian P our marketing director, Mina Vucinic our Ops director and Juri K our CTO. In addition our super advisory board offers alot of support
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Tell me more about these people are they also this well connected as yourself?
Our sheikh is checking their resume’s ^^
The Crypto Sheikh: Lol 22 advisors.
Our core team members have extensive experience related to their roles. Examples of people on our advisory board are Michael Terpin who has been a mentor to me over the years, David Namdar ex Galaxy Digital and CEO of NFT.com, Albert Castellana CEO of StakeHound, Brad Yasar who has extensive network in the space, Hartej Sawhney CEO of Zokyo, Ben Clarke, Nabeel Qadri MP at Protocol Ventures, Manmeet Singh MP at Blockseed Ventures, James Bowater founder Crypto AM and several more!
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: My goodness how did you build such network around yourself to eventually create sheesha?
The Crypto Sheikh: By being extremely active in the space and helping so many projects over the years. I personally seeded about 50+ projects and developed a solid reputation of being somebody that always helps others
I truly believe in karma. Do good and good will come to u
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: I must have bad karma, I’m stuck here with @DeFiNaut, but today I could meet you so all is well
Since your exclusive network is part of the Sheesha value proposition, what kind of partners are you working with?
DeFiNaut | Admin @DeFi Raccoons : Could not agree more, it’s how we’ve also built this community from the ground up. We’ve started with 5 members or so and right now we’re hosting projects with the likes of Sheesha Finance 😉
The Crypto Sheikh: Major Kudos to u guys.
Our current project partners are Altered State Machine, Cannumo, DeFire, Drife, Mozik, Plasma Finance, Royale Finance, Splinterlands, TeraBlock, Theos, Zignaly and in the last couple of weeks we have made partnerships with around new 17 projects which we will announce soon.
Strategic Partners are Omniscia, Draper Goren Holm, Phoenix VC, Tikivation, New Tribe Capital, Blockchain Australia, Sanctum Ventures, Ziliqa Capital and many more that my thumb is too sore to mention!
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Anyone familiar with crypto will recognize some very reputable names in that list, your thumb must be sore from having your fingers in so many good communities
Which criteria do you check in a project before partnering with the Sheesha asset pool? Have you refused any projects?
The Crypto Sheikh: Lol I am working day and night to add to the list and the team is doing an amazing job supporting me.
We have refused many more projects than we have accepted. Criteria for selection includes: Team, Idea, Token Utility, Tokenomics, Investors backing the project, Community size and many more. We go through a rigorous research, analysis and due diligence process. Meet with the founders at least twice before making a decision and always communicate with them by telegram as well. Our mandate is to incubate or seed projects. We currently have 5 projects in our incubation program called Sheesha Foundry
DeFiNaut | Admin @DeFi Raccoons : I agree that you can’t be too careful in terms of research and vetting in this space, many bad actors unfortunately. But on the other side, also a lot of talented teams.
Any names you’d like to share or is that still confidential? (talking about the 5 projects)
The Crypto Sheikh: They will be announced in due course and would rather wait till then so the full info can be provided to the public
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: ah so you wouldn’t accept my jacobus moon coin 😕
As an incubator what kind of added value services will you deliver to these projects to make them succeed?
The Crypto Sheikh: Self confidence goes a long way Herman!
We help incubated projects with getting them all areas of support that they would need from creating their legal structure, to working on their token utility, tokenomics, marketing, creating white paper, getting them influencers, developers, additional team memebrs. Everything they would possibly need to give them as much chance of success and getting to market.
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Something your team seems very well connected for to deliver on these services, from what I read you already launched some projects on Sheesha finance, could you tell us a bit how that went?
The Crypto Sheikh: In general pretty well all things considered. Our biggest success has been Splinterlands which I personally feel still has a lot of room to grow. Drife has done well too and is a disruptive platform in the ride-hailing sector. People staking on our platform can expect to yield up to 100% APY on ETH and up to around 500% APY on BSC
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Those are some insane numbers, how do you think you will sustain these APY’s where many staking coins have tapered down and died over a few months?
The Crypto Sheikh: The main vision I had with Sheesha Finance was to be the opposite of most staking/yield farming protocols that I personally participated in over the last year or so. On most protocols u start with a high APY and drops off over time. The beauty of staking SHEESHA is that u get rewards in our token and tokens of all the projects in our portfolio. As long as we build a solid portfolio and the tokens we invest in are doing higher returns than investment price then that APY will grow over time especially as more projects are added to the portfolio
In theory the value of our token and platform will go up if the value of our portfolio is going up. So far this has proven to be the case
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: An inspired vision, having a constant supply of new projects is a great source of growth as we can attest to,
How do you distribute the partner tokens? Via your platform from which stakers can withdraw or directly to users’ metamask / other wallets?
The Crypto Sheikh: Thank u kindly sir.
We build a distribution smart contract for each project that is deployed after being audited. Depending on the % a user is staking against the total staked will dictate his share of the project tokens that are being distributed. The smart contract calculates distribution for each user every 24 hrs. Users can claim their tokens every 24 hrs or at anytime within the distribution period. The distribution period matches the vesting period of the tokens agreed on the SAFTs that we sign with projects
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: So when you incubated a project the tokens are not dumped in one go after the project goes live but spread over time?
The Crypto Sheikh: We believe in the long term and always have tokens received for incubating projects vested for as long as a period as the founders and longer than any other investors. We do not associate with any hype or pump and dump projects. Quick buck is not in our vocabulary. The best investors are the ones that hold for a long time
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Excellent, that’s how you build interesting projects,
I have been following this space since 2014 with tens of thousands projects passing by over the years the amount of projects that turned out to be empty shiny promises is heartbreaking, having a community vetting these investments would be a huge help in saving time and money
how do stakers choose what projects they will support?
The Crypto Sheikh: Once our platform is running smoothly and the portfolio is large enough and performing well we will transition governance of the platform to our community. Staking our tokens will give weighted vote on which projects to invest in and operational activities of the platform. We are in the process of setting up a legal DAO structure to handle this.
In the meantime stakers get tokens of all the projects in the portfolio that we invested in
Stake one amount and get tokens without having to pay extra for allocations
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: A decentralized venture capital firm, how will the weighted vote work, will you have electors?
The Crypto Sheikh: Anybody above a certain threshold of staked tokens can submit a proposal in general. A shortlist of projects will also be submitted by the team to vote on by the community. Depending on your % staked against total will decide your weight of vote
The mechanics are yet to be finalized and it is too early to say exactly how the DAO will function. We will try to make it dynamic and fair to all
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: awesome stuff, I'll be looking forward to that. Speaking of staking, I saw Sheesha tokens and LP tokens being staked in the dashboard on your website https://dashboard.sheeshafinance.io/dashboard could you explain what the difference is between the two and their purpose?
The Crypto Sheikh: Staking LP tokens has a longer lockup period but double the rewards of staking just SHEESHA tokens. The launch of the platform was done via an LGE rather than token sale. LGE ran for two weeks and people participated with ETH/BNB on each chain. The total accumulated was then matched with SHEESHA tokens on ETH and BSC then automatically put into LP of Uniswap and PancakeSwap and the LP tokens staked. Considering people knew they would be locked up for 2 yrs the total value put in of $9.44m is extraordinary
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Ah that clears it up,
They where confident for 2 years? That is some serious commitment in the crypto space, reminds me of the polkadot ico lockups, it was worth it in the end.
The Crypto Sheikh: They must have been. I truly believe that if we continue to work hard then we can make all our early backers very happy
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: I’ve read there will be NFT lotteries for Sheesha members and a crypto art marketplace, could you elaborate a bit more on this? Are you challenging OpenSea?
The Crypto Sheikh: The NFT marketplace sector is pretty saturated at the moment so that is not our objective. We are focusing solely on an NFT lottery. The way it would work is that we would put up NFTs up for lottery draw ranging from very rare to common items of digital art or real world assets. The owner or creator of the NFT would get majority share of proceeds from the lottery tickets that are purchased using SHEESHA. A small percentage of proceeds will be used to put back into the ecosystem. Finally a percentage would go to charity that the community votes for. Hoping to launch this soon.
The first 2 pieces that we plan to put up on lottery are by our NFT Ambassador Vesa Kivenin
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Amazing idea to promote the project and give back to the artist and charity
Veesa, the Finnish artist? He’s a rather big name on the NFT scene, even got some of his work saved on my pc.
The Crypto Sheikh: Thanks Herman. Thats the one. He has a special talent
Herrman Jacobus| Host @DeFi Raccoons: Well I don’t know about our fellow raccoons here but you have convinced me about Sheesha Finance. Thank you so much for putting up with my and @DeFiNaut ‘s sometimes silly questions
Are there any final words you would like to share before we move on to the twitter questions?
The Crypto Sheikh: No such thing as a silly question. U guys have been fantastic. Final words I would mention are to watch out for our launch on Polygon chain and then all the other chains out there. We want to invest in the ecosystem of all the chains out there
TWITTER QUESTIONS
Question 1 @baykusbirligi asks: “Can you please tell the working mechanism of #DeVC? What are the advantages of #DeVC when you compare it to other launchpads?”
The Crypto Sheikh: Great question. Other pre-IDO launchpads get their community to stake their token and then based on that give allocations. Folks then have to pay separately on top for those allocations. With us u stake one amount and get ur tokens without paying anything more. IDO launchpads also have whitelisting mechanism which means not everyone gets in on the public sale. Finally u get tokens priced at seed terms and without paying extra to get them!
Question 2 @Dinoxlbqb asks: “Can you please shed some light on the SHEESHA Finance project? There was rather little on that in your docs, what do they mean basically & what are the benefits of those for the investors?”
The Crypto Sheikh: Here is a link to everything about Sheesha Finance including our litepaper.
https://linktr.ee/sheeshafinance
I think I covered a lot from admin questions about the project in general. I also didn’t quite get the question unfortunately
Question 3 @Margaret9732 asks: “SHEESHA Finance made a smart move by partnering with Sporting icons in launching NFTs for fans of sporting heroes. What other marketing strategies should we expect from your team? And what benefits will holders of $SHEESHA tokens get in your NFT market?”
The Crypto Sheikh: We have partnered with several other NFT projects that we will announce soon. We are currently exploring cross community marketing campaigns with our partners such as creating liquidity pools made of SHEESHA paired against partner project tokens and rewards folks staking those LP tokens. We will also start campaigns to reward folks in partner communities for following us and spreading the word about us. Watch this space
LIVE AMA QUESTIONS
Question 1 Velora: “We know that countless DeFi projects are vulnerable to bugs and hacks, and can be detrimental to many investors or stakeholders..
So how often do you audit your smart contracts, Any external agents involved?”
The Crypto Sheikh: Before we deploy any smart contract it is thoroughly tested by our devs and then audited by our strategic partner Omniscia. There are currently 6 distribution smart contracts being audited. Another 17 smart contracts will be created, tested, audited and then deployed. When we create staking, reward and distribution smart contracts on additional chains those will follow the same process
Question 2 Gf Grp asks: “Which idea strikes to you to get this project name ? What does it mean to you .Is there any slogan of the project ?”
The Crypto Sheikh: The name is based on a favorite pastime established in the middle east which is globally recognized. We wanted to have a name that is rooted in the region and would also be a global brand that is recognized
Question 3 Hermawan asks: “Do you have a team of developers on staff as part of the core team? Or are you working with an outside dev
company to contract out what you’re building?”
The Crypto Sheikh: We are working with Zokyo that does our dev work but will now start to expand the in house team of developers as the work load will only increase as we build out on more chains and deliver on alot more utility to our token
Question 4 Melatiputri asks: “I see the SHEESHA project currently active on BSC and ETHEREUM with a total supply of approximately 85,000 of the same tokens. But what amazes me is that even though these tokens have the same maximum supply and circulation, their PRICES are DIFFERENT on these two blockchains. Can you explain why that is? Isn't there a possibility to have a bridge that will ensure the tokens will be exchangeable?”
The Crypto Sheikh: They have different prices as they have different amounts of liquidity locked up at the beginning. Bridges wont work as each chain has its own liquidity. Finally those staking on ETH will get tokens of projects that launch on ETH and not other chains. Those staking on BSC will get tokens of projects that launch on BSC and not ETH. Each token is dedicated to a specific chain and its ecosystem. So we will have distinct tokens on each chain that we launch on. Watch out for MSHEESHA on Polygon (Matic) and many more to follow
Question 5 Barotosa asks: “Is the protocol fully decentralized and how do you plan to add value to the platform?”
The Crypto Sheikh: We will work tirelessly to add value to our platform by expanding our portfolio, team, token utility and delivering on our milestones. The projects with strong fundamentals are the ones that survive bear markets. We will look to invest in projects that have the highest long term potential
Question 6 husnain asks: “Is the protocol fully decentralized and anyone can use it from anywhere in the world? I mean is there any restrictions of using your service?”
The Crypto Sheikh: The protocol is as fully decentralized as can be for the moment. With transition to a DAO it will be more decentralized. However there still needs to be a team behind the platform that carries out the operational requirements, saying that our team is remotely located across the globe! Anybody anywhere in the world can participate and there are no restrictions.
Sheesha Finance
You can get the latest news updates of Sheesha Finance from these official channels :
Website: https://www.sheeshafinance.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SheeshaFinance_
Telegram: http://t.me/Sheesha_Finance
Medium: Sheesha Finance — MediumDeFi Raccoons
Telegram: https://t.me/DeFiRaccoons
Twitter: http://twitter.com/defiraccoons
