AMA II with Martin Dyring-Andersen, CEO of e-Money (Part I)
This AMA was conducted on September 30th, in Nhóm VBC, aka the Vietnam Blockchain Community (Telegram: @nhom_vbc). In part I of this AMA, Thai Nhat Minh of Nhóm VBC poses the questions. In the upcoming part II we’ll reprint the questions from the Nhóm VBC community.
Thai Nhat Minh: First of all, can you have a brief introduction about yourself as well as your project to all of our audience in this community?
Martin: Absolutely. My name is Martin, CEO of e-Money.com. I started the e-Money journey with my good friend Henrik Aasted Sørensen in 2017. We both have backgrounds in software development and finance. I’m 40 now, but since my early 20s I’ve been busy co-founding a wide range of tech startups, ranging from community-based spam filtering to algorithmic trading in the FX (currencies) market.
Henrik has been busy working as a consultant in software engineering. Primarily in the financial sector, where he has, among many other things, been part of creating the national e-identity solution being used in Denmark. In his younger days, he stumbled into minor fame by founding the Adblock project. I guess that is the short version. And I have a dog
Thai Nhat Minh: Now e-Money only provides eEUR, eCHF, eNOK, eSEK, and eDKK for stablecoins. Do you have any plans to add more stablecoins to the e-Money platform?
Martin: We started with these currencies as we are based in Northern Europe.
Our long-term plans are to support all of the G10 currencies. Our experience tells us that adding support for an additional currency will require significant investments in the form of regulatory guidance and the establishment of banking relationships, so it’s important to first establish a solid foothold with the European currencies. Once we’ve achieved G10 coverage we expect to dive into smaller local currencies.
Thai Nhat Minh: You mention that you launched your mainnet in March 2020, and with 40 validators, very impressive! But to be honest (and I don’t mean this negatively) are you planning to ramp up the marketing soon, and can you give a bit of detail about some of your plans?
Martin: Fair question — we have done very little marketing-wise publicly and done many things “under the radar” so to speak. So it was intentional not to kick start marketing in high gear, since we feel it would be better to go full steam as we come closer to the launch on the exchange and had wrapped up our private sale. I can tell you that we have around 7 AMAs scheduled, PR will kick in soon, some announcements will also be published that are exciting. So there is a clear plan — we just waited to start at the right time
Thai Nhat Minh: Blockchain is a rapid-change industry. Can e-Money infrastructure design be promptly changed to be suitable with blockchain updates? What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team leading the market?
Martin: Yes, let me start with the last part of the question: Our strongest advantage compared to other fiat stablecoin projects is that we have a solid technical foundation and a token model that is designed for ever-changing global economies. It is extremely important to be adaptable to events which cannot be predicted (such as interest rates). Regarding the first part (infrastructure), e-Money is running on our own blockchain based on the Cosmos stack with some customisations and is proof-of-stake.
This provides us with a lot of advantages: it provides instant finality, ie. once your transaction is in a block it will not be reversed, which means a farewell to long confirmation times while making our service suitable for real world payments. On top of this we’ve implemented our own DEX (a limit order book), in addition to payments..
We believe this will be a killer feature for payments that involve a currency conversion, but will also be a great addition to the wider Cosmos ecosystem as a cheap and fast market without listing requirements. If anyone is curious, here is some more (technical) info on the DEX. https://github.com/e-money/em-ledger/blob/develop/docs/market.md
In the longer term having our own chain enables us more freedom to make integrations with other blockchain platforms, e.g. Polkadot or Avalanche. But obviously we’ll start in the Cosmos ecosystem integrating with other blockchains through IBC. Regarding our chain, we’ll be supporting WASM contracts with the help of the Confio team. This will enable smart contracts on chain, so that people can deploy their own trading algorithms that interact with the order book. These could be AMMs as we know them already, similar to Uniswap. WASM support should happen at the end of year.
Thai Nhat Minh: My understanding is that NGM enables participation in e-Money staking (and the staking rewards). I also understand that e-Money is not using on-chain governance. Is there anything else that the NGM token is used for?
Martin: Yeah, the NGM is a staking token similar to other projects such as Cosmos Hub and IRISnet. It helps secure the e-Money chain through staking, but has some nice extra rewards on top.
Actually 3 in total:
- Staking rewards from inflating the NGM supply by 10% per year
- Transaction fees
- Buy-back of NGM tokens based on stablecoin inflation by 1% per year
These 3 reward types are described in further detail here: https://e-money.com/documents/e-Money%20Token%20Rewards.pdf
In short, the NGM both secures our chain but also thrives as the issuance of our stablecoins grows. Fairly unique for a currency-backed stablecoin project. 🙂
Thai Nhat Minh: Can you list 1–3 killer features of e-Money that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about ?
Martin: Certainly: we can support all major currencies now and in the future, regardless of changes to the interest rate environment. This means we can offer a solution where users can diversify their exposure to specific currencies. Also, to gain real world adoption for payments, you need to support the local currency for the specific market. Since we are currency-backed, token issuance and redemption scales effortlessly..
In contrast to algorithmic and crypto-backed stablecoins, our tokens do not experience significant slippage when exchanging between fiat/stablecoins. Then there is the DEX — it means we can provide a “package” solution for international/cross border payments. As currency conversion (trade) and delivery (send tx) can happen transactionally on chain.
In contrast to the most popular USD backed stablecoin, we are transparent: our group of companies are audited by Ernst&Young (EY) and they also provide quarterly proof-of-funds for the stablecoins. Token holders can rest assured that they can actually be redeemed for real money.
Apart from that, we have a great profit sharing model using the NGM. This can be used to incentivize partnerships.
Next: In Part II of this AMA we’ll cover the community questions.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emoney_com
Telegram: https://twitter.com/emoney_com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/e-money/
GitHub: https://github.com/e-money
