AMA Highlights: Genesis Shards

By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
April 12, 2021–8 min read.

Hillrise Group
Hillrise Research
8 min readMay 6, 2021

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On Friday 9 April, we welcomed Saurav into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for a conversation about bringing liquidity to pre-IDO tokens.

Genesis Shards is rethinking the use of NFTs beyond just art, by using them as a vehicle for wrapping ownership of pre-IDO tokens. Through their marketplace, this brings liquidity to typically illiquid tokens.

Key is the native launchpad that will benefit from quality deal flow via its “Access” and “Mentor” shard system.

Soon, the GS token will be launched via their “Gen Ticket” whitelist, the first implementation of their product.

In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.

Daniel Dal Bello
Hi guys, today we are joined by Saurav… our original guests are super busy with upcoming IDO planning. It would be great to start with an introduction to yourself Saurav and some background on what’s happening at Genesis Shards.

Ray Reijnders
Welcome and thank you for joining us today. The issue of pre-IDO liquidity as well as the dangers lurking in OTC trades are something we’ve seen often.

We’re curious to learn more about how you’re solving these issues and how your other products tie into this.

Can you please start with a brief introduction to yourself and Genesis Shards?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Thanks, @RaySwayCX and @dalbellodaniel for hosting GenShards!

I work on partnerships and content at GenShards. I have 3+ years of experience in crypto, prior to which I worked at Goldman Sachs for 3 years.

Genesis Shards is a 12 member strong mission-driven global team that has built and scaled products at Harmony, Marlin, EOS, Accenture, Deloitte, and Wharton. It was co-founded by Nilotpal Mukherjee and Garlam Won in 2020, both having a combined 12+ years of cryptocurrency experience.

Nilotpal started his career as an investment banker with Deutsche working on deal structuring, valuation and IPO processes, and later was a strategic consultant at Accenture before taking the first step in cryptocurrency back in 2015. Later in 2018 he joined and headed the Business at Marlin, and was instrumental in the early growth of the company laying a strong foundation for the brand.

Garlam Won has also been in the ecosystem since 2015 and previously headed Marketing at Harmony before starting his venture — Momentum 6. He has been behind the marketing of some of the top DeFi & NFT projects in the space including the likes of Band, Kava, Mantradao, and 25+ others. He further exerts influence in various parts of the Blockchain Ecosystem through his in-depth connections in Korea, China, Canada and the US.

As part of the core team, we have Jae Chung, who is our superstar blockchain engineer and is heading the development team at Genesis. He became known in the space through the EOS.IO mainnet launch as a gifted developer, with his abilities eclipsing those of his experienced peers. Jae is often invited to speak at prominent conferences and can be found discussing the benefits/pitfalls of blockchain technology during interviews.

Ray Reijnders
So you already have quite a bit of knowledge in the financial sector then! Must be great to be able to apply that to blockchain and the content that you’re working on.

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Yep, I’ve always been fascinated by finance. I’m also an MBA with a specialization in finance. Looking at the growth of the DeFi space is really interesting to me… disintermediation on so many levels!

Let me introduce the project as well…Genesis Shards is a whole new marketplace for pre-IDO tokens on NFTs powered by Polkadot.

Genesis Shards was created to usher in a new paradigm for DeFi transforming NFTs into a liquidity vehicle for pre-IDO tokens and introducing a whole new suite of DeFi products across multiple blockchains.

Daniel Dal Bello
You’ve cited the traditional finance derivatives market as a potential target for DeFi TVL/market size (roughly 1000x higher than now).

In your opinion, what would it take to get DeFi closer to such a sizable market? And, what role do you envision Genesis Shards playing in enabling this to happen?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
I believe you’re referring to some of the numbers in this article.

The projection there was for the DeFi options marketplace, which would be a subset of the entire DeFi derivatives space. Genesis Shards is a pioneer in the area of DeFi options. Solving pre-IDO liquidity is only the first application of DeFi options, we’re barely scratching the surface here.

Even if we assume that DeFi options on NFTs should capture 5% of the value of the larger DeFi derivatives sector — this alone gives the DeFi options marketplace a $25 billion value — and this is using the conservative number for the market size (kindly refer to the linked article for more details).

Daniel Dal Bello
Similar to how project launches in cryptocurrency evolved from ICOs into a mix between fair-launch liquidity mining and IDOs… what trends are you seeing, and what do you think is the next evolution in terms of go-to-market models for token sales?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Well, the entire shift from ICOs to IEOs and now IDOs has been improving accessibility and fairness upon each evolution. The trend we’re most excited to see play out, and one we’re pioneering, is the pre-IDO launch.

Lack of pre-IDO liquidity in this space is something I have personally faced and cannot wait to see being addressed through GenTickets. I hope this kickstarts innovation — we’re using NFT swaps to enable this, some projects in the future may do it differently… let’s see!

Ray Reijnders
Fair-launched projects are quickly growing in interest because they appear to align the incentives of participant-investors better with the underlying platform.

How can the Gen Ticket system be adapted for the fair-launch model?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
The GS token launch incorporated a $2.7mil fundraise in private and seed rounds from strategic investors to ascertain the growth of the network and the Genesis Ecosystem.

The token release schedule for the private/seed/strategic investors is planned such that it will have minimal impact on the public token launch.
Also, the dual launch on BSC and ETH in our view makes it accessible to a wider audience, some of whom simply cannot afford the high fees on the ETH network.

Ray Reijnders
And how do you envision other projects perform fair token launches through the Genesis Shards platform?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Well, Genesis Shards is not a platform/launchpad for token launches. The projects will be free to choose their token launch method — be it IDO/IEO or anything else. We would just be an enabler for projects to increase liquidity in the pre-IDO phase. This has a ton of benefits:

  • For Investors: they will no longer have to worry about shady OTC deals with high default risk: they can simply utilize the safe, trustless pre-IDO liquidity provided by Genesis NFTs.
  • For DeFi projects: they can leverage the early liquidity of their tokens offered by the platform and build strong community support early on in their journey. They can also get a sense of early price discovery helping with quicker course corrections.

Ray Reijnders
That’s exactly what I was looking for, thank you for elaborating.

Ray Reijnders
You’ve recently partnered with dART to bring insurance to the Genesis Shards platform.

Why did you decide to partner with dART, a relatively new player in blockchain-enabled insurance, and what does your partnership bring to the table for end users of your platform?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Well as our project is centred around NFTs as the powering force behind our DeFi options / GenTickets, we saw a very natural synergy with dART.

Here’s a summary of the value-add that this partnership would bring to the GenShards ‘users’ (keep in mind that for us ‘users’ are not only the investors and community members, but also the projects that would be part of the Genesis ecosystem).

  • dART will provide access to insurance for the Gen Ticket NFTs.
  • Any future NFT DeFi option baskets from GenShards will have access to dART insurance offerings.
  • GenShards and dART will explore synergies between NFT projects on both ecosystems.
  • NFT projects that are part of the GenShards ecosystem will be able to avail insurance from dART.

Ray Reijnders
Is there any indication on how this insurance for GenTickets will work at this point in time?

Would also be curious to know more about the premium on that insurance.

Saurav (Cryptocat)
The exact details have yet to be worked out at this point. Would be happy to share once that angle has been finalized.

Ray Reijnders
Genesis Shards has partnered with Kylin Network as its Oracle solution. Could you explain to us what the thought process was behind the selection?

How do other oracles compare including something like Chainlink?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Genesis Shards has partnered with Kylin Network to access oracle services and integrate price data feeds through Kylin’s Oracle network.

The Kylin Oracle Network offers instantaneous, secure, and reliable on/off-chain market data and social data sources to DApps — and these were key considerations for us:

  • Our partnership with Kylin will help drive oracle scripting, data analytics, and data feeding parameters with respect to our upcoming NFTX exchange.
  • The partnership also opens the doors for Kylin to become a Genesis Shards strategic ecosystem partner.

This would open up avenues for Kylin to potentially forge partnerships with promising early-stage DeFi projects within the Genesis ecosystem.

Having said that — our doors are open to partnering with other reputed oracle solutions as well (like the one you mentioned). Would like to highlight here that GenShards would have an entire suite of strategic partners — which would support the projects coming on to the ecosystem.

The ultimate vision of Genesis Shards is to be a self-sustaining ecosystem where projects can get the best possible early-stage support to navigate through the DeFi waters. Hence there is really no limit to the number of partners (such as oracle providers) that we can have in the ecosystem.

Ray Reijnders
You’ve recently announced some of your Access Shard partners. What was the vetting process like? What are grounds for termination as a partner, and what ‘is in it’ for these partners?

Saurav (Cryptocat)
Genesis Shards built on NFT swaps aims to offer a one-stop environment for great projects to meet great partners, build an engaged community base and get ‘crowdsourced’ hype early on in its life cycle.

The first step here is to actually bring in promising DeFi startups into our ecosystem! Our vision is pretty big, and we can only scout so far with our own small team.

Genesis Access Partners will help bring in promising early-stage DeFi projects into our ecosystem. This will effectively help expand our ‘field of vision’.

What’s in it for the Access Partners? Access Partners can bring limelight to a project they see promise in and/or have invested in at an early stage, by bringing it into the Genesis ecosystem. In addition to the exposure, projects get end-to-end support from all possible angles and have a greater chance of succeeding.

Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.

Genesis Shards is building a brand new marketplace for pre-IDO tokens via NFTs and is powered by Polkadot.

Connect with Hillrise Group
https://hillrise.group
https://hillrisegroup.medium.com
https://twitter.com/hillrisegroup

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Hillrise Group
Hillrise Research

Hillrise Group is a blockchain-native venture capital and consulting firm supporting emerging Web3 startups.