AMA Highlights: Oh! Finance
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
July 9, 2021– 10 min read.
On Tuesday 6 July, we welcomed Richard Seeger, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Oh! Finance into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.
Oh! Finance aims to offer its users a fairer alternative to traditional savings methods, such as a savings account — which are now often burdened with negative returns.
This also fits well with their focus on simplifying yield and providing the end-user with a non-technical background with the ability to participate.
Oh! Finance has yet to come to market, as development continues steadily we were eager to learn more about how Oh! Finance is working towards opening DeFi to a broader audience.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Daniel Dal Bello
This isn’t the first conversation we’ve had about DeFi, so tell us, what is your story and what are you working on at Oh! Finance?
Richard Seeger
I’m a technologist who has been involved in the blockchain space for about a decade now. I think literally everyone on the team has their ‘should’ve could’ve would’ve’ stories about Bitcoin and the early days.
The core team all comes from ‘big tech’ with backgrounds at Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle.
We all have a passion for customer service/customer engagement which is where the core mission of Oh! comes from. When we looked across the yield space we realized that even the easiest product was still complicated with essentially zero on-ramps from an education perspective.
So we set out to build a yield aggregator/DeFi index for the masses. Making yield easy and doing more with your USD or in our case your USDC.
Rowan Zwiers
If we understand it correctly you’ve started Oh! Finance with Noah Coomer and Mason Schuler, both you and Mason being California-based and having shared work experience at Microsoft.
Could you tell us more about how you came together to start this, how it will be incorporated, and how you know each other? Do you have past experience working together?
Richard Seeger
Mason and I have done it all from helping grow out the Azure blockchain business at Microsoft to building arbitrage bots to spending countless hours researching tokens and new launches and pretty much obsessing on all things cryptocurrency. We met Noah and Sami through other crypto-projects and our mutual colleagues.
The number one thing we learned in launching a token is how small the crypto-space is. Everyone knows everyone. So I’m a little surprised our paths hadn’t crossed earlier, but we’ve been working with each other now for the better part of 6 or 7 months building out Oh! which has been through many iterations of what we wanted it to be.
We came together to start this mostly out of necessity. We all have aunts and uncles asking us how to best get into DeFi. ‘I was told to download an app with a fox’, or ‘I was told to buy Bitcoin, is now a good time?’.
When you’re the technologist in all of our respective families you get asked those questions daily, but you realized there is not yet a product that’s made to be simple, easy, and secure to use to say, ‘Yes, Aunt XYZ — Decentralized Finance is tricky, but when used correctly you can earn a very appealing APR on your money that should surpass the stock market, or real estate, or a bank account’.
It’s actually a narrative that is hard to convey. Generically speaking, saying something is even a 4% APR is considered a ‘scam level’ for those with a conservative or safe mindset.
Our incorporation is a question for the lawyers, simply because we are all ‘doxxed’ and US-based. So we’re doing everything by the book but also doing it in a way that protects us given the murky and unclear legal landscape that is the US.
Raymond Reijnders
You mention security for the end-user as important to you. But it is also something that has proven to be difficult in the DeFi space.
What are some of the precautions that you’re taking to ensure that your platform is as safe as possible?
Richard Seeger
Top-tier audits. We sought out basically the best of the best as we went and built out Oh! We started with a Halborn audit, and we’ll be getting a secondary Quantstamp audit as well (Quantstamp’s Don Ho sits on our advisory).
So it starts with letting both the ‘degens’ and ‘whales’ and then the ‘normies’ know that Oh! will be from a smart contract perspective about as safe as it gets from an exploit perspective.
Then it starts with going the extra mile. Mike from Bridge Mutual also sits on our advisory and we’ll be working closely with his team to have insurance built directly into our UI. Intended to be a simple, easy to use, insurance offering that enables you to buy insurance on your deposit.
The intent being that smart contract exploit is just one risk, there are the other unforeseen risks that are protocol manipulation, etc that’s where insurance offers a ‘piece of mind’ story that is largely missing from the space at large.
That’s not to say that insurance offerings don’t exist, they do, but it’s the ‘on deposit’ differentiator. Being able to do it on the very action where you’ll be depositing your USDC and ‘setting and forgetting it’ for (hopefully) a long stretch of time.
Raymond Reijnders
Are you also engaging with alternative providers like Nexus Mutual?
Richard Seeger
Possibly down the road, but at this time, no. Nexus doesn’t offer cross-chain (at this time) and doesn’t offer direct in-app integration (at this time).
Raymond Reijnders
Will there be an admin key or multisig, if so, how will you be managing it?
Richard Seeger
At launch, it’ll be a 3-signature-needed multisig. A single admin key has proven to be a point of failure for other projects. Eventually, anything that is multisig’d can be turned over to the DAO or a broader managing ‘board’.
With all things multisig, you actually want it to be ‘annoying’.
What I mean by that is collecting the signatures should not be trivial. So we’ll be growing that out to more signing parties as well.
Raymond Reijnders
You expect to be able to offer between 10–21% APY on USDC, which is more than Compound (~3%) and Nexo (~10%).
How are you able to offer these rates, and is there anything you do that competitors don’t?
Richard Seeger
Well, first, some candidness. Those rates have crabbed a bit with the overall bearishness/range-held behavior of BTC and ETH. But we’re still seeing 7 to right around 15%. That’s where we’re confident we still have something special.
At the core, we want using Oh! to be boring. I can’t promise we’ll always have the absolute best APR, but our APR should be quite appealing and most importantly safe. When building Oh! we wanted to build something we actually wanted to use.
We were all getting ‘tired’ of chasing yield and having to wake up at 3am and check Twitter or see if the vault was safe etc.
So maybe it’s a bit of a mindset we are trying to change too. 7% on anything when you don’t factor in native token emissions (which we will have) is extremely good. Anything over 10% should be phenomenal.
But DeFi and more broadly this bull run has spoiled us all, where we want to see 1% daily or it’s ‘not worth the time’.
When the truth is, a large percentage of your ‘stack’ as you ‘prepare for the bear’ should be in a set and forget offering to help manage your risk (and hopefully) grow your USDC.
As for what we are doing differently, we do have some special sauce in there, the biggest and easiest to explain is the DeFi index.
Our DeFi index is a queue that rebalances into the different lending protocols thus achieving maximum yield, and minimizes the single point of failure risk of any of the individual protocols.
Most of what is out there is a deposit into a single application and by using an index you can actually catch the peaks and valleys in the individual protocols far better and squeeze out additional yield.
Raymond Reijnders
Can you give us a bit more background on the token emissions? What are the reward ranges, are they dynamic and is there any vesting involved?
Richard Seeger
Dynamic, based on TVL with holding boosts (à la Nexo / Celsius, although that may not be available at launch). Token emissions will be vested in a similar vein to Oiler, DMM, etc.
It’s proven [that] for a project to survive emissions have to be carefully thought out. And vesting seems to be the best way to do that, but we can pivot and change as needed of course.
Rowan Zwiers
As seen in your documentation gas fees are a concern for your product. In order to manage those, you’re suggesting batching user deposits into strategy loan contracts, batched auto-compounding, gas fee signals (and rebalancing on low gas fee moments), all of this is done ‘AutOHmagically’?
How would this work exactly? Would it not be possible for gas fee peaks to conflict with rebalancing opportunities?
Richard Seeger
For gas fees, it’s a queue. That’s a critical piece to avoid exploit risks as seen in belt finance etc, as for spike during a rebalancing, it calculates the gas before rebalancing. So if the gas negates the rebalancing gain it won’t re-balance.
And one of the major perks of a yield aggregator is being able to do things during peak gas times / high gas times that are unaffordable for say someone going in solo and trying to yield farm by themselves.
Raymond Reijnders
Some people have started to share their expectation that we will see yields in DeFi be similar to the yields we see in TradFi as more institutional and retail investors enter the DeFi landscape.
Is this something that you agree with, or do you have more opportunities for decentralized finance?
Richard Seeger
I think yes, for sure to some degree. But at the end of the day overhead will always exist and that overhead is always going to be massive and cut into potential yields.
The bigger competition in our eyes is say Coinbase’s new 4% offering.
But even those I expect to come down as the VC funds / IEO funds dry up, big companies will all have big company problems, and inherently that’s seen in waste.
DeFi at its very core is extremely lean and agile which is the literal opposite of TradFi (taking the custodian aspects completely out of the picture) or the Nexo/BlockFi/Coinbase’s where they are still going to have that overhead whether they want to have it or not.
Raymond Reijnders
To build on this, we see more and more platforms turn into ecosystems (Yearn, TrueFi, Aave), is this something that you’re interested in for the longer term? Will you be tackling any other products?
Richard Seeger
Yes. Again the ‘Apple’ model. Yield is the first thing we’re trying to tackle. Our very next is cross-chain and specifically being able to get and see gains cross-chain but doing it a way that is completely invisible to the end-user (outside of a well-written explainer, because you should always know where your money is being vaulted).
If we get big enough where we can start more directly competing from the perspective of lending and/or traditional loans it’s something we’re definitely interested in tackling, and we have the smarts to do it.
But let’s start with doing our one thing the absolute best. I think too many protocols fail because they try to do too much too fast.
Do one thing extremely well and be known for that one thing. Be the absolute best at something and the other opportunities will come.
I will say a good chunk of advisory comes from cybersecurity and emerging technologies fields, so we’ll be constantly looking at ways to break DeFi into traditional 401(k)s / traditional investment vehicles as well as exploring onramp opportunities.
The single biggest blocker to DeFi at this time is MetaMask.
Rowan Zwiers
Oh! Finance comes with a very distinct corporate identity, branding, and positioning. The philosophy of ‘keep it simple, stupid’, is clearly visible in the style elements and use of words. This also makes it not the easiest brand name to specifically search on, as it’s not too distinctive and we have yet to find a phrase to type into google to find the link to your website ‘oh.finance’.
Can you tell us more about the strategic positioning of Oh! Finance and your thought process behind it?
Richard Seeger
SEO (which is specifically what you are touching on) takes time. That will improve after launch as we have more traffic to the site, building a brand takes time as well.
As to the strategic positioning, Oh! is that ‘ah ha’ moment, the OH! I have been getting screwed by my banks and DeFi can be easy.
So if we do our jobs correctly Oh! will become synonymous with easy DeFi. It’ll become synonymous with a DeFi awakening, and sure maybe not with the degens, but the amount of ‘TVL’ the degens and existing whales have is less than 1% of the potential opportunity.
But degens and whales, we’d love to have you too, don’t you want to sleep better/easier at night?
Rowan Zwiers
What are you looking forward to in the near term and more generally for the space in the longer term?
Richard Seeger
For Oh! Finance, our launch. And then our launch on Avalanche as our second chain! A token generation event is extremely exciting (and nervous time) and for Avalanche there’s no better chain to be going to next. Their blockchain is truly different and perfect for yield (especially once those lending protocols come).
Longer-term mainstream adoption! When my uncle goes “OH!” and realizes he’s been missing out on DeFi. There is no reason (through intelligent welcome bots, etc.) a normie cannot be introduced and onboarded into DeFi and we’re going to make that our mission from the jump!
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
Oh! Finance offers optimized yield-generating products, focused on reducing risk and increasing volume exposure.
Connect with Hillrise Group
https://hillrise.group
https://hillrisegroup.medium.com
https://twitter.com/hillrisegroup
