NiiFi — Best of AMAs
If you’ve just discovered NiiFi — or if you’ve been with us from the start. We thought it would be a good time to do a refresh of some of the best AMA questions we’ve had. Also — don’t forget to keep playing with testnet!
Below is a selection of the best questions and answers from the team across various AMAs.
DeFi Search AMA
I am currently wondering what NiiFi will offer to the retail finance industry? What can you tell us about that?
NiiFI CEO Jacobo: Great question!
NiiFi will offer the set of unique features that any retail financial product needs: ease of use, fast and cheap transactions and, specially instant.
These things combined can help us to offer a solid product that can be adopted as scale.
If any financial institution wants to adopt/offer DeFi to their customers they will have to do so in a platform like nahmii + NiiFi; we offer instant finality, cheap and fast transactions and the ability for any business to apply their own business rules to meet regulation needs such as KYC/AML
Too many projects promise magic but never release any working products or prove any sales, During short / long release period. Is your project like this? If not, can you tell us, What interesting topic makes your project different from other projects?
NiiFi CTO Sakib: Well I think one of the key points here is that we are people who have a background in a wide berth of industries. All of the team have a consistent track record of building products or solutions and shipping them to market to millions of users.
We as an organisation are also heavily focussed on shipping our products and tools to multiple markets. We also have technology in Nahmii that truly allows us to cross over. We are absolutely NOT interested in short term wins, but more the long term path.
However, we will achieve this through short iterative releases of our tools starting from as soon as next month in testnet. [Live now — see https://medium.com/niifidao/niifi-deploys-to-ropsten-f4c8ce49a2b7]
CryptoDaku AMA
Can you tell us about market pie you are trying to conquer, your competitors and your SWOT analysis for your offerings?(can be for both Niifi and Naahmi 2.0)
So at the moment there is a fantastic and enthusiastic community in crypto and Defi. But when you compare usage to tradfi and look at the market caps available in that space we’re getting there, but there’s still a lot of room for us to grow.
NiiFi has the opportunity to take institutional and commercial grade DeFi to the masses, without users really having to know they are interacting with it. It’s the technology that truly allows us to do that and why people like Andrew Keys at DARMA capital (one of the ogs to take ETH to market) has backed us.
DeFi is rebuilding the financial systems — NiiFi and nahmii are at the forefront of that.
Competitor wise — as mentioned before there are multiple players who claim to do all the things we can actually do, but, and it’s a big but, at scale these fall down. Look at the slowing down of networks like Polygon(Matic) — or lack of security for just one example. NiiFi is able to stay secure, perform at scale without slowing down or increase in fees because of nahmii and the unique tooling we have invented with brand new “state pool” technology. With most L2s and networks there are multiple trade-offs in performance or security — with nahmii those trade-offs don’t exist.
Polkastarter AMA
Can you tell us more about the rest of the team behind NiiFi, and how your experience has led you here? Polkastarter are big believers that the team and talent behind the project is one of the most important factors for success. 👯♀️👯♀️
Andrew Keys, Lead Investor, NiiFi:This was an area I was particularly interested in from an investment standpoint. When meeting the co-founders Jacobo and Mark I saw technology veterans.
Jacobo Toll-Messia, NiiFi: Thanks Andrew :)
The background of the key team members consists on a variety of experience with the common denominator of having built systems used by millions of users across several industries such as Telecom, Investment banking, Media and Oil & Gas. We have been working around scalability in blockchain since 2013 and most recently with nahmii.
Andrew Keys, NiiFi: Jacobo already referenced the 50M plus users in a previous software stack he developed and Mark is one of the most familiar people with layer 2 scaling solutions having worked on and learned lessons from the creation of Bitcoin’s lightning network and Plasma.
Jacobo Toll-Messia, NiiFi: True: our previous platform was used by mozilla, Alcatel, Panasonic, Telenor and several other large companies where we were serving content to users from all over the world in 200 countries.
Wow, working on scalability since 2013 — that’s two years before the Ethereum whitepaper even came out. Bringing that kind of mainstream tech experience into DeFi is exactly what the industry needs, that’s exciting — sounds like you’ve assembled a top notch team that knows how to build at scale 💫
We’d love to know more about NiiFi’s competitive advantage. What differs you from other similar projects?
Jacobo Toll-Messia, NiiFi: Thank you for that :)
So, there are two key aspects: the technology we use and our commercial strategy. Without nahmii you cannot build NiiFi with instant finality nor tools around it that ease adoption. With regards to the commercial strategy, the founding team has years of experience building products and taking them to market to millions of users as mentioned before. We are targeting not only the crypto community but also several commercial use cases of which we will be disclosing more details in the weeks to come.
Andrew Keys, Lead investor, NiiFi: Low latency, instant finality and aspects of KYC/AML are table stakes for institutional investors to participate in this space and these are key points NiiFi is addressing.
QUESTION: @bolertele
I read about your instant finality, predictable fees, low latency and etc.. On paper it makes Niifi into a working product . Also, It is kinda cool to see these things finally coming into action after all the work the nahmii team has been putting in… I would still like to know, what are your plans to make your features work on long-term?
Jacobo Toll-Messia, NiiFi: It sounds like you have been following our progress for a while, always nice to hear! We are in a fortunate position to have our own layer 2, nahmii, which has been on mainnet since 2018. Upcoming upgrades add full smart contract capabilities and this is where NiiFi becomes the vanguard product for us.
We have built nahmii to support the requirements that you mention: instant finality, predictable and cheap fees, low latency and high throughput. This means that NiiFi will demonstrate performance unseen before in the blockchain space. The user experience will be orders of magnitude better than alternatives.
nahmii is also patent-pending, which protects us going forwards, which is a key consideration for corporates to consider using our solution.
The whole system is specifically built for the future and to operate at commercial scale, so this ensures the viability of the solution into the future. This project is NOT a short term plastering over the cracks that have emerged on Ethereum. It is a project which fits perfectly over the top of Ethereum where they complement each other for the long term.
Gains Associates AMA
Ayeley from GAINS: What is the relationship between Nahmii and Niifi?
Jacobo, Niifi: NiiFi is built on top of Nahmii.
NiiFi cannot be built without Nahmii.
Well, in fact, you cannot have DeFi at scale without Nahmii😬 but that is a separate discussion.
Actually, if you want DeFi with instant finality of transactions, no latency, known fees, and the ability to apply KYC/AML (which every large public institution in the world needs if they want to provide DeFi tools to their customers, then you need Nahmii ;)
Have you been in discussion with some big banks or industrial players? And if yes, what do they think about NiiFi/Nahmii?
Jacobo, Niifi: Yes, we have.
We have also built PoC’s alongside them.
And their feedback is translated exactly into what NiiFi offers :)
Again, and sorry for repeating myself, cheap, fast, instant, and knowing the costs of transactions beforehand is a MUST for any company.
Your platform is built on Nahmii “a patent-pending technology”. Maybe we’re not all familiar with this platform, so can you share the main advantages it gives to NiiFi and why did you choose it?
Jacobo, Niifi: Nahmii was one of the very first L2s ever deployed. The background story is simple: we were serving content to 50m users a day in 2017 and we wanted to build a content platform at scale. We spoke to a very high profiled project then, that was working on scaling, and we were told we could use their tech.
After 4 months of waiting, we got tired of it and on January 1st, 2018, we started working on Nahmii.
We saw the opportunity was immense as nobody else was being serious about fixing Ethereum’s scaling issues (time proved us right as now many of those projects are either dead or are ghost projects — pretending to be doing something but no development is taking place behind the scenes).
Now, the advantages Nahmii gives to NiiFi are massive.
For example, it gives NiiFi the ability for any Financial Institution to offer NiiFi to their customers as they can easily apply KYC/AML :)
Furthermore, and equally important, the transactions are cheap and instantly completed.
You cannot overlook the fact that the transactions costs are known beforehand because no commercial company is ever going to deploy a DeFi solution without knowing the costs of every transaction beforehand
And we chose Nahmii because we built it, so we are biased 😂, but also honest :)
CryptoDiffer AMA
CryptoDiffer community question: You say that one of the characteristics of DeFi Meets Utility is that in addition to solving business problems, they also improve the entire ecosystem through innovation, but what kind of innovation will it really do, and this will be done automatically? Or do they have an update and innovation program?
NiiFi CEO, Jacobo: Innovation goes by simplification; try to get the average person from the street to “go to uniswap and buy $10 of any given coin”.
That person will need, at least, 2 hours to create an account in an exchange, buy ETH in any given exchange, download and install Metamask and figure out Uniswap’s UX.
The average time might be 2 days more than 2 hours.
Again, I am referring to any person who has never touched any crypto whatsoever.
If you can do all that in 5 minutes, that is your innovation.
Add to that all the advantages that Nahmii offers…
CryptoDiffer community question: How flexible are the functionalities and design of Niifi against the rapidly changing market?
NiiFi CEO, Jacobo: Excellent question!
We have plenty of engineering and product experience….but it is impossible to keep up with the market…if you have to keep up with the market — it means you are going behind it :)
So, the best is to innovate; that way you set the trend ;)
