Structured: Making Hedged Portfolios And Fixed Income More Accessible

Mike De'Shazer
Nov 5 · 3 min read

A few months ago, I was standing outside our offices in Seoul with my co-founder, Tai. We were talking about the Korean enterprise blockchain (non)industry, new Ethereum projects, and the greater purpose of arbitrage bots. It’s always nice to think that trading profits might be having a broader, greater impact on the world as a whole somehow. When it comes to decentralized financial markets, this argument can actually be made due to the provision of efficiency and liquidity, but I digress.

That day, however, we realized something. We’d spent the last few years building new ecosystems on top of the blockchain. Perhaps, it might be more beneficial for us, and the wider system (maybe even the whole world again), to do more USING than BUILDING. This has recently been coined “composability in DeFi” or “DeFi Legos”, but essentially it’s the digital music phenomenon of the 1980s where artists unified many different musical disciplines in a much cheaper, faster, and better way without needing huge labels or band names for recording,… but for blockchain.

There have been so many interesting platforms built on top of the Ethereum blockchain in the past few years: Compound for lending and borrowing, makerDAO’s DAI for price stability, Kyber for decentralized market making, Synthetix for pegging crypto to traditional financial instruments… the list goes on. And because of the wonderful architecture of Ethereum, you could now mix and match these services to build new things.

That particular day that Tai and I were standing outside, he said: “I mean, I guess you can do actual, mature portfolio management on the blockchain now?”

“Yes”.

What is Structured?

Structured is basically the manifestation of that realization from a few months ago. Structured allows people to (in just a few seconds) combine tools and platforms once reserved for cybernerds (it still might be a bit, though). Structured can be used to generate hedged portfolios that earn daily income. There are products that consist of leverage, multi-currency baskets like Libra (but without trusting Facebook, or really anyone), products that contain loans that earn interest… even products that short cryptocurrency while earning interest from loans. Each of the products is hedged as to mitigate risk of “losing it all or a whole lot it” for purchasers. Best of all, there is no middleman. At no point do we ever hold or need to hold anyone’s money. Nor is there a fee charged by us. Just pure financial awesomeness. But that brings us to the next question.

Why Structured?

Other than the fact that it’s just really cool, both to use and to build, it brings a whole lot of accessibility with it. Granted, most people do not know how to use the tools (MetaMask or other Web3 providers) that are needed to operate Structured. This is the reason why we launched Structured Gifts a few days ago (super alpha).

Gifts allows people who do know how to use cryptocurrency to gift an interest-bearing asset to their non-crypto-savvy friends. Their friends does don’t even need to know anything about MetaMask, and can still redeem their funds, watch their interest accrue, all the while learning quite a bit about cryptocurrency 2.0: NYDB (Not Your Dad’s Bitcoin).

How Structured Works (Behind the Scenes)

Behind the scenes, Structured relies (this is the USING part of the earlier realization) on many decentralized platforms on top of Ethereum (including Ethereum itself- Thanks, Vitalik). These include Uniswap, Synthetix, Kyber, Compound, OrFeed, Fulcrum, and various other smart contracts/ecosystems. Structured merely acts as a gateway and automated solution to tap into these ecosystems.

Where Structured Is Going

For the holidays, we plan to continue iterating on Structured Gifts to gain adoption and spread awareness about the new and exciting world of crypto that’s not just driven by speculation and crazy volatility. Our vision is to help transform the narrative around blockchain. We also plan to keep developing Structured products that tap into more interesting ecosystems that are launching by the day on top of Ethereum.

Proof of FinTech

Official Blog of Proof Suite

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