Woodstock Fund is a global multi-asset investment house founded by Pranav Sharma and Himanshu Yadav in 2019, focuses on DLT, and is keen to back startups in this space, which also includes India. The fund invests in early and growth stage Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) startups and companies
Reef Team: Hi there, thank you for joining us today. Why did you decide to invest in Reef Finance?
Woodstock Fund: We are in general bullish on liquidity aggregation, cross-chain liquidity and Polkadot. Reef Finance fits perfectly as it is the first cross-chain DeFi smart platform built on Polkadot. With a seamless user interface, Reef offers its users a smart liquidity aggregator and yield engine that enables trading with access to liquidity from both Centralized exchanges (CEX) and Decentralized exchanges (DEX) while offering smart lending, borrowing, staking, mining through AI-driven personalized Reef Yield Engine.
Reef Team: What is your view on the current DeFi hype cycle?
Woodstock Team: As per our thesis this decade belongs to Digitization and Digital Assets. DeFi, Traditional finance and sound money will see convergence. Every hype cycle tests the boundaries. In the first wave of the DeFi hype cycle, there was excitement around fundamental technology architectures and the DeFi space experienced broken code, smart contracts and hacks. In this wave of DeFi hype cycle, technology doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor as there has been a focus on robust code and smart contract audits. What seems to be an achilles heel in many instances is governance, UX/UI and regulatory foresight. We believe that once these become central focus for DeFi projects within this or next hype cycle, we will be on a firm path of convergence of DeFi, Traditional finance and sound money. That’s a true unlock of DeFi potential.
Reef Team: What are some of your other portfolio companies?
Woodstock Team: Our focus is Public DLT, DeFi, Tokenization and Web 3.0. We have invested in Holochain, Elrond, Casper Labs, Band, Covalent, Marlin, Stafi, Frontier, Unilend, Paraswap, Mudrex, AllianceBlock.
Reef Team: What do you think is the most important ingredient to success as a DeFi project?
Woodstock Team: Four ingredients — Team, Technology, Traction and Timing.
In our view a solid team with a good mix of Tech and business acumen solving the right problem at the right time and showing right traction is key to sustainable success.
Reef Team: What do you look for in terms of team experience and background in the companies you invest in?
Woodstock Team: Broadly we look at three things — authenticity, capability and commitment.
In general what attracts us to a startup is the problem being solved and traction (on design, code or marketplace). We don’t prejudge an entrepreneur. We have seen self taught first time entrepreneurs being highly successful in DLT space. In general we start with a premise that if an entrepreneur is devoting valuable time of their life into a problem, then they are in it for the right reasons. The multi-level due-diligence process unravels the rest.
As a pattern in our experience, successful startups have core team members with a demonstrable track record of solving right problems, taking tough decisions (with high integrity) and breaking out (in the market place).
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About Reef
Reef is the first cross-chain DeFi operating system built on Polkadot. With a seamless user interface, Reef offers its users a smart liquidity aggregator and yield engine that enables access to liquidity from both CEXes and DEXes while offering smart lending, borrowing, staking, mining through AI-driven personalized baskets.
For more information about Reef, or to join our team, please contact us at: info@reef.finance
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