FNDZ — AMA

This is the transcript of the AMA session held on the 1st of September by the RoundtableDAO team with Valentino Cremona from FNDZ’s Operation and Tech team. You can find the full video on the RoundtableDAO’s Youtube Channel.

About FNDZ

FNDZ is a pioneer in defining a copy trading platform that is truly retail-friendly. There are no complex features or vague explanations, just a straightforward and easy-to-use platform where you can generate returns while sitting back on autopilot.

Introduction

Hello everyone, thank you for being here. This is Astropark and Jay from RoundtableDAO for with Valentino from FNDZ team.

In today’s cryptocurrency world, trading is getting harder and harder. You have to learn different tools and study hard to be successful. One platform has promised to give us the best edge possible by following the best traders of the game is FNDZ.

FNDZ is a social trading platform, promising to make social and copy trading simple by connecting retail investors with no experience to highly experienced traders using DeFi and smart contracts.

We have with us today Valentino Cremona former CEO of Amdax the first Nederland company to obtain custody and exchange licenses from the dutch central bank. He is now FNDZ tech and operations manager assuring to run things smoothly and without friction for us. He’s giving us a bit of his busy time to talk with us today about this wonderful new product.

©RoundtableDAO’s Youtube Channel

AMA with Valentino Cremona from FNDZ

Valentino welcome to the RoundtableDAO show and thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.

Thanks for having me.

Can you tell us where did the FNDZ idea come from originally? How did you choose this name.

So actually Robin [Ubaghs] and I spawned the idea together. He was running this concept on centralized finance already with api integrations and stuff and it was called FNDZ. We took that name because it made sense, it’s a silent “u” but if you start saying the project it makes sense why it’s called FNDZ because it has to do with all kinds of things with funds inside.

I’ve been in crypto for a very long time now, about ten years. I’ve built the first centralized licensed exchange in the Netherlands, on the regulatory side with compliance and everything that was a major hassle. What happened is that my network, my friends, my family, everybody knows me as the crypto guy and everybody ends up asking me “how do I do this?”, “how do I do that?”, “ can you help me?”… So and i think this is a common problem for a lot of people in crypto: the entry barrier is quite steep so it can be really confusing coming in, especially now there’s so many propaganda terms you have you have the bitcoin maximalists who are like honing down on “shitcoiners” you know. All of these terminologies which are super confusing for an outsider when they come in.

[Entering the space] is very confusing, most people don’t know exactly what’s going on, which asset to buy, which coin is good. So essentially friends of mine they always ended up coming and other colleagues and there’s really two options until now. You either:

• Make them create a centralized exchange account.
  You tell them they have to do KYC procedure or get all their documents which is a major hassle. They have to get approved and then the timing might be off and then once you’re approved then like let’s match off the logins or like i need to be there and coach you every time you log in and what to do and the interface and how to use it… I remember when i started trading crypto in 2013 or so, Kraken at the time was so confusing for me. I remember I was a total noob and I had no idea what was going on, what the interface was like doing here and there. I could have figured it out but it’s complicated if you don’t know.
  So that’s one option: you either help them and you like call them and then they log in and you need to manage positions and then maybe you have a stop loss in place but then you want to remove it, you know it’s just pain in the ass so that that doesn’t really work!
• The other option is to get them connected with APIs and then you need to give access to API, but that business model is really weird: you have to send invoices at the end of the day, chase the people that are making the bots and stuff. It’s not great, plus you’re not sure what bots you’re getting , you’re not really sure about the PNL, it could have been tampered with since it’s centralized exchange, it’s not like on chain data which can be validated. So that’s not really an option.
• The last option is you get them to send you capital. You’re like “okay, whatever, buy a thousand dollars worth of Ethereum or bitcoin and then send it to me”. Maybe you can do it for 20 friends but at this point you’re an asset manager. You’re not really allowed to do that in the traditional sense. But even if you were to do that right, you’re essentially running a fund. You need to calculate the PNL, report entry and exit, you need to deduct your fees… At this point you might as well be running an actual fund with admin systems in the back and there’s so much stuff going on.

Well, I just want my mother or a friend of mine to just go here and deposit into the vault and everything else is fine. Let’s say you want to make a vault and then you could whitelist it for example so that only the friends that you want can come in with with Metamask addresses right so you whitelist the IDs and then you say “hey this is my private vault for my friends and me and they can just participate but at least they all can deposit into that vault and then everything is managed out of there essentially”.

So that’s where the idea came from, to make the entry super simple for the trader obviously to have some sort of trading environment obviously that they’re used to but for the retail user to simply come see the on-chain pnl, the trader profile, how they’ve been performing, see this is one of the good ones, this is what they do, click deposit and get in.

One of the friction points of course is having the fiat on ramp here as well. There’s so many payment system providers at this point that have widget html code that do the service themselves with the kycml where they go through that provider deposit into their wallet and from that wallet they can just deposit into a vault.

We want to solve a problem that me and the team have encountered in our personal everyday lives for a while now. This is the solution that we’re building for that problem.

This is great! How do you think your customers will benefit the most from your product other than what you just told us?

There’s probably gonna be super crazy random benefits coming out of this that are maybe not even what we’re intending to do simply by creating a vault and you can you can decide the fees. It’s theoretically possible that people end up making very low fees and just sharing stuff with each other and then it ends up having some other dynamics that we’re not aware of.

Our clients are the retail mass users so what I did in the company before it still stands, it’s there, it’s regulated, it’s flourishing. There my idea was to make a on-ramp for big capital institutions and high nets and that’s successful, that’s working but as I was doing that for example I realized that a lot of institutions in Europe where the on-ramp is built treasuries are still debating the language of what is bitcoin. Is it money, is it a commodity? They haven’t even agreed on terms. So what you see is the first influx of institutions coming in but so slowly, there is a lot of volume coming still out of the retail markets and having been in the space for a long time and looking around it just seemed everyone’s building big brain products. So it’s very complex to understand what’s going on and it’s complex to know what you have to do but if you are in the space you understand what to do. But where are the mass retail products? Who’s catering to that so this is really where we come in, we’re trying to make retail products for people that are maybe not even crypto and they’re just trying to find an easy access into the space without having to learn this pile of content before they can make good decisions.

How will the platform work? Will it be fully operational when the token launches? So copy trading from day one?

No, unfortunately no. First we’re gonna launch the token and a couple of weeks later we’re gonna have the product ready. We’re working on the first MVP right now, that should be ready end of October maybe.

Our demo is now ready we’re getting the final front-end demo so we’ve fixed all the screens. We’ll be sharing our demo environment which is very clickable soon as well so you can get a feel and look for the platform and in the back we’re currently hashing out the other smart contracts on the dependencies deploying into testnet for example as well. So there’s plenty of stuff going on but we won’t be ready on day one.

Which exchanges or tokens will be available basically once the demo is done? Is funds going to support both DEX and CEX options?

No, we’re just doing a decentralized option. This is a purely DeFi product. There’s plenty of other automated bots you know, copy trading whatever solutions on centralized exchanges, but as you just saw with compliance Binance, for example, now had to do the api removal grant access for anyone who’s not kyc. So there’s various other challenges there happening on centralized exchanges and we want this to be a purely DeFi product. On centralized exchanges you still have to do your onboarding, the idea here is that you just connect your wallet and you literally one click or two click deposit and you have exposure. You might be going through that little onboarding ramp in case you don’t have capital in wallets yet that you go through the payment service providers so to really make it super smooth friction-less and fast just to get exposure

We’re going to be on decentralized exchanges so we have a Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum support from the beginning. As we grow we are obviously going to connect into the other ecosystems. That’s also dependent on the volume of the assets there and the users of course, so we will be making strategic expansions based on these criteria. For example let’s say the Avalanche ecosystem or Solana. Let’s see how many assets are on there and how many users and how much volume, it really depends on that. We’re trying to cater to retail so as long as it’s niche and not enough people use it then it’s not very interesting to expand to.

Do you have agreements already in place with some traders, group influencers? How will the platform grow?

Exactly, we target trading communities, we get the best traders out of those communities they will run contests they will run their own leaderboards so there is an entire plan on how to get traders onboarded and how to lock them in. That’s an ongoing process and that’s ongoing work and we currently have I think 150 traders that will start now. We’re trying to get that number to a thousand and thenobviously on chain pnl results will show which ones are the good and the bad ones, so as as time goes you essentially get their track record on chain as well so that will be interesting to see.

So it’s very good to hear that you have all these traders coming and what are the benefits of becoming a trader on FNDZ? To get these people interested.

There’s leaderboards, there’s tournaments so there will be rewards, there’s cloud chasing for leaderboards if you’re amazing. It’s a way to scale your returns if you will, you can just scale it in an easier way, you don’t need any sort of admin system in the back to do it so it’s making everything much more simple.

Let’s put it that way you don’t need a back-end admin software, you don’t need the licenses, you don’t need anything right now. The exchange is done via swapping protocols, not via us, so that’s not a licensed activity. The other license activity would be holding the custody of the assets which is also not happening, they’re in the smart contract so the user can redeem always and we also structured for example to a DAO so everyone from the ecosystem will be able to vote on the parameters that govern these vaults as we go along as the ecosystem grows.

What are the plans and strategies for expanding the adoption of FNDZ.

Obviously the user experience for the retailer is at the heart of this. Traders will have more functionality to trade ideally than the normal DEX experience that they know, well we’re working hard on that. But really to keep the user experience at the heart of this and UI obviously because retailers just need nice products and they don’t really care how it works. They just need to have a nice experience and that’s very much the focus. We also have incredible people on board some are also in the background that you don’t see officially on the website and they’re just incredible people that help us with strategies as well and expansion.

I have network circles here. Then of course on the on the product side is the expansion to the networks that I mentioned depending on their criteria and how many users volume assets they’re offering we will then be expanding into those networks as well to offer copy trading there.

Operational excellence is another one, so having the right procedures and policies in place to make sure that there’s proper risk mitigation protocols and to make sure that you have the right procedures and policies in place to really operate on a very high level.

There’s brand recognition that’s going to be worked on, so marketing growth campaigns. We have the pre-IDO, post-IDO and post-product strategies. We have the global roll out strategy so we’re currently focusing mostly in the Netherlands. from the Netherlands it’s a test bed, it’s a bit like the reality TV series shows you know how they do it: they concentrate in one area and usually they do it in the Netherlands. If it works here then you can scale it immediately. Of course we already have our global roll out plan so we have certain core communities in certain countries which really cater for this kind of product and that’s where we’re going to be rolling out.

In the end it’s really just making the product super easy to use and intuitive and the entire user experience making it very seamless. And making sure that the onboarding and off-boarding of fiat into crypto and back out from the vaults directly is going to be super easy. Those are kind of the overarching yeah strategic expansion roll outs.

Do you have any special partnerships that are coming up on?

Yeah, I can’t really say much about that, but so you understand what kind of things we’re doing, we’re obviously targeting mass retail adoption so we will be looking for partners that are outside of crypto also that do have similar style concepts, or communities, or traders tooling technical analysis whatever that are trying to find an easy way to crypto. This is the way for them to come in as well so we’re also trying to bring outside market segments into this segment. And then obviously in crypto ones where it’s just leverages our offering for example hedging with let’s say option contracts down the way if you want to go short let’s say.

Options, very nice! Can you tell me please in simple words, why we should invest into the FNDZ project instead of others?

You never invest, you contribute! Hey I’m not going to tell you what to do and what you shouldn’t do, I’m just simply telling you guys what we’re doing and if you’re looking for a project that has big potential proven in the market segment. I mean what we’re not opening up a new market segment that is unheard of where we’re testing out something that we don’t know if it will work.

Copy trading is a huge business, eToro’s massive, huge market capitalization in the billions. Robin Hood is not exactly the same but also right there there’s a lot of retailers and they have massive volume every year. There the fees are not ideal, I don’t know if you ever traded on one of those platform centralized order books. On these retail platforms they have for example secondary order books so if your market buying or selling you’re filling getting filled somewhere else with different orders you’re getting filled on a different slippage, your margins if you’re going leverage are probably not the exact levels they should be. If you’re doing the calculations yourself you realize they’re off, so that’s not going to happen so the market is big.

Copy trading is a big market, we’re not reinventing the wheel. The models that we’re using will definitely yield revenue to the ecosystem and they’re not new models either, they’re very proven old models and so we’re just bridging it all together and bringing it all into one one big pile.

Also everybody can use this platform, it’s DeFi, so as long as you have a wallet you can connect to it. We’ll see what happens with the new regulations on on the European side. If you’re american you’re already screwed anyways. They try to keep you poor over there.
They’re being harsh, let’s put it that way, the US is being harsh. MiCA regulation is also not expected to be the easiest there are the implementation of the 5th anti-money laundering directive is going to be definitely enforced. Currently it’s just a a directive to give oversight, but they’re going they’re going to implement it into the law, as far as I’m aware, so that’s anti-money laundering directives and it could then be that they do ask for kyc on wallets and stuff, that’s something to bear in mind.

Let’s read some of the questions in the chat. Tolga is asking “will FNDZ copy trading mechanism be able to implement into any platform as a white label?”

Yeah we will expand support on other networks once we get there.

“Is there going to be a ceiling on the number of users per trader and a total contributed value per trader to prevent over saturation of a particular position?”

That’s totally up to the trader.

Maybe it’s good to highlight the two users of this platform. The first one is obviously the trader. What they do is they create a vault, it’s an account in the traditional way if you think about it. So they create a vault and decide on the parameters. So they get to decide:

• the management fee
• the performance fee
• the redemption fee
• who is allowed to deposit into their vault, you can make it public or private.

You can limit the number of deposits or the amounts. You can say you need a minimum of a thousand USDT for example to deposit in, but you can also define the maximum.

Eventually you can close vaults off to to the public if you want. There’s two ways to do it private vaults where you do it privately and you can do it for friends or family or whatever, or public where you want to scale it.

So all these parameters are variables that the trader decides with a maximum, so you can only maximally take 30% percent performance and 3% percent management which is a high fund- model. So those are the maxes that are drawn out and otherwise everything is a variable.

The second user is the retail user, of course. They will see the dashboard, they will see who are the best.

When you search on our platform we also have an algorithm that ranks the vaults by certain parameters: traded volume, average deposit size and a variety of parameters. You see the active vaults but as a trader you just see the best performing vaults for example.

Or you can do a search for your friends vaults and you just deposit in with one or two clicks of a button and that’s it. Then you can have a dashboard where you track it, just making it super simple for retailers that’s essentially what the goal here is.

From Dennis Moringa: “do you think that FNDZ will have the ability to level with other copy trading platforms and if yes how do you reckon this will be done?”

It’s different, we’re not on centralized finance so it’s a different approach. This is way more inclusive, way more accessible, way easier to set up. If we do it right, I reckon we’re gonna take a lot of that volume away and a lot of those users.

I mean if your portfolio gets big enough one day, you will see that you deploy various strategies on various parts of your portfolio. You’re not gonna put a hundred percent to do one thing. You could for example say “oh i wanna have 40% spot long exposure on the majors, another 30% I’d to allocate to some medium altcoins” for example. And then you say “oh the other 30% I’ll split 15 on automated bots on centralized exchanges where you have credit risk for example, if the exchange get hacked your funds are gone. or you’re like I’m gonna let one of the FNDZ DeFi copy traders trade the other fraction. So you know what I mean, it’s not mutually exclusive to one another.

And also everyone from everywhere can join i mean you basically need a wallet a metamask for example.

That’s right, you just need a wallet and then again the only thing that could be the barrier is the fiat on ramp, that you don’t have capital in wallets. That is why I explained already that we have the payment integration services that do it in two to four minutes. You can go from credit to debit card into your wallet, you have your stables and then it’s literally one or two clicks of a button and you’re following. How much easier can you make it you know. The barrier of entrance is just super low so that it’s just so easy to do

We have the classic question from basically everyone in in any chat: “Do you have an IDO date or do you know if it’s gonna come up soon in the announcements?”

We just got our audits back so we’re going to be announcing an official announcement now with the fixed date, today or tomorrow. Just stay tuned.

Another question arrived, a very nice one: “Will funds platform have extensive notification mechanism for users? Will it be customized to follow traders?”

[laughs ]You want to have anxiety, like Blockfolio, every two seconds? Well that’s a good question, We’ll see to make it so that there is no anxiety induced decisions that are being made because the swings are crazy, but yeah there will be some notifications.

I think also if it’s something all transparent on the blockchain, I know a lot of bots that you can use to track what an address is doing so this is also something really transparent I guess.

Yeah, I mean all the pnl is on chain right, so if you create a vault and then you trade in that vault, the trades are there. You will always see it, you can’t tamper with it, so it’s a great validation mechanism of the good traders over time.

When I join a vault then how can I get back my money? After one month, or something that you set up?

No, you can withdraw it whenever the hell you want, literally. If you withdraw it early before crystallization period, there’s a small redemption fee in order to dis-incentivize going in and out obviously, to just jump from one to the other. That makes no sense, so you should be selecting the ones that you want to follow properly. But essentially you can leave any day, any moment, any time , you have total freedom.

Let’s say you get out of the vault, okay, let’s say the trader does 100% performance, the fee is applied when you exit and you get the remainder of the pnl into your wallet. This will be done in stables. The denomination of all of the vault assets will be in stables and then you essentially can withdraw via that payment service provider that i’m talking about. You will see who that is also, you can directly deposit back into your bank account if you want. In and out, so so the friction is very little.

And the trader that was running the vault, how he will benefit? Can he close the vault and get his his part?

There’s a crystallization period, which means that there is a date at which the fees will be calculated and subtracted. The crystallization period can also be decided by the trader. Some do it on a more regular basis while others will do longer intervals, that’s really up to them.

Whenever the crystallization period is due, the fees are deducted, but only if they’re above a high water mark, so only if they’re realizing performance obviously. You’re not going to pay unless the unless the traders actually make you money.

Tolga is asking if there is some kind of report mechanism if I find a copy trader doing something suspicious or malicious. Is there a way to report traders.

This is user protection, that’s what he’s talking about. In order to protect users, we actually do something: we curate the assets that are being traded. For example on Ethereum and BSC we select the assets that are being traded. You can’t just have all kinds of horseshit tokens being traded on there, especially with low volume or very low market capitalization, because there you can really manipulate price with very little capital, so we’re very aware of that.

Just bear in mind that we’re traders, all of us, for extensive amount of time in crypto. I’ve traded very illiquid stuff myself, I know how these things work.

What we do to protect the user is that we have certain threshold parameters that enable an asset to be traded and to be essentially accessible via FNDZ. So we’re not going to let you trade a hundred MC, one thousand dollar 24 hour volume token. It’s not going to happen, you have to have a certain minimum volume per day, a certain market capitalization and further requirements of course. And based on that, you then get added to a list so the FNDZ traders can actually trade these assets.

That falls under user protection and this is how we’re protecting retail users also to not be left holding some random stuff that just popped up one day. It will only be the the selected good ones.

Great, so I can’t or anyone any anyone can just launch a token and pump his own token.

No no no! Never. We’re gonna be protecting our users you know, that’s not gonna happen. User protection is imperative.

Very good, so we’re in safe hands.

Yeah, well, yeah, ideally. There is no safe hands in crypto!

No no we know but at least we’re gonna be protected.

Look we’re trying our best to do everything in a good way to protect users, to increase user experience our experience is coming from regulated. Personally I created a regulated on-ramp into crypto and out to fiat and both ways, so the rules are clear. We know how to operate within the law, we understand trading, we understand how asset composition works, we understand what can move price based on low caps low volume and how easy it is to do that, so the understanding of the market is quite significant especially of the infrastructure. We’re quite confident that we can protect users more than a lot of other projects in this regard.

Really great! How will the platform deduct fees?

During the crystallization periods. Those are defined by the traders so whenever they decide the cutoff period this is when the fees will be deducted it’s all just automated so they don’t have to worry about anything. Everything just happens in the back.

Thank you Valentino for your time thank you to all the watchers.

We’re going to be doing more AMAs and stuff that so i mean there’s way more information that we probably haven’t conveyed but I hope you guys understood what we’re doing better now. And i’m also really excited to show you guys the demo. That’s gonna be really helpful for everybody to really solidify the understanding of what it is that we’re building.

We’re very anxious for that, the platform looks very promising for sure.

Thank you so much, have a nice day guys cheers.

References

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTCL_YGfWD4

Project links:
Website: https://fndz.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FNDZtoken
Telegram announcement channel: https://t.me/fndztoken
Telegram community: https://t.me/joinchat/M-cGJOpsWkpmZTNk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fndz.io/

Disclaimer

This article is for informational purposes only. It contains no financial advice. Always do your own research before investing in any crypto project.