How Techemy Capital Has Been Bridging CeFi With DeFi — Set Social Trader Spotlight

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Set Labs

6 min readJul 2, 2020

Welcome to the Set Social Trader Spotlight Series. In these posts, we give you insight into exciting new traders that are on the Set Social Trading platform. If you want to get primed on Set Social Trading, you can click here.

Today, we‘ve got an interview with Techemy Capital, a new trader on the platform and creator of the Holistic BTC and Holistic ETH Sets, for all of you to enjoy.

Techemy Capital’s Sets are currently live on TokenSets — you can check them out here.

Hi Techemy Capital, nice to have you. You’ve been working in the blockchain space since 2010 and have really created multiple brands in the space. Can you give us an intro of yourself and what you do?

Thanks for having us on your Spotlight — it’s great to be here and share our vision! My name is Fran Strajnar and I’m a founder and Executive Chairman of Techemy. I’ve been involved in crypto since 2010. I realised back then, that for the first time in human history, money has become truly digital. Once value is digitised, it can be programmed. We knew right away that infrastructure was going to be required, so we developed a long-term thesis that focuses on the magic that happens inbetwixt financial and technical engineering.

We set-up BraveNewCoin.com to excel at benchmark and related services (market data, indices, and the research that goes with it). That sector is only really maturing now. We expect BNC’s infrastructure to be powering a proper Crypto ETF by the end of this year, for example.

We established the blockchain association in our home country, New Zealand. We set up Blockchain Labs as smart-contract auditors and solution architects. We wrote one of the first Security Token Frameworks and worked on what’s now called DeFi way back in 2014 with the likes of the Omni Protocol and some of the first DEX concepts.

Techemy Capital is a licensed funds management business. We leverage the research and data from BNC and the expertise and experience from Blockchain Labs to create what I call “unstoppable financial automata”.

We have run an experimental DeFi portfolio since January 2020 (ITD +100%!) and interacted with a number of protocols and technology partners to successfully create financial products that we believe are going to be very attractive to a wide range of investors, corporate treasury managers and everyday savers.

Can you go into more detail about that Set that you are launching and its strategy?

We are launching with three different sets. Two are actively managed by our in-house traders and provide investors with exposure to BTC and ETH, where our traders are following exclusively-designed trading strategies to capitalise on price action. There’s no leverage or complex derivatives involved. We channel our proprietary trading experience to offer better-than-hodling performance.

The third portfolio is passively-managed and is shielded from price volatility by having cDAI-cUSDC as the underlying assets. This is the first of its kind portfolio on TokenSets platform, which we think will be appealing to certain investor profiles as it provides a number of benefits, including earning lending interest through Compound, getting rewarded in $COMP governance tokens, as well as aided by ad hoc arbitrage gains.

Think of it this way — would you rather sit on Tether, or sit on something that generates a good return, but is 100% liquid, instantly redeemable, and with risk managed by professionals? And you always hold the keys!

You work with a lot of CeFi institutional investors, where do you think institutions are in the adoption cycle?

There’s still assumptions that institutions only just entering Bitcoin and that DeFi is years away from being considered. I can tell you that the educational barrier is lower than you might think.

In a world challenged with the greatest generational wealth transfer, filled with endless money printing and a complete meltdown of the financial order, there’s actually an astounding amount of $$ looking for a new home. This is one of the reasons why equities keep going up. There’s not much else that is liquid enough to park huge sums of cash into and the FED just keeps propping it up. This won’t last forever and the institutional investors know it. They are actively looking for alternative investment avenues.

The main selling point to the top end of the market is the ability to hack the yield and play with what we call in DeFi “money lego” — they understand it’s a better value than sitting on an idle capital as you can gain 4–12% annual returns in income or 30% in capital gains. Digital assets have long been positioned as a hedge against exponentially rising systemic risk of the fiat currency system, negative interest rates and endless money printing — and now you can put your assets into work in just a few clicks while using your preferred custodian or holding the keys yourself.

What do you think is the biggest barrier to making DeFi mainstream?

Like with crypto in 2010–2019, products need really good User-Experience. This needs to be fool-proof. It needs to be embedded into existing products. For example, without breaking NDA’s, I can tell you that there’s significant interest in plugging DeFi into things like subway pass-cards, or any mass adopted pools of value where there are millions of small balances. We predict that within 5 years, a lot of these utility cards for transportation and store-credit will rehypothecate the capital (balances) sitting on each user’s card while it’s not in use and earn interest on it. As a consumer, wouldn’t you be happy to have your balance on anything earn say 3% a year? It’s a lot better than what the banks are offering these days!

Techemy Capital, as well as financial providers that we work with, are aiming to simplify and abstract away all the financial and technological complexity of interacting with DeFi. TokeSets’ platform allows us to achieve that by providing not only all the required functionality, but also by having developed a seamless UX/UI.

We also believe that DeFi’s infrastructure is already really good. It will quickly get to such a point that it becomes bigger than the Ethereum network itself, sucking in value from across the competing networks and traditional markets. Liquidity begets liquidity and a global dark-pool of decentralised liquidity is already proving to act like gravity, capturing all available capital.

Tokenization of securitized assets and use of the real-world assets as a collateral will take DeFi mainstream within a short period of time. This is a snowball that speeds up money velocity, and there’s virtually no incentives to leave the ecosystem for anyone who’s ever tried it. We expect issuers and investors from a range of geographies and markets to join DeFi — it is becoming too easy and so much better than conventional banking and capital markets.

Where can people find you online?

Check out our web-sites for TCAP and BNC. We publish a ton of high-quality proprietary research and price analysis for the crypto space: www.techemy.capital; https://bravenewcoin.com

Anything else you’d like to tell us or your potential followers?

We really like how advanced TokenSet’s functionality is. The development, audits, communication and vision of your team is fantastic and we’re excited to be rolling out these initial 3 portfolios on TokenSets. We hope to roll out more complex products as integrations and liquidity allows for over time. It’s going to be a hell of a ride for the next 18+ months!

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed reading this interview! You can view Techemy Capital’s profile here. If you’d like to be notified of any future product updates, head here to sign up to email notifications!

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