Introducing the First Foundry Incubation Project – Bondly

The Foundry

Published in

The Foundry

5 min readSep 14, 2020

Dear Foundry Community,

It is with great pride that we announce to you the first Foundry incubation project: Bondly!

Bondly is a trusted, transparent and portable swap protocol designed to make you into a marketplace. Their family of trust-enabling, DeFi products are designed to be a part of everyday eCommerce transactions, providing total peace of mind for your next swap or online purchase (for a full introduction to their project, please check out their blog post here).

Bondly is not just another new DeFi project, it’s a real business with actual clients and years of work already put into it. It is led by an incredible team of entrepreneurs who have spent a cumulative 13 years of traditional financial services, 6 years of eCommerce marketing, 4 years of Ethereum blockchain development, all of whom have demonstrated a high level of competence and integrity as investors, engineers and advisors to many top projects.

And by taking a DeFi solution and applying it to a real-world problem of eCommerce escrow/middlemen and signing up early customers, Bondly is a step ahead of the vast majority of new projects.

In this article we explain why we chose to incubate Bondly and why Bondly is poised to make a huge impact on the world of DeFi and eCommerce.

The Team

When analyzing early stage projects it fundamentally comes down to the team. Do they have the “right stuff” to execute on the vision and build a viable long term business? With Bondly, the answer is an emphatic “yes”!

What words come to mind when thinking about the Bondly team? How about seasoned, skilled, disciplined, honest, fair, hardworking, visionary, but also down to earth, humble and willing to take advice and guidance and recognize their own blindspots. In working with them closely over the past few months we have come to believe they are one of the strongest teams we have ever come across. We are humbled that they chose to work with us over any number of incubators or VCs.

But of course the viability of a project is about more than just the team and their ability to execute. It is also about the vision, the problem they are solving and the technology.

The Problem, Solution and Long Term Vision

DeFi will remain a niche phenomenon unless we take the core value propositions of DeFi technology and apply them to the real world. Fortunately, there are many industries that can be served by a technology that replaces middlemen and enables trustless peer-to-peer transfers of digital assets.

Online market places represent an industry that could be well served by the tools of DeFi, with escrow and middlemen coming in between nearly all online marketplace transactions. Bondly is a trusted, transparent and portable swap protocol designed to make you into a marketplace. For instance, with Bondly’s trustless swap technology, users can turn their Twitter account into an online market place – entering into trustless swaps with no escrow or middleman right from their Twitter page.

In other words, Bondly can turn any social media channel into its own peer-to-peer market place – a true revolution for DeFi and the entire blockchain space.

The Technology

Let’s take a look at Bondly’s three core technologies: BONDSWAP, BONDDEX and BONDPROTECT, all with unique and valuable features applicable in the world of DeFi and eCommerce.

BONDSWAP

Similar to Binance OTC Trading Portal but directly on-chain and can be sent via any chat app using different blockchains

With BONDSWAP you can:

Sell a large order of a low liquidity token with no risk of slippage
Become your own NFT marketplace by minting the token, setting your own price, then post to your social media for your audience to buy
Buy assets using Debit/Credit card (using our third party partner onramp)
Send smart link in Telegram to someone you know or your favorite group

BOND DEX

Similar to Mooniswap but includes rewards token provided to Liquidity Providers on top of fee share

Interoperable DEX thats easy to use and blockchain agnostic. Requires liquidity provider (LP) participants to pool assets for a portion of transaction fees along with rewards APY rewards. The pricing engine will compare major cross chain swap options and will let you know the best one to use (even if its not us). Validation is done directly within your Web3 browser (with Metamask) or polkadot.js based Native Wallet.

With BOND DEX you can:

Trade native assets on Polkadot with USDC on Ethereum
Get recommendations on the cheapest bridge transaction path
Create your own asset pairs that otherwise might not exist

BOND PROTECT

BOND PROTECT is decentralized escrow and buyer protection for customers of crypto friendly marketplaces. It’s similar to Paypal/AliPay Express Buyer Protection combined with Escrow.com with a simple UX like Zapper.fi or Zircon, a truly revolutionary product that we believe will have a massive impact on the eCommerce market.

Designed to replace all site specific crypto escrow products with an easy to use API and completely smart contract driven product.
Offers ‘Buyer Protection’ similar to most major marketplaces, where amounts provided to Bondly by the vendor operate as collateral for the buyer
By participating in the Bondly network, marketplace vendors can represent themselves as BPROTECT ready and show their on-chain transaction history and successful Bondly enabled deals
BPROTECT will have a similar UX to Zapper.Fi that will pull this vendors on chain activity and history into one place across Ethereum and our native substrate chain so you can see their status and history
First customers will be marketplaces that sell digital goods like Domain Names and In-Game items and that support crypto payments already.
Requires that the marketplace itself stakes Bondly collateral as well as each individual marketplace vendor
COMPLETELY UNDERCUTS the whole ‘fake review’ industry which is prominently used to inflate value on sites like Amazon.com

In essence, BPROTECT is nothing short of a revolution in eCommerce and online marketplace space, as it will allow anyone to create their own decentralized marketplace on any social media channel.

What’s Next for Bondly and the Foundry

The Bondly team is working hard to bring out BOND SWAP v0.1. In the meanwhile, we will be releasing information on such thing as:

The BONDLY Liquidity Marketplace
The first BPROTECT marketplace customers
A set of early partnerships
And much more!

The Foundry team is also preparing for what’s next – lining up a team of the best influencers to invest in and promote Bondly, making key introductions to potential partners across the industry, and laying the ground work for a successful raise and launch.

We are thrilled and honored that Bondly is the first incubation project we bring to you. Together let’s make Bondly a massive success!

Very truly yours,

The Foundry Team