Hi there, Yichen, CEO of WhaleLend here! From the very beginning, WhaleLend was built on transparency. In fact, we pride ourselves on being as open as possible with our community. WhaleLend is based in Finland. For those unaware, Finish law is famous for enforcing transparency. We at WhaleLend share the same ideals as our country. In an effort to continue transparency in 2019, we would like to share what we’ve accomplished in the past year.
I didn’t set out to create a company around one of my basement projects, but, when my friends and family started asking me if they could use the project too, I knew I was on to something. Because my friends and I believe that cryptocurrency is the future and we love helping people, we turned WhaleLend into a financial product to help people earn from their crypto.
We also love to be active in local business and cryptocurrency events when we can. Here you can see an interview that we did with NEO’s MD Johnson and Juha-Pekka Raeste.
WhaleLend has come a long way from its humble basement roots. Now we’re backed by the Nordic’s leading VC funds and asset managers, including Taaleri, which is one of the largest publicly traded asset management companies in Finland. We’re also proud to be backed by Business Finland, the country’s public research and development agency.
With that additional funding came product growth. We’ve been slowly adding new faces to our team to handle that growth. However, the same familiar faces are still here, along with a lifetime of expertise in our respective fields and a dedication to making WhaleLend the best it can be.
The WhaleLend Founding Team
Yichen Wu — I am a long-time blockchain enthusiast and a graduate of the Helsinki School of Economics. After accidentally creating what would evolve into WhaleLend’s product in my basement, I soon attracted the attention of investors and, in 2017, the project was officially launched. I have a great deal of experience in blockchain, traditional finance, and tech projects having worked at Microsoft, Nordea, and EntoCube.
Chris Whellams — As WhaleLend’s CTO, Chris has extensive experience in the blockchain field, as well as other areas vital to the business. He’s a great public speaker and helps WhaleLend put its best foot forward on every occasion.
Ilkka Salo — Ilkka has a background as a technology entrepreneur and lawyer with Clifford Chance and Nokia. He’s WhaleLend’s COO and instrumental to WhaleLend’s growth. Ilkka brings with him plenty of experience from scaling companies and regulatory expertise.
Phuc Tran — WhaleLend is lucky to have Phuc as its lead engineer. He has a wide range of experience from working on projects at NordPool, Google and G-Works. He brings these experiences to WhaleLend to help create a killer product that helps us go above and beyond in the crypto space. He earned his masters in computer science from Aalto University.
WhaleLend Community in 2018
If you’ve been a member of our community for a while, you may have gotten to know the WhaleLend team a little better through our Reddit AMA. We love community outreach and that includes taking any opportunity we can to introduce ourselves to cryptocurrency fans.
This has helped us to see not only a massive growth in our core product in 2018, but it also gave us substantial growth in our community. We do our best to engage with our community members in a transparent manner, sharing the way we work, our business model, product development and the partnerships that we’re proud to have forged.
Our community has been growing steadily stronger, and so has the trust that they have put in us. We don’t take that lightly and we’re thankful for every one of the 8,000 users who has joined our platform in the last three months. If you’re one of them, then you can feel free to follow us on Medium, Twitter or Telegram to keep updated on what we’re working on at the moment.
WhaleLend is proud to have established our home base in the Kasarmikatu 21 building, which is in the new financial hub of Helsinki, Finland. Our building is home to some of the biggest financial companies and banks in our country and we’re happy to have them as our neighbors.
Our office isn’t just our headquarters either! We use it to hold workshops and events where we can network with other people in the cryptocurrency space. If you’re interested in participating in one of these events, feel free to stop by. We’d love to have you!
Financial Security at WhaleLend
We take data protection very seriously because protecting our customers’ funds is one of our greatest responsibilities as financial custodians. We strive to make WhaleLend as secure as possible. Whenever possible, we draw on the experiences of our team members to help make that happen.
Our CTO’s background includes building a trading system for Morgan Stanley and implementing security features. He’s also worked on the largest power exchanges in Europe; this gives WhaleLend access to the best safety practices in the world.
I, myself, worked for Microsoft, a company that supplies IT infrastructure to some of the largest companies and militaries on Earth. You can rest easy knowing that WhaleLend’s systems have to live up to the same rigorous standards that these organizations demand.
We’ve done everything in our power to make WhaleLend as safe as possible for our customers. All of our system design choices are made with safety as the greatest consideration. Even though it would be more convenient to use an automated withdrawal process, we manually verify all withdrawals. While this might be slower, we feel it’s worth it for the increased safety that we can offer our customers.
Definitely, 2018 was an exciting year for us and we’re so happy that you’ve chosen to join us on this journey. We are dedicated to bringing you the best product that we possibly can, and we look forward to continuing to connect with all of you over our shared love of cryptocurrency in 2019!
Originally published at whalelend.com on February 28, 2019.
