AMA with EQIFi’s CEO - Brad Yasar
Friday, the 16th of December 2022, our CEO and Co-Founder Brad Yasar held an Ask Me Anything session on our Telegram channel.
The series of AMAs on the EQIFi official Telegram channel is intended to foster better communication between the EQIFi executive team and our community.
For those in our community who could not attend the live event, we have compiled the complete list of questions and Brad’s responses in this blog post.
Below are the questions our team and community admins have been gathering from the community and users in the week prior to the AMA:
Q1. When will EQIFI be ISO 20022 compliant?
Brad Yasar: Well the standard that is referenced here is not an official certification by an ISO authority so although we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to data safety and security, there are no current plans to adopt this repository standard.
Q2. Are the Commercial Loans live now? If so, has there been much interest in it?
Brad Yasar: Yes, commercial loans are available now. Yes, there is interest in them and we are working with the interested parties to extend those facilities to them. I do want to make a distinction here. These loans are available to qualified clients and we do want to ensure that the onboarding and due diligence processes take their courses so we are not rushing to push a bunch of loans out. We want to ensure the program works well, both for our liquidity providers/lenders as well as clients looking for funding.
Q3. Can you share with us what plans EQIFi have in 2023, expansion-wise and product-wise?
Brad Yasar: We have shared our roadmap since day 1 so I will just recap here what we are working on and will continue to work on in 2023:
- Merger or DeFi and Banking is our number 1 priority. We want to make EQIFi the NeoBank that will mark our 2023 so that is the main focus;
- Acquisition of additional banking/financial licenses is the other area that we will pursue in 2023. We are doing everything we can to reduce the cost and settlement times of our banking products and services and will continue to do so;
- New blockchains and assets will also come to the EQIFi platform and expand our product suite and supported assets;
- UI/UX improvements both for the desktop and mobile versions of the platform are an ongoing concern and as we get more use cases and feedback from our community we will continue to make them better.
These are really broad initiatives that come with a lot of work in the background both from a technology and human resources perspective so we will make more detailed announcements when the timing is right.
Q4. Is EQIFi working on any new partnerships at the moment?
Brad Yasar: Yes, we are. Of course, the question is not whether we are or not but who are those partners.
In case anyone here hasn't heard of our ESG initiative, I think it is worth mentioning that since day 1, we have been very environmentally conscious and green, however, we did not talk about it much. The next wave of partnerships is going to focus on growing our ecosystem with ESG impact partners that EQIFi can materially support on top of our internal ESG goals.
An example of this partnership is going to be the launch of new yield pools that are sponsoring certain nonprofit/impact organizations so we are going to allow our users to support environmental causes not by donating, but by investing in products that create streams of revenue for those organizations and that is just the beginning.
Q5. When will we see the Native Banking Access inside the EQIFi ecosystem? What will that mean?
Brad Yasar: The original plan was to release the banking integration by the end of 2022 since we are almost at the end of the year, it will be safe to give the dev teams a little bit more time to finalize and test the integration so we are pushing that milestone to Q1 of 2023.
There is no one on this planet who wants to see that integration finished more than me, however, because it is such a major update and undertaking we are going to err on the side of delaying deployment as much as needed to get it right. Given the market conditions and the events of 2022 that challenged all of us this year, we see no benefit in rushing anything that may compromise the stability and security of our platform.
I think we ALL had enough bad news with Terra, Celsius, 3AC, Voyager, FTX and the list goes on.
Q6. What other blockchains will be supported, and when could we see them?
Brad Yasar: Well that list is being reviewed and adjusted every quarter. As you know our next suite of products is being tested for BSC and we have had BSC integration since day 1 so that is coming. We also launched a BTC product and expect to increase our native support for BTC and lightning. However, what blockchain comes next is still in the works.
We are monitoring the communities of newer L1s/L2s and looking for ways we can serve those chains well. Once something is finalized in testing we will definitely make the announcements. So far we have started looking into three new ones that we will go live within 2023.
Q7. What's next for EQIFI development? Any partnership in the future?
Brad Yasar: I think this is a combination of previously answered questions. I did briefly mention what is being worked on from the tech side and partnerships so let's open the floor for audience questions, please.
The live participants had the chance to ask questions live, you can check them out below:
Q8. What is the roadmap for EQIfi advertising? When will we reach more people?
Brad Yasar: As this year has unfolded and turned into the mess that we are in today, we took measures to contain our expenses and that reflected in the advertising budgets as well.
We will closely monitor market conditions and our internal budgets and start a new marketing push when the market is ready for such activity. Unfortunately, we thought that time would be Q4 of this year but the FTX debacle pushed it to next year.
Q9. What kind of pros or cons do you think the possible recession expected around the world will be for us?
Brad Yasar: Great question!
Pros: A bear market and recession will weed out the weak/fraudulent projects so it will be better for us to build and grow.
Cons: Funding sources and trust in DeFi have eroded so we have a harder time attracting funding, clients, and partners because everyone is worried.
Q10. Why doesn't the EQIFi App support more cryptocurrencies? I want to keep my cryptocurrencies in the EQIfi App. When will that be?
Brad Yasar: It is just a question of prioritizing. Every asset we add becomes our responsibility so it is not just a question of adding the asset from a development perspective but also making sure their tokenomics are sound, the project is viable and reliable so on and so forth so it takes time that we have not had much of this year. More will be added soon.
This year has been very tough. We saw many billion and multi-billion dollar projects collapses and take down the market with them. I consider EQIFi to be well prepared with a bit of luck that we had zero exposure to any of those massive failures. We had zero exposure to UST, Terra, CEL, and FTX because we chose the path of no leverage, no heavy debenture, and minimal market exposure. So given the circumstances, a small, young platform like ours surviving such violent fluctuations and system shocks proved to me and hopefully our community that we are here to stay and grow and we are going to do everything in our abilities to accelerate that growth when and where we can.
Q11. How many $EQX tokens will we have to hold for Corporate Loans? What percentage will be for which type of loan? And what will our total loan size be in 2023?
Brad Yasar: Tier 3/4 can apply for Loans. So you'd get the best deals if you are a Tier 4 user with 1M EQX staked. We expect the initial loan pool to be $10M if that gets fully allocated, and we have plans to increase it as needed.
Q12. Why can't we see the current lock amounts in the system? And why do minor errors in the system persist?
Brad Yasar: We work diligently on all bugs and errors that are reported.
I am tagging our CTO for this one @ioanafrincu. CMC has been very difficult to work with. We have advised them and given them correct information almost weekly and they do not do what needs to be done on their end to fix things which we have no control over so I'd suggest reaching out to them.
Our CEO ended the AMA by thanking all participants and and the EQIFi community for their continuous support and interest in the EQIFi project and its vision and mission to help people reach their financial goals through providing innovative DeFi and traditional banking services!
The team is delighted for every chance to speak with and get closer to our community!
Stay tuned and keep an eye on our social media channels for future AMAs and other announcements!
Until next time,
The EQIFi Team
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