Recap: IOSG Kickstarter Demo Day — 1st Connection Party
As applications on IOSG Kickstarter Program continue to grow, we've been amazed to see the unfolding of hundreds of exciting projects. To spotlight some of these initiatives, offer them direct developer support, and build close connections with our mentors from the top-tier industry, we organized a unique showcase: IOSG Kickstarter Demo Day — 1st Connection Party on Oct.15. Don’t hesitate to watch the wrap-up video here!
The online demo day allowed 8 promising teams to present their ideas live via Zoom and receive feedback and any sharing from mentors. We would love to extend our sincere appreciation to our mentors who attended. They are:
- Aidan Hyman, Co-founder & CEO @ChainSafe Systems
2. Marek Laskowski, CTO @Open DeFi
4. Corey Pigott, Senior Associate @Open Web Collective
5. Calvin Chu, BUIDler @Impossible Finance
6. Yaoqi Jia, Asia lead @Polkadot
7. Deniz Omer, Founder & CEO @EthereumCentral
8. John Wu, Core Developer @Litentry
9. Jocy Lin, Founding Partner @IOSG Ventures
10. Xinshu Dong, Partner @IOSG Ventures
It was thrilling to hear about their insightful sharing on project development and exciting discussion time to delve into any questions such as tech, ecosystem, marketing, community, fundraising. We're glad to see selected projects span a wide variety of use cases, ranging from ecosystem infrastructure, DeFi services, the market's new favorite NFT, etc. Don't miss out on the event recap here below:
🔥 Arkhivist (#Security Auditing)
Project Highlight
Arkhivist is a cyber security solution, providing real-time risk intelligence on smart contracts. Apart from smart contract auditing and providing predictive risk analysis, Arkhivist is also monitoring smart contracts in a 24/7 manner to alert users with potential risk and loss to their assets. Archivist is also one of the first movers in this field to solve the static and improvident problem of the currently existing solutions.
Mentor Insight
Thanh Le: It almost takes several months to audit a smart contract and can really impact the process of going to the market plan of a project, how do you see this?
Reply: Arkhivist long-term goal would be to work with DeFi project; we are targeting long-tail assets investment, we would be able to take your project on and perform a very fast audit. Apart from that, we are also providing a list of trusted protocols and this would provide more credibility towards investors.
Thanh Le: Do people need to pay for all the protocols in the DApp that you verify?
Reply: Yes, people need to pay for protocols that they wish to be monitored and we have a set of rules before onboarding those protocols, for example, there must be a time lock and there should not be an immediate risk to funds.
Marek Laskowski: I agree with the previous comment that a potential niche is to compliment and "fill the gap" and be able to launch before a conventional audit. I think with your presentation you could tell a user story from the perspective of your customer. What excites me most is the possibility of your platform to react in real-time and front-run the exploiter, "white-hat" the funds, return funds, and take a commission. How do you deal with legal issues?
Reply: It is definitely something I'm thinking about a lot, the problem about it is like you mentioned, liability and legal concerns. It is the difference between being a "custodial" and just a risk intelligence platform because we can definitely exfiltrate funds automatically, it's just that we have to be able to control them.
🔥 Commeth (#Web 3.0)
Project Highlight
An application that allows registered users to send encrypted messages to each other without revealing identity. Commeth has many advantages: First, it is user-friendly. The operation is quite simple, just like sending emails. Second, it protects the privacy of both sender and receiver, and more importantly, the message is also encrypted. Third, Commeth can deliver lots of use cases. For example, contacting the owner of a particular NFT collection; Connecting with developers of a particular smart contract, etc.
Mentor Insight
Yaoqi Jia: Do you have protection on the backend to prevent malicious attacks and to protect the users' privacy? What if someone sends a huge amount of messages to crash the server since for now, Commeth is free to use.
Reply: In fact, that's something I'm thinking about and the protection has to be integrated. But for Commeth, users have to register with their Metamask so it is not as automatic as web2 applications like Discord. Possible solutions include charging a fee for each account registered to prevent people from applying for hundreds of accounts. It would be great if mentors can give me some advice or insight on the potential business model.
Yaoqi Jia: There are two models you can take into account, either a high one-time payment for registration or a small number of fees for each message sent. Meanwhile, you also need to monitor users' accounts regularly. But the key is to find the balance between counter-measures and security. If you take too many measures against users, they will have an impression that your system is not decentralized enough.
Marek Laskowski: Does anything get written to the blockchain? One (old) idea is to pay a fee to send, and the receiver can refund the fee if the message is welcomed (not spam) (Of course your protocol can take a cut in the above fee model) Have a look at Mask.io as a comparable project. It's validation of your idea for sure!
John Wu: Do you think people will all ignore the message that doesn't link to the identity? Like I usually ignore notifications from discord.
Reply: Still researching this, maybe give users options to blacklist some kind of senders.
John Wu: For this direction, I can easily think of three kinds of message-sending models. First is email system, the second is oral, the third one is instant messenger. For now Commeth looks like an email system. For future, do you have any ideas on the product design? What are your thoughts on web 3 messenger system?
Reply: The first indicator is how the users use our platform and what they are using it for. I wanna work closely with the community to figure it out. The big ambition I have is to make Commeth a new social media platform , that is more on the instant messenger side. But right now it's too early to decide.
🔥 Hipo (#DeFi)
Project Highlight
Hipo is the real decentralized bond protocol that applies time periods and fixed interest rates in DeFi. Hipo is a brand new solution combining order book and AMM. With the innovative product design, risks are naturally dispersed and isolated. Users have low liquidation risk since the volatility of impermanent loss is lower than the price fluctuation of cryptos.
Mentor Insight
Marek Laskowski: This direction will be really hot in the future. The demand is increasing from what I speculated. Do you have any strategy for multi chain integration, or what blockchain are you focusing on right now?
Reply: Currently, we are focusing on Ethereum. We also plan to integrate on Algorand. Other low-cost chains are also in our consideration.
Yaoqi Jia: Who will be the issuers at the beginning?
Reply: We hope there are real users issuing bonds, but if there is not we will probably be the first issuer to bootstrap the product.
Yaoqi Jia: You can also have a look at TrueFi to see if you can get any inspiration there.
🔥 Rand (#DeFi)
Project Highlight
Rand is a mobile app where users, especially young adults in Europe, will be able to create or join collective prize pools to earn common yield with their money. The pools will be called parties, private parties are created between their circle of friends and family, public parties are hosted by rand to bring a financial gateway to everybody. The yield is produced with Rand yield aggregator which provides liquidity using stablecoins on several money markets or AMM.
Mentor Insight
Yaoqi Jia: Probably you could share more about your multichain plan.
Reply: We basically now have launched a test on top of Ethereum, layer 2, but almost on Polkadot.
Marek Laskowski: I like the social dimension to this project. Excellent.
🔥 Shrub Finance (#DEX)
Project Highlight
Shrub is a decentralized exchange where users can buy or write crypto options of any size. Buyers and sellers can optionally be the matcher for their trade to ensure immediate execution. They are building the Robinhood of DeFi crypto options, delivering frictionless onboarding, an intuitive interface, and an incentive structure that rewards all value providers.
Mentor Insight
Calvin Chu: Options liquidity is so fractionalized, but I think they're too slow to tap into defi — I can definitely see this being useful for other options protocols to grow across the board.
Marek Laskowski: Good presentation and team! I think there's a lot of opportunities to innovate in incentivizing liquidity provision in options platforms. On the UX side, have a look at hxro.trade for a simplified user interface.
🔥 Treasury Research (#Data Service)
Project Highlight
Treasury research is a data-driven research group focusing on Dao's treasury operation and governance activities. After researching different Daos, the team found more power under the very surface of Dao's format. Treasury research can do third-party independent investigation service for integrating transparency and education, seeking alphas of the treasury and signals behind it, and facilitating Dao's treasuries to help them get better at decentralized operation governance.
Mentor Insight
Marek Laskowski: Are you Dao?Given your model and token swaps, perhaps doing things like grants is definitely a model of the service. If not, maybe that could be your future and I would like to follow it up.
Reply: We are not yet but we would like to look into it in the future.
Thane Le: I also hold the opinion that your team can be upgraded as a Dao like an investment Dao.In the beginning, you can start with conduct research in exchange for a token swap between Daos. A bigger market you can target projects that have treasury fund and provide consulting service for them. Then you can become an investment Dao yourself.
Calvin Chu: Because you are also working with other teams and want to have Dao to Dao cooperation in a way you can look at a basket of projects.Because if you are doing token Swap you can quickly have a diversified portfolio just like ventures but in a unique way and have access to builders and may find something like proxy access.
Reply: How do you see DAO?
Calvin Chu: We can see today's DAO maximal trend, and I am really bullish on what you are doing.
🔥 Metahood (#Metaverse)
Project Highlight
Metahood aims to build a slick marketplace for metaverse lands. Currently, people are having a hard time trading lands due to the fragmentation of the market. Metahood provides a delightful and unified interface to search, browse and discover lands virtually. In addition, an alert system is integrated that enables prospective buyers to get informed of new listings. Thus users can get full access to various market data.
Mentor Insight
Jocy Lin: The aggregators are definitely very important from what we speculated in the DeFi space. So aggregators for Metaverse should be in the same logic. Do you have any thoughts on how to attract more users, like good UI/UX?
Reply: Definitely, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to use. We are thinking of ways to address the general public, not just the crypto community.
🔥 Loot Swag (#Loot)
Project Highlight
Loot Swag aims to build a Loot marketplace, where on one side, there are creative designers that do the artworks and deliver various Loot skins. On the other side, there are loot owners that are willing to buy skins to dress up their loot. Unlike many other Loot projects, Loot Swag supports synthetic loot, which every wallet has automatically and does not need to be minted. This is massive because Loot Swag can bring non-loot owners to the community.
Mentor Insight
Marek Laskowski: I think the intersection of the blockchain social projects and NFT projects is quite natural. We see the cryptopunks community and others where people just gather to form a strong community. I think this direction is gonna be massive in the future. I think an NFT based community can be a seed or kernel that would grow into wider social networks. NFT is a very interesting way to bootstrap the social blockchain community. I am bullish on this concept.
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✍️ AT THE END
It's such a great honor to connect remarkable mentors and Kickstarter projects! Presenters have shown their fruits in building their startups, while mentors have also given insightful opinions and help. We hope to strengthen the relationship between founders and mentors through the connection party, which turned out to be exactly what we wanted initially. As we said, IOSG is always here to help, to bring value to the ecosystem's growth. Again, thank you all for coming, for your time and passion. But it's not the end, so please look forward to the next party of the IOSG Kickstarter! See you soon!
🦄️ ABOUT IOSG
IOSG Ventures, founded in 2017, is a community-friendly and research-driven early-stage venture firm across China and Singapore. We focus on open finance, Web 3.0, and infrastructure for decentralized economy. Our portfolio covers more than 60 projects, including Layer 1 (NEAR, Polkadot, Cosmos), DeFi (1inch, Synthetix, UMA). We commit ourselves to working alongside various developer & DAO communities and helping the most aspiring founding teams to achieve success. As a developer-friendly fund with long-term values, we launch Kickstarter Program which offers capitals and resources for innovative and courageous developers. Since we consistently cooperate with our partners and connect with communities, we work closely with our portfolio projects throughout their journey of entrepreneurship.
