Mr. Yale ReiSoleil, Founder of IOB.FI DAO was asked a few questions by Buzz Blockchain and we received detailed answers to all of our questions. This interview was setup to know more about IOB.FI and FI Token as this is coming up to be one of the most innovative projects of 2020. Down below is the complete interview, get to know what it takes to make a change in the current financial ecosystem.
Q1. Please introduce yourself?
My name is Yale ReiSoleil. I have been trading financial markets for 25 years. I have worked in mutual funds, venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds with high-frequency trading (HFT) partners. With my diverse experience in several financial sectors managing over $3 billion funds, I am always on the lookout for emerging financial technologies. My partners and I were trailblazers in HFT in China in 2013. We partnered with China Telecom to build the first dedicated trans-Pacific fiber-optic line linking the New York financial data center to our Shanghai-based commodities hedge fund.
An unexpected event in 2015 propelled me to look into the fledgling decentralized currencies called Bitcoin and Ether. Having spent millions building a proprietary ‘black box’ algorithmic trading hardware and software system co-located in Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) datacenter, the firm’s good time in being one of the biggest stock index futures HFT traders in China came to an abrupt halt when the local government banned HFT index futures trading and limited all order size to 1 contract. Being aware of the danger posed by any centralized authorities led me to make my first purchases of BTC at $430 and ETH at $8.
I am currently managing our Defy Hedged Pool on-chain and am chief architect of ioBots trading algorithms. I am a firm believer in decentralized finance (DeFi).
Q2. Briefly describe what is iob.fi DAO?
We are one of the very few who actively manage a DeFi hedged pool. It is similar to a hedge fund, but we don’t call it a hedge fund, for reasons I will explain later on. It (the pooled funds) is on the DeFi platform, it’s on-chain, and the trading is done primarily on-chain. It is different from sending the order to a centralized exchange, that is a totally different type of interaction. The DeFi platform allows companies or platforms, including ourselves, to create any type of derivatives.
So long as there is a reliable price feed, DeFi revolutionizes finance as we know it. Anyone with a Web3 wallet is able to invest or have exposure to, not just crypto but also stocks such as Tesla. Now you feel you want to invest in Tesla. Before, it was just hard. You have to find the stockbroker that’s able to get you access (to the stock exchanges). Now anybody in the world anywhere is able to access that derivative and take advantage of the price movements.
It democratizes market access. And that’s what we do, we don’t believe in passive investing. We believe, through our know-how and our risk-control engines, we can consistently beat the market. Just like we did for the past thirty years.
Q3. What is DeFi in your terms?
DeFi platforms are naturally suitable for iob.fi to create and to trade any asset classes globally with universal market access. Synthetic derivatives break the common barriers of borders and fiat currencies. For instance, now anyone anywhere in the world can trade the gold futures with a Web3 wallet.
DeFi is more than yield farming, liquidity pool staking and flash loans. It is an evolution the world is experiencing to have more inclusion to the masses who have not had easy access to the world of finance.
However, DeFi is full of its weaknesses as it is still in its infancy. The sector is still very small and trading on DeFi hasn’t really started. On-chain trading is currently expensive, slow and highly inaccurate.
But DeFi is the future of financial markets because it’s permissionless, secure and there are endless new market opportunities.
Q4. What are the best use cases of DeFi in 2020-2021?
Uniswap is a great success of decentralized, permissionless trading and token listing. It upended the dominance of centralized, unregulated crypto exchanges.
Another great use case of DeFi is the creation of synthetic financial derivatives. So long as there is a reliable price feed, it revolutionizes finance as we know it. Anyone with a Web3 wallet is able to invest or have exposure to, not just crypto but also stocks such as Tesla. Now you feel you want to invest in Tesla. Before, it was just hard. You have to find the stockbroker that’s able to get you access (to the stock exchanges). Now anybody in the world anywhere is able to access that derivative and take advantage of the price movements.
The future of DeFi will be some fundamental functionalities that have not yet been addressed today: Efficient trading and large, frictionless and cheap financial transactions.
Q5. How is iob.fi DAO making hedge funds more accessible to an average investor?
We have moved the entire hedge fund business on-chain.
Our back office operations: account, auditing, client onboarding and management, are entirely on-chain and transparent. Anyone with a Web3 wallet, such as a MetaMask wallet, can easily log in to our both frontend website and the backend, the DAO website, to start investing. We are a decentralized autonomous organization so our major business decisions are made by our governance token holders. We don’t collect any personal information such as email addresses, phone numbers, residence addresses, or any other financial information. Anyone (from anywhere in the world where our services are not prohibited) can connect her wallet and start investing in not only cryptos, but stock, commodities, stock index futures derivatives through our hedged pools.
Through Defy Hedged Pools, hedge fund investing is no longer restricted to the rich.
Q6. What are the asset classes in which a retail investor could invest using iob.fi DAO?
Through our Defy hedged pool, anyone can become an investor by providing liquidity into the pool. As mentioned above, the pool is currently actively trading in cryptos, stock derivatives and commodities. We will gradually add more asset classes to our portfolios as they are becoming more mature in terms of trading executions.
Q7. Does iob.fi team have previous trading experience?
We are a group of traders and fund managers each with over a decade of experience. Besides me, Core Contributor in Trading Technology is Dr. D. His Ph.D. program was sponsored by Cisco’s research for the next generation of Internet Protocols, the next internet standard after the emerging IP6 protocol. Dr. D is a vice president of trading technology in a top Wall Street firm. He has more than 10 years’ experience in High-Frequency Trading and Quantitative Trading platform design. His expertise is mainly in trading platform software/hardware design, trading network design, and trading strategy design and implementation. The trading systems designed by him are running in dozens of stocks and futures exchanges in North America, Europe, and Asia.
On our advisory board, we have Tal Elyashiv. Tal has decades of experience in finance. He is also our VC investor. Another “top secret” we have is a gentleman, a top executive at one of the world’s top financial centers. He has 30 years’ experience delivering large transformation programs in a range of industries from media, to retail and public sector. Worked across a number of large consultancies as an ‘executive geek’, remaining true to his engineering background and striving for simple, innovative disruptive solutions. Over the past 5 years has taken a hands-on interest in the power of blockchain technology working across startups and community projects and now supports a number of funds and private banks with their investment decisions, due diligence, and structuring of large transactions.
We are proud to be one of, if not, the most experienced trading team in the DeFi space in the entire world.
Q8. What are some other characteristics of iob.fi DAO?
iob.fi DAO is committed to making sure that our traders in the future will have no longer need to set up trading accounts all over the world (as we have been doing until now): New York, Chicago, Shanghai, London, Frankfurt, Sydney… nor is there a need to make foreign currency exchanges to fund those accounts.
Risk control is the starting and the endpoint of all of our trading strategy and portfolio management decisions. We use different risk control methods as the main ways to achieve trading objectives. We consider risk control the single most important factor in trading success more than anything else.
Q9. What is your vision and the goal you want to ultimately achieve with iob.fi DAO?
As an asset manager of actively managed hedged pools on-chain, we want to achieve the goal of $300 million total assets under management (AUM) in 3 years with thousands of individual investors and dozens of institutional investors and banks around the world.
Technologically, we are making our Prodefy technology open-source starting next year. Prodefy is a bridge between high-performance trading systems, such as ours as well as those of many Wall Street firms, and DeFi platforms. In order to reach the goal for an all-inclusive finance system in the world, DeFi infrastructure must be constantly improved. Contributions from both startups and the established financial players are equally important.
While it is not possible to predict what financial services and technologies will look like in the future, we know that it is evolving towards a more secure, equitable and cheap system that gives all the access. We are one of such contributors, and we are building a large decentralized organization that will change trading for the next 50 years.
Q10. What is ioBots?
ioBots is a trading system. It is a collection of trading tools developed by IOB LLC in-house and is continuously being improved by the core development team at iob.fi DAO. Besides generating Buy or Sell signals, ioBots trading system tries to address trading as a system of interoperable components consisting of the price feeds, trading strategy interpretation, decision engine, risk control engine, order engine based on smart contract interactions with other DeFi platforms, and the ongoing risk monitoring.
When talking about a trading system, it is important to know that a buying or selling signal is not a trading system. A strategy is not a trading system either.
ioBots makes all the trading decisions and it is constantly evolving. We have just recently opened up one of the proprietary trading indicators generated by ioBots on our website, www.iobots.pro. It identifies which of the 5 Market Types — Very Bullish, Bullish, Choppy, Bearish, or Very Bearish — is underway every day for each market we are trading through a proprietary algorithm.
Q11. What is the significance of FI Token in the current iob.fi DAO ecosystem?
Hedge funds and hedge fund management have been secretive and mysterious for decades. They were afforded by a privileged few in the world.
FI token is the governance token of iob.fi DAO. It allows the token holders, mostly the future Defy hedged pool investors, to make proposals and vote on all major business decisions. For the first time, investors are having a say in the business decisions of a top-tier hedge fund management organization.
We envision that most FI token holders will be medium to large institutional investors, but there will only be a total supply cap of around 10,000 FI tokens, with a circulation supply between 2,000-3,000. The new FI token investors will have to buy from the current IEO investors.
Furthermore, our Prodefy platform is aimed at institutional users. They too will want to accumulate FI token to have a vote on the platform development issues.
Q12. Is the FI Token currently available for trading?
Yes. FI token is listed on Uniswap at: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?inputCurrency=ETH&outputCurrency=0xf03d05ed4cf4e723c04500ab64281bfa591968f2.
We are currently doing our IEO on LATOKEN: https://latoken.com/ieo/FI. You can buy 25 USDT worth of FI token to be entered to win 100 USDT.
And investors can buy FI token directly from our website through the Token Request app without slippage or commission: https://iob.fi/staking/fi. Buying 100 USDT worth of FI token is eligible for winning an iPhone.
Q13. Any message for investors?
The FI token is aimed at being held by institutional investors and retail customers of iob.fi DAO. While it won’t pay dividends, it fulfils a vital function in the day-to-day operations of the asset management business as a decentralized autonomous organization.
We have various staking programs for early investors for both FI token and Defy hedged pool token, DEFY. Currently FI staking on Uniswap earns liquidity providers a 28% APY. Defy staking reward is currently yielding a 28% reward, in addition to any profit earned from its trading operations, currently a little over 100% annualized.
Our business is asset management, and our strength is consistent trading profitability. Just like in trading, investment of any kind involves risks. One must take into account the maximum losses she can afford, and investment in tokens with solid underlying business that can consistently turn profits. Investing in an idea, a concept or a roadmap is not investment. It’s wishful thinking and often leads to losses.
Our business model obeys the same principles and we are working hard to make sure our investors are benefiting from our business decisions and operations.
For more info please visit IOB.FI Official Website