Blockchain Pitch Night Recap
Vlad Balaban: Hello, guys. Thank you so much for organizing this event, and thank you for this opportunity. I am a CBDO at GT-Protocol. GT-Protocol means Global Traders Protocol, a solution for a DeFi investment pool management on DEXs and CEXs. We provide a solution and one-click access to DeFi and CeFi investment and trading strategies for investors. For professional traders, organizations, entities, and crypto VCs, we provide a technology that allows the creation of a DeFi smart contract pool that helps collect investments from investors and manage these collected investments on DEXs and CEXs.
The main point of cooperation between parties — investors and pool creators — is based on the profit-sharing model. Investors pay just a percent of the profit — the success fee — at the end of cooperation.
This is the heart of our technology, the custom, and the unique development of our team. It allows pool owners and contributors to cooperate with a smart contract. Pool owners can create new pools using the head smart contract factory. After the pool is created, investors can deposit funds to the pool and provide liquidity, and after that, the pool owner can start to manage this collected liquidity under centralized exchanges.
The main point is that technology is fully decentralized, which is a non custody solution. Pool-owned doesn’t have any private keys from the smart contract. He can not withdraw funds. He can not send funds to any address in the blockchain. He is only allowed to manage assets on white-listed platforms. And he only with whitelisted trade pairs and coins which have significant trading volume and liquidity.
Technology can be used for different purposes. For example, professional traders create pools for social trading. But we are not limited only to trading. Professional investors and asset managers can use GT-Protocol to create pools for portfolio management or, for example, for yield farming. There is also a use case for crypto VCs, which can use GT-Protocol to gain additional liquidity from anonymous investors. They can manage this liquidity on CEXs. This is like a use case for a decentralized hedge fund. We also have to use cases for GameFi, NFT investors, KOLs, IDO & fundraising pools. Any organization or private person with some profitable crypto activity on the market can use GT-Protocol to cooperate with investors on the transparent, secured, and decentralized model.
We have several products.
The first one is the DeFi technology which we discussed just now. But besides that, we already have an active and launched platform. It has been working currently for more than one year. Jet Bot is a platform for algorithmic trading and copy trading on CEXs. We have a pretty fantastic performance and track record in user acquisition with this platform. When we launched the platform, we had just 200 users, and we achieved more than 25 thousand users. All these people joined our platform just because of mouth word spreading and users’ recommendations to each other.
The use case is pretty simple. Investors have access to the marketplace of top traders. In this marketplace, they can see the performance of every trader, the profitability graph for the last half a year, the history of deals, and details of each deal. Based on this info, you can choose any of these traders and start to follow them to copy automatically.
This platform is an official Binance exchange as an authorized Binance broker. All benefits are available to users. One of the most extraordinary things for people is that users can create a new Binance account using our platform with just one click. They do not need to spend a lot of time onboarding the exchange and passing KYC and other procedures.
We have a pretty active community in Telegram. Every time some user gets a report about a successfully closed deal, everyone in the group feels excited and motivated. When some user gets up in the morning and sees 5–6–7 notifications about successfully closed deals during the night, he feels excited. People want to share these emotions and success with friends. They have really spread trading reports on Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They even have some meetings to introduce their friends to the product, and they help each other set up the account and launch it for trading. And because of this performance and positive feedback on our centralized product, we were inspired to build DeFi technology which has a similar use case but has much more advantages over the centralized model. Also, a decentralized platform is not limited to trading but could support more strategies in the DeFi market.
We are negotiating with other centralized exchanges like Huobi, Okex, Gate.io. They contacted us and offered us a partnership to become their broker. These exchanges are interested in us because our users generate huge trading volumes. Centralized exchanges earn trading fees. They also split 50% of the trading fees with us. This is one of our revenues.
Right now, we are at the private round stage. Our DeFi protocol technology is under development now and will be released in several months. Centralized product is already live and active. Right now, we are doing IDO, a private round is ongoing. We have reserved partners and VCs that will join us on the last call. We are going to have a public round on such top pads as Infinity Pad, Poolz, TrustPad and ScaleSwap. We are negotiating with Kucoin, Huobi, and Gate.io. Huobi had informed us about the prime list launch and IEO. They made us an offer, and now we are reviewing their offer and waiting for offers from other centralized exchanges.
We will have a public round and token generation event in May. Right now, we are in the stage of preparations in terms of marketing. In technical terms of view, we are fully ready. We have staking, market makers, etc.
Jeremy Baksht: This is really, really exciting. I have watched the rise of traders on top platforms, and I think you build something really valuable. I really like this. On the financial model: is it all subscription based or are you also getting some transaction fee as well from the brokers and market makers?
Vlad Balaban: We use a subscription model in a centralized product right now. In DeFi protocol, people will pay only a profit-sharing fee. This platform will be available for them without any prepayments. It is very good because when users need to buy subscriptions, there is some artificial barrier for them. We receive 50% of the fee from the centralized exchanges.
Jeremy Baksht: Very interesting. I really like your token metrics. Very modest, raising the price as you go through the round. It seems like you have been pretty sensible about not going too fast with rising prices. I don’t know much about the competitive landscape. Are there other businesses like this?
Vlad Balaban: We have a lot of competitors. Most of them are in the early stages. There are some working products for several years. But they don’t have users at all because their platforms are too complicated and completely difficult for newcomers. In terms of closest competitors, we have 3commas, Dexe.network and Signal. We have such advantages as our user-friendly onboarding. On our competitor’s platforms, users need to spend at least 40 minutes creating an account and to start trading. In our case, the platform is available with just a few clicks. Any user will be able to join any pool just by connecting MetaMask wallet to their web application.
Other companies use the wallet-to-wallet model, which means separate wallets for investors and traders. The first deal is executed on the trader’s wallet, and then it will be executed on the investor’s side. This takes time, and the price on the exchange can be changed. Sometimes it causes loss.
We solved this issue just by design because users deposit funds just to one pool and one smart contract. This means that all investors and traders will participate in the deal simultaneously at the same price. It is also more eco-friendly because if one thousand investors follow the trader to execute the deal they need to sign one thousand transactions. In our product only one transaction will be executed. It is good in terms of electricity and nature. We support both CeFi and DeFi markets. This is our main advantage.
Jeremy Baksht: I like what I saw. It looks very interesting.
Rohan Khanna: Hey Vlad, great presentation, by the way. You are really super professional and know everything about your product. This is a good job. I was impressed with the partnerships. You did a great job building your list of partners. And I also checked your Medium articles, where I found partner signs one after another. So clearly, the business development is going pretty well. I think one of the hypotheses you are going to test is, do people really want DeFi and CeFi exchanges in one place? I think you are going about this in the right way for sure. I have just a quick question about user growth. I saw this jump between February to march. Did you start marketing or something?
Vlad Balaban: Honestly, we did not do any marketing at all. We are mostly focused on product development and new features development, and product improvements. All these users visited the platform organically. Some influencers also saw the platform, tried it, and liked it, so they did some reviews for free. Also, our referral program inspires people to invite their friends.
Rohan Khanna: I think when an investor of VCs looks at the project at the very early stage, they do not have much information to operate on. Your pitch is well done. But can you please tell us a bit about yourself as well? It helps investors and VCs to understand more about the team and why the project is unique. Also, I would add some statistics on the market size.
Vlad Balaban: Our team has worked together for more than 9 years, and for the last five years, we have been working on blockchain and crypto development. We developed the solution for customers, custody wallets, lending platforms, and NFT marketplaces. In 2019 we started our project. We were already involved in trading and traded for ourselves. We used some automation solutions. But all of them were not good enough. They had a lot of bugs that could cause losses. We decided to build our solution. After the launch, we shared it with our friends. We were surprised because they started to share products with their friends. Now we have around 30 people in the team. And this is all in-house team, no outsourcing.
Pedro Martinez: Vlad, thank you very much for a very insightful presentation. Can you tell us more about the assets? Do you think about exchanging NFTs, crypto or legal tender, and other financial instruments?
Vlad Balaban: Right now, we are focused only on the crypto market. It is about only crypto assets along with NFTs. We have use cases for the NFT pool and investors. Now we are not aiming to reach the classical market.
Pedro Martinez: What you definitely need to avoid from the beginning is being in the position when you need to get a banking license. I think you are staying on the safe side from this perspective. I would like to ask about your partnership as you mentioned that you are an official partner with Binance. What is this partnership exactly? What do they do for you?
Vlad Balaban: This is like a broker partnership which means that users get access to Binance through our platform with our interface. Thanks to this partnership, we provide an option to create new Binance accounts with just one click. We are not custody, and the Binance team is responsible from a technical point of view. We have direct access to the Binance technical team. They are pretty active in communication with us. They also always invite us to participate in trading tournaments, and in Binance, split generated trading fees with us.
Pedro Martinez: One thing that I would definitely consider during negotiations is intellectual property. Your technology will develop innovative pools, and this information is very sensitive. It is very important that you have to pay a lot of attention to intellectual property. And my final question is about KYC. How exactly do you implement this within your model?
Vlad Balaban: In terms of regulation, there are two fields there. Firstly we created DeFi technology which means smart contracts deployed on the blockchain. Any market participant could use this technology. No one controls these smart contracts. Of course, users will use our platform and interface because it is a convenient way to use smart contracts. For DeFi pools, there is no need for KYC. In terms of CEX trading, there will be a list of centralized pools and exchanges that need KYC from users.
Pedro Martinez: I just want to share with you that as a provider and intermediate, you always have to regard the AML and KYC. You can always outsource other platforms and rely on partners, but the application rests within your platform and it is crucial to keep an eye on that.
Vlad Balaban: You are right. We have already passed the audit with a top firm. We will continue our work with all legal partners in terms of regulations. And we will follow the requirements of centralized partners as well.
Host: Now, the advisers will give the last conclusion about the projects and how they can support you.
Rohan Khanna: Well, the event is great. I think you both guys are on good tracks. Take into account all the advice you heard today. But do not worry too much about what you heard. You should keep doing what you are doing. In terms of pitches, you both need to add your stories. Projects from Eastern Europe often have people who are very, very good at development. But sometimes in the sales or story aspect, they are not so good. I want you guys to present yourself more to investors. If you need talent now, just let me know. I have a pool of students, and I can be available for you to advise how to frame your pitchings better.
Pedro Martinez: You both are competent and have very good ideas. And taking into consideration the political situation, it is great that you develop and push innovative technologies. And people are supporting each other. I will be happy to follow your projects. We can keep the conversations in terms of legal frameworks.
Jeremy Baksht: These two companies both seem fantastic. The challenge I think for your region is to expand up the lense of WHY. You should always ask if this deal is gonna return the funds or if this deal can be life-changing for people? You need to ask more questions. In terms of WorkQuest, you need to consider what is wrong for example, with LinkedIn? The main problem is that employees are being too honest. I use LinkedIn and have 31K followers. How can you convince me to move to WorkQuest? It is pretty hard. I would just take a step back and think about how to inspire people and change the market.
Investors and VCs might get very cynical about projects which are improving old businesses. Travel, job, etc. You need to think about why you are unique.
Vlad, it is very resonating with me what you are doing as I’m familiar with crypto trading.
People usually do not know what asset to choose and how to start trading. So you are building a very smart tool for successful people. Totally makes sense to me. Keep building a big community, your community is active. So your product is necessary.
Host: Let’s stay connected and keep growing!
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