Structure Finance Summary Recap with Shin Chan Community

We held a live AMA with Founder of Structure Finance, Serge Levin on 2nd August 09:00 PM (UTC+8). Here’s the recap for those who missed it.

Introduction

Jack: Before AMA start, can you introduce yourselves and the team background?

Serge Levin: Sure. The team comes from a mix of traditional finance and crypto backgrounds. Myself, I have about 20 years of experience in managing structured product issuance, trading and sales. Beofore this project, I was a quantitative trader at Point72 and managed structured product portfolios at Nomura, Citi Bank and Morgan Stanley. So this is a natural next step for me.

Then there is Kent Osband (Head of Research). Kent has 30 years of experience in monitoring strategic risks for major investment firms, international financial institutions and think tanks, including Fortress Investment Group, Goldman Sachs and the International Monetary Fund. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, holds a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley, and is the author of three books on financial portfolio risk.

Finally, there is Evelina Lavrova who is our Head Evangelist. She has about 15 years experience in Business Development and Marketing. Prior to joining Structure, Evelina was a Global Marketing and PR of Waves and Gett. Evelina was featured in Forbes and Thrive Global. In 2017, she was nominated in Top 10 Women In Crypto by Core Magazine. In short, she’s a super-star.

We started the project about a year and a half ago, with the aim of brining the structured product framework to the crypto ecosystem, specifically DeFi. Took us a bit of work but here we are.

Jack: Do you have any news/update about Structure Finance would like to share with us?

Serge Levin: first of all, that we have a demo version for our first product out: https://structure.finance/dnt/ so wanted to share more details to community

pretty easy concept — you get paid if USD/BTC stays in range for an hour. so if nothing happens, you win

you know, boredom is better than excitement :)

more formally, you get two boundaries (upper and lower) and if these boundaries are not touched, you get paid. At the start of the trade, you can see these boundary prices and what the cost of that bet is (for example, 50%). That means you double your money if BTC does not touch these levels for an hour

we are also getting ready to push out two more products in the next few days

• the project token yield wrapper that would allow people who hold project tokens to write covered calls on them
• - dual pool volatility vault that would allow people to bet on short dated volatility in ETH and WBTC

AMA Twitter Section Begin:

Q1: PARTNERSHIP is an important factor for every project. Could you name some of Structure finance’s partners? What are the benefits that you get from them? And is there any partnership that will be established in near future?

Serge Levin: We are partnering up with several centralized exchanges and also partnering up with a few existing DeFis so we can cross-market. I don’t want to name names because it’s still in progress and I don’t want to jinx it

Q2: I read that Structure finance is built on ETH and BSC as layer 1 protocols. most users and value is derived from these two base layer protocols. but there is limited bandwidth for ETH in terms of speed and cost. To overcome this, does you also integrate with layer 2 protocol?

Serge Levin: As you said, there is limited bandwidth for Ethereum in terms of speed and cost, so Structure.finance is also integrating with layer 2 protocols like Chromia to provide better user experience for trading on Structure.finance.
I mean, it’s an obvious next step. Flexibility is increased and the costs are reduced by using a layer 2 solution

Q3: I read on the website that you offer a feature called Double No-Touch (DNT). Can you explain this feature further? What benefits does this feature offer for users as well as for your own project?

Serge Levin: It’s a pretty intuitive product — you get paid if BTC stays in range for an hour (as I said, boring is good). So you get two boundaries and if BTC does not touch these boundaries for an hour, you get $$$. That means that even if nothing is happening (like most of the time), users can make money.

Q4: Structure currently resides on the DeFi protocol on the #Chromia network.
Can you explain why you chose this network? And what benefits does #Chromia bring to your platform over other existing networks?

Serge Levin: The structured products themselves are chain-agnostic, we can (and have plans to) deploy them on multuple chains. However, Chromia was a perfect addition to basic Etherium chain. It is a “relational blockchain” — a relational database wrapped in blockchain. So any advanced applications that you normally would build in centralized manner can be built just as easy on Chromia. It gives us flexibility in the type of defi products that we can launch on the platform. For example, if the option contract is not settled funds just return to the writer very quickly.

Q5: Buyback mechanism is a very good mechanism being used by many projects. This mechanism will bring many benefits to your project. Do you plan to add this mechanism to your project?

Serge Levin: All of the structured products built on our platform will include a token buy-back component. While the token will be held in reserve for emergencies like collateral shortfall, if nothing happens it just stays there so it’s effectively burned

Telegram Live AMA Begin:

Q6: 𝗜𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺? 𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁, 𝗲𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀?

Serge Levin: We are going to open-source the platform soon. The whole idea is that we are building a structured product community, so we want people to contribute ideas such as new payoffs, bug fixes or anything else

Q7: I read on your web page that “The beauty of DeFi over traditional finance is that the protocols are open source without permission”. Well, there’s a safe and a guarantee from traditional finance. Why and how should we trust Structure Finance?

Serge Levin: Well, every product will be open sourced and audited by an independent auditor, so you know exactly what you get. We are also going to invest in educating our users about the products they are getting involved with. Obviously, it does not mean that the product is riskless, just means that risks that the user takes are exactly the risks the user wants.

Q8: How can #stf team solve the problem with negative volatility of TOKENS when the price falls?

⭕️ What is your plan for strengthening and developing the community to convince more people to look at the product over the price?

Serge Levin: While we can’t solve the problem of tokens falling in price, we are soon releasing a product that will allo token holders to monetize this volatility by writing covered calls via our wrapper product.

Q9: Written on $structured’s website that the validity of the DNT is only for a limited period of time and when that time period ends, the DNT token price will be reset and tat a new cycle begins. How long exactly is that period? How does $structured determine that time period??

Serge Levin: it’s 1 hour exactly. We picked hourly life spans because we wanted to make the product interesting to short term traders, but did not want to make it too short so it would be easy to keep track of.

Q10: I read that Structure Finance will use Hedget infrastructure to issue trading products on the blockchain. So, what is the significance of this collaboration? Can you disclose to us about the system updates that the Hedget team has been working on? What can we hope for?

Serge Levin: we are taking a 3-lane approach — short-term traders are targeted by products like double-no-touch (more payoffs with similar profile and leverage are in the pipeline), project token holders are targeted by our project token wrappers so they can generate some yield from the token volatility and finally investors in mainstream crypto like ETH or BTC are targeted by our dual-pool volatility yield products. So we cover users of all time horizons and sophistications. Using Hedget allows us to tap into an existing on-chain options infrastructure for products like yield wrappers and will also allow us to leverage their marketing and technical infrastructure. So both projects will benefit.

Q11: Almost 80% investors have just focused on price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us on motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in long term?

Serge Levin: We are trying to make a utility token that will be beneficial to the holders in the long term. First of all, there probably will be a profit-sharing feature so long-term profits of the platform will be shares. Also, all products have a buy-back feature so the token will increase in price as the platform popularity grows. Finally, there is a plan to expand our footprint via collaboration.

Q12: What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team lead the market? And do you have any plans to make Structure Finance a global expansion?

Serge Levin: We have a long experience in structured products from traditional finance (unlike other teams brining options or structured product projects). That means we will be abe to deliver new payoffs and structures very quickly. It also means that we will know the possible risks or issues better than our competitors.

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