Formation Fi AMA with MultiChain Apes
Last week we had Formation Fi team over our tg for a quick AMA before their ID. Formation Team answered all our questions in a very professional way. AJ hosted the AMA and here you will have a summary of Q&A
AJ: Hello and thank you to all of our community members who are joining us for this AMA with Formation FI!
We’re honored to have you here.
~ Can you please introduce yourself? What is your background? When did you start crypto and for how long you know the rest of team?
Edmond Truong: I come from a traditional finance background and started my crypto journey working with Harmony protocol back in 2019. After being apart an amazing blockchain project allowed me to go more in depth and explore the endless opportunities of blockchain. This led me to my first defi project which involved cross border transactions and conducting OTC deals with kraken, galaxy digital, huobi and a lot of these major otc desks. Soon after that just helped genesis shards with their launch and finally on this journey to bring formation to the community as well. In terms of how long I have known the tram, I have known my other co-founders for roughly 3 years now, and we have been on many different journeys together.
AJ: ~ How many people are part of the Formation team at the moment?
Edmond Truong: Currently, we have 13 Full Time Employees, 3 of us as core team, graphics, content, 7 developers. And we are onboarding more on the research side slowly.
AJ: ~ Is the core team located in the same time zone?
Edmond Truong: Currently, all the founders are located in the same timezone, with addition to half of the development team.
However, as COVID restrictions die down we are definitely going to station everyone in a single location.
AJ: ~ Where would that location be? Have you decided yet?
Edmond Truong: Currently, we haven’t decided. However, once we official decide we will definitely let our community know
AJ: ~ I see you have your profile pic here. Are you guys privately doxxed to any company?
Edmond Truong: No. I hope I understood your question right though
AJ: ~ On your website I see your names, but no links or real profiles.
Edmond Truong: Yes, I mean we are real people. We just decided to not share the links but if you want to find us. It wouldn’t be too difficult.
AJ: ~ Did you have any audit yet? Most of the audit companies require the team to get doxxed
Also I’d like to welcome @joshuahong80 from the Formation Team as well.
Edmond Truong: @joshuahong80 Is another co-founder of Formation Fi! He will be taking over this AMAs as I ran into a small issue. I will still be here to answer few questions.
The Void: Yes, we just got the initial security audit on our smart contracts.
AJ: Good to know!
~ Can you please give us a brief description of what exactly is Formation Fi?
The Void: Yes.
We are a defi project that aims to take yield farming to another level by integrating the risk parity strategy first implemented by billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio for stock markets.
The yield farming protocol developed by Formation Fi distributes risk across multiple uncorrelated assets within the crypto space. The protocol is chain agnostic, community-oriented, and targets long-term success.
In short, our protocol will create a portfolio based on risk profile of each cross-chain asset so that the overall risk of the entire portfolio can be reduced.
We call this Smart Yield Farming 2.0.
This approach is different because it looks at both APY and RISK more holistically.
This approach is also important for long-term investor who cares about losing money more than making money. Capital preservation must be a key consideration and today’s defi isn’t well suited for such thinking.
AJ: ~ I’m assuming that this approach will be your edge for Formation compared to other DeFi yeild farms out there, is that right?
The Void: Yes.
The trick is to preserve capital while maximizing APY per unit of risk. All investments require risk. We won’t be able to eliminate it. But, we can statistically ‘optimize’ risk to reward ratio.
AJ: ~ How does the backend work for $FORM’s farming index?
The Void: We are currently building our own custom bridges so that all these cross-chain assets can be connected. We will also convert much of R optimization software (open source) into solidity so that we can build the correlation matrix between all crosschain assets. This is the heart of our risk parity portfolio construction and will be a big technical challenge. No one has attempted to do this as of. yet in Defi.
AJ: ~ Can you explain us the Formation Sale in few words. I see that you have closed the SHO recently.
The Void: DAO Maker SHO was completely over-subscribed, receiving $45M worth of commitments from 1600 participants. Because the supply is limited to $200K worth of $Forms, we are oversold by 200 times.
We broke the all time high record at DAO Maker and it was accomplished during a tough market condition.
AJ: ~ Why did you pick DAO Maker for your IDO? How will $FORM token holders benefit from this IDO?
The Void: We felt that DAO Maker was the best launchpad. We just wanted to work with the best. During this IDO, we plan to create enough liquidity so that the token holders can be rested assure that their contributions can rewarded.
AJ: ~ How many pools are you planning to have at the launch?
The Void: For us, IDO is just part of a starting point, not the end. You will soon witness that Formation will continue to pump out activities, articles, products and services. We aim high.
Our IDO will be different from most average IDOs. Our goal is to create diverse source of liquidity for various regions and communities while trying to minimize liqudity fragmentation.
You will likely see more than one pool (or exchange) on the day of IDO.
AJ: ~ How are you guys planning to keep Formation long term attractive to investors and sustainable to the market?
The Void: Formation FI will initially focus on attracting more sophisticated, discerning Defi investors with slightly more money to deploy than an average yield farmer. In the long run, we want to attract more institutional treasuries from Fortune 500 companies. We want those CFOs to consider Formation FI as the most qualifying Defi lego block to hand over their money.
AJ: ~ Can you give us a short summary about the Q3 roadmap? What should we expect?
The Void: For Q3, we plan to deliver our V1, Alpha. We will also have liquidity mining program kickstarted so that some of you can earn a lot of $Form tokens as reward.
AJ: ~ Who are your partners at the moment? Do you have any new partnerships coming up?
The Void: Currently, our partners are: Polygon, Refinable, Bancor, and Synthetix.
We are currently in talks with a few top Defi projects and as we complete the partnership agreement, we will make the appropriate announcements.
AJ: ~ A lot of early investors want to know about your Marketing Plans. Can you share with us your marketing strategy? Are you looking to hire any Marketing Team or everything will be done in house?
The Void: We currently work with a few marketing and PR agencies — especially to cover Asia.
Our marketing plan is twofold:
(1) build partnerships with top Defi projects so that we can share communities;
(2) run a tightship so that we can control the narrative and quality.
By and large, our marketing team in house is small but works really hard.
AJ: Is there anything else you would like to add before we end the AMA. I know you guys are super busy at the moment.
The Void: Yes, one last thing: Risk Parity in Defi is NOT going to be easy to build. But, when we do it right, it will be revolutionary. It took Ray Dalio 15+ years to perfect All Weather. We welcome everyone into our community and ask that let’s do this together. Personally, I will be the 1st person to put my money into this protocol because I need it.
The communial effort is what will make this special.
Thank you everyone for your time.
Questions from the Community
- Question from @DAKSO
“Taking a look at the plan of formation, there is a dark pool exclusive to token holder alone, does the quantity/number of tokens held by a holder determines his/her access to the dark pool?”
The Void: Yes.
Obviously, when we start out, we will be a bit more loose in terms of allowing access. As we build up more liquidity however, the access will be based on the amount of token held plus other KPIs. The key consideration is we want our Dark Pools to be SUPER exclusive. The projects unveiled through Dark Pools will be highly filtered and rare.
Dark Pool will be more akin to Coinlist than say PolkaStarter in terms of the number of deals we introduce per year.
- Question from doggie
“When is the listing and how will the team adapt if the market continues downward?”
The Void: We already signed a several listing contracts with centralized exchanges. They will be announced very soon.
We fully expect that the market will be choppy and, in fact, it may enter a new crypto winter that could be more 12 months long. But, this is very natural cyclical nature of our space. So, our goal is to rely on the capital we already raised during presales to support the dev and keep building.
Product is our #1 priority.
