I recently gave an AMA for the Hoo exchange. They have recently listed our project FinNexus (FNX) so they invited me to drop in to their English Telegram channel for a visit. They asked me to elaborate on some of the key members of the DeFi options project, FinNexus. Here's what I told them in my AMA.
Sure, there’s me — and I kind of consider myself one of the OG DeFi guys IMHO. As I wrote about in my article about Synthetix a few months ago, the word DeFi came into modern usage sometime between Nov 30, 2018 - when Kain Warwick decided to rebrand his crypto project from Havven to Synthetix - and Feb 15, 2019 - when he basically invented Yield Farming. I’ve been hard-core studying this stuff since around then.
Yeah, I know that’s not that long. But I mean NOBODY cared about DeFi back then. I’d mention the word at conferences and meetups and people would be like “What?! C’mon!” People just wanted to day-trade XRP or BTC or something. I was very bored by that.
So I started looking for people who were passionate about DeFi. I thought it was what blockchain was originally meant for!
I was lucky that I had to research DeFi at that moment. Where I was working was looking desperately for a narrative that could turn around its crypto project. I thought DeFi fit the bill. My research at my previous job led me to design an entire financial services ecosystem and token-based economy using Cosmos SDK. I did it pretty much all by myself. But I couldn’t get the project off the ground. Later, once I started talking with Boris Yang, who is the CEO at FinNexus, I realized that it was because my devs were just awful.
They weren’t blockchain devs! Given that situation, working with a DeFi project where there was a strong blockchain engineer culture (Boris) and also a strong "pure finance" background (Ryan) was really appealing to me.
I really feel that my strengths lie in being the muscle tissue that binds everything together nicely. I have taught Strategy and Entrepreneurship in business schools for a living the past 3–4 years, so I was itching to find a place where I could test some of the philosophy that I was cobbling together in my lectures for my students.
Most importantly, I needed to be on a team of people that were EXTREMELY passionate about blockchain and DeFi. And I’m not sure I could have found a better group of guys in the Passion Department than Boris, Ryan and Noah, our kind of do-it-all marketing advisor who can also build APIs and do research and build websites, etc. Those guys really care about what they do.
I should also mention our top-notch community team, headed by Sarah Huang and Veer Singh, as well as our growing dev bullpen headed by Crane Lu.
We're an international team distributed throughout the world, working from China, India and the United States. That's how a lot of companies are working these days due to the virus. Ironically, I think it means you work harder, despite the fact that a lot of the time you are just doing it from your home an in pajamas! 😂😂😂
This DeFi Summer has been pretty nuts so far. There's still a lot of work to be done to liberate the masses from the tyranny of traditional centralized finance! But at FinNexus, we have the team to accomplish our goals. While I'm not sure the heat of this summer is quite over yet, I hope I can get back in the habit of sharing my thoughts over here on Hive / LeoFinance.
Stay tuned! 🏋🏻♂️