On the 4th of March, Midas CEO Trevor joined the AMA session in CryproCurrency Netherlands (CCNL) Telegram chat. The AMA focused on the background of Midas platform, interest rates, crypto assets, licensing, and Midas token. It also includes discussions on the future direction of Midas platform in the cryptocurrency industry. Below is the transcript of the AMA.
QUESTION 1
How did Midas.Investments start and what is your ultimate goal?
Trevor: Midas.Investments started as a shared masternode service in January 2018 with a discord server and google sheets to calculate rewards. In four years we have pivoted multiple times. We were a masternode platform, a staking platform, an exchange, and in the last year, we reached our final form as the interest rate platform that gives the highest yield on various crypto-assets by embracing DeFi in all its forms.
Through all these years we have been working on providing our users with passive income opportunities in emerging crypto markets.
My ultimate goal is to make Midas the secure tool for accumulating wealth through crypto. I feel that the capital efficiency in crypto is much higher than in TradFi. The DeFi protocols create new forms of earning assets by providing value to the protocols.
I feel that Midas can be the gateway between CeFi and DeFi world. Those worlds are heavily separated, both in the audience and in beliefs. My dream is to unite this polarity, giving CeFi audience a safe way to earn in crypto, while providing the liquidity for DeFi that it could not receive otherwise.
QUESTION 2
Some of the team are Russian but does Midas.Investments have anything to do with Russian law? And does the current war impact Midas.Investments?
Trevor: The core team of Midas speaks the Russian language and was located in Moscow. In terms of Midas, as a company, we have never touched any Russian law or even Ruble.
The impact of war on the world is huge. This is an intense trauma for all slavian generation. Our world will never be the same.
This war does not effect Midas, as a company. Actually, I really think that Midas was born specifically for such an event. I just did not know about that.
This war effects us as individuals. But I prepared every member of Midas to action in huge uncertainty. We have trained to embrace chaos. And chaos it is.
Now we have relocated most of our Russian team members to Istanbul, Dubai, Georgia. And most of my team feels safe, especially receiving salaries in crypto lol.
QUESTION 3
When will KYC (know your customer) be available for Midas.Investments?
Trevor: We have finished the KYC module and expect it to be launched in the next week. We will give our users up to one month to pass the verification.
We will not store ids and data and will use the verified 3-rd party service that checks ids on everything we need to check, and we simply receive the «yes/no» answer from the service.
I want to state clearly that our goal is to create fully licensed crypto asset management in Switzerland. We should receive the license this month.
This means that by using our services, you receive the services that are monitored by one of the most brutal regulators, FINMA.
Therefore, passing KYC is the question on your personal security of investing your money to the company that is verified and trusted by Switzerland.
QUESTION 4
When is the approval of the Swiss license for Midas.Investments expected and what does it depend on?
Trevor: We have already received the approval of FINMA for the launch of asset management. It’s like 96% of the work is done.
And now the only thing that left is opening a bank account. Not every Swiss bank is ready to cooperate with a crypto company.
We have applied to Credit Swiss last week and expect to open the account really soon.
QUESTION 5
How can Midas.Investments offer much higher interest rates compared to competitors?
Trevor: Currently, we have over 50 yield positions across six different blockchains. In many cases, we use combinations of strategies, like borrow one asset from another to have exposure on another asset.
All those strategies are boosted by the algorithms that our DeFi dev team builts. For example, we exited all mid and high risk strategies in January and February, just before the major drop, because our trending algorithms gave us bearish signal.
Additionally, we use automated lending health factor check (we do not go lower than 1.7 in it and if it goes lower it replenishes itself), automated swaps and so on.
We have 15 members in our investment team, 6 of which were onboarded this year.
There are three main directions of investment department team:
DeFi monitoring. Analysing all the blockchains and all the projects that feel decent, constantly reevaluating emerging opportunities, discussing and testing them and managing capital within it.
Quant analytics. Taking ideas and hypotheses into testing through code and deep analytics. The next step here is to build the onchain analytics module (smth between Duna and Nansen) to give our investment team the raw data from blockchains. Should come this month and highly boost the efficiencies of our ideas.
Development of investment infrastructure. Automated swaps, entering and exiting positions, managing lending positions, and so on.
So, we are not only DeFi token farming, which gives us an extra edge on top of others.
QUESTION 6
Why have the interest rates on Midas.Investments have been adjusted recently and are interest rates adjusted more often?
Trevor: For two years we have been giving 17% APY on BTC and 20% APY on ETH (even 23% in various market cycles).
We decided to decrease the rates for BTC (now = 13%) and ETH (now = 18%) due to the current market cycle. We have been in down-side market without new innovative projects popping out, without major liquidity transfer and so on.
Therefore, we had to take additional risks for maintaining this yield on our growing portfolio (our capital increased 4 times from 40kk to 200kk in 5 months).
But we decided to increase rates for stables (20% now) because we feel that there are a lot of usd opportunities currently that can play amazingly long-term.
We plan to adjust interest rates to the market conditions, decreasing and increasing them to maintain the health of our whole portfolio.
QUESTION 7
What is Midas token, why does it exist and what is the future perspective?
Trevor: Midas token was launched in 2019 as a masternode coin with buybacks from platform revenue.
At the end of 2021, we swapped it on ftm token and it has seen an amazing run right afterward.
Our goal for token is to have a leg in DeFi world and launch a flywheel that boosts the growth of the platform and the growth of the platform transfers to the token value.
Currently, we have staking (30% APR) and payout split, which means that 10% of all we pay to investors is used for Midas coin buybacks.
Next week we will have two major events for Midas coin. First is the launch of Midas boost (earn more yield by picking rewards in Midas coin, while your rewards are sent to liquidity pool of Midas-ftm).
Second is our partnership with Spiritswap, which will be announced later on.
This video can give a very broad perspective on our token by our magnificent COO Dan.
We want to steadily increase the growth of our token by increasing its liquidity through the growth of the platform and partner with various DeFi protocols in multiple ways
I see that in the future Midas will launch its own protocols and Midas token will be its blood.
QUESTION 8
How vulnerable is the Midas.Investments platform to hackers?
Trevor: The worst thing in hacking Midas is that all our funds are located in Fireblocks wallets, which is the multisig non-custodial wallet infrastructure.
And 95% of funds are used in strategies. And all the wallets have multisignatures. It means that the platform hack will not lead to any substantial funds loss.
We are also working on implementing multiple account security features. Google 2FA should come this month. Withdrawal lock in Spring, and so on.
After receiving the license we plan to arrange the audit of the platform and all our inner processes by trusted parties to search for vulnerabilities.
And an audit of funds ofc.
QUESTION 9
Does Midas.Investments already work with an insurance for customers? If not, are you going to do this in the future or do you think it’s not necessary?
Trevor: The easy answer is to say “yes, we are working on insurance”.
I tried to reach various insurance companies, but they have no data to calculate and evaluate the risks.
The real answer is that the only party that can agree to insure us is Midas. This is like Binance SAFU fund or NEXO fund.
The assets for this funds are taken from the abundance of the growing crypto market + icos. The large crypto companies that have been operating massively from 2017 and got an ICO with multiple million bucks are heavily profitable.
Our main issue is that we did not make any fundraising and the exponential growth of Midas started 6 months ago. It means that we did not have time to accumulate enough wealth to offer coverage for our investors.
If we will boostrap SAFU fund, it means that we take users money and say like “hey we will pay this in case of emergency”. This is not a good thing to do!
In reality we cover all the losses by our own funds. This is why we are giving rates. We take the bet that we can earn more than what we give. And if we are not able to fulfill this we take the risks on us and pay for it ourselves.
I feel that the question on insurance is the question about trust. And my goal is to give more transparency on how we manage strategies, getting licenses, making audits and so on.
This is the way to cover the question on trust, not taking users funds to give false safety!
BIG THANKS!
Iakov “Trevor” Levin, thank you so much for the time you took to be here, answer our questions and the transparency. We are already big fans! We hope by this AMA to get a lot of people excited about Midas.Investments.
Let’s hope that everyone can build up a sustainable passive income and make the most of the opportunities in this new economy!
