January 10th Cibola.Finance held an Ask Me Anything session with the ICOSpeaks team at our telegram chat.
1️⃣ Block 1 – self introduction from today’s speaker
Before we go to the first set of questions, could you please do a short self-intro?
👨💻 jpegmogul (Ishan) | Founder of Cibola Protocol & Head of DeFi at Sivo | @jpegmogul (TG)
- I am a 2x founder & operator with an academic background in bioengineering & management science. My first company raised over 3M from venture investors including Y Combinator.
- I discovered Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in 2013 and began actively trading smart contract based projects and ICOs in 2017. In 2020, I began experimenting with both DeFi primitives such as decentralized exchanges and AMMs along with a variety of NFT standards.
- While retail investing was an amusing roller-coaster, I wanted to further my capacity as a builder and I joined Orange DAO in 2021 which is the largest founder community in web3.
- Here I worked as a mentor to over 150 web3 startups while also creating strategic partnerships with ecosystem partners such as L1s and infrastructure providers. Most recently, I am excited to join the brilliant team at Sivo (YC W21) as the Head of DeFi to launch the Cibola Protocol.
2️⃣ Block 2 – project introduction by speakers
First set of questions to introduce the project!
Q: Can you introduce Cibola Finance to the team & ICOSpeaks community?
A: Cibola is DeFi credit primitive protocol for real-world assets, specifically high quality loans to financial technology companies in emerging markets.
Cibola is being built by the Sivo team and is bootstrapping a 15M+ loan portfolio with Sivo serving as the first designated loan officer.
With Cibola, DeFi users can deposit capital as they would on Aave or Blast and earn a yield of up to 10-12%.
The yield comes from the deposits being used to make low-risk loans to real-world businesses and these businesses repaying the loans with interest payments.
Q: Why is Cibola Protocol something crypto & DeFi users need?
A: Historically, DeFi has been an interesting and lucrative frontier for retail investors due to first mover advantages and marketing optics. Projects in previous cycles have shown users a large and attractive APY upfront, but in the long-run many users experience impermanence loss or diminishing returns.
Cibola solves this by tying the yield to real-world assets. Put another way, the yield is coming from actual businesses paying back loans as they generate revenue.
This gives DeFi users the peace of mind knowing that the stablecoins or ether or bitcoin they have posted as collateral is earning yield from a legitimate source.
Additionally, users now have the option to invest in new asset classes that have been traditionally walled off to larger institutional investors. This is the type of financial equity and transparency that blockchain-based applications provide.
Q: How is Cibola Finance different from other Real-World Asset protocols?
A: There are a few large differentiators for the Cibola Protocol.
Firstly, Cibola vastly reduces the risk profile and default rate of all lending products. Our loan portfolio has sustained ZERO monetary losses while serving over 30 customers (loan originators), servicing over 25’000 loans and deploying over 1.2B in capital volume. While there have been other projects in the real-world asset space, a quick Google search uncovers the complexities and risks associated with undercollateralized lending.
Second, we plan to build additional lending products that service consumers – effectively allowing DeFi users to help individuals in their credit-building journey. This is very different from the traditional B2B model that most real-world asset protocols utilize.
Lastly, we have an ambitious but exciting development roadmap and plan to be the first real-world asset protocol to launch on the Bitcoin Network. This would give Cibola access to over 800B in TVL which is currently not bearing any yield.
Q: What does Cibola mean?
A: This is a fun one. Cibola was inspired by the Aztec mythology revolving around the Seven Cities of Gold, archaeological sites around Spanish Nuevo México or today’s New Mexico and Southwestern United States. Since its inception, Cibola has been integrated into popular culture including novels, film, video games and now the blockchain.
The web3 community has frequently used the phrase “to the moon”, but we prefer the golden cities of Cibola.
3️⃣ Block 3 – question from ICO Speaks team
Questions from ICOSpeaks team!
Q: Why did your team decide to build a real-world asset protocol?
A: From my time at Y Combinator, it was critical to find a problem that solved a huge unmet need.
Sivo, had this huge unmet need As a fintech company providing debt, they had a large outstanding demand BUT not enough capital to supply this demand.
We decided to build Cibola to gain access to DeFi liquidity which is a significantly lower cost of capital in a high interest rate environment.. This solves for a huge constraint for Sivo
Further, the more I explored the current state of DeFi – I realized that many yield products were not competitive to traditional finance offerings like treasury notes. If we want to bridge the gap between web2 and web3, it was critical to build products like Cibola that offer fixed income asset classes to on-chain investors
Q: How can users sign up or begin accessing the yield products on Cibola?
A: Head to our website and sign up to private beta via the “Get Early Access” button Google Form.
Join the discord & follow twitter as well for future social verification. Slow incremental rollout.
Q: What are you most excited for with Cibola roadmap?
A: We are launching in the next few weeks with already 15M in collateral demand earning up to 10% yield which is higher than most yield products, ethereum validator nodes, treasury returns and the SOFR (standard overnight financing rate).
Furthermore, some alpha, our development and product team are actively exploring partnerships with DeFi focused ETH L2s as launch partners along with certain L1s that don’t have any pre-existing real-world asset applications.
4️⃣ Block 4 – Community Voice.
The community asks the questions they are interested in.
Q: Revenue is an important aspect for all projects to survive and sustain. So how does your project plan to generate profit and revenue?
A: Cibola will generate revenue from withdrawal fees. There will be a standard withdrawal fee of 0.25% and a fast withdrawal fee of 0.5%
Our loan officer, Sivo, has ~5M annual recurring revenue and makes this revenue from the interest rate on capital it provides originators.
Q: Many projects only talk about their strengths, can you talk about the weak points that you are currently projecting?
A: First challenge would be around liquidity! It is a very competitive environment with protocols like Blast and Manta drawing a majority of liqudity on Ethereum for upcoming airdrop campaigns.
A second challenge will be around education. It takes time and the appropriate education materials to share how Cibola is differentiated from other RWA protocols.
Q: What is the most ambitious goal of your project? Could share with us any Upcoming Updates?
A: I love this question. The most ambitious goal for Cibola would be to become the protocol that brings all fixed-income assets on chain. This would allow us to expand into bonds, treasury bills and certificate of deposits
Q: Many projects have problems with UI / UX and this one turns off new users. How do you plan to improve the interaction with new users and with users outside the crypto space?
A: Another great question. I agree that web3 has a huge UI/UX problem that often stymies adoption. Our product is being built by a web2 native team with a rich design background having built products for both consumers and B2B customers. We also plan to iterate on our product view with communities such as ICO Speaks so that we don’t lose pulse of what our users want
Q: Are you a global project or local project? At present, which market are you focus on, or is it focused on building and growing to gain customers, users and partners?
A: Similar to most blockchains, we cater to a global audience for our customers and liquidity providers. In the real world, our loan originators are from a variety of different countries including Mexico, UAE & the United States. We anticipate users who supply liquidity to come from various parts of the world as well 🙂
ICOSpeaks hosted an AMA Session with the Cibola.Finance Team. That’s all for today.
Thanks to all the users who participated.
Thanks, Cibola.Finance for being with us
Thanks, all, and see you soon😉
Cheers 🥂
