In last week’s Daily Mover on CHSB we covered the launch of SwissBorg’s Wealth App – a blockchain powered platform that simplifies the trading of crypto assets.
This week, we talked to SwissBorg’s Co-Founder, Cyrus Fazel, about the future of crypto trading, traditional finance, and the main challenges for revolutionizing both.
TL;DR
- Swissborg’s new Wealth App is bringing competition to Swiss banks by making wealth management accessible to everyone.
- Private banks in particular are interested in gaining access to Swissborg’s smart engine to calculate best prices for their own currency trading.
- After getting the right banking licenses to launch in most countries in the world, the challenge for the team remains to spread awareness about their product.
- For coming to the U.S., the path is a bit more complicated, but the team is hoping to launch the app there soon.
Rochelle: How would you summarize Swissborg’s main value proposition?
Cyrus: We are a blockchain ecosystem that is bringing swiss wealth management to everyone by making it fair, fun and meaningful. First we started with a gaming app so users could familiarize themselves with our investment tools, and win points for accurately predicting the price of Bitcoin. Over 100,000 community members can now trade their points for crypto or fiat, using our Wealth App which was recently launched.
Our goal with the Wealth App was to create a meta exchange, like Nasdaq if you will, which provides the best liquidity, and therefore the best prices. It also removes the need for trading pairs by creating synthetic routes between any two tokens or fiat currencies. The app clearly tracks investment performance, and provides live trading analysis.
This is only possible because of our smart engine, which connects to multiple exchanges from which it analyses hundreds of trading pairs to find the best trade.
Rochelle: What would you say is a challenge your team needs to overcome to drive mass adoption?
Cyrus: I would say our main challenge at the moment is educating people on our value proposition and gaining their trust. For that purpose we are putting out more video content and articles that clearly showcase what our technology can do for crypto traders, and highlight all the ways in which they can make money.
Our rewards mechanism is geared towards tracking and rewarding users for any type of engagement they provide with our platform. We do this through our Digital ID, which allows users to collect Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for any type of participation in the Swissborg ecosystem, to get a score that rewards them later. In the same vein, CHSB is a multi utility token that allows users to vote on referendums we hold, and to get rewarded for doing so.
Rochelle: Many people are comparing your product to a bank. What do you say to that, and how have actual banks reacted to your app?
Cyrus: Today we are not a bank, and we don’t need to be one. We have the right licences in Estonia for custodian and financial exchange in most countries in the world except in the U.S. where regulations are different.
Banks are really interested in our Wealth App, they strongly believe that finance is taking a new turn and they are trying to keep up with the competition. Private banks in Switzerland in particular, are very interested in ways to use our smart engine, to plug it into their exchange and find the best price for transactions. They are aware that blockchain technology and community based networks are the future of financial services.
Rochelle: Are you planning on launching your Wealth App in the U.S. eventually?
Cyrus: Yes, definitely. We’d love to be in the U.S. already, but crypto regulations there are very complicated compared to Europe. First, because they are different in each state. Second, because they don’t include specifications that cover what we’re doing at the moment. We are not a fund, and we don’t take a share of users’ profits. We are an exchange platform that also gives trading advice.
Rochelle: What’s your focus for the rest of 2020?
Cyrus: Our focus is to broaden people’s basket of investment in the crypto realm. Right now there is an easy way to make a passive income by staking cryptocurrencies. We want to implement investment “themes” as another way to make money without spending all day trading. All users have to do is pick a theme they want to invest in, such as “Market Cap” or “ Proof of Stake Tokens” or “Fintech tokens”, and the Wealth App will buy all tokens in that theme. Our smart engine will then rebalance those on monthly basis with risk management.
Rochelle: Where do you think the future of crypto trading is headed?
Cyrus: I think the investment universe is only going to get bigger, and tokenized assets are going to attract more people into buying digital tokens. Real estate is starting to get tokenized here in Europe, and that’s a huge step. At Swissborg we’re going to focus on enabling such trades to happen on our platform for 2021. For that to happen though, we’ll need a security broker dealer license.