Illuminati Round Table Call Notes: CPI Rugged. Let's Focus On That.

Is There Any Synergy Between Macro and Crypto at All?

Russian DeFi
March 06, 2023

CPI Rugged. Let's Focus On That.

Calvin from Impossible Finance Joined Us Recently.

Here Are His Declarations 👇️

Note : You can listen to the full audio here

Introduction:

Calvin has worked with interviewer Garlam on early Binance launch pad projects.
Calvin was on the Binance research team as well as working on Binance staking in 2018.
He left Binance in 2021 to focus on building Impossible Finance.
Impossible Finance helps incubate and support early-stage projects from everything up to launching a token.

Calvin’s take on DeFi:

Calvin says one of the things his team touched on and was surprised about was the overall stablecoins that stayed within the market even though we experienced massive downturns.
He says at the very peak in February 2023, there was around $124bn worth of stablecoin supply in the market.
On December 31st, he says the worst the market experienced was north of $100bn, so the max drawdown was around 20%.
Calvin explains that fundamentally the value is way more extensive in the ecosystem than inside on-chain worlds. He says this emphasizes the growth and belief in the DeFi space and crypto.
Additionally, Calvin utilizes the analogy of comparing blockchains to emerging countries and how they grow and develop. He says that how a country develops and grows, adapting to new tech, is how he believes the crypto trajectory will mirror.
Calvin says he sees a lot of utility in the Arbitrum ecosystem and that many of these new DeFi products are still developing.
Calvin says that DEXs need to learn from the scale we have seen with Binance in allowing more control for the end user and less trust in the platforms we interact with.

Synergy between macro and crypto at all?

Calvin notes how treasury notes are at 4.6%, so he hints that if we can bring some of that capital into crypto, it's fundamentally something that we are currently missing out on regarding a relatively low-risk yield.
He hints at projects such as Compound, which could easily duplicate treasury returns in some way, allowing people to keep their capital within the space for safe investment.
He says traditional worlds are printing too much money.
Trueflation is a project that offers different CPI and other data to an on-chain oracle that works with Chainlink to put this data on chain.
Calvin says that it’s essential that we see more price feeds and data feeds bought into crypto so we can relate to how these are relevant to the space and apply different metrics to the strategies we use.
Calvin says institutional investment came into the space, but not all were positive, as many funds went in simply because there was value and hype.
He emphasizes how growing too fast before the space can handle that growth isn’t suitable for sustainability and that adoption and capital injection needs to come in stages.
Calvin says that with Impossible Finance, because macro events take place for all early-stage projects, they provide a buyback protection program that gives users a price floor where they can always sell back to the team if they HODL for a certain amount of time.
He says they do this, so users have peace of mind knowing their investment won't go to 0, so there’s an incentive to hold. He says that with indicators like CPI swinging the market, this is where Impossible Finance stands firm.

On CPI Print at 6.4%:

He believes that the reality is that geopolitical issues in Ukraine and Russia will continue to affect the dollar and, in turn, affect equities keeping downward pressure and uncertainty.

What drives velocity back to the markets:

Calvin says that pure hodling doesn’t drive value to an ecosystem. It merely preserves the value to an ecosystem.
Calvin says that exploring new chains inside ecosystems can also help.

On launchpad environment and Impossible Finance:

Calvin believes that when things are tough is the best time to prove yourself (working with Binance).
Many great DeFi teams decided to refrain from carrying on doing their decentralized launchpads, according to Calvin.
The process is complex when pushing early launch pads, and sometimes it requires working with other teams to build interfaces and backends to handle the token launches.
Impossible Finance works on the sustainability of projects and has good catalysts to deploy when necessary.
Calvin mentions that with Impossible Finance, simultaneous launches could take place, where tokens are sold to different groups of communities.
He says Impossible Finance is a "multichain maxi."
Calvin says it's harder to find early-stage projects with real communities and real utility throughout bear markets because they're not in it just for the gains. Still, this mentality cements the ecosystem for the future.