CVA Podcast: Cyrus Fazel, Swissborg

Transcript

[Music] hello hello this is shiraz ahmed here ready to kick off this bite size episode of the crypto valley association podcast let's discover together the latest trends of this fast-moving space and try to shed some light on the mysteries it contains today we have cyrus fazel ceo of swissborg one of the rare crypto companies that is not based in zug but closer to my hometown funny enough in lausanne i'm looking forward to finding out more about how swissborg has survived the bear market to come out on top with one of the best performing tokens of the year so let's dive straight into the hidden world of digital asset investments

cyrus appreciate you taking the time to be with us how is everything going thank you cheers for being part of this show and uh hi to every crypto valley community it's really excited i'm doing well you know we're back into one fundamental fun craze which is you know d5 taking over and you know it's great to witness that there's more and more usage in crypto and and you know we have been in the last two years and and some moments that were not as fun as we were seeing today and um super pumped to be in it yeah to be honest awesome well that's great to hear so maybe we want to tell us a little bit more about what first got you involved within blockchain technology and this whole crypto space

yeah that's great crest insurance so as we say i fell in the rabbit hole uh very late i was working mainly in pride banking and hedge fund for a decade and one day essentially what happened is that i wanted to offer my dad a birthday present and he's based in iran and there was no real way to get to buying anything on amazon or whatever so so i was told essentially that there was a guy that was accepting bitcoins and counterparty he would actually you know essentially offer whiskey and i know my dad is a big whiskey fan because he grew up and it was in trinity and on cameras college all that so long story

short i got into crypto and bitcoin because i wanted to offer a bottle of whiskey to my dad in iran wow okay that's a that that's definitely a first that i've heard but great and so how did it go from a bottle of whiskey to swiss pork multiple bottles of whiskey after um no i think so you know like many people who got into crypto they got it rather for the product or for the let's say for the profit right and i definitely went in first for the product because i used it then i started seeing that you know there was multiple different bull runs and you know something interesting and anthony

suamir the co-founder of swiss board he then he has more engineering background he got to a little bit more talk about what was behind a smart contract and how ethereum could potentially you know change a lot you could really reshape multiple different industries and the third layer is when you really connect the most it's not by profit neither by the product but by purpose and i think so you know this is when i really embraced blockchain technology it's through its purposes how we could get essentially bank pretty much everywhere in the world but more importantly how can we essentially offer wealth management to the entire world and until then you know 2015 2016 i was

working for making wealthier people wealthier so i was only really targeting at that one percent or that zero one percent of the people on the planet and one understood that essentially a smart contract could be a wallet and a wallet could be an investment mandate i realized that you could essentially target the entire world and i saw that you know this was the trigger moment when i was like okay you know what even if you're a highly paid job you're doing great and you're quite successful let's forget about all of that the profit it's not the sum game it's not really where you should focus but really find something that could touch your heart and hopefully change this financial ecosystem wow okay and so you spoke about purpose so what

is the purpose of swissboard what products and services do you offer all right i think so you know the main mission at swissborg is bringing swap management to everyone you know by by making it fair by making it fun and by making it community-centric you know those are they're really the points that does not exist in finance right i mean there is some fairness to some extent there is not so much fun into this game and more importantly there's not really anything community-centric i think so it's very intelligent a type of conducting i don't think so that is sustainable in the long run you really want to make sure that you you're you're you're building something for the long run and for multiple you

know free entire community not just for one person if not again you're going into zero sum game i'm winning you're losing and it doesn't really evolve and and it doesn't really scale at the end so we got in you know quite late this was boring that was early 2016. uh we got to look into the ico space very early and you know we're one of the very lucky ones that were able to reach our heart gap of 52 million and this out of 50 32 no 23 000 people around 149 countries so that that was like the first cornerstone where we said okay

now we're here to stay it's not just a game it's we have a lot of power and a lot of responsibilities so we have to we have to really offer and build a very great roadmap which i hope we've been doing for the last three years okay interesting and so you spoke a lot about community and i have to agree that community is really the driver especially in this cryptocurrency space so is that maybe the reason why you decided to build the community app quite early on would you like to speak to us a little bit more about what this application does and maybe some insights behind the strategic decision to create something like this right so during the referendum we had multiple referendums

and we think this is something really great all the concepts of swiss borg is based on this meritocratic way and and what people have within when they bought our tokens it's a multi-utility token they have essentially a few ways of staking a few ways to use their token the first one was these referendums and the referendum the first big question is that we want to big build an investment platform because that was what was on our white paper we want to know if it was it was going to be a mobile-based or desktop-based people voted for mobile based and then the second theme we had is what kind of investment he would would excite you the most and people uh had a very strong connection of gaming

so we said until we don't develop this new wealth app we should at least have one fun game and as many people know we're all about edutainment we really want to educate people but entertain them at the same time because our mission again is to make as well our financial ecosystem fun and we looked at 2017 2018 and one of the biggest issues people got into space and got burnt and a lot of people on bitcoin at 15 000 a lot of people bought ether at whatever 800 dollars and you know got out of the space and we said okay let's try to focus on giving a great experience of our community by educating them

and that's the community app now we have like you know close to 150 000 people around the world playing this game it's very easy game where essentially you log on on a daily basis you want to see if bitcoins going up or down you place your bets with different points so you do risk management and and by doing that you could look at different ways of technical analysis you could look at our different ai indicators and it really teaches you the right patterns how to essentially trade and there's no risk in it because you're just uh you're betting points but the great thing out of it is that you could earn swiss bar tokens and i think so the winner right now is worn is

i think so is earning close to seven thousand dollars what is really great about it it's not only the fact that we're educating and we're growing our community is that people who want to withdraw their tokens have to do that into the wealth app so for us was as well a very good bridge to bring in more people to get to know us a bit more and then trade for real within the wealth app so that was um the the different reasons why we built this community app okay well it's great to hear it's a little bit like an entry in into crypto for these these newer newcomers that can actually get involved they can enjoy a little bit i've personally actually played around

with the community app and it does get a little bit addictive when you see oh every 24 hours you can place your your order and say okay is it going to go down now or is it going to go up and it's very simple right you just predict is it going to go up and down and with that you get a little bit more involved like okay what is happening what are the movements and uh that's it's an awesome way i think to grow a community and 150 000 people as you just said it's huge and so how did maybe this help you launch the wealth what's up yeah i think you know this is a great way to bring in a lot of people uh within the wealth app and obviously our ico and our and our token holders are obviously very excited and we're seeing more and more people so

the competition is not over so people are still you know really forecasting a lot personally i'm not i'm nowhere in the hundred top hundred which sucks because if you're like in top 100 you're earning more than two hundred dollars i need to get back into that um but i'll get there i'm sure it has helped a lot you know it helps a lot because you know for the crypto enthusiasts and the crypto investors you know this is a fun way but for the you know the newcomers it's a great way it's really the best way because people don't want to get burnt but then when they start realizing that they're out of maybe 100 forecasts they had maybe like 55 forecasts that were right

or maybe 51 or 52 that starts to give them building confidence so we saw a lot of newcomers in the in the wealth app and i think so this is overall it's our goal you know we obviously want to serve the crypto enthusiast and the crypto savvies but we want to bring in mr everyone into because that's that's something that we have to do because right now it's we're only maybe like 50 million people around the world that use crypto yes it's such a small percentage right i mean bringing global adoption and i think what you've been able to do with the wealth of that is fantastic i mean the optimized trades that look so complex yet they're so simply done through

um through the wealth app and it's a different way of trading so maybe you want to speak a little bit about the user experience of that being able to visualize these trades that go through multiple different exchanges at one time to give you the best price it's it was very fascinating when i first saw that yeah thanks sures for mentioning it the idea here was are we going to build another exchange and compete with existing ones or did we look for collaboration and i think so that swiss board one of the fundamental things that we always want to collaborate we don't want to essentially compete with all the different different blockchain projects because we know there's already a great amount i think so it comes back to what has been done as well in the past

nasdaq essentially before nasdaq there was nothing then the great nasdaq they pulled in together all these different brokers create the swift technology and then you know trading start to get the bet better and better in terms of fees in terms of transparency liquidity everything and this is exactly what we're trying to replicate at swissborg is that we took that the best exchanges such as binance kraken l max and btc and others we we said okay how can we connect all these different order books together and on top create a meta exchange right a little bit like booking.com or you know all these different other uh websites that purchases air tickets or whatsoever

and we've done that same logic where we built this med exchange on top of it we'll put all together these different order books and when one wants to go from fiats to crypto what we do is that not only look at best prices but we look at best routes so if for example you want to buy swiss francs and i don't know buy swiss board token this pair doesn't exist but what's going to do is that it's going to look at all the different exchanges and see what's different prices but at the same time trying to optimize that trade so for example maybe we'll go from swiss francs to dollars dollars to bitcoin and ether and then maybe on another exchange we'll go buy bitcoin uh to swiss bar tokens and ether

to support tokens and sometimes these routes could be like three four five six different legs and multiple trades it happens within you know 10 milliseconds and that is one of the great unique selling point that we have is we offer eliminated trades best prices best execution and all that given to any mr everyone right it's not only for the best hedge funds it's literally for mr everyone and i think so that that's one of the great thing that people love experimenting while they're trading with the swiss bar gap oh definitely and i think being in this space for a long time you start to realize how complicated it used to be when for example you might

want to buy uh some crypto through fiat and you can go okay from your bank to coinbase but then if you wanted to buy another token you might have to go through another route and then it's just you go through so many different intermediaries it's it just becomes quite crazy and you have to hold maybe 20 different accounts of exchanges and go from one to another if you have different holdings and it becomes quite quite a nightmare to manage everything with different passwords etc etc so having a type of meta exchange sounds like quite a great and innovative approach how do you think or what you believe the exchanges feel about having a meta exchange over them well i think so most of the i mean for example kraken binance and btc you know and i mean all of them but the

fourth time i'm fixing super excited right i mean we're bringing more liquidity so for them it's something that they enjoy a lot and again you know we collaborate with them right we're bringing in the more liquidity we're bringing them experienced traders but as well just regular uh people that get into crypto so i think so you know we all feel that we're on the same mission and there's a lot of room for new exchanges as well now we will be adding exchanges to our smart engine as well so for us it's it's great and for them it's great as well okay awesome and then do you ever plan to be the liquidity provider yourself so being creating our own exchange it's not in the in the pipeline to be honest

we we definitely believe that we're we're a tech fin company and we have today over four engineers in total i think so within so six over the two-thirds of employees at switzerland are engineers um we don't want to compete against what has been done quite well and even better and better i mean coinbase what they've done is great kraken is getting better and better as well finance as well there's so many different exchanges so far so the idea is to to keep the same approach as we have today and then being building more and more amazing products and more services on top of that awesome so yes so to let them do what they do best and then to just do what you do best and to leverage both

of those wow okay great and so there's been a lot of talk about swissborg in in the media and a lot of hype around it due to um the recent evolution and rise of your tokens so so maybe what you want to talk to us a little bit more about that and what you believe has driven the success in the past few months where the token has risen close to a thousand percent it's insane yeah it's quite insane uh well for the space you know it does we do those things happening sometimes but yeah for sure going from the top 400 to the top hundred you know it it really to be honest even made me cry i was like oh it's amazing you know it was good i had really tears in my eyes but it's hard work you know it

i think so everything in life happens like that is that you have a great amount of work that is done that no one really appreciates it and then suddenly you make the headlines about success and sports and work and love and life it was all the same patterns right there's a big amount of sacrifice of time concentrating your resource doing the right thing and then eventually that right thing starts to get acknowledged and then you have that positive momentum that builds up your success and it's exactly the same with that so we did do maybe 10-fold you know the performance of token but that could have been done maybe one

percent a day during you know maybe two years or a year and a half would have got that and that would have been exactly what the work was behind and um from that what we have to learn is that first these markets extremely volatile and then they are starting to get some fundamentals to this right you know a lot of people believe in technical analysis but there is a lot of fundamental investing if it goes to bitcoin it goes for blockchain apps and it goes as well to utility tokens and and the fundamentals at swissborg i think so has been shown that our swiss bar token our chsb token is is the heart of ecosystem and we've been saying that prior to ico during ico and today is the same case and

really want to create and we've been creating this multi-liteut token that has different usages and the first one is the referendum so giving you the voice to make sure that we have a decentralized governance that we see as well a lot of d5 projects but on the same side is that while you're staking the swiss board token on the wealth app enables you to get free trading or different privileges within the wealthtrack and those are two utilities that have very strong way of of showing confidence into and usage uh within our token and we've added as well on top the protect and burn

which is that essentially one our token is not performing very well and it's under the 20-day moving average 20 of the total revenues actually go to buy the token and then burn it so it gives a buy pressure and obviously as well reduces the supply as well so it diminishes the cell pressure and that shows as well a lot of confidence and last but not least as you mentioned we have this community and we've been nurturing this community for a very long time offline through multiple different meetups blockchain on chain conferences but as well online uh through you know all the social media um platform that exists and i think so this

is something that again is at the essence of swiss port we call it swiss borg but it's you know it could be called polish borg or french borg or german whatsoever there's so so many different countries and and so many people that love swissborg and we love so much and that's the one reason why later on i'll do the pow-wow of the week and communicating to the to our community that we love so much and to push that extent a bit more i think so most crypto projects should not only have the centralized governance but has as well a deo platform and this is what we put in place we haven't ever marketed so it's a very small community of 400 people on a daily basis have a lot of different missions that go

from ambassador programs to affiliate programs to and within it there's other different missions which is you know artistic things that are being done project management marketing and people really helping us to grow and all these people get rewarded each time and and one of the big projects we had this year was the crypto financial reports and the whole theo did there was 15 contributors and i think so this was by multiple different uh people and brought up from different sources so it's how to get into that same philosophy again how to collaborate with people in a better way in order to get a better financial ecosystem

out of it and helped empower each individual okay well well awesome yeah i mean kudos for sticking it out through the crypto winter this bear market and it's great to see that your efforts we can see them visibly now so it's great to hear and um and so you're actually not based within the crypto valley right you're a little bit further out in in lausanne as i said in the introduction what have you maybe either distanced yourself or decided to to be based within lausanne first because my swiss german sucks [Laughter] uh no but i think so the location of the office of any startup or scale up is always

like five blocks away from the founder's place and that goes to our store as well is that initially bo i'm i'm being living here in luzon for some time and uh well it was first base here because it was in my living room and with anthony so we were living together and we didn't have an office and then we started evolving and we had you know get to know all the epfl community and the content you know even if it doesn't look like it's one of the biggest startup content of all actually uh switzerland there's a lot of things going on epfl like ath as well are both great engineering schools it happens to be that are old backend programming language is out of scala

scala is made out of epfa so there's a lot of links that have been building and all positive momentum made us stick to lausanne uh and most probably uh you know our hq is here i mean we have offices then you know in london toronto thailand and we have a lot of remote people but it's true that uh we love lausanne and yeah and you know we we we really appreciate what crypto valley has done and uh you know it has changed a lot since 2017 and we definitely realized that there's a lot of great startups there and there's a huge ecosystem that we do benefit from but not as much as we would be there

but it's quite it's quite close anyway i mean and uh you're in the french-speaking part of switzerland which i always seem to say is is the better part anyway so uh here it's it's a nice nice place to be and the switzerland is small right so your your ability to to be within the crypto valley is is an hour and a half two hours distance so it's not too far and you spoke about yourself having these different hubs different offices around the world and this growing team so where do you see the investment space as as a whole um headed within digital assets and the blockchain space yeah i think so you know from 2017-2020 we've seen

a lot happening and crypto has these dog years where one year is like a seven year on regular financial market type of a framework and we've seen that again as well for the crisis in march right it just bitcoin went from nine thousand to four thousand within one day and a half you know within one month back to it's me so obviously the end goal would be that everything would be tokenized and you know you'll be able everyone will be able to through his mobile phone essentially buy and trade and sell different security tokens utility tokens payment tokens and that's that may be the end goal

it's hard to see how how this is going to happen on the short term we've seen some security tokens that are are getting momentum that's mainly stable coins and some commodities like gold such we have we haven't seen so much other we've seen cases it's just that it's not being used so much i mean there's a lot of real estate that's been tokenized even in zurich but we haven't seen so much trading volume through it and if there's no usage of a product the technology it's not going to be so famous at the end so i see a lot of growing from less from the payment tokens so all the bitcoin likes i don't see these growing as much as

people would say i i know a lot of people have strong belief in litecoin or ripple or different other payment tokens i don't see them as much because i just see stable coins taking over or community centric type of new ways of growing like you know what dai has been doing maker dao has been doing i see another space uh really much growing as the d5 space that we really fully embrace the d5 space all the central governance that will with it but as well all the peer-to-peer lending this is something that swiss sport will officially announce very soon but we're we are building uh and we have partners in that space so we are going into that

sure and this space you know has grown from a few hundred million dollars to over 3.5 billion dollars right now greatly and it's probably gonna grow more so that is that is massive and that's just only going to grow especially we haven't seen so much asian inflows going there so it's been very i think so focus in europe like through ave or countdown to the states and maker dao which is latin america north america and europe but we haven't seen that so much in the asian space so i think so that is going to be a very big big thing happening especially if tron gets into that space or yes other more you know asian type of blockchains i see

as well more and more proof of stake growing daniel has shown that this is very very aggressive uh on that schwann has been very aggressive on hostile takeovers comment on that but as well growing a lot of dapps on their platform and utility tokens i think so this is you know a space that we've seen with bnb we've seen that with swiss board we've seen with compound we see a lot of different utility tokens that are growing where a lot of people in 2017 had said that this was going to be the future 2018 we saw that everyone lost 99 or just went to zero but we're seeing more and more utility tokens growing that's something that i really have

faith and last but not least one of our strong partners is engine obviously on our wealth app i just believe this is where mass adoption is going to happen if you look at the different video games that has been launched uh through engine azure heroes or or there's so many different other cool cool games these collectibles nft tokens i really think this is the future and how we're going to get to mass adoption right now you could like for example win a swiss borg a cyborg of swiss borg in the lost relics i think so you know for example owning that character

is going to just grow it's going to be worth a lot of money and there's going to be more usage of that cool cyborg within las vegas and i think so that's something that we could see growing and imagine a fifa fifa competitor in 2025 where you're going to be building your team and you know you're going to see okay this guy is now the best uh golder in the world well then you'll be able to sell it against another attacking or defendant whatever you want and that for me is something that i i'll be betting on is how these nft tokens could add a lot of value into the the virtual

e-gaming industry which today is 220 billion revenues that nothing's going to the players no it's it's huge right and the whole esports industry is booming and we're starting to booming at least now as well so i definitely want a little bit more and thank you for that perspective on the future and time is uh of the essence and to maybe wrap things up here so do you have any last words for our audience it's been great having you is there any new initiatives to be launched and anything you want to share with us share my love for all the community uh you know the community crypto holders i just want to always say that swissboard we tried to do our best to to meet everyone's expectation i want to pass the word and to love all the community behind it the big news for us

is definitely the d5 space that we will be entering hopefully very soon um there's as well the theme based investments that people have been talking for a long time that no one's been able to launch them it's on our roadmap and and we want to deliver this but like always before getting to great success uh piano vasano valentino right so you have to make sure that we grow steadily and and then we deliver the best tech and the best products that we build of course room wasn't built in a day right awesome so i'm looking forward further seeing the fruits um of your labor and well if you enjoyed this conversation

feel free to check out more on our website cryptovalley.swiss where we host plenty of events educational content and even provide some information on how you can join our growing community so well thank you once again uh cyrus and stay tuned stay safe and until next time from the crypto valley in switzerland [Music] bye