We had a pleasure to host an Ask Me Anything session on our Telegram Chat, with another great personality from the crypto world! Check out what MELD Labs CEO, Ken Blaue, discussed with our Marketing & PR Manager, Shlomi Gibly.
Shlomi Gibly: Hello Ken, and our awesome community! I hope you had a great day? Tonight we have a very special guest from MELD Labs.
Ken is the CEO of MELD, blockchain-based lending, and borrowing protocol. Ken is a serial entrepreneur working in the space between technology design and data building new products to solve some of the biggest problems in the industry. With 20+ years in digital transformation, globally he has a proven track record of delivering innovative products and consumer experiences for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500.
Is there anything else you think our community should know about you?
Ken Blaue: Hi all! I guess the most important thing is that I’m the co-founder of MELD a DeFi protocol on Cardano. We are one of the first dApps to launch on Cardano now that we have smart contracts.
My background is a bit of a mixed bag.
I come with 25 years of design and communication, and then in 2010, I moved into technology development where I built tech and ran tech teams. Then in 2020, I was sucked into DeFi and I couldn’t get out. Love it. The rest is history…
Shlomi: That is very interesting Ken. Could you describe MELD for our community?
Ken: Sure! MELD is a DeFi protocol that will allow you to lend crypto and barrow fiat (USD, EUR, YEN, etc). It’s non-custodial your crypto is safe in a smart contract.
MELD also offers the stake of the MELD token. The MELD stake pools operate like insurance or security against any problems on the protocol. The stakes get 40% of the revenue generated by the protocol in staking yield.
We have some other very interesting products as well. For example, MELD will be offering a Genius Loan. This is a loan that pays itself off. All you pay for is the interest on the loan and in most countries, interest is tax-deductible. The collateral for the loan is used to generate yield and part of that yield goes to pay off the principle of the loan.
We will also be offering debit cards. MELD is similar in many ways to Celsius and BlockFi but in our case, we are decentralized and non-custodial so your crypto is always yours and safe on the blockchain not handed over to some private bank or financial institution.
I think that covers the basics of MELD. :)
Shlomi: I think the name Genius loan to a loan that pays itself is well… genius! Ken, What problems do you see in the industry right now, and what problems is your team aiming to solve?
Ken: I think there are two big issues MELD can help with.
1) If you own crypto, you don’t want to sell it. You want to HODL. But we all have to eat and get married, and buy a car, etc. we need to live life. If all our money is in crypto, we have no money for life. MELD helps people unlock a portion of the value of their crypto in a safe decentralized way.
2) When the bear market comes, what will you do. When the value of your crypto goes way down? Smart people will HODL, and wait for it to go down and borrow against it. When you do that as the crypto raises again, your loan will down. Large businesses have been doing this for 100 years. Now it's time for all of us to be able to have access to these tools.
Shlomi: Interesting. Last question before we open the option to ask for our community. Which tokens will Meld accept as collateral for loans?
Ken: In the beginning, it will be ADA, BTC, ETH, MATIC several other Cardano tokens like SUNDAE. We will expand out from there with other ERC20 and CNTs
Shlomi: Very interesting. What’s on the horizon for Meld in 2022? Any interesting events that our community should know about?
Ken: We expect to finalize at least one major partnership with an EU-based bank, and we will be launching ADAmatic, a bridge between Cardano, Polygon, and Ethereum.
Shlomi: Awesome! That would be all from me. Our community always has the best questions. Thank you, Ken! We are looking forward to hearing about your progress!
SOME QUESTIONS FROM FMFW.io COMMUNITY
As I know, a strong backer is very important to determine which project is legit. Who are your strategic partners and backers?
Ken: Our strategic partners are Nervos, Polygon, Matrixswap, SundaeSwap, World Mobile and Occam.
Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market and many projects developed here so with your project, what do you think about Southeast Asia and do you have any plan to do it here?
Ken: We are based in Singapore, part of our team is in Vietnam, Southeast Asia is a very important region for us.
Community support is one of the biggest aspects of a project’s success. Most projects have programs that interact with their users. Does you have any special plans to attract and expand the community and improve the user experience?
Ken: We have a great community. with more than 50,000 strong and most token holders at launch we have seen great support.
Do you have AUDIT certificate or are you working to AUDIT your project, so that the security of the project becomes more secure and reliable?
Ken: Not only have we been audited for our smart contracts. We are building tools in the Cardano ecosystem for auditing and reverse engineering contracts. We are eon of the major players in the security space on Cardano.
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