Genesis shards & EncryptClub AMA Recap
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: The plunge in U.S. stock market last night has serious affected the crypto market and damped down cryptoers’ enthusiasm aroused by Tesla. However, during a periodic pullback, a rapid cool-down means a fast increase and a new rag-to-rich opportunity. NFT has garnered lots of attentions both inside and outside crypto space recently, everyone is very optimistic about the on-chain artwork marketplace which makes the difficult-to-save data be permanently reserved on blockchains at low costs. Today, we will have AMA with Genesis Shards, the first marketplace for Pre-IDO tokens on NFT. Nilotpal Mukherjee, co-founder of the Genesis Shards project will introduce us this project in details.
Welcome to EncryptClub, Nilotpal Mukherjee. Would you please introduce yourself to our community?
Nilotpal: Hi, I am Nilotpal Mukherjee, and I am one of the cofounders of Genesis Shards. It’s a pleasure to be here everyone and share more about Genesis shards and about our recent fund-raise：
My first step in Crypto was back in 2015. Being an investment banker with Deutsche Bank working on deal structuring, valuation and IPO processes, and later a strategic consultant at Accenture with a deep love for economics, it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the dynamics of the crypto space. 2016 and 2017 were quite eventful wherein I consulted and invested in a lot of local projects alongside building my network. Over time I became a key player in the Asian blockchain ecosystem, advising and backing projects along the way.
In 2018 I joined Marlin Protocol (a 1.7Bn$ project atm) and headed the Business there till 2020. I was instrumental in early growth of the company, where my expertise around business growth, crypto-economics and strategy helped lay a strong foundation for the brand.
Later in 2020, I co-founded Genesis Shards with Garlam Won (who has also been in the ecosystem since 2015, and previously headed Marketing at Harmony before starting his venture — Momentum6.
Q1: Why does Genesis Shards focus on addressing NFTs pre-IDO liquidity issue? What is the estimated value of this marketplace?
Nilotpal: The DeFi ecosystem as we all know has leapfrogged in the last few years specially in 2020–21 with IDO or Initial DEX Offering fast becoming the method of choice for token distribution and capital raises. With the conclusion of an IDO event we have seen an influx of liquidity into the token.
However the Pre-IDO space is still riddled with several liquidity issues —
A) while on one hand there are very few avenues for pre-IDO trading by the community it is also a big pain point
B) for projects as they have limited community participation, and little sense of price discovery in the early stages.
For most of these pre-IDO transactions, they are currently being executed in OTC (over the counter) ‘platforms’ or ‘forums’ which are scattered and hard to find for the average investor. The biggest problem, however, is the highly inconsistent OTC trade practices for pre-IDO tokens where these trades are often conducted by two parties in an uncertain environment with a high risk of default.
In short, there are hardly any trustless and permissionless platform that allows for fair and easy trading of illiquid pre-IDO tokens. These problems faced by projects and their corresponding communities is what inspired us to create solution for pre-IDO liquidity.
-> and we just happened to find the right solution in NFTs”
Our preliminary analysis suggests that — the DeFi derivative marketplace could be worth $540 billion — and this is super conservative. We are just using the DeFi TVL in the current state of crypto for our extrapolation without even considering the potential growth in cryptomarketcap size and the potential growth in DeFi dominance within it.
Even if we assume that DeFi options on NFTs should capture 5% of the value of the larger DeFi derivatives sector — this alone gives the DeFi options marketplace a $25 billion value — and this is using the conservative number for the market size.
Q2：Why governance token is required for Genesis Shards? What does the governance token do?
Nilotpal: To understand the Governance aspects of $GS token, it’s important to understand the nature in which Genesis Shards ecosystem works.
The liquidity marketplace of Genesis Shards by very nature opens up an incubator/launchpad like environment for its partner projects; offering a one-stop environment for great projects to meet great partners. Our community on the other hand by virtue of holding Genesis NFT’ised Access cards, get access to these projects quite early in their journey.
Now as one can interpret, the various ecosystem pieces of Genesis requires community consensus at several points:
1) Be it the percentages of allocation set for each access card or
2) The projects that should be brought into the network or even,
3) Inclusion/Exclusion of ecosystem partners depending on the value they add to the community.
The Governance aspect of $GS tokens gives governance rights to its members to vote on several such decisions within the ecosystem.
We shall be releasing more on this in our upcoming blogs.
Q3：What is the advantage of Genesis Shards when compared with other NFTs platforms? How will you increase the market liquidity?
Nilotpal: The crypto season of 2021 is witnessing a quantum leap in the value recognition of “NFTs” or non-fungible tokens. NFTs are soon becoming a rapidly popular asset class. However, few, if any, NFTs have any added utility apart from their collectible value.
The very idea of NFTs being re-defined as Defi Options by Genesis Shards opens up endless possibilities for a whole new suite of option based DeFi products that can be traded on our platform. Such a market wasn’t earlier possible there in other existing platforms like Opeansea, and the likes.
While Genesis as a pre-IDO platform will have its own liquidity engine, we see huge value in partnering with the existing cross-chain architecture of Polkadot for inter-chain communication. The solidity compatible Polkadot parachains will enable Genesis Shards ecosystem to take pre-IDO tokens from various low liquidity blockchains, wrap them into Gen NFTs and be traded on Genesis enabled liquidity pools. This will also allow the projects to take full advantage of the liquidity internal and external to their native chains.
Q4：Genesis Shards supports NFTs trading across multiple blockchains, may I know how will Genesis Shards guarantee the security of the multi-chain assets on it？
Nilotpal: While the Genesis Shards native architecture has been built ground up with security in mind, we also intend to work with pre-established Polka bridges to accomodate cross chain liquidity, without really reinventing the wheel there.
This would help ensure the security of the multi-chain assets on it are best optimized.
Q5：NFTs is a new section in the field of linking real world and blockchian, what do you think of NFTs’development space in the future?
Nilotpal: NFTs are completely shaking up a lot of traditional industries including, notably, art. The highlight for NFTs so far has been the Beeple artwork selling for more than $60 million!
We like to look at NFTs as building a new liquid IP ( intellectual property ) marketplace for any form of digital content. This is a market with innumerable number of units that can be tokenized — the potential is truly limitless. We really are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here.
Let’s look at the progress of the NFT space so far, from 2017 through 2020
31 -> 180 -> 211 -> 365 (USD millions)
( Data from : https://nonfungible.com/nft-report-2020 )
The numbers clearly show an upward trajectory — and the NFT space has never come into the public spotlight like we are seeing currently.
With continued growth of the NFT space — the market will find newer and more exciting uses for these instruments. We believe with our DeFi options on NFTs, we are playing a key role in expanding the lens for how people view NFTs.
Here comes free QA session, guest can choose 1–2 lucky questions to answer.
User1: There exists many DEFI+NFT projects but few works well. Whats the size of your team, are you capable of stand out from others ?
Nilotpal: That’s an interesting one. We think we have almost everything aligned in the team that’s required for token success:
Tech:
We have Jae leading our dev. He became known in the space through the EOS.IO mainnet launch as a gifted developer, with his abilities eclipsing those of his experienced peers, and comes with years of Blockchain experience.
Marketing:
We do believe we have a very competent team from a marketing perspective. In fact our Co-Founder Garlam Won headed marketing at Harmony, and has consulted several top-tier DeFi projects in this area including Kava, Band, Mantra Dao etc.
Capital:
All I can say for now is we do have adequate backing with respect to capital — the fundraise article should give good insights around it.
Business:
I myself come with a strong business and strategy background and previously headed the Business at Marlin Labs.
User2: What is Genesis Shards’ access card? What is your favorite part in crypto space?
Nilotpal: Gen Access cards are the ‘entry passes’ into the Genesis Shards ecosystem. They allow holders to acquire Gen Tickets. Different NFT cards grant different access rights — ranging from Gen ticket size to governance influence.
That not a single day in the space has been boring.
Judy_Host of EncryptClub: Thank Nilotpal for joining our AMA and sharing so much valuable information with us. Thank you all for watching this AMA. EncryptClub will work hard and bring more wonderful content for you in future.
