BTSE AMA Transcription — Edmond Truong, Co-Founder of Formation Fi

BTSE
9 min readAug 4, 2021

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BTSE Moderator:

Hello and welcome everyone to another AMA session with us at BTSE

For the duration of the AMA, the channel will be muted to allow our guest to answer our questions.

Stick around to the end of the AMA for a chance to have your questions answered and win prizes!

Without further delay, please meet Edmond Truong @edmondtruong , from Formation.Fi

Welcome. Please tell us a little more about yourself and your team members.

Edmond Truong:

Yes definitely:

To start off with myself, I come from a traditional finance background started working at JP Morgan very early. However, in terms of entering the blockchain and cryptocurrency space I joined Harmony Protocol. I was with them for quite a long time during mainnet going live, Binance launchpad, Kucoin listing, etc. After leaving, I went on to venture in my first DeFi project, which handled solving a lot of remittance issues and worked with Huobi otc, kraken, galaxy digital, and much more.

In terms of the team:

Others have always been very heavy serial entrepreneurs who have founded big online gaming businesses, digital marketing, but most importantly have a very strong background in traditional hedge funds and working very closely in Wall Street for many years whether it was for big institutional banks, investment bankers, or venture capitalists.

BTSE Moderator:

Thank you for the introduction. What is the major challenge that the core team is aiming to solve and how will it be achieved?

Edmond Truong:

To put it simply: Cross chains rebasing of assets in real time to maintain stability with in many different parallel chains represented by an index that is self rebasing. This feature is underlying core to all our index strategies — with Alpha coming first.

However, we are also trying implement risk parity strategies into Defi yield farming strategies because as you can see at the moment no one significant in Defi thinks intelligently about hedging risks over a long period of time. It’s all about maximizing APY.

BTSE Moderator:

Awesome. Who are your investors or partners? Do you have any ambitions to form relationships with other initiatives in the future?

Edmond Truong:

Our investors include founders of many top leading blockchains and apps with in the space, including founders of Bancor, founders of Polygon, Synthetix , etc. Also some notable VC like Kenetic, Spark Digital, Kosmos, etc. If you want to take a look at the full list of investors, you can find it directly on our official.

In terms of expanding our ecosystem with other initiatives, yes this is an on-going process and we definitely will be working with the top-industry projects in the space. I believe our community will be very happy to see what we have in store along the way

BTSE Moderator:

I see that you have mentioned of the index strategies. Before we zoom into that, if you could sum it up, what is your grand vision with Formation Fi?

Edmond Truong:

Formation FI is an innovative risk management Defi portfolio construction asset manager. Where a user can deploy their capital and based of his/her risk appetite our index strategies will take over the rest, no matter the chain, provide satisfying ROI. In addition, As a lot of new capital/assets starts flowing in from huge fortune 500 companies, we plan to see them looking at formation fi because the fundamental movement risk parity which drives our strategies are very similar to what they have seen.

BTSE Moderator:

Risk management has always been overlooked. That’s good to have you guys working towards this.

On the medium page says that “Formation Fi is engineering a safer longer-term strategy for investing in DeFi and Web3 that captures the fast returns”, how does Formation Fi achieve that?

Edmond Truong:

We have an investment research team who solely focuses on constructing the index in such a way that we could achieve risk parity, having negatively correlated assets with in same basket, to off set investment risk. But more importantly, what people don’t understand is we are building the “Defi logo blocks” as we call it. We will build the framework and toolkits similarly to the tools that very successful hedge funds use internally to make their fund special and unique.

Also, we have released three major articles running through some of the framework and how each index will be constructed. I would definitely take a look at these.

ALPHA: https://formation-fi.medium.com/formation-fi-alpha-the-bold-one-b576f9052bdd

BETA: https://formation-fi.medium.com/beta-the-bedrock-for-balanced-portfolios-built-on-defi-and-web3-44066f537d5f

GAMMA: https://formation-fi.medium.com/gamma-the-calm-center-within-the-unknown-abyss-653ad85f9f74

BTSE Moderator:

Wow. That’s great that there’s an article written for each of these. I am sure the audiences from today could take a look into these after the AMA.

I see that you have mentioned Risk Parity Protocol multiple times. Could you tell us more about the Risk Parity Protocol?

Edmond Truong:

In terms of the risk parity protocol, this is being designed as the fundamental basis of how specific assets will be chosen where we take a deep look into standard deviations, mining costs of the asset, usage data, and a bunch of different factors.

BTSE Moderator:

Thank you for your explanation!

What are the three key ideas of All Weather by Bridgewater for the yield farming environment? Give us a simple overview for our readers. Perhaps you could also tell us the reason why you base your principles on All Weather by Bridgewater.

Edmond Truong:

Understood.

In terms of why we based a lot of our movement of All weather by bridgewater, is more about taking “risk parity”. As you guys know, the cryptocurrency market has been evolving and maturing over the years but still lacks a lot of attention to risk parameters.

We saw that there was a very big marketplace for individuals who have capital and they just don’t have the time to worry about the crazy volatility in the market, but they want to make sure “over-time” they will out perform the market and they will have sustainable high income.

BTSE Moderator:

I am sure that we will all benefit for the less crazy volatility in the market.

The next set of questions will be about the project’s tokenomics. Tell us more about the token you’ve created. What is its function?

Edmond Truong:

The FORM token will have triple utility from:

1. FORM token entitles its holders a right to vote

2. Reward sharing: portion of future net income generated by the protocol

3. exclusive access to the secret Dark Pool’s only accessible to the members of the Formation FI ecosystem.

I believe we have a lot of strong material out there whether it is medium articles, or even Dao-makers extensive research paper on us. For anyone who wants to take a deeper look, these places would be a good starting point!

BTSE Moderator:

Then people should really hodl to have the exclusive access! With that being said, when was the $FORM token launched and how can users get a hodl of it?

Edmond Truong:

$FORM was launched back on June 18th of this year.

In terms of the how users are able to get a hold of it. We are currently on many different exchanges. However, most notably: KuCoin, Pancakeswap, Gateio, and Uniswap.

BTSE Moderator:

For the audiences out there who are interested. Please note this. Let’s move on and do a comparison. There’s a lot of yield farming systems out there, where does Formation Fi fit into that?

Edmond Truong:

Yes, yield farming is definitely out there. However, a lot of them either focus on only one chain or they’re mostly appealing to users that want to maximize yield but not optimize it.

Formation FI — is all about risk management so you could have your returns delivered in the safest way possible — corresponding with in your risk/reward profile. One example that I like to use is the following:

Currently, if you want to Yield farm, you will have to go on all these different platforms like yearn, harvest, badger, etc. All of these platforms are “VAULTS”. Old method like Yearn: Users will go in and they will have to stake each LP token individually. This means that the user will have to understand how to create a portfolio and manage all of them at once. The user has to manage each single one (STAKE, UNSTAKE, etc.) which we feel is too time-consuming and not practical.

FORMATION: You will own one single index token: The index token will essentially represent and have (let’s say 20–30 different Yield farming strategies, which could be 40+ different LP tokens, and across multiple chains).

BTSE Moderator:

With that example, that definitely shows how you guys are optimizing it. Good stuff.

Please share with us any future plans you have in place, any new exciting partnerships or listings?

Edmond Truong:

We have a bunch in store for our community and entire ecosystem.

In terms of new listings. Yes, we already have them in place and soon to be announced.

In terms of exciting partners. Yes, we have been working very hard on them and will be pushing them out as well!

BTSE Moderator:

Alright, that sounds like you guys will have many for us to keep an eye out for. NFTs are still all the rage — are there any plans to expand into NFTs?

Edmond Truong:

NFTs are definitely something we strongly believe in.

You will be very surprised on how we plan to expand into NFTs, I believe its going to be very exciting when we do.

BTSE Moderator:

Alright! Can’t wait.

Dear community, we have now arrived at the live Q&A portion of the AMA. Please have your questions ready!

I’m Ninja (@MrJackBT):

While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands? While you build your project, do you take into account community feedbacks and demands

Edmond Truong:

In terms of community feedback,

We take this very seriously. We are always monitoring our community and making sure we know what’s going on and what they’re looking for in terms of what we need to change to make it the best experience for them. The entire team will always continue to take in consideration all the feedback and demands to ensure we provide quality products to our users.

Happy🎀Daisy (@happydaisyl):

Do you have AUDIT certificates, or are you working to AUDIT your project, to make it more secure and reliable?

Edmond Truong:

Yes, currently we are working with Certik and Halborn as our partners for long-term security accounts. However, as time goes on we also plan to onboard more top tier security providers to help maximize our security.

Isa Cargill (@plugpopee):

What are the plans to educate and raise awareness and adoption among the community to make more people understand about the project easily?

Edmond Truong:

In terms of educating and raising adoption, we are looking for very organic growth and people that truly believe in the project to come over and have a chat. However, our main goal is to educate as many people as possible about our project and allow them to have a clear understanding of what we are building because we would love them to be apart of the journey!

This could include AMAs, Fun events to win prizes to learn about $FORM, Ambassador programs, and much more!

Renaldo McGraw (@RenaldoFincher):

I love Hackethon and it’s healthy for both community and for project itself. Do you have plan to involve community developers and run a Hackethon program?

Edmond Truong:

Most Definitely,

We will have bounty programs, Hackathons, and other creative ways to make sure our developer community is involved with the project as well.

Sky Ghe Tai(@Iamskyoi):

Where can I buy your tokens now, what are your current contracts and how can I buy them and what are the benefits?

Edmond Truong:

As stated earlier in the AMAs,

There are quite a few locations where you can purchase $FORM tokens now.

https://formation.fi/

On our official website, we have a direct buy button which will link you to all the most popular exchanges offering $FORM currently.

BTSE Moderator:

Thank you for answering the questions from our audience. Really appreciate it.

To close this AMA out, we have a couple questions to wrap this up. What should the community anticipate in the near future for events?

Edmond Truong:

Currently, we have two major events coming up

1. LGE (liquidity generating event) which is our soft launch

2. V1 ALPHA Launch.

BTSE Moderator:

Great, that’s definitely good to keep an eye out on.

To wrap this up, where can the community find more information about the project?

Edmond Truong:

For more information about the project:

Website: https://formation.fi

Telegram: https://t.me/FormationFi

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FormationFi

Medium: https://formation-fi.medium.com/

Formation.Fi

BTSE Moderator:

Folks, this concludes the AMA. Thank you for attending!

Edmond Truong:

Thanks everyone and I hope that you guys take a look into Formation Fi!!

We have a lot of exciting stuff, soon to come

BTSE Moderator:

@edmondtruong Great to have you here tonight. You have been awesome.

Please keep an eye out on the Twitter for future events and announcement!

https://twitter.com/BTSEcom

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