Tony Ling from Standard Protocol interviews Allen Que, the Founder of WeBlock, in our Investor Series:
Please tell us about your fund.
WeBlock is a blockchain acceleration institute. We are founded two (2) years ago when the blockchain market was on a downturn. Hence, we have witnessed that many excellent and potential startups have no way to continue their development because of either 1) fundraising, 2) insufficient team core contributors or 2) lack of industry resources, which made us want to help. Therefore, we aim to establish WeBlock in order to spot and help more blockchain startups in the blockchain ecosystem.
In the first half of this year alone, we have invested and accelerated more than ten (10) start-up blockchain companies, most of them related to DeFi protocols with cross chain functionalities and NFT. Luckily, all of our accelerated projects have received sufficient funding, community assistance and ecological assistance, and they have more confidence and clearer paths to build their projects so that they are more stable, they could diversify and they could constantly improve their products in the future.
What are some of the criteria you look at when investing in blockchain projects?
There are four (4) aspects: 1) Team: the background of the founders and their previous experiences; 2) Vision: the next two years’ plan (We want to invest in founders with clear roadmaps); 3) Unique and innovative concept; and 4) Product: what kind of product they want to deliver and how.
Why did your fund invest in Standard?
We invested in Standard because
An amazing initial team: The founder comes from a technical background and has sufficient experience in the blockchain space where he helped built successful companies prior. The other founders fully understand the operational side of the project. They have a marketing plan for the initial launch, not to mention contributions from their experienced advisors globally.
Vision: The team has a long vision in what they are trying to build; and they have many years of prior experience to help them achieve that vision of an innovative rebase mechanism. They are exploring an efficient process to support the liquidity aggregation for long-term development.
Unique and innovative concept: the algo stablecoin mechanism.
What draws you to Decentralized Finance?
It’s a quite generous topic because unlike the beginning, DeFi is quite huge now, and we could include a lot of areas include lending, de-trade, stablecoin, liquidity mining, perpetual, even NFT etc. I think it’s hard to describe in a few sentence, but if I could get into the topic by mentioning a few notable ideas, I think it would be more exciting if I could see that DeFi could be integrated into the traditional bank system and be regulated under certain jurisdictions. Hence, there would be a wider range of individuals that decentralized technology could help through the traditional financial system.
What are some of the challenges DeFi is solving in the ecosystem as a whole?
Again, this is a quite professional question and we could talk about it all day and night — politically, economically, culturally and all other aspects — but what makes me interested is how could DeFi solve two challenges:
1) Safety:
First one is the security of smart contracts. The whole DeFi system has lost hundreds of millions of dollars each year due to coding security issues, including stability. For example, the Safe dollar was hacked just a few weeks ago and the price was almost down to zero afterwards.
2) User friendly:
Another problem that needs to be solved is the user-friendliness of the product. The current mainstream DeFi threshold still has a high learning curve. For users who have not used DeFi before, the operation process will be quite complicated, which hinders people from using the product, and a low level user experience could not allow products to continue to grow bigger, not to mention provide exposure to groups who have not been exposed to cryptocurrency before.
Any more suggestion you can give to Standard Protocol——strategy, product, marketing or anything else?
I think there are many talents who are working on it to finish the process of zero to one. Excited to see more individuals, hackers and community members to join the project.
In the meantime, tell your friends!