Let’s build a bank for the new financial ecosystem

Open Finance is the next natural cycle of human evolution. With this evolution, the types of financial applications we use today will evolve as well. Banking is the biggest financial application today.

If you are interested in helping build a community-driven bank for this new financial ecosystem, please fill the form below.

https://bx1499vaars.typeform.com/to/oMKCYTMr

We are building a world for machines. These machines will be the evolved form of humans.

Humans evolved quickly compared to other species because we were able to coordinate in larger sets of groups. Machines can coordinate more efficiently with each other if the information flows freely and openly between them. This includes financial information too. Hence in a futuristic machinic world, finance will be more transparent and distributed.

I wrote a more detailed piece on this financial evolution. Click below if you want to read on that.

The way humans use finance is evolving and becoming more efficient

Finance will evolve to be more open where anyone can innovate. The financial system will become transparent, and everyone will have access to the same information. And I believe Bitcoin and Ethereum are our steps towards this evolution.

Let’s focus on what change this will lead to in this decade? How can we speed up this paradigm shift?

Today the most prominent financial application in the world is banking. Globally 69% of adults(~3.8 billion people) have a bank account(source: globalfindex).

Most humans use banks in the following ways.

1. Payments: Send/accept payments for goods and services.
2. Investments: Generate yield by investing idle capital in various financial instruments. These include fixed deposits, buying stocks, ETFs, and others.
3. Loans: Borrow money for mortgages or businesses.

These use cases will remain the same, at least for the following few decades. Open Finance needs to solve at least one of these three use cases to attract the next 1B people.

I believe that investments will be the first mainstream use case for Open Finance. The other two use cases will take time to come on-chain. Payments need high throughput and broader infrastructure(tax, accounting, stability, consumer/business acceptance). Loans need more physical world assets and information.

Investment is one use case where Open Finance will be a game-changer. It will bring new and existing financial opportunities to a broader global audience.

Till now, people just wanted to buy cryptocurrencies because of their upside potential. 10x more people are already using centralized crypto exchanges than noncustodial wallets. Because till now, Open Finance was not solving mainstream use cases for average users. But now, Open Finance is bringing better financial opportunities like access to US stocks and trade finance to a broader set of users worldwide.

An application bringing access to these opportunities and solving payments will bring billions of people to Open Finance. To make a simplified reference, I will call this application an Open Finance Bank or a DeFi Bank.

This brings me to the question of how should we build this Open Finance Bank?

In my previous blog, I mentioned, we will evolve towards a machinic ecosystem. These machines will get better and better in how to coordinate in a larger group. In these systems, each participant machine or consciousness will have a say. This already happens today as well with current human civilization. When you vote, invest money or spend time somewhere, you are putting your voice out there based on your view of the world. In a machinic world, it will be far more efficient to do so.

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are a step towards that. Each DAO is like a collective consciousness formed by individuals who are part of the DAO. And a DAO is nothing but a community of people who have the same value and belief system. We will see many current corporation-style organizations will move to DAO-style organizations. DAO versions are already emerging for some of the most prominent traditional world organizations. These include venture capital, hedge funds, exchanges, and many other applications. Some of the prominent DAOs include Meta Cartel, BadgerDAO, Gitcoin, and many more.

A DeFi bank should be driven by a community of people as well. People who use and believe in this bank should be able to govern it themselves. We are chasing this mission, and we are looking for people who also feel the same.

As a first step, we want to make DeFi investments easier for average users. We are building a community-driven noncustodial asset management platform. To make it usable for millions of users, we are making the user experience and interface simple. A user chooses her risk appetite and deposits their funds. A community of DeFi experts manages the pooled capital to generate yields. This community consists of people with various skill sets. Some people find opportunities, write smart contracts, vet the strategies, and suggest allocation. Some people work on growth and making the community stronger. A token model incentivizes everyone to do their work and keeps them aligned.

Here is the link for you to try it out. https://mesh.finance/

We are sure that this product itself will go through many iterations. And as a community, we will be able to carve out the product in the right shape to achieve our mission.

We are looking for the first 100 people who will love to be a part of this community. People who will love to work on the product, find investment opportunities, write smart contracts, and review them. And People who can help with growing the community.

Our mission is simple. We want to speed up this evolution of Finance and bring Open Finance benefits to every human. We believe a DeFi banking protocol will be a much larger opportunity than all traditional banking combined. It will be worth trillions of dollars due to its unique characteristics…

1. A DeFi bank will not be limited to geographic territories.
2. A DeFi bank will be able to solve multiple use cases leveraging DeFi composability.
3. A DeFi bank will have strong network effects between community, users, and capital.

We have a chance to build something gigantic from the ground up. If you believe in this dream as we do, please fill up the form below to become one of the first 100 community members. We want the first 100 people to put their soul into making this a reality.

Fill up this form to join the community.

https://bx1499vaars.typeform.com/to/oMKCYTMr

We plan to bring benefits to all the people who fill up this form even if they are not in the first 100 community members. So I recommend everyone excited about this to fill up the form.

Thanks to Vijay Chetty, Prince Arora, Himanshu Yadav, Ryan Sean Adams, Joel John, Krishna Sriram, and Sumukh Shetty for their help with the draft.

About me:
I am co-founder and CEO at Mudrex (a Y Combinator backed company). Mudrex helps people invest in crypto in a risk-adjusted way. At mudrex professional traders create quant funds and let others invest in their funds. We have already helped thousands of people trade more than $0.5B.