Teller: Teller is a decentralized lending protocol, so it’s an order book essentially. Where there is a bid and ask. There is a lender who says I’m willing to offer ETH at $1300 for every ETH, but they specify the ratio, they specify the loan terms and the borrower comes in. If they have the necessary collateral and say “I think I like the loan terms that this borrower is offering” and accept the loan terms. You will not get liquidated if the price dumps. You will only get liquidated when you don’t pay on time and we support every token that is available in this space right now. All you have to do is make a request saying that you need a loan on a particular coin and there will be some offer that will be made to you. So any erc20, any erc721, or erc1155 is eligible for a loan on Teller. It’s decentralized, it’s an order book, that’s like the TLDR, we can type more into it, but yeah.
Polytrade: Yeah. So one quick question on this one. So I can think of it like a call or a put option depending on if I’m bullish or bearish and maybe try and take a loan from you, could that could be a perspective, right?
Teller: Yeah, right now let’s take an example, trade token is currently at 40 cents. So somebody has made a loan offer saying that they’re willing to give out a loan to $trade at 20 cents for 7 days at 15% APR. So if the borrower defaults in 7 days then they will end up being able to get $trade tokens at 20 cents that is pretty much what you call what the lender is thinking. It’s very similar to a call option.
Polytrade: Pipe do you wanna take over?
Pieper: Yeah sure. I think we were building in the same space it is great to be building alongside peers like Teller, I’m also a big fan. So essentially we are just like a tech enabler for asset-backed financing on-chain. So very similar to where users can bring their assets and get the quality from Lenders. So it is like a 2 sided protocol. We also have a platform and they referred to working with you guys as well.
Polytrade: What is your favorite asset that you have liquidated up till now?
TGEN: First of all, we haven’t liquidated anyone because we are a platform we are a protocol. So there has been liquidation that has happened in the past like PFPs mostly in the past. I wouldn’t say any of the quotations to be like our favorite, because it’s often not that great to see the quotation happening. But it is part of the protocol. It is part of asset-backed. It is part of lending and borrowing.
Phillipp: I’m Phillipp, Co-founder of Swarm.
Polytrade: When will I be able to take a loan on equities through Teller or Pine or can I already do that?
Swarm (Phillip): Pretty soon
Teller: You can take a loan on ERC20 right now.
Pine: We just launched a new tool on our platform that lets users take loans.
Polytrade: what’s your journey been like? What’s the best learning you’ve done and how has it affected your journey?
Teller: We started with Rootstock, they tokenize houses. They came to us for liquidity. We partnered with them and that was the most of our early journey. We figured out how to issue loans to individuals in the US because that was their problem.
Ashish: Does Teller do their own Underwriting?
Teller: We have a partner called BlockTower, they help us do the underwriting
Polytrade: Do the lenders get insurance.
Teller: Actually, if the borrower fails, the lender has the ability to liquidate the buyer’s collateral.
Polytrade: TGen, give us a short background.
TGEN: We started with PFP NFTs. We bought BAYC, but my Co-founder wanted to buy another NFT, so he sold his BAYC. Then we realized that he shouldn’t have sold his BAYC for the NFT, which made us think about starting asset-backed lending.
Teller to TGEN: How do liquidations work on your protocol?
TGEN: It works the same way yours does.
Polytrade: How do you get liquidity? LPs or Pools?
TGEN: We have institutional lenders and individual lenders
Polytrade: Did you sell your BAYC?
TGEN: I’m a diamond hand. I don’t sell anything that’s sold to me. I just hold.
Phillip: Ashish, just as you said code is law, Law is code. It’s best for everyone to abide by the legal codes so penalties can be avoided.
Polytrade: What has the product journey been like?
TGEN: We started earlier in 2019. Liquidity was missing. We took the business to Europe for fairer regulatory compliance, and we have continued to try to keep the liquidity supply with the demand.
Teller: Finding liquidity is a problem these days. We have community members who want to provide liquidity but it’s nowhere near the demand, I don’t know if you feel that way too, that’s why we switched to an order book model.
Polytrade: Where is the demand that you see on your platform coming from and what did you do to get it?
Teller: We get liquidity from loans that we give to protocols that are not targeted by pool-based protocols e.g PEPE, PNBC. The other is ENS lending. Some projects come and use their ENS as collateral and take loans.
Polytrade: Where is the most money coming from?
Teller: the community.
Polytrade: What’s the default rate at Teller?
Teller: on ERC-20, it’s 0%.
Polytrade: TGEN?
TGEN: On the PFP side, we still have demand.
Phillipp: on the Crypto side, we are approached by L1s, wallet providers, and market makers. On the B2B side, it’s tokenization platforms.
Polytrade: What’s it that as a protocol that we are missing? And why do you love Real World Assets?
Teller: Gas optimization to reduce the gas while someone is taking a loan and more ease taking a property on-chain with more ease. We love Real-world Assets because the narrative is great.
TGEN: We’re living in the real world and we need to tokenize more real-world assets. PFPs aren’t enough. We need to work together and create that ecosystem. We are huge supporters of Polytrade. We should all be like-minded.
Phillipp: it’s RWAs because the opportunity is bigger than any other cryptocurrency initiative. If we get it right, we will dwarf any other cryptocurrency initiative.
End.
Listen to the full conversation: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lDxLPDOEwqxm