Wolfonaire Chatbox : AMA With Polytrade (22nd June, 2021)

Hello! Wolfonaire Family & Crypto Enthusiasts

We recently hosted an AMA With Polytrade 22nd June, 2021 at 2.00 PM UTC. This session was phenomenal. If you have missed then here is the precious AMA transcript, for those who missed the live session this will enlighten you for sure…

Guest Speakers :

Mr. Piyush Gupta | CEO & Co-Founder, Polytrade

Mr. Arul Prakash | COO, Polytrade

(Note: This is the transcription of the event. Please note that the transcript was edited for comprehensibility and coherency, while the content was not changed.)

INTRODUCTION

Piyush : Hello everyone, myself Piyush Gupta, CEO and founder of Polytrade. Its great to e meet you all today. I’ve been with the Trade finance industry for the last 15 years with experience in organizations like Societe Generale, Kitara Corp, AmiCorp and few other big names. I setup my own trade finance business back in 2014 and since then have expanded operations to Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Dubai. Am currently based out of Dubai. At Riqueza capital we have processed invoices worth more than 500mn USD in the last few years… all of which we are confident will move to POLYTRADE. Am an Aerospace Engineering from IIT Bombay by education.

Arul here.. COO of Polytrade. I’ve been working with Fortune 10 companies in my recent past and heading product development & business transformation functions for many of my clients. Worked with companies like Walmart, CVS, Accenture and the TATA group extensively. Have been in the crypto space for the last 4 years and waiting for the opportunity to bring real world to Cryptosphere. MBA & engg by education.

Arul : COO of Polytrade. I’ve been working with Fortune 10 companies in my recent past and heading product development & business transformation functions for many of my clients. Worked with companies like Walmart, CVS, Accenture and the TATA group extensively. Have been in the crypto space for the last 4 years and waiting for the opportunity to bring real world to Cryptosphere. MBA & engg by education.

Our core team members are: Piyush Gupta, Arul Prakash, Sankalp Kumar, Aditi Saini and Ashish Sood. While Piyush has been focusing upon on our investor side and ensuring a successful IDO, I have been looking at product development, Marketing & operations. Sankalp- our Business development Manager has started preparing a pipeline of borrowers who are keen to come onboard. Aditi — our Marketing expert is working on getting us more visible across communities and driving community engagement. Ashish is super focused around Product development and roadmapping the solution. Rest of our team is focused in supporting each of these areas and ensuring we work effectively.

AS we speak we are also getting our Chief Growth Officer with extensive background in Marketing and Growth hacking! Super excited about team expanding!

Piyush : Let me tell a bit about Trade Finance Industry to begin with. The overall size of this industry is above 7 trillion USD. While it includes multiple elements, one of them and the core pieces of it is Receivables financing. With Invoice Financing and Invoice factoring, being two methods of how receivable financing works, the process kicks in when a supplier/manufacturer supplies to a buyer. Typically there is a duration called as Credit period. This is the duration after which the Supplier actually gets paid by the Buyer — Which means if the Buyer receives the goods today, he will only be making the payment 60 days later to the supplier.

This locks up critical capital that the supplier needs to pay his suppliers, employees, maintenance etc.
So in this case, TIME is literally money.

The borrower approaches lending and financing companies today for this working capital so he can pay his expenses.

POLYTRADE intends to provide this much required capital to suppliers at an industry competitive fee structure. We will seek funds from crypto native investors to use our platform to lend us stable coins. These stable coins are then converted to fiat or otherwise, and given to the suppliers, who then become our borrowers. So instead of waiting for the entire duration of the credit period, the supplier immediately gets access to the cash for his expenses.

The responsibility of collecting the money now has been moved to Polytrade from the Supplier. Now the BUYER, has a liability to pay POLYTRADE. Once payment is received the cycle is complete.
The motive of POLYTRADE is to BLOCKCHAIN enable this and improve various facets of Invoice factoring works.

Wolf : For our members who are not already familiar with the project, can you give us a very high-level overview of what #Polytrade is and what competitive edge it brings to the Crypto Universe?

Arul : Polytrade has a very organic approach to tackling the century old trade financing market. We do not want to bite more than we can chew. We do not intend to make a business model which is dependent on our partners and customers knowing Crypto. While all our underlying transactions will be logged on blockchain and executed via smart contracts, the user will require near-zero knowledge of crypto. We will become the ramp via which he gets exposed to crypto.
So our platform is going to be easy for on-crypto users at the same time bring in the various benefits of smart contracts and decentralized platforms, by making it quicker and “cheaper” to actually complete the whole process.
Our Investors and lenders will get exposure to a conventional real world asset which is protected from the volatility of the crypto markets.
Advantages to crypto Lenders: Safe insurance backed investment in real world asset
Advantages to Borrowers: Super quick financing even for smaller ticket sizes and access to lower better liquidity.

Wolf : How do holders of the #Polytrade Tokens benefit in the ecosystem? What power within your model do individuals hold? Why is it so attractive and what are the basic requirements to participate?

Arul : This entire process is going to be enabled and supported by our NATIVE TRADE token. TRADE is going to be the oil that will move this centuries old industry and the processes at Polytrade. TRADE will enable operationalisation and incentivization of all functions and stakeholders to make Polytrade successful.

Governance council will be built up by eminent individuals in TRADE finance and allied areas. Investors will get an opportunity to delegate the governance council to make the right decision for the protocol.

Stake $TRADE shall be rewarded and strengthened by funding an additional insurance pool to cover against any unseen losses. In return they get a share of the protocol fees.

Borrowers will receive discounts and rewards for using TRADE tokens to settle fees applicable.

Buyers will receive discounts on invoices for settlements done on the Polytrade platform. Thereby they will promote polytrade with their other suppliers to receive additional discounts.

Channel Partners & Service Providers will receive TRADE for participating in the trade finance economy by performing key tasks of KYC, document validation, credit evaluation, and more.

Wolf : Have you met all your goals in the roadmap till now? And were there any difficulties that you didn’t expect and were not prepared for?

Piyush : Talking of milestones/goals first, majority of our focus until IDO has been around product development and investor onboarding. Wrt product development we are working towards designing and developing the various portals that the product will have. We are also focussed on building our teams to cater to all the requirements that we have. And wrt investor onboarding sharing our vision with the industry leaders and proving them our ability to ensure this becomes a reality has been a major task, but a great eye opener to achieve. We have some of the best investors in this space and they are providing invaluable guidance to us in how to ramp up from where we are. On borrower side, there has been a lot of discussion with our existing customers, warming them upto Polytrade and the various benefits that will be offered to them. They are way more excited about it than us.

Our immediate focus of course is doing successful IDO on the best IDO platform that we have been pursuing and get listed and see the price as a reflection of the trust the community has on us. Post IDO our entire focus will shift towards product development which should see a MVO launched in the mainnet within the next 2 quarters. We intend to partner with downstream and upstream businesses within the trade finance area to ensure we become an all -encompassing layer for trade finance. Our other key focus area is going to be security and safety. We are getting our contracts certified currently and will be periodically doing so with industry leaders in this space. We also will be working with our insurance providers who will also be providing the additional safety for our investors and lenders.
We want to be the biggest crypto enabled end-end Trade Finance company. As far as we understand we are one the early ones taking an approach that we have. We intend to scale organically and scale BIG. That being our long term goal, our immediate short term goal is to get our product out there in the market and get feedback from all our users. Its progressing in an awesome pace. And we are waiting for it to be launched in the market. We expect this to happen within the next 2 quarters.

Lets move for the Twitter Round

Q1. What can we expect to see from your platform in the short-term (at some point in 2021) & 2022?And beyond (long-term goals)?

Q2. Africa seems to be the region with the least service in terms of global finance providence among all regions. How can Polytrade help people in this region to get more favourable access to trade finance services?

Q3. Are you planning to integrate with other different blockchain technologies to expand the ecosystem and generate more trust?

Q4. What kind of partnerships with different projects/platforms/protocols can we expect from PolyTrade in the future? Could you give us some examples of how other projects can leverage PolyTrade ?

Q5. In the invoice financing process, do the parties involved have to sign or approve some kind of agreement? Would this agreement be created by the parties involved or by Polytrade?

Ans.1 : I believe Piyush touched upon the long term goal of being the largest trade finance company in the crypto space.

That being our long term goal, our immediate short term goal is to get our product out there in the market and get feedback from all our users. Its progressing in an awesome pace. And we are waiting for it to be launched in the market. We expect this to happen within the next 2 quarters.
You can refer to our roadmap.

Ans.2 : Our initial operation will be in Asia — SE, ME and Indian subcontinent. Asian market has been our strength as we have offices across Asia operating for last 5 years in conventional receivable financing area. Asian markets are the best positioned in the FinTech space and with the kind of growth Asia is seeing, it is a great place to start with.
Once this market is better penetrated and grown, we will keep expanding globally to other regions including Africa. We are aware of the rising trade finance gap in the continent, estimated to be more than US$81bn. We will need to understand the regulations in Africa and adapt the platform work effectively to cater to the African market keeping the decentralised nature in mind. Trade Finance industry follows certain internal regulations and trade practices. Polytrade will have to follow the same guidelines.

Ans.3 : Yes we are planning to, but for now we are focussing only on Ethereum considering the large ticket size/transaction amounts and the important of security in our business. We chose Polygon primarily due to the lower fees of the MATIC network, and security of Ethereum where our transaction fees will be under control and our code is going to audited and insured as well.
Once we are stabilised based on the roadmap of polygon, we will move to other blockchain technology wherever there is business demand.

unless there are extremely majoy issues with either ETH or POLYGON, which we dont believe is a possibility, we will first grow and stabilize the said platforms, before moving on.

Ans.4 : If you see our product roadmap clearly, we have included an aspect called as “Decentrlaization score”. This indicates the scale and pace at which we will be moving Polytrade more and more towards the principles of decentralization.
To start off with, there are definitely going to be certain aspects of agreements that might require legal documents to be signed by participants. These are specifically to cater to regulations and the insurance requirements to cover such real world assets. As the Blockchain adoption gets deeper; as regulations become favourable; as our partners come onto blockchain based systems, we believe the need for legal documents outside the realm of blockchain will reduce. Thats our end goal… Right now we are just mounting the horse to kickstart our journey!

Ans 5. : With respect to Crypto ecosystem we are in early stages of building our partnerships. Having Sandeep Nailwal, COO of POLYGON as our Advisor/investor definitely, opens up many doors. There are many more partnerships and ventures that we are looking to expand our token utility. And we have chosen all of our investors to support in those initiatives. We are looking at multiple crypto native upstream and downstream partners in the area of insurance, Credit checks, logistics, banking, etc. to build a complete ecosystem towards TRade Finance

We already have about 5 partnerships that have been established waiting for an announcement for public view.

Now Community Question & Answer Session Began

Q1. What factors will influence the future demand for “Polytrade “ ? or What steps would you take to boost demand? Could you please tell me how you intend to attract more business partners to your project?

Ans. : Globally Trade fiannce is a 7 TRILLION USd industry… yes TRILLION… Of which 1.5 TRILLION is not addressed.. That is the size of prize that we intend to pursue. Its a huge market and huge opportunities for growth and customers.

Unlike other crypto projects, non-crypto users are super critical for us. All our Buyer and supplier community are not cryptosavvy. In fact as part of our marketing plans, we intend to have 2 heads — one looking at Crypto-Marketing and another in the conventional non-crypto space. Our goal clearly is to build the bridges between these two spaces, without which POlytrade will not be able to function effectivelly.

We already have dealt with 5000 customers in the last 6 years in our earlier venture and have processed 500mn USD worth of invoices. OUr past business and connects will easily help us penetrate the market even further.

Q2. There are many rug pulled and exit scam happening now days. How can investors trust you to not to do the same?

Ans. : You can check our profiles and would love to meet you all. We are not anonymous and our expereince in trade finance, blockchain technology and business management with nature of background we come from itself is proof that we are not here for the short haul.
Our team is made up of premier Engg and MBA grads and with rich professional experience, which you can verify. So as a team, we are not going to vanish into thin air! 🙂
Now about the project — Trust me when I say this, all our investors, you can check the name on our site, have done a rigorous evaluation of our business model, experience and feasibility of us being able to pull this off.
There will be competitors with similar or different model catering to this industry and our approach to our competitors is very simple, in simple ways same as CZ. This space is nascent and new, the unaddressed market alone is in trillions. so we welcome our brothers from competing entitites to come to crypto space and build the bridges between the real world and crypto world to benefit one and all.

Q3. What makes POLYTRADE distinctive and ahead of other Security tokens/competitor projects on blockchain that currently exist, keeping in view that their fundamentals are also based on decentralized finance?

Ans. : DEFi is a concept and its here to change the way world works. There is so much going to happen in coming days. We are focussing on a very niche space in the huge financial industry. Still we are dealing with a market of 7 Trillion dollars in our niche. We have an amazing team and years of experience in this product. Thus we can safely say that we are here to make a difference.

Q4. When THE BEAR MARKET COMES? WILL your token PROBABLY DUMP? Are you prepared for this bear market? How will you handle the panic of your Investors?

Ans. : When the market comes, every coin does dump. 🙂

But from our token utility response earlier you would have seen that our intent is to increase the utility of the coin, not play around with hte price using Minting, burning and other mechanisms, clearly relevant for a crypto-asset, not necessarily a crypto-utility token like ours..

We indeed would like to reduce circulating supply, though unintentionally via the staking pool and the governance mechanism that we intend to create.

Q5. Is your project is fully decentralized?Also, is there any possibility of centralization in the future?

Ans. : our roadmap is very unique in this case… we include a clear call out of how decentralized Polytrade is, during different phases… check it out.

Now the session ends with lots of thanks to our Guest Speakers…

Here are some important links of Polytrade

Website | Telegram | Twitter | Wolfonaire Family Chatbox | Wolf