Episode 129 of the Public Key podcast is here! Why build another DeFi product or platform when there are already so many? Well that is both a good question and an unfortunate problem according to the CEO of Tea-Fi, Matan Doyich. His team is creating a one-stop shop for the wide variety of DeFi platforms in order to have the ability to conduct swaps, provide lending, execute decentralized trades and all the other core fundamental products of DeFi all in one place.
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Public Key Episode 129: One DeFi Platform To Rule Them All
Why build another DeFi product or platform when there are already so many?
Well that is both a good question and an unfortunate problem highlighted by Ian Andrews (CMO, Chainalysis) in today’s episode as he speaks to the CEO of Tea-Fi, Matan Doyich.
Matan and his team is creating a one-stop shop for the wide variety of DeFi platforms in order to have the ability to conduct swaps, provide lending, execute decentralized trades and all the other core fundamental products of DeFi, all in one place.
Matan details Tea-Fi’s features, including its privacy-focused solutions using ZK technology and the ambitious goal of integrating lending, swaps, and synthetic assets with upcoming support for cross-chain transactions and a debit card.
He provides his insights on international regulatory scrutiny towards privacy protocols like Tornado Cash and explains why Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) could be the future of adding privacy to existing crypto solutions.
Quote of the episode
“There’s so many platforms. So the idea of Tea-Fi is basically to create one platform that will integrate into it all the core fundamental products of DeFi into one place and make it much more intuitive, much more seamless, much more user friendly” – Matan Doyich (CEO, Tea-Fi)
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 | Simplifying DeFi: How Tea-Fi plans to turn a complex ecosystem into one user-friendly platform
4 | Matan’s crypto journey from algorithmic trading to creating a crypto hedge fund
8 | Balancing privacy and regulation in decentralized finance (DeFi)
12 | Understanding the focus by regulators on Tornado Cash and Telegram as money laundering conduits
17 | Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) could be the future of adding privacy to existing crypto solutions
20 | Unveiling the Tea-Fi ecosystem including DEXs, swap protocols and landing platforms
24 | How Tea-Fi will be able to offer uncollateralized crypto loans via their network reward program
26 | What Tea-Fi is excited about for the end of 2024
Related resources
Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.
- Website: Tea-Fi: The One-Stop Shop For DeFi
- Whitepaper: Tea-Fi Whitepaper: Private Decentralized Finance
- Roadmap: Tea-Fi Roadmap – 2024 to 2025
- Blog: 2022 Biggest Year Ever For Crypto Hacking with $3.8 Billion Stolen, Primarily from DeFi Protocols and by North Korea-linked Attackers
- Article: Tea-Fi: One-Stop Shop for DeFi
- YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page
- Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchain
Speakers on today’s episode
- Ian Andrews * Host * (Chief Marketing Officer, Chainalysis)
- Matan Doyich (CEO, Tea-Fi)
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Transcript
Ian:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Public Key. This is your host, Ian Andrews. Today I’m joined by the CEO of Tea-Fi, Matan Doytsh. Matan, welcome to the show.
Matan:
Thank you. Happy to be here. How are you?
Ian:
I am excited because Tea-Fi is something that I had not heard of before. I think it’s an exciting new protocol. I started reading about it. But I want to hear straight from you, what does Tea-Fi do? Why build another platform in Tea-Fi? Let’s start there.
Matan:
Sure. So actually, that’s a great question. Why building another product, another platform? There’s so many and I think that’s actually the exact problem that we’re here to solve. There are so many. And right now, let’s say you go to Ethereum and you open MetaMask because that’s the default. Let’s say, for example, you’re a bit educated and FTX just collapsed like it run 10 billion and you don’t trust centralized platforms. So you are a bit educated and you go to MetaMask because that’s default, they have 100 million users.
And then, you want to swap something and you’re like, “Wait. Uniswap, Sushiwap, 1inch, OX. What do you do there?” And you need to pay the Godspeed with Ethereum. And then, if you want to move to different blockchains, different wallets, and different SysPhrase… And what the hell are SysPhrase? And even the Godspeed itself is so complicated. And now, it’s like the average, the basic user, if you want to use lending, if you want to maybe move between different platforms. And then, you need to get used to again for different ones and bridges, everything is in different places. So all over the place. As you say, there are so many platforms. So the idea of Tea-Fi is basically to create one platform that will integrate into it all the core fundamental products of Tea-Fi into one place and make it much more intuitive, much more seamless, much more user-friendly, and basically, that’s it.
Ian:
It’s amazing because that framing is exactly how I feel. Every time I go to open my wallet and send some funds somewhere, there’s this momentary feeling of terror as I’m like, “Well, is this the right address? Am I actually interacting with the DAP that I think I’m interacting with? Or is the URL, the right URL that I connected my wallet to? Can I trust this platform? Who else is using the platform? Am I, maybe without even knowing it, interacting with some people that I don’t really want my funds co-mingled with?”
That goes through my head every time I open MetaMask to do anything. And so far, there’s not really been a great answer. So I’d love for our discussion today to get into how you solve some of those problems. But maybe, we can rewind a little bit. Because from what I understand, you’ve been working in crypto for about six years-
Matan:
Almost, yeah.
Ian:
Almost six years. I’d love to hear how you found crypto. What drew you into the space in the first place?
Matan:
So it’s actually a pretty funny story. I started my crypto journey when I was 17. I basically just searched online, searched in YouTube, “How to make money online?” And then, basically, that’s how it started. I wanted to buy Minecraft, didn’t have the money for it. It cost $7. I just started. I just started. Been through a lot of ups and downs. Algo trading, mining, equity providing. I worked in multiple Web3 companies. I managed my own hedge fund. I was an analyst for private investing books. In Web3, I did marketing, operation. I did business development. I was in conferences all around the world. Been a crazy six years, definitely. That’s it.
Ian:
That’s such an amazing story. Do you remember what that first video was that you found when you searched for how to make money online?
Matan:
That’s a great question. Yeah. I do actually. It was the video of a chic called the Moona.
Ian:
Okay.
Matan:
She made a video on this automatic trading inside this crypto platform and 100x leverage and getting rich overnight. You can start with as little as $10 and I was like, “Oh, wow. I just need three more.” And so, yeah, I think if I’m not mistaken, that was the fifth video.
Ian:
Did you try it? Did you try and follow the advice and build an algo trading bot-
Matan:
No, it was too complicated. It was so complicated.
Ian:
Because at that point in 2017, we were at the peak of the ICO market and you had lots of companies listing what amounted to equity tokens in their projects. So I was curious if that was maybe the path that you initially ended up going down, but the algo trading piqued your interest first, I guess.
Matan:
I actually based my RIP hedge fund, I’ll talk about why RIP in a second, but my RIP hedge fund on algo trading. But generally speaking, no. Actually, it was pretty diversified. I wouldn’t say like doing something and then heard about something else. And then, “Okay. How can I get to do that?” Trying as many things as possible. Nothing really felt right. Nothing really felt satisfying, felt like that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.
I think it felt that way until I started focusing in Web3 company. I think two aspects. I can say that doing them, I can imagine myself doing them until the end of my life which is R&D. Investigating all those projects, understand what went well, what didn’t went well. Even being in this economics with the mathematicians and experts and all the extreme use cases and the token utilities and everything. Trying to find could this increase in value? Is this increase sustainable? A fund is really fascinating. I’m a big fan of math. And I think business development, that’s definitely, not even investing, not even making money, just business development. Just being in a meeting, closing the deal, making the connection, doing the mingling. That’s, I think, the top two things that I found extremely fascinating in the crypto space, for me at least.
Ian:
So take us from the hedge fund into Tea-Fi. Is the hedge fund still round or did you wind that down?
Matan:
So I was 18 years old. I started doing this algo trading. With this algo trading, it cost a significant amount of money a month. I already did pretty well. I did a couple extra on three tokens and I was okay. Also, I found a job at the same time, so I’m getting money and putting everything inside crypto. And basically, it came to the point that it was this one algo bot who had 2% drawdown at most and had maybe three years of back testing already, live back testing. And never more than 2% drawdown. It was amazing. It was doing 10% a month.
Ian:
Wow.
Matan:
And I was like, “Wow. This going on for another three years, I’m a billionaire.” You cannot fault the people making these calculations. And of course, that’s never how it ends. But generally, this is how it started. And then because it was so expensive per month, I found a lot of users that it wasn’t lost for them to pay that because it cost 5,000 a month, so dollars. So if you put $50,000, you basically basically break even, that’s not affordable for most users. I started letting people put money with my trading account and start from that and pretty quickly taking from their profits like, okay, I’m going to take 3% profit and you’re going to use my bot for free.
And pretty quickly we grew over a million dollars and we started testing more algo bots and have a marketing department and sales department and bring in actual traders full time. And we actually at a certain point actually managed over 10 million. I’m 19 at this point. And then apparently it was something very cool that they just found out called regulations, which was a bit unfortunate, but we had to shut the whole thing down.
Ian:
Did your investors at the time know that you were 19?
Matan:
Yes.
Ian:
So you were not an anonymous crypto trader, they knew who you were, you’d met them in real life?
Matan:
Yeah, it was starting friends, friends of friends, family and then their friends and at school pretty quickly. But I think maybe not first connection, maybe second the third connection, but everyone knew who I am. Knew, oh, you’re her little sister or you’re his friend or stuff like this.
Ian:
It’s an amazing amount of trust to give somebody at 19 millions of dollars worth of money. So there must have been deep trust and interest in what you were doing. So you wind that down as you run into regulatory hurdles and you jump, I think even into maybe a more complex space when it comes to regulation to start Tea-Fi, right?
Matan:
Yeah. So actually it’s less complex.
Ian:
Tell me why.
Matan:
We don’t manage any funds. We don’t provide any financial service. It’s basically a set of smart contracts, which we have been rewarded, which will get adopted, but it’s much easier than actually holding people… Being an exchange, a centralized exchange for example, regulatory wise, it’s much more complicated. So we need to show you, you are decentralized or you walking towards decentralization and the foundation and everything, but generally speaking it’s significantly easier if the right lawyers.
Ian:
Do you think that that position holds over time? Because my perspective on the crypto market is 2014, 2015, no one really knew how to regulate anything in crypto. Even the companies that wanted to be regulated, the regulators didn’t know what to do with it. It was like, yeah, we don’t understand digital assets, we don’t understand crypto. And then sometime around 2017, 2018, it became pretty clear, hey, centralized exchanges, they’re a type of money service business, and so we’re going to require them to do transaction monitoring and collect customer information, and they need to abide by anti-money laundering regulation.
And I think we’re in the moment with DeFi that we were with centralized exchanges 10 years ago where people aren’t quite sure what to make of them. But it seems like one logical path is that DeFi exchanges will have to ultimately collect customer information, they’ll have to do regulatory reporting and transaction monitoring. And I’ve seen at least some platforms move down that path where they will attempt to block wallets, for example, that are known to be sanctioned, the most extreme end of the compliance spectrum. What’s your thought on that? Or do you see it evolving a completely different way where decentralization, everything remains permissionless.
Matan:
That’s actually a very interesting topic. So out of my gut, I can tell you immediately that when someone asked me what’s the difference, what’s the advantages in decentralized exchange compared to a centralized exchange? So the two biggest advantages is the self-custody and no KYC. And even with collecting data and stuff like this, it’s still no KYC. Like we still preserving those two key principles. I think collecting data is mostly relevant for privacy platforms, not for general input. The blockchain is transparent if you think this address is doing something so you can follow this trail and get to it, but if it went through me, well, what can I tell you? It’s everything that’s there on the blockchain. So yeah, it’s actually very, very interesting. By the way, if you ask us there, for example, you go to the biggest privacy protocols that’s being hammered by the authorities, you’ve already think about Tornado Cash?
Ian:
Sure.
Matan:
And we also have a privacy solution privacy, and you have to ask yourself, why are they being so hammered? You can find a different word for it, but we’ve been pursued by the authorities. But generally speaking, sorry, so they’re being pursued by the authorities and they’re not really other major players in the market that got this amount of fire and we are trying to look why. So you look at, for example, they can think, and I saw decentralized, maybe data ownership or privacy protocols. And I think the reason for that is when you have a legitimate use case, but if you’re building a tunnel below the border between Mexico and USA, you don’t have any legitimate use case. You’re either trafficking humans or you’re smuggling drugs. You don’t have any legitimate use case.
But on a world when you aspire that the old world is going to evolve onto, everybody’s talking about on boarding the next billion users, so if you’re looking on it and you’re saying, “Okay, when I’m buying milk in the grocery store and I’m paying $1, is it really make sense that the cashier person which is 16 years old will see all my net worth and whoever I interacted with and what am I holding and how much do I have from it?” And it really make sense to you? Does that feel to you like a good base to onboard a billion users to? I don’t think that’s the case. So I don’t think there is something bad with privacy. I think they have a legitimate use case for it. What do you want to say?
Ian:
Well, no, I was going to completely agree with you. That is actually my, I think issue with how we’ve developed blockchain is that there was no privacy at the start. We were substituting anonymity for privacy. So we said, hey, it doesn’t matter that all the history for all time is publicly readable because no one can associate transactions to individuals. Now that obviously turned out not to be true. And so now you have this contention over well, is anonymity real or not? But you have no privacy in either context. And I think privacy’s entirely appropriate for transactions. When I use a credit card, which is a little bit different than the cash scenario that you proposed, but I’m checking out at the grocery store, the cashier can see what I’m buying in the moment and the bank, the card network processing my card, they can run a fraud check on the transaction and make sure that I am actually the owner of the credit card. And the issuing bank is probably also verifying that I actually have funds in my account to pay for whatever I’m buying.
So it’s not that the transaction’s anonymous, there’s at least four people involved. Me, the cashier, the merchant network, issuing bank. But everybody else in the store, as you said, doesn’t get to see everything I’ve ever bought overall time with that credit card. They don’t get to know my current balance or any of my other financial details. To me, that feels like the right level of privacy. We can prevent crime, we have fraud checks. So when someone steals my credit card number and they’re checking out at the grocery store, on average, that gets caught more than it doesn’t. And that’s good. I think that’s the model that we generally want on, but we do want to instill some privacy.
And I haven’t figured out how to bring that on chain effectively because the reason the Tornado Cash guys seem to get in trouble, and I am not an expert, I don’t have inside information here, this is my outsider view, is because the North Korean Lazarus group was using Tornado Cash as their primary laundering platform. And it appears, at least I think this is the government’s argument, that the developers were profiting from that laundering, meaning that they were earning fees generated off those transactions because they held the token associated-
Matan:
Actually I think they also think that they actually went there to teach them how to use it effectively and stuff, which is much more extreme. But even without that, there would’ve been government trouble. And the reason that all the other privacy preserving protocols are legitimate and they’re not is because when the time comes and saying, listen, this money, this wallet over here, use your service to launder this amount of money right there, here’s transaction. Where did the money went? And here we have the signed court order and we have everything, and is the evidence that is actually a table activity, where did the money went? Anything? Nah. We’re decentralized.
So honestly, probably it’s a hot topic right now because that’s very similar to what Telegram founder did with the Telegram being the main communication platform for ISIS. And then he’s coming up on a stage and saying, ISIS will find a way to communicate anyway. The fight in terrorism does not make holding the privacy of people rights. I won’t get roasted in the comments or something, but I actually disagree with that. I think you can monitor specific walls and you can monitor specific codes, specific accounts without compromising the privacy of the entire system. Like zkKYC, how they do it. They basically check in what you are not because instead of what you are and they’re giving a yes or a no at the end. So I think then this would be really effective. And just looking at the wall and saying, I don’t see anything, closing your eyes and saying, I’m blind.
Ian:
So maybe we can talk specifically in the context of Tea-Fi because when I look at the website, tea-fi.com, the first decentralized finance platform to offer full privacy, ensuring security and trust while meeting regulatory requirements. So maybe let’s break that down a little bit and start with full privacy. What does that mean if I’m a user of your system?
Matan:
If you’re a user of our system, sorry, sometimes you’re just getting so emotionally attached to something you just working nonstop on and it’s like a baby. But no, Tea-Fi allows you to have full privacy because no platforms allow you to have privacy in specific actions. And we orchestrate a platform where you can easily and seamlessly integrate with all the various parts of the DeFi ecosystem and embed natively inside of it the privacy layer, which you also seamlessly communicate with. So if you have swap, you have anonymous swap. If you have lending, you have anonymous lending. If you have domains, you have anonymous domains, if you have transfer, you have multi-send like payment master pay, or you have account abstraction where you can pay the fees every time you want. You have cross-chain bridges and assets, all of those, you also have a parallel private version of them. That basically means where you have privacy everywhere and makes full privacy.
Ian:
And so that privacy is provided because you’re using a ZK layer to abstract or further encrypt everything? Help me understand maybe at one level deeper how that actually works.
Matan:
Sure. So right now we are utilizing a ZK protocol for that. The problem is it’s actually very similar. We just onboarded MoonPay for the on-ramp. It’s very different, but I get the point. So we just did onboarding with MoonPay and we were asking, yeah, but MoonPay is expensive. Why did you work with MoonPay? They take like 4% commission on critical charges. And I was like, “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter.” First of all, you need to have the solution. You need to make sure you have the solution. And after you have the solution, now you perfect it. Now you ideal it. Now you made the improvements needed and everything. So yeah, we worked with MoonPay because MoonPay have the biggest SDK, they have the library, you don’t need to audit their codes and everything. And now with facial boarding, then we started researching different on-ramp platforms. So we started with ZK because it’s a very known, very well-developed and used technology in the crypto space, zero-knowledge proofs and making the audit process much easier. And we can provide privacy from day one.
And simultaneously, we have a development team who is working on a solution for privacy, which is, in my opinion, very innovative because it solves two major problems with ZK. So currently you don’t really have ZK on Ethereum. And the reason for that is that Ethereum is very expensive. For example, if you have swaps, with ZK it will cost you instead of say $1, it cost you five, $6. Sorry, I’m talking for send, but you’re talking about swaps, which already cost five, six, $7. Using ZK protocol is usually going to cost you around 30, 40 bucks, which is very expensive.
Ian:
That’s because of the incremental computation necessary to use a zero-knowledge proof versus a standard transaction.
Matan:
Yeah.
Ian:
Okay.
Matan:
I’m not a tech guy to be honest. I’m mostly business, but basically you need to run all the process till this point on every single transaction you are submitting with doing that. Actually, wait one second.
Ian:
Sure.
Matan:
Yeah, I am back.
Ian:
Okay. Just one note before we jump back in, your pen that you’re clicking, we’re going to pick that up on the audio if you don’t mind if you’d-
Matan:
Yeah. I saw it in the comments long, long ago.
Ian:
Okay.
Matan:
Sorry. I’m like ADHD, sorry.
Ian:
Yeah. A fidget that doesn’t make any noise would be perfect.
Matan:
Makes it fair enough.
Ian:
So jumping back in then. So it totally makes sense the implement what works well. So MoonPay and using a ZK proof just to get started because you know it works, people trust it out of the box and then over time you’ll optimize those for lower cost, more efficient.
Matan:
So we got to use actually for the ZK because MoonPay is easy, find another service doing the same, just a bit cheaper. It’s not different technology, just maybe a bit less greed. But when you are talking about privacy in the blockchain, there are not many successful proven technologies which are more effective than ZK. One really interesting one really took place in the past six months and we are working on it pretty early on called FHE, Fully Homomorphic Encryption. And basically it allows you to store less data, let’s say maybe it’s less data that you need to store and submit later for transactions. That’s why our privacy solution will be cheaper than ZK solution.
And so it will be still sustainable even for small wallets or for multiple transactions or high frequency transactions on Ethereum. And moreover than that, because our solution will also be utilizing layer one liquidity, so we’re also going to solve, in my opinion, a big problem in the layer two space, which is liquidity. I think right now, for example, by the way, if you look at layer two and then liquidity, there are significantly, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I lost it completely. I just stood up and then took the pen and I don’t even know where we are. I’m sorry.
Ian:
No worries at all. Let’s take it from here. So when we dive into the capabilities of Tea-Fi a little bit, it sounds like at the core there’s a DEX. I also see on the website that you’re planning to launch a token, I think, there’s a token launch there. Are you also-
Matan:
The resale.
Ian:
Yeah, the presale, are you also planning to launch your own Layer 2?
Matan:
Yeah, so actually the privacy protocol will be a Layer 2.
Ian:
I see, okay. What else am I missing that’s under the Tea-Fi umbrella? Because I think it’s a very broad vision. Maybe you could just walk us through each of the pieces.
Matan:
Yeah, definitely. Maybe I can talk a bit about, I think the most, I think innovative parts in mapping, let’s say about top three or something, because we don’t need to go home today, and we don’t want the listeners to be kept too long. But I think DEX, when you talk about the privacy, when you talk about the fully customizable, where it could be exactly what you used to or you don’t need to go anywhere else to find information because at times you’re doing trades, you’re doing swaps, everything. You got one track CMC for market cap and description official sites, and you check DEX tool for security rating and liquidity and you check TradingView for chart analyzing and you check DefiLlama for TVL and ItaScan for on-chain holders and so many platforms. And so basically the idea is to have one platform when you have everything you need and you going to go anywhere else and also fully customizable to make it still very easy and very user-friendly.
And if you don’t want to see all those things and you don’t use them, you don’t care about how much TVL is because you are a day trader, so don’t need to see it. Just make everything more complicated. And I think also the Gatsby top-up, which is things that makes the swap, in my opinion, stand out. The second part, I would say is the lending protocol for maybe two main reasons. The first reason I would say first is the privacy and everything, and I haven’t actually saw any private lending protocol. But generally speaking, I think two very cool features we have in the lending protocol, and there are still some finalizations to do to it, but first of all is the over collateralized line of credits. Because if you saw on the website the TeaCard, we are going to launch a Visa Tea-Fi debit cards. And we are going to allow users to actually put deposits and take like over collateralized line of credits for the credit cards. So I think that’s a cool feature.
And I think one other cool feature is with the TeaClub, even if you notice that, but I’m really a big fan of integrating everything seamlessly with everything else. So in the TeaClub, users will be able to earn profit sharing from the platform and by that, create an income basically. And I think what separates the crypto world from the traditional world, or traditional finance, traditional banking maybe, is the loan part where it’s so… Because if you look at swaps, that’s really straightforward. That’s the same. Maybe they could with a bit more, self custody, but it’s the same. Swap in here, it doesn’t matter. But on the lending side, usually when someone takes a loan, it’s because he needs the money. And in crypto you can only take the loan if you have twice the money and then you risk being liquidated. If you want to gamble and you are high-risk trader, yeah, that works for you. But that’s not what lending is meant for
We’re an economy based on debt. That’s how people know how to live. And when you’re talking about onboarding the next billion users, yeah, but that’s not what they used to, how can they live on that? So with those passive incomes… Sorry, one step back, so the reason for that is because you don’t know what is going to do next month because you have 1000 bucks and you want a loan 10,000, but you don’t know if you’re going to pay the loan next month, it can just disappear. It’s anonymous. The blockchain, it can be in Peru and you’re in, I don’t know, Australia. So the reason we can allow not only under-collateralized loans, but actually uncollateralized loans, with no collateral near at all, is because when you provide income for the user and you know what’s going to be the future income, you can estimate approximately. You can take maybe a percentage of gap in between of what’s going to be the income of the user, you can give him a loan based on that, and you can deduct the loan payments from his future income.
Ian:
I see. So if I hold some of the Tea-Fi token and I’m presumably staking it, you’re going to pay me a network reward and I can borrow against that projected future network reward. Is that roughly what you’re describing?
Matan:
So that’s one part of it, yes, for the section. TeaClub is going to be a karma based loyalty reward system where you can actually… Because the staking you earn rewards from the new limited tokens and on the TeaClub itself, you will earn rewards from the profit sharing of the system.
Ian:
Oh, interesting. Okay. So some amount of profits that are generated by Tea-Fi overall will be reallocated back to users and you can forecast that revenue and therefore the individual’s rewards. And again, you’re going to allow users to borrow against that projected future income.
Matan:
Yap.
Ian:
Interesting. Now, you all are a prelaunch right now. So in terms of that feature working, I would imagine it requires a pretty substantial user base who are actively trading and utilizing the platform in order to generate all that fee income, which gets redistributed. How do you think about the challenge of launching a new protocol into the market these days? What’s the promotion plan to build that user base and not just people showing up once, but kind of the ongoing enduring approach. What does that look like?
Matan:
So there are few elements to that. The first point is making a good platform to make sure that the ones who does come, won’t want to go. Then have a big user retainer, like retaining the users that you’ve managed to onboard. The second part is not counting on that, that’s why the TeaClub is only planned for the middle of 2025. And so that’s currently something that’s not going to be from the beginning. So at the beginning, we’re only going to get the quality from different protocols. So even if there is only one user, it would still have the same seamless experience, high depth equation and everything like there is a billion users. So that’s also very important. And we also are working with multiple KOLs, very big ones from all around the world actually. I think the followers base of maybe top three KOLs is over eight million followers only for top three. So we are planning on having a massive KOL campaign.
So the idea is not to count on it, and eventually on a very wisey time moment bring huge exposure to it. And when you bring huge exposure to it, you’re going to make sure before that, that the platform is very good that the exposure is going to come and you are going to be a certain conversion rate, I don’t know, we’re going to see this exposure going to be to 10 million people, out of them, let’s say 10%, like one million, then see the platform. So we want to focus on having a good product and have a high retainer retaining the users that actually come. And then if you get a million new users, that’s going to share the platform and out of them 800,000 will stay, I think going from 800,000 to 100 million, significantly easier than going from zero to 800,000.
Ian:
Yeah, that’s exciting. So maybe give us the roadmap. People are listening, they’re excited about Tea-Fi, they want to check it out. Today, it looks like you’re still in the beta stage. What’s the timeline from now as we’re recording in the end of August, what should we expect over the remainder of the year?
Matan:
So what we are going to expect more quickly later this year, it’s funny because sometimes you walk in under the radar for so much time and then at one moment so many things are happening. So we definitely have exciting six, maybe five months ahead of us. We have the testing coming out, we have the TGE, we have the initial listings, and of course how could we not? We have air token distribution and the Mainnet launch V1, which is going include multi-chain support, cross-linked capabilities, the swap, the gas top up, the synthetic assets, and several more stuff including the debit card, which is going to launch actually maybe even before the end of this year. So yeah, definitely exciting five months ahead.
Ian:
It is going to be a busy finish to the year for you. That’s great.
Matan:
I already said goodbye to my mom.
Ian:
Hopefully you can still make it over for dinner Friday night with your mom.
Matan:
We’ll do my best.
Ian:
Matan, this has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed getting to learn about the platform, what you all are building. I am excited to see it develop over the course of the year and can’t wait to try it out once it goes live on Mainnet. That’ll be great.
Matan:
Excited to have you as a customer.
Ian:
Yeah, we’ll have to chat again once you guys get live. Thanks so much for joining us on Public Key today.
Matan:
Thank you. Has been a pleasure.