Investment Thesis: Fluent Finance

Addressing the shortcomings of existing stablecoins

Current stablecoins, such as Tether, have faced multiple challenges, including the lack of transparency and regulatory scrutiny. Fluent Finance addresses these issues by creating a fiat-backed stablecoin infrastructure that offers 100% provable, liquid, and verifiable cash reserves. This level of transparency and accountability not only increases user confidence but also makes Fluent Finance’s stablecoins more likely to be accepted by regulatory bodies.

Real-world yield generation

One of the key criteria that Optic Capital considers when evaluating investment opportunities is the potential for real-world yield generation. Fluent Finance meets this requirement by generating a 4% interest through investing in cash equivalents and treasury bonds. This approach not only provides a stable source of income but also ensures that the platform’s reserves are held in secure and low-risk assets. The ability to produce real-world yield further enhances Fluent Finance’s value proposition, making it an even more attractive investment for Optic Capital.

Seamless interoperability and integration

Fluent Finance’s solution is designed for seamless integration with both traditional financial institutions and distributed ledgers. This allows businesses and individuals to move their assets between traditional finance and decentralised finance (DeFi) with ease, unlocking new opportunities for cross-border transactions, remittances, and access to DeFi products.

Lowering costs and increasing efficiency for enterprises

Fluent Finance’s stablecoins offer enterprises a more efficient way to conduct cross-border transactions, reducing back-office costs and enabling near-instant payments. Additionally, Fluent’s custom settlement network technology allows businesses to create their own stablecoins for various financial vehicles and use cases, further streamlining operations.

Enhancing the retail user experience

Retail customers can benefit from Fluent Finance’s direct connection to U.S. regulated banks, allowing them to issue and redeem stablecoins with a single click. The platform’s cross-chain interoperability ensures that users can access their assets on their preferred public chain, providing a seamless and user-friendly experience.

Diversification and risk mitigation

Fluent Finance’s federated custody model ensures that reserves are stored across multiple institutions, reducing the risk of a single point of failure. This approach further enhances the stability and security of the platform, making it a more attractive investment opportunity.

Scalability and adaptability

Fluent Finance’s technology is capable of deploying crypto assets representing any fiat currency or real-world asset 1:1, allowing for the creation of fully verifiable, custom stablecoins. This adaptability ensures that the platform can cater to the evolving needs of the market and capitalise on emerging opportunities.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Optic Capital’s investment in Fluent Finance is a strategic decision driven by the platform’s innovative stablecoin protocol, ability to bridge the gap between traditional finance and distributed ledgers, and its potential for real-world yield generation. Fluent Finance’s unique combination of transparency, interoperability, efficiency, risk mitigation, and yield generation makes it a highly promising solution for both enterprises and retail users. This investment aligns with Optic Capital’s focus on supporting disruptive financial projects with significant growth potential in the emerging digital assets landscape.

Introduction

Optic Capital sees a massive opportunity in Nillion, as it addresses some of the most pressing challenges currently facing the blockchain ecosystem, such as privacy, interoperability, and scalability. Nillion’s groundbreaking Nil Message Compute (NMC) technology holds the potential to reshape the Web3 landscape and drive the adoption of decentralized applications across various industries.

Addressing Key Challenges

Nillion’s NMC technology offers an innovative approach to solving the issues of privacy, interoperability, and scalability in the current blockchain ecosystem. By enabling secure and private data storage, computation, and decentralization, Nillion allows for the development of new use cases that require confidentiality and security, without sacrificing the benefits of decentralization.

Privacy

Optic Capital recognizes that privacy is a major concern in the current blockchain ecosystem, with many industries and use cases requiring secure data management in order to adopt decentralized solutions. Nillion addresses this critical issue by employing its proprietary NMC technology, ensuring that data remains private and secure throughout the entire process. The NMC network transforms and masks data provided by dealer nodes or individual users, rendering it unrecognizable and securely stored within the network. When users need to access or use their data, NMC nodes process it without being able to identify the owner or the content of the data. Finally, Nillion’s Reconstruction Mechanism reconstructs the real output while maintaining the confidentiality of the initial input. This robust privacy feature offered by Nillion sets it apart from other blockchain solutions and will likely accelerate the adoption of decentralized applications in industries where privacy is paramount. Consequently, Optic Capital views Nillion’s strong focus on privacy as a key advantage.

Interoperability

The future of blockchain is undoubtedly multi-chain, and Nillion is poised to become an essential component of this interconnected ecosystem. By providing a Meta Layer that can enhance the functionality of existing blockchains and enabling seamless communication between different chains, Nillion paves the way for a truly interconnected Web3 world.

Scalability

Traditional Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) faces limitations in terms of scalability due to the necessity for nodes to exchange information during computations, causing significant delays and inefficiencies. Nillion’s groundbreaking Nil Message Compute (NMC) technology overcomes these limitations, offering a more efficient and scalable alternative to traditional SMPC.

With NMC, nodes can perform computations locally at nearly plaintext, client-server speeds without the need for inter-node messaging, making NMC vastly superior to traditional SMPC (secure multi-party computation) in terms of processing speed. For instance, while SMPC may take upwards of 28 hours to perform 1 million multiplications, NMC can achieve the same task over a billion times faster. This remarkable improvement in computational efficiency enables Nillion to serve as a highly scalable sidechain solution, providing both high security and high throughput, effectively addressing the trade-off between the two.

By leveraging NMC’s unique capabilities, Nillion can bring about unprecedented scalability to the decentralized landscape, supporting the growth and adoption of blockchain technology across various industries and use cases. Optic Capital sees Nillion’s potential to revolutionize scalability in the blockchain ecosystem as a key factor in its investment thesis, driven by the company’s superior NMC technology.

Strong and Experienced Team

Nillion’s team boasts an impressive lineup of seasoned experts and accomplished professionals, including founders of billion-dollar crypto and non-crypto companies, as well as key players in top 100 cryptocurrencies. The team’s diverse experience in cryptography, technology, business, and finance uniquely positions them to deliver on Nillion’s ambitious vision. With leaders like Dr. Miguel de Vega, the inventor of NMC, and Conrad Whelan, the founding engineer of Uber, Nillion has the knowledge and experience to bring their innovative technology to fruition.

Investment Potential

Optic Capital believes that Nillion’s groundbreaking NMC technology and its potential to revolutionize the blockchain ecosystem make it a highly attractive investment opportunity. As Nillion addresses key challenges in privacy, interoperability, and scalability, it unlocks new possibilities for decentralized applications and industries, ultimately driving mass adoption and fostering the growth of the Web3 ecosystem.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Optic Capital’s investment thesis on Nillion is based on the belief that the company’s unique technology, strong team, and potential to transform the Web3 landscape position it as an attractive investment opportunity with significant upside potential. By tackling the most pressing challenges in the blockchain space and enabling a new generation of decentralized applications, Nillion is poised to become a critical component of the future decentralized internet infrastructure.

Introduction

Optic Capital has chosen to invest in FilSwan due to its strong position in the growing Web3 infrastructure market, its comprehensive product suite, and the recent launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) on the mainnet. This investment thesis will first provide an overview of Filecoin, explaining why Optic believes in its potential, and then delve into the current challenges surrounding Filecoin that FilSwan can address. Lastly, it will explore the implications of the vast amount of data on the internet and why smart contracts on Filecoin, facilitated by FilSwan, offer a viable alternative to Ethereum-based solutions.

Filecoin: A Promising Decentralised Storage Solution

Filecoin is a system designed to be a blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval method. It is a powerful and dynamic distributed cloud storage network that has been adopted by multiple blockchain projects like Near and Polygon. As a decentralised data storage solution, Filecoin ensures data security, reliability, and faster access for global users. The network’s decentralised nature allows for reduced dependence on centralised storage providers, which often have a single point of failure and can be subject to censorship or data breaches.

Optic Capital’s Belief in Filecoin

Optic Capital believes in Filecoin’s potential to revolutionise the way data is stored and accessed in the era of Web3. Filecoin’s decentralised storage solution addresses many of the shortcomings of traditional, centralised storage systems. It promotes data security, reliability, and accessibility while offering cost-effective storage solutions. With the rapid growth of data on the internet, the need for secure, reliable, and decentralised storage solutions has never been greater. Optic Capital sees Filecoin as a vital component of the Web3 infrastructure, poised to play a significant role in the decentralised internet’s future.

Current Challenges Surrounding Filecoin

Despite Filecoin’s potential, several challenges exist that need to be addressed to fully realise its potential in the Web3 ecosystem:

Limited information on storage providers: Users often lack sufficient information on the quality of service offered by storage providers, making it difficult to make informed decisions.

Inadequate matching functionality: The lack of a comprehensive matching system that caters to diverse data storage needs makes it challenging for users to find suitable storage providers.

High barriers to entry for beginners: With numerous storage providers to choose from and varying pricing structures, it can be time-consuming and costly for newcomers to find the best fit for their storage needs.

FilSwan: Addressing Filecoin’s Challenges

FilSwan is a multi-chain Web3 infrastructure provider offering products and services that enable developers to easily integrate decentralised storage, computing, and network core capabilities. It aims to address the challenges surrounding Filecoin by providing tools and solutions for large-scale dataset storage, facilitating the migration of datasets to the Filecoin network, and simplifying the data storage process.

With more than 5 million terabytes of data on the internet and Ethereum full nodes reaching sizes of up to 1 terabyte, it is becoming increasingly clear that relying solely on Ethereum for a decentralised internet may not be sustainable. Decentralisation could be threatened, and issues with network bloat could arise, potentially hindering the progress of Web3. In the long run, smart contracts on Filecoin could emerge as a strong viable alternative, and FilSwan is well-positioned to be a key player in facilitating this transition and realising the true vision of open, trustless, decentralised economies in Web3.

The recent launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) on the mainnet has opened up new possibilities for developers to create smart contracts and applications that can leverage the storage capacity and capabilities of the Filecoin network. Examples of potential applications include decentralised computation, crowd-funded dataset preservation, smarter storage markets, multi-generational storage, data DAOs, tokenized datasets, locally-stored NFTs, time-locked retrieval, and collateral loans. These developments will enable better cross-chain interoperability and integration with apps deployed on other chains like Ethereum, NEAR, Polygon, Solana, and Flow.

Partnerships

FilSwan has established significant partnerships including that of Binance Greenfield (which is the third blockchain in the BNB ecosystem tailored to providing decentralised storage infrastructure) further strengthening its position in the Web3 ecosystem. Binance Labs, the venture arm of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has incubated FilSwan, providing the project with valuable resources, industry connections, and strategic guidance. This incubation demonstrates Binance’s belief in FilSwan’s potential and its commitment to supporting innovative blockchain projects. Additionally, FilSwan has received grants from both Chainlink and Filecoin, two prominent players in the blockchain space. These grants not only provide financial support but also signify the recognition of FilSwan’s value and potential by industry leaders. Such partnerships and support contribute to the credibility of FilSwan and Optic Capital’s confidence in its ability to address the challenges of decentralised data storage and facilitate the widespread adoption of Filecoin and Web3 technologies.

Conclusion

Optic Capital’s investment in FilSwan is grounded in its belief in Filecoin’s potential as a decentralised storage solution and the crucial role FilSwan will play in addressing Filecoin’s challenges. As the internet continues to grow exponentially, Ethereum’s limitations may become more apparent, and smart contracts on Filecoin could emerge as a viable alternative. FilSwan’s strategic partnerships, which include being incubated by Binance Labs and receiving grants from Chainlink and Filecoin, further bolster its position in the Web3 ecosystem. These partnerships not only provide resources and financial support but also signify the recognition of FilSwan’s value and potential by industry leaders. FilSwan is well-positioned to facilitate this transition, capitalising on the opportunities presented by the launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine and leveraging the support from its influential partners.