Connect Financial Community Update

Good week everyone! This weeks update will be a pretty light one as we are in the midst of quite a few pieces that are time sensitive.

I found a good quote the other day that I find very applicable -

“It’s just one of those weeks” I tell myself, having picked a career that does not seem to have the other type of week.

General development update

The development on the proprietary parts of the client portal are nearing completion and we are preparing to move into the public testing and hardening phases before general release. This is exciting for a couple of reasons. Firstly it means that we can look forward to releasing the test platform into the (carefully controlled) wild. Secondly, it means that we can turn our focus towards integration with our partners.

As you can imagine, releasing a program of this size and scope is no small undertaking, and multiple partners are helping us achieve the vision. After months of discussions and preparations, I can confidently say that we are working with some of the best in the business. Our processor partner has more than 20 years of experience in delivering comparable programs and have incredibly powerful and robust systems that add huge value to the Connect Program.

We are still not ready to announce an official launch date, but the team’s progress is very encouraging. We’ll keep you posted.

Go To Market update

In September, you can look forward to three major developments as we prepare to launch.

Firstly, we will be removing the login screens on the website and replacing them with an official card waitlist. This waitlist will be compatible with your referral code, so once it has moved into production, you can start sharing the page with your referral link and become eligible to receive some lucrative rewards once we go live.

Secondly, we will be updating the site in general to showcase the product suite and, in particular, place the membership program front and center.

Third, we will be phasing in our first paid ads across several media channels. Our marketing team have been working hard on building out a library of advertising content, and it’s exciting to be in a place where we are ready to start spreading the word. We know that this is something that the community has been waiting for, and I’m sure that you’ll share our excitement.

Product Update: X-Finance

For those of you who have been around for a while will know, part of the Connect Financial platform included the “Earn” product. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of this title, in part because it is shared by many of our competitors, and in part because it never captured the vision for what our product sets out to do.

I’ve written about some of the issues that some of our competitors have had with their versions of ‘Earn’ products. While a lot of issues came down to the fact that their investment approaches were essentially black boxes where there was almost zero transparency, other issues came about by having client funds locked up in illiquid strategies while still offering unrestricted withdrawals.

The team has been putting together a reimagined product which addresses the issues around transparency, risk and liquidity, which we are calling X-Finance.

The X-Finance platform will offer you multiple strategies that you can allocate funds to across five broad categories:

Lending: The simplest and lowest risk strategy involves you lending out funds directly to the Connect Financial. We will borrow USDC against your asset, open up delta neutral positions on the collateral and then lend out to our credit pools where members will pay interest on either their fixed loans or credit card lines.

Delta Neutral: Working with our prime lender, you can enter deltra neutral strategies based on your risk tolerance. For example, by committing ETH to a strategy for 90 days, we will borrow funds to purchase a basket of assets (e.g. leading DeFi tokens) and open short and long positions. At the conclusion of the term, the assets are sold, and your principal is returned along with the gains yielded from the strategy.

DeFi: Our markets team curate ultra-transparent smart contract powered strategies that allow you to participate directly in staking, farming and liquidity opportunities directly through the Connect Financial platform.

Staking: Contribute to PoS strategies that secure networks and protocols. For example, you’ll be able to stake ETH 2.0 in both locked and liquid staking contracts.

Launchpool: You’ll be able to participate in highly curated crowdfunded token releases and real world asset purchases identified by the ConnectDAO.

For all of our X-Finance strategies, we’ll be balancing risk and return carefully. Every strategy will outline the exact steps that we take, what counterparties the strategy is exposed to and what the commitment period is, all wrapped in a simple to use UI.

Obviously it will take some time to build out all of these features, and it is likely that the initial platform release won’t include many of the X-Finance features, but I want to share a taste of the direction in which we’re headed.