By Femi Babatunde
Co-Founder, Savecoins Technologies.
Savecoins is an investment platform for simplified crypto savings and investment options. Users are able to save and invest from fiat into their favorite crypto, USD and also tokenized assets listed on the Savecoins platform via dollar-cost averaging. Savecoins aims to make it easier to get started while taking their income and risk aversiveness into account. It also allows offline users save in USD stables as opposed to saving in fiat using the traditional savings system also know as ‘osusu’ savings model. Using an extensive agent network, Savecoins would onboard these offline users and provide access saving in stables still using the preferred method of saving daily.
WHAT PROBLEMS ARE WE SOLVING?
1. Inflation and recurrent currency devaluation in struggling economies:
In Nigeria, The Central Bank devalued the Naira by 7.6% against the US dollar in May 2021, according to Nairametrics, a financial literacy and reporting platform. As a result the Naira is under pressure due to falling oil prices, as Africa’s most significant economy exports oil but spends foreign currency on food, clothing, electronics, and refined gasoline.
2. Bumpy access to crypto assets and well researched crypto investment products:
Blockchain technology is rapidly becoming the most widely used digital asset class. By 2025, the total value of these assets is expected to exceed $5 trillion. As a result of the spectacular rise in the value of their crypto assets, market participants have created significant wealth. Despite this positive note, there is a market segment of individuals who are aware of the intrinsic value of these assets but are hesitant to participate and invest due to market volatility, lack of professional guidance, and lack of customer-centric DCA platforms.
3. High entry barrier for low- and middle-income earners:
This has been a problem for individuals particularly in Africa and Latin America. We aim to solve the financial inefficiencies that have been a significant roadblock for new entrants looking to enter the DeFi landscape by providing innovative, convenient, and long-term solutions to ease entry into the DeFi through DCA, collaterizing on-chain assets and API integrations.
4. Access to Liquidity without sales of assets:
As blockchain technology goes mainstream and sees widespread adoption, inevitably, this will lead to the higher market capitalization of crypto assets. However, this process isn’t linear as we’ve got bearish and bullish market cycles, and the best way to maximize the intrinsic value of crypto assets is long-term hodl. However, despite these benefits, the need for liquidity will arise, and there are very limited avenues for hodlers to access liquidity without selling off their assets.
5. Hard to understand UX of Defi products:
A certain problem with DeFi is the scalability of its UX. UI/UX is very important in understanding and using digital products. With the need to connect your decentralized wallet to Dapps and also confusing UI, average users who are just understanding the meaning of decentralized finance will have problems with onboarding and joining the community. We want to educate our users about Decentralized finance and also expose them to products like staking, yield farming and also understanding liquidity pools.
HOW WE PLAN ON PROVIDING SOLUTIONS.
1. Savecoins is an alternative to saving in weak fiat currencies:
The ability to save in liquid crypto assets would allow citizens to hedge against inflation and their currencies’ purchasing power deterioration. They would be able to protect the purchasing power of their earnings if they had access to cryptocurrencies (viable volatile assets and stablecoins). Limit orders for Fiat to USD savings will also be available to build up a long-term USD-savings position.
2. Personal Finance Education:
A significant feature of Savecoins UVP is the customer focused approach it wishes to adopt in both its customer acquisition and customer education strategies. With market volatility being a genuine concern for crypto newbies and experts alike, Savecoins aims to solve that problem by firstly making newbies create a balanced crypto assets-stock tokens portfolio to cushion the effects of the more volatile cryptocurrency assets. Also, Savecoins will push succinct crypto education content through various media tailored to our users and crypto enthusiasts alike, to help them grasp how the market works and why Savecoins is the best platform to get started.
3. Availability of crypto-backed loans:
Savers and Investors on Savecoins can collaterize assets to access loans and get assets released to them when they pay off loans and accrued interests. Moreover, loans can be taken out for short or long periods according to the user’s wish.
4. Crypto Index Funds:
Index funds have been a great way of passive investing and also an optimal use case of diversification. Crypto volatility can be menacing and the best way to reduce the risk of exposure for our users is to introduce them to investing in index funds. Savecoins index fund will be an index mutual fund mimicking bitwise BITW. The index fund will track assets in bitwise crypto index fund and it will be rebalanced monthly.
5. Infrastructure & Team:
The team is a group of young financial research engineers, finance professionals, designers & retail crypto investors. We are building a liquidity aggregator infrastructure for simplified crypto investment options/products.
Our goal is to onboard users to DeFi by bridging the process of understanding & using web 3 investment products and also providing simplified Crypto Banking as a service for Africans and Latin Americans
At Savecoins, we aren’t financial advisors and none of what we post is financial advice. What we aim to do is to build products that simplify crypto savings and investment options with an affinity for risk management.
