AMA Recap: NASDEX

11 min readSep 28, 2021

Welcome to the recap of our AMA with the team behind NASDEX, the decentralized exchange that offers users the ability to trade tokenized equities on blockchain via a minting and trading mechanism that mimics the off-chain economics of the real world equity price.

If you want to find out more, NASDEX invites you to visit their website, follow them on Twitter, and join their Telegram community.

The IDO kicks off tomorrow so without further ado let’s get into the AMA! Read more about how to get involved in the IDO here.

Moon Trips
Welcome to the Starter community Belinda & Josh!

Josh
Thanks @moontrips for having us here! Excited to share more about NASDEX

Belinda Zhou
Finally our AMA finale with the starter family!

Moon Trips
So are we! Everyone’s talking about Nasdex in our chat and I know they’re looking forward to hearing from you. 😎

Belinda Zhou
Super stoked to be here!

Moon Trips
Your team has been such a pleasure to work with. We’re excited for the community to hear directly from you before tomorrow’s big day.

Let’s start by introducing yourselves along with your backgrounds.

Josh
Sure. So I’m Josh. I’m one of the cofounders of NASDEX. My background is actually in TradFi. For the past 15 years, I’ve been an institutional investor at places like Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and other major hedge funds. I’ve been investing in equities all my life so I’m super excited to work on NASDEX which is a DEX that will bring tokenized equity onto the blockchain.

Belinda Zhou
Hi everyone, this is Belinda from NASDEX! I will be leading the marketing and community building! I went down the rabbit hole of blockchain in 2018 when I was in Dubai. Ever since then, I have helped quite a number of projects, tokens funds and exchanges with marketing and community efforts. Crypto marketing has been my full-time job for the past 4 years lol

I'm an active DeFi farmer and stock investor too

But shrimp, Josh is the whale

Moon Trips
Awesome!! You guys certainly know what you’re doing with all that experience

It’s a really good sign when we see that a project has such a credible team behind it.

Gives us confidence that you can achieve your goals.

Josh
Yeah we definitely all bring something unique to the table from the team

Moon Trips
Love it!

Ok let’s hear your elevator pitch for NASDEX and where did the inspiration come from for this project?

Josh
Hah sure for me — NASDEX is a decentralized exchange for tokenized equity. The general idea is that we want to bring the equity asset class onto blockchain in the form of trading through a decentralized exchange.

We are quite unique in the market given that we are bridging two major asset classes in the world. We want to introduce household equity names to our users but with the additional functions and features that we know and love in crypto and DeFi.

Moon Trips
Bringing these DeFi features to traditional assets is pretty cool.

I can imagine many people wanting to utilize this.

Josh
Yah absolutely, I’ve been an institutional equity investor all my life but I’ve seen the power of crypto and the rich features of defi. I want to help create a bridge between these two wonderful asset classes and offer this product in the most user-friendly way possible.

Moon Trips
So smart!

I also see it turning non-crypto users into crypto users once being introduced to the profitability formulas of crypto.

Josh
That’s what we are hoping to do along with helping crypto users into the world of tokenized equity as well

Belinda Zhou
I'm telling my sisters: NASDEX helps you make more money by holding the same stocks on-chain. The on-chain stocks are working for you in DeFi but they are not doing anything right now.

100%

Moon Trips
Right, 100%

So have you guys already raised funds?

If so, how much and how are those funds being utilized?

Belinda Zhou
Yes, so we have closed the seed and private rounds with 16x oversubscription! Raised $1.35million

Moon Trips
Amazing!!!🤑

Belinda Zhou
The funds are mainly deployed to product development (developers, audits, etc), legal (entity, consulting), and community building.

The team is frugal in terms of marketing haha; we focus more on good product and community building

Of course, part of the funds go to liquidity pools for everyone to trade

Moon Trips
Sounds great and makes sense to focus the funds in those areas. And yea, if you don’t have a great product or strong community, who are you marketing to right?!

Belinda Zhou
Exactly, over promise and under deliver kills a project

Moon Trips
So true

Belinda Zhou
And we dont like to pay for inflated marketing costs in crypto. We select partners carefully! We are willing to spend more money on audit than to some crypto media agency

Moon Trips
Good call. It’s clear your product is going to be sharp as hell!

Can you explain your tokenomics and how your token will be utilized in your DEX. Do you have a tokenomics link you can share?

Belinda Zhou
We try our best!

Here is the tokenomics link: https://twitter.com/nasdex_xyz/status/1441074186152255500

Belinda Zhou
NSDX is our governance token

Moon Trips
Thanks for this!

Belinda Zhou
and like all governance tokens out there, its value really is determined by the traffic of the platform and users

The main function of NSDX is to serve to share in the profit of the DEX

Moon Trips
Who doesn’t want a share of the profits?! Am I right??😅🤑

Belinda Zhou
The bigger NASDEX gets, the more users trade stocks on NASDEX, the more profits will be shared by the NSDX community

Totally and there are 3 ways we do that

Moon Trips
That’s really cool. Let’s hear it!

Belinda Zhou
NSDX holders will be able to share in the revenues of NASDEX through buy-and-distribute, buy-and-burn, or direct profit share mechanisms.

The actual mechanism will be voted by the NASDEX DAO

Another function of NSDX is to serve as collateral in the minting of tokenized stocks, which really maximize the capital efficiency and reduces NSDX circulation too

And finally, there are additional governance features like the ability to vote on new stocks to list on the exchange. Say I want to short Evergrande, I can propose a listing and DAO will decide

Moon Trips
This is all really well thought out. Tremendous benefits to the community/investors.

Belinda Zhou
And maybe in the future, we will explore NSDX token holders having discounts on our DEX 🤔

Stay tuned!

Moon Trips
😉
We shall!

Who are some competitors of NASDEX and how are you different / better than the competition? 🏆

Josh
We are actually pretty unique in the product segment that we are focused on which are tokenized Asians. As of now, we actually don’t have any competitors in this space

However, as with tokenized equities in general. There are some players in the market today. But at the same time, I have to mention that the market for tokenized equities is a potentially 100 trillion dollars market, so having a few competitors is actually not a bad thing. As our peers and us will hopefully build this space together

Moon Trips
No doubt about that.

Nasdex is truly unique in what you’re building.

Josh
The existing players like Mirror and Synthetics have tokenized equities. But share a different business model than ours. For example, Synthetics uses a single collateral pool to back their stocks; so their users benefit when their stocks outperform other stocks within the pool so they can withdraw more of that collateral pool. Whereas, we are purely creating a 1:1 peg in terms of price between on-chain stock vs off-chain stock

Moon Trips
I never really look at competition as a bad thing

Josh
This will give our users the ability to take both long positions as well as short positions on equities

Moon Trips
Interesting

Josh
We recently wrote about an example and case study of how users can use Nasdex to take advantage of the Evergrande situation.

Josh

Evergrande Case Study — How to use NASDEX to protect your crypto portfolio

Evergrande news has been brewing for the past 6–12 month and came to a head recently. TradFi folks have already been…

medium.com

Moon Trips
You guys should all read this!!

Josh
These are just some of the examples of unique features we bring to the table for our users

Moon Trips
And those are pretty fabulous features 😃

Who are some of your partners and how are they benefitting Nasdex?

Belinda Zhou
So we are very good friends with the Polygon ecosystem. We are blessed to benefit more from our partners at this stage actually. Starter is an amazing IDO launchpad to work with! Polygon gave NASDEX developer grants and Quickswap will list us.

Gate.io is our CEX exchange partner so users who don’t know how to use metamask can trade NSDX there too

All of them have provided great exposure for NASDEX

In terms of product, we have partners in oracles, transaction fee omission, NFT launch etc

They are all helping NASDEX becoming a better product and build a quality community!

We really appreciate it!

Moon Trips
That’s a great group of partners. Really helps power everything else you’re working on.

Belinda Zhou
There are more exciting partnerships to be revealed in October time

Moon Trips
Excited to hear

Belinda Zhou
Exactly

Moon Trips
Speaking of Starter 🙃 …why did you choose Starter as your IDO launchpad?

Belinda Zhou
For me, I think first of all, we share the love for #STONKS

The community has that stonk gene so we believe they will understand what NASDEX offers right away! the synergy is there

Moon Trips
📈

Belinda Zhou
We know starter is the exclusive IDO launchpad for Wallstreetbets

Most importantly, the starter team is very supportive to their IDO partners!! 🌟

The team helped introduce partners, arrange AMAs, give helpful suggestions from time to time!

😊 Your success is our success!

It’s truly a pleasant experience

Moon Trips
Likewise, we couldn’t agree more

Belinda Zhou
And I can feel that starter is long-term with the projects they select.

Anyone in the starter team could pretend to be NASDEX team members and do these AMAs

no one would suspect 😂

Moon Trips
Hahaha

Well, we’re glad you’re happy and on the way to big things!

And what made you decide to launch on Polygon?

Josh
We actually had to consider many things before deciding on Polygon but it was actually the speed and the gas efficiency that really made an impact for us

As you know, for a tokenized stock dex, the protocol needs to constantly make call requests to ensure that onchain price is pegged to the off-chain price so speed and efficiency is critical for our infrastructure

Moon Trips
Absolutely

Josh
And of course, it’s extremely hard for users to trade frequently if gas per trade is in hundreds of dollars. So the fact that gas fees are much cheaper on Polygon really sealed the deal for us

Moon Trips
Nice, yea that’s critical

Josh
Working with the Polygon team has been very rewarding as well. We won a developers grant from Polygon which is very cool. It’s really a great partnership to bring a tokenized stock dex onto Polygon for the first time ever

Moon Trips
Yeah they are a great team.

Awesome to be first. You’ll also be best!

Your big day is tomorrow, with your IDO on Starter. What does your roadmap look like after tomorrow’s successful sale? 🙂

Belinda Zhou
After IDO and listing, we will focus more on product development!

We will host educational sessions and create informative content to onboard the users on the marketing side. When product is ready for internal tests, we will recruit testers too.

During October, a series of product-related partners such as oracles, insurances and infra providers will be disclosed to the community with elaboration on their role in NASDEX ecosystem.

We plan to release the MVP in November with all the functionalities such as minting, farming, trading and staking of on-chain stocks available!

And then we keep iterating the product and enriching synthetic assets provided on our platform for the users!

Moon Trips
Wow, lots lined up!! Busy end of the year for you guys. This all sounds good, I like the educational sessions you’ll be doing.

Before we head to Q&A, can you share all your links again here so that Starters can get to studying? 🤓

Belinda Zhou
🔗 USEFUL LINKS 🔗

Website: https://www.nasdex.xyz/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nasdex_xyz

Medium: https://medium.com/@nasdex

Telegram: https://t.me/nasdex_xyz

Announcements: https://t.me/nasdexannouncement

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nasdextech

Moon Trips
Perfect, thank you!

Belinda Zhou
Come learn with us and watch NASDEX grow!

The IDO is just the birth of the project!

Moon Trips
Ok now we’re going to open up the chat for 5 minutes and you guys will answer as many questions as you can and choose the winners!

xperia
Hi!‼️ Hackers and Scammers are very much active. Can you please give some information about the Security system of NASDEX? How safe is NASDEX especially for long term investors? How will you protect your investors? @belindazh

Belinda Zhou
Indeed the worrisome bit of the DeFi space is hacks and exploits. That’s why we take audits seriously. Just last week, the $NSDX token contract has successfully been audited by Armors Labs with zero issues. Security is the №1 priority at NASDEX with all our future products expected to be audited by 1st class Auditors before launch.

🔥🔥 FIRE 0077 🔥🔥
Token Burn or BuyBack programs Play An IMPORTANT role in increasing Token value. Do you have a token burn or buyback program plan to attract investors??

Josh
Yes. Token burn or buyback is how we plan to distribute the platform revenue to our NSDX holders. So as NSDX grows, so should rewards for our holders.

Natasha Wright
Is your platform suitable for Crypto beginners? Or does it only appeal to professional users?

Belinda Zhou
NASDEX is made easy for beginners, especially for traditional stock investors without any crypto/ DeFi experience. We will try to eliminate the potential roadblocks such as gas needed for transactions. We want the product to be rookie-friendly but institution-level secure.

Alexei Petrov
Is your project only for elite investors, what about others with small funds, is it open to everyone?

Josh
Definitely not only for elite investors. We are trying to make tokenized equity investing accessible for everyone, including people with small funds. We hope to make our platform as user-friendly as possible.

Moon Trips
Great answers guys, thank you!!!🙌

Ok, that brings us to the end of our AMA with NASDEX. I hope everyone enjoyed meeting Belinda and Josh and learning more about the project before tomorrows IDO! Don’t forget to see their tokenomics, check out their links, and read their Medium article shared today.

@belindazh & @joshdu_it it was a pleasure having you with us today. Thank you for sharing such great knowledge with the Starter community!!!

Josh
Thanks a lot @moontrips ! Thanks everyone

Belinda Zhou
thank you so much starter family for having us!

Moon Trips
Here’s to an amazingly successful IDO tomorrow!!!🥂