Stellar Community Fund

By Excellar

Excellar

SCF #17

$88.8K

Legacy v4.0 Award

Awarded

Excellar is building financial products on-chain for real world assets.

Products & Services

Why build a real-world asset tokenization platform and an associated lending protocol

DAO treasuries, crypto funds, crypto native startups, and Crypto OTC desks sit on large amounts of stablecoins and other crypto assets. The DeFi TVL crashed after Q2 2022, so most crypto native assets are not participating in the DeFi ecosystem. Meanwhile, real-world assets such as Treasury bills and Agency-backed MBS in the US have become productive due to the rising inflation and central banks who have responded by raising rates. This has increased the rate of high-quality fixed-income assets such as US treasuries and RMBS securities. The prominence of real-world fixed-income assets is here to stay as the era of quantitative easing and free money is ending. This means that the DeFi native assets would remain uncompetitive with the real-world assets unless the inflation rates in the real economy go down significantly, which is an unlikely scenario based on historical patterns.

What are the products

Excellar will create two products on Sorobon, Excellar Mint, which will be used for asset tokenization, and Excellar Repo (xRepo protocol), which will be a repo-like lending protocol. Excellar Mint will tokenize public and private funds holding real-world assets. Note that the tokenization platform will be hosted at http://excellar.finance. Excellar Repo will allow token holders to borrow stables against those tokens unlocking liquidity for the short term if needed. Note that the lenders of stables on the Excellar repo lending protocol would differ from the borrowers due to their different liquidity, duration, and risk tolerance profile. Note that the tokenization platform will be hosted at http://xrepo.finance. Further, crypto holders can borrow stables against their crypto from DeFi protocols such as AAVE and then use those stables to mint the tokens and earn higher net rates on their crypto as the rates on real-world assets will be higher than those in DeFi. This will also push up DeFi rates.

Excellar Short-Term US Government Treasury Fund (XUSG)

Fund Holdings: Our first tokenized fund (XUSG) would be a Short-term US Government Treasury Fund holding iShares Short-Term Treasury Bond ETF (NASDAQ: SHV) and cash. The ETF documentation is available here https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239466/ishares-short-treasury-bond-etf. Transparency: The fund administrator is an independent service provider who does an independent valuation of the fund and publishes a Net Asset Value (NAV) at a frequency specified in the fund prospectus. The administrator also publishes reports of the asset holdings of the fund. This fund is a typical Regulation D private fund offering in TradFi, where investors receive a prospectus, limited partnership agreement, and a subscription document. Together these documents detail the operations of the fund, the assets holdings, and details of the service providers, such as the fund attorney, administrator, and auditor. Please note that we will tokenize more funds in the future, each with a clear specification of the fund asset holdings in its prospectus. Full documentation on the tokenized fund and the repo-lending protocol is available here.

Documents for Excellar Finance Tokenization Platform: https://scife-stella-protocol.vercel.app/docs

Documents for xRepo Lending Protocol: https://scife-xrepo.vercel.app/docs

Requested Budget

$88.8K

Team

Who We Are

We have over three decades of combined financial industry experience, focusing on lending, trading, and risk management at storied institutions such as Millennium Management and Bank of America.

Amit Kaushik, CFA - Chief Investment Officer of SciFeCap LLC, a Crypto Asset Management Firm and author of "The Crypto Investor." Amit has worked at leading hedge fund Millennium Management and Wall Street firms such as Barclays and Bank of America.

Lisa Li - Chief Risk Officer with deep expertise in digital asset risk management. She spent over a decade heading up the risk management function at a leading futures/swap/broker-dealer, where she was instrumental in establishing and managing industry-leading risk management practices. She was also a key team member who managed the firm's $4 billion book of customer-segregated assets in short-term treasuries and related strategies.

Bowen Zhao - Quantitative Trader at SciFeCap and Consultant at Excellar. Bowen combines quantitative research with software engineering to architect and trade high-frequency crypto strategies across major exchanges including Binance, Bybit, OKX, and DeFi venues. He holds a Master of Science in Computational Finance from Carnegie Mellon University and designs multi-chain DeFi strategies with sub-50ms execution capabilities.

Our team is further supported by additional quant engineers from top firms, bringing cutting-edge quantitative and technical expertise to our institutional-grade tokenization platform.