Stellar Community Fund

By Excellar

Excellar

Liquidity Award - '24 Q1

$50.0K

Liquidity Award

Awarded

At Excellar we are bringing compliant yield-bearing assets on-chain. These assets provide on-chain exposure to the real-world assets, delta neutral trading strategies, otherwise accessible to deep pocketed and large institutions. Our vision is to democratize yield.

Products & Services

The growth of DeFi is dependent on exogenous yield. By generating yield from real-world assets, we generate yield that is not dependent on the product itself. This 'exogenous' yield allows DeFi protocols to attract liquidity. For example, a lending protocol could create a XUSD-USDC pool and let users capture the 5% yield coming from the reserve assets backed by money market instruments. This external yield would make the pool more attractive compared to another pool that does not receive this external yield. We are regulated by a leading insurance and digital assets regulator, the Bermuda Monetary Authority (the "BMA"). This brings more trust to the ecosystem. Trust, along with the yield, would attract more capital to the ecosystem. We believe that XUSD will become the stablecoin of choice for DeFi protocols, payment service providers, savings, and investment product providers as it pays yield on a block-by-block basis and provides safety and security similar to major stablecoins.

Our license also allows regulated entities to accept XUSD as collateral, bringing more use cases to the Stellar network. For example, we are working with insurance platforms licensed in Bermuda that can accept XUSD as collateral. These insurance platforms can use DeFi protocols on Stellar to enhance the yield given to their investors. This is a salient example of how XUSD can benefit not only the insurance platform but also DeFi protocols and the Stellar ecosystem.

Soroban

Yes

Requested Budget

$50.0K

Go-To-Market Plan

We recently got a conditional approval of a Digital Assets Business license from the BMA. We will make XUSD available on Stellar in the first week of August. We expect to add an XUSD-USDC pool on both a lending protocol and an AMM by the end of August. We have been reaching out to potential partners in the Stellar ecosystem who can benefit by diversifying their treasury in XUSD. We aim to onboard five-ten entities in September. Our aim is to get XUSD cross $1M by the end of November.

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.