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AMA : Revest

The Selective
10 min readSep 21, 2021

We’re joined by Rob M, the CEO of revest, in his own words for context :

Rob M :
So my name is Rob Montgomery and I’m the CEO of Revest Finance. I came up with the idea for our project around the end of April and I’ve been working on building it into something real ever since.

Most of my day-to-day consists of a mix of working on the code itself, as I’m one of the devs on the project as well, and planning our path to launch, working with everyone else on the team to make sure everything that needs to get done is getting done in a manner that is efficient and effective. Pretty much the job of any leader; I’m either doing the work where I’m needed, or piloting the ship where it needs to go.

Question 1 :
Can you start off by telling us what Revest is all about?

Rob M :
So Revest is a concept that I came up with around the end of April, towards the end of the first NFT bull-run of 2021. I was contemplating the long-term potential implications of NFTs, and I realized that they worked well not only for representing ownership of art, but more generally, for representing any non-fungible position in finance. We realized that you could lock fungible ERC-20s into non-fungible ERC-1155s and it would enable for the transfer of that locked value via already existing marketplaces such as OpenSea. That’s exactly what Revest offers: 3 different types of locks for locking your ERC20 tokens into NFTs.

  • The first of these is the time lock, name is self-explanatory.
  • The second of these is the value lock, which allows you to create a lock that unlocks at a pre-defined threshold based on measuring one asset’s price relative to another with oracles
  • And the final one of these is address locks, which allows users to write their own lock contract and create custom locking mechanics that are easily integrated into the Revest experience via our open API

Mission :
Thanks. So to put it simply : Revest allows you to lock tokens inside of NFTs instead of attaching to a wallet — for vesting or simply locking purposes, yeah?

Maybe you could express what problem you feel this solves in defi, and why it’s superior to locking / vesting in the “old way.”

Rob M :
So the first problem in DeFi that we’re going to be tackling is that of vesting tokens. Current vesting solutions are clunky and illiquid. They don’t allow for many of the common things we see in centralized finance, such as acquisitions, and they limit the sort of locks that people can place on their vested tokens.

Let’s start with team tokens and liquidity tokens. The keys to the ownership of any successful DeFi project. At the current time, you cannot trade on locked liquidity tokens; they’re locked to a single wallet and become illiquid for the entire period of time that you’ve locked them once they’re locked. You can’t transfer ownership of the wallet because you already know the private key; you can’t fractionalize them because they’re locked together in one big pot. There are no good escrow methods available for facilitating any of these transfers, even if they were possible. Enter the FNFT. You can set up your LPs as multiple copies of an ERC1155. Have 1000 LP tokens? Okay, you fractionalize them into packets of 10, for a total of 100 FNFTs. You can now allow for partial acquisitions of your project, just the same as any CeFi institution would. If you want to allow for an acquisition, you can just sell the locked FNFT over OpenSea to whoever is interested.

With team tokens, it is a similar process, but you can use our value-locking mechanic to implement KPIs in how the unlocks are staged. That means that if the team performs well, they might get access to their tokens sooner than expected, based on increases in market value. FNFTs open up the means by which to do things that with current locking mechanics simply aren’t possible.

That’s to say nothing of the applications for general vesting systems. Currently, in crypto, there exists no way by which an institutional investor, such as a DAO, might exit a position as an early investor in a project. That leads to situations where when the institutional investor doesn’t like the direction a project is headed in, they are simply written off. Hurts the investor, and hurts the project, since they won’t get any further resources from their investor. What Revest facilitates is to allow for another institutional investor who is geared for project rehabilitation to come in and buy the rights to that project’s tokens from the institutional investor at a sub-prime price, allowing them to make a profit if they can help the project, allowing the project to have access to the resources it needs, and the original investor to exit their position in a better place.

Vesting systems, however, are only our first application. We see a lot of problems that we can solve in both personal finance, and even some highly nuanced ones in the derivatives space. Vesting is the low-hanging fruit, which is why we are going for it first; but Revest is far more generalizable than that; our mission is to tokenize non-fungible financial positions, and vesting is our first mountain to climb.

“. . .our mission is to tokenize non-fungible financial positions, and vesting is our first mountain to climb.”

Question 2 :
One thing I’m curious about is the address locks, can you give an example or two of what this could be used for? Just having a hard time imagining exactly.

These are like ‘programmable’ locks, basically, right? That can be tailored to the specific needs of a specific project?

Rob M :
Yeah, absolutely. So the first example is one of the simplest: a combination lock. You pick whether it will be time and value or time or value. The user pastes the address of the lock contract into our frontend (or selects from a list of presets), the contract tells our frontend what inputs it needs from the user, the user provides that information, and the lock is created to spec. When the user tries to withdraw, our contract talks to the lock contract, asks it if it’s unlocked yet, and the lock contract says yes or no based on whether the conditions are satisfied.

The other type of address lock is one where the lock only unlocks when an unlock method is called on our contract from that address. This one doesn’t fully utilize our API, but its very easy to build; you can set the address to your wallet’s address and make a call to it. You could even set up external triggers on that address, such as having an automatic transaction sent when man steps foot on the moon and an off-chain analysis of the news confirms that this has occurred.

And yes, they are fully programmable, fully reusable, and this allows a collection of address locks to grow over time. Right now, when a DAO rights a clever vesting contract, that vesting contract is limited to people in the DAO. With this method, good locks can be shared in the community, and when we find really impressive ones, we’ll add them to our list of presets.

Mission :
That last paragraph is actually something I hadn’t thought of. Very nice, and honestly an across-the-board improvement on defi infrastructure it sounds like.

I think the value proposition is clear, and I want to have time to get into the sale & the future, so I’ll just leave this here for anyone who wants to check out the process of minting and the UI :

Question 4 :
Regarding the distribution and tokenomics : can you tell us about the reservation event, and what sort of sales have already happened?

Rob M :
So the reservation event works as a batch auction. We’re distributing 33M RVST tokens (our utility token) over the course of the next 3 days. It’s structured in such a way that everyone who participates will get the same price, and price is set by the level of participation. Designed it this way to ensure that everyone has a chance to buy tokens, that we avoid a gas war, and that we settle at a price near to our market value. Once it completes, we list on Uniswap at a 10% premium to the reservation event price

Prior to the upcoming reservation event we had one other round of funding, our seed round, in which we raised $2.1M for the 19MM tokens allocated. We were incredibly humbled to receive interest from some of the top strategic players out there and were able to be selective and bring on only high quality partners who shared and could support our long term vision and goals.

Mission :
So price will be organically discovered in the reservation event, then listed at 10% premium, correct?

Rob M :
Exactly!

Mission :
And regarding the seed round, will these tokens be vested? If so, what is the schedule like?

Rob M :
Yeah, they’re vested across a 6 month schedule. 25% unlock at TGE.

Mission :
It’s a linear unlock schedule over the 6 months? (aside from the 25% at TGE)

Rob M :
No, we’re doing it via time-cliffs. Unlocks at 1, 3, and 6 months — find that this leads to lower constant selling pressure

Mission :
Yeah, makes sense. Thanks.

For the last set of my questions, let’s discuss what happens after launch. . . It enters beta, right? What’s the plan after that.

Question 5 :
How will you encourage adoption?

Rob M :
Yeah, so we are entering an Open Beta for the next 6–12 weeks following launch, during which we’ll be collecting data on usage in an effort to determine how best to implement fees. We distribute 99% of fees to stakers, will be holding people over with a certain amount of RVST we’re distributing as staking rewards in the meantime, but once we figure out what fee structure makes sense, we’ll turn that on and begin monetizing the platform, similar to how AAVE works.

We will encourage adoption through strategic outreach and partnerships, in our initial vertical. We’re in late-stage talks with a variety of different people in the space who we think can deliver our product directly to early-stage projects, so we see this as a business-to-business system at first. We’re going to be offering kickbacks of fees to partners who officially integrate with us as well, to form long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships.

Audience Question 1 :
Thanks for the AMA, seems like an interesting project! Q..

So you’ll be able to transfer/sell your NFT-wrapped-locked-token. Would this translate into price drops of the underlying token, in the usual pump-n-dump for ICOs. Or if not, why not?

I’ve seen a similar secondary market mechanism elsewhere (e.g. P2P lending), where effectively the secondary sees a price discount — Sellers trade a reduced price for increased liquidity. I’d expect ‘most’ of the sell pressure would be contained within the secondary market, but do you have any forecast or commentary on how this is expected to play out?

(TL;DR: Does this help prevent price crashes for new tokens with presales/vesting/etc?)

Rob M :
Directly or indirectly? Directly, no, there is no interaction with an AMM and the locked tokens never move, they remain in the Revest vault the entire time. Indirectly, I’d say that will highly depend on how much weight the community attributes to the sale of the locked tokens

I would suspect that done improperly, you could see issues with price, but done properly, things like this are very much able to help stabilize price

Audience Question 2 :
“Let’s say that you put a condition to unlock an FNFT that never occurs, which means that FNT is locked forever?”

Rob M :
Yes, the value would be locked forever, having a backdoor would be a security vulnerability. Address locks may be constructed with those, but it isn’t something in our core offerings

Audience Question 3 :
Have you thought about contacting incubators and launch pads to see if they’d like to partner with Revest?

Rob M :
We may already have 😉

Audience Question 4 :
Ok, finally, I’ve seen some rumors :

Could you talk a bit about your relationship with Geometric Energy and the Space X missions coming up? How is Revest involved?

I see a lot of familiar faces in Geo, revest, & rena TGs O.o

Rob M :
We’re friends with Geometric Energy and I won’t deny that we have some ideas planned, but I can neither confirm nor deny the specifics 😉
Can promise it’ll blow your mind though

Audience Question 5 :
Regarding PA after the reservation even — who will be left to buy? But I guess with so many connections & partnerships in the works : that sorta takes care of that.

Rob M :
We’re launching the product immediately following the reservation event, so we aren’t terribly concerned about PA. Goal is to avoid high volatility, as always, but yes, we are a product-focused group first. We’re hopeful that translates to only positive things for our community 👍

  • reservation event is live until the 24th! HERE

Resources on Revest 📚

Defi
Nft
Ethereum
Crypto
Blockchain

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The Selective

Written by The Selective

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