Vladimir Gorbunov is the founder and CEO of the Crypterium wallet and neo bank app, which supports over 600,000 registered clients across 170 countries. The company has recently launched Choise.com alongside a new token, the CHO token. Choise.com will enable users to swap between centralised (CeFi) and decentralised (DeFi) finance at the press of a button, meaning they can harness the power and benefits of both digital asset worlds.
We recently spoke with Gorbunov regarding Crypterium’s new product launch and learned all about the exciting plans for Choise.com.
Q: What is Choise.com, and how will it revolutionize the current Crypterium user experience?
A: Choise.com is a clear and logical next step in our company’s evolution. We entered the market when DeFi was just in its infancy, with the goal of building an easy-to-use crypto-fiat wallet. As a result, Crypterium has become one of the most convenient and user-friendly global crypto-banks for buying, exchanging, and withdrawing cryptocurrencies.
In the meantime, the DeFi market has shown explosive growth and is now maturing Consumers are looking for the opportunity to use decentralized exchanges and cross-chain solutions. DeFi enables great returns as users interact directly – the liquidity they provide increases market efficiencies and yields by eliminating intermediaries.
CeFi companies that resemble Crypterium have focused not just on enabling buying, selling and exchanging crypto but have also provided consumers with the chance to earn on their funds. Our user feedback and consumer research show that our customers are eager to benefit from the higher returns available in the DeFi world, but today this is technically very difficult and not easily accessible. We at Crypterium, maintain our mission to make the crypto world as easy to use as normal money so we have created a unique solution in the form of Choise.com.
At the heart of Choise.com is a new, in-house DeFi ecosystem — Charism, a suite of products, including a non-custodial wallet, cross-chain bridges, decentralized derivatives and other DeFi solutions. This will enable Crypterium users to not only access all the advantages of the CeFi world, such as easy exchange, payments and money transfers, but also DeFi’s higher returns.
We estimate that these unique “choice to earn more” opportunities will be available to 100 million users around the world who will enter this market in the next few years.
Q: How does the CHO token make Choise.com a better platform?
A: Everything that Choise.com does is aimed at ensuring that any user has a choice of how to earn more. All we will be doing in the next three years is to enable people to use the potential of their funds. For this, we create products for an audience of new users and current ones, so that everyone can expect to receive 10% instead of 5% yield, or not 50%, but 100%.
All these opportunities are also concerns for deposits because they will become even more profitable.
To expand product and community capabilities in the decentralized part of the market, a new CHO token will be added. Several factors influenced the design of our new token. With our recent Seedrs crowd-funding, UK FCA registration and our upcoming Visa card launch in the US, as well as our B2B and direct-to-consumer offerings, the company is scaling. We have a clear strategic path towards achieving a capitalization of $10 billion and building a multi-million dollar user revenue base worldwide.
We also realize, however, that Charism is a separate, standalone DeFi ecosystem and so needs to be constructed in the usual DeFi way through a dedicated token used in its protocols. The CHO token enables the efficient protocols deployed in a decentralized environment, while still being independent of the company. It also enables users to become ecosystem stakeholders through the implementation of governance, voting mechanics, etc., thereby allowing them to influence critical decisions within the Charism ecosystem.
Q: How will CHO and CRPT interact? Will CRPT still be the platform’s main token of interaction?
A: The CHO token will be the backbone of our new DeFi ecosystem. CRPT was, is, and will continue to be the primary token of our CeFi functionality, being the platform’s utility token.
With CHO, our goal is to achieve complete decentralization and form a community of interested tokenholders who can influence and govern the development of decentralized protocols as part of Choise.com.
The transaction fee and “burn” models in Crypterium remain in place. For Crypterium users and CRPT holders, the new CHO token will therefore be a bonus. They will be able to get it through airdrops or as bonuses for any account activity. So CHO will have the additional advantage of stimulating activity within Crypterium’s centralized world. Over the next two years, the CHO budget will be 10% of the total CHO token supply and will be distributed among active CRPT tokenholders through several airdrop programs.
Sale rounds for CHO are the formation of a community and long-term partnerships. The funds collected initially are primarily intended to form the liquidity of the token as with most DeFi protocols, liquidity is of the essence for Charism as well, especially at launch. For users and Choise.com, this is a win-win story and a base for the successful development of a new ecosystem.
At the same time, the example of other companies, for example, Сrypto.com with their capitalization of several tens of millions of dollars, shows that the appearance of the second token has a positive effect on the development of the ecosystem and its success.
Q: Can you clearly lay out all of the benefits associated with the Charism DeFi ecosystem?
A: The Charism DeFi ecosystem is based on a non-custodial wallet. There are a large number of blockchains today and they are evolving and growing. Many have exciting features but to access them, you have to have an app or service for each one and also have funds within each blockchain for initial transactions – this is hugely inconvenient.
Our DeFi protocol aggregator allows people not just to switch between networks but also to see everything in one marketplace. We plan to add other services through our custodial wallet to increase income for our users. Some of these benefits will already be familiar to our users, such as swap and token purchase. In the future, we would plan to gradually add derivatives and other solutions, dependent on regulations.
For interoperability, we have built a Charism transaction builder protocol that allows you to aggregate transactions in the centralized wallet and send those transactions to wherever you want — even to a decentralized network. This could be the purchase of an LP token, a new coin, a swap, or other decentralized activities Everything will be within our protocol and allow our users to access both CeFi and DeFi worlds with the press of a single button – we think this is very exciting for our users and unique in today’s market
Q: How did the idea to build your own in-house protocol come to fruition?
A: Many companies are starting to work on combining the capabilities of CeFi and DeFi. We are one of the first to offer such a comprehensive solution.
In fact, we didn’t just want to build DeFi. We wanted to launch “MetaFi”, which has required us to create our own protocol. There is no such solution in the current market. We know this, so nine months ago, we began to build expertise within the company, research existing solutions, add new team members, and analyze how this can be implemented appropriately. Charism will be launched in the near future to bridge these two worlds of centralised and decentralised exchanges.
Q: Which decentralized benefit do you think will revolutionize the user experience most?
A: We think that the main benefit will be income generation for our customers. The cryptocurrency market is seen by most users as a way to invest and grow their money. Crypterium, together with Choise.com will make it much easier for consumers to enter the DeFi market and follows our ongoing mission to create transparent, easy-to-use and customer-centric access to the world of digital assets.
Q: Do you think the future is full of bridged CeFi and DeFi platforms or decentralized exchanges alone?
A: We think there will be two major trends in the next few years. The first is increasing regulation, and we can expect an increased focus from regulators on the DeFi world, although hopefully with the opportunity to still innovate. Secondly, these two worlds need bridges. Here at Crypterium, we are leading in both directions: Crypterium has excellent experience working with regulators and we are world-leading in the way that we have made it simple and easy to access and use cryptocurrencies.
Q: Will Choise.com’s innovation inspire other platforms to build something similar?
A: We consider ourselves pioneers in the cryptocurrency world – our original ICO was one of the most widely subscribed and we have created an app that is one of the simplest to use, on the market. We believe we shall create new solutions and trends for the market. You have to understand though that we haven’t announced all of our plans in full; and we shall introduce services which we think will be revolutionary. What we’re doing today is the first big step towards that new world.
Q: Since they can choose between a CeFi or a DeFi, which platform do you think will be most popular among users?
A: When regulators get more involved, we will have to see how that influences the digital asset markets. But in our opinion, the choice between CeFi and DeFi will favor solutions like our MetaFi, where one has a choice. We are confident that our CHO token will become the gold standard for decentralized tokens, allowing people to enjoy the benefits of “bridging” the CeFi and DeFiworlds and opening up opportunities for excellent returns in a simple easy-to-use way
