As a relative newcomer to the DeFi scene, Paribus has already developed a strong community inspired by the project’s vision to pioneer a new type of lending and borrowing platform within the Cardano ecosystem. What seems to have captivated the community’s imagination so fervently is the concept of being able to bring liquidity to otherwise illiquid digital assets such as NFTs.
Given this week’s launch of native staking, we felt it was an ideal time to shine the spotlight on the thought process of the team behind Paribus and gain a greater understanding of how the project first came to life.
The initial concept arose as a by-product of various conversations the team had when they were first getting to know each other in the cryptocurrency space. There was never an intention to develop a project, it just gradually came to life as a result of discussing the space and talking about the areas that were most in need of development.
The team recognized the huge value and importance of NFTs and the challenges of it being a highly illiquid market. It seemed strange that you could tie up thousands of dollars in an NFT and be left holding the bag, unable to do anything with it or leverage it in any meaningful way other than selling it on. As Deniz explained, “We realized NFTs are growing and this trend is bound to pick up steam; however there wasn’t a fair, decentralized, and scalable lender aside from P-2-P lenders — which we thought wasn’t sufficient, thus we decided to press ahead.”
Whilst identifying gaps in the market is useful, transforming that into a living, breathing project is quite something else. As the team explained, “Our coming together, and discussion of what we thought was lacking in the general crypto market happened naturally and initially without the intention to change the status quo. But as ideas started flowing, we realized that the scope is far beyond initial thoughts and it addresses a common problem that is affecting a highly valuable but illiquid market and most importantly, that we had the skills and connections to see our idea come to reality.”
One of the unique characteristics of the cryptocurrency space is that it actively embraces innovation and problem-solving. Time and again you’ll hear similar stories of how the space has enabled growth and development of ideas, provided that the innovators want to be proactive rather than just critiquing from the sidelines.
As with every idea and start-up we proceeded to carry out a feasibility study to assess how realistic our ideas were. It’s one thing to come up with a new way of doing something in theory, but translating that theory into reality requires prudent planning and an immense amount of work.
Upon completion of the feasibility study the outcome vividly presented multiple avenues how Paribus can change and take NFTs to the next level. We immediately began putting the pitch deck and started reaching out to our network for initial investments. The initial feedback received was extremely receptive and sparked great interest within our network. Such positive feedback and hyper-interest in the idea gave us the much required reassurance and confidence that this was truly an innovative and market changing idea.
Although Paribus could have collected much more funding in pre-seed/seed rounds, we decided to keep the raise amount reasonable — bearing in mind our tokens should be in the hands of masses, not a handful. An allocation was carved out to finance the initial efforts and start building our MVP via private token sale. The fact is Paribus could have raised funds and built a decentralized service with equity raise, however, tokenization of the project rather than raising capital through releasing shares is truly a testament to our vision as we believe in handing over Paribus as a DAO to the people once its ripe and mature.
“The route of tokenizing our project was one we considered carefully. We came to the conclusion that it would make most sense for us, as we wanted to build a community and not just another tech company. With a token raise, not only do you distribute the tokens to more holders, thus allowing for a more decentralized distribution of PBX, but it also grows a broad and inclusive community. While we did have initial seed and private investors, we want the power of the community to help shape Paribus long-term goals.” — Wilson Davis, COO
Given our choice of actions in terms of tokenization, the growth of our community and support was awe inspiring and humbling at the same time. We, as the Paribus team, truly thank our community and for the support we have received till date. One very recent example of our appreciation of the community is this week’s launch of its native staking app. Originally it was never planned to offer this form of staking, however in response to calls from within the community for staking, the team developed a special one-off staking program. It shows just what can be achieved when a project and its community work together.
This understanding of the importance of a strong community for the future longevity of Paribus also informed us of some of the ideas and discussions around governance, which are still ongoing.
“Some later additions we thought were important to include that weren’t there in the first few brainstorming sessions were governance and the possibilities of becoming a DAO in a responsible manner. This will take a lot of time and thought to make it work successfully. While this is many years off, we have this as a long-term goal. We are still in the very early stages and we strongly believe in taking an adaptive approach which will allow us to grow and iterate as we see fit, while keeping the best intentions for the longevity of Paribus.” — Simon Kruse, CTO
Paribus has grown and developed organically from the very beginning. From the first principles of identifying a need and then addressing the best solutions possible, we have continued to drive forward the horizons of possibility in this space. It’s appropriate therefore that we settled on the name, Paribus. We gave it a significant amount of consideration so that it would encapsulate and convey the ethos and values of their work together.
“Our name was inspired from a quote from Alfred Marshall, a 19th-century economist. The quote goes “…a complex question, studying one bit at a time, and at last combining his partial solutions into a more or less complete solution of the whole riddle. In breaking it up, he segregates those disturbing causes, whose wanderings happen to be inconvenient, for the time in a pound called Ceteris Paribus.” That phrase “ceteris paribus” is Latin for “all other things being equal.” We believe that it is important to have a strong name that connects our users to have an intuition about what type of company we are. We’re adding together the pieces of what makes a truly superior borrowing and lending platform, one step at a time, and will continue adding as we iterate and grow.” — Deniz, CEO
In an incredibly short space of time, we have managed to successfully launch the PBX token, grow a loyal community of early supporters, launch native staking, and be on the verge of launching our MVP. Each step is followed in rapid succession which promises to make 2022 a very exciting year ahead for Paribus with support from our community and our friends at IOG.
