#38 Crypto Native story v3 ZacharyDash from Flashstake
How he went all in crypto, his plans for flashstake & his alpha for community
#36 Crypto Native story v3
Story of @ZacharyDash from @Flashstake
Including
How he went all in crypto,
CMO for a crypto marketing agency
Created first self-destructing currency
launched Blockzero labs
Edge of Flashstake
His alpha to community
Check out my sponsor pendle_fi launching on camelot soon too!
Interview with ZacharyDash
❓what is flashstake in a few short lines?
ZacharyDash:
Flashstake is a DeFi protocol that enables anyone to earn instant upfront yield. For example, instead of earning $100/day through lending on Aave, you can "Flashstake" for one year and earn $36,500 today. The entire process happens in one ethereum transaction.
My previous tweet about Flashstake
❓Can you share with us a bit about ur background & story n journey in crypto?
ZacharyDash:
In 2017, the same day I proposed to my girlfriend (now wife), I quit my 9-5 day job to find a full-time opportunity in crypto.
In 2018, I joined as CMO of a crypto-native marketing agency where we grew to 75 clients and a team of 33 remote workers.
In 2019, I created the world's first self-destructing currency, a social experiment to fight monetary inflationary. https://medium.com/swlh/14-things-we-learned-creating-a-million-dollar-hyperdeflationary-currency-f372b270469c
In 2020, I launched the Blockzero Labs DAO with a mission to created a decentralized accelerator (think Y Combinator but for web3)
In 2021, we pivoted Blockzero Labs from an accelerator who helps external projects to a venture studio we we build our own projects.
In 2022, we launched Flashstake v3, the time travel of money protocol ⚡
❓Can you share the story of how team was founded?
ZacharyDash:
Flashstake consists of a public facing 5-7 core contributors who have been building together since 2019 together.
Most of these relationships were formed through the initial launch of Bomb Token back in 2019.
❓Do you mind sharing a bit more on @BlockzeroLabs & its relationship/connection with flashstake
ZacharyDash:
Blockzero Labs is a decentralized venture studio that creates multiple experimental projects. We realized Flashstake has the biggest opportunity of all the projects we were building so we decided to direct all our resources to building it.
Blockzero DAO has covered all expenses and done 100% of the development/marketing for Flashstake to this point. It owns 27.5M FLASH tokens.
❓Can you share the advantage of Flashstake over other "yield" type of protocol on the market?
ZacharyDash:
There are several amazing people building cool yield type projects, each of them created in various ways and solving different problems.
There are three primary areas we feel Flashstake differentiates itself.
⚡First: Simplicity
If you use any other yield swap or yield fixed-rate products, they can be pretty overwhelming, even for myself. All the current ones use terms like "maturity" or "expiry" dates and add extra friction of understanding yield vs. principal tokens.
Flashstake abstracts all this complexity.
There are no set maturity dates and users can Flashstake for any amount of time down to the minute. Additionally, user never sees anything but the token they stake and the token they get out. For this reason, we feel Flashstake is creating the "Uniswap" of time tokens. Simplicity is paramount.
⚡Second: Composability
Since we don't have predetermined expiration or maturity dates, our "yield tokens" are very much suited for composability with other protocols. Instead of needing to continously create new ones, ours are perpetually fungible.
⚡Third: Business Model
Many of the other projects are really fighting for people to user their platform or frontends.
Flashstake has taken a different approach.
Rather than needing people to use our products, we've built Flashstake in a way where any developer is economically incentivized to build a Flashstaking strategy of their own and deploy it.
For example, any developer can create a flashstaking strategy for any token they want, then set/take a fee any time someone uses it!
For this reason, you may consider other protocols like Adidas or Toyota, trying to get you to buy/try their products. Our model is more like Amazon or Shopify, creating the marketplace for others to build on top of.
We are agnostic to what you build, because each time you make revenue, so do we.
❓what the biggest challenges you think flashstake is/will be facing, how is your team over coming it?
ZacharyDash:
Our current biggest obstacle is education. Since we are building something that's never been done before, there's a steep learning curve and initial skepticism in the product.
Consistent and quality education along with history of security is the path through here.
There are no shortcuts, and it will be difficult, but if we can break through, the upside is asymmetrical.
Here's also another list of challenges we face
❓Do you mind sharing the plans and future for flashstake?
For future of Flashstake question, you can tease people to join this Friday
"We have a laundry list of products and potential partnerships in the roadmap. Will be revealing more of these this Friday at 5PM!
❓ Any alpha to share with the community?
ZacharyDash:
Flido.fi, built on Flashstake protocol, launching Feb 15th, but that's not much alpha anymore. Here's a screenshot of a never before released concept we are working on. I'll let the readers try to connect the dots of the rest
❓ What do u think is required to make it in crypto?
ZacharyDash:
Very different answers depending on how you're trying to "make it" (investor, builder, user, etc)
The one quality that binds them all, relentless curiosity.