10 questions for Brad Yasar, CEO of EQIFI

Following the ongoing growth and success of decentralized finance, newcomers need to make an impact on the industry. Since launching in April, EQIFI has successfully garnered attention. Unlike other projects and protocols, this project is in partnership with a fully licensed and regulated digital bank.

In recent weeks, the EQIFI team has worked behind the scenes to complete their seed and strategic investment rounds. As interest in this protocol grows, it is essential to keep forging strategic partnerships. With these funding rounds completed, the team can continue to build their DeFi vision and introduce more enhancements, features, and options.

To provide valuable insights about EQIFI, CEO Brad Yasar has taken some time to tell us more about the project. Furthermore, he also highlights why this project is unlike any other decentralized finance product or protocol on the market today.

First of all, can you tell us how you initially got involved in the blockchain space? What attracted you to it?

I got into blockchain at the end of 2009 when a friend of mine introduced me to Bitcoin. I was always interested in cryptography, and when I realized what Bitcoin had accomplished after playing around with it for a bit, I got hooked on its potential. That was the beginning of a lifelong passion for blockchain and the communities it created.

Moving on to EQIFI, can you tell us more about your vision for the project?

Simply put, EQIFI is designed to open up DeFi for non-crypto people. My partner Jason Blick and I wanted to create a gateway for people who may not be technologically savvy to be able to benefit from all the cool innovations that space has been seeing in the past two years while allowing those in the DeFi space to have access to digital banking that is crypto-friendly. This vision was the genesis of EQIFI - a regulated and licensed global bank partnering up with a DeFi platform to reimagine the future of community banking.

What is it that sets EQIFI apart from other DeFi projects?

We have EQIBank as a partner, which allows us to bring traditional banking and financial products together with the programmatic DeFi products on the same platform.

The problems that users face with the traditional banking system are well documented. How can EQIFI help solve some of those issues?

By not carrying legacy banking issues forward and applying decentralized financial products to reduce overhead and expenses, we aim to solve some obvious ones, such as negative rates, access to products, and high cost of operations. However, that is just the beginning. We plan to expand from there.

How has the community responded to the responsibilities and governance options they have regarding EQIFI? Has anything surprised you in this regard?

The response to the project has been very positive and exciting. Although we haven't had many governance-related conversations so far, it is still very early. Once the platform launches, we expect more engagement from the community about governance and their involvement.

Which challenges do you foresee for both EQIFI and the broader decentralized finance industry in the next 12 to 24 months?

The biggest challenge will be adopting people who have not owned crypto before and are uncertain about how it would work. Since our goal is to grow the crypto market cap and not get market share from other projects, our challenge is going to be educating our users, which is also the biggest challenge that the industry faces as a whole because it is very new and often misrepresented and misunderstood by the general media/public.

Do you expect there will be more “crossovers” between DeFi and centralized finance in the future? If so, why (not)?

Yes, I hope that many others will follow in our footsteps and increase access to the ecosystem. Simply put, we believe that earning negative interest rates on someone's hard-earned money is just not acceptable. There are existing products in the DeFi space that solve this problem if we remove the technological barriers for everyone.

Will EQIFI eventually focus on cross-chain asset support, rather than Ethereum and ERC-20 tokens only?

Absolutely! We are starting with Ethereum, so we don't delay our launch too much, but once we are live, we have plans to adopt multiple blockchains under one roof to simplify the user experience for our stakeholders.

Do you think decentralized finance will ever become a mainstream trend, and if so, what will it take to attain that level?

Yes, I firmly believe DeFi will play an integral role in the future of global finance. It will take a much easier UI/UX experience coupled with innovation-driven regulation in the space to attain that level.

EQIFI had a very successful seed & strategic round of investment, with it finishing oversubscribed. This is obviously great news for you and your team. Can you tell our readers what’s next for EQIFI?

Next is growing our community and support base until we launch the platform at the end of Q2/beginning of Q3. Once we have a live platform and an active user base, and a community of supporters of our ecosystem, we are going to listen to their feedback and continue building a new feature, improving the ones we have, adding more products and chains, and make EQIFI the go-to platform for DeFi.