UNIZEN WEEKLY PULSE #10

Edition 10: 4th February, 2022

Message from Sean Noga, CEO Unizen

Welcome to our tenth edition of the Unizen Weekly Pulse. In this edition we focus on the newly launched CeDeFi Alliance, an industry effort pioneered by Unizen and its partner Jun Capital to promote the development and mass adoption of CeDeFi.

The motivation behind the Alliance is the ambition to unite all existing CeDeFi technology and leaders into a single force for fast growth, mutual support, and powerful representation.

Since Monday, we have had a dedicated cross section of our community putting the Unizen Multi-Chain Bridge through its paces.

With representatives from BlockUnify and Necker Ventures road testing the bridge ahead of its public release, we have had a great opportunity to gather feedback and engagement directly from our community.

We would like to thank those taking part for your valuable insights to optimise the bridge for launch.

About the CeDeFi Alliance

The decision to establish CeDeFi and the CeDeFi Alliance as its representative entity is grounded in several motivations:

• DeFi offers innovative technology, autonomy, and accessibility to individual finance participants. However, it has been overlooking the key players – banks, institutions, governments.
• CeFi is interested in exploring decentralized finance and crypto-asset investments. For now, they don’t have a secure, trusted gateway for interacting with decentralized capital and innovations.
• The relationship between CeFi and DeFi can currently be described as competitive. Decentralized finance seeks to disrupt or even replace traditional organizations, while the latter have their own reasons to oppose DeFi solutions: particularly, the lack of regulatory clarity and the KYC and AML non-compliance.
• CeDeFi as a new financial system presents an intermediate way to benefit from the practices of both industries. Armed with DeFi, centralized actors can increase the efficiency of their operation, achieve higher accessibility, and benefit the public (billions of users). DeFi acquires support from established participants and proves its credibility, which is essential for productive legislative discussions.

Main Goal of the CeDeFi Alliance

1) Bringing together the leading DeFi and CeFi expert on board of CeDeFi discussion.

2) Focusing on regulatory compliance and create an infrastructure that fits the international legal frameworks.

3) Starting a discussion with representatives of institutions, leading DeFi teams, governments.

4) Building a global CeDeFi ecosystem that creates tangible value to individual and institutional participants.

5) Assisting in preparing CeDeFi policy and removing the regulatory tensions regarding DeFi and its compliance.

6) Fully preserving DeFi values while creating new use cases for the technology – in particular, the ones adapted to global use and institutional participation.

7) Creating an accessible system through which every individual and organization and can use and contribute CeDeFi technology with confidence in its full legitimacy.

The Structure of the Alliance

The members of CeDeFi Alliance are DeFi teams who are working on merging DeFi and CeFi processes, and CeFi institutions, interested in contributing to DeFi, and leading experts on economics, finance, banking, cryptography, software development.

The foundation of CeDeFi was being laid for several years already. The rapid movement of the market and increasing regulatory tension highlight the need for cooperation, which is exactly the role of the Alliance.

Founding Members: The Alliance is co-founded by the founding members of CeDeFi Alliance, one of which is Unizen, hence they are part of the board. Each founding member carries 1 Voting power.

Voting/DAO: in the future the board will meet on a regular basis and the decision-making process will be conducted through voting in a Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Interactions of CeDeFi Alliance With Decision-Makers

While it’s true that the need for CeDeFi is becoming an apparent idea for many financial actors, it’s by no means a common concept. The present divide between a decentralized market and institutional providers limits both parties, preventing the adoption of DeFi and promoting the reliance on bull-and-bear cycles.

The presence of a united entity is necessary to synchronize communication, get powerful decision-makers together, and find applicable applications for DeFi’s paradigm-shifting innovation. CeDeFi Alliance fills this gap by creating space for DeFi and CeFi participants to exchange ideas and collaborate, and most importantly, create a comprehensive legal framework for the emerging financial system.

To motivate a productive discussion, CeDeFi Alliance will help centralized actors leverage the following opportunities:

• Using compliant DeFi technologies for highly scalable use cases by providing a highly reliable infrastructure, redundant performance, audit-proven security;

• Increasing the degree of autonomy of financial institutions by creating blockchain networks, stablecoins, infrastructure for asset exchange, custody, and monitoring;

• Creating highly accessible, scalable, and secure networks for global interactions, expanding reach into international markets, with the focus on benefiting end-users;

• Minimizing risks by creating gateways for interacting with trusted providers for portfolio diversification with crypto assets;

• Assisting in developing, testing, maintaining blockchain technology, and creating a new framework of managing financial processes that are to be disrupted by DeFi;

Currently, there’s a gap in technical skills, infrastructure, communication, and knowledge in CeFi-DeFi interactions. By bringing high-tier experts from both worlds, CeDeFi Alliance builds a solid bridge for long-term cooperation between the two systems.

To promote wide adoption, CeDeFi Alliance will open multiple possibilities to DeFi teams, such as:

• Assuring full compliance of the DeFi technology by established legal and finance experts bringing on board;

• Negotiating the favorable regulatory frameworks and cooperation conditions on behalf of DeFi;

• Transitioning current DeFi functionality to its compliant version while preserving DeFi values and maintaining high user satisfaction;

• Identifying opportunities in CeDeFi realm and bringing in new DeFi teams to expand the reach of the Alliance;

• Adapting DeFi infrastructure to the needs of large-scale providers, preparing the technology for the interactions with the institutional capital, assisting in identifying global opportunities and their negotiation;

• Increasing the number of users by creating truly global use cases that are not limited to narrow crypto-only scenarios.

Members of CeDeFi Alliance

At the start of Alliance activities, all board members are carefully selected by Unizen and the founding members. However, the application is open to all individuals and entities. However, participants must be approved by the community and board on the basis of the value of their contributions.

• Compliance experts. The Alliance will complement the work of International Standard bodies by issuing reports, proposing frameworks, identifying gray areas, and set up the legal framework for new CeDeFi use cases.

• Experts in non-financial fields. The ultimate goal of the Alliance is to become a starting point for CeDeX, where X stands for any industry. Decentralization has a proven potential to revolutionize fields by introducing self- governance, accessibility, removing single points of failure. The Alliance will work with decentralized teams ad centralized bodies outside of finance realms, creating use cases and building a legal framework for their compliant execution.

• Communication teams. The CeDeFi Alliance will educate both sides of the CeDeFi market. The centralized participants receive reports, events, one-on-one consults, and personalized educational courses that would familiarize them with opportunities for decentralization in their field. The decentralized teams receive guidance on compliance, best practices on collaborating with large market players, and integration with existing frameworks.

Final Word

CeDeFi Alliance responds to the current needs of decentralization markets and a proactive way of leveraging the increased institutional interest. In 2021, we have seen exceptional interest from institutions and governments, and it’s absolutely necessary to use the momentum. The global adoption of decentralization is shifting from being the best-case scenario to the highly probable one.

However, in order for it to match the values of decentralization, we should take initiative, create the vision, and propose it to decision-makers. This is exactly what CeDeFi Alliance will be doing by bringing together leading experts. Their knowledge and reputation will contribute to driving proactive discussions about the expansion of decentralization use cases and their compliance.

Website: https://www.unizen.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unizen_io?s=2

The Unizen Ecosystem is housing and aggregating trades across trusted first- and third-party exchange modules to enable a ZEN state of mind for traders.

Unizen is the first CeDeFi exchange to combine the functionality of first-party and third-party CEX’s and DEX’s in order to meet the needs of both retail and institutional traders. Unizen Exchange is able to find the most cost-efficient trades across a multitude of exchange modules, including Binance, to provide the best offers, reliable performance, and a secure environment for high-volume trading. All in one seamless user experience.