Meet The Founders Revolutionizing How Users Access Investments Getting into investment markets has for much of human history been a feat only the privileged few could manage.
By Asit Tirkey
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Humanity has always looked at investing as a means to grow wealth and secure the future. Throughout history, this has taken different forms, from buying and hoarding gold and other commodities to executing calculated trades involving assets like stocks and bonds.
But while markets got more sophisticated and instruments more complex, one thing remained largely unchanged – the ease, or lack thereof, at which people access these opportunities.
Getting into investment markets has for much of human history been a feat only the privileged few could manage. This is why it was such a big deal when the internet, more specifically Web2, came along and promised to make investing in financial markets easier by eliminating tedious processes involving brokers, lawyers, and documentation.
Fast forward a couple of decades later, and today, there is a multitude of online trading platforms where people can conveniently buy, sell, and invest in securities. The rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology has also created a whole new class of easily accessible assets. So, one might wonder, can investing get any simpler from here?
Well, yes. According to the founders of Mimo Capital, Claude Eguienta, Yacine Farouk, Badredine Yahiatene, and Naim Boughazi, investing in assets and securities can and should get much simpler.
Democratizing Asset Investment With Web3
Claude, Yacine, Badredine, and Naim are a group of founders driven by the strong desire to make the world a better and more equitable place. Their goal is to give financial access and education to the less fortunate.
This is because while Web2 has revolutionized investments, it can still be difficult for small businesses and retail investors to understand how to access traditional investment instruments like bonds. And this is a problem that needs solving.
How?
Blockchain technology has, in the past decade, proven it will define the 21st century. In addition to being responsible for the emergence of new asset classes, the technology, through smart contracts, has advanced far enough to provide a platform for the next generation of the internet to be built on.
This is Web3, and people worldwide, including the founders of Mimo Capital, are already using it to build solutions that will shape the future.
The Mimo team says it found blockchain technology to be the perfect medium to achieve its goal of making investments in assets and securities easy enough for anyone, anywhere in the world to be able to do it.
By leveraging tokenization and bringing assets on the blockchain, the company hopes to give people convenient and permissionless access to traditional investments in an auditable, transparent, and secure way.
Fortunately, in pursuit of their goal, the team has no shortage of experience when it comes to building and founding. Claude Eguienta, the CEO, is a software engineer who has worked as a lead architect for one of the biggest Japanese tech companies. He has also co-founded two companies in the past; a crypto startup called Kabotip and Telcoin, a financial remittances startup that leverages blockchain technology.
Interestingly, the co-founder for both these startups is another one of Mimo's co-founders, Yacine Farouk, the Chief Marketing Executive. Yacine is a serial entrepreneur who used to consult for Nike and had in the past run a design studio and multimillion-dollar fashion label originating in Paris. He has also worked for various startups and large companies in Paris, Miami, Tokyo, and Dubai.
This means that two out of the four founders already have experience building blockchain-based solutions. The rest provide equally impressive portfolios in the other areas that are needed for such a venture to succeed.
Badredine, chief technology officer (CTO), has occupied various tech-related roles across traditional finance. He has worked for finance and asset management companies like Generali, Societe Generale, and BNP Paribas.
Naim Boughazi, Mimo's product director, has immense experience creating products. He was a product director at Tantan, a successful social network in China that is designed for millennials. He was instrumental in making the platform as popular as it is today with over 360 million users.
Pooling their knowledge and experience, Naim, Badredine, Yacine, and Claude have built Mimo Capital.
Achieving Through Mimo Capital
Mimo Capital is a company that creates protocols providing tokenized real-world assets. So far, it has created the Kuma and Parallel protocols.
Kuma is a DeFi protocol that provides tokenized real-world assets in various forms. These include USK, an interest-bearing stablecoin that is backed by US sovereign bonds, and debt tokens, which consist of other stablecoins backed by various forms of debt.
On the other hand, the Parallel protocol is a lending platform for overcollateralized stablecoin loans. It will allow users to mint price-stable tokens backed by various currencies after depositing collateral. These include pEUR, pegged to the Euro, and pUSD, which is pegged to the US dollar.
Mimo's goal, through Kuma and Parallel, is to give users access to traditional assets in a DeFi-compatible way. And given that DeFi is a permissionless financial system, doing so will open up investments to people from all walks of life, bringing the founders' vision to life.
Mimo will continue to pursue its goal by creating more blockchain-enabled solutions, one investment problem at a time.