Shahaf Bar-Geffen is the CEO and founder of COTI Network, a blockchain-based payments network.
Bar-Geffen has a wealth of experience in the technology space and believe it or not, in 2016 he sold a media company by the name of Web3 to the Mccan Erickson Group (IPG). He also founded a company called Positive Mobile — one of the first places to advertise on smartphones and a company that was also later acquired.
His passion for cryptocurrencies started in 2015 and became even more serious when he founded COTI in 2018. Since then, COTI has become a notable player in the field.
In this exciting episode, we talk about what COTI is, its close relationship with Cardano, CVI — which is the cryptographic version of the famous VIX, and of course market sentiment and recent trends — NFTs and the metaverse.
What is COTI? The 2022 edition
First, COTI is a layer 1 protocol that has its own native chain. It is optimized for making payments — more precisely, consumer-merchant payments.
“That means we built everything from the ground up to specifically address the issues around payments.” — According to Bargeffen.
Talking about the problems that COTI is supposed to solve, the world’s underfunded population has come to increase, and he argued that the existing system currently is not cut to deal with such issues. Centralization, expensive transactions, lack of transparency — these are just some of the challenges facing COTI, in Bar-Geffen’s words. He also explained some of the technical differences between the COTI network and other layer one protocols such as Ethereum.
In addition to all the features he explained, we also played at COTI’s recently released Treasury, which is an algorithmic, decentralized pool where users can deposit their COTI and be rewarded for their participation.
Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of COTI.
The pool will grow over time because the entire ecosystem pays fees to the Treasury — either directly or indirectly. When someone bets on COTI, they are entitled to a share of the growing Treasury, providing yet another use case and merit for long-term holders of the cryptocurrency.
Another product of the COTI team is the CVI, which stands for Crypto Volatility Index. According to Bar-Geffen, CVI tokens can be leveraged to protect against one of the most dire holes in DeFi — impermanent loss.
Cardano and Coti: Love Story
For those unaware, Cardano is gearing up to launch the algorithmic stablecoin DJED, and COTI Network will be the official broadcaster. Bar-Geffen revealed some interesting details about DJED and Coti’s involvement.
“DJED has already established partnerships with more than 10 decentralized exchanges, among the 10 largest in Cardano. We believe that DJED will be to the Cardano ecosystem what USDC is to Ethereum DeFi, i.e. the token everyone uses to build their trading pairs.”
We also talked about whether or not he feels the future will be multi-chain, and that’s exactly what Bar-Geffen hopes. However, he also said that no one should disappear with Cardano because they are doing a great job.
Tight relationship. Charles Hoskinson and Shahaf Bar-Geffen
“Some people like to make fun of Cardano and those people will be very wrong. This is because Cardano is very strong in engineering — there are hundreds of engineers working there. They published more scholarly work than everyone else. […] I also like to remind people that Charles Hoskinson is a co-founder of Ethereum.”
He also argued that the easiest thing for Cardano would have been to build “another imitation of Ethereum”. They decided against it, and when “they actually release stuff, they’re pretty good.” Shahaf also believes the Cardano ecosystem will be “super strong”.
NFTs as an integral part of the metaverse
The podcast wouldn’t have been as interesting if we didn’t talk about non-fungible tokens, the metaverse, and blockchain-based games.
Speaking of recent cryptocurrency trends, we also talked about Vitalik Buterin’s inspiration for building Ethereum, part of which was the popular story of how his World of Warcraft character was nerfed, and he decided that is an unacceptable display of centralization.
The CEO of COTI is a proponent of play-to-win and believes this is one of the best use cases for blockchain-based technologies. He also thinks non-fungible tokens will play an integral role in the metaverse.
$30k before $100k
It’s worth noting that Bar-Geffen is also partnered with a company called Frequence that provides technology for algorithmic trading.
At the time the podcast was recorded, he shared that he and the algorithm were not very optimistic about the near-term future of BTC and even expect Bitcoin to retest $30K before hitting the $100K milestone. that will be in the next few years. Among all the insights he shared, the expert also revealed that they are very optimistic about Bitcoin and the entire ecosystem in the long term.
To see where COTI’s CEO thinks the industry is headed, watch the entire podcast.
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