SkyVision Capital and Sienna Network AMA
Last week, we had an incredible opportunity to interview an evangelist of the Sienna Network. We had a wonderful time learning about the Sienna Network and the various capabilities that the team has planned. If you haven’t yet taken a look at what Sienna Network is, feel free to check out our previous article! We are excited to share with you a few highlights of our AMA. If you would like to listen to the full audio, feel free to check it out below!
👉 https://soundcloud.com/user-665077171/skyvision-x-sienna-ama
SkyVision:
Can you tell us more about yourself and the founding team?
Sienna Network:
Well, I’ve been on a number of teams, and I’ve been in crypto for four or five years. I attended various conferences and interviews in the space. Slowly, opportunities started coming my way and then towards the end of 2020, the team at Sienna approached me. At that time, I just thought that this was the greatest group of people that I’d ever met. The group was initiated by a global group of people with different backgrounds and complementary skills from computer science, blockchain, entrepreneurship, and communications. Since inception, we actually have a powerful crypto community of people with a strong privacy focus. The one of the things that I love the most about this team is just how much I’ve laughed this decade. The team is just a group of really, really enthusiastic, special, bunch of people!
SkyVision:
What inspired you guys to come up with the project? Especially the Privacy aspect.
Sienna Network:
We started off in stealth, we got a great team of people with skills from all over the board. And what basically allowed us to come up with this idea is that we all noticed that the first generations of blockchains are fabulous but flawed. We knew that there were many improvements to be made. Blockchain allows you to have inherent trust without having any third parties being involved. However, if that comes at the cost of public access, then all the information on the ledger, in a transactional context, will be negatively influenced. And some data as we know needs to be private.
SkyVision:
How would you pitch the project to governing regulating bodies versus the retail investors?
Sienna Network:
It’s very important to distinguish between anonymity and privacy. They’re not really the same. Anonymity is problematic in financial markets for obvious reasons. Privacy is a must not only to protect the information being exchanged but also to prevent unintended misuse of the crypto space. I’m sure we all know the problems with Bots front running the market, so we believe that institutional adoption will only come when privacy can be preserved in ways that will also maintain Regulatory Compliance. And that is also the reason why we’re built on the Secret Network. With Secret, we found it possible for a production ready Blockchain system.
SkyVision:
Now compared to the institutional side of that, why would retail investors enjoy the Privacy aspect more?
Sienna Network:
We try to be regulation ready. We’re based in Zuch. As you may know, anything can happen in this space. Institutions want to make sure that what they’re doing is the right thing. They want to know that there is no illegitimacy in this. Crypto has had a bad reputation as it is often seen as a place for money launderers, gun runners, drug dealers, and all that stuff. We don’t want anything to be wrong with what we’re doing. And you know the institutional investors are not going to get involved in DeFi or anything in this space unless they can trust it. Our whole long-term plan revolves around making sure that we’re compliant and here for the long-term success of the ecosystem. I can’t reiterate that point enough haha
SkyVision:
Do you think your project is at risk to be used for illegitimate purposes due to the private encrypted data? And if so, how do you guys plan to mitigate against this.
Sienna Network:
Absolutely, I think that’s a fantastic question following on from your previous one. The world is manicky. It’s split between good and evil. With what’s happened over the last 15 months with COVID, the places that people stand with their opinions and their thoughts are going to be different. So, there’s always going to be some people in this world, they’re going to jump the fence or try and steal the march from everybody. But we also believe as a concept and as a kind of philosophy; Privacy is a human, right? You know, I mean we’ve seen our privacy being compromised. You’ve seen what Apple has done just recently about trying to protect us a little more. Bearing all that in mind, we seem to be scraped all the time for data. And, you know, I still think that privacy is something that is inherent to us as humans. We’ve given up a lot of privacy under COVID. You know, no one really cares about that anymore as long as you can stay alive. But you know that it’s clear that there are different initiatives such as FATF, which are there for a reason and these can be accommodated within the blockchain space. However, there’s always going to be wrong people in the space, we just want to be the right ones.
SkyVision:
So what preparations are you making to launch your project successfully?
Sienna Network:
Every single preparation on the planet. As I said we’ve got a fantastic team. We’ve all got complimentary skills as previously suggested. You know, we really believe that we have built a great product. There’s been so much love, resources and sweat going into it. And we think that these features didn’t exist before and you know you’re nothing without your community, right? We think that what we’re doing is going to be loved by the community. I mean I might be you know presuming and assuming a little bit too much, but we were doing it for the community. This might sound a little bit too noble and a humble brag, but we are heavily invested and collaborating with the Secret Foundation to ensure everything goes smoothly. We hope to evangelize privacy since it is much needed in Fintech. It shouldn’t be mistaken for anything else since anonymity is key.
SkyVision:
So how would you define a successful launch?
Sienna Network:
As long as the rocket gets off and gets to the moon and you know — it’s all these kinds of space metaphors. 😂 You know, I mean getting off the ground rocket, moon launch. 🚀 All of that stuff I think that’s slightly over you know, over spacey. If you know what I mean, and if I think you can get lost in the metaphor sometimes, but you know, let’s come down to earth using another metaphor.
SkyVision:
Keeping the theme 😂
Sienna Network:
Yes, it’s a race to the bottom, race to the center of the Earth 🌍. The most important thing, however, is that the community around Sienna likes the products. We’re seeing the community starting to provide liquidity to the pools as well as recommend and even share it! We’re really seeing Sienna take off 🚀. It’s a little bit like in The Social Network when they set up Facebook and everything starts pinging. That’s what it’s been like for us over the last couple of months. I’ve done a few things in my life, but this has been unheralded. I mean, it wasn’t unexpected, but it’s been simply amazing. The fact is that the traditional transactional costs are significantly lower with us since it’s not Ether based platforms. So, this would really accelerate adoption once the community realizes the amount they will be saving! But what truly defines a successful launch is that our community is showing love towards our platform. Remember that Sienna is a governance-led community where the token holders vote on the product roadmap. The community will play a key role in ensuring the long-term success of Sienna!
SkyVision:
How will you ensure longevity of your ecosystem after liquidity agreements conclude and all the Sienna tokens have been minted?
Sienna Network:
With the longevity of the ecosystem, we have to dive deeper into the tokenomics. The vesting doesn’t happen until 26 months after the TGE — the token generation event. But keep in mind that Sienna gets burned on the swap and will keep the user case relevant. The supply diminishes over time and to be fair, the product roadmap is awesome. That’s what we think we’re doing at the moment.
SkyVision:
Aside from Ethereum and the planned Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, Monero, and Cosmos Bridges. How big do you guys plan to go? Which planet are we going for?
Sienna Network:
Hahaha wow, we’re going to fly far too close to the Sun. We could be here all day! I’m enjoying this. Aside from Ethereum, I think you mentioned Polkadot, BSC, Monero, and Cosmos Bridges. We believe that the cosmos bridges via the inter-blockchain Communications IBC protocol will make this ecosystem explode in size. We’re also working with direct partners to change and integrate with existing solutions. Sienna is actually an Italian city where finance was first born. Back in the 12th Century, Sienna was an important trade city where a lot of trade occurred from Sienna to Venice. However, there was a lot of robbery that went on and that’s when they created cryptography. Traders were then able to get a code in Sienna and jump onto their horse to Venice. When they arrived, they were carrying no goods, no money, just the code and they were able to trade safely. It’s a pretty awesome piece of History. When it comes to Cosmos Bridges, Cosmos Bridges I kind of think of us as Venice. We basically help connect all the underlying things that are around and bring it all together.
SkyVision:
Now can you talk a bit about Sienna Lend, your next protocol? Do you have more protocols in your roadmap? I know you mentioned that the community will vote on the roadmap. So, will you have more protocols in your roadmap that you’re planning for the community to be voting on?
Sienna Network:
Yeah, this is key and a great question. Again, we believe that the current options are only a weak starting point. The lending now is not really lending and more like a pool broker. You know, you deposit something of value then you borrow something else of a lesser value. And we think that it’s not fair at least in terms of the transactional process. We believe that we can change up the space by utilizing collateralized loans. This will open up a new market that is currently dominated by legacy financial institutions that charge crazy costs to the users. So, we have a lot more protocols on our roadmap and it’s not going to be easy. There’s going to be a lot of tinkering under the bonnets to get the car on the road.
SkyVision:
What differentiates you guys from your competitors?
Sienna Network:
That’s always a tough question to ask, we’re not the only ones doing good work, right? If there’s no competition, then there’s no business. We are fans of a lot of our competitors. Not all of them obviously. But yea as I’ve said before, our team has a great mix of skills, and we’re wonderful, fun and intelligent. We have an entrepreneurial culture at heart. It’s all about long-term for us. Resilience and persistence are probably two the best qualities that any human can have. And we should all teach it to our children. Our team has true grit, and we really believe that that makes us different. The team, the belief, the interaction between the people and the team. No one’s unique but we kind of think we are.
SkyVision:
Do you guys plan to incorporate traditional finance and trading into your ecosystem?
Sienna Network:
Not really in a traditional context. If we consider the DeFi technology as an enzyme, we are convinced that this catalyst can amalgamate financial products from the Legacy side of old banking systems and traditional non-fintech innovations. I mean just think of Fintech in London. There’s always been two schools of thought about whether you create something new or you work with something that was already there. I mean we obviously can’t ignore traditional finance. A lot of this stuff is just native to us as humans. And I think we’d be foolish to ignore anything like that including trading.
SkyVision:
Now that you are about to launch your product, what are some things you would have done differently?
Sienna Network:
Ah you’ve hit me right at the end. Give me a minute to think about it… Okay, so, the three things that we would have done differently, would be in no particular order. I think we would have scaled up the coding capacity faster. But then, probably everybody would say that. Oh well, and apart from that, I think our team asks a lot from each other and sometimes we just need to chill out a bit. Be more realistic, you know?
SkyVision:
What are some things that you would do the same?
Sienna Network:
As for things we would do the same, we would stick with the onboarding of strong advisers. Um, you know, the technology behind the company is amazing. I think our long-term need and wants is to be compliant and regulatory. We were very quick in getting the best legal minds involved to ensure that we were doing the right thing. This also greatly contributed to the project. And as per usual, we would also stick with being decentralized on day one. And I think we did that quite well! While we’re not perfect, we strongly believe in improving and we plan to do that in the long-term 🚀.
About SkyVision Capital
SkyVision Capital (SVC) was founded with the mission to promote new, open decentralized technology and its development. We provide advisory services and a strong ecosystem to overcome barriers allowing clients to succeed.
Our team is composed of experienced senior lawyers, financial analysts, entrepreneurs and strategists. We have deep technical knowledge, strong business experience, and legal acumen in blockchain. We are consultants to our partners and assist them with scaling their startups by jumpstarting their vision, accelerating their fundraising and providing them with go-to market strategies.
We are your LAUNCH PAD and NAVIGATOR in the uncharted LEGAL territory of blockchain and decentralization. We do the due diligence and take care of the details, so you can focus on what you do best; disrupting the future.
