A former TON Foundation executive is launching Affluent, a cryptocurrency investment app on Telegram featuring yields and lending.
Affluent, a money market protocol built on Telegram-linked blockchain, The Open Network (TON), announced its full launch Monday.
Co-founded by ex-TON Foundation director Justin Hyun, Affluent aims to introduce trustless crypto asset management to Telegram, allowing users to benefit from decentralized finance (DeFi) lending and yields without associated complexities.
“Our goal is to transform complex DeFi services into a simple and intuitive experience where users of all backgrounds and knowledge levels can easily invest and grow their wealth,” Affluent co-founder and co-CEO Hyun said in an announcement shared with Cointelegraph.
Strategy Vault and Vault Manager system
Built natively on TON, Affluent implements key features like Strategy Vault and the Vault Manager system, which are designed to automate asset allocation and yield strategies.
“By depositing assets into a vault, users let Affluent manage their assets via a combination of automated smart contracts and expert management,” Affluent’s announcement reads, adding that user deposits are auto-spread across different lending markets for optimized returns.
The protocol is built to “balance with human judgment,” enabling users to interact with a clean and simple interface, while expert-managed vaults work in the background to optimize for long-term performance and safety.
Combination of TradFi and DeFi
Hyung Lee, another Affluent co-founder who brings traditional finance (TradFi) options trading expertise, said the app will deliver a unique combination of TradFi and DeFi experience.
By applying the mix, Affluent aims to create a new mechanism that will allow users to earn interest in a manner as simple as depositing assets with a single click via Telegram.
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“By engineering solutions from traditional finance and developing them into a fully modular blockchain-based infrastructure, we are building the next generation of DeFi protocols — one that has all the advantages of Web3, but with the security and risk management of TradFi,” Lee said.
“Flash loans are not a risk”
The crypto lending industry is known to be vulnerable to different issues, including the highly volatile nature of crypto assets. According to co-CEO Hyun, Affluent does not overlook this problem.
“The Affluent protocol has been audited by Trail of Bits, an industry-leading security audit firm. Affluent’s design inherently embeds robust risk management via the implementation of its isolated lending pools,” Hyun told Cointelegraph.
The isolated pool structure includes the risk of bad debt to a specific lending pool if any arises, protecting the entire protocol from being affected. The co-CEO also mentioned that Affluent’s Vault Managers are “highly sophisticated institutions which constantly monitor utilization rates” to optimize user deposits.
“Flash loans are also not a risk due to TON’s asynchronous design,” Hyun said, adding:
“There is currently no insurance on user deposits, but as the protocol grows, this is something we will take into consideration.”
Affluent’s launch follows years of Hyun’s work at the TON Foundation, where he served as the head of incubation and director of institutional growth, launching the first global TON hackathon and onboarding funds and institutions to the TON ecosystem. Before co-founding Affluent, co-CEO Lee also co-founded the DeFi research and development firm B-Harvest.
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