Bloq, led by Jeff Garzik, is releasing a new product for investing in decentralized finance (DeFi) projects through cryptoasset staking.
Bloq’s new platform, Vesper, is marketed as an easy-to-use tool for DeFi products. Through Vesper, users will be able to block ETH, wBTC or USDC for staking from mid-November using one of the “storage pools”.
Bloq co-founder, former Bitcoin Core developer Jeff Garzik, said that after depositing cryptoassets, users can choose the level of staking risk for profit – aggressive or conservative. Among the conservative-risk DeFi protocols, Garzik says, are the well-known Aave and Compound applications. With an aggressive approach, the platform will invest cryptoassets in lesser-known projects.
“We’re all tired of farming and dumping,” Jeff Garzik said at the CoinDesk invest: Ethereum economy conference. “There must be a market to transform these risky and often sloppy investments into more professional operations.”
Vesper will only be offering pools with a conservative staking strategy from mid-November. However, Bloq said it plans to add other investment strategies and crypto assets to the platform in the future. Vesper is backed by its own VSPR token, which will be used to distribute rewards to users and developers.
While the initial investment strategies will be developed by the platform team, Vesper will also offer strategies from developers who can be rewarded in VSPR if their proposal is accepted by the community. The platform will charge users 5% of the profits generated from staking their cryptoassets and 1% for withdrawing money from “storage pools”.
“This is a simple passive income product,” Garzik said. Vesper’s approach is somewhat similar to the strategy followed by ETFs, where the due diligence of an investment product is mainly performed by the issuer, he said.
More and more companies are looking to enter the DeFi industry amid its growing popularity. This week, corporate fintech platform COTI developed a decentralized cryptocurrency market volatility index (cVIX) to help investors assess industry risks.
