Ask-Me-Anything with Lifetise Co-Founder Nick Wasmuth — A Recap
Incase you missed it — we hosted an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) live chat session with Nick Wasmuth, Co-Founder and COO of Lifetise, in our Telegram group (https://t.me/lifetisechat) on May 5, 2022. We are so thankful for the proactive participation of our 75,000 followers from all over the world.
For those who missed it or who wanted to revisit the exciting Q&As, we have prepared this recap of the answers to all the (#) questions Nick answered from our community.
Could you please introduce yourself and your role at Lifetise?
I’m Nick Wasmuth, co-founder and COO at Lifetise. I was part of the team that grew Vitality into a billion dollar business using Play-to-Earn to improve people’s physical health, whilst reducing the cost of health & life insurance.
We’ve transferred that model to Lifetise as we use P2E to improve people’s financial health. 🤸♂️🤸♀️
Can you give a brief explanation of Lifetise?
Lifetise is a Metaverse with a Purpose 💫. You design the life you want with Lifetise’s virtual life simulator and we show you how to achieve it in real life.
You pick your goals in life (it could be buying a new laptop, or going on vacation, or saving for college, or getting a down payment to buy an apartment).
Now based on your current financial situation, it might take you some time to afford these goals. But Lifetise is here to show you how to hit your goals faster — by staking and earning $LIFE tokens and by using products from our DeFi and TradFi partners.
It’s all about helping you get the things you want in life quicker, easier and cheaper!
What have you achieved so far and what’s your roadmap for this year?
Unlike most pre-IDO projects, we’re an established business with a successful track record.
We were part of Accenture’s prestigious fintech accelerator in 2019, and since then we’ve built and launched products with tens of thousands of users. We have been named a top fintech company in the UK where we first launched.
We have many exciting plans for this year.
Firstly, we will be announcing dates for our $LIFE token IDO very soon and we have TrustPad and Occam as launchpads.
Staking rewards will be available straight after IDO, making it easy for HODLers to stake and earn APY.
Then later in the year we will launch phase one of P2E mode, where users will earn $LIFE tokens for using the platform and being engaged in the community.
Also, we are talking to some major DeFi protocols to be our cornerstone DeFi partners, so we will be integrating them into the platform progressively.
Plus, we’re going to be hosting lots of exclusive events and giveaways for our community, so it’s going to be non-stop and high activity from here!
What are your plans for growing your user base? Lifetise started out as a UK project didn’t it? Are you going to go global and what’s your planned timetable for that?
Yes, Lifetise started out in the UK, like a lot of the big fintech companies like Revolut and Monzo. And yes, the plan is to become a global metaverse project, open to everyone everywhere in the world.
We have designed and architected the platform so that it can support people in many different countries worldwide.
In terms of growing the user base, we will focus on building communities in key markets where we’re seeing the demand for Lifetise is especially strong, including Southeast Asia and the US. We’ve got our go-to-market strategy in place that takes full advantage of native Web3 channels, from KOLs to community, partnerships and airdrops, in order to supercharge growth and loyalty.
As we are a DeFi aggregation platform, we will be partnering with other protocols and other partners in the ecosystem for co-marketing initiatives to mutually grow our user bases.
How would you rate your team compared to other DeFi projects? Coming from a Web2 background what makes you confident about delivering on the roadmap?
I always think it’s too easy for me as co-founder to say that we have an amazing team, so instead I will give you feedback that we got from one of the YGG founders who described our team as “one of the best I’ve seen in all of DeFi”!
We keep hearing the expression that there are a lot of projects in DeFi, but not many businesses and I think that’s why we stand out. The senior leadership team at Lifetise is very experienced in running businesses.
As I said at the beginning, I came from Vitality, which grew to be a billion dollar business.
Caroline, our CEO has worked in senior roles for big technology companies including Rakuten, Deliveroo and Blippar.
And Stefan our CTO has previously built telco, banking and fintech platforms in Canada and Europe.
We’re a team of 10 in total with very talented, creative and hard-working team members.
We’re very confident about delivering on the roadmap as we are already an established business, so we have all the pieces in place already.
We’ve got some fantastic advisors supporting the project, across DeFi and blockchain (from Occam.fi, Bitcoin.com, Currency.com), TradFi (from BlackRock and McKinsey) and the games industry (from Microsoft and Kwalee Games with over 500,000 downloads).
Plus we’ve hired incredibly experienced blockchain developers who have contributed to AllianceBlock, Tally, and the Graph.
Where does revenue come from in the project?
We’re pretty unique in this sense, because we have a dual revenue stream of both crypto revenue and fiat revenue. This makes us less exposed to fluctuations in either market.
Essentially, we get paid a transaction fee whenever we recommend one of our partners to you and you choose to use that partner. So that could be one of TradFi partners, like Habito or Trussle in the UK, where you choose to take a mortgage through them to buy an apartment. Or one of our DeFi partners, where you use their protocol to take a loan using some of your BTC or ETH as collateral.
Where we also do things differently is that we will share our revenue with users. So when you use one of our partners, we’ll give you some $LIFE token as cashback. It’s our way of sharing the wealth that you help create for the ecosystem.
Have you found any challenges moving into blockchain and DeFi?
Actually, we have found this to be a very natural transition for the business. Primarily because we knew it was something our community wanted, so having that continued support and enthusiasm as we build out all this new functionality has been amazing.
I was always very interested in launching a Lifetise token. I saw the potential utility for how it could incentivise and reward users for becoming more financially healthy. During the ICO wave back in 2017, I studied what worked and what failed — a lot of the use cases back then lacked genuine utility. But I could see the potential for Lifetise, because it just fits our whole business model and ethos.
I’m sure we will run into challenges as we grow (and things change so quickly in this space that it sometimes feels like dog years rather than human years!). We of course have to be respectful of the regulatory landscape and that’s something we take seriously — we are a business built on consumer trust.
Of course, there is always a race for hiring great blockchain developers and marketers who truly know the crypto space, but we have managed to attract some of the brightest in the business to the project. We’re a high energy and very solid team, so I’m feeling confident for the future that we can meet whatever challenges come our way.
Will users have to pay to use Lifetise?
No, it was always important to us that Lifetise is accessible for everyone. No matter where you are in the world, or what your financial situation is. So Lifetise is free to use and instead we take transaction fees from the partners we work with (as they usually have deeper pockets than individual users!).
You say you’re going to integrate with multiple DeFi partners. How do you choose which partners and how will you bring them onto the platform?
We’re taking the same approach that we took with our TradFi partners (which was successful).
With our TradFi partners, we selected them based on the quality of their service, their customer reviews and how transparent they were with customers about things like fees.
With DeFi protocols, we’re approaching projects which have a good track record, good TVL metrics and strong communities and teams.
We will onboard a mix of large and smaller projects, to give users a great choice of protocols for all their saving, earning, borrowing, investing and insurance goals. And we will be asking you, our community members, to recommend partners to bring into the ecosystem. If there are good DeFi projects that you think we should look at, please let us know.
In terms of onboarding them, we’re in discussions with a number of protocols, including Aave, Yearn Finance, and SwissBorg and part of my role is to develop strong relationships with all our target DeFi partners.
How will Lifetise be measuring and reporting its impact on user’s financial literacy through different life milestones? Thanks for all that you guys do!
Great question, thanks!
That’s really the beauty of what we’re building. Every time you set your goals, each goal is broken down into a series of smaller steps for you to take. You record your progress (which is how you earn tokens through P2E) and it also means we can see how well you’re doing against your goals. We can help if you get stuck on any steps and provide additional support.
We also report quarterly on the impact that our products have on people’s financial health. We have a series of metrics that we report against (including how well people are doing against their savings goals, number of users whose financial situation has improved during the period they have been using our app e.g. total savings/net worth, debt-to-earnings %, credit score, partner products accessed and money saved etc).
How can Lifetise help in Creating a token economy driven by the permissionless and decentralised power of blockchain?
This is what excites us as a DeFi aggregator. We can bring all of the power of DeFi protocols under our platform and make it easier for people to understand how to use them to finance their lives. In the traditional financial sector, many people are excluded from getting access to financial services, or you have to fill out long application forms and make sure you have a perfect credit score. The permissionless nature of the DeFi protocols that we will partner with means that it removes the gatekeeping — so we can empower more people globally to access financial products that help them get the things they want in life.
Lifetise is very much a mass-market platform, we are helping build awareness and capability amongst a much bigger audience to be able to take advantage of everything that blockchain finance offers.
What is the MISSION of Lifetise? How is your project designed build real benefits and investment return to global community of crypto investors? How will you create positive impact on people and in the digital ecosystem using #blockchain technology?
We could do a whole AMA on just the Lifetise mission! Everything we do is to help people from all walks of life build better financial health. So whether you are a Lifetise user, or an investor, the mission is the same. Let’s all build strong and sustainable wealth and bring more people into DeFi.
What made you decide to develop on Polygon?
A combination of lower gas fees, a strong ecosystem and lots of DeFi protocols that we can easily bring onto the Lifetise platform. There is already good liquidity on Polygon and it made sense for this to be our first L1 as a DeFi aggregator.
More AMA’s to come!
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