InkSight 4: Crypto financial instruments supermarket using DAO to level up

4 min readMay 25, 2022

An interview with INK’s partner, Ryan Chow, Co-founder of Solv Protocol

Solv Protocol is the first and largest decentralized marketplace for creating, trading and managing vouchers–NFTs that represent financial rights. As a close partner of Ink Finance and early investor, Solv Protocol’s co-founder Ryan Chow explains more about Solv’s leading products and the collaboration between INK and Solv.

1. Solv Protocol introduced a new class of financial instruments into the Web3 DeFi world, tailor made smart financial products & bespoke financial NFTs. Would you expand on how Solv’s innovative financial NFT fits into the process of financializing Metaverse or GameFi assets?

Many financial assets such as fixed-income and derivatives products require semi-fungible features, which means those assets need to be both unique and also be splittable. To achieve that, we designed the innovative ERC3525 token standard based on ERC721, which is a Financial NFT token standard for creating financial assets. Using ERC3525, we have launched two products: Vesting Voucher and Bond Voucher to support DAOs to mint, manage and trade their own locked allocations and bonds.

In terms of Metaverse and Gamefi assets, we believe many of them are income-yielding assets. Income-yielding assets are actually very good foundational layer assets to be wrapped into more advanced products. We are currently exploring using Gamefi assets as collateral for Bond Vouchers. Another interesting direction is to use these kinds of assets to create ABS.

2. Solv Protocol is introducing the “Initial Voucher Offering” as a new form of fundraising. What are the benefits for both fundraisers and the investors, compared to the traditional IEO or ICO methods?

IVO is supplemental to IEO and ICO, not a replacement. For fundraisers, IVO works very well for those who haven’t planned to list tokens but would like to start building their communities. Vesting Voucher is the product used to conduct IVO and it is a NFT that can represent token allocations. Projects can distribute Vesting Vouchers to thousands of people who will hold the token for the long term and naturally align their benefits with the interests of the project instead of worrying too much about the token price on the secondary market. Take Solv as an example, we haven’t launched our token yet but our $Solv Vesting Voucher currently has more than 6K holders’ addresses. IVO helped us to build a strong and powerful community from early on, which is essential for our long term growth.

For investors, buying Vesting Voucher is to gain early stage allocations with cheaper valuation of the projects they are interested in. The allocation is represented in NFT and can be easily traded in Solv Marketplace at any time. In the future, Vesting Voucher can also be used as collateral.

3. What other products are available or are currently in the pipeline for Solv Protocol?

Our very next step is to put emphasis on Voucher Airdrop — the upgradation of Vesting Voucher, which will better support projects to Airdrop through Vesting Voucher on our platform. Our goal is to provide more benefits to Solv users while helping project partners to gain new tractions. Voucher Airdrop is a very important product line that we believe to achieve this goal. For our next product in line, we are currently exploring the innovation in NFT installment and ABS. But before the new product launch, we focus on further optimizing Vesting Voucher and Bond Voucher.

4. Solv Protocol has participated in several rounds of INK’s fundraising; as an investor, what potential advantages do you see in INK as a financial DAO tooling protocol that is essential to supporting the construction and execution of financial instruments?

We believe Ink provides meaningful solutions for the industry. DAO Governance and DAO Financing are two areas that are under most discussions and are early in their developmental stage. Ink tries to build a full financial governance mechanism to help DAOs solve those two painful problems, which created a whole new primitive in the field. We also noticed that projects such as Mirror World have already adopted Ink’s solution. These all made us believe in the huge potential of Ink.

5. As a large-scale economic user of INK, can you elaborate on how INK’s financial DAO tools help enrich Solv Protocol’s product lines and market growth?

Solv can be described as a supermarket for financial instruments. We focus very much on the liquidity of such instruments. Ink Finance focuses more on the DAO governance and the generation of the financial instruments. Therefore, we formed a natural complementary relationship. With Ink helping more DAOs to establish financial governance mechanisms, the adoption of financial instruments will be promoted and expanded as well, which align with Solv’s growth as well.

Meanwhile, Solv’s Vesting Voucher and Bond Voucher can be included as one module of financial services Ink could provide in the early stage, which not only helps Solv Voucher gain more adoption but also helps Ink to provide DAOs with more powerful infrastructures.

InkSight column covers everything you should know about the DAO revolution. Featured guests are pioneers from Web3 industry, institutional investors, researchers, and founders, including our backers, partners, and ecosystem users.