Host: Alright, we're live from definition at token 2049 in Singapore, and of course it's where institutions, builders in tokenized credit yield and stablecoins meet, and it is powered by accountable, the verification layer bringing institutional finance on chain. And right now I have the pleasure to be joined by Joanna Incheva, who is product and partnerships lead at Raven, a trading firm, uh, that is providing liquidity across crypto and prediction markets. Welcome to Fintech TV.
Joanna Incheva: Thank you very much.
Host: So Joanna, uh, for viewers who don't know Raven yet, what does the firm do and, uh, where do you operate?
Joanna Incheva: Thank you for your question. Uh, we do market making and high frequency trading. Uh, what that means is whenever, for example, somebody wants to, if uh you have an exchange, whenever you want to go to this exchange, and let's say buy a Tesla stock or some other type of stock or some other type of asset, there always has to be somebody on the other side selling you that asset. Um, if you wanna sell it, same thing, there has to be somebody on the other side buying that asset. Um. For that to happen at every single point in time because there are 7 billion people who are constantly a large portion of them active on any type of market really, for that to be realistic, you can't expect the other party to always be a human being. So that's where market makers join and they actually take the other party algorithmically and this is what we do. We operate in all types of markets of the sort of anything from crypto to more innovative markets of the sort of prediction markets. More traditional markets of the sort of equity, um, of the sort of commodities and so forth, right?
Host: And tell me more about the team's background and, and what did you set out to build when you actually started Raven.
Joanna Incheva: So as a team we have quite a long background specifically in the blockchain space. Um, I took co-founders, they joined the blockchain space back in 2016. Uh, they first started building in in uh wallet infrastructure. And then back in 2019 they joined the back then small company nowadays called Wintermute and one of them, currently our CTO called Yuri Mironovic, he actually became the head of Defi at Wintermute. So throughout the whole Defi summer and all of the first. Years of blockchain getting bigger and popular as a space, they were actually in the middle of the industry in one of the currently largest market makers out there, which later on inspired them to move on and create Raven.
Host: And I think it's quite you that I have to say congratulations on your recent uh funding round, right? And, and my question is what will the new capital help Raven do?
Joanna Incheva: It's a good question. The new strategic round is specifically designed to help us scale even further in the prediction market space. We are already quite, I would say quite experienced in everything in the traditional blockchain space, whether it's centralized or the centralized exchanges, but prediction market is still a very new space and it's very interesting. Because whereas there is at the same time lots of both retail interest and lots of uh institutional interest as of the past couple of months, liquidity in the space is still extremely thin, so that means that uh whenever large institutions are currently trying to join the space they can't really be as um effective as they want to be in the market because markets are not as efficient. So this is why we decided to move into this niche in the market.
Host: And how is making markets on a prediction platform different from doing it on a crypto exchange?
Joanna Incheva: Basically at the core of it it's a very similar business, I would say what makes it more different is the set up of the whole industry. So crypto has already been around for I mean already about 15 years, so even though it's still early of an industry, it's much more mature than prediction markets is. So whenever new founders, builders want to want to join the crypto space, for them it's much much frictionless because there's already so much resources, so many people around that could help them in the first move. In prediction markets that's still not the case. There is The space is very, very consolidated and thin at the moment, and that means that all of these early stage builders, which very, very much of them, for example, are very young people, lots of the prediction market builders are something of the sort of 20 to 25 years old, so all of these people need all kinds of support, and what we love doing at Raven is actually providing this support from all sides. So for us that would mean that it's not only liquidity that we do. Um, in their books or in their protocols and so forth, but it's also how do we make sure that their ecosystem is successful, how do we make sure that their product is successful, how do we make sure that they manage to connect with investors and everything of that sort.
Host: Right, uh, Joanna, thank you very much for joining us on, uh, FinTech TV. It's been a pleasure.
Joanna Incheva: Thank you as well.
