unFederalReserve — 2022 Year in Review

9 min readJan 6, 2023

The Emperor Has No Clothes is a great children’s story that reminds us to approach opportunity with healthy skepticism. Unfortunately, entering 2023 major headlines in mainstream media, when there are crypto headlines at all, tend to solely focus on the amounts of financial damage caused by crypto’s bad actors, faulty software, attacks and mishaps.

Where the mainstream media fails us is in its lack of inspirational stories around how decentralization has improved the lives of others. While Coindesk (“congrats on FTX scoop Ian”), Cointelegraph, and the Block have done their part to inform us of true advances in use case and adoption of the technology, we need more advocates in senior positions of power.

As a company, we advocate for greater participation in local, state and federal government by crypto hodlers and industry stakeholders (e.g. accountants, advisors, journalists, etc.) As with most challenges the governments around the world face, we do not need regulation creation, but rather regulation enforcement. All major global powers have at their disposal the legislative tools and laws in place to deal with data privacy, banking, money-handling, alternative asset brokering and investment. We would like to see U.S. judges (and judicial systems globally) leverage those extant positions and opine on digital cases directly by making verdicts or letting juries decide.

Publicly available rules and a judicial track record will do wonders for the safety of crypto users, the developers pushing this innovation forward, and the countless hundreds of millions of people around the world disenfranchised and abandoned for whom crypto would help.

We lived by our core principles (e.g. Safety, Courtesy, Inclusion, Efficiency and Experience) in 2022 and it was reflected through our commitment to our customers, users, stakeholders and all others.

In 2022, we saw a serious contraction in DeFI and blockchain investment, broadly. We were severely impacted in early January with the collapse of OHM and TIME, and our own token, as we had a corporate treasury dedicated to building pool-to-peer platforms for avalanche, polygon, and a few more. Thankfully, we were able to stabilize the business but not without having to let go of some great people. Our advisors, Martine Niejadlik, Mike Forester and others continue to be great advocates for the business, and we are better capitalized, connected and on target than we were when this journey started December of 2017 and as late as December 2020.

Special thanks to David Beazley, Executive Partner at Alumni Venture Group and the 11.2 Ventures folks (Kurt Johnson and Gary Scheier) as well as Gerbian King at Atipana for participating in interviews throughout the year.

Please join me in looking back over the year’s accomplishments and additional special thanks to Incubella Technologies and WebdevelopPro for the many years of support and invention.

Looking forward to January when we will release the 2023 Roadmap. Have a safe and healthy holiday season. -Howard

Below are the quarter-by-quarter tasks we wanted to see complete in 2022; so, let’s see where we stand! Here is a link to the original Roadmap 2022 article put out in January. We’ve switched up the order based on product priority.

ReserveLending

Product Overview: ReserveLending (RL), a decentralized P2P (“DeFi”) protocol that allows crypto holders of certain tokens to Deposit, Earn and Borrow.

Calibration of stablecoin interest rate models to align with defirate.com metrics-COMPLETE
Collateral factor review and, for vote, possible adjustments-COMPLETE
Maintenance, debugging and further documentation-COMPLETE
Continued evangelism of market leading APYs-COMPLETE

Final comments: It is great to see the team accomplish everything it set out to achieve. The platform had good liquidity and usage throughout the year. Over 100 unique borrowers over the past twelve months joined the fray, which is incredible when you consider we had no direct advertising in place until just a few weeks ago. Not to spoiler alert the 2023 roadmap, but RL will play a KEY role in our success next year. By far, our most viable and vibrant product.

Analytics here: https://dune.com/browse/dashboards?q=unfederalreserve

ReserveLending+

Product Overview: RL+ is a permissioned version of ReserveLending (RL) for use by KYC’d institutions only, and custodied by a Host qualified entity, leveraging information about product, rates and usability obtained from other institutional DeFi programs, and our discussions with major KYC partners. This is the next RB2B waypoint.

Create permissioned core unContracts (the “Core”) — COMPLETE
Create a username/password 2FA interface — COMPLETE
Build out ReserveLending+ UI experience — COMPLETE
Partner with a broker-dealer to custody the Core — COMPLETE (we partnered with Aegis Trust Company)
Market to KYC’d entities through strategic partnerships with KYC partner platforms. -ONGOING (Notes: to date we have 3 or 4 entities signed up with our banking partner [NextBank], and I expect it will take 12 months or so to get them over to self-custodied DeFI given the pace of adoption, market demand, benefit to their business and market conditions.)

Final comments: I’m going to give us a B+ here. We had a Trail of Bits audit which in and of itself is a stand-out accomplishment. We have worked to get entities into NextBank, but frankly, we have limited resources to sell banking services to crypto entities. The tech will age very well given its simplicity, and with not many entrants targeting self-custodial pool-to-peer lending for asset-rich, non-crypto native (necessarily) companies, we have time on this front.

ReserveFunding

Overview: ReserveFunding (RF) is a DeFi to TradFi platform that allows cryptowealthy, U.S. citizens to participate in 506(c) alternative investment opportunities without having to sell their crypto. Our first fund, Atipana and our new splash page encourages guests to select the types of funds in which they are interested, and allows funds to sign up to be considered for listing!

Gathering marketing data on selected fund types — COMPLETE (result was inconclusive regarding which funds to target. ESG investment did not come up as a priority amongst Crypto HNWs, and more interest was placed on shorter lock-up periods and higher returns than the nature of the investment itself.)
Creating fund acquisition pipeline from RF entrants-COMPLETE (we have onboarded ReserveFunding Series II and Trivium2, a direct feeder fund to the Alumni Venture Group.)
Maintenance, debugging and further documentation-COMPLETE
Expand Atipana Opportunity Fund to first TradFi vault-COMPLETE (timing is likely late fall, but this is in the mix)
Design Percent® Aggregator interface per MOU (Memo Of Understanding) allowing users to invest in all Percent® deals-COMPLETE (but not in a good way, lol. Percent indicated as the market was collapsing that they did not have a digital asset strategy nor did they intend to incorporate this into their development roadmap anytime soon. This is understandable given the success they’ve had in other areas and the persistent uncertainty from some market participants regarding the ability to make an offer available but not solicit investment, underwriting the source of funds and general stigma that comes with accepting this asset class. It won’t stop all from trying, thank goodness, but it stopped these guys!)

Final thoughts: When payroll protection loans came to the forefront in the pandemic, we created a UI tool for banks to make processing those loans easier. There was not a single buyer for that tech because as soon as the opportunity to make money off those loans faded, the banks that stuck with the product had tech in place. ReserveFunding is a similar issue. The funds we’ve worked with, including closing our first PE fund deal in Atipana, love the concept. However, with the collapse of the digital asset market a lot of value either dropped or left the ecosystem. As a result, there is really not a use-case for a bridge from crypto to LP interests in PE funds. It’s okay, though, from our perspective. It does not cost anything to host what is up there and we will consider listing more opportunities if the circumstances make sense.

That about covers product, so let’s talk about some of this year’s highlights.

This list is not comprehensive but does speak to our own advancement relative to broader market challenges brought about by fraud and mismanagement. We are here, and we have done these things in an effort to move the project forward. Thank you for your appreciation.

Open Market Purchases commenced around this time last year. The total eRSDL purchased out of the market under the open market purchase program was approximately 6.6 million or 1.46% in supply removed from the market through either burning or storage in corporate Treasury since the program’s inception.

We launched in Rinkeby, ReserveLending+, an institutional pool-to-peer over collateralized lending and borrowing platform. Akin to AAVE Arc, we’ve partner with NextBank, subsidiary of publicly-traded fintech, NextPlay Technologies, to allow only permissioned, U.S. commercial businesses access to the platform. Trail of Bits, the nation’s leading provider of blockchain contract security audits, completed its audit of ReserveLending+ and the results were extremely encouraging. Coupled with our engagement with Aegis Trust Company (that, coincidentally, led to Howard being named their Interim President), we were able to parse together the pieces we think will be critical to decentralized finance going forward.

Our stablecoin interest models were updated to generate the optimal borrower/lender spread without increasing risk to either party. The result has been healthy liquidity and competitive market rates. You should really consider parking your stablecoins in the platform to just partially offset inflation if nothing else. And, if you need capital or want to short, or increase purchasing power, the borrow side is highly competitive. Always consult your financial advisor before making a decision like that; however, there is always a risk of losing everything.

Seeing Atipana funded through a variety of asset types was something else to witness. It was the future of finance delivered by our own hands. Adding Trivium, the only non-alumni network entity to be a feeder fund for the Alumni Venture Group, to our listings generated a good friendship along with another use case of how our licensing fees could directly feed into our buy/burn mechanism.

We also began our relationship with ReserveDAO in 2022, bringing forward the concept originally raised by our development team, to #BuyTheBank.

Our migration to Wyoming was completed in 2022 and from a house-keeping perspective the company is set up for great success in the years to come. If you are new to unFederalReserve, then please feel free to reach out Howard Krieger, CEO through his LinkedIn account (https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardjkrieger), and welcome aboard. For those of you who have been a hodler for a while now, thank you for the continued support.

Social Media

Here are some statistics to chew on when trying to measure us up against your other pet projects or the broader market.

Twitter Engagement

Tweets — 754
Tweet impressions (000s) — 3,815,700
Profile Visits (000s) — 1,906,900
Mentions — 26,390
New Followers — 34,616

+2000 followers

YouTube

44,600 views
1,500 viewing hours
77 new subscribers

We continue to enjoy vibrant discussions on Telegram and Discord and invite you all to connect in 2023.

Conclusion

The key to success for a start-up is a good product, good team and good capital. We are positioned well if these are the only measures that mattered. While 2022 was a tumultuous year for markets, and we were no exception, we let our principles guide us through these rough waters. For an instant, if we were to remove 2021 from the history of our business, 2022 would be a significant year-over-year improvement from where we were in late 2020. We will carry the momentum implied by all but that exceptional year into 2023 and continue to deliver on our promises. The future of finance is quickly approaching.

About Residual Token, Inc. dba unFederalReserve

In business since 2018, Residual’s team of former bankers, technologists, and compliance professionals have been exploring ways to make crypto lending and borrowing markets safer and traditional markets more efficient. They currently have in development a handful of blockchain-based software available for license. Its flagship product, ReserveLending, allows permissionless access to crypto holders to deposit, earn and borrow top digital assets safely, efficiently, and effectively for cash management, hedging, or speculative purposes.

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