Interview with Tony Tang, Founder and CEO of Ink Finance

It's always great to learn about how partners are using Humanode and what results they get. We are extremely pleased to introduce Tony Tang Founder and CEO of Ink Finance - Humanode business partner. For those who are unfamiliar, Ink Finance is an all-in-one DAO toolset, enabling a wide range of ecosystems to establish their governance reputation, manage communities, strengthen fiscal control, and connect with cross-chain DeFi investors.

Let's find out how Ink Finance work and their future plans with Humanode.

1- Tell us about yourself and INK Finance?

I am a financial industry veteran coming from an engineering background. I’ve served as managing director at several top international financial institutions, working in areas of FICC derivatives, ABS, Asset Management, and PE/VC.

Ink Finance is built on our core team’s vision that Web3 will reshape the operational framework for organizations to run their fiscal and financial affairs. Its mission is to be the most flexible, comprehensive, and powerful decentralized financial SaaS, enabling organizations from all walks of life to drive their growth using Web3 finance.

2- Why do you think Web3 is the future? And what is the role of DAOs in the Web3 ecosystem?

Web3 is at a watershed moment, in the sense that blockchain technology must prove itself to unlock real values from real economies and communities, as opposed to being a regime of self-induced and hyper-financialized speculation. Yet real individual values and the creator economy cannot be realized without organized activities, and DAOs are the perfect vehicle for carrying out organizational tasks.

A wide range of businesses can take full advantage of the unique features of DAOs built on blockchain to dramatically enhance the efficiency of engaging with their users and communities, where the traditional boundaries between employers and employees, merchants and consumers, investors and management, etc. can be redrawn in the most profound ways.

3- How did you come up with the idea of INK Finance?

First of all, our team comes from a deep fintech background. Most of us have played big parts in using Web2 technology to reshape the operations of traditional financial institutions, and we see Web3 as a more profound movement that can reshape the institutions themselves. Ink Finance is a natural extension of our product and development expertise in corporate finance, investment banking, and fintech applications to the Web3 world.

The project was initiated as a pure financial infrastructure focused on heterogeneous asset wrapping and risk management on-chain, based on our deep fintech background in asset-backed finance and big data based risk management. Under the guidance of our vital institutional advisors, we then repositioned Ink Finance as a full-blown financial management Web3 SaaS that can service any DAO with dynamic financial needs and economic governance.

4- What role do you think INK Finance plays in Web3?

We strive to be the go-to platform, a back and middle office financial platform, for all decentralized organizations looking to reach their missions via prudent and professional financial tooling. From metaverse & gamefi to on-chain VC/Angel, to real-world asset managers, to community-based content creators, we see Ink Finance play a critical role as an enabler of value creation.

5- Describe three main reasons why investors, businesses, and other people should be interested in INK?

For investors, Ink Finance offers a clear and well-defined utility that will capture the explosive growth value as DAOs become a more and more viable form of governance and management. The economic model of Ink Finance sets itself apart from competitors in that it establishes a clear value proposition that’s viable in a traditional sense and a crypto context.

For businesses or organizations, Ink Finance lowers the barriers to entry to Web3 to the minimum and offers the most flexible way for a DAO to start, evolve, and adapt. INK neither defines your DAO nor does it limit or “categorizes” a DAO. We fully understand the very dynamic and fluid nature of the Web3 environment, in which no one can be sure of the path to success.

INK gives a DAO all the convenience and flexibility, without sacrificing power and professional rigor.

For the general Web3 public, Ink Finance is your DAO financial product supermarket. Here you will see the well-managed DAOs offering their bespoke financial products with total transparency regarding risk control and their ecosystem health. Out goes throwing darts in the dark hoping for luck, in comes prudent investment decisions based on facts and credibility. DeFi investment in blockchain will have a different feel and meaning.

6- Seeing the recent developments in blockchain and the web3 ecosystem, what are the most crucial aspects to look at?

Ecosystems need to think deeply and hard beyond selling vaguely defined “utility” tokens. They need to, instead, examine the inherent ability to generate values, and hence assets, that are coherent with their missions. Financing should no longer be achieved by pumping and dumping meta tokens; it should be gained by transparent and robust management and the true ability to produce useful assets.

7- You announced your partnership with Humanode recently. What attracted you to Humanode, and how will Humanode enhance INK Finance?  What issues do you think this partnership solves?

Our motto: Finance is built on credit, and credit is competence. No one automatically deserves to receive money because you are on blockchain, and everyone has to prove their “money worthiness”. In the process of establishing credit and reputation, the ecosystem’s integrity - that of its managers and members - is the key component.

We highly value Humanode’s one-person-one-node, and we see it as a perfect decentralized solution for Ink Finance to implement our integrity-assuring framework.

We see a perfect account/login management system in the Web3 operating environment, which, when combined with our stake-to-govern mechanism, offers the convenience, rigor, and incentive for solid Sybil resistance and integrity maintenance. We believe this combination is the starting point for any DAO to establish its competence and eventually its creditworthiness which is the absolute necessity leading to its successful financing.

The partnership between our two protocols will address one of the most pervasive issues that would hinder the mass adoption of Web3, and we are confident that this partnership can go a long way toward tearing down the barrier of entry and prove to be a great example of collaboration and growth sharing that is the aspiration of the decentralized paradigm.