Interview: Choise.com CEO Vladimir Gorbunov on Aggregating the Best Crypto Solutions

In today’s interview, Finance Magnates is speaking with Vladimir Gorbunov, the CEO of Choise.com, a MetaFi ecosystem that aims to bring together the best-in-class crypto solutions to breach the gap between CeFi and DeFi.

Mr. Gorbunov is a serial FinTech entrepreneur and has been actively involved with the crypto industry since 2017. His company Choise.com recently went through a rebranding stage, and we reached out to him for some insights into the company plans and what place it’s looking to take on today’s crypto stage.

Your company has been a key industry player for over five years. Can you walk us through the rebranding process to Choise.com?

We began operating in the crypto market in 2017, during one of its most difficult periods. From 2018 to 2020, the market was going through a crypto winter, and it required products that would promote mass adoption of digital assets.

We were among the first to launch crypto cards, introduce the ability to transfer cryptocurrencies by phone number, and offer the possibility of making crypto/fiat withdrawals to Mastercard cards around the world.

Over the 5 years we have come a long way, building a company that operates in 80 countries of the world and serves 700,000 clients. I believe that by the end of this year we will have reached 1M+ users.

And as our company continued to develop, we came to realize that, just as we set out to solve the issues with the centralized part of the crypto market in 2017, today we need to do the same for the decentralized sector, as well. The realization settled that we needed to change our strategy and move on towards something new.

What is Choise.com’s mission moving forward? How does this cater to a growing segment of your clients, i.e., crypto users?

We set ourselves the mission of breaking the divide between DeFi and CeFi. And Choise.com is our answer to this task. In simple terms, it is a marketplace for reliable and profitable crypto products. Our desired goal is to make sure that our users get the opportunity to earn more. To this end, we search for the best services created by other crypto projects, assess their viability and profitability, and integrate into our platform.

We wish to free our clients from the necessity of choosing between different protocols and services by placing them all under a single roof. To enable people to earn more without having to spend all their time studying new products and choosing the most suitable ones.

Choise.com positions itself as a MetaFi ecosystem. What kind of meaning do you put into this term?

We call Choise.com a MetaFi ecosystem, because it gathers multiple CeFi and DeFi solutions in a single marketplace to offer more opportunities to earn on crypto. New centralized and decentralized products appear every day, but most people find it problematic to make use of them. They are constantly forced to move between different blockchains, platforms, and wallets to get access to more liquidity. That is why having a unified marketplace that brings all these solutions together is advantageous.

Online marketplaces in general are a very popular trend today across various industries - most people have heard of big names like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and others like them. These kinds of platforms allow third parties to provide services or sell products to a wide array of people. These services can range from car rentals, to real estate, to physical goods, and much more.

What we offer is similar to these platforms, only in the crypto sector. Crypto and blockchain companies that have developed their own solutions (liquidity pools, yield farming, lending protocols, etc.) can come to us and integrate their services on our platform. As a result, Choise.com users can connect to those solutions and gain access to new earning opportunities.

At the same time, the partner companies whose services we have onboarded gain an additional channel through which they can sell their products, expand the user base, build brand recognition, and generate revenue at a quicker pace. Everybody wins.

What is your stance on the crypto market and the winter period it is currently going through?

Here it must be said that, since we operate in the earn market, we are not particularly influenced by seasons. Be it a crypto winter or a crypto summer, people are always looking for ways to maximize their gains.

In this regard, scammers and ponzi schemes represent a much bigger cause for concern. You need to be very careful in this market, as there is no shortage of bad actors that promise high returns without taking any responsibility for the results. At Choise.com our task is precisely to keep our customers safe from unreliable offers, as we assess all products and services that we add to our platform. Our team of analysts has been working in the crypto market for five years now and understands well which projects have solid purpose and tokenomics behind them, and can promise real gains to clients, and which do not.

What kind of solutions does Choise.com offer as part of its suite of products?

In terms of products and services, we have several different categories to look at.

First, there is a group of products that allow hodlers to earn. To people who seek to hold their assets during this crypto winter, Choise.com offers the opportunity to earn on staking and multiply their gains. This is the simplest of our offerings. For example, we offer crypto savings accounts where users can get up to 17% yearly interest on their digital assets, including up to 15% APY on stablecoins.

Another path our clients can take is to increase their crypto assets by opening a deposit on our platform. Choise.com then undertakes the task of managing these assets and using safe mechanics to boost their capital.

We are also developing credit products, which we intend to unveil for the broad public soon. These products will be of use to people who have crypto, do not want to sell it, but need liquidity.

In such circumstances, they can come to us, stake crypto assets in exchange for stablecoins, and then use said stable coins to pay for whatever they need.

And I’m just scratching the tip of the iceberg with what I’ve listed so far. We have a team of 170 people working on a whole array of products meant to enable our clients to earn more, during the crypto winter and beyond.

What is the Charism in-house DeFi platform and how does this interact with existing DeFi solutions?

Charism is our newly developed protocol that sets the mission to unite various blockchains and products based on these blockchains in one place. The end goal here is for a user not to need many private keys and accounts related to various services on different blockchain networks.

In the near future, we will combine our CeFi and DeFi services in one interface via Charism and enable easy management of funds within it. All the difficult technicalities associated with the transition from one system to another will be handled internally within the system. And due to the aggregation of transactions in the CeFi part of our ecosystem, the commissions will become smaller. All of which leaves users with the freedom of having all their options available to them with just one tap of a button.

What are some current CeFi products on offer by Choise.com?

Among Choise's centralized products are infrastructure products that make it easy to enter or exit the market and operate within it. They include things like buying cryptocurrencies via a card or a bank account, various wallet solutions and the ability to make crypto/fiat transfers. We also have a series of centralized products related primarily to staking and asset management services that we are adding on our platform soon.

By creating a MetaFi ecosystem, we want people to no longer think in terms of "centralized" or "decentralized". We want them to have access to all our products, and not have different user experiences when making use of them.

What lies ahead for Choise.com and are there any new and exciting products currently in development?

Naturally, we have all kinds of interesting services and products that we are planning to launch soon. You are actually the first outside party with whom I’m sharing these updates.

One of our upcoming products is crypto insurance: when buying crypto, a user can hedge against market volatility by setting up a minimum price for a period of time. And should the price of the bought asset fall beyond the fixed level, the difference will be compensated to the client. This particular product is going to be highly useful in the crypto winter conditions, in order to encourage people to enter the market.

We are also adapting some of the centralized products for the decentralized market, working to introduce things like dual-currency interest accounts, which will allow users to get significantly greater returns on a pair of cryptocurrencies (up to 180-200% APR), practically without carrying any big risks.

At Choise.com, our fundamental mission is to ensure that any person always has the right and the opportunity to earn more. It doesn't matter if our users are more supportive of the centralized or decentralized sector – we seek to help both.