On this joyful day, my guest is Mason CEO of HedgePay. In business management, Mason has been an innovator in business ownership for the past 10 years. He has directed several businesses to financial success, working side-by-side with employees, and focusing on active innovation to improve the overall adoption of new technologies. Mason holds a Master of science degree and has personally owned 3 businesses.
Chris: Hello. Thanks for being here. Let’s cut to the chase right away. HedgePay claims to have a “proprietary HedgeFi risk-reduction algorithm, to customize your BUSD rewards” — can you elaborate more on this algorithm and how does it work?
Mason: An algorithm was designed to essentially allow the hedgefi reward pool to be staked in the highest yield possible while mitigating volatility and risk we are familiar with in the crypto space. Small portions of the fund are actively traded utilizing specific crypto derivatives from our hedgefund manager but the majority of it is used in high yield stable staking protocols. This removes dependence from transactional volume to keep rewards flowing when volume and market is down.
Chris: Tell our readers about the inception of the business. Why BUSD?
Mason: This all originally started when I found myself constantly monitoring the price of crypto i wanted to purchase. I constantly was trying to time the markets with only my personal experience to guide me. This led to late nights, difficulty sleeping, and constantly watching tickers. It felt almost like an illness I had. I would be tired in the morning and still needing to work, be a husband, and a father. So I needed a solution. I wanted to create a token that provided passive rewards that allowed someone to buy, hold, and receive them. Many other companies have ideas similar to this, but many of them fall into the mistake of depending on one crucial factor. Volume. Most passive reward tokens require volume as the means to provide reflections to their holders, which is often great initially but tends to wane as excitement about the product dies down. Soon many of these projects are almost bereft of any volume leading to a complete dead-stop with rewards.
So our solution to this was to create the hedgefi reward pool. Utilize transactional taxes to fill this fund, use a variety of ways to generate rewards from this fund and spend 80% on BUSD rewards for the biggest supporters and holders and 20% on buyback staking protocol. However, that plan still required a dependence on volume, at least initially. So as a backup, we decided to create a company that offers software services to real world companies, and crypto projects. The revenue from these sales, will cover costs, then be broken up into 50% into the HedgeFi Rewards pool and 50% into the company treasury. The company treasury is used for marketing and development. This way, we start off as a small startup crypto company and as we grow and offer more services and corner a spot on the market, the hedgefi rewards will continue to grow not only from transactions and staking, but also from a company earning in this space.
BUSD was chosen because it was regulated by the NYDFS and available for 1:1 customer redemption. I also liked that they fully aggregated their assets as opposed to some stablecoins which have recently come under scrutiny of the United States Federal Government and regulators.
Chris: There are free monthly rewards, aren’t there?
Mason: The rewards aren’t just monthly, they accrue continuously. The fees associated with collection of the rewards drop to their minimum every 30 days. This allows the maximum staking yield for the most patient of holders, and contributes to the overall health of the hedgefi rewards pool.
Chris: Sweet! And what are some unique features of your token, namely HPAY?
Mason: We are essentially one of the first tokens focusing on volume independence from rewards which leads to longer term sustainability of passive reflections. We are also working on an aggregator dex that is currently in beta. This shops around for the best prices on the established DEXs within the blockchain and keeps a record of the savings with a log for each user. The Dex profits are also allocated to rewards as well, so users will be increasing the health of the HedgeFi reward pool with every transaction.
Our automated IDO platform is also unique in that it offers several different ways for projects to raise liquidity and we charge some of the lowest rates in the space. 1 BNB and 1% of raised native chain tokens. We never take tokens from the projects because I never want to be in a position where I would have to sell someone’s project against their chart and damage their hard work. People can do liquidity raises, IDOs, private sales, fair launches, or amended fair launches. We also will offer KYC and audit badges through us or our partners. We also will be offering marketing services that any project can come and take advantage of at launch or at any time in their development. This also makes contributions to the HedgeFi reward pool, allowing further support for those looking to receive our passive rewards.
Chris: Alright. What’s next big thing on your roadmap?
Mason: Our next big project is a freelancer platform that allows crypto payments to be made, where developers, artists, writers, and all forms of creators can offer their services and receive the security that their payment is held in an escrow smart contract. Fiat purchases will also be available to be more inclusive, but HedgePay will end up being the main escrow contract for this platform. This will allow an increase in volume on our contract and for the profit associated with the platform to be distributed to holders of HedgePay. One of the ways we are planning to do this differently, is to have the fees associated with the platform to essentially be at a fixed rate. Historically, many people meet on freelancer platforms but take their business off the platform because the risk/reward ratio is more beneficial. They take a risk of getting scammed but some of the platforms have exorbitant rates against the transaction. Even being 20% or more. We decrease this to 5% max traditional crypto payments, 7% fiat payments, and 3% HPAY payments, mitigating the higher risk/reward ratio of other competitors and encouraging users to stay safe within our ecosystem.
Chris: One of the questions I reаlly wanna ask is: what are some main mistakes you have made along your journey but learned from them abundantly?
Mason: The marketing we had planned on launch day fell through, which was extremely unfortunate. We should have had more backup marketing plans in place. We also spent money on many different marketers that in the end was not worth the cost, this however did give us a list of marketers that were worth their weight in gold. It helped us formulate a list of services we can offer to projects that help them not make the same mistakes we made.
Another mistake was not to have a vesting schedule when we launched. The KOL raise of 150 BNB should have been vested, but we didn’t and that was a mistake. If we were to have launched on ETH like we had initially planned, then vesting probably wouldn’t have been as big of an issue as in my experience (feel free to correct me) ETH seems to be a more patient space. That being said, we also chose BSC because we wanted to be a solid legitimate and transparent project in the space because it is a great chain with significant potential. I was a little too idealistic about what we could accomplish in BSC, hoping to encourage more projects to be giving with their community and take a moral stance in a space that sometimes felt bereft of these qualities.
We also recently had a hack on our autocompound vault. On 17 Oct an early investor brought a minor issue with the auto compound vault to our attention. A fix was pushed and the next day someone set up a rogue contract that exploited a previously amended vulnerability. Really learned a lot from this. Hurt me and honestly frustrated me quite a bit. I have been spending countless hours and loads of money on our development and to be hit so hard was a tough lesson to learn. This did however help us amend our deployment process to ensure higher security going forward. All code that is pushed, and even fixes are now thoroughly reviewed before deployment. This thankfully happened before a large number of features are set to be released.
Chris: To finish up: tell us about your team and the common values you guys share.
Mason: Our team is Me, Ed the literal human work machine, and Dan our brilliant lead developer. During this process we have become close friends and a huge foundation of trust was built between us. We have even shuffled around tens of thousands of dollars without a concern of anything negative happening in our core team. That being said we are still large proponents of security, hence why we use Gnosis multi-signature wallet for our transactions in order to give the community a greater sense of security than just me saying “dont worry i trust these guys they’re my friends”.
We share the common values of hard work, a love of passive revenue streams, and communicating with kindness. We believe in honesty and transparency and want to build the best platform we possibly can, not just for us, but for the community that believes in us.
Chris: Thanks! Anything else you would like to mention? Where can we follow your updates?
Mason: I just want to mention that despite our current mcap, I truly believe that HedgePay is a hidden gem and I put my money where my mouth is. I personally have invested tens of thousands into the development of our project and probably close to six figures at this point. It’s not easy for someone like me to part with that much money. I’m not some hedge fund kid or inheritor of great wealth. I started from poverty and built businesses and made connections that afforded me a level of success. I still work for a living to feed and support my family and inflation and rising cost of living still hurts me like everyone else. But I work extra to earn enough that I can support our progress. I know the heights that HedgePay can reach and genuinely believe that all our hard work will pay off. That’s why I continue to invest so much into this project, because I care deeply about the community that believes in us and has continued to be loyal during bear and bull markets. I know things will improve, and look forward to seeing all our hard work pay off.
And as always, you can always message us with questions, concerns, and feedback. We love to hear from our community. https://t.me/hedgepay or message me at @hedgepayceo or Ed at @hedgepay_ed or Dan at @thegreenvixen.
Thanks for taking the time to interview me and I genuinely appreciate your interest in us.
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