I just attended the Haru Invest Meetup in Singapore

26 September 2022 at The Hive@36 Carpenter Street

Table of Contents
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Introduction

I just attended the Haru Invest Meetup in Singapore (2022). This was my first in-person crypto related event. Noting down my takeaways while they are still fresh in my mind.

I arrived at 7:15pm, and was guided to the venue at the ground floor by Justin. Registration was smooth. I reckon there were around 30-40 attendees and probably 10+ Haru Invest staff.

There were prepacked food boxes available but I passed on them as I had just finished my dinner.

The event consisted of:

  • a sharing session by the CEO Hugo about the history and operations of Haru Invest
  • Q&A session
  • quiz giveaway
  • social networking session.

Door gifts

Attendees were given a tote bag containing a Haru Invest T-shirt, a brochure, some stickers and a mystery gift box.

Haru Invest stickers
Haru Invest stickers
Mystery gift wrapped box
Mystery gift wrapped box
Revealed to be a rechargeable portable fan upon reaching home
Revealed to be a rechargeable portable fan upon reaching home. My mum likes it and wants to bring it along for her upcoming holiday trip.

My takeaways

Birthday of Haru Invest

6 August 2019

Demographics of staff

The staff I saw at the event seemed to be in their 20-30s, and many of them appeared to be Korean. I was too shy to practice speaking in Korean.

Investors from 140+ countries

There are 54,000+ global investors from over 140 countries. Hugo joked that he wonders how people from certain countries could have learned about Haru Invest. πŸ˜‚

Deposits go into cold wallets within 10 minutes

Hugo shared that deposits from investors go into cold wallets within 10 minutes, which is a plus point for the security of the platform against hacks.

Criteria for derivatives platforms

Hugo share that Haru Invest only uses derivative platforms that handle more than one billion in trade value daily for their trades. The rationale is that such platforms would likely make a lot of profit from the trading fees alone and by extension should be relatively less risky.

Upcoming improvement to Haru Freeze marketplace

An attendee provided feedback that there were many listings on the Haru Freeze marketplace which were listed with negative yield.

Background: The motivation for the Haru Freeze marketplace is to provide an avenue for investors to exit their locked investments early by sacrificing a portion of the potential yield. This is achieved via listing their Frost at a discount, which would attract another investor to buy over the locked investment.

Issue: However, some investors were listing their Frosts at above market value, which doesn’t make sense for anyone to buy them over. Such listing were clogging up the marketplace.

The response from the Haru Invest team was that some improvements would be rolled out very soon:

  1. negative yield listings would be moved to the bottom of the search results.
  2. users will be prompted to list their Frosts at a discount.

They did highlight that the Haru Freeze marketplace is a open marketplace and they would not interfere to prevent users from continuing to list Frosts above market value.

Haru Switch

Haru Switch is actually a P2P based swap. Hugo hopes more people will start using it.

I didn’t quite catch why he thinks it is a superior product. It would have been good if his slide on it contained more information and comparison vs other swap options.

New token listings

XRP was recently added. It was listed before USDC because of its lower transfer fees, which allow users to deposit funds at a cheap rate. Hugo also hopes users would make use of Haru Switch more to swap their XRP into something else.

USDC would be added soon. Target to be by the end of 2022.

BNB is currently not being considered due to limited trading pairs and tight coupling to Binance.

Lockup is good

Hugo shared that 95.66% of the assets under management at Haru Invest is under lockup. This helps improve the stability of the platform and prevent bank run events suffered by some other platforms.

High user retention rate

87.5% of users with deposits continue to explore the platform’s various products.

How to choose a HODL platform?

Hugo shared that a common strategy for investors is to spread their investments across multiple platforms to distribute their risks. This is something I do too.

Apart from that, another tip is to look for platforms with good track records, meaning that have survived or even thrived in previous bear market conditions.

Haru Invest boasts a record of zero security breaches since launch.

Regulatory compliance

Apart from the BVI entity, other entities are being set up in USA and South Korea. Also, Haru Invest’s recent acquisition of Haruus LLC gives them a MSB license, which is a financial service license supervised and granted by the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (U.S. FinCEN)

Unfortunately, despite being an event in Singapore, they didn’t share any information with regards to meeting the regulations imposed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

Feedback on venue

In case the event organisers are reading this:

  • the wooden chairs are uncomfortable to sit on for long periods
  • the venue only had one shared toilet for everyone which is inadequate.
Admin
Admin

Started investing in crypto towards the end of 2020.

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