Talking about cryptocurrency, there is a genre called “Meme Coins,” which generally gets advertised and identified as animated characters or animal meme images. While these coins, just like other cryptocurrencies, get created through blockchain’s help, the tokens themselves are hexadecimal numbers that are stored on a blockchain, with private keys associated with them for ownership purposes. The images of coins with fun logos are used to help attract users (mostly young ones).
While some meme coins come with a market value (which also makes them convertible currencies that can be used in real-world transactions), most of them don’t often have utility, such as being used to pay blockchain participants for doing work for the blockchain. For example, ether is used to pay validators for verifying transactions on the Ethereum blockchain.
When discussing meme coins, the first name that often comes to mind is Dogecoin (DOGE), which has a market cap of USD 14.42 billion as of September 2024. However, other notable coins include SHIB, PEPE, WIF, BONK, and FLOKI. In today’s episode of “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will feature a venture called Neverless. This company aims to simplify the process for aspiring investors to start trading cryptocurrency, with a particular emphasis on providing access to small-cap tokens.
Knowing The Start-Up In Detail
The crypto startup was founded by three former executives at British fintech giant Revolut in 2022. One of the founders, Phuc To, was Revolut’s global head of product, and was in charge of the company’s crypto project back in 2021. His colleague Mikael Peydayesh was the head of core payments at Revolut, and later became the head of premium plans, and another co-founder Arthur Johanet was the head of card payments for a while before he went on to lead Revolut’s cryptocurrency department.
While crypto exchanges have greatly simplified the onboarding experience for new users over the years, the trio believed it could still be improved, so they teamed up to create a new app with one vision: making cryptocurrencies more accessible. Neverless lets crypto investors buy over 400 crypto tokens from the start-up’s app using Apple Pay or Google Pay. In addition to the most common cryptocurrencies, the start-up has chosen to offer access to meme coins and relatively rare coins with low trading volumes.
Buying these small-cap tokens can be challenging, as the investors usually need to find a crypto exchange that lists them. Alternatively, they can swap tokens on a decentralised exchange, which can be complicated if the investors don’t understand how decentralised applications (dApps) work. When it comes to people buying tokens with low trading volumes, they can face things like varied pricing from one trading venue to another, apart from having a large spread between the buying and selling prices. Neverless claims it can seamlessly route trades to the right trading platform to get its users the best prices.
On some cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, DOGE, SOL, XRP, and AVAX), Neverless generates interest that is passed on to the users. The company also offers automated trading strategies that revolve around high-frequency arbitrage and market-making. Neverless can take a share of the returns generated from these yield-generating products.
The company has secured a MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) license, which means that it is a regulated financial firm in Europe. It will have to comply with the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation when it comes into force in the coming days. Earlier in 2024, the start-up raised USD 6.7 million in a seed round led by Lakestar and Connect Ventures.
As of December 2024, Neverless has transformed itself as an institutional-grade platform to grow the crypto investors’ capital, with the latter getting the opportunities to buy meme coins, trade 500-plus cryptos for free, apart from earning automatically up to 7.78% AER (Annual Equivalent Rate) on savings, investing like hedge funds in 11.16% AER Strategies and zero-fee trading, which results in crypto investors earning higher returns on their assets (six times higher than the highest easy-access rate of banks).
Here Are The Products
In terms of facilitating crypto trading, Neverless allows investors to open their online accounts in less than two minutes, from where they can buy their meme coins through Apple or Google Pay, while not hurting their purses on things like deposits or excess fees.
If these same people are buying coins from other platforms, they immediately start at a loss of up to 1.49%, due to odds not being in their favour. However, Neverless assures profits for crypto traders as by spending USD 1000, they get 0.01074 BTC in return, higher than what established exchanges like Binance and Coinbase are offering now. The traders automatically earn 3.04% annual interest on Bitcoin with Neverless, with no lock-up period.
Next is Neverless’ “Strategies Account,” which the start-up dubs as a crypto investor’s pocket hedge fund. By investing in the fund, one will get a return of 11.17% AER (Annual Equivalent Rate that shows what the interest rate would be if interest was paid and compounded annually). Returns through the “Strategies Account” make investors’ long-term earnings exponential.
Unlike traditional hedge funds, “Strategies Account” gives people options to invest in crypto as little as they like, without worrying about locking in their funds for long periods. Generally, hedge funds involve investments based on “prediction,” while trying to forecast market movements, highs and lows. However, predictions often don’t come true, resulting in those investments failing.
Neverless Strategies differentiates itself from traditional hedge funds by helping investors to make money in real-time with real data. The start-up’s algorithm scans the live markets for inefficiencies and profits from them. It detects small price differences of the same asset in different venues, or quotes to both buyers and sellers at different prices. All the trades take place in nanoseconds, while ensuring consistent returns at lower risks, irrespective of the market movements.
Giving Paramount Importance To Data Safety
While most of the 21st century businesses are relying on AI-powered bots to answer customer queries, Neverless has put its money on “Human Intelligence,” when it comes to answering things in a transparent and crystal-clear manner, especially making investors understand that “No Return is Risk-Free.” To back things up, the start-up has even installed an in-app risk dashboard, updated in real-time.
The venture’s core team comes from a bank (Revolut) that looked after 40 million-plus customers and more than 17 billion euro in assets. All of Neverless’s solutions are designed and operated as per the industry-leading security protocols like biometrics and multi-factor authentication. Passcodes never get stored in plain text and irreversibly hashed using a competition-winning algorithm so that no one can read or decrypt them, not even Neverless staffers.
Registered as a Virtual Asset Service Provider in multiple European Union countries, Neverless only works with the world’s best financial crime technology firms.
“Data are encrypted at rest using AES-256 and in transit using TLS 1.2 or greater. We leverage Google Cloud for the physical security of our servers. Our staff is thoroughly vetted and regularly trained on data protection. Minimum access is given on a need-to-know basis and frequently reviewed,” the start-up noted.