Crypto or Blockchain Aside, Know Saga
Here are Five reasons for why you should get to know Saga as soon as you’re done with the post.
Iddo Sadeh is probably one of the most intelligent, educated, friendly and well rounded founder you’ll get to meet and converse with.
Saga is not a blockchain company. It is a product of mature, well rounded philosophy that harnesses Blockchain technology as a vehicle for bridging the gap between virtual currency and current, fiat money.
Saga is not a cryptocurrency project. It is a product of financial design that uses the better parts of crypto in order to facilitate what their philosophy requires.
Their founding team is super impressive and includes the brightest, most experienced financial leaders and advisors a company can dream of.
They are getting traction from investors you wouldn’t imagine touching crypto and blockchain with a stick not so long ago.
Saga aims to create a reliable asset-backed digital currency, which is tied to a reserve invested in fiat currencies (the SDR basket) and held in reputable banks. Saga seeks to complement existing traditional currencies by working closely with established economic institutions.
In other words, Saga is not taking a stand on the Crypto vs. FIAT world war. Instead, it is building a bridge between the two universes. And this bridge is exactly what makes Saga so promising.
How will that technically work? In a BUY transaction, the user will purchase SGA with ETH, some of which will be converted to fiat and sent to the reserves. In a SELL transaction, the user will sell SGA to the Main Contract and receive ETH in return, obtained by converting fiat drawn from the reserves. The smart contract will generate and burn SGA tokens as ETH is sent and withdrawn from it, and the price of SGA will be algorithmically governed to minimize volatility, based on an adjustable reserve ratio (resembling the Bancor protocol). As Saga gains trust, its reserve ratio will decrease in favour of an independent establishment of value.
To ensure accountability, all participants are required to undergo a formal KYC procedure.
Or as Iddo prefers to describe it: Currencies are established on trust. When they’re launched, there’s no trust. Over time, trust is earned, and only then it can be relevant for holders. Not before.
“The bridge” is a recurring theme of our discussion. Saga is not trying to fight state governance. It’s not trying to take Blockchain or Digital Currency to an ultimate win. “Banks are good”, “Fiat is a great way to classify currency” and “We need to state informed, involved and in strong position” are common, recurring themes that come up in our conversation. “Seriously, do you really think my mom should give up her ATM card for an electronic wallet? And…how is removing the option of assisted, human, financial services helping her in any way?”
And he’s right. It’s the “Either Or”, good vs. evil, battle that is preventing digital currency from capturing the so overdue need of a common, global mediator. It’s not about“Bitcoin vs. USD” or “Ethereum vs. Euro”. It’s about how the two eco systems can co-exist, compliment, help each other and give us new options we never had.
Bridging does not make it easier though. Think of issues such as reserve ratios, anonymity, privacy, long term governance, contracts, legal mediation… Saga is going for the holy grail; A social structure, a financial system, a legal language, an evolutionary path that used to take a century and should now take a decade. And this, surprise surprise, is super hard.
In order to achieve that purpose, Saga has put together the Saga Foundation, a non-profit organization headquartered in Zug. The foundation has raised 30 million USD from Mangrove Capital Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, lool ventures, iCapital, Juno, and Initial Capital as investors, some of which are not your typical Crypto players.
The Foundation Council is comprised of Saga co-founders Ido Sadeh Manand Moshe Hogeg — who are also co-founders of The Singulariteam Technology Group — along with Mark Tluszcz (Co-Founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners and Chairman of Wix), Barry Topf (33-year career at the Bank of Israel; one of the founding members of the Monetary Policy Committee and Senior Advisor to the Governor, Stanley Fischer), and Guido Schmitz-Krummacher (Managing Director at Sielva Management). Saga’s advisory board includes Jacob A. Frenkel (Chairman of JPMorgan Chase and former governor of the Bank of Israel), Myron Scholes (Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences), Leo Melamed (founder of the National Futures Association and Chairman Emeritus of the CME), and Dan Galai (co-developer of the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s Volatility Index; former Dean of the School of Management at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem), as well as Emin Gün Sirer (blockchain/cryptocurrency researcher at Cornell) and Eyal Hertzog (Co-Founder & Product Architect at Bancor).
Saga is indeed on an ambitious mission, but one that takes on more than just niching out a profitable coin wrapped with half assed use cases for blockchain.
And this is why I personally find it fascinating, in addition to its Cryptorated Review.