Nour Haridy is the founder of Inverse Finance, a DAO that aims to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) tools for borrowing, lending, and synthetic asset creation. ^[1]

Education

Haridy graduated from United World College-USA in 2017. ^[1]

Career

After graduating, Haridy co-founded Lamarkaz, the first blockchain lab based in Cairo, where he worked as a smart contract developer until July 2019. During this time, he also worked as lead blockchain developer for Tykn B.V., a digital identity management platform, and as a Web3 engineer for Bountyhive, a bug bounty hunter platform. In September 2019, he worked as a blockchain architect for Mosendo, a money transfer app using decentralized personal finance tools, until 2020, when he founded Inverse Finance. ^[1]

Inverse Finance

In January 2022, CRE8RDAO’s Fugu interviewed Haridy about Inverse Finance and the upcoming release of INV+. At the start of the interview, he explained the reasoning behind the project’s name: ^[2]

“I actually didn't pick the name. It was at that point, the initial product, which was DC Evolved, was launched. There was no token, there was no DAO, there was really only like a very simple product and a Telegram channel and a bunch of people in it, like about 200 people. There wasn't even a name, so the product actually wasn't launched yet at that point. It was just a bunch of contracts and a front end that I built, and I wanted to kind of put it live. So I basically just like asked the people on Telegram, and we came up with all kinds of different names. Inverse sounded, I think, I think what Inverse kind of the impression, the Inverse as a brand right now gives, and I think also that was kind of the intended impression, is that it's like kind of the values that we have and kind of the ways we're doing things in many different ways are almost the inverse of kind of the status quo.”

When asked if the project had received any criticisms, he responded: ^[2]

“I think it's funny because it sounds like most people would not criticize the way we're doing things. Most people I think that I've talked to would agree that we have been taking a very sustainable approach. But on the other hand, when you compare us, especially in the stablecoin space, and the competition, you would see that some other projects have increased their stability supply by many multiples compared to DOLA. When they see that, it looks a lot like DOLA is kind of a failing project to many people who criticize the project.”

“It's not like people would criticize what we're doing. I would say that people, without really going into the details of the decisions we've made, would look at DOLA and just make a judgment that it's not going very well. But the truth is it's actually extremely easy for us to make a governor's proposal to just spend 10x the amount of rewards we're spending on DOLA liquidity rewards, and our current liquidity on Ethereum would go from 15 million to 150 million in just one day. So we are making a deliberate decision to limit DOLA's growth.”

He also discussed DOLA, the project’s stablecoin: ^[2]

“So DOLA is unique, not only compared to other stablecoins like DAI and any other debt-backed stablecoin. The reason is that the Fed contracts actually give us an incredible amount of control and protection tools over the peg. We're able to not only control the rule of supply to balance it compared to demand. The goal of making any kind of peg protection tool, like an interest rate or a PSM like Maker and DOLA have, or any kind of tool, is to make sure that supply and demand are always equal. Right now, with some examples, that's completely not the case. Supplies are many multiples more than demand right now—maybe about 10x. Looking at the ratio in Curve, it's really 10x. We have the best tools to prevent that from happening and to recover as quickly as possible if it does.”

Towards the end of the interview, he shared his views on audits: ^[2]

“I think there is a significant risk using Inverse, but I don't think it's more significant than other protocols. I think it's the same. I think audits, especially protocols that publish, advertise, and market their audit reports specifically, are more risky than Inverse. We've seen that if you go to the news leaderboard of hacked protocols, you're going to find more audited protocols than unaudited ones on that list. We get a lot of users asking about audits on Inverse, and I'm sure we've turned a lot of them away because of the fact that we're unaudited. That also probably implies that these protocols would have turned a lot of users away if they were unaudited before they got hacked. I think the systemic risk and the moral hazard of audits are larger than the actual potential risk of not being audited.”

Interviews/Panels

Inverse AMA

Haridy discussed Inverse Finance, a DAO launched in December 2020 focusing on developing decentralized financial products. He highlighted two main products: DC Vaults, which reinvests yields into different assets, and DOLA, an over-collateralized stablecoin similar to DAI but with greater capital efficiency. Haridy emphasized Inverse Finance's commitment to decentralization, operating without a central team or legal entity and relying on various committees for governance. He also talked about their collaboration with Olympus DAO to improve DOLA's market presence and liquidity through innovative bonding mechanisms and leveraging staked assets, positioning Olympus DAO as a key liquidity provider for DOLA. ^[3]