UNION’s cornerstone of full stack protection reduces the risks and costs of DeFi. Anyone can buy tailored protection for composable risks such as: Layer-1, smart contract, exposure, and transaction completion risk.
Purchase, redeem and manage collateral optimization protection. Volatility protection for stablecoin borrowers and large position holders. Protection writing for long position leverage.
More Information
Bug bounty program
[COMING SOON] - Purchase, redeem and manage protections for smart contract breaches, project rug-pulls, balance theft and malicious hacks.
UNION is a technology platform that combines bundled protection and a liquid secondary market with a multi-token model. DeFi participants manage their multi-layer risks across smart contracts and protocols in one scalable system. UNION decreases the barriers to entry for retail users and lays the foundation for institutional investors.
Safeguarding numerous risk factors, individually or as a bundle, across DeFi protocols. UNION’s protection is built to cover the multi-layer stack introduced by Defi composability.
No KYC, no members. DeFi is an open industry, and protection should be too. UNION’s inclusive protocol has no special requirements preventing cover purchases and capital inflow.
A liquid and open secondary market, together with robust capital and pricing models battle-tested in the traditional finance and insurance industry, help distribute risk for the entire industry, creating a safer environment for all.
UNION is a technology platform that provides DeFi users with bundled protection featuring different layers of coverage and segregated underwriter exposure (e.g., Layer 1 risk, smart contract risk, exposure risk, transaction completion risk).
Complete protection offers broader coverage and cost savings seen in the traditional insurance market.
A well-functioning secondary market for protection enables individuals to trade risks and implement sophisticated risk management strategies traditionally reserved for institutional finance. The protection market benefits from secondary liquidity and distribution, allowing it to scale more efficiently.
We imagine a system where each trade, portfolio, or strategy can be tokenized and protected by the community for the community.
UNION’s token model is architected for success and scale using a multi-tier model with clear separation of function for each token:
Governance token and protection tokens are separated to prevent conflicts of interest and detach governance from market dynamics of buying and writing protection.
Our team is made up of experienced professionals in the fields of finance, systems engineering, business strategy, and law.
Team members previously worked and held executive roles at wealth management, hedge fund, fintech and blockchain companies.
Michael is a business strategist and technologist with over 20 years of experience in the areas of health care, finance, and wealth management. During this time, he took on multiple roles such as founder, principal consultant and CTO. He also served as an AVP at a prominent capital management company where he performed software architecture and development related functions for a hedge fund with $14bn+ AUM.
Michael has a BA in Economics-Political Science from Columbia College of Columbia University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He holds five patents in areas related to decentralized cryptography with respect to management of data rights and entitlements.
Jarrod has served as a corporate attorney for 10 years and gained extensive experience with startups and early stage companies. He specializes in structuring corporate acquisitions and collateralized debt. For the past two years, Jarrod worked as General Counsel to a New York based blockchain development company where he oversaw corporate governance and compliance obligations.
John is a Product and Strategy executive with 19 years of experience in fintech and institutional finance. For 10 years, he led product organizations in rapidly evolving environments and later served as a multi-asset credit portfolio manager and specialist for 9 years, overseeing over $1bln of assets at institutional hedge funds.
Over the last 3 years, John held executive roles in the blockchain space at Fusion and WeDeFi.
Antonio Reyes' background spans over 30 years of experience in executive positions and founder roles across media, technology, education, and nonprofit entities. Reyes is the Co-Founder of BlockScience, a leading complex systems engineering firm and close UNION partner. Before BlockScience, Reyes was the Co-Founder and CEO of IGM Global Inc, which developed online B2B education medium portals for C-Suite executive guidance regarding the impact of exponential technology. Reyes also was the Co-Founder and CEO of Excelorators Inc., partnering with faculty at leading universities. His other roles include the Co-Director of the Breakthrough Program in South Florida, the Founder of Startowers Inc, and the Director of Latin American Operations for the CBN/Family Channel Network.
Dr. Michael Zargham is a data and decision systems engineer with over a decade of experience designing and evaluating decentralized algorithms related to business processes. He is the founder and CEO of BlockScience, a research and analytics firm for blockchain networks that has worked with prominent projects including Ocean Protocol, Balancer, and more. Michael holds a PhD in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied optimization and control of decentralized networks.
Manos Megagiannis is Union’s Infrastructure and Information Security Officer (ISSO). Manos has over 30 years of experience in software development, information security, LAN/WAN/datacenter architecture, and computer forensics. Manos previously held CTO roles for numerous companies and has worked with several Fortune 500 firms, government agencies, tech startups, and SMEs
Bill is an experienced executive with over 20 years of experience in banking, structured finance, consumer lending, and venture capital.
Bill is currently the Co-President and CFO of Liberty Lending — a leading fintech platform for personal loans — and is a Partner at Common Ocean, a hybrid VC firm based in New York City. Prior to his current roles, Bill performed roles at major investment banks including UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Lehman Brothers. Bill holds a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.
Bill’s wealth of experience in TradFi brings significant advantages to UNION’s advisory team as we engage traditional market participants and scale-out our product line of asset protection pools, C-OP, CDOs, and Crypto Default Swaps. DeFi’s cross-over with TradFi is often spared from discussions within crypto circles, but onboarding financial professionals like Bill with venerated track records can help meld the experiences of TradFi with the underlying power and novelty of DeFi.
Toby Lewis has 12 years of analyst experience from the worlds of institutional finance, venture capital, blockchain and crypto. Lewis began his career at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, before co-founding a well known analyst firm of corporate venture capital Global Corporate Venturing. He went on to set up Union partner Novum Insights, an analyst firm of blockchain, crypto and other frontier technologies in 2016.
Wan Li is an experienced venture capital investor. He has held senior level investment roles at Fairhaven Capital, which has invested over $450M in technology startups, and at the corporate venture capital arm of leading U.S. construction company Suffolk. Prior to VC, Wan Li was a product leader at Microsoft in enterprise application software. Wan Li holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from MIT, where he completed research in artificial intelligence and quantitative finance.
David Namdar is the GP at Coral Capital and CEO of NFT.com. David’s wealth of 15-year experience spanning entrepreneurship, international business development, venture capital, derivatives, foreign currencies, and the DeFi market draws from his high-profile background as a founding partner of both Galaxy Digital and SolidX Partners. David’s previous roles also include working at Millennium Management and UBS Hong Kong. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance and International Business from the USC Marshall School of Business and also holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
Marlon Geerts, Founding Partner at Grizzly Capital, studied Union Finance’s model, mission and team and decided to roll up his sleeves alongside Union’s Project Lead, Michael Beck. This combination creates a powerful force enhancing the braintrust at Union.
Grizzly Capital assembled an experienced team with an extensive track-record. They are probably best known for their early support of well-known successful projects including leading the investment round from MoonEdge and participating in the equity raise for Cheqd. The team’s involvement in the cryptocurrency markets dates back to 2013.
In a time of DeFi set against a backdrop of meme coins and volatility, UNION found its spirit animal in a purple bundle of persistence, resourcefulness, and, at times, irreverence.
The honey badger exists in nature as a creature of strength, who is difficult to deter. Their skin is hard to penetrate, almost impervious to arrows, spears, and machetes. As such, the meme lives that honey badgers weather all, that they just don't care (The Hunny Badger).
Our hUNNy Badger meets the challenges of DeFi head-on. He's a fearless defender who protects projects and users from hacks, rugpulls, volatility, and everything else that would keep most people running for cold storage. He contributes daily to UNION morale and social engagement, reminding our community that steady perseverance, undaunted by the market, competition, token price, and naysayers, leads to progress and, ultimately, triumph.
