KEYTANGO — A Deep Dive

9 min readMar 2, 2021

DuckDao’s Next Takeover

This article will dive into the upcoming DeFi project, keyTango. By using all the available sources, I will be gathering each and every useful piece of information that you need to know. Finding information about upcoming projects can be hard because the details are often scattered around in different documents and social media platforms. Thus, this write-up seeks to alleviate some of that information-gathering stress. Therefore, I will only be using legit sources that can be found on keyTango’s official website, documents, and platforms. Sources that are cited and used will be available at the bottom of the article.

Before we are going to dive deep into the world of keyTango, let us address the elephant in the room, DuckDAO. You might have heard about them; Arguably one of the biggest incubators in the DeFi space, currently sitting with an impressive incubation portfolio, with the likes of $PAID, $BASE, $CUDOS, $POOLZ, $BONDLY, and now, keyTango. What do all of these have in common? They have AT LEAST performed 10x — up to 138x ROI. Mind. Blowing. Numbers. Without the risk of sounding too simp-like, one can’t help but observe that wherever they decide to walk, success inevitably follows their footsteps. And not only for a short-term pump. In fact, most of their incubation projects have had immense long-term success as well.

So with the most obvious shill-material of keyTango addressed, let us move unto the actual functions of the project at hand.

What is keyTango?

When you enter their website, the first glimpse that might pique your interest is their slogan; The easiest way to get started with DeFi <Robinhood for DeFi>. This alone might make you realize the inherent potential of this project, considering the behemoth of an industry that keyTango seeks to disrupt. keyTango essentially seeks to provide the easiest way to get started with DeFi. Making DeFi approachable, noob-friendly, and thus, advantageous towards retail investors.

keyTango tries to capture an opportunity within a specific problem, which is how DeFi strategies can be a struggle for retail investors. For retail clients, attractive DeFi strategies are often too hard to discover; and complicated to invest in. The fact that the average borrow position on Compound is $18,000 serves as a confirmation that it is dominated by professionals. Thus, tapping into the huge market of retail investors has its obvious potential.

keyTango’s Uniqueness and Competitive Advantage:

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keyTango’s Web3 application is made for DeFi newbies and acts as a frictionless gateway to popular DeFi products and services ready to be unraveled within a couple of clicks. Unlike YFI which takes some familiarity with deep DeFi for granted, keyTango offer an intuitive UI/UX, coupled with rich and concise content and tailored suggestions based on your previous DeFi experience.

keyTango presents a Robinhood like UI, rich educational content, and an investment dashboard tailored for newbies, enhanced by unique features such as tailored onboarding: connect your wallet and get insights and rapid exit: convert all your DeFi assets to stable coins instantly with one click. By being able to do this, you can easily manage your risks with the click of literally two buttons.

Key Features:

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Technology

They are launching a React web-app that interacts with multiple DeFi products (Ethereum smart contracts). In addition, they are improving DeFI’s UX with unique features such as (1) Tailored onboarding: connect your wallet and get insights (Node.js, AWS, pulling data through Etherscan API) (2) Rapid exit: convert all your DeFi assets to stable coins instantly with one click.

Market

The DeFi market is exploding with 800% growth in the past 90 days. Our Beachhead market is the 1M active metamask users who still don’t understand concepts like AMM. These are retail investors who are currently excluded from using DeFi products due to their complex UX/UI.

Their closest competitor- Yearn, attracted hundreds of millions in client funds with half-baked products, by making yield farming easier for power users. But their products are still incredibly hard to use.

Token

The $TANGO token is a governance token that allows its holders to participate in governing over all of keyTango’s smart contracts. On-chain governance scope: Protocol fee policy and collection, $TANGO community treasury, 3rd party protocol interactions (for example, lend in Compound or Aave).

Traction and Funding

keyTango assembled an A-team of crypto veterans, MIT, and Ycombinator alumni. Graduated from Outlier Ventures Base Camp program, closed a pre-seed SAFE round. They also included Outlier Ventures staff as angel investors in their round of private sale(personal investments). They also aim to release educational content with thousands of overall impressions and hundreds weekly. In addition, they have 100 organic signups for our beta and token sale request.

keyTango’s Competition

I don’t have to spell it all out for you in terms of competition, but the obvious ones are of course Yearn, Robinhood, Uniswap, different upcoming DEX’s, and similar projects. However, these are not “retail-noob friendly”. No, Uniswap and co- are not hard to use, but they do require quite a bit of research. You got to remember, that most of us have been deep into the DeFi space the last year. Most of the actions that you do are basically muscle memory. If you engage within’ these projects on a daily basis, you don’t really consider how hard it is for true beginners in this space.

If keyTango manages to make it even more simple, while showing the lucrative opportunities that crypto and decentralized finance offers, I don’t think billions of dollars are an exaggeration. If they manage to offer an intuitive UI/UX, coupled with rich and concise content and tailored suggestions based on your previous DeFi experience, its a done deal. There are plenty of retail investors that want to jump into the DeFi space, but without a smooth entry, you sadly lose the majority of people.

Tokenomics:

In this section, numbers speak louder than words:

Summary

Token ticker — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — $TANGO

Total supply — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 50M

Initial circulating supply — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 4.89%

Estimated public sale date — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Feb-2021

Sale rounds

Token allocation % of total supply

Circulating supply

Potential Shortcomings or Obstacles:

Of course, when you aim to take on any market as an on-ramp exchange, there are several things you need to be aware of: Regulatory tasks, licenses, and interest from the target audience. And the same question I asked in my LCX article is quite viable here: Most users are placed at Binance, Coinbase, Uniswap, and other exchanges, so what would make people switch their positions to a totally new exchange? Fine, they are aiming to simplify DeFi, which arguably is way different than what all of the above are, except Uniswap. But it is still worth considering.

I will repeat the same obstacle once more, will they be able to handle the flow? Exchanges are often unable to manage their current account opening facilities due primarily to the rapid surge of people. As a result of this problem, many affluent traders are not in a position to register for their preferred exchange. However, this might not be as big of a problem, considering they have a multitude of options through the use of different decentralized platforms such as Ethereum, or maybe in the future, DOT, AVA, or AVAX.

Why I Am Bullish & keyTango’s Potential Growth:

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The whole concept itself is aiming to fit into an untapped market in crypto. This itself is, in my opinion, incredibly bullish. Imagine a Robinhood of crypto, with even more options, easier access for retail investors, running on the decentralized world of finance. Giving you a perspective in numbers, as of May 2018, Robinhood raised a total of $539 million in venture capital funding. As of 2020, Robinhood is worth more than $20 billion.

If we are to compare potential exponential growth as well, let us continue to take a look at Robinhood as an example, since it is a valid comparison:

2014–0.5 million users

2016–1 million users

2017–2 million users

2018–6 million users

2019–10 million users

2020–13 million users

This exponential growth will arguably be even faster for keyTango, as they tap into a market that has gained insane traction the last couple of months. In addition, since they are using DuckDAO as their incubator, they have already gained priceless marketing, gaining even more publicity.

(Egan, M. (2020, August 17). Robinhood is now worth more than $11 billion. Retrieved January 28, 2021, from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/17/investing/robinhood-trading-app-valuation/index.html)

In addition, the team is actively trying to network, especially focusing on the Chinese market. In fact, they spoke at the 2021 MIT Wuxi Virtual Symposium, about a week ago. The event was co-hosted with the Wuxi Municipality in China, with industrial executives and MIT connected startups exploring emerging technologies.

More information about this can be found here: https://ilp.mit.edu/attend/2021-mit-ilp-wuxi-virtual-symposium
https://twitter.com/TangoKey/status/1354636186724265984?s=20