Welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to Chris. Chris is the CEO of Summer.Fi. This was earlier called the Oasis app.
He has worked with MakerDAO. He made a leap from fintech to blockchain and DeFi sectors. So he’s been around for a while.
He’s been around since 2018. So he’s seen at least two cycles. This was an insightful conversation delving into DeFi and the kind of challenges it faces even now and their outlook, basically.
Chris’s outlook and Summer.Fi‘s outlook on the kind of things that would really make an impact in users’ lives. I can’t wait for you guys to hear this. Let’s deep dive right in.
Hi, Chris. How are you doing today? Hi. Yeah, very well.
Thank you. It’s good to be here. Thank you so much for making the time to speak to us today.
Can you tell us, for our listeners, a little bit about yourself and how you got into Web3, what you’re building currently? Yeah, sure. So I’m currently the CEO of Summer.Fi. My journey started back in mid-2018. I joined as a product manager for MakerDAO, primarily responsible for their front ends and so on.
I had a kind of big product management background in fintech apps already, kind of at the early stage in startups. But yeah, I joined Maker at that early stage. Single collateral die had been launched about six months earlier and so on.
And all the work at the time then was kind of focused on multi-collateral die. Yeah, they only really had kind of like very, very, very basic front ends. When I joined, it was already in progress there.
But yeah, we kind took ownership of the single collateral die front ends. We launched the CDP portal back in the day, which was a huge success of reducing eight transactions down into one or two, and then the governance dashboards and so on. But yeah, I was with Maker all the way through to 2021, including the multi-collateral die launch in 2019, the launch of Oasis.app on there, which eventually we took out into a separate entity, which we then rebranded to Summer in July last year.
And that takes us to where we are today. Yeah. You’ve had quite a journey from, you made a transition from fintech to blockchain and you got into DeFi in the relatively early days, like in 2018, you’ve mentioned.
So how did you decide to make that leap? Was there a particular point where you decided, okay, I need to look at this particular technology. What kind of made you look at it and what made you stay? So, I mean, I was kind of diving into it a little bit more in 2017. I think like a number of people were in like the kind of the book, the bull run in 2017.
And although it was heavy in, it was heavy in ICOs and stuff, it was heavy in ideas. And a lot of those ideas just seemed like ideas, right. And the majority of them never came to anything and so on.
I came across Maker in early 2018, a very good friend of mine that I’ve worked with on a couple of projects, Henry, he joined Maker as head of design. He dived down the rabbit hole a little bit earlier than I did. He joined in early 2018 and yeah, kind of introduced me to the team, that kind of like coming up to mid 2018 time, I think like around May, around May time.
And I actually didn’t have any intention really, I think of joining crypto or the blockchain space in all honesty when I spoke to them. I was just kind of, I was intrigued, like they wanted to speak to me about product management stuff. I spoke to him about kind of like what they were doing.
I was interested, particularly in the governance aspect of things, but I was in the wealth management kind of space at the previous company I was at. And the Maker system kind of fascinated me around how that could be used in future for effectively being able to borrow, maybe borrowing against like the like shares and ETFs and so on that users had and customers had at the time. Like we saw back then a number of times where people would have to like sell their positions or like withdraw their money from their accounts in order to pay for like big life events, whether that was putting children through university, it was moving house, it was buying a car or whatever.
And when I first came across Maker and heard about the system, it kind of fascinated me that like they could borrow maybe against these positions. If all these things were on chain, users would be able to borrow against them at a lower rate ultimately than what they’re earning. So if they could borrow at like kind of one and a half, 2%, which was kind of what single collateral die rates were at the time, I think they were like 0.5% when I joined, then it was fascinating.
And in the early use cases, because DeFi was at such an early stage during single collateral die times, there was nothing else, there was no yield farming or anything like that. So people were literally borrowing against their ETH to buy things. We had use cases of people buying a car or deposits for houses.
Like we haven’t had someone look like bought a computer screen as a use case and so on. So that was like really awesome. But yeah, I had these conversations and then I think I came off the call and looked at my partner at the time and I was kind of like, oh no, I’m moving jobs.
And yeah, that took me into like, we had a few more chats, a few more calls and within like two or three months I was working for Maker then. But yeah, I just found it fascinating. And now you look back on the simplicity and basics of DeFi then compared to what DeFi is now and it’s hard to believe it’s only like five years, five, six years really.
Yeah, that is absolutely true. I think the kind of maturity this market has seen and this particular niche has seen, the way it has grown, it is absolutely commendable. So you know, you started your journey, you had a very crucial role like at MakerDAO and then you became like a product leader at Oasis.
So what were the kind of key achievement and challenges during that time that kind of shaped your approach to building a user-centric DeFi product? Because I think that is something that we get a lot of big bets about, that DeFi at times is not really very user-centric and there are solutions for the sake of creating those solutions. What is your take on that and how did your achievements and challenges kind of create your perception around product building? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, you kind of touched on it a little bit there.
Like one of the biggest issues with DeFi back then and still today really is user experience. Really, like that is where I’ve always been focused as like kind of a UI focused, UX focused kind of growth side of things really. So when I joined like the, like Maker had two dashboards basically, two tools.
It had the kind of what we call the die dashboard which was this gray. It exposed all the functionality of the underlying protocol and it was, you had to really understand how the protocol works in order to use it and that’s never a good thing. Like you don’t understand how your banks work under the hood or behind the scenes in order to use your bank account or whatever.
You don’t understand how the car ultimately works in order to drive the car. But in crypto and so many apps and still a lot of them today, the front end, the user interface just exposes the protocol functionality rather than kind of building an experience on top of that and making use of the protocol functionality under the hood. So we kind of took, we did something with that to try and make that a lot better.
Again, working very closely with the design team in particular and the UX researcher we had on the team to really understand like how we could improve that. It didn’t satisfy everybody. There was many people, particularly because it was so developer heavy and engineer heavy in the space at the time, like a lot of the engineers building and writing these things wanted that core functionality exposed and so on.
And some decisions we took, we really abstracted some of that functionality away, which maybe simplified things at times, but it simplified it for the user, which meant the protocol was maybe not being used to its absolute full potential, particularly with governance and so on, but it made it accessible for others. And that was the key. And that’s been the key thing that’s kind of led us really throughout our entire time, whether it’s like kind of maker dashboards, the OASIS app, the Summify interface now, like making it usable and accessible for users.
Cause that is the only way we’re on board, like the next set of users and so on. Absolutely. Some of the achievement, like, yeah, like the first governance dashboard was, I think a pretty strong achievement.
Like it went from just a couple of users, handful of users using governance, I think to a hundred plus at the time, which was like, yeah, the first major really DAO votes that were, that were happening and governing a protocol on chain at the time. And yeah, in fact, I think there’s probably more people now vote in them than there was today, for example, on it, but it’s been a, yeah, it was, it was a great success. The first CDP portal, although I didn’t have much involvement other than just getting it out the door and releasing it.
Yeah. OASIS app was a good, like a huge achievement for like making it simple to do things basically and making things accessible. Right.
I think that is the way, this is like an off repeated narrative. And I think in the DeFi space, a lot of people work about how it is and which is true that, you know, the user experience is very marred and, you know, there is a lot of resistance and that needs to be worked upon. And obviously with a lot of leaps that the tech has taken in terms of, you know, wallet abstraction and whatnot, it has become a little better, but obviously it’s, there’s still a long way to go.
So I completely concur with you there. Now, just to give our listeners a little bit of context about the OASIS app, can you, and now it’s just rebranding to Summit.py, can you tell us about what the app does? What, what is the mission behind it? Yeah, certainly. So OASIS.app was the, originally was the product with InsideMaker when it first launched, it was the front end or like the reference front end in some ways to the MakerDAO protocol when it launched multi-collateral DAI in November, 2019.
Originally it was, it was launched with three functions. It was borrow, save and trade. So borrow kind of obvious in all of them, really in the names, but borrow, you are now due to use the, the core maker protocol was kind of most people understand it today where you lock collateral and you borrow assets, borrow DAI against, against that collateral.
There was save, which exposed the DSR, the DAI savings rate and so on, which allowed you to earn a yield on your tokens. It was one of the first yield bearing kind of like tokens, really at least a very safe one. You had RV and compound and so on at the time as well.
But yeah, the DSR was, was, was, was really fascinating because the rates didn’t fluctuate very, very often. It did hit a high when the, when the peg for DAI deviated below its peg for a little while. And the rates went up to like 16, 17%, which was pretty fascinating.
And it was a very retail-y focused product, but like the kind of retail users around at that time. And it got a lot of users in compared to the main protocol. And then there was trade, which was kind of does what it says on the tin.
It was a kind of basic trading interface. Really it had a basic order book, follow it for Oasis DEX protocol. That’s no longer around anymore, unfortunately, because of the costs to use it with gas prices increasing and so on.
But it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was a really nice app. It was very clean. It really fitted and kind of fitted into the maker ecosystem on there.
And again, from that Oasis DEX protocol, we use that Oasis brand that was associated with maker really nicely. But yeah, in 2021, when the maker foundation had effectively completed its role, completed its job really of delivering the maker protocol when handing it over to the community, the maker foundation dissolved and an Oasis.app was moved into a separate entity, which is when I took over then the project as CEO from product lead. But like at that time we knew that for Oasis app to grow, it had to become more than just a maker front end.
It had to become a more of a curated DeFi experience. We didn’t want to become an aggregator where it opened up to every protocol available and effectively removed the trust element that it had brought with it from the maker days. So it became this curated front end and it just started to add protocols that we felt hit the same level as maker, the maker protocol.
So like things like Aave and then things like Morpho and then Spark and things like that. So these top level protocols, these top tier protocols ultimately that fitted into the ethos of what Oasis.app was fitted into the functionality. And then we started to add more functionality on top of that, things like multiply, which allowed you to effectively do leverage like trading, effectively using these different protocols under the hood, but do it in one transaction.
So a lot of users were using all these protocols to do these sorts of trades, but it would take them six, seven, eight transactions to do. In the worst case, it would take them those six, seven, eight transactions to close their position when the market was dropping fast. So we enabled all of these things to happen in one transaction.
And then the same for yield loops as well. Once things like state teeth and then the different kind of like yield bearing stable tokens as well, you could start to yield loop these things. So you could arbitrage the borrow and lend rate up to 10X and so on, which often gave you a much better yield than just holding the underlying token.
You took some risks and you still take some risks for the peg and so on. But yeah, a lot of users make more money for that, for taking on that additional risk and so on. And again, the importance there is being that you get in and out in one click and that you have a UI dedicated to showing you the information that you need to make informed decisions for that.
And that’s really there when we, like kind of last July, we rebranded away from Always Start App because Always Start App had that real tight connection with the Maker Protocol and MakerDAO and so on. Like even though we’ve been a separate company for like two years, we were still like kind of referred to as the Maker team, still referred to as the Maker front end and so on, even though we started to have these other protocols on there. So as part of all of that, we rebranded away from Maker into Summify, kind of trying to play on that kind of ideal crypto summer positivity kind of happy thing, but trying to retain the trust and brand equity that we built up through the Oasis days and Maker days as well.
And yeah, and that kind of takes you to the Summify app that you see today with like automation, multiply, yield loops, still basic borrowing functionality as well. But yeah, a very useful tool for many, many users. Absolutely.
So, you know, from what I understand is that you are trying to become the one, the most trusted entry point for managing capital in DeFi. How do you ensure that security? I’m So the mission of Summify is basically to become the most trusted entry point for managing capital in DeFi. How do you ensure user trust and security on the platform, especially even the complex nature of this entire niche? Yeah, so we have a couple of ways we do that.
Firstly, we only work with what we consider to be the top tier protocols. So protocols that we like, we either know the teams by or the teams are public and so on, but we understand and we get to know the team. So we have a relationship with all the teams and protocols that we support and the underlying products.
All of those protocols have to be heavily audited and so on. We also audit all of our code as well when you use kind of coding best practices. So we will not put out functionality and features that have been built in a weekend.
There are many kind of, like, if you look at like the kind of DeFi summer in 2021, there was projects being created at Hackathons and then released publicly within a weekend and so on. Like really awesome for like the community, really awesome for like, yeah, seeing how quickly and well you can build on top of Ethereum in particular and so on. But it came with a lot of risks.
There was a lot of hacks, a lot of exploits and so on, quite a few scams as well. So we try and like, yeah, again, have that curated experience where we know from when we speak to a lot of our users through like surveys or interviews and so on, that they will trust the protocols that we support because they trust SummerFi. And again, that goes then into our own coding practices, whether it’s kind of code reviews and so on, and then into audits and so on.
But I think it also touches on one of the biggest things as well from kind of Web 2 to Web 3. So Web 2, like kind of created by like kind of Facebook and Google’s and so on. But like this concept of move fast and break things is very difficult. And I remember when my first kind of first couple of months at Maker, I was kind of repeatedly told that the move fast and break things kind of like approach doesn’t work for Web 3 because there is no undo button, like there’s no way to reverse a transaction and so on.
So you’ve got to take care, you’ve got to take time, you’ve got to make sure things are on right. And because you’re dealing with user funds, right? So you can’t really take a risk there. And any which way we have a perception problem within the industry.
We don’t want to work. Exactly. Yeah.
And on SummerFi, we’ve got about $4 billion of user collateral on the app being managed and so on at the moment, I think about $300 million in the automation contract. So yeah, they have to be, they have to be perfect before they get released. The functionality has to do what it says on the tin.
And yeah, so it’s a little bit of a different thing. And there are still projects obviously out there kind of moving fast and breaking things and so on. And you see that with the exploits and so on in some cases.
But yeah, in order to create long term value, we have to maybe just take that slightly slower approach at times, not too slow, you’ve still got to balance kind of like the risk and reward side of things. Like it’s no good bringing out features that are no longer applicable to the market and so on. But yeah, it’s a, yeah, it’s a balancing game.
It’s a little bit of a balancing game. So yield generation is like a key part of SummerFi’s offering. Can you explain how your platform enables users to earn competitive yields and what kind of distinguishes it from other platforms that are also DeFi yield protocols? Yeah.
Yeah. So like most of the yield strategies we have on SummerFi today are our yield loop strategies. So they’re kind of for the more advanced yield generation strategies for more advanced users and so on.
But they’re the ones that effectively lend one asset on a platform like Aave or Arjuna or Spark or Morpho and then borrow another one to then swap it to the lending asset and put more lending asset in and kind of loop that around maybe 10 times, eight, nine, 10 times and so on. What you’re doing there is if the asset that you’re lending is, for example, carrying a rate of say 4% and you can borrow another asset for 2%, you’ve got a kind of arbitrage rate there of net 2%. So if you do that say 10 times, you’ve effectively got almost like a 20% return on the asset that initially you started with just 4%.
And all you’ve done is deposit that one token at 4%. And as you’re starting blocks, if you deposit let’s say $10,000 or 10,000 savings die and so on, you still have a net value of 10,000 at the end of this kind of loop when you first open it. But you would have, for example, maybe 100,000 savings die locked in Aave.
You may have 90,000 USDC borrowed that you swapped to savings die and then deposited that back into Aave in there as well. So they’re the kind of strategies that we got, but they are fairly advanced strategies. The user type and user profile that we talk about at Summify as the one we target and have is what we call like the semi-sophisticated crypto enthusiast.
So these are people that understand crypto and know exactly how it works and understand the kind of the logic and the risks behind some of these strategies. What we’re actually working on now though, and we just released our light paper a couple of days ago for this, is what we call something like called a lazy summer protocol. And this is a yield generation, like yield aggregation protocol that we’re building that’s going to be released just after Christmas, hopefully.
But it’s going to basically simplify your generation for users. So any user that is ultimately lending to Aave or Compound or Morpho or any of the metamorphic bolts or even using Pendle and so on, this will make it so you just deposit once and it’s continuously and permissionlessly rebalanced for you and then managed by governance throughout. So it makes your generation a whole lot easier.
And why that’s really important as well is that for us, we don’t see the fact that in order to onboard next 100 million users, for example, so if we go from where we are today, maybe two to three million users that are using crypto today, particularly on-chain anyway, crypto, if we want to bring 100 million people on-chain, we do not believe that some of that, like the learning curve for getting into WebGUI is extremely steep. And those 100 million users are not going to do that. So they need a product that they’ll be able to access through the existing apps and FinTech apps that they use today already.
So we’re building this new yield aggregation protocol ultimately to be able to integrate into the existing apps that they use today. And yeah, that will provide a very, very competitive yield. It should give you a better yield than just lending into like Aave or Morpho or Compound separately and in a very safe way as well.
But sticking with kind of a summer and originally Oasis ethos around using kind of like top tier protocols only. So not taking risks with user money, not chasing 100% APY returns on protocols you maybe never heard of, I’ve only been around for maybe a couple of days or weeks, but getting safe, sustainable returns, which is what we believe users are interested in, particularly when you look at kind of user saving habits in the traditional kind of financial world and so on. Right.
Yeah, I think that is a good approach to take to this particular product. I think 100% APY is a thing of the past. And if they do exist today, then yeah, you really need to be very cautious about putting your money there.
Can you tell me a little, shed some light a little about the compliance. Is your platform registered or does it require any licensing? Is that something that the user should be thinking about? Can you shed some light there? So our platform is entirely non-custodial at the moment. So yeah, we’re following all the rules that we need to follow and ticking all the boxes there, but it’s a completely non-custodial platform.
At the moment, we have no custody of any funds or anything. We can never touch anybody’s funds if we even wanted to. So it isn’t like a Coinbase or a Kraken or anything like that.
It’s an entirely non-custodial platform, but yeah, I’m sure the rules and the regulations and stuff will become clearer for that over the next few years. It looks like there’s a lot of work ongoing in that area. But yeah, right now, it’s just an entirely non-custodial platform.
We just help users craft messages to interact with the online protocols and so on effectively. Awesome. So can you now tell me a little about the next big milestone for you guys? Yeah, so this is the Lazy Summer Protocol that I just referenced before.
So this is the next major thing for summer. It’ll be coming in a couple of months’ time. Like I said, we just released our light paper a couple of days ago.
So you can find that, for example, at lazy.summer.fi and see what we’re doing there. That’ll be going to audit in the first of the several audits in a couple of weeks’ time. And yeah, we’ll hopefully be launching early January.
So just after Christmas, basically. Well, early January next year for that. That will be a reference implementation on the SummerFi interface in order to kind of show users and show integrators how to do that.
And crucially for us, it’s going to be coming with an SDK kit as well. So what that means is that as well as the protocol, it will come with a very easy and kind of like institutional graded integration kind of package really to be able to integrate this protocol into multiple different types of apps. The one beautiful thing about the way the protocol is being designed is it’s very modular.
So that means that actually we can actually go and deploy different versions of the protocol for different use cases as well, particularly kind of from an institutional point of view as well or for different large apps. If they want to have their own curated version effectively that maybe whitelists only their own users and so on, they only onboard and rebalance with the protocols they want, then this works kind of like perfectly well for that. So yeah, from a kind of crypto native point of view, it’s an incredibly easy way to earn a better yield.
Like I said, we’ve spent a long time doing a lot of backtesting where it shows it can earn at least 20% more than you just standard deposits into like a lot of the DeFi platforms that have a lot of the idle capital today. And it will just automatically rebalance you to the best kind of like risk returned yield in there up to a certain point. So with the protocol, you get the best yields that are available at any moment in time and with diversification.
So you’ll never be put into a single protocol. So you will never be taking one protocol’s risk in there. And then it will be like, so you’ll have some diversification, but always in the highest earning protocols at any one time.
So I said, if you’re earning maybe 5% on Aave with an Aave deposit, you can earn at least 6% plus probably with the summer protocol based on all the backtesting that we’ve done with the design of that. That’s the next major thing. Exactly.
Yeah. And then, and then if it can get integrated into the kind of Web2 world a little bit more as well, then we’ll look to like, we’ll be onboarding a ton of people from the Web2 space, the traditional space, retail users, without them even needing to know they’re using DeFi basically. I think that is always the key.
They don’t need to really understand the tech or know the tech, but they just need to be able to use it to be able to derive the value that the product brings to the table. I think so, you know, you guys seem to be like right on the right path and all the best for your January release. I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the Ethereum ETF and the institutional adoption angle and the impact that you kind of foresee on the DeFi space, especially in terms of, you know, institutional adoption of DeFi protocols.
What is your take on that? Yeah. So, I mean, the ETF thing kind of splits me a little bit. I mean, I think it’s, I think that on the ETF side, obviously it’s really good for like kind of press and PR on the surface and so on.
But like, I personally don’t like the amount it’s celebrated, particularly kind of within the kind of maybe DeFi developer ecosystem and so on at times. I don’t think we should be celebrating a custodial implementation of someone like BlackRock just sucking up and holding like ETH or BTC and so on. I mean, it’s great.
It’s great for the surface level and great for kind of validating crypto and so on. But a lot of us have been here five, six, seven years or whatever, working on a technology that kind of blockchain and kind of like non-custodial kind of ledgers and so on, like the forward thinking kind of technology that we’re building here. And none of that is being used by any of the ETFs and so on.
The ETF stuff is ultimately a huge step backwards in some ways. So, yes, it helps maybe pump the prices. It helps keep the prices of ETH and BTC higher because it takes so much off the market and so on and actually sucks up a lot of the market that’s available.
But it’s in no way an advancement towards technology and stuff that we’re building. Absolutely. That said, there is a lot of now like kind of, I mean, there’s been huge progress over the last five, six, seven years anyway, like we kind of alluded to that at the very start as well around kind of what Maker was doing and what DeFi was in 2019, 2018 compared to what DeFi is and the amount that you can do now as well.
But there’s still a huge, huge, huge way to go. We are seeing kind of, I think, interest in institutional kind of like there, like we’re seeing it from our own point of view around some institutions kind of starting to like look into creating proof of concepts and so on around how more money could be deployed actually into DeFi and so on. That is where the real advancement and the real kind of hype should be, in my opinion.
We’ve seen some RWA stuff take shape this year in particular, a little bit towards the end of last year. At the moment, it’s predominantly US Treasuries and so on.
I think for three years, we’ve always said the next year will dominate, be RWA, real world asset dominated, and we’re still waiting, I think, for that real RWA breakthrough. But I think we’re starting to see more and more of it now. And yeah, that’s where institutional lending and so on, I think, will really come to the fore.
Yeah, some of the early use cases of crypto have never really taken off and so on. But the other side, kind of thinking outside of DeFi in particular, though, is obviously crypto gaming and so on, and blockchain-based games. Yeah, there seems to be a lot of hype around that, particularly at the start of this year.
There seems to be a lot of hype around gaming. I know there’s more going on at the moment. But yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens there as well.
So let’s say from an institutional maybe point of view, but from big game companies potentially being able to do something using the blockchain, which brings a ton of users onto, like on-chain, again, without them even really needing to know about it. Yeah, I think I concur with you there. I think there was too much celebration.
So I usually gall at any kind of over-policy coming into the picture or any kind of centralization coming into the picture for that matter, because I feel that goes a little or completely against the ethos of the technology and what it stands for. So I think you and I are on the same page there. But as you said, it did pump the prize a little bit.
But what of the long-term consequences? And that is something that people, like you mentioned, who’ve been around for a while, that is what they’re looking at. Because in the short time, great, celebrate. But you need to think and measure the kind of impact it’ll have in the long-term as well.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maybe it’s good from the press and PR point of view, and it brings other institutions to the table to at least start having those more in-depth conversations about bigger integrations into the actual DeFi world.
So it may have a long-term net positive effect, but I think the way it was celebrated, yeah, it was just price-based. It was a little short-sighted. Yeah, yeah.
It was a little short-sighted. Exactly, yeah. And unfortunately, the money prices and value tends to drive a lot of the crypto ecosystem and so on as well, as the majority of crypto and the technology is used to speculate and make money or try and make money in reality.
And I think the quicker we move beyond that maybe, then yeah, the better it will be. And of course, the more institutional integrations and the more technological advancements that happen are obviously going to increase the prices probably more than likely anyway in the long term. But yeah, we should be focusing on developing stuff rather than trying to, yeah, celebrate things that haven’t been touched on.
Exactly, yeah. Celebrating on the basis of prices is like calling a startup a success when they have raised money, right? Exactly, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.
What are you going to do with the money? How are you executing? How does your idea stand? Will it stand the test of time? I think those are the important things. So I completely agree with you there. So when you see the next major innovations coming in, in the DeFi space, because, you know, you’ve been around for a while and you’ve been in this space for some time.
What are the kind of niches that you feel would do well broadly in the crypto space? And then, you know, specifically to DeFi, what are the kind of major innovations that you’re very excited about? Yeah, I mean, I think once we kind of conquer chain abstraction, I think that’s going to be huge. There’s a lot at the moment on on the kind of accounts and account abstraction and so on, like kind of removing the kind of need for all the wallets, like seed phrases and private keys and so on. I think there’s been a lot of work done there, but there’s still a lot more to come and a lot more on the integration side to come there, kind of on a super high level kind of chain abstraction.
So it’s something that we’re working with in particular on the protocol level as well, but effectively being able just to have a single balance across all protocols and it not matter for you which pro chain you’re on and you just see a single balance. You can deposit or withdraw whichever kind of chain you want, and that’s going to be important for integrations as well because they won’t have to ultimately pick a winning chain. It can just be any at that point.
But when it comes to that kind of DeFi technology innovation, I mean, I really struggle personally to kind of pick winners and so on there and even understanding like I didn’t really see the kind of liquid restaking thing taking off as much as that has taken off and so on like that really shocked me. I know that’s ultimately the apps that are built on top of it ultimately that help create that, like the pendals and so on. But yeah, I mean, if I could see and make my guesses for those, I’d be a very rich man on those things.
But I mean, it is so difficult. There’s so many teams working on such amazing stuff. Sometimes it lands and like quite often some of the things I think are like, oh, that’s going to be incredible.
And then it doesn’t land at all. And then the things that look just completely weird to me suddenly like take off and become like the biggest possible thing. Like even the points farming, again, kind of looking at Pendle and the points farming and the kind of like in particular about the kind of like the YT tokens and so on like are just crazy to me.
But yeah, like that’s the ecosystem that we’re in and like gambling and the points and they’re taking risky bets and so on. And yeah, again, I think there’s some more stuff to come in the RWA space. Like I’ve seen things recently, like some comments around like there’s a number of new stable coins coming out over the next kind of 12 to 18 months apparently.
So it’s gonna be fascinating to see what the new use case or USPs are for those types of stable coins because really when it’s dominated really by USDC, USDT and DAI or what’s going to become USDS with Sky. But yeah, I really don’t know. I mean, yeah, I think the Athena thing was amazing with USDE and SUSDE and stuff as well.
So yeah, we just need to see. I think it’s very hard to second guess. And a lot of the time it’s down to timing as well, right? Yeah, it’s about timing.
In the right market and so on. Yeah. Yeah.
Your product might be wonderful, but the timing might not be right. And then it’s gonna fall flat. And then after some time, you’ll perhaps see a similar product which is doing splendidly well.
I think timing can become very, very crucial when it comes to building innovative solutions. But then again, the idea is that it’s very, very hard to time the market in any way. So it is a bit of a tricky situation to be in.
So you mentioned that you are pretty impressed by stuff that is happening with real world tokenization and those assets. Is that something that you would perhaps look at integrating on your platform as well? Maybe. I mean, I think it will have to be.
So if you look at some of the real world asset stuff in the U.S. treasuries, whether it’s like USDM or Mountain Protocol or even Athena’s like USDE, SUSDE and so on. But they are effectively kind of like RWA tokens in some way. Athena’s maybe a little bit of a stretch because it’s the interest on the leverage on Binance and things like that and so on.
Right. But yeah, I mean, some of that kind of is it on the protocol, but like kind of backed finance, they’re doing some really awesome things like, yeah, like these are all potentially yield generating tokens that, again, we talked about the kind of protocol, like kind of allowing you to earn the best yield possible and so on. Like if, yeah, some of these things can can take effect, then yeah, I think that’s great at that point of view.
Right. Yeah, I get that. I get it.
I can completely agree with that as well. So if you had to zoom out a little bit and talk about the crypto space in general, apart from DeFi, what are the use cases you feel, what are the niches you feel are really pushing out good, valuable solutions for users? So I think, I mean, I think like the likes of like RWA Compound and like even Maker and so on, like they are useful tools. I think Athena’s, SUSDE like from a yield based point of view is and so on.
But again, these are still kind of like the crypto enthusiasts that they’re producing kind of like good use for. I do think, I mean, I’m going to keep pumping like our own stuff that we’re that we’re doing, but trying to create like a like if you look at what ordinary users do, like if you speak to ordinary people on the street, most people have savings, most people maybe have pensions and so on of one sort or another. We can we can take a lot of those things and put them on chain effectively, like creating a savings product ultimately that that is on chain is the easiest use case to attract the most amount of people really to bring them out there.
So if we can create a nice, trusted, sustainable, long-term savings product, I believe, or like kind of a product that looks like a savings product and so on, like earns a yield for users without taking a huge amount of risk for them, then that is I think the easiest way to onboard users because they don’t want to have to check their account every day. They don’t want to have the risk of liquidations. They don’t want to have effectively exposure to these volatile assets and so on beyond maybe more they’ve got in like kind of like stocks and shares, maybe they have like five or ten percent of their portfolio in in ETH or BTC or so on.
But I think the majority of people, they want the safe, sustainable kind of like return that isn’t going to fluctuate maybe five or six percent every day. They can hopefully just earn a competitive yield on that’s better than maybe the one or two percent that their bank is offering them. And I think as well, when people understand and learn a little bit more about having a little bit more control over their money, then that’s amazing, particularly maybe in the Western world and so on.
But there’s huge parts of the world that, yeah, having access to a safe, sustainable kind of currency is something that they don’t have the luxury of right now as well. So we kind of have that in the stable coins already, but you still need to try and beat inflation as much as possible as well when you can. And that’s why I think some of the kind of new yield aggregation protocols are doing that are more focused on the more ordinary retail user than maybe the more degen like yield chasing kind of crypto enthusiasts that we have today.
I think sustainable growth is better and consistent sustainable growth would be something that’s attractive to the larger populace as well, I think. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah.
So can you tell me, can you recommend now a few like resources that our listeners should follow or listen in to, to the podcast folks, you know, talk leaders who you feel are disseminating the kind of right information and you learn a few good things by following up on these guys? Yeah, I mean, it depends where you are on your crypto journey and so on, I think, but just understanding the basics of, of even just kind of ETH and so on, how, how they, how the network is protected, how the value is driven to ETH. I think it’s, it’s always a good start because it’s kind of the phrase, almost the first level of DeFi in some ways as well. And then like, I’m not sure, but like things like Defiant and so on, I still think like the Unchained podcasts and stuff, like particularly the early ones and so on have so much insight and so many amazing projects on there as well.
On there to, to kind of, to, to read about, to learn about and so on. But yeah, I mean, sometimes the best way is just to try and get involved, I think, in some of the communities that are around in the bigger ones, maybe the ones that are more kind of project driven and so on and working towards something rather than just kind of like price speculation again. But yeah, it’s a good suggestion.
Anyway, all this goal, like Defiant and, you know, it has always been a great newsletter, I think. There are several others. I think just going by these established names and trying to get in your information, doing your research, using these types of sources, I think does help a long term when people are trying to get into DeFi or just in that way in general.
Oh, I was just going to say, I think it’s just really important to try and find and use as much as you can unbiased, unbiased kind of like references and links and communities and so on. There’s a lot of bias and a lot of, there’s a lot of kind of, yeah, just price speculation things out there. So yeah.
A lot of vested interest as well, I think, right? Vested interest and unbiased, you know, that is already there in the market. So it’s very difficult for somebody who’s just starting off to find perhaps, you know, sources that are credible and that are perhaps neutral in nature and, you know, they let you decide on your own. So it’s good to sort of have, obviously with everything being online, it’s easy to sort of do that research.
But I always advise, you know, folks who are getting into crypto that do not be lazy, because, you know, if you’re going to be lazy about your research or doing that research or implementing that research, all of it is, it’s going to cost you. Yeah. Yeah.
Indeed. Yeah. A hundred percent.
So as I was saying earlier, Chris, this has been a wonderful conversation, but we’re almost out of time and I would love to get your parting thoughts. But before that, I ask something that I ask everyone who comes on the show. You’re somebody who made the leap from FinTech to blockchain.
And, you know, you told us how the journey kind of started and what you’re building on is super exciting. But if you see somebody facing a similar dilemma, they’re trying to decide whether they should be building in Web3 or they should be utilizing Web3 in some way in their life, what would be your suggestions to them for them to start living on blockchain? Yeah. I mean, I think it’s kind of a little bit like we just talked about with like the resources and so on, but I think you’ve got a, there’s a lot of projects out there.
There’s a lot of projects that don’t, don’t end up delivering anywhere near what they intended intended to deliver or deliver anything at all. In most cases, I think if you are, I mean, it’s different. It depends on it.
It half depends, I think, as well, what your aspirations are as well. If it’s just to earn more money or just earn a quick buck and just get involved and so on. Then I think, yeah, you can, you can join anything to a point.
Just make, just make sure again, they may like, you get to know the team, the team maybe are, maybe you understand who the team are and they’re not associated with any scams or exploits and stuff in the past. Like I would definitely recommend like to start with joining, joining communities of the bigger and well-known protocols and so on. I know so many people that just started out as like kind of community members in, in some of the projects and some of the bigger projects and kind of got to know the stuff, started doing like even some of their own things, got paid for it through grants and so on, and then worked up and joined other projects and so on.
Maybe earlier, earlier stage products and so on that maybe take on a little bit more risk that, that have higher reward, but learn, learn the basics in kind of like bigger well-known projects is would, would be my advice. And so on for me, like Maker was pretty much one of the biggest projects at the time on building on Ethereum and so on. Like it was a, it was a trusted name as a trusted brand.
Like it’s very easy to get burned. And it can sometimes be very easy as well, just to be kind of sold, sold the dream of a potential token in the future and not get paid and end up spending a lot of time and maybe getting yourself into a little financial difficulty as well. So I think it’s, it’s better to learn the ropes on a maybe bigger, a bigger project, understand the kind of risks, dive, dive deeper into the rabbit hole and then yeah, maybe move on to something more startup-y, growth-y early stage.
I think at that point it would be personally my, my, my personal advice. And that’s very good advice to end this episode with. Thank you so much once again, Chris, for making the time to speak to me today.
Any parting words before we wrap this up? No, that’s been great. Thank you so much. All the best for your launch in January.
Cool. Thank you so much.