Dan Greer, co-founder of DeFi app, welcome. Hey, it's great to be here. Man, I have been looking forward to this. Before the show started, I shared with you that one of your team members reached out to me and told me about DeFi app. And I'd seen DeFi app on the Kaito leaderboard, but didn't know much about it. I then proceeded to learn as much as I could. And I couldn't believe that I had missed DeFi app this entire time. Like you guys are killing it. and growing massively and I feel so old that I didn't know about it. Like I feel like a boomer. I don't know if it's my age, but it's like I'm getting to that point. But I wanna, maybe I could start out with reading a blog post from a couple of days ago called Better Than Sex, number five, the billion dollar milestone. just to set the stage and then would love to hear about you and like how you got into crypto. But I think the audience first needs to hear this. Okay, so DeFi app, one billion in total swap volume in six weeks, 5,000 daily active users, top 10 DEX aggregator globally, 99 % swap success rate and zero gas fees or bridges. And that's pretty amazing. that you guys have accomplished all that in really a pretty, I know you've been building for a while, but you've accomplished all of this in really a short amount of time. And I want to definitely get into DeFi app, but I think a lot of it has to do with kind of how you guys built it and kind of your design philosophy. you, so can you give us a sense of like how you got into crypto and like what first made you convinced that design was one of the key problems in crypto that in a space that many people are still quite technical and focus on infrastructure, you instead focus on design. And it turns out that I think you might be right. Yeah, so I guess the first thing about me is, you know, I'm a product designer. been designing now for 10 years. I'm very much always, you know, problem first. And my whole specialty, I'm a developer too, front end developer, but my whole specialty is just taking complex things and making them simple. That's my thing. I feel like it's very much in my bones and I've always done this. And... You know, that's kind of like the foundation for DeFi app. the funny thing is I've been in crypto now since 2017. So what's this? Eight years. It's kind of crazy to think about that. At the time, you know, I was really just getting familiar with crypto. Started a blog that did really well, actually blew up. think we had like over a million readers. We weren't really blog writers, but it was really just an opportunity to sort of learn. This was some Friends I knew at the time, know, kind of we'd been tinkering around building companies together, coming in from, actually, social, so we built our own like social app. Anyway, we then kind of pivoted into building an automated trading terminal. So at the time centralized exchanges really sucked. Like you couldn't set any complex orders. traders were waking up at four o'clock in the morning to alert that sound some third party tool or trading view. And they'd have to go in and they'd have to click and make some changes. we, you know, we were trading ourselves and we were like, Hey, let's just build an augmented tool that essentially makes all of this simple. You can enter a position, you can set your take profits, you can set your stop loss and you can just press go and it does everything for you. And, yeah, that was a great, you know, sort of start. We, did really well with that. were acquired by Shopify. I went over and worked there in the finance team for a while started or immediately started missing the startup grind. corporate is just not the same, even though it's an amazing company. So left, you know, fairly early, about a year, year and a half into it and came back into crypto. And so, yeah, you know, a few years went by, doubled around with various different projects here and there, did a bit of consulting work on the sides, sort of learn more and more about the space, really just getting involved in everything. And, you know, after last cycle, like last cycle was insane. You know, I was trading a bunch. And you remember what it was like, right? Like there was some new chain launching some new tokens launching here, some new yield farm launching there. And it always involved, you know, getting a wallet set up, you know, with Avalanche, had to, you know, I can't remember what it was now, but you had to like set up some wallet, do the Avalanche bridge, get it over. And there was just so much complexity. was insane. And like at that time it was like, well, obviously we don't have a billion people on chain because why? Like it's, know, and so funny where maybe the super cracked people that just don't care about risk when we probably should. you know, we dove in the deep end, which is incredible. but when you really think about it you're like, you know, thousands of dollars, you know, I don't know what percentage of people's like livelihoods, you know, going on chain in this complex world where you've got to think about wallets, chains, bridges, gas, like just so much complexity and DeFi app was just such a no brainer. And the funny thing is, is like a few people have asked me this now, which is just like, like, damn, why hasn't this been done before? And I honestly have no idea. I say the same thing every single time. I have no idea why this was not done before, because this is just such an obvious no brainer to me. Everything about it, you know? And so. Yeah, there's a few things that kind of came together in terms of why we started. So of course that simplicity, thinking back to the previous cycles, how to create a centralized exchange like experience where the UX is great, but it's entirely decentralized foundationally. And... You know, we, of course you've got to also bear in mind one amazing thing about DeFi app is part of its DNA is, risk. So one thing that holds back centralized exchanges and stops them from being able to dabble in decentralized finance is risk, right? Like they have an incredible big business, know, Coinbase has, you know, stock on the stock market. You've got Robinhood and so on, but they can't just dive into decentralized finance because of all the regulations. So that's our. That's our advantage as a startup. There's a nimble startup that also doesn't because DeFi is very much like an aggregator of aggregators. We don't hold any users funds at any point. Like we don't own any smart contracts that users funds stay in. Maybe that'll change a little bit in the future, but it's very much part of our DNA to just sort of, are a bunch of incredible solutions that exist out there. You know, Uniswap, Oneinch, LiFi, Relay, so on and so forth. Let's just aggregate them all together and just focus on the UX portion of this. Let's take what already exists. That's already doing really well. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Let's just unify it into one interface. It feels like a centralized exchange. Do all the magic in the background and let the user just do what they want to do instead of like crypto. Sorry. DeFi so far has always been like, you want to go from A to Z. There are a million potholes you have to get around before you can accomplish that. And we were like, okay, what is the problem the user wants to solve? They want to go from bonk on Arbitrum to broccoli on BNB. That's just what they want to do. Just let them do that and we'll handle everything else. And that's exactly what we've built. And so you're really abstracting away all of those individual steps. And yeah, just getting the user to solve the problem as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible. I see a couple like cultural, I think culturally there are a couple of issues in crypto. You've got like highly technical co-founders or founders that for some reason they revel and get excited about complexity. And so they use a lot of jargon and they get excited about complexity and you can see that in the content and like what they write. But you're exactly right. Like the user... I mean, they are target seeking people. have a goal. They're goal seeking. They want to get something done. And it's on us that creates these products to make sure that they're able to accomplish their goal. And your idea of abstracting the complexity away from the user is so important. And it's just not appreciated enough in crypto. Why do you think that is? Yeah, great question. And you know, the interesting thing is had DeFi app had been built, you know, eight years ago when I first got into crypto, it's actually possible that people would not have been interested in DeFi app. Like I could, I could imagine DeFi app succeeding, you know, I mean, except for the technology, a lot of technologies come a long way, but you know, imagine that was there. I could see it succeeding, but it definitely would have been a harder grind than it is now. And I think. Good thing about like crypto as a whole, right? Like it very much, you know, from the get-go attracted anarchists, people that wanted to disrupt the norm, you know, go against traditional finance, go against all of the big players. Like it attracted like these, like, I always think of them as monkeys with wrenches. And I mean that in the best sort of way where it's just like, you know, diving into the gears, tinkering around with stuff. Like they, you know, developers being proud of making something of the blockchain, know, inventing a whole world. And it very much is a wild West, you know, there really isn't a ton of standards. And you know what? I love that. Like, I love that developers are like that. Like that's our opportunity as DeFi app is to come in there with, you know, product first thinking, but I love that developers have thought that way. Cause that's what pushes the bar. That's what gets, you know, creative solutions out there solving problems. creating problems and then solving those problems. And so I really, know, kind of the fundamental of DeFi app is like, recognize that. I think it's incredible. And I hope that crypto never loses that spirit. I love that someone with a laptop in their parents' basement can build a world changing product. And it's insane. And people don't realize how often that is the case, but I love that. But you know, they can do what they do best. which is the technical solving problems and we'll do what we do best, is providing that surface to users and owning the end user, owning the end user experience. so I kind of see this big shift now of people being done with overly complex products and moving towards simplicity and just they're tired of things, they want convenience and... We are giving that to them. And as we do these protocols that all these very talented builders are building move, you know, a layer down and we become a layer above them as that UX layer. And you know, there, there are incumbents. There's other people doing the same thing, even centralized exchanges. Now, you know, a few big announcements recently, but everyone's moving into the space here because it's just so obvious. Like this is what someone told me one time centralized exchanges were both the best and worst thing to ever happen to crypto. And the best thing because, you it made it easy, it made it relatively safe. Anyone can get involved, but also the worst thing because it almost entirely like circumvents the whole point of crypto existing, you know, like you owning your own funds and you having control over your own funds. And so that's why DeFi is such a no brainer. That's why exchanges, you know, should be decentralized by default. And that's kind of what drives us daily. You know, how do we... build more of it and as we go on, how do we become the front page of decentralized finance? How do we become synonymous with decentralized finance? so lofty journey, but I feel like we're doing pretty good. I think so too. I don't know if you were around when Ether Delta was around back in 2016, 2017, but I remember. No, I remember first trying out Ether Delta and I had no idea what was going on. The thing was the most complicated piece of software in the world. And as a result, like a lot of people lost money, including me, just because I didn't know how to figure it I just couldn't figure it out. I don't know what I was doing. And an interesting cultural thing happened. I would ask other people in the forums, hey, how do I do this? And as a new person, like I almost felt like they were making fun of me. They're like, what? You don't know how to do this? Are you crazy? Why are you even in crypto? And this is 2016, right? We're like all new in crypto. But I felt like there was like this inner circle of like people that knew how to do stuff and I was not in that circle. yet. But it turns out that it's like, like you literally had to have lost a lot of money as as tuition to learn how to use Ether Delta. And or either be one of the developers that actually built it. But it was pretty clear to me at the time, like this thing was not built in in a way that like met users like needs because the thing was just it was just very hard to use. fast forward to, you know, DeFi Summer. And that was so fun. know, Wi-Fi came out, yams. I mean, it was just a blast. And again, no one knew what they were doing, right? We were just like de-genning in and out of things. But it was so fun. But there was kind of a different feeling back then. It was like, it felt like, okay, this is a new thing. You know, we're past the ether Delta stage. Now we're like, now we can actually make money and like there's yields and there's this and that. And it was just such a fun thing. And the feeling was a lot different, but still the user interfaces. mean, if you remember wifi, was just like, you know, it was like a Linux terminal, pretty much. It was just like, you know, just ASCII code. And, and I feel like we're now at a stage where it's, you know, if you're rowing on a boat and you're kind of capsizing on one side, of complexity. And so now it's like, have to go on the other side where it's like, let's remove all the complexity and make it easier. And I think that's healthy. I think we're at that stage now. And I think DeFi app is one that's kind leading the way. Exactly. Yeah. It's a, you know, it's like, there's a divergence convergence. And that's what this is, is, know, at one time it really was just a handful of tokens you could ever buy in crypto, you know, and then it explodes. And that's very much the divergence we saw, you know, this cycle has been a bit of a weird one, but like just seeing the explosion of innovation is really interesting. And then now I very much think that, you know, we're moving towards this convergence where we're saying, okay, enough of that, enough of that noise. Let's, let's clean it all up and actually turn this into something that's useful. And I think one big thing that's changed as well as people are really craving authenticity. mean, we saw that with like the, hyper liquid airdrop, you know, became a $30 billion valuation. You know, I think the ceiling for that is much higher. and I think, you know, people are really just craving products that are like, no, like it was a fun time. feces, insiders, know, pumping bags, but it got old quickly. And now people are looking forward to products that are very much community first. again, problem first, very grassroots. I hope that we, I hope that we are that we try to be. I mean, we are, we're very much just very passionate people that have been around for a very long time in crypto. And I just building to solve our own problems and other people's problems too. That's awesome. Let's get into the DeFi app. I think to transition into it, I'd like to play the video on the website of this grandma. It's hilarious, by the way. This is the other thing. After one of your team members wrote me, and I went to the site, and this is the first thing I saw, I that's brilliant. Like we've actually, like many people have said, hey, a video of a grandma or your mom should like, know, using DeFi, but you actually did it. You know, it's like people have been talking about this for a while, but you guys actually did it and created commercial out of it. no joke in internally in the team, actually even externally too. We genuinely refer to like you know, okay, this is good for crypto natives, but this can grandma figure this out. Like it's actually like a metric that we look towards and we, and we genuinely visualize this grandma that needs to be able to navigate this page. And it needs to be so simple that she can. And, know, and I feel like that's, that's how you bring on the, the non crypto natives, the crypto adjacent people, the half a billion people on centralized exchanges and beyond. yeah, it's very much a part of our culture. I love it. After the show, I want to show you a video that I had created back in 2017. It was actually hilarious, but it was way too long. Like yours, this video is hilarious. Ours was like five minutes long. It was like this guy in the desert and he tries to buy lemonade from a lemonade stand with crypto. so anyway, I'll have to show you after the show. But let me kind of pull this up. So I'm going to play this and then let's get into DeFi app. I just swapped Ethereum with Salami! and Jarvis will present you with the best price. Wait for your confirmation and voila, swap complete. Want to earn a yield instead? Simply ask Jarvis. Get presented with the best yield options based on your personal preferences, click to deposit, and we're done. DeFi Albus made crypto as easy to use as an iPhone. Powered by our recent fundraise led by Mechanism Capital. access every token, every app, every chain, or deep by dot app. Front door for your crypto. We just made centralized exchanges obsolete. Our mission? Displace the 40 billion dollars in annual revenue captured by centralized exchanges and through decentralized governance, return that to you, the users. Hire a token that allows you to own a piece of the entire ecosystem. For DGENs, by DGENs. Welcome home. Alright, love that. Yeah, there's so much to get into. Like right now, my mind is like the one of the key features, right? Is the gasless transactions. And I think most like Ethereum people, like they're like, well, how are they doing that? But you said in in a in an X-post, it's not about gasless, it's about friction. And so I love that the way you frame things, because most people get stuck on the technical aspect, which which is exactly where my mind went to. but instead you're like, it's not about the gas, it's about the friction. Tell us more about that and then tell us about like DeFi app, especially for those that don't know about it. Yeah. so I mean, you, couldn't say that better myself. you know, a large piece of any product, not just ours is, building a brand, building a understanding, even like convincing someone of a mindset and You know, that's kind of, I think one, like when one big blocker for decentralized finance is people are immediately turned off by it because instantly without even knowing all those details, you know, they've only had just heard about wallets, for example, they've done a Google search and they've heard about wallets and they're immediately switched off because they're like, this is not for me. This is for way smarter people than me. And their motivation to go and learn the other complexities is incredibly low. And let's face it, you know, it's all learnable. We all started from zero and we all came in here. Anyone can do it, but it's so daunting. And it's, still very much that today, know, the mainstream media pushes this idea, right? So what we've tried to create with DeFi app and it's an ongoing journey, you know, we're always going to be evolving and, you know, but Is exactly that where it's, you know, for the sake of gas, like we don't want people thinking about gas, just like I don't want people thinking about chains when they go from A to Z, they just, they just say, doesn't matter. Don't think of the intermediary things. have USDC and I want to buy, you know, whatever on, on, for example, but that USDC behind the scenes might be split up across five different chains, depending on all the trading you've done. You might've had it, you know, some of it's on Solana, some of it's on You know, arbitrary and some of it's on base and all routes just figure it out. They just get your 1000 USDC that you wanted to use and swap it through various different routes to get it into the end asset. And one thing that I'm quite proud of and that we definitely want to double down onto as time permits, is, you know, you've probably seen this anyone who trades and especially when you see that kind of example where an asset that you're trading is coming from various different sources. when I see a lot of people like, when I see a light bulb moment for a lot of people, when they get very excited, because I feel like, you know, we've done a good job of showing that path. It's a good balance of like that transparency to show that, okay, behind the scenes is a bunch of nuts and bolts. And yes, your USCC isn't quite, is not so simple. It's coming from various different chains. You can click into that. You can still go to the various, you know, explorer and go and see how that transaction has been performed. But from the top level, you just see this very lovely story. And if it fails too, which is a big part of it at the end of the day, we're building a UX product in the wild West, where there's all kinds of different standards. Things do break. Sometimes you need to be refunded for various different things. And that's all part of it too. Like in without DeFi app, something breaks and very often you're left like searching on various different scanners, trying to piece together this crazy story. And it makes no sense. And there's like, you know what I mean? And, and especially as we move towards like You know, intent based bridges and stuff like that. Like things become a little bit opaque, but with DeFi app, just tells the story. It's like, Oh, my swap failed at this point here. Here's exactly why it failed. Here's what percentage of it failed. Here's me getting a refund with that. And I can see that USDC being refunded back to me on Arbitrum and his, you know, you know, 60 % of it went through and performed the swap and Yeah, it's that's kind of like our bounce, which is like, we understand that there are, you know, crypto natives out there and quite honestly, like our initial people that were bringing it onto DeFi app are very much crypto natives. We're, trying to, you we're building for this grander future where we get all grandmas, the half a billion people, the crypto adjacent people, get them into DeFi. But you know, at end of the day, the most active people on chain are the crypto natives. So we're building for them too. So we don't want to make them feel like they're using some baby products that like is too simplified. So our kind of approach to that was always just allow people to double click, like allow progressive disclosures. What, you know, it's the UX sort of approach, which is just keep it really simple from the top level. Cause in 90 % of those cases, you don't care, especially when you build a trust with that brand, with the idea that this product just handles the complexity for me and gets me where I'm going. Very often, you don't really care. Like, do you really care how the car works and how the engine looks? Most people have not even like looked at like how all the inner workings of a car, you know, look like, but You just trust it. You just get in, you turn the key and you drive. and so that's 99 % honestly of the experience for people. And that's what we've optimized for. But for those who are inclined, who want more information or in edge cases where something fails, they can double click. And if that's not enough information, they double click again and they go deeper and they keep going. so, you know, trying that with like our goal is really just, we don't want to take away from the transparency. that you have right now with DeFi, decentralized finance. We don't want to limit things either by being too opinionated, but you know, on the very top level, we want to be opinionated because that's how we curate. That's how we frame a simple experience that anyone can use and that anyone can get involved in. And we just take that methodology, that really UVP, even though it sounds so simple and rudimentary, but like that UVP of just how do we make these scary things, you know, simple? We're just applying that to everything. So one big feature we're working on right now, which fingers crossed don't hold me to the skies, but fingers crossed trying to get some alpha testers on this this week. and then maybe get into production, you know, in next couple of weeks is perhaps trading. So, you know, as of right now, it's going to be powered entirely by hyper liquid behind the scenes and you'll be able to perform. do everything that you can currently do on hyper liquid. You'll be able to do that within DeFi app only we've made your life just that bit more convenient, just that bit easier. You can, you know, it's the same place where you do all of your spot trading, you know, across like every, we support five chains right now. And we, you can buy any token on any of those five chains. And so you can do all of that. You can then easily deposit into your hyper liquid purpose account. You can then perform your leverage trades in the future. We'll add a bunch more, you know, probably like GMX and any other future perhaps platforms that come out there and get a ton of love. We'll put them in there too. And you'll be able to just move your money easily, but you know, seamlessly between those, those protocols. I will add, you know, lending and borrowing. You've to move your money into lending, borrowing trivially. Like there's so many things that we can do, but the fundamental thing is always just how do we make the complexity simple? And, and that's always going to be our angle. Like there's always going to be someone who's using DeFi app. That's like, Hey, this doesn't have all the knobs and dials that I need to trench trade. There's enough, there's enough products out there for those trench traders. What we are trying to focus on is those people that, you know, just want convenience and just want to get the job done. because there really should be no reason why you're using any other product out there. Like DeFi app should do everything. And if it isn't doing it yet, it will do one day. And that's kind of the goal. And I like that approach because there's a set of users that definitely want to look under the hood. And then there's a set of users that are really focused on convenience and they just want their goal seeking, like I said earlier. And DeFi app kind of satisfies their needs. And I think that's super important because really a lot of crypto products, they don't. I mean, they're just not convenient. You use a phrase called progressive disclosure. Okay. And also UVP, can you help maybe define those for the audience and like, are you talking about? Yeah. So UVP is just unique value proposition. So it's just what is, yeah, what is the thing that we provide that, you know, that is a convincing enough argument to stop using your existing system and come over and use ours. And that's actually, you know, one thing I will touch upon there is another framework is jobs to be done. And this is a framework that I've very much bestowed the design team pushed this. very much a design led company, as you can probably tell, but you know, We push this across every single person who's making any kind of product decisions within the company. And it's just, what is the job the user is trying to get done? And this is usually, we're not inventing jobs for people. They're already trying to get the job done. They're already trying to swap from, you know, USDC on some EVM chain into whatever on Solana. But like, we are just taking that and making it faster, making it safer, making it more convenient. That's all you're doing. You're not reinventing the wheel. You're just saying, Hey, how do I make this thing? you know, fit into your existing habits. How do I take your existing habits and route them through DeFi app and then apply that same thing to everything. And you know, it doesn't sound super exciting in the early days, but like as time goes on, once you solve those, those jobs to be done for people that you kind of build this surface where now you can create new paradigms on top of that surface. Like as of right now, there's no need for new paradigms besides the, the seamless money movement. really is no need for new paradigms, but Once we've got that base level where you kind of, you you cover most people's use cases with the decentralized finance, then you can start to build on top. So I went on a bit of a tangent. tend to do that, but jobs to be done is, is a really cool framework that goes hand in hand with the unique value proposition. And then what was the other acronym I used? was progressive disclosure. Yes. So, yeah, progressive disclosure is very much, you know, it's kind of in the name. It's just very much like. Users tend to get overwhelmed if you present too much information upfront. And we don't even realize that like users really don't like, you know, or people don't really like choice too much, you know, like we want choice, but then as soon as it's put in front of you, get like super anxious and you're like, what do I choose? Just tell me what to get. Like, you know, when you go to a restaurant, you're probably going to order the food from the menu that has the pictures, you know, like There's like you, when you go to a supermarket, you're probably going to order the biggest, brightest fruit that you're going to ignore everything else. Right? Like it's people want to be told what, what they want to see. But oftentimes there is a need to double click. is a need to go a level deeper. And that's what progressive disclosure is all about. It's just, Hey, here's a piece of information, consume this, understand this. Once you've got that and you feel confident and comfortable now here's something else. And It works really, really well. And honestly, it's probably for the most part with, with what we're doing and how we're simplifying, you know, decentralized finance, that's probably the simple it's sorry. That's probably the main ingredient. It's just progressive disclosure is how do you take and chunk things so that people can, you know, understand them. So it's digestible, before they move on to the next. And it's also humane, right? It meets people where they are. Like you don't give them more information than they need so that they don't feel overwhelmed and feel all this cognitive load. And it's overwhelming. And especially for new people, but really most crypto people feel that way. Like I don't want to be overwhelmed with stuff. I just want to be able to do what I need to do and then move on with my life. But if you give me more information than I need, most people... would tend to freeze up and then just kind of probably end up making mistakes. And so I think as a design principle, that's, in DeFi app, where do you see that design principle, I guess, implemented or instantiated? Everywhere. you know, biggest, yeah, biggest examples definitely, you know, you'll see that in the swapping. So with the roots, with, know, understanding the, the actual mechanisms behind the scenes, the providers that are being used, being able to see, the transactions in the various different scanners. Like that's probably the biggest area where you'll, know, where it's most prevalent, but, maybe, I wonder if you could frame it this way. a situation where I wanna swap 10 USDC for 10, I don't know, bonk, where progressive disclosure is not applied, and then where it is. What is the, I guess that before and after look like? Okay, so, you know, 10 USDC to 10 bank, know, in without DeFi app, the way that that looks is what do you do? So, okay, so you have to check your wallet, check your balance, you know, how much USDC do you have? Okay, just double check that you've got enough gas on whatever chain is that you're going to make that swap. Okay, cool. And now I'm going to go and find a product that I use. You probably got it bookmarked. It's probably like Uniswap or Cowswap or whatever, one 1inch or whatever. And so you're to go to that. Okay. Then you go and you perform the swap. And you know, for you, maybe it's an aggregator. If it's one 1inch, using some aggregation. I don't know if you care about $10, but if it was a much bigger value, you probably want to double check where it's being rooted through, what liquidity is being rooted through. And so there's all of these various different things that you have to do. to be able to then perform that swap. And there's so much cognitive overload. And so for the CryptoNators, we're so used to it we probably take it for granted. And maybe we even kind of love that because it's a skill that we've learned, but like the rest of the world that want to use crypto, they don't want that. You know, like they don't need that. Like they don't need to be, you know, knowing the inner working. So with our product, it'd be just very much like, no, cool. You've got 10 USDC. You want to swap it for, no, I think you said $DOG or whatever. but you want to swap it. And like I said, in 99 % of cases, no one cares, especially when you already trust DeFi app at that point. And as we get more brand recognition, people just will just out the gate, they'll just trust the brand and they'll be like, I know this is going to work. I know this is the best. I don't need to know more. And that's great. They're just mindless swapping one after the other, assets to assets. Behind the scenes, it's going across various different chains. It's performing all various things. It's using this provider or that provider, depending on how cheap or fast they are. And they don't have to care about it. It can be totally oblivious to it. And that's great. Like that is just seamless. That's, that's what seamless is all about. Right. But for those who still, you know, want to see what's going on and have a little bit of control, they can double click into it they can see that route. They can see exactly where the, you know, the USDC is going from what provider it's being used. what chain is being bridged due to be able to get into, you know, or whatever is at the buying. And yeah, and that's that, that's progressive disclosure. It's like that information, that route is only there if they choose to double click and they're looking for answers. But if they're not, and again, 99 % of cases, usually people aren't, they're pretty oblivious to it. They don't have to worry about it. They just get the job done. It's kind of like a kind of real world example is, you know, I, tend to throw things in like the closet and in that I close the door. I don't need to know what's behind it. But if you want to know, like be cautious because when you open it, like there's going to lots of crap in there. and, that's the thing it's like, you know, in our relationships, we don't just like show them like open doors in our closet and like, it's, it's all the dirty laundry is in there. give another example, right? Like say you're dating somebody for the very first time, right? Everyone's got problems. Everyone's got something on their mind. You know, some tragic backstory, but you don't come in the first date and start telling them that, right? Like progressive disclosure is the first date is, know, hopefully you're being authentic, but like you, you, you're just being, it's the rosiest side of yourself. You want to kind of tease them into the funnel, right? Like And then later on down the line, they figure out a bit more about you. And there's even an important moment where that builds trust. And then all of sudden, now you've got more of a connection with this person. And the funny thing is, is that analogy is exactly the same with DeFi app. Like crypto natives, I hope that crypto natives will go in, see under the hood, do it maybe a couple of times, realize they can trust us and then never bother with it ever again. And they're just like, cool. It just does the thing. Why would I check under the hood again? I don't need to, you know, it's always there if they want to, and they have that trust. But that's the thing is it's like this, what DeFi has done, which is really cool is it gives people the sense of control and abstracting things away sort of makes people feel like they don't have that control. you know, maybe quite that, maybe that's accurate, but. So we want to have, that's the balance is like, Hey, listen, you don't have to control this thing. We will do it for you, but if you don't trust us, go and check and. If you just simply trust that it's there and that you can double check at any time, that's enough for most people and they don't have to worry about it again. And you also have an opportunity to like, hey, it's okay. You don't trust us right now, but you know, play around for a while and at some point we'll earn your trust and you don't need to look under the hood anymore. It's actually, it's relational, right? And I think that's a lot of software is relational. We just don't approach it like that. It's very kind of, we take a very utilitarian approach when it really is kind of relational. And especially in crypto, it's not just with the piece of software we're using, but it's like the team behind it. And we tend to forget that. I really liked that you brought that up. And actually one thing I will throw on there that, know, is a something that a lot of people don't realize about DeFi app is it's been designed so that people can come as they are now, you know, PSA, we want everyone to come in there and sign up for embedded wallets, you know, they, which is where you enter your email address and we generate wallets for you. We try not to talk about it as a wallet. tried to frame it as an account, right? Like you just have this one account that you'll, you'll never need an account again for crypto. Like this is one account where you're about to buy and trade anything. You know, and yield farms, everything sorted through this one, this one profile. We want that. we encourage it. We reward more XP for it. we want that because it's the most convenient experience when you, when you're trading. But if you're a crypto native and you're stubborn and you like your ways, and by the way, that, that, that approach, that account approach is entirely self-custodial. Like you can export your keys. You can take them elsewhere. If you want to, if you don't like DeFi app and we're not doing a good enough job, you can take your funds elsewhere. It's entirely self-custodial. But. If you don't trust us, which, know, a lot of people, get it, right? Like you have a meta mask that just works. You've always used that. You can come in and you can connect that and you can get trading with DeFi app. It's a little bit clunkier. You have more signatures you have to do. You still have to maintain gas in that situation, but you can come as you are and just use the product and it kind of meets everyone. then hopefully when we've convinced you of the safety of the, the account approach, the embedded wallet approach, like then you transition, maybe you dip your toes and use it a little bit. You just use it for Solana. And then when you're happy with it, then you move entirely over and you only use the embedded account for both Solana and EVM. And it's very much like this mentality we've tried to apply, which is like, we're not trying to reshape how people approach their behaviors. We're just saying, hey, listen, come as you are, use this product, we'll solve your problem and make your life easier. If you take these steps, you'll make it even more convenient. You mentioned earlier that DeFi app supports five chains right now. What are those chains and what's on the roadmap for what DeFi app will support next? Roadmap is everything, but the main net, course, Arbitrum, Bass, BSC, and Solana. Yeah, I'm not missing anything, I don't think. and we just added Sonic, sorry, we've got six chains. Sonic will be coming out very soon, we just still got it in the testing phase. Yeah, so I'd say probably the next couple are Optimism and Avalanche. They should be pretty easy ads, so why not? I am particularly quite curious about Hyper-EVM. I would also, this is really just for the culture. I would really love to have Bitcoin in there where you don't have to buy wrapped Bitcoin. You can just buy native Bitcoin. I think that'd be great if you can just, you don't have to go to a centralized exchange to buy native Bitcoin, which let's face it, that's pretty much the only way you can do it today. So yeah, that's probably in that order. And then we'll add everything else. Really just looking at where the volume is, what are people trading on? Yeah, we I met with George from Lombard a couple of weeks ago. He actually asked a question that I'm going to read here in a little bit. But one of the part pieces of conversation that we he and I had was that, you know, for DeFi to grow like Bitcoin has to be part of it, because otherwise it's really it's probably as large in terms of like market cap as it can be right now, because it's kind of just like we're not getting really very many new entrants into DeFi. And so for it to grow as we need, BTC has to be part of the story. And so for DeFi app to support native Bitcoin is huge, as well as like it's liquid kind of equivalence, such as LBTC, Lombard BTC, for example. And so I'm pleased to hear that you guys are looking into that. I'm also quite active in the runes community with, you know, these are like meme coins on Bitcoin. And so dog is one of those. And in fact, there's tons of comments in the post that I posted yesterday of, you know, when dog. so, and you don't have to answer that or commit to anything, but just know that now it's like all these like runes, you know, meme coins on Bitcoin people are like, they're looking to defy app. Hey, you got to support, you know, runes now. think that's really cool. And honestly, you know, a large piece of this is just making sure that we have the provider infrastructure so that we have, you know, good liquidity, that we can be able to perform those trades or someone could perform those trades on our behalf. that's the biggest thing, but honestly, I I want to get adding chains down to like, you know, obviously EVM chains are going to be much easier. but I want to get adding chains down to like a week turnaround, like being able to just add them one after the other and really expand our our coverage because you know, that's how you become the front page, right? That'll be huge. Okay, so let me ask the questions that people posted on the, as a reply to my post yesterday. So this is from George Beale. As I mentioned, he's at Lombard. He's the head of business development there. He said, I'd love to learn more about how they do user research and product design. While many companies claim to prioritize product design, DeFi app has killed it at execution. What do they get right that helps set them apart? damn, that makes me happy to hear. Sets us apart. Stubbornness. So I would say actually, you know, one thing that's, mean, me as a co-founder, being entirely product design driven, I'm incredibly stubborn and I push back on so many things. And the way I tend to approach designers, you know, And we had a couple of issues with this, by the way, is I will sometimes over abstract things. will oversimplify flows. And I do that because it's so much more difficult to take things away than it is to add. And I would much rather start off extremely simple, even if it makes us look dumb and like we've missed something. Cause I would rather have people knocking at the gate saying, no, I need this. need this so I can speak with them. Like I would rather. I'd rather poke the bears and say, guys, you know, like make them demand it from us. Cause then I can speak with them and I can try to understand why, why, why, and keep asking why until I understand the fundamental problem. And then I can give ground begrudgingly and I can introduce it in and I'll never give up on that idea. And even one day in the future, I might remove it again, because sometimes I do. And sometimes you think you need something, but it's not actually the case. know, like, it's a It's just what you're used to. So that's kind of my tactic. It really very much is stubbornness. We have very, very talented designers on the team. I'm extremely proud of them. And, know, maybe for an early stage startup, we started off with more designers than most companies would. started off, we, know, myself included in two other designers. we're now at five designers total, which is very heavy for a team. You know, we're, think we're at 25 percent team now we're adding developers left, right center. So, you know, for. Like it's a very large portion of the team is being very design focused. And I love that. I love it because we all call it out and we create that culture within the company. We're a zero bullshit company. We're very much just like, if you don't like something, you call that thing out. There's none of this like corporate cook behavior within DeFi app. It's very much just like, what do you think of this? Share your opinion. Everyone's very respectful, but it's like, how we were all aligned on how do we solve this problem best? And that's really the crux of you know, the approach with everything. yeah, so we have to recognize and one big thing that every company gets wrong at some point and we'll still continue to get wrong. And we'll have to keep reminding ourselves is you can't build for everyone all at once. You have to start off with a certain subgroup of people and you have to defend that shit. Like you need to be like fully aligned with like, this is who I'm building for because the market will shift you, you know, and all feedback is welcome. Of course it all needs to come in. but it's on us as the product leaders to make that decision, to decide to say no to a lot of things and say yes to some things. And it's on us to cherry pick what we want because ultimately we're the ones building out this vision. And a lot of the times it won't be, people won't realize it until it's realized, until it gets to a certain point where you hit some threshold where they go, I get it. I understand now why all of this was done this way. And if you, you know, So there is this fine balance when it comes to feedback where I absolutely encourage everyone send it out to us. We do user interviews as well. recommend anybody reach out to us who wants to do a user interview. You know, we test Figma prototypes that are very lifelike. then, you know, hopefully we've actually built out a prototype that you can literally get a URL to and actually test it out and put some real money into it. And that's generally what we strive towards. But yeah. Like ultimately the thing that I always encourage the team is like, need to know, you need to have your own conviction. What do you believe in? If you have an opinion, say it out loud, defend that opinion, fight for it. And then have, then encourages everyone to come up with like constrict, like their own arguments for pros and cons. And then it's really easy to assess what is the right direction. And that's really just how we've made every decision until now. And sometimes it can slow things down. And sometimes, like I said, it oversimplifies things, but I would much rather that because that's what the space needs. That's ultimately what the space needs. Well, it sounds like it's working. Okay. Next question. This is from 0xrumrunner. He says, when perps, when staking, will there be vaults to farm things like Lombard or other pre-TGE protocols? Keep up the good work. So obviously you don't have to answer or commit to any dates, but that's his question. yeah, I can't commit to dates, but yes, the short answer is yes. There will be all of the above. Staking, of course, some kind of staking mechanism, you know, if we launch a token, there would be some kind of staking mechanism. You know, of course we're going to have probably Aave, we'll start off with just to kind of feel out what a lending borrowing platform could be a bit of like yield farming going on. And then we'll probably hand select, you know, a few products to integrate like Athena and any of the big ones. And really start from there. Again, stay really like, it's not about how do we add everything. It's just what is the 20 % that is 80 % and then how do you make that really simple and make sure it aligns well with the, you know, the vision. Once you've locked that down, once you've locked that vision down, then it's just like one after the other. Same thing with a swapping interface. Like I said, I want to get it down to one week implementation per chain. Like once you figured out the recipe, then it's really easy to just execute on it. So that's really the big focus right now. But perps should be an alpha end of week. Maybe next week we'll see. I don't want to rush things. I'll start getting some people in there to sort of test it out. But it's power by hyperliquid where they are already do a brilliant job. So it shouldn't be too far from now. Awesome. Okay, last question. And this is from Holly at Holly goner. Will they be including gaming into DeFi apps power function? Very possibly. And you know, there's a lot like that too, like, you know, AI as well is something that I really want to integrate, but I've actually pushed back on that a lot and the team would know it and I've been a pain in the ass about it. And I'll be the pain in the ass about gaming and so on. I think there's use cases, but I want to know what that is. I want it to feel like a pull. I want it to be so obvious to me that I'm like desperate to get that thing added. And I've just not, maybe I'm a cynic, but I've just not been convinced yet. When I see it though, When the stars align on that thing, when I can apply our UVP to that space, it will be in there. so Holly was it, she needs to convince me. She needs to tell me why I'm adding that. I'm not just adding that to pump tokens. I'm adding it because it solves a real problem. And that's how we approach everything. Cool. Well, what I love about DeFi app is it's very consumer focused and I can see a flywheel happening. If the ambition is to take significant wallet share from centralized exchanges and then that value will somehow accrue to the eventual token that DeFi app will have home, I believe. and then holders of home will benefit from that. And so it creates this flywheel. And you don't see a flywheel like that in a lot of crypto projects. You see it in Hyperliquid, you see it in Kaito, you see it in, and I think you'll see it in DeFi app, but a lot of these infrastructure kind of focus projects in Ethereum and not quite Solana. Solana is very consumer focused, but I think a lot in Ethereum, they're still very kind of infrastructure focused. so there is no net... necessarily a flywheel in a lot of the applications and projects on L1 or rollups or L2 or decentralized sequencers, etc. It almost feels like the user acquisition play for them almost feels kind of like manufactured. They have to create a point system that is kind of not quite related to the thing that they've built. But now they have a token, they have to figure out how to accrue value to it. And so it feels very It doesn't connect. And that's what I love about DeFi app is that it feels like it's going to connect. Like things are looking like, OK, it's like a bunch of pieces of the puzzle are available. And then I can see there's like one that's not. But once it's there, it's like it's going to create this flight wheel. Am I making things up? No, that's you got it exactly. So, you know, I can't slate people running points programs too much. There's a lot of bad ones out there where it very much is disjointed, like you say, and it's like, why are you doing this? What are you? So the way I see points programs from a, you know, there's a few things to actually, but one big thing from strictly, you know, objectively from a startup perspective is it's kind of like running paid ads. Right? Like early stage startups can run paid ads. probably shouldn't, you probably shouldn't until you figured out product market fit, but you can to sort of jumpstart that wheel, get people in the funnel, you know, start getting user feedback because that can lead towards reaching product market fit. And I see points programs is very much the same. You're incentivizing people to come and use your product. Now the issue that most companies run into with that is, whether it's traditional startups with ads or whether it's points programs, they start listening to the feedback from these people. They're effectively paying to come and use the product. which isn't inherently bad, but would they be using your product if you weren't incentivizing them? And if the answer is no, and oftentimes it is no, then is that really the feedback you want to have? And if you take all of that feedback, it can really send you on a path of just, you don't know where you're going. You lose that conviction in where you're going. So it's really difficult. It's a fog and you have to keep a clear sight through it. That said, It is really good to get people in the funnel using your product. I'm so happy that we've had that in the early stages of DeFi. Thank God, no one's actually lost money, but there's been moments where, know, someone, if this was like months ago, where someone would perform a trade and it would kind of get stuck in some, in the provider and we had to then realize we had to design something and build something out that would refund the user automatically. And it's like, you really just don't find that those leaky, those holes in the leaky book. You just don't find them until you start pouring water in there. So you start getting users using the product. And those troops going in and using it have been, you know, they're largely responsible for where DeFi app is today and why it's so successful today. And, know, that's very much part of it. You can't rely on, it's not, you know, it's a crutch. You can't rely on it forever. And so what you've really got to get to is just like more fundamental flywheel effects and really network effects. Like the goal that most crypto companies neglect. because they just very much rely on that token. And once that whole cycle is done, they move on to something else. The thing that is different about DeFi app is we're moving towards how do we build network effects? How do we create a flywheel that is so powerful where the product gets better the more that people use it. And it's a very, very difficult thing to solve for. And, you know, there's obviously many different mechanisms too that lead into it, but that's what DeFi app is going for. And when you have that, not only does it help the token, but it also creates a fantastic product that everyone is using. And it becomes the Google of decentralized finance, know, because synonymous with DeFi. That's awesome. And that's a great place to end. mean, just for the listeners to know that the co-founder of DeFi app believes in the fact of the more users there are, the better the product gets. They give feedback and like that feedback loop is incredible because I can tell you, know, having spoken to lots of co-founders, there are some co-founders that don't want to hear feedback and that you're open to it to help improve the product. so that more users will use it is incredibly refreshing. for the audience to hear that, I should give them more confidence that they ought to give DeFi app a try, see if it meets their needs. If it doesn't, give you the feedback or give the team the feedback. Hopefully the team will listen, improve it, and this feedback loop will continue. As far as the product market fit, I mean it... definitely feeds into product market fit, the more other users there are. And that's what I love about product designers, like having a product design kind of thinking like your hat, the product design hat on. that sounds so weird when you say it slowly, the product design hat on, you know what I mean? Like you have like a product designer kind of like mine, like worldview, like having that is really amazing because a lot of co-founders are highly technical. And they don't have that. don't think about product market fit yet. You actually care about product market fit because it's a product for consumers. That's eventually going to have a token. and you want people to use the product. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Dan Greer from DeFi app. Thank you so much. This was amazing. I love talking about design and, and how design can help solve problems. And you guys are killing it at DeFi app. Thank you. Thanks, Peter. You've been an excellent host.