Ep. 686 AI & DeFi: The Evolving Landscape for Retail Crypto Traders

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Crypto101 podcast, presented by Gemini. [SPEAKER_00]: Your bridge to the future of money.

[SPEAKER_00]: all right everyone welcome back to the crypto 101 podcast we hope everyone is having a great week so far man i don't know where the crypto market's gonna be at uh... at the time that you all are watching it but man the crypto market is absolutely on fire [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, we love bringing in some of the leaders from the space to talk about what's going on in crypto, especially when it comes to new form of innovation. [SPEAKER_00]: So today we have Brian Huang.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is the co-founder of Glider. [SPEAKER_00]: Brian, welcome, and we're excited to be able to talk to you here today. [SPEAKER_01]: Happy to be here, thanks for having me. [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, man. [SPEAKER_00]: So this is interesting because we've all traded crypto in one form or another, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Some of traded the ETFs, some of traded on decentralized exchanges, some people have done centralized exchanges like Coinbase and there's all these different kinds of trading between spot and contracts and options and all these different things. [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a million thoughts about where you should trade and how you should do it. [SPEAKER_00]: And you have a bit more of a nuanced approach to this. [SPEAKER_00]: You guys are kind of looking at this thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: How has not only crypto changed, but how is trading changed? [SPEAKER_00]: And it's interesting because you bring in some of these new aspects of DeFi and AI, and we're going to dive into all of this. [SPEAKER_00]: But I just want to kind of preface the audience and say, you know, this is what we're going to be talking about this episode. [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like the future of what trading and crypto and management could look like.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think that this whole space. [SPEAKER_00]: even defy as a whole is kind of moving towards and progressing to these next levels and I think today we're going to get a little bit of a glimpse of what that could look like and what it's already looking like from what you all have been working on. [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, before we even get into that, I guess Brian, you know, you have a pretty cool background.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have experience at Morgan Stanley, at Anchorage, at XTX, and [SPEAKER_00]: you first found Bitcoin in a pretty interesting way. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't want to spoil it, but just I guess give the audience a bit of a background about yourself and what kind of got you introduced to the Bitcoin and crypto. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for sure. [SPEAKER_01]: My career has really taken the full arc from like purely traditional finance, starting my career Morgan Stanley.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like to describe that as like Wolf of Wall Street without the fund. [SPEAKER_01]: Like working on a big bank these days is like, [SPEAKER_01]: a very different experience than it was, maybe in the 80s or 90s. [SPEAKER_01]: And then my career has shifted now all the way to the other extreme where we're building applications for retail crypto investors. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, from Morgan Stanley, I went to XTX markets. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a high frequency trading firm.

[SPEAKER_01]: We traded a bit of crypto. [SPEAKER_01]: It was far more tech-leaning though than Morgan Stanley. [SPEAKER_01]: I left XTX and I joined Anchorage. [SPEAKER_01]: If you're not familiar with Anchorage, Anchorage is a big institutional custodian. [SPEAKER_01]: They hold funds and crypto for pretty much every major VC, asset manager, corporation, visa, Nike out there. [SPEAKER_01]: I led the product build out of their trading suite.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, [SPEAKER_01]: you know, the likes of micro strategies, for example, executes trades through Anchorage, either through our APIs or through a trading GUI. [SPEAKER_01]: And now we're here. [SPEAKER_01]: I met my co-founder a little bit over a year ago. [SPEAKER_01]: And we're building effectively what we think is the future of automated D5. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, how do they get into crypto? [SPEAKER_01]: I think that you alluded to in a little bit.

[SPEAKER_01]: So back in 2014, this is like so long ago. [SPEAKER_01]: It's crazy to think it's been 11 years. [SPEAKER_01]: But in 2014, MIT did this experiment where they gave everybody a third of a Bitcoin. [SPEAKER_01]: And to give you a sense, a third of a Bitcoin back then was $100. [SPEAKER_01]: So Bitcoin was trading at $300. [SPEAKER_01]: And they wanted to see what people would do with it. [SPEAKER_01]: And it was so ahead of its time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like even today, you can't go and buy bananas with Bitcoin, right? [SPEAKER_01]: To give you another sense of this time, I had a circle while it. [SPEAKER_01]: Like this is, you know, USDC circle. [SPEAKER_01]: Like that circle was doing custody at that point. [SPEAKER_01]: Like MetaMask hadn't taken off. [SPEAKER_01]: Phantom wasn't even a company yet. [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I sold that Bitcoin at 300 bucks.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, thinking I tripled my money, you know, little did I know would have been like 40k today. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what they got out of that experiments, but that was sort of my first stabbling in into crypto. [SPEAKER_00]: Man, that's crazy.

[SPEAKER_00]: So just to get this straight, so they gave you [SPEAKER_00]: a third of a bit coin and I am curious like what was their angle with that like what was the hopes to study of like how would people send it how would they store it I mean maybe just [SPEAKER_00]: who knows, but then what a good entry for the people. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, like, like, I mean, they ultimately wanted to see like how people would spend it. [SPEAKER_01]: But again, you couldn't spend it anywhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even if you wanted to sell it, like you would either move it to Coinbase or Circle and just dump it. [SPEAKER_01]: So you had a lot of that, of course. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, these are college students who are like, kind of like, like, I'll just take this and go, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I don't need crypto. [SPEAKER_01]: What is this?

[SPEAKER_00]: And for the listeners out there, Bitcoin back then, I think this is what a lot of people might failed to understand, transacting Bitcoin back then was not like, not even close, like it is today. [SPEAKER_00]: When you look at wallets, when you look at exchanges, when you look at all the infrastructure that we have, it is so easy to take it for granted.

[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the day, I mean, I'm kind of in the same boat, I did some reports on Bitcoin [SPEAKER_00]: I was under 18 and, you know, still in school kind of like you, like well, you could have just gone like a coin base or a Robinhood. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, no, I couldn't have. [SPEAKER_00]: That was, it wasn't like that back then. [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, again, it's a different world.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's that famous pizza story, right, as well, where the guy traded like thousands of thousands of Bitcoin for a couple pizzas. [SPEAKER_00]: And, [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the rest is history, but there's just no way to know that earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: I remember when I was looking at this back in the day, and you know, Bitcoin was 20 bucks, a hundred bucks. [SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, this is incredible. [SPEAKER_00]: It's 20 times.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth 20 times what a dollar is. [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, the euro isn't doing that. [SPEAKER_00]: The one and all these other foreign exchange, all these other fiat currencies aren't doing that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I just thought it was tremendous that it's had such a strength.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, and kind of uptrend versus the dollar is like no other kind of current he's done this, you know, now we look at it during the day and it's over 100 grand and you know, over 120 grand and it's it's wild looking back on it, but I know in hindsight people always like to grill it in the comments section, but it's a little it's a little bit more than that, but so I don't want to dwell in that it is a super interesting intro and I don't think anyone else has come on with

[SPEAKER_00]: with that kind of intro in mind, but, you know, walk us through Glider, right? [SPEAKER_00]: You've gone through all this, you've had the Tradfight experience, you had the introduction with Bitcoin, how does that kind of bring you to the mission of Glider and what you're doing? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think we're entering a world where we actually have permissionless markets, right? [SPEAKER_01]: You have assets that now are trading 24.7.

[SPEAKER_01]: You have different protocols that you can interact with either via a wallet or, you know, some type of embedded application. [SPEAKER_01]: What we're seeing [SPEAKER_01]: you know everything that you see today in crypto every single app whether it is centralized exchange like a coinbase or a decentralized exchange like a unit swap or a lending protocol like a more foe.

[SPEAKER_01]: What we're seeing is that everything is sort of a poor copy of something that has already existed in traditional finance. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's great, like these are user experiences that people are familiar with, but it doesn't take advantage of what's cool about programmable money. [SPEAKER_01]: Like the fact that now you can move money seamlessly between things, automatically, land, borrow, trade, autonomously, that's where things get cool.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll give you a very simple example because for most people they understand, like if I'm on Robinhood and I wanna move money to Coinbase, [SPEAKER_01]: I need to go through like a bank of America or a chase or like some, you know, checking account, basically. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's like a four day process. [SPEAKER_01]: You've got two days to do one transfer, two days to the next transfer.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you think about crypto, like one is permissionless, there is a way to interact with on chain stocks, crypto assets, MRWA's, but if we're going to have all of these like [SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't really make it any better than TradFi, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, the fact that Robin Hood is now, you know, a very similar experience to Uniswap, doesn't really mean that we're taking advantage of what's possible in crypto. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, that's where Glider comes in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Gliders here to essentially solve for the gaps that can be automated away. [SPEAKER_01]: So this is movement of assets. [SPEAKER_01]: How do we speed up the velocity of assets that are moving? [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and then abstracting away all the things that are really difficult about defying today. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's gas. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to think about gas. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to know what gas is when you use it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, bridging like our firm belief is that you shouldn't have to care what chain a token is on. [SPEAKER_01]: You just need to hold that asset. [SPEAKER_01]: and then things like signing in custody so we allow you to create logins via email, Twitter, like all your usuals, or you can come in with a wallet if you already have one, but you don't necessarily need to.

[SPEAKER_01]: Our bread and butter, and this is what most people can understand without getting into the the deep layers of everything that we can talk about after this, but our bread and butter is you can make any ETF. [SPEAKER_01]: Any token, any chain, any mix of them, market cap waiting, equal waiting, percentage waiting. [SPEAKER_01]: But what's different is you own the underlying assets. [SPEAKER_01]: And that is the key.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you own the underlying assets, that means you can lend to them. [SPEAKER_01]: You could stake them. [SPEAKER_01]: In crypto, there's things of governance. [SPEAKER_01]: You can claim an air drop, vote in a dowel. [SPEAKER_01]: There's utility to actually owning the underlying. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what's different about gliders. [SPEAKER_01]: When you own the underlying, you get that utility. [SPEAKER_01]: Same thing is true in stocks.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you hold the S&P 500 ETF, you don't get all of the benefits of the underlying stocks, right? [SPEAKER_01]: You can't vote in those companies in your meetings quarterly meetings. [SPEAKER_01]: You do get some of the dividends that pass through, but not necessarily all. [SPEAKER_01]: And you can't tax optimize either. [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're holding the ETF, you can't sell the losers and keep the winners.

[SPEAKER_01]: So owning the underlying is actually really, really important. [SPEAKER_01]: And something that we [SPEAKER_01]: is a huge unlock for investors both on the retail and institutional side. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that. [SPEAKER_00]: How does that process work of being able to create an ETF for anything? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so we've built a very simple, no code builder.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you can come into the platform and you can say, OK, I want to have a market cap waiting portfolio. [SPEAKER_01]: And then all you do is type in the tokens you want, or the assets that you want to hold, it creates a nice list. [SPEAKER_01]: And there you go, you've got a market cap weighted ETF. [SPEAKER_01]: But again, you own the underlying. [SPEAKER_01]: So you can still lend the underlying as well, which means like take the Mac 7 in stocks. [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: You could hold Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, all the rest Google, but not only now do you own the stocks. [SPEAKER_01]: You can also lend them on chain and you can earn 2% on all of them. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: That's a very easy thing to understand for people. [SPEAKER_00]: And so when you say people can come in and they can stake and they can lend and they can get kind of plugged into these different areas.

[SPEAKER_00]: do they need to know how to go through like the whole process of like plugging in a wallet going to the decentralized platform lending because I think that scares off a lot of people is they're like, oh, I don't know how to do wallet management and I don't know all the tips and tricks of how to navigate these crypto sites and plug in my wallet and do the lending and take it all back and I think a lot of people get nervous around that. [SPEAKER_01]: it's way to complicated.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like crypto is so, so frustratingly complicated. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what our goal is, right, to make this easy. [SPEAKER_01]: So no, you can come in today, you can log in with an email, you can log in with an X account, you can fund it with a credit card, a bank transfer, you can fund it directly from Coinbase. [SPEAKER_01]: That's actually one of the easiest ways to fund your portfolio. [SPEAKER_01]: And then you don't have to come up with these ETF structures yourself.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can copy what other people have. [SPEAKER_01]: We have a nice explore page of tokens that are trending, or you know, have the highest returns over the last 24 hours, seven days, 30 days. [SPEAKER_01]: Look, the goal here is like, [SPEAKER_01]: more real-world assets and actual stocks and tokenized credit is going to come on chain. [SPEAKER_01]: Investing is going to be on chain. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't care about trading memes and trading crypto.

[SPEAKER_01]: You could do that in 15 million different places. [SPEAKER_01]: Robinhood and Coinbase included actually investing and being that entryway is really where we see a lot of value.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, who do you guys use as the infrastructure for this? [SPEAKER_00]: I guess I maybe I should know this. [SPEAKER_00]: But is it the eighth main chain or do you guys use an L2 or what do you guys look for for in terms of like infrastructure to run all this? [SPEAKER_01]: So I mean, ideally, you shouldn't have to know, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, none of this is important.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, we don't, we don't think any of you necessarily need to know what chain you're operating on, just what the asset is. [SPEAKER_01]: We've built it for EVM. [SPEAKER_01]: So this is net Ethereum, but we can launch on any L2. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're on base as well right now, and then we'll launch on many more chains in the future. [SPEAKER_01]: We are also building out Solana support as well, and so you'll be able to seamlessly invest across Solana and EVM assets.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't have to worry about gas either, because that's usually the tricky part is like, okay, I have to have soul for the gas on the Solana side. [SPEAKER_01]: I have to have Ethan and I have to have Ethan base, like it's just way too complicated for the vast majority of people to deal with. [SPEAKER_01]: And how do you get a work around there for gas? [SPEAKER_01]: We paid for you. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not magic. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not magic. [SPEAKER_01]: We paid for you.

[SPEAKER_01]: It has come from what is called a Paymaster. [SPEAKER_01]: And so a Paymaster is a [SPEAKER_01]: It's like an invention within the last like two years, maybe you're enough, where you can pay for a transaction on somebody's behalf and so four things like base and other L2's gases relatively affordable so it's fine on on main net,

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but yeah, look, every app out there should be paying for your gas users shouldn't have to think about gas, especially when you start to think about like the cross chain world, how many times have you like been to an application and been like, oh, I'm trying to send something and they're like, oh, [SPEAKER_01]: No gas. [SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, oh my god, like you got to go to Coinbase, buy the tokens, send it to your MetaMAS, like this way too many steps around that.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, we just simplify for the user. [SPEAKER_01]: We pay for it for them. [SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk a little bit more about the automation side of things because I think it is interesting, you know, people can kind of come in here and really customize it to what they want to be without necessarily, [SPEAKER_00]: having to know all the nitty-nitty or the nitty-gritty of blockchain technology without having to understand how to code.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's kind of the two hangups. [SPEAKER_00]: You have to people say, well, not a code or the other half of the people say, well, I don't understand all the technicals. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that this should be the direction that crypto and blockchain moves, right? [SPEAKER_00]: It needs to kind of move itself on a direction to where you're right. [SPEAKER_00]: People don't need to know what blockchain they're using.

[SPEAKER_00]: They don't need to know how to do all this stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: I think having something that is fully accessible to someone that is brand new and people at an entry level can access it. [SPEAKER_00]: Like that's the goal, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's one of... [SPEAKER_00]: One of the biggest drivers for the tech boom that we've seen is kind of just creating everything that was online in a part of technology and just simplifying it all.

[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to be a technician or a coder or some sort of computer mastermind now to operate it, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Most people don't know how to put together a computer, but they can operate one. [SPEAKER_00]: Most people don't know how their bank accounts work behind the scenes, but they can log into them and operate them and send money. [SPEAKER_00]: And the same goes for credit cards and everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think crypto should really kind of push itself and direct itself towards that same path. [SPEAKER_00]: And it is doing that, you know, yourself and a lot of other people are already getting ahead start on that. [SPEAKER_00]: But when it comes to the automation side, I guess what other kind of like automated systems or strategies can people find non-glider or use?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Another analogy to add, which you just said, my friend loves to say like, you don't need to know how an oven works to use it. [SPEAKER_01]: somehow it works. [SPEAKER_01]: People use it. [SPEAKER_01]: That's really how it is. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a couple things, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like when you are lending, you're typically looking for high yields that you would, you know, have a taller, more amount of risk to take.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so Glider can move you between different lending protocols in a very seamless way. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't think of that as the product, but it's a feature within the product. [SPEAKER_01]: Another thing that we can do is, you can trade on any on-chain or off-chain signal. [SPEAKER_01]: So this could be literally anything. [SPEAKER_01]: This could be, okay, like price movement. [SPEAKER_01]: Those are obvious ones.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, okay, when Bitcoin hits 130k, I want to sell out of it into stables that are then earning yield. [SPEAKER_01]: But this could also be like, [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there's a trending token and I want to only hold that token while it is trending. [SPEAKER_01]: So you can hold like the top 10 trending tokens on Glider and it will rotate out of what's no longer trending. [SPEAKER_01]: But anything really could be tradable.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you wanted to trade the weather and because you can trade any on-chain asset, sometimes we get asked about really weird things and so like we have a friend who's doing a start-up on on-chain music. [SPEAKER_01]: And so because these songs are tokens, their assets, you can make an ETF with what looks like a album because it's now a group of songs as an ETF and you're holding that as an investment vehicle of sorts.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I wouldn't go investing into songs, but those are some of the things. [SPEAKER_01]: Any type of constant action, constant rebalance. [SPEAKER_01]: or any type of one-off trigger that you want. [SPEAKER_01]: Glider will take that action for you without you having to be sitting at your computer, paying gas, clicking a manual transaction. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, we're moving into a road of like 24-7 finance.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, nobody had time to sit in front of their metamask and click 100 times, like, you know, because I'm gonna get liquidated on an exchange. [SPEAKER_01]: It's another thing that Glider can do very easily is like, protect you from liquidations so that you can set like different, [SPEAKER_01]: protections, essentially. [SPEAKER_01]: A good example that we mentioned to is like, you know, Terra Luna, when Terra Luna went to like zero, it happened at like 3 am Asia time.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you had a wallet, that's would have had a very nice little protection to say, okay, the stable coin is depegged, sell out of it. [SPEAKER_01]: It would have saved a lot of people a lot of money. [SPEAKER_01]: And so what glider starts to look like is actually a much smarter wallet than what we have in the existing Chrome extensions that for people who are outside of crypto just aren't never going to download.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, we try to make things as opinionated as possible, try to make really like clear choices about what we think users would want and then give them functionality to customize as well. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, risk management is key. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that is God at the one of the most important things for anyone, doesn't matter if you're brand new, a veteran, crypto's volatile, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen a lot of volatility in recent years to the upside, but it goes both ways. [SPEAKER_00]: And [SPEAKER_00]: Risk management is I think the most important thing. [SPEAKER_00]: I think anyone can pick a winner but not everyone can manage risk and to win to get out and figure all that out and so I agree with you it is a super important thing to look at in general.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was thinking as you were talking through that [SPEAKER_00]: Do you guys see Glider being used more for like long-term purposes? [SPEAKER_00]: Or do you see people trying to, I don't know, maybe use it a bit more like a trader. [SPEAKER_00]: Like what do you see more of when it comes to your activity? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the most common thing is you come in and you just create a very simple ETF of like major tokens.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like Bitcoin, Solana, [SPEAKER_01]: Those are the big things, right? [SPEAKER_01]: This is like a long-term holding. [SPEAKER_01]: And then of course, you can earn yield on top of all that as well. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, there's enough places to swap and flip and make quick bucks. [SPEAKER_01]: I think to what you said earlier though, knowing when to exit is the tricky part. [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people get in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, with Cliter, you can set a very nice like, okay, when this doubles, if it doubles, I will automatically sell out of it. [SPEAKER_01]: And if that happens at 2 AM, it will still execute on your behalf in a very seamless way. [SPEAKER_01]: My co-founder John, like one of the original reasons why he built Glider in the first place he's the more technical side of this half.

[SPEAKER_01]: Was that he had a, I think it's uncle or is it brother and law maybe it's brother and law who's a pilot and as a pilot he can't sit in front of his computer. [SPEAKER_01]: 24-7 because he's flying a plane. [SPEAKER_01]: I have to, right? [SPEAKER_01]: I hope it's not like, you're not on pub.fun. [SPEAKER_01]: I'll just vote on him all fly. [SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, but, you know, like, as a pilot, like, he would have these conversations.

[SPEAKER_01]: He'd be like, oh, did you buy Bitcoin? [SPEAKER_01]: And he'd be like, yeah, and like, you know, maybe Bitcoin's not the best example, but like,

[SPEAKER_01]: He would never know when to sell these things because he would just buy in and then forget about it And I think a lot of it's done this right like you've bought some tokens, and then you forget to check your portfolio like It's very nice to be able to set some protections around when to exit whether it's on the downside or taking profit on the upside and Then knowing that those assets are then being put to use like your earnings table coins that are then earning You know 15-20% yield on top of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's like pure capital efficiencies [SPEAKER_01]: That's that's that's the automation, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like you couldn't do that with your Metamask or Phantom wall at today without being there manually clicking and moving things and then lending to a protocol that you have to then go to a different website to see like it's way too siloed today. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I agree, man.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, one of the cool things is that [SPEAKER_00]: you all are able to essentially get access to any kind of market through this, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I guess not only you all, but the users in general can kind of do this, and we've seen

[SPEAKER_00]: Different exchanges and recent months kind of make a push for this, saying, hey, you know, you can get access to the decentralized exchange market and the centralized exchange market and that was one of those things for me where I was looking back on it and I was like, why don't we have this sooner, another thing that you will do is like all these different kind of advanced order types having people. [SPEAKER_00]: just have more control over like when they can get in and out.

[SPEAKER_00]: That was something that a lot of like even like tier one tier two exchanges wouldn't have until like the recent I'd say the last like two years or so and they would always have such a hard time doing the simplest of things. [SPEAKER_00]: How do I place a stop loss and how do I place a take profit?

[SPEAKER_00]: And you look back on things like that and being able to trade from a singular place [SPEAKER_00]: and both the decentralized and the centralized market, like how is this not done sooner? [SPEAKER_00]: So it's cool to be able to hear that this stuff is happening and that there's players like yourself that are that are working towards this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess when it comes to automation, I mean, do you think that this is the future, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Because there's a lot of talk about AI and agents and this this future and I know AI is being hyped up. [SPEAKER_00]: Do you really think that automation is the future? [SPEAKER_00]: And do you think that all this AI stuff can live up to the hype when it comes to the financial markets?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, first thing, I love that Coinbase and Binance now have centralized liquidity on their sexes. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's about time, the, like, not only, it's about time. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, the, like, the dooply that they have in terms of, like, exchange listing and getting people to be able to have access to them through their platforms is, [SPEAKER_01]: coming down, which is great.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like now you can just list it down, get it and it'll trade on these sex-like platforms. [SPEAKER_01]: Remember, I mean, if you're question now, because I've got all the content. [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, good. [SPEAKER_00]: I was just saying, you know, when it comes to AI and AI, AI, that's all I, like, do you think it can live up to the hype and kind of, do you think that that is the future still? [SPEAKER_01]: So here's a take for you.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't think that AI is very good at doing things that have finality. [SPEAKER_01]: And what I mean by that is like transactions basically. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, you're not sitting on chatGPT and asking it to Venmo your friend. [SPEAKER_01]: Or like, you're not actually going to chatGPT and you're saying like, you know, plan this vacation and then let me pay for it with my credit card on chatGPT. [SPEAKER_01]: No, it's not really the way it works.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it might get there, but that's not the way it works today. [SPEAKER_01]: That actual like step of like doing the transaction is very much something that lives off of the like assistance LM that is providing you some context. [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's what we believe on the DeFi side as well. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there will be and there already are good chat bots that can help give you ideas and how to position and trade.

[SPEAKER_01]: But actually going from idea to execution, a lot of the execution is still handled manually. [SPEAKER_01]: And [SPEAKER_01]: for good reason, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, if you told, um, you know, an LM say, like, hey, I want to buy token XYZ. [SPEAKER_01]: Who knows if it's going to actually get the right XYZ token? [SPEAKER_01]: That XYZ token could be on Solana. [SPEAKER_01]: It could be on Ethereum. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a million scams out there that are also XYZ token.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the trust that it needs like that accuracy, especially when it's real money moving on block chains where you can't get your money back, is something that we feel like users are going to have some difficulty gaining that trust. [SPEAKER_01]: And if you've ever tried to work with LMS [SPEAKER_01]: Try to like, finagle their output. [SPEAKER_01]: You know that it's not easy. [SPEAKER_01]: Like you don't have that fine tune control that you would think.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so... [SPEAKER_01]: That's one thing we think that, you know, defy, like AI is going to struggle with. [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing that we don't want to go into is like black boxes. [SPEAKER_01]: Like there are lots of protocols out there that like, don't tell you what they're doing or how they're doing it. [SPEAKER_01]: It could be like a bot of sorts. [SPEAKER_01]: Like we believe in full transparency here.

[SPEAKER_01]: So like when you create a portfolio on glider, you use that no code builder. [SPEAKER_01]: You see exactly what it's doing, right? [SPEAKER_01]: We don't make any decisions for you. [SPEAKER_01]: You are seeing like exactly the plan you laid out and then executed on your behalf. [SPEAKER_01]: That's the difference. [SPEAKER_01]: And so [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see how it plays out. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, yes, there are AI components we want to pull in.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think coming up with ideas and how to position and what assets are cool and trending and, you know, there's social aspects to that as well. [SPEAKER_01]: But like, actually going from idea to execution, still is something that lacks not only in D5 but like, in general. [SPEAKER_01]: We still, again, don't see people setting money via chatGVT. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And who knows, maybe we will get there. [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny.

[SPEAKER_00]: We just had someone on who is talking about this. [SPEAKER_00]: And they were saying that they think it'll be possible. [SPEAKER_00]: At some point in the future and that we'll work our way. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it will eventually, right? [SPEAKER_00]: I think we'll eventually get there, but you're right. [SPEAKER_00]: At the moment, you really don't see that many people kind of doing that and taking that approach quite yet.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, man, we still got a lot of time for this stuff to evolve. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think. [SPEAKER_00]: The other side of things too, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, but just going back to ETFs. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of altcoin ETFs out there. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we know that there's, I think, a 100 different pending ETF applications for all these different. [SPEAKER_00]: For all these different altcoins, which is fascinating.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that that helps or hurts? [SPEAKER_00]: Glider in kind of your guy's model, because some of these are like in the seas, right? [SPEAKER_00]: They're different forms of indexes where they're essentially just baskets.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they already have a bunch of cryptos kind of inside of them. [SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that that kind of pulls people away from Glider or is Glider different enough to where it doesn't really have to compete with these baskets from some of the larger asset managers? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, let's think about it from like the investor perspective, right? [SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a prime example. [SPEAKER_01]: Like gray scale has an ETF called GDLC.

[SPEAKER_01]: It holds the top five assets market cap weighted, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. [SPEAKER_01]: And that ETF charges 59 basis points annually, which is absurd. [SPEAKER_01]: That is, you know, 0.59 percent on your total investment. [SPEAKER_01]: And you could access to like five tokens, all of which you don't earn any yield off of.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, they're probably doing some stuff where they're earning yield without giving it to you, on the other side of things. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, [SPEAKER_01]: Um, one, we think it's great that people are investing in crypto like don't get me wrong. [SPEAKER_01]: Like that's really excellent.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the efficiencies of actually doing things on chain mean that we could offer the same exact portfolio at zero cost right I can I don't have to do any fee and then on top of that I can offer you yield on all five of those assets and so.

[SPEAKER_01]: look like we're a team of eight people we can create any of these ETFs the instant that they file for SEC filing and we don't have to pay millions of dollars to lawyers exchanges market makers you know all of the likes to actually like create these things and so in the long term better systems should prevail and you know if it's a it's a basket of assets on an exchange like [SPEAKER_01]: That's okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Like that's getting where places.

[SPEAKER_01]: What I don't understand is when you have like a ETF of one token, like a salot, yeah, for EDTF because as a retail investor, you can go on Coinbase and buy these tokens very easily and you don't get charged a, you know, in the case of the Grayscale GBTC, you're getting charged 150 basis points. [SPEAKER_01]: That's 1.5% a year.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you can go and [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's some catching up that society has to realize, but if you're a savvy investor, you should be looking for a place where fees are low, if not zero, and the only way to do that is if you can do it on chain, because there's other ways to optimize, there's other ways to monetize, there's less [SPEAKER_01]: bureaucracy. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't need a big, massive company like BlackRock to if you are an ETF.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so yes, I'm very excited that we're getting more people to invest in crypto, but it's not the right vehicle yet. [SPEAKER_00]: So you guys, I want to make sure I heard this right. [SPEAKER_00]: You said that you guys don't charge any basis points when people are creating managing these. [SPEAKER_00]: Is that right? [SPEAKER_01]: Correct. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't charge anything right now. [SPEAKER_01]: We don't need to charge anything because on the yield itself, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: We can take a little bit of yield. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's fine, right? [SPEAKER_01]: This is an ultimately better product still than your traditional basket. [SPEAKER_01]: So [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and also like look, we subsidize a lot of what we do as an application through integrations. [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you're a integrator like a uniswap or a metamask or a phantom and you want to put these portfolios onto your app, we do revenue share with them.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so that actually can subsidize our flagship app for all of our users, which is pretty cool. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so yeah, that was going to be my next question is, is how does Glider stay afloat here, you know, how is Glider making money if if you're not taking anything from from that and and your pain the gas fees, but it seems like I mean, do you see that lasting for forever or do you think that that's more of just like an onboarding thing and I'm going to use to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think the thing that we see a lot with crypto apps is they get hot for like a month and then they die off. [SPEAKER_01]: You've seen this so many times. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe like, you know, even OpenC was hot for like, okay, let's call it two years and it died off very slowly. [SPEAKER_01]: And so the vision is that you need to embed across all of these other applications.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, I mentioned the wallets, the uniswaps of the world, like that is where things get interesting because if you're a phantom, you can create an ETF and you can issue it to all of your users, you can charge 20 basis points or whatever you want and glider earns, you know, some percentage of that, which is really cool. [SPEAKER_01]: And you can curate these things, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a website that is only interested in tokens on arbitrum, you can curate the ETF like structure to just be arbitrum tokens or tokens that your users are interested in. [SPEAKER_01]: Far more than we could ever curate our flagship app to everybody out there. [SPEAKER_01]: Don't get me wrong, our flagship app is really slick.

[SPEAKER_01]: You should have tried it out, but [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot more interesting distribution channels on the B to B to C side, so that's something that we are actively working on and we'll have a couple integrations to announce sooner rather than later. [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, man. [SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to the the regulatory side, how are you all able to do a lot of things that these asset managers aren't because.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we talked about this, but like there's so many things where you're like why aren't these big players doing this stuff already and it seems like they have to go through so many hurdles to get a spot ETF approved and then to get staking approved for it, which is still a battle and this is all happening in a pretty crypto friendly administration here in the states and there's just seems like there's a lot of hurdles to kind of jump over.

[SPEAKER_00]: how are you all kind of able to skip the line here and work your way through this without having all of the same kind of troubles that these big banks for us at managers might have? [SPEAKER_01]: I've been a bit of a different take here. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's actually due to talent. [SPEAKER_01]: When you're a big bank or fidelity or a vanguard and you're trying to build out a crypto arm, [SPEAKER_01]: If you're in crypto, you probably don't want to work there.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's good point. [SPEAKER_01]: That's really where the problem is. [SPEAKER_01]: No, I've talked to engineers at fidelity and they'll say things that are like, oh, that'll take months. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, really only takes us like two days here. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, there is a big difference. [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the struggle that they really have. [SPEAKER_01]: Is that they can't hire talent that actually wants to be at the frontier of crypto.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what that will mean, you know, if they still want to be around, you know, 100 years of now is that they'll have to acquire. [SPEAKER_01]: And you're seeing this with Stripe, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Stripe acquired, privy and bridge, and launching their own chain, but they will have to acquire. [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I would say it's actually it's a difficulty recruiting talents.

[SPEAKER_01]: That is actually the struggle for them because [SPEAKER_01]: Would you rather work at Uniswap or would you rather work at Vanguard? [SPEAKER_01]: Like you'd probably want to work at Uniswap if you're, you know, a big crypto native person. [SPEAKER_01]: On the regular story side though, what's different is that we're non-custodial, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And so we don't custody your assets.

[SPEAKER_01]: You come in and you create your own wallet, whether it's through email or ex, or you come in with your own wallet already, Metamasker Phantom, or any wallet. [SPEAKER_01]: And then we don't make any financial decisions for you, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like everything you do is based off of the rules that you set. [SPEAKER_01]: And that is the execution that occurs based off of those rules that you set. [SPEAKER_01]: So there's no management of funds here.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is simply a way to automate the steps that you set out in the first place. [SPEAKER_00]: You know what I like about that is that there's no one to blame but yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: right when these people come in and something goes wrong they can't go say oh well it was there following this and that's like that I don't know you set the rules you set the parameters you set the wallet now it's time to put on your big boy vans and own up to it so I like that I like that [SPEAKER_01]: We, I mean, that's that's the power of self custody, but I think it has to be done right, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, we're not like, you know, we curate the experience.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're not putting random like lending pools on our front end because we know that those are not necessarily, [SPEAKER_01]: the most stable lending pools and so there is a level of curation that goes into it but through that curation you can choose whatever you want so again we work with like the biggest partners in the space so nothing that's like super random ever get shown but if you do want to interact with something you know that's not listed

[SPEAKER_01]: it's fully non custodial so you can go ahead and do that and you couldn't you know it's permissionless defy like that's the cool part about all this is that you can build on top of it you can go and take your assets elsewhere uh... you don't need to be balanced by whatever we offer on our platform yeah well i think the coolest thing about this man is just the versatility the versatility to have so much freedom without having to

[SPEAKER_00]: have all the complexities that kind of come along with it. [SPEAKER_00]: Cause usually the more freedom and the more you want to do and the more you want to trade all these different assets and create these different strategies, it's usually a pretty complex task to kind of put it all together and that scares a lot of people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a lot of people that know what they want to do and how they want to do it and they have this pretty brilliant concept but putting all the puzzle pieces together is really kind of the hardest thing and that's kind of where the gap is. [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think the versatility here that Glatter can provide is by far like one of the craziest things that we've talked about or seen on the podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I love this because it shows how far crypto has advanced to get to this point and to be able to do stuff like this. [SPEAKER_00]: And again, if we would have had this conversation a couple of years ago, I mean, we would have just been like, [SPEAKER_00]: Um, with how much everything has advanced, it's like, no, like we're here, we're at this, this level where it feels like anyone can have an institution, an institutional grade system, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because this is the kind of thing that I think a lot of people imagine that these big institutions have is that they have these systems like this and now we're kind of having this [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of the democracy of technology where people can kind of get access to this stuff in a much more simpler way, which, again, to me is fascinating. [SPEAKER_01]: The infrastructure has evolved so much, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: We have so many providers, a lot of really commoditized tech to build on top of now. [SPEAKER_01]: And cheaper chains, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like things like this would have been really hard on main end of the area because it's very expensive. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and you know, like this isn't just talk like you can go to our website, you can try out the platform like I think a lot of people say that they're simplifying D five, but like.

[SPEAKER_01]: when you try it out, it doesn't feel as simple as you would expect. [SPEAKER_01]: Go and use the product. [SPEAKER_01]: Like I think you will be actually, if you're a crypto native, you'll be very surprised with how seamless it is. [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not a crypto native, like you shouldn't have to know again that like everything behind the scenes of this is crypto.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you want to invest in stocks or anything else that's on chain, like you can do that in a really cool way. [SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, like, [SPEAKER_01]: Not just talk like we're real product builders. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a real product here that people can go and use. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we finally reached that point in like crypto's evolution now that like applications are where it's at.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like applications are way cooler than your random new layer two chain that you launched that nobody's ever going to use. [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, you raised about load of money for like. [SPEAKER_01]: We're trying to build like real value for real investors here and that I think is far more exciting and far more fun to build than [SPEAKER_01]: you know, some crazy niche little product that far and few will understand in the long term. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, spot on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Brian, we really appreciate your time coming on here. [SPEAKER_00]: Enforming the masses about everything that's going on, especially when it comes to this next era of defy, because again, it truly is fascinating. [SPEAKER_00]: There's so much versatility, that's with it. [SPEAKER_00]: If people want to get plugged in, maybe they want to go to Glider, follow Glider, follow yourself. [SPEAKER_01]: Yep, we're on all the usual channels, so our website is collider.fi.

[SPEAKER_01]: You can follow us on X as well. [SPEAKER_01]: That's where we have most of the up-to-date information, Glider, underscore FI, and then everywhere else. [SPEAKER_01]: Really, if you need support for any reason, we have a discord, and we have a telegram, of course we're on LinkedIn, tick-tock, maybe we'll have an Instagram soon, but for the most up-to-date, let's focus on X, that's Glider, underscore FI, [SPEAKER_00]: Perfect.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Brian, once again, we appreciate you coming on here and thank you very much. [SPEAKER_01]: It's great. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, Adam.