Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Host (Gemini Crypto 101 Intro/Ad)
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
- [00:15]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
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 going to be at at the time that you all are watching it, but man, the crypto market is absolutely on fire. 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. So today we have Brian Huang, he is the co founder of Glider. Brian, welcome. And we're excited to be able to talk to you here today.
- [00:47]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [00:49]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Absolutely, man. So this is interesting because we've all traded crypto in one form or another, right? Some have traded the ETFs, some have 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. And there's a million thoughts about where you should trade and how you should do it. And you have a bit more of a nuanced approach to this. You guys are kind of looking at the saying, how has not only crypto changed, but how is trading changed? 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. 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. It's kind of like the future of what trading and crypto and management could look like. And I do think that this whole space, even Defi 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. So, you know, before we even get into that, I guess, Brian, you know, you have a pretty cool background. You have experience at Morgan Stanley, at Anchorage, at xtx and you first found bitcoin in a pretty interesting way. 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.
- [02:20]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, for sure. My career has really taken the full arc from like purely traditional finance starting my career At Morgan Stanley, I like to describe that as like Wolf of Wall street without the fun. Working at a big bank these days is like a very different experience than it was maybe in the 80s or 90s. And then my career has shifted now all the way to the other extreme where were building applications for retail crypto investors. And so, you know, from Morgan Stanley I went to XTX Markets, it's a high frequency trading firm. We traded a bit of crypto. It was far more tech leaning though than Morgan Stanley. I left XTX and I joined Anchorage. If you're not familiar with Anchorage, Anchorage is a big institutional custodian. They hold funds in crypto for pretty much every major VC asset manager corporation like Visa, Nike out there. I led the product build out of their trading suite. So you know, the likes of microstrategies, for example, executes trades through Anchorage either through our APIs or through a trading GUI. And now we're here. I met my co founder a little bit over a year ago and we're building effectively what we think is the future of automated defi. Now how did I get into crypto? I think that you alluded to it a little bit. So back in 2014, this is like so long ago, it's crazy to think it's been 11 years. But in 2014 MIT did this experiment where they gave everybody a third of a bitcoin. And to give you a sense, a third of a bitcoin back then was 100 bucks. So like Bitcoin was trading at 300 bucks and they wanted to see what people would do with it. And it was so ahead of its time. Like even today you can't go and buy bananas with bitcoin. Right. To give you another sense of this time, I had a Circle wallet. Like this is, you know, USDC Circle, like that. Circle was doing custody at that point. Like Metamask hadn't taken off Phantom, it wasn't even a company yet. And yeah, I sold that Bitcoin at 300 bucks thinking I had tripled my money. Little did I know it would have been like 40k today. I don't know what they got out of that experiment, but that was sort of my first dabbling into crypto.
- [04:51]
Podcast Host (Gemini Crypto 101 Intro/Ad)
All right, Crypt Nation fam. Let's pause for one second and talk about an important issue going on right now, and that's sim swap attacks. Sim swap attacks are becoming a serious threat, especially in crypto. If someone gets control of your phone number, they can access your bank accounts, your exchanges emails and even your private messages. That's why the Crypto 101 podcast has partnered with Afani. It's America's most secure mobile service, offering a guaranteed protection against SIM swaps with added privacy. Since launching, not one single Afony user has ever been sim swapped. And for some reason, if it ever does happen, you're backed by up to 5, $5 million in insurance against financial losses. This is literally why we chose to partner with them. It is our favorite thing about Afani is the insurance policy of up to $5 million if it does happen to you. Afani runs on either AT&T or the Verizon network and you get to choose which one. There are no contracts and it is super easy and seamless to sign up. You also get a 60 day money back guarantee, so there's zero risk in trying it out. Right now for our listeners. You get 99 off when you sign up at afoni.com crypto101, that's afani.com/crypto 101 or check the show notes below for a link. These days your phone number is probably more valuable than your Social Security number, so make sure it's protected with Afani.
- [06:07]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
That's crazy. So just to get this straight, so they gave you a third of a bitcoin and I am curious, like, what was their end goal 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 who knows, but man, what a good entry for the people.
- [06:26]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Like, like, like, I mean, they ultimately wanted to see like how people would spend it. But again, you couldn't spend it anywhere even if you wanted to sell it. Like you would, you would either move it to Coinbase or Circle and just dump it. So you had a lot of that, of course. I mean, these are college students who are like a hundred bucks for free. Like, I'll just take this and go right? Like, I don't need crypto. What is this stuff?
- [06:51]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
And for, for the listeners out there, bitcoin back then, I think this is what a lot of people might fail to understand. Transacting bitcoin back then was not like it, not even close like it is today. 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. Back in the day, I mean, I, I'm kind of in the same boat. I did some reports on bitcoin back around 2012 and people be like, well, did you get any? I'm Like, I was under 18 and, you know, still in school, kind of like, you, like, well, you could have just gone to like a Coinbase or a Robinhood. I'm like, no, I couldn't have that. That was. It wasn't like that back then. And so, you know, again, it's a different world. And there's that famous pizza story, right, as well, where the guy traded like thousands and thousands of bitcoin for a couple pizzas and, you know, the rest is history. But there's just no way to know that. Earlier, I remember when I was looking at this back in the day and, you know, Bitcoin was 20 bucks, 100 bucks, and I was like, this is incredible. It's 20 times. It's worth 20 times what a dollar is. I was like, the euro isn't doing that. The one. And all these other foreign exchange, all these other fiat currencies aren't doing that. And I just thought it was tremendous that it's had such a strength and kind of uptrend versus the dollar. Like no other kind of currency has 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 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 on that. It is a super interesting intro, and I don't think anyone else has come on with that kind of intro in mind. But, you know, walk us through Glider, right? You've gone through all this. You've had the tradfi experience, you had the introduction with Bitcoin. How does that kind of bring you to the mission of Glider and what you're doing?
- [08:45]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, I think we're entering a world where we actually have permissionless markets. Right. You have assets that now are trading 24 7. You have different protocols that you can interact with either via a wallet or, you know, some type of embedded application. What we're seeing, you know, everything that you see today in crypto, every single app, whether it is a centralized exchange like a coinbase, or a decentralized exchange like a Uniswap or a lending protocol like a morpho, what we're seeing is that everything is sort of a poor copy of something that has already existed in traditional finance. And that's great. Like, these are user experiences that people are familiar with, but it doesn't take advantage of like what's cool about programmable money. Like the fact that now you can move money seamlessly between things automatically, lend, borrow, trade autonomously. That's where things get cool. And I'll like, I'll give you a very simple example because, you know, for most people, they understand like if I'm on Robinhood and I want to move money to Coinbase, I need to go through like a Bank of America or Chase or like some, you know, checking account basically. And that's like a four day process. You've got two days to do one transfer, two days to do the next transfer. When you think about crypto, like one, it's permissionless. There is a way to interact with on chain stocks, crypto assets, RWAs. But if we're going to have all of these like disparate apps, that doesn't really make it any better than Tradfi. Right. Like the fact that Robinhood is now, you know, very similar experience to Uniswap doesn't really mean that we're taking advantage of what's possible in crypto. And so that's where Glider comes in. Glider's here to essentially solve for the gaps that can be automated away. So this is movement of assets. How do we speed up the velocity of assets that are moving and then abstracting away all the things that are really difficult about Defi today. So that's gas. You don't have to think about gas. You don't have to know what gas is when you use it. Bridging, like our firm belief is that you shouldn't have to care what chain a token is on. You just need to hold that asset 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. Our bread and butter. And this is what most people again understand without getting into the deep layers of everything that we could talk about after this. But our bread and butter is you can make any etf, any token, any chain, any mix of them. Market cap weighting, equal weighting, percentage weighting. But what's different is you own the underlying assets and that is the key. If you own the underlying assets, that means you can lend them, you could stake them. In crypto, there's things of governance you can claim an airdrop vote in a dao, you, there's utility to actually owning the underlying. And that's what's different about Glider is that when you own the underlying, you get that utility. Same thing is true in stocks. When you hold the S&P 500 ETF, you don't get all of the benefits of the underlying stocks. Right. You can't vote in those companies. Annual meetings, quarterly meetings. You do get some of the dividends that pass through, but not necessarily all. And you can't tax optimize either. So if you're holding the etf, you can't sell the losers and keep the winners. So owning the underlying is actually really, really important and something that we think is a huge unlock for investors both on the retail and institutional side.
- [12:38]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that. How does that process work of being able to create an ETF for anything?
- [12:46]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, so we've built a very simple no code builder. So you can come into the platform and you can say, okay, I want to have a market cap weighting portfolio. 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 and there you go, you've got a market cap weighted etf. But again, you own the underlying, so you can still lend the underlying as well. Which means like, you know, take like the MAG7 in stocks, right? You could hold Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, all the rest, Google. But not only now do you own the stocks, you can also lend them on chain and you can earn 2% on all of them. And that's a very easy thing to understand for people.
- [13:30]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
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, do they need to know how to go through the whole process of plugging in a wallet, going to the decentralized platform, lending? Because I think that scares off a lot of people. 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.
- [14:02]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Dude, it's way too complicated. Like, crypto is so, so frustratingly complicated. And that's what our goal is, right? To make this easy. 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. That's actually one of the easiest ways to fund your portfolio. And then you don't have to come up with these like ETF structures yourself. You can copy what other people have. 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. Look, the goal here is like more real world assets and actual stocks and tokenized credit is going to come on. Chain investing is going to be on chain. We don't care about trading memes and trading crypto. You can do that in 15 million different places, Robinhood and Coinbase included. Actually investing and being that like entryway is really where we see a lot of value.
- [15:08]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
You know, who do you guys use as the infrastructure for this? I guess maybe I should know this, but is it the ETH main chain or do you guys use an L2 or what do you guys look for in terms of infrastructure to run all this?
- [15:20]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
So I mean, ideally you shouldn't have to know, right? Like none of this is important. 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. We've built it for EVM. So this is mainnet Ethereum, but we can launch on any L2, so we're on base as well right now. And then we'll launch on many more chains in the future. We are also building out Solana support as well. And so you'll be able to seamlessly invest across Solana and EVM assets. And you don't have to worry about gas either, because that's usually the tricky part is like, okay, I have to have Sol for the gas on the Solana side, I have to have eth, then I have to have Ethan Base. Like it's just way too complicated for the vast majority of people to, to deal with.
- [16:06]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
And how do you get a workaround there for gas?
- [16:09]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
We pay it for you. It's not magic. It's not magic. We pay it for you. It has come from what is called a Paymaster. And so a Paymaster is a, I'd say like an invention within the last like two years, maybe year and a half where you can pay for a transaction on somebody's behalf. And so for things like base and other L2s, gas is relatively affordable. So it's fine. On Mainnet ETH, we still pay for people's gas, but you know, we don't rebalance these portfolios as often because that would get a little bit more expensive. 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 like, oh, no, gas. And you're like, oh my God, you got to go to Coinbase, buy the token, send it to your metamask. There's way too many steps around that. So, yeah, we just simplify for the user. We pay for it for them.
- [17:15]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Well, let's talk a little bit more about the automation side of things because I think it is interesting people can kind of come in here and really customize it to what they want to be without necessarily having to know all the nitty nitty or the nitty gritty of blockchain technology without having to understand how to code. And I think that's kind of the two hangups is half the people say, well, I'm not a coder. The other half the people say, well, I don't understand all the technicals. And I think that this should be the direction that crypto and blockchain moves, right? It needs to kind of move itself in a direction to where you're right. People don't need to know what blockchain they're using. They don't need to know how to do all this stuff. I think having something that is fully accessible to someone that is brand new and the people at an entry level can access it, like that's the goal, right? I think that's one one of the biggest drivers for the tech boom that we've seen is kind of just creating everything that was online and a part of technology and just simplifying it all. You don't have to be a technician or a coder or some sort of computer mastermind now to operate it. Right? Most people don't know how to put together a computer, but they can operate one. 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. And the same goes for credit cards and everything else. And I think crypto should really kind of push itself and direct itself towards that same path. And it is doing that, you know, yourself and a lot of other people are already getting a head start on that. But when it comes to the automation side, I guess what other kind of like automated systems or strategies can people find on glider or use.
- [18:52]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, another analogy to add what you just said, my friend loves to say, like, you don't need to know how an oven works to use it, right? Like somehow it works, people use it. That's really how it is. So there's a couple things, right? Like when you are lending, you're typically looking for high yields that you would have a tolerable amount of risk to take. And so Glider can move you between different lending protocols in a very seamless way. We don't think of that as the product, but it's a feature within the product. Another thing that we can do is you can trade on any on chain or off chain signal. So this could be literally anything. This could be okay, like price movements. Those are obvious ones. Like okay, when bitcoin hits 130k I want to sell out of it into stables that are then earning yield. But this could also be like maybe there's a trending token and I want to only hold that token while it is trending. So you can hold like the top 10 trending tokens on Glider and it will rotate out of what's no longer trending. But anything, anything really could be tradable. 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 startup on on Chain Music. And so because these songs are tokens, they're assets. You can make an ETF with what looks like a like album because it's now a group of songs as an ETF and you're holding that as a investment vehicle of sorts. And I wouldn't go investing into songs, but those are some of the things like any, any type of like constant action, constant rebalance or any type of one off trigger that you want. Glider will take that action for you without you having to be sitting at your computer paying gas, clicking a manual transaction. Like we're moving into a world of like 247 finance. Like nobody has time to sit in front of their metamask and click 100 times like, you know, because I'm going to get liquidated on an exchange. That's another thing that Glider can do very easily is like protect you from liquidation so that you can set like different protections essentially. A good example that we mentioned too is like you know, Terra Luna, when Terra Luna went to like 0, it happened at like 3am Asia time. If you had a wallet that would have had a very nice little protection to say, okay, this stablecoin is depegged, sell out of would have saved a lot of people a lot of money. 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 are never going to download. 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.
- [21:56]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, risk management is key. I think that is got to be one of the most important things for anyone. Doesn't matter if you're brand new, a veteran, crypto's volatile, right? We've seen a lot of volatility in recent years to the upside. But it goes both ways. And risk management is I think the most important thing. I think anyone can pick a winner, but not everyone can manage risk and know when 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. You know I was thinking as you were talking through that do you guys see glider being used more for long term purposes or do you see people trying to, I don't know, maybe use it a bit more like a trader. What do you see more of when it comes to your activity?
- [22:47]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, the most common thing is you come and you just create a very simple ETF of major tokens. So like bitcoin, Solana eth, we have some people doing things with like the major defi tokens. So like Uniswap's, uni, morphos, morpho, pendles, Pendle token, those are the big things, right? This is like long term holding and then of course you can earn yield on top of all of that as well. Again there's enough places to swap and flip and make quick bucks. I think to what you said earlier though like knowing when to exit is the tricky part. A lot of people get in, right. With glider you can set a very nice like okay, when this doubles, if it doubles, I will automatically sell out of it. And if that happens at 2am it will still execute on your behalf in a very seamless way. 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 was that he had a. I think it's uncle. Or is it brother in law. Maybe it's brother in law who's a pilot and as a pilot he can't sit in front of his computer 247 because he's flying a plane. I hope so, right? I hope he's not like he's not pumped out fun on his on his phone while flying. But who knows? But, you know, like, as a pilot, like, he would have these conversations, he'd be like, oh, did you buy like, bitcoin? And you'd be like, yeah. And like, you know, baby, bitcoin's not the best example. But like, 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 us 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 you're earning stable coins that are then earning, you know, 15, 20% yield on top of it. That's like pure capital efficiencies. That's. That's the automation, right? Like, you couldn't do that with your MetaMask or Phantom Wallet 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.
- [25:07]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, no, I agree, man. And, you know, one of the cool things is that you all are able to essentially get access to any kind of market through this. Or I guess not only you all, but the users in general can kind of do this. And we've seen different exchanges in recent months kind of make a push for this, saying, hey, you know, you can get access to both 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 didn't we have this sooner than. Another thing that you all do is like, all these different kind of advanced order types having people just have more control over, like, when they can get in and out. 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. How do I place a stop loss and how do I place a take profit? And you look back on things like that and being able to trade from a singular place and both the decentralized and the centralized markets, you're like, how is this not done sooner? 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, I guess when it comes to automation, I mean, do you think that this is the future?
- [26:25]
Podcast Host (Gemini Crypto 101 Intro/Ad)
Right?
- [26:25]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Because there's a lot of talk about AI and agents and this future. And I know AI is being hyped up, I guess. Do you really think that automation is the future? And do you think that all this AI stuff can live up to the hype when it comes to the financial markets?
- [26:44]
Podcast Host (Gemini Crypto 101 Intro/Ad)
All right, Crypt Nation fam. Are you interested in effortlessly growing your Bitcoin portfolio? Because I know I am. The Bitcoin credit card by Gemini earns you Bitcoin back on every purchase. Use it like any credit card. You buy lunch, you get gas, any of your weekly grocery expenses and you'll earn up to 4.4percent back instantly in Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos straight into your account. All that with no annual fee. And right now you can grab 200 of bitcoin. That's right, a 200 bitcoin welcome bonus with the Gemini credit card. It is the easiest way to start building your Bitcoin stack. Go to gemini.com card to learn more. Terms apply. See the link in the description for more information regarding rates and fees.
- [27:27]
Ad Voiceover (Rippling Ad)
You hired a new employee. Time to get to work, right? Not quite. First you need to get a bunch of HR tools for payroll and benefits. Then you'll need to add IT software to manage their devices and app access. You also have to track their expenses, so you'll need different finance software for that too. Oh, and none of these softwares work together. That's sad. Software as a disservice, Rippling is built to serve your business. It lets you run hr, IT and finance on one unified platform. Rippling provides time saving automations and connected workflows across your departments so you can finally find time for the work that matters. And for a limited time you can get six months of rippling free when you sign up at rippling.com podcast. That's R-I P P L-I-N- dot com podcast for six months of rippling free terms and conditions apply.
- [28:25]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, first thing, I love that Coinbase and Binance now have centralized liquidity on their sexes. Like it's about time the like Monopoly it's about time like the like the duopoly that they have in terms of like exchange listing and getting people to be able to have access to them through their platforms is coming down which is great. Like now you can just list a token and it'll trade on these. These sex like platforms. Remind me of your question now because I've Gone off on a tangent.
- [29:02]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
All good. I was just saying, you know, when it comes to AI and aging and all that thought, like do you think it can live up to the hype and kind of, do you think that that is the future still?
- [29:13]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
So, so here's a take for you. We don't think that AI is very good at doing things that have finality. And what I mean by that is like transactions basically. Like you know, you're not sitting on ChatGPT and asking it to Venmo your friend 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. Like no, it's not really the way it works now. It might get there, but that's not the way it works today. That actual like step of like doing the transaction is very much something that lives off of the like assistance LLM that is providing you some context. And so that's what we believe on the defi side as well. Like there will be and there already are good like chat bots that can help give you ideas and how to position and trade. But actually going from idea to execution, a lot of the execution is still handled manually and for good reason, right? Like if you told, you know an LLM say like hey, I want to buy Token xyz. Who knows if it's going to actually get the right XYZ token. That XYZ token could be on Solana, it could be on Ethereum, there's a million scams out there that are also XYZ Token. And so the like trust that it needs like that accuracy, especially when it's real money. Moving on blockchains where you can't get your money back is something that we feel like users are going to have some difficulty gaining that trust. And if you've ever tried to work with LLMs and like try to like finagle their output, you know that it's not easy. Like you don't have that fine tuned control that you would think. And so that's one thing we think that you know, DeFi like AI is going to struggle with. The other thing that we don't want to go into is like black boxes. Like there are lots of protocols out there that like don't tell you what they're doing or how they're doing it. It could be like a bot of sorts. Like we believe in full transparency here. So like when you create a portfolio on Glider, you use that no Code builder, you see exactly what it's doing.
- [31:34]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Right.
- [31:34]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
We don't make any decisions for you. You are seeing like exactly the plan you laid out and then execute it on your behalf. That's the difference. And so we'll see how it plays out. Like yes, there are AI components we want to pull in. I think coming up with ideas and how to position and what assets are cool and trending and there's social aspects to that as well. But actually going from idea to execution still is something that lacks not only in defi, but in general. We still again don't see people sending money via chat. Gbt.
- [32:11]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah. And who knows, maybe, maybe we will get there. It's funny, we just had someone on who was talking about this and they were saying that they think it'll be possible at some point in the future and that we'll work our way. And I, I think it will eventually. Right. I think we'll eventually get there. But you're right at the moment you really don't see that many people kind of kind of doing that and taking that approach quite yet. So you know, man, we still got a lot of time for, for this stuff to evolve. Yeah, I think the other side of things too, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, but just going back to ETFs, there's a lot of altcoin ETFs out there. I mean we know that there's I think over a hundred different pending ETF applications for all these different, for all these different altcoins, which is fascinating. Do you think that that helps or hurts Glider and kind of your guys model? Because some of these are like indices, right? They're different forms of indexes where they're essentially just baskets and they already have a bunch of cryptos kind of inside of them. 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, these baskets from some of the larger asset managers?
- [33:29]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yeah, let's. Let's think about it from like the investor perspective. Right. I'll give you a prime example. Like grayscale has an ETF called, I think it's GDLC. It holds the top five assets market cap weighted like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Cardano. And that ETF charges 59 basis points annually, which is absurd, that that is, you know, 0.59% on your total investment. And you get access to like 5 tokens, all of which you don't earn any yield. Off of they're probably doing some stuff where they're earning yield without giving it to you on the other side of things. And so one, we think it's great that people are investing in crypto. Like, don't get me wrong, like that's really excellent. But the efficiencies of actually doing things on chain mean that we could offer the same exact portfolio at zero cost.
- [34:26]
Ad Voiceover (Rippling Ad)
Right?
- [34:27]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
I can, I don't have to charge you any fee. And then on top of that, I can offer you yield on all five of those assets. And so look like we're a team of eight people, we can create any of these ETFs the instant that they file for an 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, if it's a basket of assets on an exchange, like an etf, like gdlc, like that's okay, like that, that's getting where places. What I don't understand is when you have like a ETF of one token, like a salon ETF or etf, 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 like Grayscale GBTC, you're getting charged 150 basis points. That's 1.5% a year when you can go and make a Coinbase account and buy Bitcoin. So like, I think there's some catching up that society has to realize. But like, if you're a savvy investor, you should be looking for a place where fees are low or 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 bureaucracy. You don't need a big massive company like BlackRock to issue an ETF. 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.
- [36:07]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
So you guys, I want to make sure I heard this right. You said that you guys don't charge any basis points when people are creating and managing these. Is that right?
- [36:15]
Podcast Host (Gemini Crypto 101 Intro/Ad)
Correct.
- [36:15]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
We don't charge anything right now. We don't need to charge anything because, you know, on the yield itself, right, we can take a little bit of yield and that's fine, right? This is an ultimately better product still than your traditional basket. So. Yeah, and also, like, look, we subsidize a lot of what we do as an application through integrations. 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. And so that actually can subsidize our flagship app for all of our users, which is pretty cool.
- [36:58]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Okay, so, yeah, that was gonna be. My next question is, is how does Glider stay afloat here? You know, how's Glider making money if. If you're not taking anything from. From that end and you're paying 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 getting people used to it?
- [37:18]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
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. You've seen this so many times. Maybe like, you know, even opensea was hot for, like, okay, let's call it two years, and it died off very slowly. And so the vision is that you need to embed across all of these other applications. 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 some percentage of that, which is really cool. And you can curate these things. Right. 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 far more than we could ever curate our flagship app to everybody out there, don't get me wrong, our flagship app is really slick. Like, you should definitely try it out, but there's a lot more interesting distribution channels on the. On the B2B2C side. So that's something that we are actively working on. And we'll have a couple integrations to announce sooner rather than later.
- [38:37]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Absolutely, man. When it comes to the regulatory side, how are you all able to do a lot of the things that these asset managers aren't? Because, 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. 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 or asset managers might have?
- [39:23]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
I have a bit of a different take here. I think it's, it's actually due to talents. When you're a big bank or a Fidelity or a Vanguard and you're trying to build out a crypto arm, if you're in crypto, you probably don't want to work there. And that's a good point. That's really where the problem is. Like, no, I've, I've, I've talked to engineers at Fidelity and they'll, they'll say things that are like, oh, that'll take like months. And I'm like, really only takes us like two days here. Like, you know, like there is a big difference. And so that's the struggle that they really have is that they can't hire talent that actually wants to be at the frontier of crypto. And what that will mean, you know, if they still want to be around, you know, 100 years from now, is that they'll have to acquire. And you're seeing this with Stripe, right? Stripe acquired Privy and Bridge and launching their own chain, but they will have to acquire. So yeah, I would say it's actually, it's a, it's a difficulty recruiting talents that is actually the struggle for them. Because would you rather work at Uniswap or would you rather work at Vanguard? Like, you'd probably want to work at Uniswap if you're, you know, a big crypto native person. On the regulatory side though, what's different is that we're non custodial, right. And so we don't custody your assets. You come in and you create your own wallets, whether it's through email or X or you come in with your own wallet already, Metamask or Phantom or any wallet. And then we don't make any financial decisions for you. Right? Like everything you do is based off of the rules that you set and that is the execution that occurs based off of those rules that you set. So there's no management of funds here. It is simply a way to automate the steps that you set out in the first place.
- [41:15]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
You know what I like about that is that there's no one to blame but yourself. Right? When these people come in and something goes wrong, they can't go say, oh, well, it was their fault and this and that. It's like, no, no, no, no. You set the rules, you. You set the parameters, you set the wallet. Now it's time to put on your big boy pants and own up to it. So I like that. I like that we.
- [41:38]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
I mean, that's. That's the power of self custody, but I think it has to be done right. Right. Like, we're. We're not like, you know, we. We curate the experience. We're not putting random, like, lending pools on our front end because we know that those are not necessarily like 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 gets shown. But if you do want to interact with something, you know, that's not listed, it's fully non custodial. So you can go ahead and do that and you can, you know, it's permissionless. Defi. 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. You don't need to be bound by whatever we offer on our platform.
- [42:28]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, well, I think the coolest thing about this man is just the versatility. The versatility to have so much freedom without having to have all the complexities that kind of come along with it. Because 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. 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. 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. And so I think the versatility here that Glider can provide is by far, like, one of the craziest things that we've talked about or seen on the podcast. 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. And again, if we would have had this conversation a couple of years ago, I mean, we would have just been like, all right, something's not right. Like, this isn't possible. But now 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? 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 sort of 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.
- [44:06]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
The infrastructure has evolved so much, right? We have so many providers, a lot of really commoditized tech to build on top of now and so. And cheaper chains, right? Like, things like this would have been really hard on Mainnet Ethereum because it's very expensive. 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 Defi, but like, when you try it out, it doesn't feel as simple as you would expect. Go and use the product. Like I think you will be actually, if you're a crypto native, you'll be very surprised with how seamless it is. 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. 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. And so, yeah, like, not just talk, like, we're real product builders. There's a real product here that people can go and use. And I think we finally reached that point in crypto's evolution now that applications are where it's at. Applications are way cooler than your random new layer two chain that you launched that nobody's ever going to use but you raised a boatload of money for. We're trying to build real value for real investors here. And that I think is far more exciting and far more fun to build than, you know, some crazy niche little product that far and few will understand in the long term.
- [45:39]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Yeah, spot on. Well, Brian, we really appreciate your time coming on here informing the masses about everything that's going on, especially when it comes to this next era of Defi, because again, it truly is fascinating. There's so much versatility that's with it. If people want to get plugged in, maybe they want to go to Glider. Follow Glider. Follow yourself. Where can people find you?
- [46:03]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Yep, we're on all the usual channels. So our website is Glider Fi. You can follow us on X as well. That's where we have most of the up to date information. Gliderfi and then everywhere else really. Like you know, if you need support for any reason, we have a discord and we have a telegram. Of course we're on LinkedIn, TikTok. You know, maybe we'll have an Instagram soon. But you know, for the most up to date, let's focus on X. That's gliderfi and then our website is Glider Fi. Perfect.
- [46:33]
Podcast Host / Interviewer
Well Brian, once again we appreciate you coming on here and thank you very much.
- [46:38]
Brian Huang (Co-founder of Glider)
Sweet. Thanks for having me.
- [46:51]
Ad Voiceover (Rippling Ad)
You hired a new employee. Time to get to work, right? Not quite. First you need to get a bunch of HR tools for payroll and benefits. Then you'll need to add IT software to manage their devices and app access. You also have to track their expenses, so you'll need different finance software for that too. Oh, and none of these softwares work together. That's sad. Software as a disservice. Rippling is built to serve your business. It lets you run hr, IT and finance on one unified platform. Rippling provides time saving automations and connected workflows across your departments so you can finally find time for the work that matters. And for a limited time, you can get six months of rippling free when you sign up at rippling.com podcast. That's R-I P P L-I N G.com podcast for six months of rippling free terms and conditions apply.