“I would call it the era of 'moving fast as hell,'” said Robert Leshner of decentralized finance (DeFi) at the moment. Leshner, founder of the Ethereum Compound Labs-based money market, and Tarun Chitra, creator of cryptocurrency financial models for Gauntlet Network, have recently inaugurated a new fund they are managing together.
The new funds from Chitra and Leshner
This is the second fund created by Leshner's company, Robot Ventures, and has already secured a $ 4 million loan, led by Galaxy Digital with the additional participation of Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam's Paradigm.
Scout funds act like Investors initial but with links to institutional funds, helping larger entities get a first reading of opportunities for subsequent rounds. Robot Ventures was first announced in April 2019.
“It is quite difficult to understand which ones make sense and which do not make sense,” Chitra said, because it can be difficult for those who are not in the trenches to assess the quality of a project's relevance. "We can serve as a bridge."
Chitra and Leshner bring complementary skill sets into space. Leshner is the one who created a DeFi company and brought it to a market leading position. Tarun, as Leshner said, "is probably a leading figure within DeFi and has done much of the structuring of token distributions and economic analysis for probably every project you've heard of." Leshner joked: "He is the brain, I am the muscle."
The advantage of DeFi
Chitra said that DeFi today has a clear advantage over traditional high-end trading desks that won't even consider creating a derivative for less than a few million dollars.
DeFi launches new derivatives every day, completely overturning the model. This is where big investors want to get some kind of exposure. "I think it's a bit like when traditional markets went electronic in the 90s, when people could, for example, start their own exchange in the backyard and that over time became the current modern trading ecosystem," Chitra said.
"I think [DeFi] will converge into a happy medium that replaces many of the traditional investment banking functions." At any moment, something new could be born in the DeFi space that will take on considerable dimensions, or something else could surprisingly collapse.
Leshner added: “This is DeFi's speed-of-light era, where a week feels like a year. The rate at which people try new things is the highest it has ever been. "
