Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave, comes onto the show to discuss the lending protocol and second-biggest DeFi project by total value locked. Here are some of the highlights:
- How Stani’s background studying law and his passion for fintech led him to the world of smart contracts (1:53)
- Why he decided to transition ETHLend to Aave, and how that eliminated the “meme” narrative (5:55)
- How Stani would explain Aave to a five-year-old, or your normie friend (9:04)
- What new features were released in Aave v2 (15:54)
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- reducing overall gas costs
- aTokens
- swapping collateral
- debt tokens
- What Aavenomics is and how the “safety module” attempts to keep the protocol secure (20:39)
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- How AAVE works as a governance token
- Active versus passive risk in governance staking
- How Aave is transitioning from a centralized to a decentralized protocol (25:01)
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- what he's finding difficult about this process
- issues with voting and an over-reliance on the Aave team
- delegating voting power to what he calls “protocol politicians” and whether this is good or bad for DeFi
- Who is using Aave and how they are using it? (37:27)
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- what OpenLaw is and how OpenLaw contracts work
- how credit delegation, or unsecured loans enforced by law, differ in v2 vs V1
- how people could use lending protocols to build credit
- What Aave plans to do with the E-Money (EMI) license it obtained in the UK (50:51)
- Since Aave was a pioneer in flash loans, which are responsible for the majority of DeFi attacks, whether Stani would do anything differently (53:12)
- Aave’s partnership with tokenized real estate project RealT and how Aave manages it given that, in the US, RealT tokens are securities and can only be sold to accredited investors (58:42)
- How Aave has been thinking about scaling given the high fees on Ethereum (1:03:57)
- Why building a moat in DeFi is impossible (1:07:16)
- What is next for Aave (1:11:40)
Thank you to our sponsors!
Crypto.com: https://crypto.com/
Episode links:
Stani Kulechov: https://twitter.com/StaniKulechov
Aave: https://aave.com
Aave stats: https://aavewatch.com
Protocols mentioned
Aavenomics
Decentralization concepts
Other topics
Aave Version 2: https://medium.com/aave/the-aave-protocol-v2-f06f299cee04 + https://github.com/aave/protocol-v2/blob/master/aave-v2-whitepaper.pdf
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