Accelerate with Mert Robert Leshner: Tokenizing Wall Street, Decentralized Finance, and Blockchain IPOs | ACC 1.3
Aug 11, 2025
Robert Leshner, a pioneer in decentralized finance and the founder of Compound and SuperState, shares his journey in tokenizing traditional financial assets. He discusses the transformation of Wall Street through blockchain and the innovative complexities of building on Solidity. Leshner explains the benefits for issuers in tokenizing shares, including access to crypto investors and reduced friction. He emphasizes the importance of compliance and the challenges faced when tokenizing private companies. Plus, he offers valuable advice for startups on choosing investors and scaling sustainably.
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Pools Replace Peer-to-Peer Lending
- Compound replaced peer-to-peer lending with pooled liquidity so users can always borrow or earn interest instantly.
- This design scaled to billions by abstracting counterparty risk into always-on smart contract pools.
Learning By Building A V0 Prototype
- Robert Leshner learned Solidity by forking early projects and building a proof-of-concept lending protocol in 2017.
- That V0 convinced investors and led to a production rebuild and the 2018 launch of Compound.
Indexes Solve On-Chain Scaling
- Smart-contract scalability required inventing on-chain financial primitives like interest rate indices.
- Indices let the contract update interest for infinite users in parallel without per-user writes.