Interview with Paul Faecks | Alloy Capital
Interview with Paul Faecks | Alloy Capital
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Interview with Paul Faecks
- DezentralizedFinance.com sat down with Paul Faecks, co-founder of Alloy, to discuss the latest developments & updates from Alloy, the future of the DeFi industry, and the latest Web3 ecosystem news.
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Alloy is a product that allows investors to natively use DeFi protocols in a regulated, custodial framework.
- What is Alloy: Alloy is a solution for sophisticated investors to use existing DeFi infrastructure. We offer institutional investors regulated, custodial access to the entire universe of DeFi. That means staking, trading, lending, derivatives, and everything else currently possible with DeFi
- Don´t miss any Web3 insights. Get involved in DeFi & NFTs & Web3 for free!
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DezentralizedFinance: Kindly introduce yourself and describe your crypto journey and share the moment/reasons why Alloy was founded.
- Paul Faecks: My background is in the very active on-chain DeFi world. I got into crypto around 7 years now and went through a few cycles myself. With the advent of DeFi on Ethereum around 2019/2020, I was one of the more active users of the now large and established protocols. From compound liquidity mining to farming yearn, to algo stables, I’ve been through it all.
- Me and my cofounders initially built some portfolio management tooling to manage our own money on-chain. Pretty basic stuff around what assets we were long/short in different protocols and different chains and what our overall exposure to be hedged elsewhere is.
- Alloy started because people would ask me “you’re into DeFi, I have a large ETH position, what should I do with that?” And I’d give these super long answers starting with buying multiple hardware wallets, setting up Gnosis Vaults, down to the actual smart contract layer of using protocol infrastructure. We quite quickly realized that this isn’t a viable setup for large, sophisticated players and that tooling was still quite bad for natively accessing on-chain DeFi. So we decided to change that with Alloy.
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DezentralizedFinance: Describe the Alloy use case and share more details about your vision.
- Paul Faecks:
- Alloy is a product that allows investors to natively use DeFi protocols in a regulated, custodial framework. Our thesis from the beginning has always been that transparent and regulated custodial solution will dominate as access gateways to decentralized infrastructure- and we still very much believe that. Especially in light of recent events, [FTX] investors are increasingly considering which platforms to use and where their crypto assets are custodied.
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DezentralizedFinance: What clients/users are you focused on? What are you doing better/differently compared to your peer group?
- Paul Faecks:
- For now, we are focussed on Funds, family offices, and asset managers. Basically, anything one would consider “institutional” is relevant to us.
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DezentralizedFinance: Can you introduce your team to the readers? What relevant experience do they have?
- Paul Faecks:
- Sure. We’re three founders: Adrian Pirija, Tim Wagner, and I. I met Adrian at university and we’ve been working together for a few years before we started Alloy actually. Adrian runs all things product. Tim is an old friend of Adrian, perfectly complementing the team by being in charge of all things finance and operations. We’re actually 15 people in total now, all of whom are amazing.
- Don´t miss any Web3 insights. Get involved in DeFi & NFTs & Web3 for free!
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DezentralizedFinance: What are you looking for at the moment (funding, talent, network, development, community building, etc.)?
- Paul Faecks:
- We’re not looking for anything specific right now. More than happy to talk to anyone who’s interested in using the product or has any questions!
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DezentralizedFinance: What do you believe is the next “killer use case” in the crypto and web3 space in 2023 and beyond? What new networks and projects are you following?
- Paul Faecks:
- The next step for DeFi is to let a larger set of users interact with it natively. It is striking how incredibly resilient and reliable protocols have been amongst the carnage in crypto markets over the last few months.
- Billions are flowing through DEXes and lending protocols without issues, the product market fit of DeFi, especially in light of the many opaque CeFi companies’ blowups (Celsius, FTX, Voyager, BlockFi,…), my conviction is only increased that decentralized financial tooling is not only valuable but necessary.
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DezentralizedFinance: Are you focused on the infrastructure (L1 or L2), middle, or application layer at the moment? Please answer this from a business and investment perspective.
- Paul Faecks:
- We don’t really fit neatly into one of those categories. We’re like a separate layer above the existing infrastructure layer, aggregating the on-chain protocol/application layer in one product.
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DezentralizedFinance: How to get in contact with your team and your community?
- Paul Faecks:
- On our website, Alloy.capital!
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DezentralizedFinance: What podcasts, newsletters, and news sources do you recommend?
- Paul Faecks:
- Besides DezentralizedFinance.com of course, I quite like the Blockcrunch podcast. In terms of keeping up with what’s going on in crypto, Messari, Nansen, Token Terminal, and TheTie are really good.
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DezentralizedFinance: Thank you for your time and the great talk, it was really fun. Hopefully, we can repeat the interview in the future.
- Paul Faecks:
- You are welcome, Thank you for the great chat.
- Find more valuable interviews at DezentralizedFinance.com in our category Interviews.
- RISK DISCLAIMER: All information presented above is meant for informational purposes only and should not be treated as financial, legal, or tax advice. This article’s content solely reflects the opinion of the writer, who is not a financial advisor. Do your own research before you purchase cryptocurrencies. Any cryptocurrency can go down in value, also to zero. Holding cryptocurrencies is very risky.
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