Li.Finance | The Cross Chain Bridge Aggregator | Interview
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Li.Finance | The Cross Chain Bridge Aggregator | Interview
- Interview with Philipp Zentner – 11 important questions about Li.Finance
- Li.Finance provides the best cross-chain swap across all liquidity pools and bridges. The future is cross-chain and Li.Finance makes sure you don’t have to care.
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The future is cross-chain and Li.Finance makes sure you don't have to care.
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Interview with Philipp Zentner
- One of the best ways to better get to know a crypto project is to talk with that project’s founders and team members. DezentralizedFinance.com sat down with Philipp Zentner, CEO at Li.Finance to discuss the latest developments, news and insights from Li.Finance.
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Question: Kindly introduce yourself and describe your Crypto journey and share the moment/reasons why you started to develop your project.
- Philipp: I’m Philipp, one of the two founders and CEO of Li.Finance. Max, our CTO and co-founder and I joined crypto just in February 2021 by helping out a befriended Youtuber on a NFT based side project. We were quite amazed about the ecosystem, quickly dropped everything else and won hackathon after hackathon. The prize money alone kept us up and running and as we found the next idea we wanted to work on (LiFi) we could even start employing other people with the prize money and grants we’ve gotten. I wish I would have joined the space earlier.
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Question: Describe your project/product – what value are you offering to the crypto ecosystem? What problems are you solving with your service?
- Philipp: The current situation is that due to Ethereum’s astronomical growth, it lays out the processing of transactions to so-called “rollups”, which are blockchains on their own but then write these verified transactions back to Ethereum. At the same time, other Layer 1 blockchains like Solana and side-chains like Polygon aim to repeat what we call the “DeFi Summer of 2020”. Decentralized financial products have brought massive traction to the whole blockchain ecosystem and thus, liquidity is nowadays fragmenting and as each blockchain has its own underlying consensus algorithm it’s not simple to move funds from one chain to the other.
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Therefore, “bridges” are being built.
- Now, as you build your dapp and deploy it on one blockchain, your users might come from everywhere. So you have two options:
- a) you tell them how to bridge their funds and thereby send them away or
- b) you implement bridges by yourself.
- While a) creates a lot of friction which ends up in a bad user experience and ultimately leads to a loss of potential users and thus, revenue, b) introduces a lot of risky dependencies you don’t want to deal with.
- So we take care of b), we’re aggregating cross-chain bridges, even connecting them to decentralized exchanges (DEX) and DEX aggregators and are offering cross-chain any-to-any swaps out of the box. A smart contract that unifies and abstracts away the communication to all those bridges and an API that computes the best route based on the desired swap. You can have these things one by one, bundled as an SDK or even embed our swapping widget directly, which saves you time on the frontend side of things – of course these things are configurable, monetizable and customizable.
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Question: Can you introduce your team to the readers? What relevant experience do they have?
- Philipp: That would become quite a large interview. We’re 16 people by now and we’ve chosen them wisely. The core leadership team consists of Max, me and Ed. Max Klenk and I have around 17-18 years of software development experience. While Max is much more knowledgeable and flexible regarding different technologies, I have been focusing more on business development over the past years. Max and I have been working together for over 8 years. We’ve first built stomt.com (SaaS in the customer satisfaction space) and after that, we’ve tried different things in biotech and marketplace intelligence. We have a favor for data processing and analysis.
- Ed, I met last year in Bali. Due to the lockdown, we’re trapped on the island and we actually lived together for a month. He’s been developing Solidity for over 4 years and has his own company within the crypto space called Escaroo and has been sharing his Solidity knowledge on Youtube on his channel “What the func”.
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Question: How did you achieve your funding requirements, was it from a token sale exclusively, private funding, or were you granted?
- Philipp: Apart from prize money and grants we did classic fundraising via convertible notes. But instead of a future option to convert into equity, our investors would convert into tokens. We wanted to align with the country we live in (Germany) and comply with regulations and rules.
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Question: Please describe the basics of your (governance) token model / tokenomics.
- Philipp: We haven’t figured that out yet. We basically went from zero knowledge and network to $2,7mn in funding within 5-6 months. We agreed on finding product-market fit first and will then think about a tokenomics model that would align with all stakeholders. Right now we’re focusing on growth.
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Question: In which stage are you with your project at the moment and what can we aspect in the next months? How is your strategy to grow your community?
- Philipp: We’re 100% focusing on our launch at the moment. That means releasing our API and SDK, getting our smart contracts audited, and setting up our branding. We aim to succeed by having clear messaging and a very focused approach. We’re a bridge aggregator and position ourselves in a B2B market.
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Question: Please share your mid-and long-term roadmap with our audience.
- Philipp: Mid-term we’ll implement more bridges, improve our algorithm, maintain our integrations, gas-optimize our contracts and try to build the best product possible. In the long run, we’ll try to tap into more and more ecosystems via integrations and at some point create value-adding products on top of our system.
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Question: What are you looking for at the moment (funding, talent, network, development, community building, etc.)?
- Philipp: Right now we’re searching for other dapp developers and protocols that want to allow their users to move their funds from anywhere directly into their contract – integration partners. Nothing else. Come talk to us if you read this!
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Question: What is your thesis about DeFi, NFT/Gaming and Web 3.0 and what are you most excited about? What are the next roadblocks after scalability is solved – How important are tooling, development kits, applications and dashboards with a high UX?
- Philipp: I’m a bit angry with myself that I’ve ignored that space for such a long time. But that actually stupid thinking. We’re still so early. It’ll take 5-10 more years to actually arrive in the market but I’m super excited about what’ll bring to the whole world. Nation-states will change and will have to adapt and we see more and more that it’s becoming a topic on any level (local, national, EU-wide and globally). Large brands and banks are getting their hands dirty and will change many industries for the better.
- The general user experience, as well as developer experience, is still questionable, but it’s getting better every day. I’ve never seen such a fast-paced industry.
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I’m a bit angry with myself that I’ve ignored that space for such a long time – Philipp Zentner
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Question: What do you believe is the next big thing in crypto in 2022/2023
- Philipp: I believe social networks. I believe the social graph could be incredibly more powerful on the blockchain. I’m not sure if the timing is right though but the industry has to get its hands dirty with this topic. Another topic is gaming, digital ownership finds a new paradigm within crypto and for the gaming industry (where Max and I have been active for many years with stomt.com) it’s low-hanging fruits to re-invent their revenue streams and game mechanics.
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Question: How to get in contact with your team and your community?
- Philipp: Best way to get in touch with me is via Twitter or Telegram, on both I got the handle @philippzentner.
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Question: Thank you for your time and the great insights into Li.Finance.
- Philipp: You are welcome, thank you for the great chat.
Summary – Li.Finance | The Cross Chain Bridge Aggregator:
- We hope you enjoyed the Li.Finance Netowork interview with Philipp Zentner.
- The need for easy-to-use cross-chain bridges, multi-chain liquidity solutions and inter-cross-chain swaps is rising every day as more and more layer 1s and 2s are getting traction and different blockchains need to be connected. The demand for an aggregator of these different cross-chain connections by providing an all-in-one API and SDK for projects, networks, infrastructure providers and B2B services. The market for interoperability will be very big in the future.
- DezentralizedFinance is very excited about the upcoming multi-chain world and the further development of Li.Finance as a Cross-Chain Bridge Aggregator!
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Li.Finance provides the best cross-chain swap across all liquidity pools and bridges!
- 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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