# Presentation by Squid's Fig | Fig - Squid - Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver) - Date: 2026-03-09 - Duration: 11:56 - Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-XzUy5G7mZFs - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzUy5G7mZFs ## Description πŸš€ Get Ready for ETHDenver 2026! πŸš€ We're already hard at work preparing for next year's biggest Web3 event! Keep your eyes peeled for more info on ETHDenver 2026β€”it’s going to be epic! 🌟 ## Transcript All right, we are ready for our final speaker of the day. Welcome Fig, the founder of Squid, and he's going to be talking about the powers of decentralization and centralization converging. Welcome, Fig. >> Hello, everyone. Thank you. Um, yeah, very excited to be here. My name is Fig. I'm a co-founder of a project called Squid. And we are an API and a UI that allows you to swap tens of thousands of tokens across about a 100 chains. So crosschain bridge swapping. Um we work with hundreds of projects and about six billion in volume. But I'm here to talk about the path of DeFi from 2020 all through today and um the patterns that I've noticed in how builders are are working with DeFi and the tools. So wind back to 2020. Everyone's in co at home and a whole generation of nerds including myself are sniped into this dream of DeFi. It's completely free markets. Um a global layer for for finance. Um everything's transparent. Systemwide leverage is clear clearly visible and people can build modules for finance which other developers can permissionlessly bring into their apps. Um, Vitalik is saying that everyone will have an Ethereum account and it'll be the world computer for your access to everything in finance. Um, unis swap and ave were the spearheads of D5 summer. So, unis swap v2 especially allowed you to create uh permissionlessly any market and ave is a lending protocol. These were extremely successful because of the UX. It was just so simple to make a new market. It was really simple to buy things as well. You didn't need to go through KYC or open a bank account. It was just log in with an internet connection and you're off. They were also really successful because of tax. Um I think a lot of people were avoiding tax. There was a lot of money laundering. North Korea's everywhere. Um used by a lot of sanctioned countries as well. And I think that's why DeFi was so successful early on. And then you have all of this liquidity coming in in co from the money printing that made everyone rich. And that incentive brought people on chain. That got everyone excited that this was the future of finance. But over the next couple years, it became clear that this wasn't going to replace TRDFI. Like DeFi wasn't able to replace, you know, a fullfledged private bank or um you know, the stock New York Stock Exchange. Um we needed we're going to need to arrive at a a compromise between the two. Um, North Korea has probably stolen I don't know where they're at right now. It might be up to 10 billion or something of of dollars. So, security is really bad with smart contracts because you have everything public. It's like you're giving your code for someone to break if they want to. Um, the immutable nature of things means that when money's stolen, you can't get it back. Um, the user experience, while it was really good with unis swap, once you started getting more complicated, it was it just broke down completely. um bringing your MetaMask wallet to different apps on Ethereum and trying to work out how each new app worked and then having to go to another chain. That's where Squid originally started was because going to new chains was actually really difficult. Going to new chain was extremely uh complex and confusing. So the UX broke down, people got tired of this like um you know the speculation that was bringing people to DeFi. And then also we found that because tokens couldn't act as equities, the incentives were all wrong. All the DeFi builders couldn't actually raise money into a good investment product. They'd have to release these tokens that were essentially useless and then all the valuations have gone down over the last few years. And yeah, it's been terrible for the industry. So there's all these sort of headwinds we've been going up against. Um, but we solved them with a kind of regulatory arbitrage. roll-ups came along and Ethereum was getting really expensive, really slow and it had this but it had this legal precedent where it was able to run this financial computer where people were holding assets, trading, doing all these things which usually really tightly regulated without any like licenses all over the world and rollups came along and they were like we can also get this legal precedent across to our technology but we didn't need any of the decentralization. So they they built I won't go into the details but essentially we solved the speed and um scaling issues of Ethereum through a kind of regulatory arbitrage and then intense did the same thing for unis swap. So instead of having to combine lots of different smart contracts on say different chains or on Ethereum, you could use this thing called an intent which is essentially a bridge between offchain on one side which can do a lot of complex things really cheaply into onchain which does the settlement of the assets at the end of the day. So intents allow you to essentially run a centralized um do do the same things as a centralized tra traditional finance company but then you uh since the it's quite permissionless and self-custodial you just limit the blockchain uh to only do the movement of tokens between the different parties. Um and this actually worked really well. Um generally there's been a pivot to this deregulated finance where as much as possible is moved off chain and we keep just the things which are needed for regulation and for self-custody on chain. Um so we get the best of both worlds speed compliance agreements were also an interesting thing because we found that you know a lot of credit you actually need trust in the other person. It's not just a numbers game. You actually need to know the their business or what they make. So a lot of that sort of soft social layer of finance um needed a way of coming on chchain and intents do that um really nicely and onchain kept itself custody. Um the Ethereum account model also didn't work very well. Um I went into that before but it's been solved essentially by bringing the modularity into the developer layer. So instead of a user taking their account to different apps and trying to sort of work out their own modularity, developers can integrate everything really nicely, put a lending protocol, a swap protocol, like whatever they want into one product, package it up, and the user logs in with Google and it feels a lot like web 2, but it still has the best of that self-custo self-custodial model. It's got the global access and same with institutions. They want full control of their custody. So you building like integrated products works really well for them. Um and yeah, chains stay doing just what they're good at, which is being accessible 24/7. Um you can issue anything. Anyone can issue a token on them. Everyone in the world can access them and they're quite secure. And then if you put all of these together, you get an exit hatch, which is this was part of the original dream. If you can exit from the system, um, then it makes it a lot harder to gatekeep. I used to work in traditional finance and I saw just layers and layers and layers of fees being taken and not much value being added. And that's because you can gatekeep in traditional finance with you have this sort of um no transparency and no way of your customers actually being able to leave and go with someone who offers a better product than you. So, we've kept that so far. And I'm really bullish on um on DeFi because of this. Also, we need to um we need to work with the suits to be able to make D5 successful. So, I've uh I've got my first suit last year for my sister's wedding, but I might have to use it a bit more in business. Um and so, traditional finance players are actually really really skillful. Like, there's hundreds of years of of skills and they're amazing at what they do. So being able to use a lot of what they've built in crypto is uh I think a really good thing. A lot of yield products especially I think are interesting when you you bring them on chain via a real world asset uh and make them accessible to everyone all over the world but the yield is actually coming from something which is more real like coming from a crowdf player. So I think that's something that you know DeFi is going to be amazing for giving someone in a country where they usually don't have access to good finance access to these products. Um, and I've been chatting with institutions all week actually, and the two main things they say about crypto are the 24/7 settlement is um, going to make everything a lot more capital efficient, and things will come on chain for that reason. Um, and then the global access as well is the other one. Um, we need to watch out for though, the gatekeeping might start happening. I've already seen a lot of asset issuers that have mint and burn control on their assets, circle included, once you pass a pass a certain threshold, they can charge essentially whatever they want to for you to have to mint and burn the assets. So, that could get out of hand and I'm yeah, I don't want to be part of a system where only a few players can essentially control the in and-out flows of money. Um, and then we've also seen self- custody is coming under threat still. Mika is doing a lot against it. Thankfully in the US it's not too bad but we need to watch out to keep self custody. Um, so this is where we're at at the moment. I think we've got uh speed, cost, UX, business logic all offchain and then we keep the global access and censorship resistance on chain uh decentralized and that all comes together really nicely in these neo banks which everyone's building now but I think that's just the honestly table stakes you should have a wallet access to assets um access to like global investments you can open an account without uh KYC and um yeah these Companies like XOXOs, Onomorpho, they're bringing good off-chain products onchain and accessible for these these users of the NeoAKs. We did this with a company called Minipay who have I think 12 million users worldwide often in you know South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, people who usually don't have access to any good investment products and we gave them access to gold investing for the first time ever. um they don't have to open an account. They have to they don't have to buy a minimum of $50 which for them might be a huge amount of money. They can buy $10 or even 10 cents. Um and it's available in their time zones. Uh this has been really successful actually. And yeah, generally Squid, we work with a bunch of these teams, hundreds of uh businesses to allow them to swap to and from about 20,000 tokens on our API across crypto. And I think the most exciting thing about the next year, we'll be seeing all these RWAs come on chain and our one API can will be essentially more powerful than like New York Stock Exchange or the you know London Stock Exchange or China hopefully one day. So if we can get everything all in one API for every user in the world. Um yeah, I'd love to see that. So yeah, not as all not all is lost. Um, we've got onchain settlements still going strong and I think the original dream is dead, but the deregulated finance dream is is well and truly alive. Tons of adoption from the biggest financial institutions in the world. And um, yeah, thanks for listening. 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