The Founder Fireside Chat series hosted by DeFi Pulse interviews DeFi founders in the hopes of offering readers an opportunity to better understand their perspective and what drives them to build their vision.
Another week, another intriguing chat to share with you all. For this week’s Founder Fireside Chat, we spoke with Ross Middleton, Co-Founder of DeversiFi, about the leap forward in technology that rollups represent for our industry.
DeversiFI is a layer-2 exchange built on Ethereum. When we set out 2 years ago, we wanted to give people all the features and benefits that they were used to from trading on a large centralised exchange, but without giving up control of their funds.
We launched on the StarkWare validium technology 10 months ago to launch the first scalable & private DEX that offers incredible aggregated liquidity for major pairs. Trading & Swapping on DeversiFi is private – privacy and aggregated liquidity are two of the main differentiators vs other order book DEXs.
I think all three are important aspects. For those who haven’t encountered DeversiFI before, DeversiFi is a layer-2 exchanges that uses zk rollup/validium technology to achieve scalability without sacrificing security or decentralisation.
We examined a number of different scaling solutions (and built one or two ourselves) before landing on zk rollup technology as rollups really do solve the scalability trilemma.
Building a product that people find useful and can actively be a real part of is key in building a long lasting community. If you give people a unique tool that solves one of their daily pain points then they are only too happy to provide feedback and put their time into making your project even better.
I am biased here but Layer-2 really is the future. All of these ‘Ethereum killer’ layer-1 chains are having their moment in the sun because fees on Ethereum are so high at the moment.
We have operating Layer-2 exchanges on Ethereum that allow people to trade & swap without paying any gas at all. Within 12 months we will also start to see Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible rollups, bridges and CEX on/off-boarding. There may never be a reason for anyone to every touch Layer-1 Ethereum ever again, let alone another blockchain.
So many! We launched at the bottom of the bear market in 2020, before DEXs and DeFi was really a thing.
We had an existing DEX that settled every trade on-chain, but it was taking up a lot of time to support and interfered with our ability to raise financing as people thought it was our main product.
In hindsight, we should have stopped supporting our old product and focused entirely on the new one. There are so many other lessons that we have learned as a team but we don’t have time to go into more than one of two!
I like the ‘waiting for Eth 2.0 to launch meme’ the most because we actually don’t need Eth 2.0 to fully launch now that we have a whole ecosystem of rollups that is springing up. I see rollups as a way to scale Ethereum for the long run, not just whilst we are waiting for execution sharding.
Thank you for reading! A special thanks to Ross for joining us for a rather interesting conversation about how rollups have impacted DeFi. For more, you can find Ross Middleton on Twitter and explore what DeversiFi has to offer.
