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.
Welcome back for another chat! Tyler Scott Ward, Co-founder of BarnBridge, joins us this week to talk about value of transparency and community as well as the pitfalls of hype.
What are you building and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?
That is fine I don’t really need to promote anything, I think most of the readers may already be somewhat familiar with BarnBridge. We have over $250m locked in TVL on our SMART Yield product which allows you to structure your risk for deposits into AAVE, Compound and CREAM (Polygon coming soon).
Our philosophy and ethos is mostly around security and our DAO first approach. We empowered the community much earlier than other projects in the ecosystem by launching as a DAO and then putting the power in the hands of the BOND token holders.
We also as a generalized ethos tend to ship slow and focus on security. We have some of the best developers in the space, are all early ConsenSys folks, and we are in it for the long haul so security of users’ funds is our utmost priority.
Which quality of the Scalability Trilemma do you find to be the most important?
I think security and decentralization are of the utmost importance like I mentioned above but we are working on the scaling component by focusing on sidechains and layer 2s.
As a money lego we can really only go from a scalability perspective where other primitives that we plug into go so we work with our partners and build out integrations based on their movements. That allows us to focus on scalability and decentralization on the base Ethereum layer.
What is the most critical part of forming a lasting community?
I think being communicative and thorough and also being extremely transparent. We spend a lot of time working with our community and working to explain how our products work and what is coming out. Naturally, people flocked to the degree of decentralization and transparency we ushered in from the very beginning.
What is something in DeFi that you think more people should be paying attention to?
BarnBridge lol. No, but honestly, I think it’s insurance (off chain and on chain). Longer term, I think ZK-rollups.
What is a critical lesson you have learned on your journey?
Don’t launch into hype. Try to build early in your community and allow for people to get in early and build with you. Hype is a double edged sword that often comes with unrealistic expectations if you are focused on security.
What is your favorite meme from the DeFi community?
All of the Amish & James Bond memes that we push out I’m obviously partial to but outside of us it’s the yield farming honest work meme and then generally all the Pepe Chainlink and then Spartan stuff for SNX. Those communities banded together around memes and they did a great job. I’m here for it.
Thanks for reading and thank you to Tyler for sharing his thoughts.
Follow Tyler on Twitter or find out more about BarnBridge.
