Anyone Can Create Their Own ETF and Get Paid for It; This Wasn't Possible Before

Hello Defiers! This week’s interview is with Fernando Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Balancer Labs, a second-generation Automated Market Maker. So first let’s briefly talk about AMMs: Bancor and Uniswap popularized the concept of a decentralized exchange, where tokens get deposited in smart contracts, together with a more liquid asset to facilitate trades between any two assets, no matter how illiquid they are. Those who deposit tokens in the protocol, or liquidity providers, get fees in return. These “pools” of tokens mean that traders don’t need to wait for a counterpart and trades can happen automatically. They eliminated the need for order books and complicated interfaces, and allowed for an automatic, seamless experience, which was many times better than clunky decentralized exchanges of the past.

Balancer Labs is an AMM with a twist. Instead of liquidity providers having to deposit tokens in a pool at a pre-determined ratio together with a more liquid token (usually ETH), Balancer enables users to create token pools that have any ratio they want between their tokens. They can use any combination of tokens, and can even exclude ETH. The pools automatically rebalance when tokens’ price change, so that the same ratio is maintained. This way, liquidity providers are effectively creating something like a tokenized index fund, or ETF, in which anyone can invest. On the other side of the protocols are the liquidity takers, or traders, who can exchange tokens from these pools, or “ETFs.”

Traders pay a small fee, determined by liquidity providers, which means that unlike in traditional finance, where you have to pay ETF providers to trade index funds, you can create your own fund and get paid for it.

Fernando explains how Balancer works, and gives the scoop on what’s coming up next, which includes, an interface for non-technical users to create their own token pools, a Balancer token to be launched in V2, liquidity provider rewards using this new protocol token, and plans for decentralized governance. He also talks about Balancer’s business model, the steps it took to ensure the protocol is safe and the level of control the team has over the protocol —which he says is basically zero.

Now let’s get into it!

🎙Listen to the interview first hand on this week’s podcast. You’re a paid subscriber (thank you!) which means you also get a full transcript.

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Fernando Martinelli: I started going down the rabbit hole of crypto in early 2013 when Ethereum didn't exist. I was very excited with Ethereum and paid very close attention to the early projects in the space. One that really caught my attention was MakerDAO and I got involved with the team, Rune and Nikolai. I did some collaboration on the control of the target rate feedback mechanism.

I slowly moved to a full-time crypto job with Balancer as a project at Block Science. Block Science is a research company that does works with complex systems. It does a lot of cool projects in crypto. We started Balancer as a project in early 2018 and realized that it had a very big potential so we spun it off as its own company, which is Balancer Labs. Nikolai was very excited about the project as a user. He was pre-seed investor and helped write the code which is something he's brilliant at and did a great job. He was the main person to write our first version Balancer.

Liquidity on Your Own Terms

Camila Russo: And then in 2018, what was it that made you want to spin off Balancer as a separate company? What were the origins of Balancer that excited you so much?

FM: I actually also was looking for something like Balancer as a user, as someone who wants to provide liquidity and have my portfolio composed of a few different tokens. Uniswap wasn't even a thing. It hadn't been launched back then. The idea that you can provide liquidity on your own terms, so you can say I want to put 20% of ZRX and 80% of BAT, that wasn't possible back then. So that's how the idea of Balancer was born. We did a lot of research and a lot of simulations to make sure that it worked and all the mathematical frameworks made sense.

CR: If you could describe Balancer for a non-crypto person, what's the analogy or description you would use for the traditional finance world?

FM: It's great that you asked that because it's really easy to explain Balancer to non-crypto people. It's simply an ETF that you create. The fact that Balancer keeps continuously rebalancing your pool or your liquidity means that it's practically an index fund. So you say, I want to have 20% of my dollar value in ZRX and 80% in BAT and it will always keep that way, 20/80, even if the prices of those two tokens vary relative to each other.

Image source: Balancer Labs token pools dashboard

The best thing is that actually when you have like an index fund or an ETF in the real world, you're usually paying fees for others to rebalance for you, because they have to do that actively. They have to go out and sell stocks and buy stocks. Balancer inverts that idea and lets people buy when it wants to sell and sell when it wants to buy and charges a fee for trading [and pays liquidity providers who are creating index funds.]

Then there's the idea of impermanent loss. I don't get into that detail for people outside of crypto, but it explains more or less why if prices fluctuate, you end up making money from the trading fees because Balancer charges a fee for the liquidity provider instead of the liquidity provider having to pay a fee to have their portfolio rebalanced.

ETF Maker

CR: Let's kind of break it down even more. So you're saying Balancer is like an ETF, but would it be more like an ETF maker? Does it allow people to construct their own ETFs and invest in other people's ETFs that they have also made?

FM: Exactly. So you can either create your own pool or use your liquidity and add that liquidity to other existing pools.

CR: Okay. And then the difference between fees in traditional ETFs and in Balancer, what you were saying is that for traditional ETFs, you have to pay to provide liquidity, right? You have to pay when you want to buy an ETF, you have to pay fees for the portfolio managers, the ETF provider, BlackRock, whatever you're buying from. And in this case you receive fees to provide liquidity?

FM: Yes.

CR: Okay. And who is paying those fees?

FM: Traders that use the liquidity in Balancer to exchange a token for another one pay fees. So yeah, let's say you, Camila, want to sell ZRX for BAT and I have a pool with those two tokens, you can just go to my pool and say, I want to exchange one BAT for one ZRX and then you pay a very tiny fee that goes to the liquidity provider. And if someone else wants to do the opposite trade, then you're both meeting on my liquidity pool. You could have used an order book exchange but by having a liquidity pool, you can always trade with that liquidity pool. You don't need to wait for another order to exist for people to meet. So that's kind of a main advantage of AMMS [automated market makers].

CR: So that gets to the other piece of Balancer, right? Which is, it's also an exchange. Because you have the ETF side of it and then the other side is, these pools of tokens which create the ability for traders to just come and trade their tokens.

FM: That's correct.

CR: And for traders to use this liquidity, for example, if I go on with your example with ZRX, say they want to trade for ETH, for a trader to come and buy ZRX, does it have to be with the same pair of that same ETF or can you just take tokens from one ETF and another ETF and combine?

Multi-Hub Trades

FM: Yes, you can. That's something we are building right now. That's multi-hub trade. So if you want to sell A for B and there's no pool with A and B, you can sell A for C and then C for B. So you're trading A for B.

But right now, imagine you have a pool with five different tokens, A,B,C,D and E. You can trade within that pool across any pair of those five tokens. So A to B, A to C, A to D, which is actually great because you're not fragmenting liquidity across many pools just because you are limited to having two tokens per pool.

I’ll use a practical example here: RealT. I don't know if you know David Hoffman's project. So they are putting tokenized shares of properties on the Ethereum network. They have to make sure that those tokens are liquid, so they have them in Uniswap pools. But yeah, you would have to have ETH and property A in one pool, ETH and property B in another pool and so on and so forth.

Balancer allows you to have property A, property B, property C; all of those in one pool and you don't need to have ETH there as well. Any combination of ERC20 tokens is enough. So you don't have that much impermanent loss which happens when you have ETH and another token that varies a lot. So yeah, that's just to show you that you can have one pool with many tokens and you can trade across any pair of those tokens in that pool.

CR: Okay, so you can trade within pairs in in one pool, but in the future you're building so that you can trade between pairs across different pools.

FM; Right. So if you want a pair that's not present in any pool, then you need to do a multi-hop trade, which is where you use an intermediary token for that trade, from A to B, you pass through C and then go back to B.

Flexible Fees

CR: How do those fees compare with traditional ETF fees? How much in fees should a liquidity provider expect to gain?

FM: That's something that shows our flexibility. That's totally configurable. The creator of the pool chooses what swap fee or trading fee they will charge for traders that will use their pool. You can not only choose what tokens you want to have in your pool, what percentages or weights you want to have for each of those tokens, but you can also say people will trade for 1% in my pool.

And then the market adjusts it. If there's another pool —and there can be any number of pools because we're totally permissionless and trustless so people can create pools as they want— there can be other pools with a lower fee and traders will probably trade with them more than with mine. But on the other hand, if you have zero fees, then the liquidity providers are not going to be attracted to put their liquidity in that pool because it doesn't generate any returns for them. So there is a sweet spot where it's really up to the market. We say we're a market enablers, so we are not setting up that fee. We just let anyone choose whatever fee they want and let the market decide what pools are most successful.

If You Build it Liquidity Will Come

CR: I think like the great innovation that you're doing is allowing these different weights of tokens within these pools, like these different percentages. I think that's the biggest difference with other AMMS.

So how are you able to make this work? Because I imagine the reason why in the past, other protocols like Bancor and Uniswap, the reason why they need a specific weight is to secure some level of liquidity between token pairs. I see how this can work for the ETF side, but how do you make it work well for the Dex side?

Fernando Martinelli: That's a great question. Our focus is mainly on the liquidity side. Our belief is that if there is a lot of liquidity, then there will be trading, there will be traders coming to our liquidity pools because they offer very good rates or very low slippage and low fees. Since you have lots of different pools with the same pair, some will be better for you to buy, others will be better for you to sell.

So we focus on the liquidity provisioning side and the trades are a byproduct of that. Of course, if you're not integrated and connected to DeFi then people will not see our liquidity pools and they will not trade with them. So we need to be integrated so that there are trades, so that there are trading fees being paid and the pools are profitable otherwise liquidity providers will go elsewhere.

Integrations

CR: Yeah, so you want to create the best environment for liquidity providers and you're betting that because you have this great environment to deposit your tokens and invest in these pools, you have enough pairs and enough tokens that it'll be a good for traders anyways.

FM: Yes, kind of. Of course we need to proactively look for partners to integrate with us. We have 1inch already integrated from day one since we launched and they bring most of our volumes. We're talking with ParaSwap, 0x API, Kyber. So we're talking to all those users of liquidity and we believe that once we have a lot of liquidity and those guys integrated, then there's going to be lots of trades. So that's kind of our dream.

CR: And then the integration with these DEX aggregators is so that when traders go to 1inch, for example, Balancer appears as one of the alternatives to trade in, right?

FM: Exactly. That's the case already. If you go to 1inch and trade, you're going to see Balancer as one of the options.

Activity Stats

CM: Perfect. So you launched March 31st. How has activity been so far? Can you share volumes, users, any stats?

FM: Sure. There’s a very good overview of stats done by Teo Leibowitz from The Block, which we use internally actually to kind of follow the stats. Today we have a little bit over $2 million on the protocol [UPDATE: It’s now over $3 million], which we weren't really expecting that early on. We have very big red warning sign on our pool management UI saying that this is still beta, we have just launched, please don't use a lot of money. There’s still $2 million. So yeah, we were very happy.

Trades haven't been so intense or so big yet because of course there's little liquidity compared to other dexes. There's not that many pairs I think we just hit 50 pools yesterday. So there's already 50 pools [UPDATE: Now almost 70] that the community created. Then you can see like there's lots of experimentation .

Image source: Dune Analytics, Matteo Leibowitz

Smart Pools

And there's one thing I haven't talked about which is the idea of smart pools, which I think is actually one of the things that sets us apart. Just to explain the idea of smart pools, I have to explain the difference between private pools and shared pools. So there's two types of pools on Balancer. When you create a pool, it's by definition a private pool. You are the only one who can provide liquidity to it, but you can also change any of the parameters. You can add tokens, remove tokens, change the percentages of values for each of those tokens. You can change the swap fee. You can make the swap fee dynamics. You can do whatever you want, but you are the only one who can provide liquidity to that pool.

As soon as you want orders because you think your pool is cool and it will attract a lot of liquidity, you can make it a shared pool. Once you turn it into a shared pool, there's no turning back. It's a one way street. And then other people can add liquidity to that pool, but you lose all your rights and that pool cannot be changed.

But there's a nice third type of pool, which is actually a type of private pool, which is instead of you, Camila, using your own address to create a private pool, you write a smart contract that will deploy a pool and that smart contract controls that pool. So that smart contract is actually a gateway for orders to provide liquidity to that pool that only the smart contract can change. Whenever people invest liquidity in that pool, they do that through the smart contract, and that smart contract can do things that people agree that it can do, for example, dynamic fees. So you create a smart pool that cannot add new tokens, cannot change weights, but it can change the swap fee if volatility is high. So I can invest in that pool even if it's a private pool, through the smart contract and I know all that can happen is the swap fee changing.

And there's lots of other ideas like RealT, for example, they're probably going to use a smart pool where they allow themselves to add new properties. Because imagine if you have seven properties and then you have an eighth one they just acquired, they would have to create another pool with all the seven ones plus this one and everyone would have to migrate their liquidity to the new pool so that would be kind of a hassle. Instead they can have a smart pool where people know that they cannot steal money because it's there. The smart contract, everyone can read and it's going to be audited, but people know that they have the authority to add a new property, which is amazing.

The smart pool concept is something that really blows my mind. I don't know if you've heard of PieDAO. That's actually a smart pool. So BTC++ is a Balancer pool that their smart contract controls and they can swap or change a lot of different parameters. They can stop trading, for example, when the imBTC problem happened [NOTE: imBTC token was used to hack a lending protocol], they could pause the trading because they control that Balancer pool. So yeah, there's lots of interesting features you can have with a smart pool on Balancer.

CR: Oh, that's so interesting. And so does everyone who provided liquidity to that pool have the ability to update the smart contract?

FM: Not really. So imagine it's a DAO, so people who provide liquidity have a share in that DAO. For example, RealT, they are the only ones who can add a new property. But you could have a DAO like PieDAO or like MolochDAO where you could have a vote where token holders of that DAO can say we want to add a new token. And then if 75% or more of the token holders of that DAO voted yes, then that smart contract automatically adds that token. So yeah, so you can have both ideas, either like a DAO or someone who centralizes the power.

Friendly Interface Coming

CR: Going back to the question on your numbers so far, so you were saying you have 50 different pools created by the community. Have those pools been created by people using Balancer or did you create pools of your own to kind of get the system going?

FM: No, it was all the community. We've been already talking with friends, alpha testers since last year. A lot of people connected to the Maker community in our Discord channels. So they created everything and that's kind of why if you look at the distribution of value across tokens, you're going to see a lot more value in MKR and ETH. That's kind of the majority so far of liquidity.

But yeah, it's been all the community and we help them. For now, we still don't have a UI front end for people to create their own pools. So all those pools have been created with smart contract interactions on EtherScan. We're working on a friendly interface for people to create their pools without having to interact with smart contracts directly and like a wrapper and a proxy that does all the steps that you need to create a pool. Similar to how if you opened a CDP a long time ago, you had to go through 12 steps and eventually they created that proxy that does everything in one go. So we're planning on doing the same.

CR: So right now for the average nontechnical user, the way that they're probably interacting with Balancer would be to invest in other people’s pools that they've already created, right?

FM: Yes, that's correct.

Protocol Fees

CR: Great. And so you mentioned talking about fees. I was thinking about whether you as a protocol take your own fees and what your business model is. How are you planning to make money in the long term?

FM: That's a great question. For now, we don't take any fees. The idea is that when we launch this second version, there will be a token and actually that is tied up to the long-term vision of Balancer.

The vision is to be fully decentralized, like Maker. We want token holders to control the future of the protocol and Balancer Labs will eventually fade out and cease to exist. So the idea is that when we launch that token, we will also launch protocol level fees, which will be probably a percentage of the trading fees that are generated within Balancer and that will go to the token holders somehow.

Balancer Token

We're still thinking of whether it’s going to be a buy and burn mechanism, but the idea is that the company, Balancer labs, still is not going to have any of that. It's just going to go to all of the token holders. So that's why we didn't want to have a fee in this first version, which we consider like an MVP. There's lots of new features we are launching on V2. The idea is a token that encompasses governance and also accrues value through a small fee that's charged by the protocol for every trade that's made.

CR: Interesting. So what sort of utility will the token have within the protocol?

FM: The token will be mainly a governance token and there will be token rewards. Some pools will get rewarded with Balancer tokens for providing liquidity. And that's something actually we are going to announce pretty soon.

You have to kind of have some governance to decide what types of tokens will be eligible to be rewarded because otherwise Camila, you and I, we can create Camila and Fernando tokens and create a Balancer pool and trade a lot because only we control those tokens and generate a lot of fake volume to get Balancer tokens as rewards. So there has to be some governance to decide which tokens are whitelisted.

And then the protocol fee is itself a governance decision. Like if you charge a huge fee, let's say we charge a hundred percent of the trading fees goes to the protocol, no one's going to trade with Balancer or no one's going to provide liquidity because they’ll get nothing out of it. So people will just fork or people will provide liquidity to other protocols. If we don't charge anything for the protocol level fee, then it's not sustainable. We can't really continue developing this. So there's a sweet spot and that's going to be decided by the governance. The token will be a governance token and yeah, there's definitely going to be other types of utilities attached to it.

CR: For a governance token to actually work and if you're going to use it as your kind of business model in the long-term, there should have to be a way for this token to gain in value, right? Will it be the base tokens through which other tokens are traded or are you thinking along those lines?

FM: Yeah, so there's a few options like staking Balancer tokens to be able to trade or to be able to provide liquidity. We're leaning more towards not adding friction to the protocol. So you don't need to hold any Balancer tokens in order to trade or to provide liquidity. But if you hold the Balancer token, it's indirectly accruing value from trading fees being generated. For example, you have a pool Eth/Dai and the protocol gets 5% of the trading fees, so it accumulates Eth and Dai, and at some point it auctions those Eth and Dai for Balancer tokens. So it kind of pulls from the market and burns them, it may accrue value to balancer token.

Community Governance

CR: So is the idea is that Balancer Labs will fade and then there would be like a DAO for community-wide governance of Balancer.

FM: Yeah. So governance is a very, very hard subject and we're seeing still like companies or protocols like MakerDAO struggling with that. So we are probably going to learn a lot from those experiments in the following years but the idea is definitely to either do a DAO or some other mechanism that is controlled by token holders. And then the Balancer Labs, the company will be dissolved.

CR: And I know you say you don't have like a date for launch but is this something that you are envisioning for this year, for the next five years?

FM: Probably next year. We're already working actively on V2, but probably it will be next year because we take security very seriously. So our MVP, our version one, it was mainly ready in September last year, but we did a lot of testing and auditing. So probably next year I would say is V2 time line.

Security Practices

CR: It's great that you brought up the security question because we've had so many issues lately in DeFi. So you said you did testing, you did audits. Like what were the steps that you took yourself to prevent anything, any bug or anything wrong happening, and what would you recommend the rest of DeFi projects to do?

FM: We followed all the best practices. Some of the most recent attacks happened because of very simple things that were known for a while. Nikolai has been around for a while, so he followed all of those best practices. Our CTO Mike McDonald is also a brilliant coder and a great tech guy. We did an audit and not only one audit. It was many audits, we had a five day audit, a two day audit. They helped us shape the code until we got to the final version where they did their final audit. We're going to do a second audit with ConsenSys and after that we're probably going to have had the protocol with $2 million for a month, probably out in the wild.

So we're going to slowly be more confident to bring more liquidity and launch the rewards program where people will get Balancer tokens —or actually they will get them if we launch a token in V2. So of course we can't really make a promise because there's many things that could happen that would prevent us from launching. But if we launch a token, then they will get kind of a backward kind of retroactively the rewards for providing liquidity in V1. So yeah, security is definitely something we take very seriously and we spent a lot of money to have audits and we'll do a second audit, have a bug bounty as well. So anyone who finds a critical bug on Balancer can get $25,000.

CR: Okay. So that's an interesting topic because this whole ecosystem is supposed to be about being open But that obviously creates a double edge sword in the sense that, so anyone can build, but that doesn't mean that anyone can build safely. And at the same time you have people who are building these projects and that can be accessed by anyone. So you have this like perfect storm of people building maybe projects that are unsafe and then anyone being able to access these projects. And then kind of the requirements to make these projects safer are maybe not accessible to everyone.

You mentioned, you had to spend a lot of money to get these audits. To get a sense how much do audits costs a project or how much does a complete safety plan costs for a DeFi project?

$500K Safety Plan

FM: If you put together Camila, like a bug bounty program plus all the pre audits and final audits and maybe two audits to be sure that you have two different groups of people looking at your code, I would say it's definitely more than $100k. So it's in the six digit figures. And yeah, I would say it could go from anywhere from $100k to $500k. It gets very expensive if you take it seriously.

CR: It's a shame. It obviously raises kind of the barrier of entry to building in this space, but it's so needed. We've seen so many attacks and people lose money.

FM: Yeah. I totally agree with you. I also love like that guy, that programs alone in their garage, the white hats. But if people know that a project hasn't really spent a lot of money in audits and security, at least make sure that you look at it and see that there's been like a honeypot for long enough that probably a lot of hackers took a look at it and haven’t managed to hack it, instead of investing your money in something that just launched last week and it doesn't have any audits, right?

So if it doesn't have any audit, at least wait like a few months until other people that are more risk friendly, they've invested enough money to make it a honeypot. That famous hacker, he said he waits for projects and prototypes to catch his attention and that happens usually when there's enough money being traded and yeah, some money like a honeypot for others to get interested as well. That's when he looks at the code.

Admin Keys

CR: That's a great tip for users to look at for sure. Okay. And also on the line of security, I wanted to ask you about your admin keys and the level of control you have over Balancer.

FM: We're very proud to say that we have zero privileges or zero admin functions. We have nothing. So Balancer is completely trustless and permissionless. We can't stop the pool once it's been deployed. We don't control any like wide variables or properties. That's probably going to change in V2 because it will get more complex. We'll have this protocol level fee, but it will be always the ethos of Balancer, our culture is to make things as trusted as possible. So we still are not going to be able to censor or to white list what tokens can be created or added to balance the pools. We're never going to be able to stop a pool or to do things to a pool. So yeah, for now it's completely trustless, just like very few other projects have that level of zero trust.

Funding Round

CR: Okay. Really cool. You recently announced an investment round, right? Was it $3 million?

FM: Correct. $3 million. Accomplice and Placeholder where the co-leads and then followers were CoinFund and Inflection.

CR: Great. And then when you were talking about your token, I was wondering whether investors in this round, which I mean, I assume they invested $3 million for stock in Balancer Labs, for equity in the company. Right?

FM: Yes.

CR: Did they also get kind of the option of getting Balancer tokens when V2 launches?

FM: Yeah, so the idea is that the company will have a part of the full supply when V2 launches, and the tokens held by the company are going to be kind of prorata given out to all shareholders. So investors have a share of the company, they will have like the same prorata share of the tokens that the company will get.

Tokenized Future

CR: And to start wrapping up, I just wanted to get your broader vision for Balancer. So you talked about V2 already, but I want to get a sense of where you see Balancer and DeFi way out into the future, say in 10, 20 years. Like what role do you see Balancer playing in this new financial system?

FM: I see like Balancer V10 probably in so many years. I think that there's going to be so many new things and changes that a protocol like us or any other protocol will have to keep up and evolve over time. I hope that Balancer is still around. We're going to do our best to make sure that it does. I see the conventional world using Ethereum. So I see as soon as we have scaling and all those features that we need to bring the conventional world to Ethereum, I see stocks and all types of ownership, things that haven't been possible so far. Fractional ownership of so many things in the world that are just too expensive in a conventional system. I see creators of art, I see Harberger taxes. I see so many things and I think Balancer is a great way, and AMMS in general, are a great way to let people invest their portfolios without the hassle of having to run infrastructure of market makers like they have to do when they're investing in or they're putting orders on order-based exchanges.

I see AMMS in general as a great way for inclusion of liquidity providers. And I see Balancer as one key tool, one key building block for people to get creative and create smart pools that do things that we can't imagine today, but probably very cool things that have to do with DAOs, controlling what configuration of pools they want and treasury management of pools, of projects and companies.

CR: I love that vision of having Ethereum and DeFi be this layer to tokenize any asset and just give access to everyone to manage these assets in a simple way that cuts out all the intermediaries and paperwork and just time and bureaucracy of the traditional financial system that we're all used to. So yeah, I really hope this pans out because I think it's so needed right now.

In the very short term, what should people expect from Balancer. Like what are the very next features or things that are the most exciting that you're working on right now?

FM: We're working with lots of integrations and liquidity providers will feel that by an increased trading volume in their pools and of course ROI or profitability, APR of their pools. We are about to launch, I'd say in maybe a month's time, the front end interface for people to create their own pools. So if they're not happy with the pools that have been created, they're not comfortable with interacting on Etherscan to create a new pool, they'll have that front end. And also the rewards program, which I think is going to be very interesting because people will get that, as I said, kind of promise that if ever we launch a token, they will get a share of those tokens. So it's kind of a conditional promise and for people who provide liquidity in tokens that are kind of a widely held. Yeah. So I think that that's one of the things that are very exciting that we're going to be soon announcing.

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money.

About the author: I’m Camila Russo, a financial journalist writing a book on Ethereum with Harper Collins. (Pre-order The Infinite Machine here). I was previously at Bloomberg News in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires covering markets. I’ve extensively covered crypto and finance, and now I’m diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.