Podcast: Aave founder explains how $1 trillion will flow into DeFi | Stani Kulechov & Santiago Santos

Stani Kulechov & Santiago Santos discuss the massive and continuous growth of DeFi as they talk NFTs, decentralised social media, and more.

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In the latest episode of Blockworks’ podcast “Empire,” Jason is joined by Aave founder/CEO Stani Kulechov & technology investor Santiago R Santos.

Sitting at the forefront of the fast evolving DeFi ecosystem, we invited Stani & Santiago on to Empire to share their thoughts on the exponential growth and assess whether DeFi has hit escape velocity.

This conversation was fascinating and covered a range of topics including how DeFi managed to attract $100 Billion of total value during the 2020 DeFi summer, when $1 trillion of value will be locked in DeFi, how social media could be decentralised in the web 3.0 transition, NFT’s, and Stani & Santiago’s outlook for the end of year bull market.

They also discuss:

  • Tokenizing real world assets
  • Collateralized vs Undercollateralized loans
  • and so much more!

Check out what they had to say in the video below. 👇

On “Empire,” once a week, Jason interviews individuals that have built the crypto industry to talk about their struggles, bold moves and tough decisions. For any NPR or Guy Raz fans out there, you can think of “Empire” like a “How I Built This” for the bitcoin and crypto industry.

Episodes are released every Thursday morning. 

Subscribe to Empire today on Apple or Spotify. Watch episodes on YouTube.


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The dynamic between Ethena, Pendle and Aave exhibits a mutually-beneficial relationship, where the offerings of each business grows the top lines of every party in this exchange. Pendle sits at the intersection of YBA issuers (Ethena) and money markets (Aave), demonstrating heightened utilization rates of YBAs, where the PTs then exhibit profound utilization as collateral. YBA issuers see Pendle as a premier go-to-market venue, often underwriting incentives for liquidity on the market and solving for Pendle’s supply side, while money markets view PTs as attractive collateral types to lend against, solving for Pendle’s demand side. PTs represent a highly profitable collateral listing for Aave, with depositors maxing out the available borrow capacity. Pendle’s recent launch of Boros may now present the most material growth vector beyond what is currently exhibited on V2 markets, offering the ability to price yield, spreads, and duration risk across various points in time out into the future.

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