- Leshner says his company Robot Ventures wants to invest in DeFi on Ripple.
- This is an unusual leap for one of DeFi’s early founders.
Ripple has just conquered a DeFi godfather.
Robert Leshner, an early founder of DeFi on Ethereum, is now looking to support crypto entrepreneurs building decentralized applications on Ripple.
With only eight DeFi applications and more than five million user accounts on XRP Ledger, Leshner says the network’s large user base is ripe for new products.
“What makes DeFi on Ripple exciting is the huge retail user base they have built, even without on-chain applications,” he said. DL News.
“The introduction of DeFi could encounter an extremely active user base.”
This is a striking development.
Unlike Ethereum, a decentralized network that hosts nearly $73 billion spread across hundreds of financial applications, Ripple is a centralized company with around 900 employees and a business focused on penetrating one of the most traditional financial networks. hidden: cross-border payments.
It sells blockchain solutions powered by the XRP token to financial companies like MoneyGram, PNC Bank and Santander.
Join the community to receive our latest stories and updates
Over the past seven days, the token that powers Ripple’s tech suite has soared 80% and nearly doubled its market cap to $151 billion, according to CoinGecko.
Ethereum, on the other hand, only grew 7% during the same period.
Indeed, Ethereum and Ripple couldn’t be more antithetical, which makes Leshner’s leap all the more puzzling.
He is, after all, one of the original founders of DeFi on Ethereum.
Leshner launched Compound Finance in 2017, one of the network’s first lending protocols. This project also brought yield farming – a practice whereby users are rewarded with a protocol’s native token simply for using the protocol – to the market in 2020.
So, is he just jumping on the XRP bandwagon?
Not quite, he said.
Leshner said Ripple’s decentralized future is only just beginning.
Solving Ripple’s Bottlenecks
One of Ripple’s blockchain solutions is the XRP Ledger, a blockchain similar to Ethereum or Solana.
Unlike these two blockchains, the XRP Ledger has automated market makers, like Uniswap or Raydium, which are natively integrated.
Leshner says it has already shown promise. Trading volumes on decentralized blockchain exchanges surged amid the latest XRP rally.
There’s just one problem.
I played with Ripple DeFi today and I am completely unsure how many IQ points I lost or gained.
–Robert Leshner (@rleshner) November 30, 2024
Without the widespread programmability of smart contracts, which essentially allows developers to create whatever they want on a blockchain, Ripple’s DeFi future is limited.
This is expected to change with the launch of the Ripple EVM sidechain and would make the network much more like Ethereum.
And Leshner wants to be there long before he arrives.
“We see this as an inflection point for the arrival of DeFi on Ripple,” he said. “We want to meet with the teams that make up Ripple DeFi before it is ready.”
Liam Kelly is based in Berlin DL News corresponding. Do you have any advice? Email to liam@dlnews.com.
