Bryan Hernandez on Structure's DeFi trading platform for traditional products

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have brian hernandez co-founder and president of structure ryan welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time thanks ashton nice to be here you're very welcome let's dive into the world of defy let's just kick off our

0:20conversation with first what is your team working on with structure how are you incorporating defy and blockchain solutions into the real world and then we'll dive into the details sure yeah so structures of mobile first training application would be familiar to most people who have done anything in crypto because usually buying an asset is the first step to

0:41doing anything in crypto but in addition to offering access to trading and cryptocurrencies or things going on in d5 we also offer access to the traditional world of financial assets so stocks and bonds and etfs currencies commodities things like that interesting that's great and with that approach of incorporating traditional finance do you see that as a

1:04trend that's becoming more prevalent where these platforms will have access to just traditional finance plus crypto and hopefully that brings crypto into you know an equal playing field as just products that deserve to be in this in the same area as all of these other investment products yeah absolutely it seems to be a trend over the past at least

1:29two years i'm surprised it hasn't happened faster but you know the pace of the market can sometimes be slower than you expect you know fundamentally i see i've always seen crypto blockchain web 3 it's an enabling technology and it turned out to be a very interesting asset class in and of itself to speculate on and invest in but we're finally getting to the point

1:52to where these technologies have matured such that you can build businesses around them and this is really unlocking the great promise and potential of the technology to begin with so as we as we contemplate like a future defy world and or at least defy interoperability putting all of these asset classes on the same stage makes a lot of sense and

2:14makes the lives of you know retail investors and professional investors alike like a lot simpler you know i started trading crypto in 2013 2014 and at that time there was a huge gap between you know the platforms that would give me access to trading crypto assets and the platforms that would give me access to trading traditional assets and over time

2:36that's you know gotten narrower but it's still way too large and so what you find no matter the type of trader investor you are is when something starts to happen if you're not already well positioned to take advantage of that by having accounts open in the right places by having your funds in the right places you'll miss out because usually these things don't like the great

2:56opportunities don't last more than a day sometimes much less than that and so one of our goals with structure was to bring as many things as as you can as we can under one roof so that you know your attention and your assets don't get distributed too broadly definitely and i like that point brian and you're right about the opportunities it's often you know hours or minutes

3:19where you know to get the best opportunity before before it disappears especially in crypto with it being 24 7 it's super fast and defy as well is just growing exponentially it's hard to keep up with the products and services as you're continuing to build as the industry continues to expand now building this d5 product and including the tradfy products in there as well

3:41more specifically focused on defy looking at the d5 space and how it continues to grow where are you know the pain points that you've pinpointed for structure in a way that you're gonna bring a competitive advantage into the defy world and become one of those go-to defy apps yeah well i don't think the difficulties in d5 are that distinct

4:06from any new technology it's hard to understand there's a lot going on and most people don't have a lot of time to educate themselves and figure out how everything works so one of the things that we're trying to do is make this as simple as possible and like what robinhood did to trading stocks for retail investors in the united states we want to do to the rest of the world

4:29with more than just the stocks in crypto but the full universe of tradable assets so you know fundamentally like there's a lot of value being created in d5 things are growing very rapidly there's a number of reasons for that but i think the number of people that are participating in that growth is way too small and it makes sense why it's small

4:50just because of the reasons that i already mentioned most of us don't have eight hours a day to you know go through twitter and read blogs and spend all this time so if we can build an app that exposes the best opportunities that are going on in the market and just make it as easy as pushing a button i think we're going to see much more participation

5:10in this world than than we're currently seeing where you have to manage your own web 3 wallet and connect it and write these transactions that people have a very you know limited understanding of what they're doing not to mention the dangers of doing that so the way i think of commercializing defined crypto technologies like similar to the

5:30way that we commercialized jet travel right none of us know how jet engines really work we get on a plane we feel safe we feel like we're going to get to the other end and it's fine and the role of the company is sort of this custodian of like we know the right way to use the technologies we're going to expose the parts of it that are the most interesting for you and make sure that

5:49you get the benefits without having to have this huge depth of knowledge definitely great analogy and yeah it can be intricate on the back end but let's not have the customers worry about that let's just get them on board into d5 and be able to invest in the assets that they want to now i'd love to get more of a scope brian of you know it's a big job to build these

6:13applications and keep up with the industry at the same time so let's talk about you know how long you've been working on it and where exactly you're at with the platform right now yeah so we got started in august 2020 we with our first fundraising from polychain and the product is well we're never a feature complete but we're the core features are complete it's

6:39being tested in a beta currently and hopefully we'll be releasing it to a number of countries over the next couple months but yeah the experience is you can go on and create an account you know pass your kyc aml checks create watch lists of various assets look at market data deposit funds trade between any two assets on that and also then withdraw your assets

7:08awesome and as you continue to grow and you know obviously it's a never-ending process there's no finish point you're going to continue to bring updates to the customers and more product features and more defies that continues to grow are you expecting people to just flock to structure as you know the go-to place and the robin hood for defy

7:29or are you also going to employ specific marketing techniques tactics or bring draw people in a certain way you know how are you going to actually grow the customer user base well that's a great question we'll have to see how our first experiments go but you know a lot of the names or products that we've come to know and love in crypto actually

7:52were able to reach their size and brand equity through just word of mouth just by building the right product so that's always been our focus at structure is iterating really rapidly on the different features and the problems that we're trying to solve obviously keeping open channels for people to make referrals to use the product but i think the stickiest thing in any

8:14really in any domain is if you can help people make money they are very very appreciative and they like to come back to using that they like to talk about your product so what we're trying to do at structure beyond increasing the access to financial markets to the world as much as possible we're trying to find ways to make people money and i think if we're successful in doing

8:33that we won't have any any trouble growing the number of users definitely yeah i agree and if you have the right products that people enjoy they're gonna keep coming back and you know i've heard some of the greatest crypto companies like finance just say as long as you're building products that you know people are asking for the community asks for something new and if

8:53there's a majority of them asking for it and you build it they're going to stay they're going to love you so i believe that community-oriented projects especially in crypto are are key to long-term success because the community leaves then you know you're going to lose all that traction and speaking of having the right products for the community in the defy sense on structure

9:17there's a lot of different products with defy where you know you can do just the basic assets but you can also do more speculative you know high apy degenerative defy that people hear about and you can do swaps and liquidity provision and where is structure starting to focus on in terms of which digital assets are going to be included and how deep d5 will go

9:42well we have to focus on the largest volume investment opportunities to make sure that you know we cover our basis to the to the most degree that we can first and then expanding more to the fringe stuff as as time goes on like it's it's you know there's we only have so many development resources to integrate everything all at once but my philosophy is like let the user's

10:07interest drive our product roadmap and you know if we can if we're going to respond to that then i think people will be pretty happy it's very it's very encouraging when you work with a service provider you express a desire to do something and then in a few weeks like you at least can try it out in like an mvp level and so we've kind of built the organization

10:27in order to do that effectively awesome and with that road map that we're talking about in the next few months here what are the major milestones that you're looking to bring out to the public with structure yeah well in the next few months we expect to launch in our first country which we haven't disclosed publicly yet but i'll give you the teaser of it's a latin

10:54american country that has been extremely pro crypto and crypto adoption so i think it's a great testbed to release structure there and then we'll be growing outwards from there my goal is to focus on the countries that have historically been the worst served by financial service providers and you know conveniently these are actually

11:20populations that are growing very rapidly that have a huge amount of interest in crypto and the developments there so i think it there it's very well matched our go to market strategy and the needs of people i love it and there's been a lot of talk in the news about you know just bitcoin you know with latin american countries starting to maybe make it legal tender and then who

11:43knows from there on i feel like yeah in terms of financial inclusion defy is a great way for people in emerging countries that don't have access to financial services to get a loan to earn interest on their capital when they couldn't access a bank account do you see you know the major topic of discussion is bitcoin in other parts of the world and you know

12:06that's like the gateway to hopefully unlocking the knowledge for people that hey these types of assets can now also bring us interest and help us be included in a financial system and preserve wealth more than just bitcoin but do you see that as like the gatekeeper to bringing everybody into d5 yeah that's a good question i think yeah i mean it's hard to compete with

12:33the brand of bitcoin it's the largest asset i think the yeah i mean it's it doesn't need to be the gateway into the world of d5 but it's certainly a convenient one as it's very easy to get in a lot of places most people understand it and like it's it's useless store value or as a speculative asset or even as a form of payment are reasonable like

13:03you could you could do worse and with things like lightning network great like it kind of opens up a few more opportunities to use it in a more everyday currency sense so yeah i mean i don't really have to too much strong opinions about whether or not bitcoin is going to continue to lead forever versus one of the one of the other popular cryptocurrencies i think they all

13:26serve a place in the ecosystem and you know so long as that diversity can be maintained i think we're in a good place definitely brian and speaking of you know fitting in and serving its place i would love to hear your five-year three-year vision you know because crypto moves so fast when the products out when there's customers using it in multiple countries around

13:48the world what do you see as the success factor for your team that's going to keep people coming back and be one of those go-to d5 places or you know the robin hood of d5 yeah well on that timeline i hope that we're not thought of as a defy app or even just a trading app but it's a it's a place where you can go to make some money right and that

14:13that this works in as many countries around the world as is possible as is legal for us to operate in because you know at the end of the day like income inequality asset ownership distribution is very poor right it's very imbalanced so if we can connect someone to the internet and give them a way of making money this is like a really game-changing opportunity

14:38there's going to be lots of things that come and go in d5 there's going to be lots of interesting opportunities in traditional financial assets what will not change over that timeline is the need for people to go in and find investment opportunities to make an allocation decision and to do it without a huge suck on their time and attention and

14:59requiring huge amounts of education this is why we're doubling down on making things simple accessible as many places as possible and then also not not nickel and diming our customers by taking fixed fees of certain for certain transactions like if you imagine even if like your commission was like a dollar per trade or something if you only have twenty dollars to invest this

15:22month because that's how much you saved this is this is prohibitive right there it doesn't make a lot of sense and so you know the right business model with the with providing lots of access and making things very simple i think is going to win in the long term well said brian and for those people that are looking to get access to structure as you

15:43continue to build it out and launch in the first country what is the best way for people to follow along and to follow into the structure community online as well sure so well you can sign up on our website the website structure.phi you can follow us on twitter structureunderscorify you can read our blog you can join our discord things are going to be moving very

16:08quickly so one of these social media channels we'll keep you updated on the latest and greatest developments from our team and yeah with any luck we'll be open in the country where you're you know calling in from and you can jump on the app and enjoy the vast world of trading and investing amazing i will leave all those links in

16:29the description box below brian all the best with the launch of structure and just everything in the continued growth i appreciate you taking the time and let's follow up in the near future cool yeah thanks a lot ashton have a good day