Alpine's Tarik Moon: DeFi loan took 15 seconds, bank loan took over two weeks

Ashton Addison: What is Alpine, and what are you bringing to the space?▶ 00:44

Tarik Moon: We're a team of experts building Alpine, a savings protocol. It lets people use the primitives we're building to connect the next 100 million people to DeFi and to remove barriers for the unbanked. DeFi protocols remove middlemen and barriers. Products like Compound and Aave have attracted billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars in assets because they make getting a loan more efficient, inclusive and seamless. I wanted a loan for personal expenses. From a bank it took me more than two weeks, even though I had all the paperwork ready. Getting a loan with my crypto as collateral from a crypto protocol took 15 seconds. In simple terms, we're a savings protocol. We let people have their money grow and work for them, and it's completely powered by crypto.

Ashton: Self-custody DeFi can be a daunting jump for people who aren't financially educated. How is Alpine making it safer and easier?▶ 02:38

Tarik: We believe one of the main reasons DeFi hasn't reached its potential is the user experience. Managing your own private and public keys gets so complex that unless you have a computer science degree, you're probably not going to manage it. Just think of our parents or grandmas. Could they use those products? Not a chance. So we're using a kind of second-generation onboarding technology. You can connect your email address and still get a non-custodial wallet. You keep control of your funds without managing a key, but you do have to secure your email, as with Coinbase or any other exchange. There's also friction in having to buy a specific token for each chain, like ETH on Ethereum or MATIC on Polygon. With Alpine, you sign up with your email and gas is denominated in US dollars. Because of the technology we're using, we can give users almost free transaction costs, whereas on Ethereum you might pay hundreds of dollars in gas to deposit or withdraw. Only about four million wallet addresses are using DeFi, so most likely around a million people, while several hundred million people own crypto. That's a huge runway, but we need the right product, the right user experience and the right pricing.

Ashton: DeFi covers savings, loans, swaps and liquidity provision. Where is Alpine focusing?▶ 07:56

Tarik: We're building two primitives. The first is a savings product denominated in USDC, because that's the easiest for most people to understand. You deposit and earn interest, and it's completely decentralized. One of the main things we bring is transparency, and that's where we believe we're more powerful than many centralized incumbents. People can see where their money is going. It's not going to some shady exchange or third-party trader. It's not a black box. The second is for people who are more bullish on crypto and want to hold some. We're building a basket that combines Bitcoin and Ethereum. It gives you broad market exposure. It's almost like the S&P 500: instead of buying 500 different top US stocks and rebalancing every week, you buy into one fund. People can be as hands-on as they want, choosing their allocation and rebalancing weekly, or they can rely on the DAO to rebalance for them.

Ashton: Are you focusing on emerging markets, where people are turning to crypto because their national currencies are struggling?▶ 11:13

Tarik: This topic is very dear to my heart, because I have friends in countries like Turkey and Venezuela, and we're seeing war in parts of the world right now, with the Ukraine-Russia conflict affecting ordinary citizens on both sides. In all those cases we've seen big adoption of crypto because the traditional currencies are underperforming severely compared with crypto. We want to capture that, and once we release phase one we'll probably focus on some of those countries. Our transaction costs are almost free because we currently use Polygon and will also use Solana. Both are very fast, and fees are fractions of a cent. We're building almost an abstraction layer. You don't have to worry about which protocol or chain your money is in. You put your money into Alpine, and it gets moved across different chains and protocols through our system.

Ashton: What milestones are coming for Alpine in 2022?▶ 13:53

Tarik: We're thinking of launching our first public product sometime later this year, though as development happens I can't give exact dates. For now we have a private product for early adopters, investors, and friends and family, and we're using it for two things. Security is one of the most critical elements, so we're being formally audited by several security firms right now. We're also fine-tuning the user experience, both the web app and the protocol underneath it. We want to nail those two before bringing the product to the public.

Ashton: What will be the key factor in Alpine still having millions of users years from now?▶ 15:43

Tarik: We're user-centric. We want users to get not only the best experience but also the best price. We're building a protocol under the hood that is owned by the community. Even if I, as CEO of the wallet product, wanted to change the fee structure, I wouldn't be able to without the community's buy-in. I think that's a powerful mechanism for earning people's trust faster. The second thing is that whether or not something is decentralized almost doesn't matter if we don't give people the experience they want. If we don't give people what they want out of these DeFi products, we will not succeed. We haven't reached the public market yet, so being honest and humble, talking to our users and making sure they love the product will be our main priority in the coming months.

Ashton: How can viewers follow along and get involved ahead of the phase one launch?▶ 17:56

Tarik: We have a live website with demos our engineers created, at tryalpine.com. You can also follow us on Twitter, and reach out to us there with any questions. The website has a waitlist, which is where we're getting our first users from. More than 50,000 users have already signed up, which keeps us pumped about the product, because so many people want it.