347: How Blend.money is Building the Global Savings Layer for DeFi with guest speakers Manny and Jamie
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, innovators, entrepreneurs, and risk takers. Welcome to another episode of Web3 with Sam Kamani Podcast. And in this episode, I am joined by Manny and Jamie, the founders behind Blend, a DeFi savings platform, which is focused on capital protection, as well as global access and long-term financial security. So both these guests have, they bring like a deep experience from building high scale crypto infrastructure at risk labs, working on protocols such as UMA, U-M-A. And across them, they share both lessons that have shaped Blend's safety first approach. And in today's podcast episode, we are going to unpack why savings, not speculation, is the real next chapter in DeFi. How Blend is building a global savings layer for users regardless of their passport or their local currency.
And why isolating risk at the account level changes how people should think about on-chain finance. We also explore FX hedging, self-custody, design, transparency, and what it takes to build trust in an industry that has lost it too many times. So if you care about where DeFi is going beyond trading and how crypto can actually help people preserve wealth globally, then this is a conversation worth listening to. as always nothing that we talk about here should be taken as financial or investment advice and please like share subscribe and follow with all that out of the way let's get into it So Jamie and Manny, welcome to the show.
How did Jamie and Manny get started in the crypto industry?
It is an absolute pleasure and an honor to have you guys here. And I'm so looking forward to our conversation about all things DeFi as well as what you guys are building with Blend. But before we get started, I wanted to find out how did you guys get involved in this industry, starting with Manny, take it away.
Yeah. I've had an interesting journey being in, I guess, crypto and or software. I've been in software and educated in software for a long time. Some, I guess, a notable name that everyone would resonate with is I was ex-BlackBerrys. If you ever used a BlackBerry phone, that's where... I was a developer for Blackberry. And then all good things in software come out of curiosity. Early in my days, I saw this thing called Bitcoin. It seemed very interesting. So, I mean, one thing that all software people like to do is also play with hardware. So the interesting part is that you could go and like set up a miner, play with this thing. And I was like, cool, I got this Bitcoin thing. It was very interesting. And I just, one thing led to the other, Ethereum, and it got back to my software and you can like develop, you can develop smart contracts and the NFT craze is all there.
And it just made me very excited about DeFi. And then just keep diving deeper and deeper into DeFi. I started exploring this marvelous thing called DAOs, hate them or love them, they exist. And I served on a pretty notable one called Developer DAO, still serve it, serve there as a steward. I still think Web3 can use more developers and we can like get to our mission of like basically getting more and more people into Web3. And then from there, I joined Risk Labs, which is, it runs UMA and Across.
What makes Blend.money different from traditional yield platforms?
So UMA does Polymarket. It's their, it's their Oracle that resolves Polymarket. And then Across is the one that helps you whip through all of the hundreds of blockchains and moving it. So that's kind of been my journey. That's kind of where I met this lovely person named Jamie and we decided, Hey, we want to solve a problem in DeFi.
And JB, what about your background? How did you, what's your journey that led you here?
Yeah, it was around 2014 when I got involved into crypto. I was sitting right next to someone who had a trading terminal up and I was like, what is that thing? And they told me it was Bitcoin. And that sort of shaped that one like pivotal moment, shaped the next 10, 11 years. Wound up grabbing a couple of advanced degrees in quantitative finance in CompSci. And it all sort of started to focus around consensus and natural language programming. Then I started a company and an exchange that went really well in crypto.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:51
2
How did Jamie and Manny get started in the crypto industry?
1:51–3:32
3
What makes Blend.money different from traditional yield platforms?
3:32–5:10
4
How does Blend ensure capital safety for users?
5:10–6:21
5
What features does Blend's app offer for savings and swaps?
6:21–7:18
6
How does personalized FX protection work in Blend's platform?
7:18–8:00
7
What is Blend's North Star goal for user growth and deposits?
8:00–14:46
8
How does Blend plan to support local stablecoins?
14:46–46:30
Speakers
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372: The Security Mistakes Every Web3 Founder Makes (And How to Avoid Them) with Guest Speaker Johnathon Claudius from Asymmetric Research
371: What Founders Still Get Wrong in Crypto with Guest speaker William Quigley from WAX + Tether
369: Tezos, Etherlink & Tokenized Uranium: The Future of Blockchain Infrastructure with Guest Speaker Adebola Adeniran from Tezos
368: Why AI Agents Are Now Hiring Humans (And How You Can Get Paid) with Guest Speaker Sydney Huang from HumanAPI