My guest today is Fernando Martinelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Balancer Labs. Balancer Labs is the company behind Balancer. Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools. Although Balancer isn’t the first DeFi protocol to make use of AMMs, however, it has brought a new face and approach to liquidity. The unique feature of the protocol is that it allows Liquidity providers to have up to eight assets per market which are weighted by percentage and rebalanced automatically. Fernando has been part of several startup companies before Balancer, which include PrepLounge in 2014, Brasil Mate also in 2014. Before these startups, Fernando worked at Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH in Frankfurt, Germany in 2010; and Bain & Company also in Germany in 2011. In our conversation, we cover Balancer, DeFi’s exponential growth, and Ethereum/EIP-1559. Fernando discusses the Eth/BTC flippening and why he believes it’s inevitable. Fernando goes on to explain the EIP-1559 upgrade and what it could mean for the Ethereum ecosystem. We go on to discuss how projects are on a path to decentralization and how decentralization is a spectrum. Fernando also discusses Balancer and how their liquidity pools function. We end our discussion talking about why the future of finance will be built on crypto rails and why building open source financial systems is important for humanity. Please enjoy my conversation with Fernando Martinelli
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