Ep 34 — How to Bring Institutional DeFi Trading to Retail with Jai Prasad
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Welcome to the Deco podcast, where we bring you stories from founders and investors in Web three. Before we get started, this is not a financial or legal advice. It's just a conversation about things we find interesting in Web three. Views expressed are our own personal opinions. The co members or guests appearing on the show may have positions on assets they talk about. Alright. We are with Jay Prasad, founder of Definitivefy. Jay used to work at Coinbase. And, yeah, there's a lot that we are gonna talk about right from his Coinbase days to what he was doing there, what his views on DeFi, and
for having me. Really appreciate it. Really hyped to be here.
Awesome. Let's get on with it, and take me back to your Coinbase days or, like, if it is relevant, like, even before to understand what you were doing and your fascination with DeFi, basically. Basically. Yeah.
Actually, it starts before Coinbase, and, you know, actually, that's how I know your partner, Joel. Wow. So, yeah, in '20, you know, 1718, I started one of the first on chain data companies called TokenAnalyst. So think of it as, you know, Dune Analytics or Nansen. Prior to those, I was one of the first people who, you know, said, hey, there's all this interesting data on chain about these new tokens that are launching. This was right after the ICOs. Can we analyze it? Can we garner insights from it, etcetera? And so started this company back then and met your partner, Joel, through that. He w
What are the differences between, like, what is offered to retail versus prime brokerage, for instance?
Yeah. So first and foremost, on the retail product, when you do a swap, when you trade one asset for another, it sources liquidity from the Coinbase exchange. On Coinbase prime services, when you wanna buy Bitcoin, it sources liquidity across many exchanges, including Coinbase. So it plugs into Kraken and plugs into market makers directly, plugs into, you know, whatever, Bybit, etcetera. Not sure all the exchanges. And that's because when you're trading that size, the bips matter, and you want best execution. And so you have something it's called, like, a smart or router, which you might have
So, basically, it is broken into different pieces so that you can Yeah. Like, best
Thousands of pieces across many venues. Right? So what happened was, you know, myself and my cofounder is super into the DeFi space and had experience building kind of crypto infrastructure and trading infrastructure for scale. And so we were we kind of had the vision that this institutional DeFi or institutional trading infrastructure that we'd built at Coinbase was not applicable to DeFi. You can only access CeFi through it. And to onboard and unlock the next, you know, $10.20, hundred billion of capital on chain, the similar infrastructure would be needed in DeFi. And that was the kind of g
So, basically, anyone who has a wallet should have access to institution to create like Keyfax. Exactly.
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