Glider, upstart of on-chain asset management led by a16z and CoinBase: Use intention-driven architecture to solve the problems of custody and income

Author: Patti, ChainCatcher

Edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

Onchain trading platform Glider is quietly rising.

Recently, Glider completed a US$4 million financing led by a16z CSX, and investment institutions such as Coinbase Ventures, Uniswap Ventures and GSR participated in the investment. The strong financing lineup attracted the attention of the crypto community and attracted widespread attention from the industry in the onchain asset management track. Glider's popularity continued to rise.

On-chain asset management pain points

As for traditional financial asset management institutions, Bitwise, Grayscale, etc. usually adopt a custody model, and user assets are centrally managed by institutions. In Glider's view, although traditional asset management institutions provide professional management services to a certain extent, they also sacrifice users' independent control over assets.

Glider co-founder Brian Huang once said that Glider’s uniqueness is that it will not host users’ assets like traditional finance, which will be achieved through blockchain technology.

But even on the chain, portfolio management faces many challenges:

The threshold for technical complexity is high: under the multi-chain ecosystem, the heterogeneity of Gas tokens, the delay risk of cross-chain bridges, and the real-time requirements of rebalancing strategies make manual operations difficult to deal with market fluctuations.

Serious infrastructure fragmentation: There is a lack of standardized interface between DeFi protocols, and users need to switch frequently between AMMs, lending protocols, and option platforms.

Returns and risks are asymmetry: Retail investors often fall into the dilemma of "the strategy is open and invalid" in the process of strategy replication, while professional institutions build advantages based on quantitative models. This information gap has led to a few people controlling most of the on-chain returns.

In response to the above problems, based on the balance between the automation execution layer and user control, Glider proposed a new set of ideas.

Intent-driven modular system

Glider co-founder John Johnson said that Glider was founded out of frustration with the fragmented infrastructure that has long plagued cryptocurrency portfolios, and Glider was born to completely eliminate this friction and achieve accurate and automated execution across networks.

Its core idea is to build a "middleware" for on-chain asset management, decouple the strategy formulation, execution, risk control and other links into programmable modules. Users can configure parameters independently according to their own needs, or they can choose smart templates provided by the platform.

Glider's product core is an intent-driven modular architecture. Users only need to set investment goals and strategic intentions, and the underlying chain abstract technology will automatically complete cross-chain operations, asset adjustments and transaction execution, reducing the burden of manual operations.

Glider's technology stack adopts a modular design, with the specific features as follows:

Portfolio Construction

Users can use intuitive asset allocation tools or selected templates to customize their investment strategies.

Automated execution

Glider will look for liquidity on different chains and manage rebalancing to trigger transactions. When market conditions change, the system can automatically execute preset strategies.

Unmanaged integration

Users can connect to any existing wallet (such as MetaMask, Rainbow, Safe, WalletConnect, etc.) without new mnemonics.

Integrated lending

Glider automatically lends through trusted DeFi lending protocols such as AAVE to optimize returns. Users use assets to borrow and obtain additional profit opportunities without transferring ownership of assets.

Collaborative investment

Users can share strategies and customize them to continuously optimize their investment portfolio.

Integrated backtest

Users can use historical data to test strategies on the Glider interface and compare performance with BTC, ETH and other benchmarks. Through the backtesting function, they can understand the performance of the strategies in advance.

Team background

Judging from the currently disclosed founding team information, the team members are mainly Brian Huang and John Johnson.

As co-founders, Brian Huang and Johnson have also had outstanding resumes, and have worked in well-known institutions such as Anchorage Digital, XTX Markets, 0x and Matcha respectively. Other members of the team also come from famous companies in the industry such as Coinbase, MetaMask, 0x, Cega and PoolTogether.

Brian Huang holds a PhD in computer science from MIT. He has served as chief architect of Anchorage Digital. The cross-chain hosting system he leads in developing supports more than 20 public chains.

As an early core developer of the 0x protocol, John Johnson led the reconstruction project of the Matcha aggregation trading engine, which set an industry record of US$1.2 billion in trading volume per day.

Conclusion

Currently, Glider is still under technical testing and the product is planned to be launched in the next few months.

According to the official website, the product is now inviting and waitlist is being opened.

According to Glider builder@marcos_0x, more Glider functions are currently under development. Currently, Glider can display the current value of the user's investment portfolio and netflow (a key visual clue to understanding investment performance).

In addition, according to its official disclosure, it plans to make a profit in the future by charging users a certain proportion of the scale of their managed assets.

In the process of the cryptocurrency industry's evolution from "financial experiment" to "value network", true decentralization should not be at the expense of user experience, but should be internalized through technological innovation.

"Everyone should be able to accurately adjust their investment portfolios according to their own wishes, automate them, and conduct investment operations as they like within their own risk tolerance and risk preferences."

Perhaps, only when on-chain asset management can be as simple and easy to use as traditional financial ETFs, DeFi is expected to transform from geek toys to mainstream financial infrastructure.

Glider is making new attempts in the field of on-chain asset management.