Meet Alex: he’s a Jewish-Russian immigrant living in Canada. He’s got a heart of gold and is a pretty easygoing guy. Except when he’s had a bad tech experience. In this case, his bad experience was with yield farming.
Yield farming is a DeFi concept that enables people to generate rewards from crypto projects by supporting the project by owning its token and parking it in a farm (essentially lending it to the project for liquidity). The concept is beneficial to DeFi users, who can earn a ton of rewards and grow their digital assets by just holding certain crypto tokens and locking them up in these farms. Projects benefit as well, as they are always looking to attract as much liquidity as possible.
Alex wanted to take advantage of yield farming for his crypto. He understood the concept of yield farming because it closely relates to how the corporate bond markets work, where companies issue bonds (in crypto the equivalent of rewards) to attract capital (in crypto we call it liquidity) to support their project.
As the former CTO of a massive wealth management firm (Gluskin Scheff, bought out by Onex Corporation), he understood bonds quite well. He had to re-design the firm’s back-office bond tracking and settlement systems when he joined because the existing system was slow and had become obsolete.
As he started yield farming he quickly realized the experience was not great. Too many steps, nothing was intuitive, so many farms to choose from. Nothing functioned well. The whole user experience, from figuring out how to yield farm, navigating the thousands of chain options, and completing a transaction was extremely difficult.
“You have this amazing DeFi concept, that benefits everyone, the project, the people. But very few will use it because it’s hard and time-consuming.”
So he decides to build a better yield farming platform for DeFi. The first goal was to automate all the annoying steps the user needed to complete just to enter a farm. The result:
Yield farming in 3 clicks. Super simple.
As the Founder of an IT software development firm operating for close to 30 years, he has the luxury of having the team and experience to build pretty much anything. His core team has been together for close to 25 years, a massive anomaly in today’s dev world. Their experience is vast. And, extremely relevant to DeFi: fintech, wealth management, insurance, telecom, data infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
To build a better yield farming platform, Alex took a different approach to most DeFi projects: build the code from scratch, with no forks.
“Sometimes it’s possible to build off existing code. In this case, we could not see it. Forking anything pulled all of the complexities and time-consuming steps that we were trying to eliminate. We felt the better way to handle this was to build from scratch. This approach achieved what we wanted.
The product runs better, is easier to use, and you can enter a farm in 5 seconds, 3 clicks. Better yet, when the market is selling off, you can exit just as fast. And transactions are executed much faster compared to other yield farming plays.”
SimpleYIELD® is born.
SimpleYIELD® is Alex and his team’s solution to the complexities that exist in yield farming today. And EASY Vaults® is the first release within the SimpleYIELD® suite. EASY Vaults® turn every farm on a DEX into a vault, making it fast and easy for anyone to yield farm. The total TVL locked in DeFi is over $60 Billion at the time of writing. However, the potential is enormous as people and institutions begin to adopt crypto strategies to earn passive income that outpaces inflation.
“I set out to build this for our use. We were getting annoyed frankly with the time it took us to yield farm. However, we quickly realized that our solution can help a lot of people. It makes it easier for people to earn rewards in DeFi, which is awesome. But it also helps projects looking for liquidity.
There are a ton of great projects out there that people don’t know about. If they did and had an easy way to support the project with liquidity, the whole system wins. That’s why we decided to launch.”
Alex and his team are just getting started. SimpleYIELD® is the first service launched within a bigger ecosystem called SimpleDEFI. The name of the ecosystem aligns ‘simply’ with the team’s goal: to build tools that increase the adoption, liquidity, and utility of digital assets.
People, and especially institutions should have all the relevant services they need to navigate DeFi in one unified platform. And it should be easy for them to use it. We also believe Web3 projects have challenges with attracting liquidity, among other things. We have ideas on how to help them as well. This is why we think in terms of ecosystem vs protocol. Build easy-to-use tools addressing gaps we see in Web3.”
Alex is especially familiar with the institutional finance world. He has built several technology solutions including trading, operations, and back-office management platforms for the space. He also sits on several boards for wealth management firms in Canada, the US, and the UK. And his contacts are telling him the same thing; to get more active in DeFi, they need the tools and resources that integrate their entire operational functions. They cannot manage digital assets in silos.
“I’m not one to do something half fast. I don’t like building narrowly focused solutions. SimpleYIELD solves one problem in DeFi, easier and faster yield farming using our EASY Vaults®. I like building things that complete the entire puzzle, not just one piece. That’s the SimpleDEFI Ecosystem.”
The SimpleDEFI story is catching on fast, even though zero time and effort has been spent on marketing. The team has already secured partnerships that integrate their service into more than 230,000 users. The next step is to expand the ecosystem and begin efforts to grow their community.
“We realized that if DeFi is hard for us it will be hard for millions more. And we get a kick out of building cool stuff that helps people. Look at yield farming. This use case alone should have 5x more TVL. It’s possible.
How? We need to make it easier for people to provide liquidity. And make a number of other things easier. SimpleDEFI aims to do that: provide tools that simplify things for users and projects.”
