Aave to Avatars – DeFi & the Metaverse: Interview with Stani Kulechov, Founder & CEO, Aave

Stani Kulechov is the Founder & CEO of Aave Companies, a Web3 company building user-owned infrastructure eg decentralized finance, social, commerce etc. The Aave protocol is a leading  open source software that enables users to lend/borrow cryptographic assets running on various blockchains e.g. Ethereum, Polygon, etc. In Stani’s view, DeFi is a technology to make TradFi more efficient by improving the back-end infrastructure and transparent by using the public blockchain with the goal of a composable ecosystem wherein TradFi can build services on top of DeFi infrastructure. Stani expects total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi ecosystem could grow to $1 trillion driven by institutional adoption. Stani believes DAOs are better at governance but concedes that centralized platforms that efficiently build hardware will play an important role in the Metaverse ecosystem.