Mike Silagadze - The Future of Consumer Applications on Ethereum - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

All right, you made it. Thank you for sticking around. I'll try to make this as entertaining and and hopefully quick as possible so you can get on to your uh dinner or drinking or wild parties of uh tokenuh 2049. Uh okay, so maybe I'll start with a quick question just to sort of level set. Uh how many people have heard of Ether before?

All right, that's not bad. 20%. Uh, okay. So, I I'll start with a quick introduction and then I'll talk about uh uh really what's a call to action to build uh real things on uh on the blockchain. Um uh so Ether Fry um we started off in our early days uh about a year and a half ago as a liquid staking protocol and since then we've added a suite of products to flush it out into a complete uh cryptonnative neo bank a new category that we're we're calling DeFi bank and I'll tell you uh more about that a little bit later.

Um the uh you know high level where the protocol is at is we've got about five billion uh dollars in TVL. Uh we're one of the top five uh largest protocols in in all of crypto. Um uh one of the fastest growing to get to that scale just over the last year and a half. Um and continuing to grow and uh uh and add users. Uh okay.

So let's uh start with a question which is uh how big is DeFi? Uh in other words, if you were to look at let's say the top five or 10 uh projects on uh a DeFi llama uh and ask how much revenue do those projects generate? So not how much TVL do they have, not how many, you know, tokens they've uh they've emitted, but how much revenue do projects in crypto actually generate? Um these numbers are you know plus or minus maybe 50% depending on how how accurate the data in DeFi lama is but uh if you look at those top five uh projects you'll see numbers you know along these lines uh so a big lending and borrowing market I think uh they're the largest protocol by TVL these days uh depending on the day generates about annualized 50 to 100 million in revenue uh you know hugely successful business very profitable doing doing great. Uh Lido uh the largest staking protocol um generates again roughly $50 to $100 million in revenue depending on the price of E on that day.

Uh Sky or Maker as it used to be called generates uh almost $200 million. These days I think they were up almost $500 million uh uh prior to that. And then Ether Fry last year we did about 26 million in revenue. uh and uh you know this year we'll do depending on uh uh how things go 50 to 100 uh so that's that's the order of magnitude the largest uh protocols in crypto decentralized protocols in DeFi generate you know on the order of uh tens of millions to uh a few hundred million dollars in uh in revenue. Uh again this can be a little bit murky.

So, for example, you know, is Pump Fund, they generate a fair bit of revenue. Is that really DeFi? Uh, Hyperlquid, another good example. You know, it's sort of in a gray area, but I think this is representative. Okay, cool.

That's that's where we are. Let's level set on that. Uh, now let's let's look at the the outside world in uh uh you know uh companies that are publicly traded. Uh this is Zenesk. For those of you that are familiar, for those of you that aren't, it's a fairly random uh help desk software company.

Maybe some of you have used it. Uh they generate about $ 1.5 billion in revenue. Um it's like an early 2000s help desk software. So when you, you know, chat support the ticketing system is probably in some cases run by Zenesk.

There's dozens of companies that are in this space, some which are larger than Zenesk. So I use this really as a fairly boring kind of prosaic example. There are tens of thousands of companies in the world that are larger than uh Zenesk and it's valued at around $10 billion. So in just about a decade of development uh all of DeFi has managed to get to less revenue than one fairly random help desk company from the 2000s. Uh that's uh I guess what it shows is that there's a lot of opportunity here.

There's a lot of opportunity here to do more than just gambly stuff that uh you know recycles the same capital between the same couple thousand people over and over again. There's a huge opportunity in building things for uh for real people. So uh that's my my call to action is enough with the gambling stuff. Uh it's time to build products for real people. There are two or three orders of magnitude of scale.

that are left to be had by building uh products for users, by creating products, charging money for those products and then feeding that back into the DeFi ecosystem or more broadly the crypto ecosystem. And the talk we just saw before Gonzilla was, I think, a really great example of that. I mean, huge opportunity, huge scale, uh a lot more revenue than uh you know, what we've been kind of working with. Okay. So now I'll go into what's EtherFI doing to try and uh try and move in that direction.

As I mentioned, uh EtherFI started off as a staking protocol and then expanded our our mandate. And the mandate that we're going after now is uh to create this DeFi bank to create a cryptonative neo bank built on uh built on crypto rails. And that market is massive. Um the global neo banking market is about $150 billion as of last year. Growing super fast, tons of users, tons of demand.

Uh whether you look at the developing world or uh uh you know even uh you know countries like the US or or more uh more mature markets uh tons of market opportunity and revenue to uh to be had. And so what EtherFi has built, if you were to use it like a just as a as a customer, as an individual user, you would open up the app, it would in many ways look and feel very much like a Revolute or a New Bank or Chime. But the difference is it is entirely built on crypto. Every transaction is on chain. It's fully self-custodial.

It is probably an order of magnitude cheaper, less extractive from uh from our customers. Uh and gives you a lot of the same uh features and benefits that you would expect. So specifically, you can deposit your money. You can fiat on-ramp onto your EtherFi account. Uh you can use that to then uh to buy and then stake your crypto whether it's ETH, BTC, USD or whatever.

You can then deploy it into DeFi right from your from your app in a safe sort of bubble wrapped way so that you don't uh you know it's not that you can sign a random transaction and uh your money is gone. Instead, it's it's nicely uh protected. Um, and finally, you have a credit card attached that allows you to either spend uh your assets directly or to borrow against them. Uh, I would say it's the first instance of this uh complete end-to-end alternative to a traditional bank. And as I said, we've been we've had a tremendous amount of success uh over the last year and a half that we've been live.

Uh I would say looking at our uh growth curve, I mean it's probably one of the healthiest ones in uh uh in crypto in that we had a massive scale up and we managed to retain our users and continue to grow. Part of that has to do with building up a trusted brand uh and uh just creating products that people actually value, not uh products that just only survive off of uh kind of nonsense pawns as uh uh people are used to. Um uh great. So that's ether and as I mentioned uh we actually make money uh crazy idea in crypto I know but last year we did about uh 26 million in revenue fairly diversified for a first year in in business uh generated net income uh and this year we're forecasting to at least double that probably more depending on a bunch of uh parameters uh and so uh with that hopefully that serves as as an example to other uh builders out there and I would like to you know put that call out to action to everybody everybody out there uh that it's time to build. Focus on real users, real customers, and there's uh there's no limit to how big you can get.

Uh I guess if there are questions, I'm happy to do them. I think we've got a little bit of time. If not, we can wrap up. There we go. One question 13.

Okay. Right. Right. Uh thanks so much. Last session of the day.

Great energy. Uh, one of the themes that I've picked up today is around, uh, how non-consumer friendly some of the languages that we use in in crypto or web 3. Your company is called ether.fi. Uh, you know, there were coms, you know, Amazon.

com, Google used to be Google.com and so on. How do you see five years from now, maybe even 10 years from now, if there are a billion people using your product, your platform, do you feel like the branding, the consumer messaging will change? And and do you have a plan for that or is it going to be something that's organic and you just play it by ear? I I think that's a really good point and good question.

I mean, aside from just naming, you know, even today if you were to use EtherFi, uh, well, less so today now that we've launched the whole DeFi bank thing, but up until recently, I mean, having to like have a a crypto wallet with seed phrases, uh, a hardware wallet, just the concept of signing transactions and approval. I mean, the whole thing is insane. I mean, I don't know if you've ever tried to onboard a friend to crypto. I mean, it's just madness. it literally takes days, sometimes weeks to get them to do even the most basic things.

So, I would say that's super important. Uh, with respect to the name, I don't know. I guess I'm I thought it was a really we thought it was a pretty cool name uh to get started. You know, as a counterpoint, one of the most successful companies in the world has a product called Chat GPT. It's arguably the worst name in history.

Um, but you know, like what really matters is the the actual value it delivers. So, uh, and names tend to be sticky. After a while, I think people won't even register the the connection. It's just so hopefully remember it as something that, uh, is just valuable and has a positive brand association with them. But I think it is a good point.

Yeah. one one uh uh hello uh tell them please what do you think about the price of a fear and uh when will be growth uh of this crypto all right that's what's the price uh what's my feeling about the price of Ethereum uh okay I'm going to call it I'm going to say we bottomed out uh I think ETH is up only from uh from here on out uh I think there's so many so many positive catalysts about ETH um you know I'm I'm you know I'm an engineer at heart So, uh maybe it's it's very easy for me or or it's very tempting for me to get excited about all the techy stuff rather than focusing on more kind of like uh you know 80 IQ kind of narratives which tend to drive uh price movements mostly. Um but uh but I still I'll say the price of ETH has bottomed out. Um there's so many positive catalysts. I mean we have what Etherealize is doing on the institutional front which is incredibly exciting.

We've got, you know, a meaningful change at the Ethereum Foundation. They're focusing much more on scaling the L1 L2 interop, improving the usability. These are the exact things that they should be uh working on. I think they they've been doing a much better job of engaging with the community community and focusing on advocacy and education. So, there's so many positive things that are happening.

Um, these things take time to percolate. Maybe it'll take 6 months or or a year, but I really think we're at a turning point. Uh, and I'm super bullish. I mean, I honestly can't imagine if someone is serious about building decentralized applications, I can't imagine building on anything other than Ethereum. I mean, for all the that people have talked, some of which was was legitimate about Ethereum.

Like, what what else are you going to build on, right? Um, you know, I I don't want to Yeah, I won't talk about any other projects, but I really think it's the only option. All right. Uh, okay. Well, thank you.

Enjoy the rest of your, uh, conference. Uh, have fun drinking or partying or whatever. And, uh, that's it.