Brian Huang - NEXUS Final Round #4: Glider - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hello everyone. My name is Brian Huang and I'm one of the co-founders at Glider. As heavy DeFi users, we believe that DeFi has plateaued. Very little has changed since the early days of Uniswap, Banker, and Curve. And if anything, it's gotten more complicated with a bunch of verbs nobody outside crypto understands.

When I first met my co-founder John, I said there are two things we can do together. One, we can simplify DeFi for everybody. And two, we can take DeFi beyond just swaps and lending. Let me introduce you to Glider. With Glider, we turn your investment beliefs into fully automated onchain portfolios.

What do I mean by this? You can do things like create any basket of rebalancing tokens. You can react to any one-off trigger, whether it is a price movement, a tweet, the weather, you name it. Literally any data. Um, most importantly, all of this occurs without gas, signing, bridging, and it's fully non-custodial.

This is what it looks like live in production today. Every crypto app today is a very poor mimic of something in Tradfi, and that is not interesting to us. We are strictly interested in things you can only do onchain and we're interested in increasing the velocity at which assets can move between protocols, chains, assets, you name it. The orchestration here is what's important because these are things that Robin Hood and Coinbase can't do out of the box. As I mentioned yesterday, we're also not just a direct to consumer platform.

We have a B2B TTOC platform. We're already talking with the biggest wallets in the world, including Phantom co-founders who are close friends and investors. We don't just talk crypto, we can actually build. My co-founder led all development of Matcha.xyz at Zerox.

I led all development of trading at Anchorage. And we have a team of engineers from Coinbase, MetaMask, and many other major players in the crypto space. We raised around six months ago led by A16Z's CSX program and some of the biggest consumer names in the space including Moon, Coinbase, Uniswap, and Ono. Now, we don't usually do this, but today we're going to share some metrics because the judges asked for them after yesterday. Uh, as of today, we have over 250,000 people on our weight list.

We have let off about 11% of these users of which now we have 15,000 active portfolios holding real assets on real chains. We also have done over 20 million in volume and we do 4% every single day of all of the user ops on base. This is incredible leverage with every network that we ever go to. On launch, we will be doing upwards of 10% of all transactions on base. VCs, you may not know it yet, but the distribution layer is at the apps.

It's not at the network. Now, I'll leave you with one thing. Glider is not a vault. You own your assets. So, you can lend them, you can participate in governance, you can vote, you name it.

Come glide with us.

Thank you very much. Okay, judges, your questions, please.

Well, thank you for the metrics. I know you seem to love the metrics. Um I'm curious how the actual custody and execution uh layer of glider works like hey if I tell you run this strategy how does a transaction actually get signed with the limits on that walk us through that.

Yep. So when you come into Glider today you can login with any social login but you can also connect your wallet. We use privy nothing crazy. Um, but when you create a portfolio, what you're doing is you're signing a session key that allows us to execute on your behalf, do these rebalances in a fully non-custodial way. So again, your seed phrase protects all these assets.

User funds are never coming. In fact, every portfolio spins up its own set of wallets. And so at Glider, we have hundreds of thousands, soon millions of wallets under the hood.

And uh, how are you finding these users? um how much is that costing you and how does that compare with what you estimate the lifetime value of those customers are?

Yeah. Uh we have a lot of really interesting ways of acquiring users that'll come soon uh especially using some ZK stuff which um is a whole other conversation but um you know in our fund raise we were very specific in targeting consumerf facing companies and moon unis swap coinbase these are massive distribution players not only on the B2B TOC side but supporting their portfolio companies uh so it's been incredibly organic we have a massive following on X now and Discord and all the usual flywheels. Um, but I I would say we've been quite surprised at at how much it has picked up. Um, yeah,

I think I asked a little bit about this question last time as well, but I'm curious how you guys internally uh prioritize when it comes to ecosystems given, you know, your success at base. I'm curious if there's, you know, some type of ruthless prioritization that you guys do internally to kind of pick what's the next ecosystem, the next batch of users that you want to target. There is indeed a a ruthless prioritization process that occurs. Um it's our firm belief as I mentioned in the presentation that apps have the power. Apps have the users.

Apps can use those users to leverage everything below that. Whether it is a protocol, whether it is a middle layer infrastructure provider, you name it. And when you use Glider, you don't even have to know what chain you're on. So that's important. Um,

you know, we

So, to answer your question,

uh, yes, we do. We've talked to every single major chain. Nobody is doing something quite like Glider and every major chain wants Glider on their platform because we create a massive amount of transactions, right? We fill block space. We are constantly paying gas.

We are constantly generating volume and those are all metrics that they absolutely love. I I think maybe we talked about this a little bit yesterday too, but um do you currently charge fees and yes or no going forward? Do you view this as more of a aum based uh revenue model or a transaction volume based revenue model?

Yep. So the whole purpose of Glider is to trade as much as possible like seamlessly. We do not charge fees on trading, right? If you want to come in and rebalance every block, you can do that. We will not charge you fees.

We also pay for all of your gas which is really important. But we do it to make money somehow. So, we uh do charge TVL fees. Um these fees depend on the types of assets that you hold and the amount of assets that you hold that are tiered. But in the long term, we can drive these fees to zero because there's many other ways to monetize.

And we have incredible leverage again over everything that's deeper into the stack as long as we have the users. And B2B TOC will also subsidize the direct to consumer side for us. Is this an equity only deal or you do envision a token?

We do indeed have a token that would uh come at some point. Um not to divulge too much. We've spent a lot of time with A6NZ on what the token should look like. Um and specifically worked a lot with layer as well on top of this. There is a deeper decentralization meta that would bore everyone here.

So I won't go into it, but we could have a longer conversation about what that looks like.