Brian Huang - NEXUS Startup Competition Pitch #2: Glider - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

As heavy DeFi users, we believe that DeFi has truly plateaued. Very little has changed since the early days of Uniswap, Banker, and Curve. And if anything, it's only gotten more complicated with a bunch of verbs that nobody outside of crypto understands. When I first met my co-founder, John, I said, "There are two things we can do. One, we can simplify DeFi for everyone.

And two, we can bring DeFi beyond just swaps and lending. Let me introduce you to Glider. With Glider, we turn your investment beliefs into automated portfolios. What do I mean by this? You can create any ETF, any token, any chain with Glider.

We will constantly rebalance that portfolio for you. And you can also react to any one-off trigger, whether it is a tweet from Elon Musk or a top 10 seller of a holder sells the token. Not only that, best of all, there's no gas, no signing, no bridging, and everything is fully non-custodial. This is what it looks like live in production today. When I said we're truly chain agnostic, I mean it.

We don't think users have to know what chain they're operating on. Only that the assets that they want, they can invest in them. Our portfolios are also fully sharable. You can change, edit, remix, whatever you want with all of your friends. On top of that, we've added some really nice AI features where you can explore new portfolios, new ideas to trade, and new tokens that might be trending.

But Glider is not just a direct to consumer application. We are also B2B TOC. You can take these portfolios and embed them into a wallet, a DEX, a mobile app, a Telegram bot, you name it. And that's valuable because these end users can get curated experiences for specifically that front end. We have a team of crypto veterans, including my co-founder, John, who led and built all of Macho.

xyz while at Zerox, including engineers from Coinbase and MetaMask. We led our first round with A16Z CSX and some of the biggest consumer names in the space including base moon on and unis swap labs. Let me end with this. Glider is not building vaults and that's really important. When you put your money into a vault, somebody is able to extract value from that.

With Glider, you own your assets, which means you can lend them, stake them, participate in governance, anything you would normally do with those assets. Your assets always yours. And with that, I welcome you to Glide with us. Thank you.

I'm wondering what's the ideal profile of the users that you're targeting specifically? Um, is it proumers? Is it strictly retail? Curious on your thoughts.

Uh, we firmly believe in building where users are today. Where are we in terms of product? meaning how cryptonative should we be versus normie and then where is society as a whole and we want to basically pair those up over time so that we can become more normie as society becomes more normie.

Why do you think uh DeFi is the right format for this? Because centralized exchanges you know they have index products um you know there are sort of obviously like uh you know strategic trading applications that you can use and plug your Binance key into. Why this format? Well, I think it depends on how decentralized the sexes eventually go, right? I'll give you a very simple example.

If you want to hold Tesla onchain stock and you want to earn 7% yield on it, you can do it in Glider. And that's something that you can't do on Robin Hood. It's very easy to sell to somebody who is new to crypto.

Uh, can you take a second to walk through the competitive landscape a little bit? Um, and how you guys stand out. The

competitive landscape is interesting. We've not seen anybody quite doing it the way we're doing it. There are lots of vault products out there and we can aggregate vaults. There's also a lot of agents out there. We don't believe in black boxes.

Everything that you do on Glider, it's not shown in this, is done via no code builder. You can also do it via natural language as well. Um, but no, there's no clear competitor that we see right now.

I'm curious I I'm sure like the integrations throughout the ecosystems are vast. I'm curious like how you are you guys focusing on specific ecosystem once I'm building that no code builder like how do you kind of keep on expanding to the more and more like you know links that you have to do for you know being bullish on base being bullish on salana memes etc.

Unfortunately crypto is very tribal these days and so we've spent a fair amount of time on each ecosystem that we go to rather than throwing all the chains at somebody at once. Uh we will be launching on Salana before the end of the year. Uh and you'll be able to trade again any asset, any chain.