Andrei Anisimov - DeFi: The App Store Moment for Finance - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Uh my name is Andre Anisimov. I'm a co-founder of hypersurface a protocol for structured yield. A bit about myself. I come from engineering software engineering background. I spent couple years at the traditional hedge fund.

Then I worked at Coinbase custody where I helped launch Salana compound and other uh assets during the early days of DeFi. And now I'm building hypersurface. So today I would like to bring you to a moment in time. The moment when phones changed forever. I'm talking about the moment when the app store launched.

App store turned the phone from a closed box into an open platform and it changed entire industries. Today I will argue that DeFi brings the finance to the exact same inflection point. And I would consider my talk to be a success if by the end of it I managed to convince you that you are not bullish enough. So before app store phones already had apps but they weren't that great. You had email calendar maybe some games but the u UX was limited and clunky.

The apps were built by the phone manufacturers and were not optimized for user needs. The you can argue that apps were underscaled. The people didn't live through them because they were not good enough. The app store opened floodgates. Suddenly any developer in the world can build an app, deploy it and get an instant global distribution.

What it did is existing apps got reimagined. Indie developers rebuilt calendars, navigation, music and they did it much better than the incumbents. Then uh the second thing that happened is the whole new categories of apps got me but got invented such as Uber, Instagram, Tik Tok. So all of this became possible because of this open platform. So let's take music for example.

Phones had music players before but they were quite basic. When the distribution opened we got Spotify which is completely reimagined way to access global library of music. Another example is Uber. A whole new industry created because of the open access. Okay.

Now shift back to finance. Um most of us currently interact with this monolithic platforms such as swap, fidelity and others. They have many different products. They have stocks, bonds, ETFs, options. But typically the UX of how these products are presented is quite flat.

You interact with those products as just tickers and all you can do with them is buy or sell. You can argue that those platforms are pre-appre finance. Take options for example. Options is one of the most powerful products ever invented in finance. Yet currently it is scary, intimidating.

It is buried under advanced tabs uh with 20 different dropdowns. There is no really attempt to reimagine UX for each option strategy. So the trapi is um is pre-appre finance where it's a closed systems closed platforms where many apps left buried and underscale compared to their true potential. Now Defy changes that. Defy just like the app store.

Defy is the open platform for financial apps. Any developer in the world can build an app, deploy it and get instant global access. What it will do, what it what it enables is reimagining of existing applications, UX, creation of a whole new categories of financial apps and most importantly scaling the usage to the levels that were not never possible in closed systems. So one of the clearest example that already exists today is asset swap in stratfi. If you want to move your cash from equities, from stocks to bonds, typically you need to sell your stocks, maybe wire the funds, wait couple days, buy the bonds.

In DeFi, you can swap between any pair of asset instantly. And because it's an open platform, anyone can integrate that functionality into their application. For example, most of the popular crypto wallets, they embed swap u Ui UX natively, which makes this product even more accessible. So now combine it with the fact that the universe of the tokenized assets is expanding rapidly. You have native crypto assets, you have tokenized equities, real world assets, creator coins.

It is very easy to imagine that the trading volumes in the future will far exceed what we have today in centralized platforms and legacy trafi platforms. An example of a sort of a new category that was created already is lending. In Trafi, lending was typically an obscure institutional activity not available to retail. In DeFi, protocols like a maker democratized it. Now anyone can lend or borrow against their assets permissionlessly.

And this is the example of how DeFi um expands the scope of what's possible. turning niche product and making them u scaling them to mainstream level. Now let's talk about the product that we are particular excited here at hypersurface covered calls in trafi just cover call ETFs account for 150 billion of assets under management about the same as the TVL of entire defi in cryptoc calls already doing around 2 to 5 billion per months yet most people don't even know this product exists why because it is still buried as just one out of 20 option strategies in traditional platform. It is a powerful product but is significantly under scale compared true potential. So just for those who are not familiar with cover call the idea is very simple.

You commit to selling your asset at a predetermined strike on a future date on that future date and you receive an upfront cash premium for doing this for making this commitment typically delivering double digit APR on that future date. If the asset trades above your chosen strike price it gets sold at that level and if it trades below you get your asset back. In either way you keep the premium. So this strategy is already uh very popular with foundation with foundation treasuries and funds who wants to earn yield on the asset while setting takeprofit targets. So here is a cool insight.

Cover call essentially is just a delayed limit order that pays you yield. So why not design it this way? Instead of having this complicated option UI, you can have a simple user interface that just as simple as swapping assets or creating a limit order. And this is the type of reimagining that DeFi enables. And the way DeFi enables it behind the scenes is that um we can enable this product in a fully permissionless non-custodial way because we can build on top of existing DeFi infra.

For example, the protocol pro uh manages it risk by intelligently providing liquidity into dexes. It is composable by design, meaning anyone such as DEX or a DEX aggregator can integrate this product into the UI and offer it like another type of yield order that uh limit order that earns you yield. So this is what we are building at hypersurface um a general purpose infrastructure for cover calls turning niche product into mainstream financial primitive and today I'm proud to announce the launch of hypersurface 1.0 O on Hyper EVM with yields available on Hype, ETH and BTC and soon expanding to other assets and ecosystems. So here's the bigger point.

The App Store moment in finance is here. The legacy financial platforms are like pre-apptore phones. They are closed. They clunky. They underscaled.

Defy is the app store of finance. It is open. It is global. It is composable. What defy is going to do?

It will reimagine the UX of financial apps. It will scale the usage to the levels that we've never seen before. And it allow that it will unlock new categories of applications that we can't even imagine today. The way I see it is we have this rare opportunity where the history repeats itself. And just like with the app store, it's important to not only to see that this change is coming, but to understand that the level of impact it will create is far beyond what we can imagine today.

So at Hypersurface we are betting on this future building cover calls as just the first step towards scaling structured products for everyone. My name is Andrea. Thank you so much.