Cindy Leow - Drift: The DeFi SuperProtocol - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hello everyone. Thank you for having me here today. We have a very special memory of token 2049 last year. It was the first time we had announced our foundation as well as the launch of the Drift token and it's been an extremely eventful year since then. Today I want to talk about Drift's big vision and our positioning as a D5 super protocol, the first of its kind within Salana and within the DeFi ecosystem.

Before we get started, I'm going to start us off with a very clear problem statement, which is that the state of finance today remains very centralized. With every single platform you use, you need to KYC yourself, provide information in order to even get access to the most basic of financial services. We think that this needs to change the fundamental core mission of DeFi, which is to enable financial services for anyone in the world. Now, that's all great, but why haven't the current DeFi protocols managed to really take off? We have a thesis that being permissionless is not enough.

That being transparent is good, but it's not the perfect product. We believe that in order for DeFi to win, you need one key magic ingredient, which is capital efficiency. What does capital efficiency mean? It essentially means being able to recycle your margin across many different products to get the best value for each dollar you place into an ecosystem. And I'll walk through this more later.

But before that, let me give an a quick introduction and history about Drift, where when we started and where we're going. So Drift started back in November 2021 as a pure perpetuals exchange. We then we then realized that um after hitting a billion dollars in volume in 30 days being one of the fastest growing D5 protocols that a major gap in the market was in cross margining. We realized that a lot of people wanted to use Salana, Bitcoin, Ethereum as collateral, being capital efficient, not needing to sell their their collateral into cash to trade perpetuals and quickly launched the first and only cross margin product in crypto and DeFi. We then also realized that there was a big segment of the audience that wanted passive products.

Not everyone is 101x leveraged trader. Some people also want to invest into steady return products that that yield 10 20% annualized. So we launched superstake soul the first ever recursive staking product and then we launched drift earn which enabled you to get access to a financial primitive enabling you to earn more on your stable coins as well as crypto collateral. And to to really start by showcasing the true functionalities of Drift and why we call ourselves a super protocol, let's talk about where we started. We started as a trading platform enabling you to trade with leverage.

We quickly expanded with the same collateral base to five different product suites that enable you to stretch your dollars across multiple products in a single crossc collateral account. We launched borrow lend which was our our signature earn product. We launched prediction markets to time with US elections last year that allows you to bet on real world events. We launched a spot product that enables you to trade any asset with spot. And then we also launched as I mentioned a vault wealth management product.

Now altogether we now call ourselves the all-in-one D5 prime brokerage protocol which enables you to with a single dollar deposited into Drift have access to all of these products without ever moving your funds from one place to another. Gone are the days where you need to withdraw your funds from a borrow pool, deposit it into a an AMM to trade and then take that out and deposit it into a per exchange. Now you can do that all in a single protocol which is not just a protocol but a super protocol drift. Within the last 3 years, we've grown significantly from zero to now 1 and a.5 billion in deposits.

We've hit a cumulative of over hundred billion in volume traded. We have annualized about 30 $40 million in annualized revenue and we have listed the most markets across any D5 protocol allowing you to trade any asset with anything as collateral. The one big takeaway for Drift is that we create capital efficiency on chain, enabling you to have access to all different types of product suites within a single pool of collateral, similar to how you have a checking account in Tradfi and a brokerage account underneath that. Drift enables the same type of behavior without ever needing to move your funds from one place to another. Now I want to dive into a couple of subproducts that we have.

The first being earn. It's been our biggest launch and focus to date in the last year where with drift earn you can deposit any asset as collateral enabling you to earn like look at this yield right now 7% across the last 3 months compared to earning zero if you were trading on a regular centralized exchange or any other dex perm. The second big highlight for us this year was the launch of wealth management products, namely vaults. What we've done is we've taken the complex world of hedge funds and wealth management and put it in a single product on chain where you can now with as low as $10 deposit into professionally managed strategies that are run by the best hedge funds in crypto and in the world. These strategies are our ecosystem partners and enable you to earn anything up to 10 to even 50% depending on the risk tolerance that you're willing to take.

The second flagship product and our largest to date bread and butter is obviously trading. We offer the highest leverage across any DeFi exchange. 101x leverage. If you have $5,000, you're able to leverage up to up to 500K within a single trade. And that enables maximum capital efficiency and degeneracy by enabling you to keep as little collateral on chain as possible while doing the maximum with your money.

And the great thing here, if you look at this breakdown, is that you can use any asset as collateral. So imagine you're bullish on Salana ecosystem tokens such as Salana, JTO, Drift. You can have a mix of these assets within your account and apply margin towards it. As you can see, this breakdown tells you that you do not have to sell these underlying assets to have access to this onchain. This is a huge breakthrough in terms of what you're able to do with your present assets without always needing to hold cash.

Why does this matter? We are building a flywheel where the more traders we have on a platform, the more the higher the yield for depositors on the platform, increasing the TVL on the exchange, which also which then creates more borrowing opportunities for traders to then generate more fees on top of. This is the drift flywheel and why we've been so successful to date with growing both TVL as well as trading volume. Our big thesis is that super protocols like Drift will ultimately overtake single isolated protocols that offer the same function simply because the margining abilities and the capital efficiency benefits will outweigh needing to ever take your money out of a single protocol again. How will we grow from here?

There is both vertical and horizontal integrations. With vertical, we believe that we see opportunities for structured products, OTC, stable coin payment rails to be built on top of our current smart contracts. And horizontally, we see the growth of assets like commodities, options, FX to be added to our exchange being the one place to go to trade anything. We recently listed gold as our latest commodities launch and gold is now top 10 market on Drift. So if you're looking for an inflation hedge portfolio, Drift is the best place to find that.

to quickly highlight our amazing ecosystem projects. As I mentioned, Drift is a set of open-source smart contracts that many projects can build on top of, especially frontends, doing trading, terminals. We have many ecosystem teams here who are now building entire businesses operating on drift alone which is growing from drift as a single product to now an ecosystem of products, businesses and operators. To give you an example of where we're going with Drift's ecosystem, one example is the use of isolated pools to drive more growth. Imagine being able to take real world assets and put them into an isolated pool engine, lever up against it with a pool of stable coins on chain and boost your RWA yield from something like 8% to 10% within a single isolated pools.

This also offers the ability to have KYC and have a KYC layer allowing you to get access to even more real world assets on chain. Now the big question is where do we go from here and have we hit the ceiling for DeFi? I would argue that we are less than 1% of the way to go in terms of total addressable market. We currently serve 200,000 users. Salana has a million.

Robin Hood has 50 million. We see that fundamentally DeFi is cheaper, better to operate, and more userfriendly than any of these existing incumbents. There's no reason that DeFi cannot go to 50 million users within the next 5 to 10 years. And I want to touch on the three-phase vision and how we plan to get to 50 million users. We're currently in phase one.

We're focused on building the underlying open-source protocol and infrastructure. You what you see today is a very DeFi native interface. Where we're going is building new large-scale consumer apps that use the same DeFi infrastructure and liquidity layer because now that liquidity layer has grown so massively that it makes it does not make sense not to build on top of the existing liquidity that is on chain. Now this looks like new frontends being built uh that are focused 100% on consumer. At this stage, you wouldn't even know that you're interacting with Salana or Drift in the back end.

All you see is the flows, the trading and terminals in front of you that look exactly the same as the Robin Hoods of the world today, which is our big focus this year, launching mobile in Q2, Q3, and that will be our big push towards consumer. And lastly, this is our big vision of where we want to be because we are building a super protocol that ultimately replicates a lot of the financial ecosystem in traditional finance today. There is a world where this supersedes the existing financial ecosystem and becomes the default banking rails and default wealth management rails that all eventually run on DeFi. And we believe Drift will be the home for not just the front end of finance but the fi the but the front end of banking and traditional finance as a whole. With that, thank you very much for your attention today.

Um, look out for more updates at Drift Protocol on Twitter and please give us a follow.