How Glider Is Rebuilding On-Chain Portfolio Management from the Ground Up

Brian Huang started his career trading bonds at Morgan Stanley, which he described as "the most boring traditional finance you could imagine." That was almost a decade ago. Today, he co-runs Glider, a platform live on Base, Solana, and Plume that automates portfolio rebalancing on-chain while letting users hold every underlying token directly in their own wallets.

From High-Frequency Trading to Building in DeFi

After Morgan Stanley, Brian moved to XTX Markets, a firm that trades every liquid market in the world including a portion of crypto. COVID pushed him toward a different question: rather than trading markets, could he build something for the world? He joined Anchorage, an institutional custodian that holds assets for major venture firms, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and corporations, where he spent about two and a half years building out the trading platform. It was through a recruiter at Anagram, a crypto venture firm, that he eventually met his co-founder John, who had previously built and led Matcha.xyz at 0x, one of the first consumer DEX aggregators. The introduction was the third attempt by that same recruiter over roughly five years. Brian and John formally started Glider in September of 2024 and have been building for just under a year and a half.

John leads the engineering side. Brian oversees product, design, marketing, and business development. At the time of recording, the full team was five engineers including John, and Glider had crossed 80,000 users who had logged in and verified through Privy, with 100,000 as the next stated milestone.

Gas Is a Big One

A recurring theme in how Brian frames Glider's purpose is what DeFi friction actually costs people. He pointed to the Trump meme coin as an unusual data point: the surge of retail interest in getting on-chain was real, but most of those users went through Moonshot rather than a self-custody wallet, which tells you something about where the barriers sit.

"Gas is something that I think all of us have had headaches with when we are dealing with multiple chains, or you run out of gas, or any number of problems. You're bridging, who knows. And so, we pay for everybody's gas, and we abstract that away. We think everybody should be doing this. If you're not using an app that's paying for your gas, they should be. They're in 2021, and it's 2026 now."

Beyond gas, Brian argued that users should not have to think about which network an asset lives on. If someone wants to invest in a token on Base or Solana or Ethereum mainnet, the network is not a relevant detail for them as an investor. Bridging is the same: nobody should need to know what bridging is. The analogy he used is an oven. When someone uses one, they turn the knob. They do not need to understand the mechanics behind the heat.

"Fidelity On-Chain, But We Do Things Fidelity Can't Do"

Glider's pitch is that it handles long-term on-chain wealth management in a way that looks and feels like a traditional investment platform, while giving users access to things that only work in a decentralized context. In the demo portion of the conversation, Brian walked through a portfolio modeled after the Bitwise Crypto 10 index, holding ten assets including ETH, Solana, Sui, and Coinbase stock, rebalanced autonomously on a schedule the user sets, whether that is every hour, every week, or every month. In his own instance, the platform had saved him $5.57 in gas by handling execution automatically.

The part Brian kept returning to is direct ownership. Unlike an ETF wrapper or a vault model, Glider does not hold tokens on behalf of users or mint a derivative token representing the basket. Every portfolio gets its own set of non-custodial, account-abstracted wallets. The user owns the actual underlying tokens. That distinction matters practically: it means users can participate in governance votes, claim airdrops, lend or stake their assets, and sell specific lots for tax optimization.

"When you own an ETF, you don't get the voting rights of that ETF. You don't get to buy and sell to tax optimize. You don't get all of the dividends, depending on the ETF, of those underlying shares or any of the benefits of ownership. Like, if you have a gold ETF, you don't actually get to hold the gold, right? Like you just have a wrapper around it. And so, we don't believe in wrappers."

Behind the interface, Glider runs what Brian described as cron jobs that check at each interval whether a portfolio needs rebalancing. If it does, the platform finds liquidity and executes the trades on-chain. The agent operating on a user's wallet has a constrained set of permissions: it can trade assets within the portfolio and route to designated liquidity, but it cannot move funds to arbitrary addresses outside the user's connected wallets. Brian acknowledged the system is centralized today, and he referenced the concept of progressive decentralization, crediting a16z with the framing, while noting the current team size and priorities make other improvements more immediate.

Building for the API Layer

Glider also exposes APIs and SDKs for developers who want to build portfolio creation and management into their own applications. Brian described two main use cases. The first is programmatic portfolio management: creating and updating portfolios through code rather than the front end, which is useful when external data is informing allocation decisions. The second is B2B2C integration, where a fintech product such as a savings app, a wallet, a launchpad, or a token issuer embeds curated portfolios directly for its own users and can take fees through the platform's fee routing.

He gave one example that illustrated the range of what on-chain infrastructure makes possible: a developer came to Glider wanting to tokenize songs and bundle them into a portfolio structured like an ETF, calling it a playlist. The logistics of liquidity routing would need to work out, but the core idea is that on-chain settlement does not require the kind of deep custom integration that building on top of traditional financial rails would demand from a Coinbase or a Fidelity.

The October 10th liquidation cascade, the social app wave, trading cards, perpetuals: Glider has watched all of it come and go in under eighteen months of existence, while continuing to build toward what Brian called a world where all real assets, stocks, RWAs, bonds, and credits, are on-chain and need somewhere serious to be managed.